No Script for This

With things going well between Brendan and me, we decided to do something vulnerable, frisky and fun. Two months into us talking, he sent me a selfie of him holding a VHS camcorder. “Sex tape on deck,” I immediately wrote back, without thinking twice. I wasn’t exactly serious, but I also wasn’t fully joking. It was just an obvious thing to say.

We’d both done it before with other partners, so it wasn’t uncharted territory. But that was when we were younger, more reckless, and not yet traumatized by personal experiences with revenge porn. Still, there was an enticing “I’m down if you’re down” energy between us.

So, there was one week during the summer, feeling sensual and at the height of our romance, when we made it happen. Twice.

The first go-round was spontaneous. We didn’t even use the video camera like we’d talked about; we captured it on a phone instead. It was in public. It happened on a night I’d gone to happy hour with a friend before meeting up with Brendan at a bar, so there was a significant amount of alcohol involved. 

We slipped away to a single-occupancy bathroom where we both dropped our pants. If you’ve ever had intercourse in a public restroom, you know that viable positions are limited. It made most sense for me to bend over, which left the camera work in Brendan’s hands. As music blared beyond the confines of the walls, we documented minute-after-minute, my lower back bared as my black top cropped at my waist. It was a “no face, no case” setup at the start.

Then, assuming the role of director, Brendan suggested we move across the room to where the sink was. Pants around our ankles, we waddled our way there, now lending our reflections to the home video as our faces appeared in the mirror.

When I played the clips back the next morning, I watched in disgust as my eyebrows furrowed and my mouth hung agape (my involuntary o-face) in the looking glass. Meanwhile, the footage showed Brendan holding the phone in front of his face, covering most of it but exposing enough to reveal a big smile.

We brought the camcorder with us to brunch. I wore a casual tight white dress and dark sunglasses

I couldn’t bring myself to watch it all the way through — it was too cringy. We needed to redeem ourselves. We needed to make something better. “Can we delete the videos?” I asked Brendan. “I’m horrified.”

Days later, we brought the camcorder with us to brunch. I wore a casual tight white dress and dark sunglasses. Taking turns filming and snapping photos of each other as we nibbled on shrimp and sipped mimosas was foreplay.

The new recording was shaping up to have a retro Kim and Ray J vibe, calling back to the early 2000s. We weren’t on vacation but that’s what the energy felt like as we soaked up the beautiful summer day in Los Angeles.

Afterward, Brendan filmed me as I got out of our Uber and walked up the stairs to my building. “Do something sexy,” he encouraged while trailing behind me. I liked having him direct; it made me feel like the star of the show. I leaned forward and shook my butt a little before I punched in the door code.

Finally in the privacy of my apartment, we had everything we needed to really get the ball rolling. But first, we looked at each other eye-to-eye. “This is only for us,” Brendan said as he extended his finger for a pinky promise. “Only for us,” I echoed in agreement.

And because of that moment, I’ve found it really difficult to write this piece the way I imagined I’d write it — in careful detail, drawing out the sweet moments between Brendan and me, sharing what we said, describing his facial expressions, etcetera. It’s too personal. 

So I’ll fast-forward and say this: Even though watching our tape back after spending the day making it together was one of the most unexpectedly intimate things I’ve done with a partner, Brendan and I stopped seeing each other just a couple of months later.

Just like our entire five-month relationship had been, the breakup was calm and level. Anticlimactic, really. There was no argument, no tears, no harsh words — just the return of the key to my apartment, upon my request.

If it seems like giving Brendan a key in the first place was abrupt, that’s because it was. It kind of happened on a whim. I was only being flirty when I replied one morning after I’d missed a text from him in the middle of the night, “About to give you a key, then you can just slide into bed with me [next time].” The previous night he’d hit me up to hang out after I’d already gone to sleep.

He wrote back, “You’d give me a key?” I went along with it and typed unequivocally, “Yes. Would you take it?” He did take it, and that was that.

When we split, I barely felt anything, except a sliver of relief to be out of the wrong relationship. In retrospect, I think things between us went as far as they did simply because I was happy to have a consistent male presence who didn’t feel like a threat to my emotional well-being. He checked several boxes and provided the companionship I was seeking, but we weren’t a match. It reiterated to me that this dating shit is precarious.

But being single again freed me up for the fun that was to come with F and Bubbles as I rounded out the fourth quarter of the year.