Introductions

Hello there, weary traveler. Welcome to A Fox in Heat. I'm Espresso (Es for short), and my partner is Absinthe (Sin for short). No, these are not our real names, but for a blog like this, they work!

Es eating out at a Japanese restaurant.

For this first post, I want to talk a little bit about myself, and I'll talk about some of my relationships before I ever met Sin. In the followup to this, I'll tell the story of how Sin and I met~

To tell you my story, I should start off by saying I grew up in the deep, rural South. Despite that, my parents weren't really religious. Conservative, yes, but not religious. I grew up being told to lock my car door if black people were around, to turn off the TV if I ever saw "faggots" on there, and to always see women as mere sex objects. All of these things made me uncomfortable growing up. I was a reader. Would Harry Potter lock his door? Would Lyra Belacqua turn off the TV? Would Matthias the Hero treat women like that? The answer is of course no.

In my mind, I was straight as could be, but just not the kind of straight person my dad was. Every year, he bought me a swimsuit calendar for Christmas. I told him I didn't feel comfortable putting that up on my wall. Every year. And he told me to put it up anyway. It would "make me a man." (Well, now I wear stockings, chastity cages, and panties from time to time; how'd that work for you, dad?)

I discovered during college that I had an interest in animals and the ways they were represented sexually in American culture. The wolf whistle. The cougar label. The sexy cat costumes. The Playboy bunny. And that's how I discovered the furry fandom. There was a local meetup right in my town! I checked it out and interviewed people for my research. One of the people I interviewed was my first boyfriend. Let's call them Milkshake for now. If they were a drink, they'd definitely be a tutti frutti milkshake. We lasted about six months. But it was all new to me. Dating a guy. Kissing a guy. Sleeping next to one. But it didn't work for me. I started learning that I wanted a dominant partner. I wanted someone I could feel safe with and taken care of with. Not in a codependence kind of way. Just in a general security kind of way. I didn't feel that with Milkshake.

My next partner was a guy I'll call Malbec. He came from Memphis to see me in Nashville every weekend. He was HIV-negative. He was a sweetheart. He was funny. He was a gentleman. On my spring break, I took him with me on a vacay to the Bahamas. I was sick immediately, but it wasn't seasickness. It was like the flu. Malbec took care of me the whole time, never leaving my side. I knew he was the one. He could have went off and enjoyed himself, but he was taking care of me instead. I stayed sick when I got back home. The doctors couldn't figure it out. Eventually, it passed. I moved in with Malbec, but things just didn't work out. We didn't click anymore. We fought all the time. We broke up but saw each other now and then for the rest of the year. Then I talked to his new boyfriend, a guy he had dated before me. The boyfriend asked me, "Oh, so you must be HIV-positive, too?" I was dumbfounded, "What do you mean? Malbec is negative." "Nah, he's been positive for about ten years." I confronted my ex, and it turned out to be true. He had been scared I would leave him if I had found out. I went and got tested. Came back positive.

I went on dates off and on for a few years, but it wasn't until 2016 that I met a long-term partner again. This guy, we'll call him Cider, was sweeter than my past partners. He knew how to cook. He knew how to bake. He enjoyed reading as much as I did. Hell, we met over a book I was publishing. He was fairly kinky too, something I had started to get into. I moved in with him after just a month of dating, and that first year went great. We had a trip to Disney, we cooked together a lot, and we worked on book publishing together. But then the next year, when we moved up to Michigan, things quickly turned sour.

When you start to look at any relationship, yours or someone else's, and you start talking about blame or who owes whom what, you are engaging in what I call a system of "moral capitalism." Treating love and feelings like financial values of worth. Things fell apart with Cider and me, and I'm not exactly an unbiased party. He resented that I "made" him move up to Michigan. He missed everything about his home state. I resented that he stayed pissed all the time and wasn't willing to talk through his thoughts and feelings with me. Some days, he was verbally abusive. And me, I was unfaithful...in a closed relationship. I don't see these two things as connected really. We both fucked up, in different ways. That doesn't make either of our problems acceptable. But they happened. And I feel we both learned from them. Toward the end, we tried things like being "open" and talking more. But on my end at least, I was disenchanted. I had to fight with him multiple times a week for sex, and he would only ask about it at a time when he knew I was busy and then never again. On his end, he saw me as not being romantic at all anymore or being too demanding. I eventually read all of this as a sign that we just weren't compatible anymore. I ended it.

Since then, Cider and I have stayed friends. Right now, I'm even typing this pantsless in his house while he's working at his own computer. He probably has no idea I'm writing this, but I don't think he'd mind. He and I have grown very distance in a lot of ways. He told me recently that if offered the chance he wouldn't date someone like me right now. I'm too political and unapologetic about it. I'm not as tolerant toward centrist and libertarian perspectives, views that he has often embraced. Even my aesthetic has changed, wearing more tank tops and dying my hair. We've grown apart, but we're still comfortable around each other. Can comfort be the basis of a relationship? Maybe, maybe not. But when you also have the history, many shared interests, and a long friendship, it's hard to even want to end it. I don't plan to.

But about half a year into my dating Cider, I encountered an author that I would come to love, and his name, at least on this blog, is Absinthe.