Like all the worst (and best) things in life, it began with a piss kink.
We’re in bed, in a hastily booked AirBnB in Barcelona. The sun is streaming in through the greasy glass panes of a pair of double patio doors. They are, of course, jammed. It’s 26 degrees outside, and there’s a greenhouse effect in the room that is making me feel like a dog locked inside a car on a hot day with no window cracked.
Because the apartment we’re staying in is owned by a man, the sheets are stiff – tragic casualties of a lack of fabric softener – but we’ve both made some kind of silent pact not to acknowledge this. I was responsible for the accommodation so, naturally, I am internally cringing. Ana’s hair undulates across a cardboard-thin pillow, and I find myself compulsively twirling the ends, rubbing strands between my fingers to verify that it’s as soft and as fine as it appears – as I imagine it, as I know it to be.
There’s that heady, post-sex atmosphere in the room where nothing feels off-limits, and yet, I catch a glimpse of myself and feel internally repulsed. I am thirty, but I am acting like a teenage boy: horny, awkward, stupid. My skin is sticky, but hers is cold, like it doesn't bear even a trace of the heat of my touch, and I can smell my sweat, can feel the flush in my face.
Her face is two bottomless pits, framed by long, featherlight lashes and supported by sharp, precise architecture. She is refined, poised, self-possessed. I am the opposite: from the tits spilling out the top of my bra, to the tiny sliver of thong prising my ass cheeks apart. She is bone, I am flesh. My vulnerability in this moment is laced with self-disgust, and I’m distracted, thinking of getting up, getting moving, doing anything to get rid of this feeling.
Ana is questioning me about my urine fetish: asking me to explain it, to recount scenarios, to rationalise why I could find something like this attractive, to tell me the most extreme things I’ve ever done. This is a game she often plays, this forensic interrogation of my sexual past. I can never quite discern the motivation, can’t tell if it’s a case of genuine curiosity or a gateway to second-hand titillation. I’ve always been a strategic oversharer – generous with my time, money, and body – thinking it will barter my safety, that my gifts will be gratefully received. I know she likes this openness, and how available it makes me to her, but I am beginning to know she also detests it: that she thinks I have circulated too freely and easily to others.
Still desperate to keep her attention, I tell her about how smelling someone’s pee is probably the most intimate thing you can do without getting under their skin, how it’s warm and alive with their body, how you get so close to the inner workings of their anatomy. When this doesn’t seem to entertain her, I tell her I’m like a dog, getting to know others by sniffing their pee. She seems to like that, so I tell her more. About the girl who peed on my hair, on my chest, and denied me a shower, making me go outside soaked in her piss, marking me as her property.
She asks me if I’ve ever let someone piss in my mouth and I explain that yes, of course. She asks if I’ve ever let a man piss in my mouth. I hesitate. At first, I thought we were both playing by the same rules, but it’s beginning to dawn on me that she is looking to catch me out. I can hear her breath accelerating. Not because she’s horny, but because she’s angry. I have to be careful. I explain, once again, that I have barely slept with men. The two I have, I’ve been the dominant one. I start pulling up examples from the archive: my teenage boyfriend, the one whose chest I pissed on. I start to rationalise. Submission is banal with men, with women it’s exciting. Except none of this is working. She is pressuring me for a straight answer. Okay…yes, I have let a guy piss in my mouth. And yes, it was the guy I dated three years ago.
I close my eyelids shut for a second, scrunching them until I see pixelated colors at the back of my retinas. I am trying to stretch out time, to delay coming back to this moment, on this bed. When I unpeel my eyes and look at her, I know it’s the beginning of the end. There is a raw, vicious energy radiating from her. She is staring at the ceiling, and I know she is mentally replaying the images in her head. For some time, it’s silent. The tension breaks with a flinch. She punches the mattress, inches away from my unguarded body. I can only process what’s happening in parts. I think of the delicate skin draped over knuckles, her knuckles against the unmanicured sheets, the shock reverberating through the springs in the mattress.
Being a bitch feels like my only defence.
“No use crying over spilt piss,” I say, swinging my feet over the edge of the bed.
I swiftly make my way to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I don’t want her to see I am shaking. I turn on the shower, take off my bra, and kick off underwear, which, concerningly, is wet. I am clearly mentally unwell to be turned on right now. I step into the moderately clean bathtub, contemplate mentioning the middling hygiene in my AirBnB review, and face the ongoing stream of water. I grab the hair falling down my back and wrap it around my nose and mouth, fantasising briefly about waterboarding myself with the shower head. Instead, I pee as a fuck you to Ana: watching as gold meets water, mushrooming and swirling around my feet. Fuck. You.
Megan Wallace is a writer exploring eros and hedonism through prose. They publish dispatches from the sexual underground via their Substack PULP and write about desire and sexuality for the likes of Cosmopolitan, British GQ and Playboy. @meganhwallace