I.

____ is the first man. I know he wants me the first day we meet in philosophy class. Something in the way he spreads his legs as I shed my coat full of wintry morning, or maybe the slant of his look, or the tenor of his jokes, or his questions about my philosophy of friendship. The way he asks me if I am really bi after I share my sexuality. How he thought I was a lesbian. His interest in my open relationship. How eager he is to share his poetry. 

I have been pining after another classmate, a girl with dark hair and dark eyes who is named for an oracle, and I decide that she has become my muse. I want her in a way that ties a knot in my tongue and I spend pages of my time writing poems for an Archer, from Taurus. I am sure that she is straight, so I resolve to never tell her how I feel. Instead I go home every night and share my crushes with my girlfriend, who pays all our bills and puts me through school and cares for my dog, who loves me, who stays in the closet and does not desire to make love to me. 

My girlfriend has been pining after a classmate of her own, a boy with dark hair and dark eyes who is named for a wolf. She tells me that I’m ____’s muse, and I preen at the idea of so much power over a man. My girlfriend tells me to pursue this if I want, reminds me that I do not need to ask her for permission, that we’ve finally decided it’s okay to be open. So when he invites me to a party three days shy of twenty-one, I tell him yes, knowing exactly where it will lead. 

Half a bottle of tequila later, he asks me if I’m flirting with him, and I tell him that I’m like literature: open to interpretation. So he kisses me on a stranger’s balcony and buys me tacos that I don’t touch before we Uber to his apartment in the heart of Cambridge. I tell him he’s the first, and he tells me to use less teeth. 

All is well until tequila wells in my throat and I’m on my knees in front of his toilet texting my girlfriend that I can’t stop vomiting, calling for an ambulance because I’m feeling too faint and I can’t believe that this is how she’s meeting ____, helping me out of his apartment, refusing the ambulance because it will cost us far too much, taking an Advil even though I can’t keep any water down and somehow I make it back to our apartment in one piece but something is unquenched, something disappoints me, and I’m reminding myself that first times are often disappointments, remembering our first time and how she flinched at the sight of me, accepting that I’m only attracted to how much ____ craves me, grappling with the idea that I can wield my sex like the edge of a sword, learning that I can seduce someone with one long look, filling the void that I attribute to my girlfriend’s unwillingness to touch me and my unwillingness to leave her—because she is my first, because she must be the last, depending on her and the all the security she gifts me. I tell myself that I must stay with her, that in accepting her money I have cuffed myself to her ankles and must learn to love the taste of dust kicked in my mouth. 

I fall asleep in her arms and am grateful that she takes care of me.

II.

____ is the second man. We meet in poetry class, and later I will learn that he is friends with ____, who was the first. My girlfriend and I stumble upon him on a drunken Saturday night in spring, deep in his cups at an Irish bar and willing to buy us ours. He is desperately in love with his best friend, a boy, and my girlfriend and I know this without him saying so. He wears his best friend’s Vans proudly. 

He showers my girlfriend with attention all night. He compliments her afro and when I step away, he tries to kiss her. He is surprised to find me feminine, in red-lipped warpaint and a cat eye, because I often present masc. When my girlfriend and I are alone in the bathroom, I ask, “are we doing this?” and she says “yes,” so when we go back to him, I let him kiss me like the afterthought that I know I am. 

Everything about him is sharp and pale: his eyes, his hair, his milky white chest. He likes to put on lipstick and skirts in the bathroom of his apartment. We kiss him rosy in the stillness of his blue-black bedroom, and in the darkness his pet cat watches as my girlfriend’s hands blur into ink blots against the creamy canvas of ____’s breast. He is pink in his cheeks and pink at his tip and pink in his hand when he slaps my girlfriend hard enough to make me hurt. He takes off the condom without letting us know and when I notice, we decide to keep going anyway. He is so drunk and nervous that he can’t keep it up. He turns soft when I hold him in the cradle of my mouth. 

He is my girlfriend’s very first man. 

We meet again, but this time at The Tam. He introduces us to a black-bearded bartender and buys us shots until we’re smeared at the edges. 

“I’m kind of an alcoholic,” ____ jokes over his whiskey, “I’ve been in and out of rehab a couple of times.” I laugh because he seems so young and I am only twenty-one and I haven’t lived enough to learn what a cry for help sounds like. 

In the sweat of his apartment, he asks me to leave because he’s having trouble staying hard with both of us there. My girlfriend doesn’t mind, so I step out of the room, and in the doorway, I record them to remember that she never sang as sweetly for me. His cat curls up next to me on the little sofa and together we wait. He ends the night with an apology and calls an Uber for all the trouble. 

My girlfriend texts ____ again, but he never responds. We assume that he’s embarrassed. She laments the potential for a friendship with him and I don’t tell her that I am festering on the inside when she won’t fuck me the same way she fucked him. I am embittered by the fact that I knew him first, that her curls and her hands and the soft dimple of her lips should have been mine. I listen to the video in the lowest hours of the night. 

When I visit The Tam for the first time in months, the bartender recognizes me as a friend of ____’s. 

“Did you hear?” he asks as he serves my whiskey sour. “____ died a couple months ago. Asphyxiated at a party.”

I think of ____ often. His crooked nose, his blonde shock of hair. I wonder who will feed Batman, his little black cat. 

I finally stop watching the video of a dead man with my woman.

III.

_____ is the third man, but it’s his friend who starts the conversation in line at the arcade. Something in the friend’s smile tells me that we are both used to playing second fiddle, so I let him hook his hand around my waist while my girlfriend flirts with _____. We all smoke with a man who pulls pristinely rolled joints from the brown leather of his trench coat and shows off the stash in his cracked, metal briefcase, and my girlfriend laughs in that way that turns her all squints. We make friendships that last for only a summer, and we do not tell them that we are girlfriends. 

I stumble upon the girl who I have made my muse on a thirsty Thursday evening, and as we take the T together, I invite her to get drinks at a bar in Allston. I tell her that my girlfriend wants us to meet up with our new friends, so on our way we talk about what it means to be bisexual, and she makes it clear that she is straight and will only be my friend, and still I spend the night mapping my future in her words. I walk behind the group with her while my girlfriend teases _____, and I grind my teeth when he drapes his arm around the girl who is not my girl on the brown-banistered balcony, and I say nothing.

A week or two later, my girlfriend texts _____ and his friends to come get a drink with us. To her immense relief, it’s only _____ who can meet us, and although she buys the drinks, we spend hours orbiting the tension like a three-person tango, flirting with the possibility of going back to _____’s place. While we play darts, I watch my girlfriend admire the tight cords of his arms, and I lament that my arms will never be strong enough to hold her tight to me in the throes of lovemaking I so desperately desire. 

When we finally head to his house, we giggle and take pictures against the backdrop of a mural at the end of his block, and then we play what has to be the world’s worst game of strip poker: taking off bracelets and socks and rings and a single t-shirt. I am tired of waiting, so when my girlfriend leaves the room to grab a glass of water, I use my hands to say what she is so afraid of and break the dam of his desire. 

When my girlfriend flies out to visit family for a week, _____ comes over with a weak excuse to see me. I ask if I can taste him and we fuck before he leaves, and although it should be permissible, I’m afraid to tell my girlfriend. She responds how I expected she would: why would I have sex with him, without her, if I knew she wanted him first? 

I don’t have the courage to see _____ again, to give him a proper goodbye, to treat him like the friend I so desperately need. When he moves to NYC a couple of weeks later, I do what I do best: I delete his number, his social media, his name.

IV.

___ is the last. We meet up for a drink after classes have ended on a cool night in fall. I shave everything despite telling myself that we’re just friends, even though I like the gap in their teeth when they smile, their sandy wave of hair, their poems in our workshop, the way they smoke their Marlboro Reds. The gentleness in their voice. The way they move their hands. 

I buy our drinks with my girlfriend’s credit card, and after flirting in the chill, I say, “Just kiss me already,” and their tongue lifts the words directly from my lips. So I tell myself that I will ask my girlfriend for permission. Because I like ___ too much. Because I want to do whatever this is right. 

I go home and wait and write a sonnet about the ocean, about how I am torn apart by an undertow. Maelstrom, I call ___. Whitecap in my chest. 

I do not show my girlfriend the love poem that isn’t for her. 

And when I am given permission, my throat pythons around the truth and I do not tell her: that I am craving the massage oil, the orange-candled sex: that every inch of me has become an ode to a fling with a poet: that I feel like a line break / my breath an enjambment // that leaps across a stanza. I tell myself that hiding this will preserve my girlfriend’s feelings, and when I’m awoken by the gasp of her going through my texts and seeing all of the longing that I have kept for myself, I pretend I do not see the tremble of her lips. I remind myself that I have chosen this commitment. That I have indebted myself to loving her. 

___’s girlfriend does not like me. Maybe this is because I have misgendered ___ for the first few months of our friendship, or maybe this is because I do not understand what it means to be poly and have entertained the idea of competing for the spot of the primary lover. I ask my girlfriend if she would try polyamory with me and she asks me why I like doing what is most convenient for myself at any given time. 

I ingratiate myself to ___’s beautiful mother, and I learn that ___ comes from music, money, and a happy family not afraid to love their child, who welcomes a handful of twenty-somethings onto their Airbnb balcony to smoke pot and pet their dog named for a pie. I imagine a life with ___ where we listen to Simon and Garfunkel with their father, where their money is not like Damocles’ sword, where their love is not like my own mother’s: holding onto the hope that I will outgrow my bisexuality and marry a nice man. I do not consider what would happen with my girlfriend, and I cling to this foolishness like an oasis after the desert. 

Our last date that is not a date is a failed seduction. We smoke behind their apartment and although we kiss, I am the initiator. When I am with my girlfriend, I am always the initiator. A mutual friend texts them and they ask if I want to hang out together. I imply that I would like to have sex and they tell me that they’re not feeling it. When they don’t look at me, I realize that the fling is already over. It was never, not for a moment, a competition with their girlfriend—I wasn’t ever in the running. 

The last time I see ___, they help me with a project on Bisexual Erasure because although they aren’t interested in me, they are still kind. I wish I could smooth the tangle of their tawny hair, but my girlfriend is with me that day taking pictures on the Common. I ask them to write down the most hurtful thing that someone has told them about their sexuality, and their sign reads “___, 22, ‘You flit around when you’re young, but eventually you have to pick…’” 

I take a portrait of them holding this sign, and I smile even though I know I will never see them again. I long for the choice to leave, for the luxury of not having to pick someone over myself. 

I do not sleep with anyone in our relationship again. I love her, I remind myself as I go home with my girlfriend. There is a part of me that knows this to be true.