The taboo. As a slave it keeps me reminded that I am nothing more than a depository for my Master’s body fluids and that is most gratifying. Steve, Ontario, US These choices are homophobic,” I tell my new friend Dana. She’s technically my press handler, tasked with making sure I see the best that the tour operator, Olivia Travel, has to offer. So far, she’s more than delivered, but the weak karaoke selection — not Dana’s fault! — is a rare low point on a trip that, four days in, has already slowly but surely begun to change my life. Once, after I came in her hands, I burst into tears (yeah, I know, big dyke energy), and she held me tightly in her strong, sure arms. “You’re OK,” she said. “I’ve got you.” She kissed my hair. If you liked this story you should give our new sex podcast Good Sex Bad Sex a listen – it’s out every Wednesday. Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet.

It wasn’t until the day afterward that we’d realize exactly how much of a spectacle we’d made. Lynette had been chatting with a few women the day before, more than one of whom confronted her in the cafeteria the next morning. “Everyone saw that young blonde hanging all over you last night,” she told her scornfully. “You better be careful.” Another woman caught us goofing around in the pool and reported to Lynette that we were causing a bit of a scene. One day I was having this kind of anxiety-ridden daydream about what would happen if the football team found out about me. I was captivated by what Eileen Myles told me at the time: “I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait. I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.”She’s a true Pisces — romantic and dreamy and always processing. (My Capricorn groundedness makes us a good match, allegedly.) She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old. Her mom still prays that, someday, she’ll find herself a good man. I would try to separate my feelings for Lynette from my feelings about wanting someone or something different in general — out of a desperate desire to feel some sort of control over my choices — and concede that was pretty much impossible.

I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis. After my partner came out as nonbinary a couple years ago, I felt even more confused and guilty about my conflicting desires to both lean into my own womanhood and flee from it. I knew my partner’s identity was its own independent, beautiful thing, something that was entirely their own. But I still wondered — as people around me whom I loved began to move away from the genders they’d been assigned — what I should be doing, if anything, about mine. For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics. Electronic Items for Resale/Distribution: this license includes the right to use the media in webtemplates that are sold to more customers, screensavers, e-cards, powerpoint presentations or as wallpapers on cell phones. Maximum number of electronic items is unlimited (applies as a total of each type of usage). When my partner jokingly warned me, before I left for the cruise, not to fall in love with a hot older butch — seriously, we joked about this — I thought, Fat chance. Not only because I had no intention of falling in love with anyone else, but because I thought hooking up with hot older butches would remain the stuff of my fantasies.Later in the week, Tisha Floratos, the vice president of travel for Olivia, told me that she and her staff think about this a lot. “We’ve talked about how we begin to promote inclusivity while also preserving our core: that this is a company for lesbians. We don’t publicly, historically, say that we’re trans inclusive, but we’re always welcoming to our trans guests.” I just don’t understand some of these women,” she said, looking around the room at the joyful group of dancing lesbians. “Why do they insist on making themselves so ugly? I’ve never gotten the whole butch thing.” The weird thing is that, while I’ve never been one for watersports, the pressure on my bladder is kind of horny.

I would sob in a car to uptown Manhattan, where my friend Alia would take me in her arms and tell me it was all going to be OK. We both like Justin Bieber, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, babies, spicy foods, and romantic comedies, as well as traveling, swimming, dressing up, having sex, being tall, biking (“cycling,” she’d say), and making detailed plans well ahead of time. We also appear, at this admittedly early stage, to be each other’s scarily perfect sexual complement; lesbian sex can look like a million and one different things, and we like so many of the same ones that it is, honestly, a miracle we ever got out of bed and did anything normal, like eat dinner or generally interact with other people. (Turns out, there was nothing wrong with me during my sad stretch of a dry spell after all — I just hadn’t been having the sex I actually wanted to have.)By this point, I was — somewhat unintentionally — quite drunk. We started making out (I was still peeing) and almost right away, I began writing a goofy story about it in my head, thinking about how I’d relay the anecdote to my friends (“So I had sex in the bathroom of a catamaran???”). But there was another part of me that was very much not into it, especially when the makeout gave way to other things and people started banging on the bathroom door. I don’t care,” Lynette said, shrugging. She told me she’d lived on this earth for 53 years. She knew what she wanted. And now it was my turn to figure that out for myself. I planned to meet Dana in the ship lobby that morning so that we could wander around for a while before the event. When we set off into town together, she gently informed me that my whatever-it-was with Lynette had not gone unnoticed by the staff, who’d encouraged Dana to encourage me to spend more time speaking with other people and reporting on the ship’s endless entertainment options. Per the rules of our loose nonmonogamous agreement, I FaceTimed with my partner about what was happening on the cruise, first telling them about the catamaran girl and then, in so many words, about Lynette. I suspected, even early on, that I was about to break our most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love with anybody else. It’s all good, clean, healthy fun (although, beware of playing if you have an infection in the area).

I was the one who seemed to stress this rule the most. I warned my partner about it all the time: Don’t leave me. But they were confident that they’d always love only me; with other people, they assured me, it would only ever just be sex. I’d never considered before that being a femme with a butch partner needn’t be some inequitable hetero horror show, but instead could be something imbued with incredible queer comfort and power. It could be fun. It could be hot. What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life.That night, Matie and Jamie convinced me (against my natural inclination to avoid live entertainment) to go to the evening’s scheduled attraction, a comedy set by Elvira Kurt. Before Elvira performed we were welcomed by Tisha, Olivia’s VP and our cruise director, who greeted the “ladies of Olivia” and announced a few of the events coming up over the next few days, including a meetup for the “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” or “OWLs.” (“Date me, OWLs!” Matie whisper-yelled next to me.) In my relationship, I often worried that I was taking on the femme role to my partner’s masc — the Wendy to their Peter — in ways that weren’t always positive or healthy. My partner got frustrated when I mentioned what I thought were our gendered roles; they thought I was projecting straight bullshit into a queer space where it didn’t need to be. We were lesbian and nonbinary dykes; we were supposed to be beyond gender. The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia.