Gershon: I'm doing the pipes. I was a little paranoid. I'm definitely not good at any of that stuff, so I just needed to be convincing…I kind of got into it. It's so dirty and messy, and you're shoving this thing in the plug. It was fun. I just wanted to look cool, like I knew what I was doing. I liked all the physical activity. It just made me feel like I was doing all the things that I wish I knew in real life. I remember my mom said, "You're a really good actress." I asked, "Why?" She said, "Because I believed the plumbing stuff." Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself. 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. Revealed: How many units are REALLY in your wine, beer and spirits - and why booze has got so much stronger since the 1970s The deadly art of the sniper: As Ukrainian marksman claims record assassination from 2.6 miles, some of the most incredible long-range kills

Tilly: Everyone's positive that they're so in love, and they're going to live happily ever after, but I really think in Violet's nature, she's a predator. I do not think it's going to end well. Violet's in love with Corky, but she's very damaged and I just don't think it's going to be like one of those, "50 years ago, we met cute," you know? Then Brandon said he would tie her up on the carpet down stairs, this way there wouldn’t be any obstacles like a door or table and chairs to get in the way. Tied up I thought. Up until now I had never thought of playing cops and robbers this way. I wasn’t sure about letting someone else tie up my mom either because that was my thing. But when I looked over at my mom she seemed quite complacent to play. Who was I to object? Until then the only way I saw tying someone up was by the feeble way I had tied my mom. So with a slight regret I agreed. We all formed one big circle, and the staffers got the ball rolling. First things first: How had we all heard about Olivia? Erin got the key, and with Erin and Amanda working together, Marie was soon free of all restraints. I would move into a house with some friends in Brooklyn, where a room had just magically opened up. There’d be a dog, and a yard. It would feel like a sign. (I’d start getting really into signs.)Excellent choice," Marie said. "But first, I don't think Erin is wearing enough tights. What do you think, Amanda?" Tilly: [The rating board] said, "It looks like they're really doing it." And the [Wachowskis] go, "Let me get this straight. If the girls weren't such good actresses, you wouldn't have a problem?" They were embarrassed, and they said, "Yes."

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.Throughout the trip, Matie and Jamie would have a number of tearful conversations about trans inclusion with some older passengers who refused to accept trans women as their fellow sisters. But they also got many women to reconsider their more middle-of-the-road views on trans inclusion. “Those are the people who matter,” Jamie would later tell me, recalling her latest conversions over coffee in the cafeteria. For now, though, Olivia’s brand remains quite wholesome. On the first night there, I witnessed a marriage proposal (“Do you think they just met?” joked a woman at my table; “That’d be a record”). Tisha, the cruise director and VP, met her wife on an Olivia cruise. And she emphasized to me that it’s a place where many women go to fall in love — which certainly does happen. At first, sitting alone on the catamaran heading out for my snorkeling excursion, I felt shy again, and wished I had Dana or Jamie and Matie at my side. One of the guys running the boat, a youngish dude with dreads, took pity on me and brought me a glass of water. He asked me if I was staff on the cruise, noting my friendlessness, and I told him I was a reporter. 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.

their rounds. I hopped down from the ledge and tiptoed to the door. Mrs Gomes had given up on struggling and lay on the floor sniffing. I pulled the handle down and slammed the door behind me. Immediately she turned around to face the door as I approached her and removed the blindfold. It was wet so she had been crying, even her eyes were a bit red. I was hesitant for a couple reasons. The first was that they’d slept with someone else, just once, when they were on a solo vacation, before we’d agreed to any sort of open-relationship terms; I felt like they’d forced my hand. (It’s hard for me even now to say they cheated on me, though that’s precisely what they did.) The second reason was that I’d watched some of my friends in long-term relationships experiment with nonmonogamy, only for the experiment to end in disaster: Somebody, inevitably, fell for somebody else. She plays the drums, loves cars — like, posts-on-car-forums-level loves cars — and follows tech news. She cares about clothes and buys a lot of hers vintage. She just got a tattoo commemorating Liverpool, her beloved football team. 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.As they made their way down stairs Brandon stopped me and said I have to wait up here until he was done. He didn’t want me to interfere or know exactly where she was downstairs. Where could she be I thought, we only have one carpet down there. So I sat in the living room as they went down stairs. It was only a couple of minutes and I couldn’t hear anyone talking after a while like I did when they first went down and the suspense was killing me. So I sneaked to the stairs commando style and peaked over the edge. What I saw caught me completely off guard. 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.

Our little sis is very wise," Marie said. "Anyway, thanks, it's good to know I'm not totally insane. But I'm really curious about your outfit, Spider-Man," Marie said, looking at Erin. Okay," Marie said. "But sit down and relax, both of you. You're making me more nervous than I was already. I was deeply relaxed when both of you barged in, screaming and scaring me to death." 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.

Arts

MMMMMMMM EWIKKAAAA EEETTT EEE GOOOO PLSSSS” She wailed from behind her gag. I wanted to laugh like all those villians in TV shows but that would spoil all the fun. Untying her proved almost impossible. Since I wasn’t allowed to use a knife I had to cut some of the ropes with a pair of scissors. It was slow going because I didn’t want to slip and cut my mom but I eventually got her to a stage where she could help me untie her. Once the ropes were off I noticed deep welts where she had been tied. She massaged those spots while I watched. She must have thought I was in distress because as she looked up. I asked if she was alright and she told me that of course she was. We threw the rope away and she went to the washroom to clean up.