“‘Oh my god, are you a furry?’ He nodded sheepishly, and the word ‘sheepishly’ suddenly had a different luster.”
Dan Meth / BuzzFeed
He was an Australian flight attendant in town from Dubai, and he only had until dawn. In the doorway of my bedroom he asked, "Are you going to make my last night in New York one to remember?"
"Yes," I replied, about as enthusiastically as anyone could, having just been thrust into the Lea Michele subplot of an ensemble romantic comedy.
We'd met online twenty minutes earlier. His face, a shiny new square in the patchwork quilt of familiar faces and torsos, stood out, and even though he was undoubtedly being inundated with come-hithers from my latitudinal compatriots, I threw my hat into the ring. His profile, you see, described a tall, pale foreign tourist with elastic vowels, a clean bill of health, and a fetish for outie belly buttons. Sensing an in, I wrote to him, "I have one."
He wrote back immediately, "No way."
I responded, simply, "Way."
Fun fact: being born was such hard work for me, so arduous,
so toilsome, that I emerged screaming with an umbilical hernia that gifted me for life with an outie belly button. I never touch it; I think it's dark-sided. But, with a man in sight, I was suddenly the old-timey director throwing open the homely under- study's dressing-room door: "You're on tonight, kid! Learn the steps from Daisy and keep those lips closed when you smile."
"Send a pic?" he requested.
Obliging, I lifted my shirt and began to wildly photograph my stomach. I applied a tasteful Instagram filter to the best shot and sent it off. He responded with a slew of exclamation marks and slobbering emoticons and begged to be invited over. Turns out my milkshake can bring one boy to the yard: a fetishist.
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
He sat on my bed and he didn't slobber, he didn't mouth- breathe, he didn't writhe—what did he do? He grinned sheepishly and said, "Sorry, I'm a bit shy." He was awfully cute. I sat down next to him. "How old are you?" he asked.
"Twenty-nine," I replied.
His mouth dropped. "No way," he said. "I thought you were my age."
He told me he was twenty-three. "I'm not that much older than you," I started, but he cut me off with, "No, it's just—you look good, you look young."
"Well, you know," I replied. "Advances in medicine."
He told me my cardigan was lovely, and, as though someone had pressed play on a Paula Cole song, I jumped on him, koalaed myself to his body, and put my mouth on his. He was a fantastic, tender kisser, and his hands were deft and assured, strong, I could only assume, from maneuvering the beverage cart up and down countless airborne aisles. He lifted my shirt and kissed his way down to my belly button, where he hovered reverently. I squirmed.
"Sorry, it's just—" he said, and brought his mouth in for a landing. I sat up instantly, and he pulled back. "Is that okay?" he asked. "Is that weird?"
"No, no," I replied, wanting to be hospitable. "It's just—new." He dove back onto it and I flinched.
"Oh, wow, you hate this!" he exclaimed.
"It's just that—no one has ever done anything to me there
before," I told him.
"Really? What have the other boys done, just gone around it?"
I didn't want to tell him what the other boys had done, but did offer that, yes, the few who had taken a passing interest in my pleasure had indeed gone around it. He shook his head, staring at my outie with the same love in his eyes that appears in mine when I see passed trays of cheese at a reception. I ran my hands through his hair and told him to go slowly, which he did. He kissed it gently once, and then several times more. It was the most personal impersonal thing I've ever experienced. My body filled with emotion, as though I might at any moment cry or laugh or poop, so I put my hands to my face and quickly chose laughter.
The truth is, I'm scared of my belly button. My childhood doctor told me that I should never travel anywhere that was more than an hour away from a hospital because my intestinal wall could rupture further and I'd start to, you know, come out of myself, unspool. This was summarily debunked years later by my uncle, who's also a doctor. But I've tiptoed around my weird navel ever since, as though it held the key to my mortality, and now I'd, what, invited someone over to put his mouth on it and potentially suck the life out of me.

"Okay, I think I'm ready to move on to other things," the Australian said. "Sorry, I'm a little fucked-up about sex. Not many things turn me on, outside of my fantasy life."
"Oh yes, yes," I murmured, steamrolling over that little tidbit and kissing him again. I wanted to busy his mouth, lest he tell me more about his fantasy life and disrupt mine, in which he was someone who knew me and loved me.
It worked.
After we finished, he put his arm around me. It was one of the first warm nights of summer, and we lay in the breeze from the fan in my window. He didn't much want to talk about living in Dubai. This was his first visit to New York, and while he'd ascended all of the recommended tall buildings and waited in line for all of the recommended pizza, he'd mainly come here to wander, to get lost, to walk the streets and follow their concrete whims.
"I want to be a town planner," he said, "and I'm mad for your grid."
He'd spent the previous afternoon wandering in disoriented circles through the West Village, and as he told me about it his eyes, like towns themselves, lit up. He'd be back as soon as he could, he said, but the New York flights were the ones all the flight attendants fought over, and he didn't have much seniority yet. "Plus I'm taking two weeks off to go to Berlin for a convention," he added. "Not for work, though." I asked him what for. "One of my passions."
"Oh, is it a town planning convention?" I asked.
"No, my other passion."
"What's your other passion?"

He looked at the ceiling and sighed. "This is where you ask me to leave."
Oh, god, I thought, the aforementioned fantasy life and Berlin. "What's your other passion?" I asked again, picturing a bunch of neo-Nazis doing bath salts in an Embassy Suites.
"You didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in my picture?" he asked.
That's when his profile picture flashed back to me: him sitting on a carpet, smiling, wearing normal clothes, being hugged from behind by someone in a full fox costume. Full fox. Again I sat up: "Oh my god, are you a furry?"
He nodded sheepishly, and the word "sheepishly" suddenly had a different luster.
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