I’m racking my brain for a story of my own as my turn arrives. I think about the worst situation I can remember—the guy I married when I was eighteen, my manic-depressive young husband. I remember getting divorced from him at twenty. I remember the angry words, the suicide threats. I remember the cold metal of the gun on my bare thigh the night before I finally moved out, I remember being terrified, and I also remember being very, very wet. No, I imagine that story won’t work.

Nobeko starts in on a story about a woman who wanted to tie her up and how shocking this was to her. I can’t stand it. The world is desperately in need of more people with enough passion and drive to understand the dynamics revealed in restraints. You wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve actually had to ask to tie me up, pretty please, which tends to limit the high of submissiveness. Believe me, the concept of men and domination is a myth.

I shrug and pass on telling a story when it’s my turn, and after a couple more “it was awful’s” the conversation turns to great sex. But the bad sex concept holds in my mind, and I know there is no way to look this up in my library. Field research is required. I never pass on anything. That’s why people like me become researchers, because the urge to know everything and anything about a subject is overwhelming once it slips into that certain mind-curiosity groove. If there’s bad sex out there, I’ll find it.

“It’s sort of a scavenger hunt for bad sex, Holly,” I try to explain to my upstairs neighbor and lover. We’re buried deep under her pink comforter eating chocolate chip cookies the next night. Holly is the Martha Stewart of my love life—candlelight and cookies and flowers all the time. Some nights just walking into her place is better than actual sex. She’s a Dragon—as into mind-touching as body-touching.

“Sometimes I have bad sex with myself,” Holly offers. “You know, those nights when even your own fingers bore you to death?”

“Bad sex for one? Sounds like something Stouffer’s would make.”

Monogamy is not a fetish of mine, but still I feel a little guilty, even though Holly and I have always been open about any other lovers we might have. I decided a long time ago that two lovers was exactly the right number for me. My other lover is a student named Keith, a Snake like me, but from a different generation, twelve years younger. He knows what I need. He likes to use my hair to tie me up in strange places before he fucks me, and I’m immensely fond of that particular knot.