Curator's Thesis

I was fifty-one years old, standing at my kitchen sink in Portland on a rainy Thursday in November, rinsing dinner plates, when the words just fell out of my mouth.

"I want you to fuck me in the ass."

There. That's the sentence. I'd been holding it in my chest for about a year, and it came out while I was scrubbing curried lentil goo off a bowl we got at a yard sale in 2022. Very glamorous.

Behind me, Jackson set down his beer. Jackson is fifty-three, a photographer, the kind of man who owns nine camera bags and uses maybe three. We've been together three years now. We met at a gallery opening when I was forty-eight, curating a photography show, and he spent twenty minutes defending a picture of a parking garage to me like it was the Mona Lisa. I agreed with none of that. But I kept him.

"Okay," he said slowly. "Say that again? Because I think I got water in my ear."

"You heard me." I kept rinsing. Coward move, talking to the sink. "You heard me fine."

"I mean, I did. I just want to make sure the sink didn't say it."

I turned around. He was leaning against the doorframe with his eyebrows somewhere near his hairline, and honestly? Not a bad look on him. Curious. Not horrified. That was important, because I had a whole backup plan where I claimed I was talking about a documentary.

"Yes," I said. "I'm serious. I've been thinking about it since I turned fifty and I finally just. Said it. Out loud. To my boyfriend. While holding a colander."

He laughed, which helped more than he probably knows. "How long is a long time?"

"About a year, Jackson. Since I turned fifty." I set the bowl in the rack. "I've just never. Well. My ex thought it was gross, so I filed it away, and then I turned fifty and thought, you know what, life is short, my knees hurt, my retirement account is doing great, maybe I get to have this one thing."

"You turned fifty and decided on anal?" He was grinning now. "Most people buy a motorcycle."

"A motorcycle can't hold me after."

"God, you're romantic!" He came over and took the dish towel off my shoulder, dried my hands like we were in a costume drama. "So tell me. When you say you want it. Is this a fantasy you want to keep a fantasy, or is this a Tuesday?"

"That depends. Are you in?"

"Mae." He looked at me the way he looks at a contact sheet when he's about to find the one. "I have wanted to be asked that question since we met, basically. But I was going to wait for you. Because it's your ass, and my motto has always been invitation only."

"That's a terrible motto."

"It's a great motto. It got me you."

I want to note here that nobody was drunk. We'd each had one beer with dinner, three hours earlier. I'd made salmon. There were brussels sprouts, which in hindsight was a bold choice, and we can skip past why. We were two sober adults in their fifties discussing logistics in a kitchen that smelled like dish soap, and we were both grinning like idiots.

"Okay," I said. "So. How do we even. I mean, I've read things. Articles. There's a lot of information out there and most of it is terrifying."

"We go slow," he said. "We use an absurd amount of lube. We stop whenever you say stop. And we start in the shower probably, or after, because, and I say this with love, sprouts."

"Jackson!"

"I'm just thinking of you! I'm being a gentleman."

"You're being a coward about a vegetable."

He kissed me then, quick, on the mouth, and asked, "Can I kiss you properly, or are your hands still prune-y?" and I said yes, obviously, and he did, and it was nice, familiar, three years of nice. Then he pulled back and said, "Bedroom. I'll grab supplies. You just. Do whatever makes you feel brave."

What makes me feel brave, it turns out, is taking my clothes off while my boyfriend rummages in the bathroom cabinet like a raccoon.

* * *

Our bedroom has two warm lamps, no overhead light, which Jackson installed specifically because I told him once that ceiling lights make me feel like I'm being interviewed. The bed is a mess of quilts. There's a tripod in the corner that he keeps threatening to sell. Art books are stacked on the dresser in towers of three, leaning like drunk architecture.

I peeled off my sweater and my jeans and stood there in my bra and underwear having a small crisis about my stomach, which I then told to shut up, because I'm fifty-one and he's seen this stomach for three years and he's never once made the face.

"Okay so," Jackson called from the bathroom. "I have lube. I have the good lube, the expensive one you bought me for my birthday, which, ha, turns out to be prophetic. I have towels. I have. Wait. Do we need gloves? Do people use gloves?"

"We don't need gloves, Jackson, this is a bedroom, not a hospital."

"Do we need a safe word?"

"Jackson, I have known you for three years, my safe word is 'stop, Jackson.'"

"Solid system." He came back in with his arms full, towels over one shoulder like a waiter, bottle of lube in his hand, and stopped dead when he saw me. "Oh. Hi."

"Hi yourself."

"You're gorgeous. You know that, right? You know that, and yet you still got dressed up in flannel for dinner."

"The flannel was clean. That's the entire story of the flannel."

He put the towels down on the foot of the bed, very seriously, like he was laying out surgical instruments, and I laughed so hard I had to sit on the edge of the mattress. Then I reached back and undid my bra, and threw it at the tripod, and missed, and he said, "That counts, that's a bullseye," and I said, "You're stalling," and he said, "I'm a little bit stalling, yes, because I want to do this right and I love you and also your aim is terrible."

I pushed my underwear down and off and lay back on the quilts, and he took off his shirt, and there we were. Fifty-three and fifty-one, naked on a Thursday, one lamp on, rain going at the window.

"So," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. "Where do we start?"

"Well," he said, climbing onto the bed beside me, lube bottle in hand like it was a walkie-talkie. "First I'm going to use my hands and my mouth on you until you forget your own name. Then, if you still want to, we go further. Slow. And you call the shots the whole way. Deal?"

"Deal." Then, because he looked nervous too, I added, "Hey. Jackson. Thank you for not making a joke about the sprinkler incident of 2019."

"Mae. I am saving that joke for our anniversary."

I hit him with a pillow, and he caught it, and then he was kissing his way down my body, and the nervous part started melting right off both of us.

He worked his way down like he always does, unhurried, like we had nowhere to be, which technically we didn't, it was a Thursday and I'd already fed us salmon. By the time he got his mouth on me I was making noises into the quilt that I hope the neighbors couldn't hear through the rain.

"Mae," he said at some point, chin against my hip, "you're squirming like the bed is electrified."

"I'm fifty-one years old and this is my first time doing this, let me squirm."

"Squirm approved."

Then he had me roll over onto my stomach, and he piled a quilt under my hips like he was building a nest, which he probably was, and he said, "Okay. This is the part where I use my hands. I'm going to start with just lube and one finger, and you tell me everything. Good, bad, weird, all of it."

"That's a lot of categories."

"That's the point. Ready?"

"Yeah. Yeah, do it."

I heard the cap of the expensive lube click open, and then his hand was warm on me, and the lube was cool for one second before his fingers followed. He started slow, just stroking, around and around, gentle as anything, and I will admit I tensed up as if a door had slammed.

"Hey," he said. "Breathe. You're clenching like you're about to be audited."

"That is exactly what it feels like. My body thinks it's getting a colonoscopy."

"Tell your body it's getting spoiled rotten instead."

I laughed, and the laugh helped, honestly, because laughing loosened things up in a way that trying to relax deliberately never did. He kept stroking, patient, and gradually, gradually, my body got the memo. Then I felt one fingertip press, barely, just testing.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Go slow."

He did. Slow, and a little at a time, and there was this odd fullness, not painful, just strange, like my body was reading a form it had never filled out before. I gripped the pillow and breathed.

"How's it feeling?" he asked. "Talk to me."

"Weird. But not bad weird. Kind of like. Hmm. You know when you're at the dentist and they put that thing in your mouth and it's enormous but it doesn't actually hurt?"

"That is the least romantic comparison ever made in this bed."

"Take it up with my brain, it's what I've got."

He laughed and kept going, a little