I don’t sleep. Or at least I haven’t with any regularity since I was a teenager, and that’s been a few decades. When I have insomnia, my life feels like a watercolor painting; when I’ve slept well, it’s sharp and vivid. I envy those who sleep well and have infinite empathy for those, like me, who don’t.

Whenever I meet someone new who has suffered a few restless nights, they offer me a solution that they swear will work because it did for them. One day my eyes are gonna roll all the way into the back of my head in exasperation of someone who thinks that in my twenty plus years of insomnia that it has never occurred to me to try melatonin.

Recently, through some strange bit of fate, I ended up sleeping with not one but two narcoleptics. All three of us were clinically diagnosed for sleep disorders and medicated for them. How strange, though, to discover two people who have trouble staying awake when I can never sleep. The odds of that wreck my brain, having never met a narcoleptic before and having at all times struggled to sleep.

Bunny, I dated for two months. She would spend the night and lay in my arms calling me daddy as she succumbed to her sleep medicine, which made her both sleepy and horny. Her hand would slide under the blanket and take hold of my cock, and she would plead with me to let her put it in her mouth. She’d told me before this might happen and urged me to give in to it, but only if I wanted to. She was a sweet girl but, twenty years younger than I and having suffered a lot of trauma. When she called me daddy, it felt like I was her caretaker and was needed more than wanted. I felt protective of her, but it became harder and harder for me to see her as a sexual partner. I would hold her as she would drift off to sleep, I, however, could never sleep while she was near, which took its toll on me. That relationship was ill-fated from the beginning, and I had my first solid night’s rest in weeks on the day that it ended.

Bae was the second narcoleptic and someone who I’d been speaking to on friendly terms while seeing Bunny. When Bunny and I split up, Bae and I got close, quickly. She was leaving town, but we made the most of the time before she left. She was a submissive in need of a cathartic beating, and I, a sadist, was happy to provide her with it. Gagged on my bed, I left stripes on her that would last well after she’d left for her trip; marks she was proud of for taking, and marks I was happy to have given. She slept one night in my bed, curled up next to me, and sometimes I’d manage to drift off for an hour or two, but I was awake when she fell asleep and awake when she woke.

The next few nights, I couldn’t sleep. I was restless at night and walked through my days feeling like I was in a dream, hyperfocused on moments and trying to interpret and correlate things that were unrelated to make sense of everything.

One sleepless night, I swiped on Mallory on a dating app, not expecting much to come of it. I had very little faith in most applications, and I’d written my user account bluntly and without real consideration of any particular outcome. It said something to the effect of ‘Looking for someone to chokefuck and co-parent a rescue dog with. Have all the streaming services and antibodies, but I’m still taking the pandemic seriously.’

I matched with Mallory, and she came at me hard out of the gate, telling me she already had a dog and HBO Max, and asked what I had to bring to the table that she couldn’t provide for herself; I liked her instantly.

Her photos showed a slender woman in her early thirties with tattoos, dark hair cut just below the chin, framing a serious face. Her user account said that she was a company intelligence director, and a quick look at her Instagram showed that she was obsessively interested in pole fitness and had her own pole in her living room. Clever, gorgeous, successful, and with a dark sense of humor; this was someone who I wanted to meet.

Dating in the time of a pandemic is challenging, so we skipped some formalities and I went to her place the first time we met. She met me at the door of her high-rise apartment in over-the-knee socks, pole shorts, and a white tank top.

“Come on in, Dad,” she said, playing into the dynamic that we’d discussed at length via text, often late on sleepless nights.

I took note of the taut lines of her legs and the curve of her ass as she led me into the apartment, which had high ceilings, wood floors, and large windows that looked into an office building across the street. I imagined that if it were not for the pandemic, there would be people in those offices getting an interesting show of Mallory working out on her pole as we walked past it to her couch.

Mallory’s most prominent kink was dark roleplay that involved being overpowered by someone close to her. She liked the idea of playing with the power of attraction to the point where a person couldn’t help themselves and then they wouldn’t stop. It was consensual non-consent at its core, and it required a certain amount of negotiation in advance to be able to navigate it successfully. This first date was a precursor to that, and as she sat on the couch eyeing me, I could already tell we would push that kink to some dark places.

We spent that first night talking, negotiating, and setting the scene. We didn’t fuck, but we felt each other out to see what that might be like and if we were both capable of being the scene partner the other needed. By the time we said goodnight, there was no chance we weren’t gonna end up fucking; it was inevitable. I left her apartment thinking about the feeling of her legs draped across mine and the taste of her mouth. I wondered about what it would feel like to push her against the wall, throw her down on the bed, feel her fight back as she begged and pleaded.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I felt the throb of my pulse in my ears as I played out the violence of the scene that we’d been creating. I messaged Mallory, and we added details to it one after another until it was late. Like me, Mallory often didn’t sleep, and we used that time instead to craft a scene that would take us both into a dark, dark place.

**

When the day came to let it play out, she came to my apartment. She entered my apartment wearing clothing fit for the gym, but not for a New York December evening.

“What the fuck are you wearing?” I asked.

“It’s dance gear, Daddy. I just came from class,” she retorted, rolling her eyes at me.

“What the fuck are they teaching you at these private lessons?” I asked.

We argued back and forth about what was appropriate, about why I was looking at her that way, about what kinds of things she’d done with other boys. It got heated and I pushed her into my bedroom, throwing her onto the bed.

“Why?” she pleaded.

“Because you are *my* little girl, and none of them even sees how special you are. No one does but me. Stop wasting yourself on them and learn to give your time to someone who will appreciate it, someone who will love you for it, someone who will treat you like more than a story to tell their friends,” I spat at her.

“Maybe I just want to be a story – maybe I don’t fucking care – I just need to feel something… Where the fuck have you been all this time, daddy?” Mallory sobbed at me.

“I’ll show you what it’s like to feel something,” I said, feeling rage create.

“You mean other than disappointment?” she taunted.

“Maybe it’s time I tried something different. You haven’t learned any other way that I’ve tried to teach you, so it’s time for a new lesson…”

I pinned her down on the bed, holding her wrists firmly in my hands. I was deep inside of her, and her legs were pinned together. The rougher I was with her, the wetter she got and the more I taunted her for being a dirty little whore.

“Please, daddy,” she pleaded.

I could smell her hair and feel her warmth, and she told me I was a disgusting pervert, that I raised a filthy little cumslut and there was no stopping the train that we were on because we were on it together.

***

A week later, Mallory was in a bodysuit, metal manacles and chains, and wearing a muzzle. She was laying on my bed, and we were talking about data strategy in relation to work. We’d fucked around already, and she paused for a moment and then popped the question:

“Do you want to go get dinner with me? Is that weird to ask?” she said, second-guessing herself.

This strange combination of incredibly forward and very uncertain caught me off guard. I didn’t know exactly what to do with it, but I said yes because I did very much want to have dinner with her.

This is the beginning of something strange and gorgeous. It is dark and twisted, and at times we will likely ask ourselves if we’ve gone too far. It feels certain that if we do, we will do it together, and we will do so boldly. Mallory, too, has a sleepless heart, and I am hopeful that it was what I’d been looking for all this time.