John removes Jacob’s mask and jacket so his son can play in the playground unencumbered, and then, alone on a bench away from other parents, composes a sext to a woman who is not his wife. He wants the sext to be good. He wants it to be sexy. He wants to increase his deviancy by the rightsized increment, large enough that she will be surprised by the advance, small enough that, in retrospect, she will not be surprised at all. 

So, in response to her message about finding herself totally alone in her company’s Manhattan office — vacant ever since the pandemic — wondering what they might do together if he was there too, John types:

Well, Jill, to be honest, I think we would probably have a brief conversation about whether we both wanted what was about to happen to, in fact, happen, especially considering the context in which we started chatting. If we concluded that we did, I would smile and tell you to get back to work; you’re on the clock, after all, and we don’t want you getting into trouble. Then I would get on my knees and climb under your desk. The absurdity of this might make you pause for a second, a full-grown man, practically a stranger, on your office floor, but I’d look up and say nothing, patiently waiting for you to roll your chair back and get serious.

John looks over the sext. He fears that a millennial like Jill will consider it too long, might even call it a “novel” if she wanted to make fun of his Gen X naivete. He fears someone younger than her, a geriatric Zoomer of some sort, would consider his tone, style, and attempt at eroticizing consent pathetically cringe. Scrolling back through the text, careful not to accidentally send it, John searches for words to cut, ways to remove signs of effort. He changes the try-hard semicolon to an em dash, then changes it back. 

There is, he realizes, a perverse thrill to be had in this kind of moment, when a risky message precariously sits on one’s screen, an impulsive tap away from the realm of consequence. He has a sudden urge to delete what he typed and replace it with something much stranger, like, Well, Jill, I would hop onto your desk and lay supine so you could put a fresh diaper on me. John is not remotely into that genre of fetish, but maybe he is slightly into whatever genre includes holding incendiary material near an open flame. 

The urge passes. His message is fine, overwritten but appropriate given their previous conversations, signals both subtle and overt. He allows the smooth surface of the tip of his thumb to change the electrical charge over the part of the screen that displays the upward pointing blue arrow. This triggers a series of electromagnetic events involving radio waves and cell towers that, although John sometimes writes about technology, he does not understand beyond the fact that it will almost instantaneously make his words no longer his alone. The word Delivered appears. 

He is in awe of how quickly they have gotten to this point. Jill messaged John several days ago in response to his tweet: I am writing a piece about the reported uptick in sexting under lockdown. I would love to talk with anyone who has experiences, thoughts, feelings, hopes, or fears regarding this growing digisexual practice. DMs are open :). John had reservations about the tweet but was convinced to tweet it by Asher, an editor at a culture magazine of moderate prestige and dwindling readership. He has never met Asher — who, on social media, appears to be a hip man in his late twenties — so John was surprised to receive an out-of-the-blue email from him with a link to a study that showed sexting was on the rise. Above the link, Asher had written a single line: Trending… any interest in writing about this? 

It had been three years since John had contributed to the magazine, one year since he had contributed to any magazine at all. Although he very much wanted to get back into the fold — he needed something to do more than he needed the three-hundred-dollar fee — he told Asher he did not think he was the right writer for the assignment. He blamed the mismatch on a lack of knowledge of the subject — T9 predictive texting had yet to be released the year I met my wife — but the truth was that he suspected nobody wanted to read a 47-year-old man’s perspective on sexting, not even other 47-year-old men. Asher emailed back, saying he hoped John would reconsider because he thought the topic was very much in John’s thematic wheelhouse, mentioning a piece he wrote about flattening the hierarchy of authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her. Asher proposed that John approach this buzzy subject from a similarly evergreen techno-philosophical angle, interrogating the question, Is sexting sex? 

John was flattered, surprised not only that Asher enjoyed his three-thousand-word essay from 2013, but that he had read it at all — Asher was probably in high school when Her came out. The essay had been commissioned by Asher’s predecessor, a woman John’s wife went to college with, now long gone from the editorial world and raising three kids with a hedge fund manager. John remained unsure if he should accept the assignment but liked the idea of looking at a topical tech phenomenon from a sober, historical view, situating it as just the latest iteration of a complex issue that humans had been grappling with for centuries. His wife was heading to San Francisco for a VC fundraising meeting. He could write in her home office all week while Jacob attended remote school in the kitchen. 

In his next email, John admitted, The ontological implications are interesting to me, more so than the sociosexual ones, but worried that even if he could find academics or psychologists to interview, it would be difficult for him to find a “sextually” active subject to anchor the piece. Virtually everyone he knew was either over forty and married or younger than ten and cell-phone-less. The main sexting demographic, as far as the study suggested, lived several exotic degrees of separation away.

John has seen other writers put out calls for subjects on Twitter, and it has always struck him as a little amateurish and desperate. Half-joking, hoping to buy time to think about it, he told Asher he needed to check with his wife. 

Jill’s initial DM arrived just minutes after John’s tweet. It was so simple, normal, and promising that he thought it was a scam: Hey, I’m Jill! We’ve never met, but we have some mutuals. I’m up for chatting. Let me know how I can help. He did some cursory sleuthing under the pretext of due diligence, and discovered that Jill was funny, and had a better feel than he did for the unhinged, slippery irreverence of the internet. She occasionally expressed sincere political opinions, which he found brave, and managed to do so without being annoying, which he found impressive. She was a creative director at an agency. She liked poetry. She had a dog. She cared about the rights of sex workers. She was pretty, seemingly in her early thirties. Her mother had died a few months before the pandemic began. 

They messaged back and forth, checking to see if any mutual followers were mutual friends. It turned out that all their connections were peripheral: John had once worked with a colleague of Jill’s when trying to make extra money writing commercials; Jill was internet friends with John’s old roommate, now a successful podcaster. If the simulation of their lives ran for a thousand years, it seemed equally possible that their paths would never cross and that they would find themselves sitting next to each other at a dinner party the coming weekend. 

On a scheduled phone call the next day, John, after thanking Jill for being open to chatting about such a personal topic, mentioned he would be taking notes while they spoke. She said one of her best friends was a journalist, so she was relatively familiar with the reporting process. John said he barely considered himself a journalist, more like a writer who occasionally wrote about technology and culture. 

Before diving into the questions he had prepared, John asked Jill if she would be comfortable with her name appearing in the piece. She was unsure, and proposed pseudonyms: she could be Jill and the man she had sexted with could be Jack, not just for the allusion to the nursery rhyme, but for the innuendo. 

John did not see any potential innuendo. 

Jill laughed, Jacking off? Jilling off? 

John laughed, unsure how he had missed it, unsure if Asher would go for it. He promised Jill that he would tell his editor that the names would make the characters a little mythic, the topical story a little timeless. 

Armed with anonymity, Jill told John all about her pandemic sexting affair. She had matched with Jack on a dating app in March 2020. They both lived in Brooklyn but ended up riding out lockdown with family, she at her father’s in New Jersey, he at his mother’s in Arizona. Jack looked handsome but not suspiciously handsome, and after some small talk, he proved to also be sane, smart, and kind. They migrated off the app and began texting. Soon the small talk turned into flirty banter. Then the flirty banter turned sexual. Then they were masturbating in their respective childhood bedrooms, spinning fantasies, sending each other explicit photos, videos, and voice notes. Once they had both orgasmed, they agreed, That was nice, and planned to sext again the following night. Jill and Jack ended up sexting every day for a month. 

John asked, What happened after a month? 

Jill sighed. When it became clear pandemia was the new normal, both she and Jack returned to New York. The plan was to meet up as soon as they got back, go for a socially distanced stroll, then take an antigen test before going back to Jill’s apartment to consummate the old-fashioned way. When the day of the long-awaited rendezvous arrived, Jill sat on a bench, reading an article about overcrowded hospitals in order to stop herself from checking if every pedestrian within a mile was him. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder; Jack was as attractive and tall as he looked in photos. They began walking and, within a block, she was overcome by an icy wave of sadness, certain that, after an obligatory half hour, she and this perfectly nice man would go their separate ways and never speak again. 

I would have felt guilty if I wasn’t confident he felt the exact same way.

What was wrong? John asked. 

Jill was not sure, but she knew the chemistry or whatever one wants to call the mysterious, ineffable thing that makes people attracted to each other just wasn’t there. What she found confusing and disappointing was that it was there when they were sexting — undeniable and trustworthy. She went as far as to call the month of transcontinental orgasms one of the hottest of her life. Without touching a single human during that period, hugging only her dog because her father is immunocompromised, she had felt physically alive and sexually sated. Crazy, huh?

On the bench in the playground, John’s phone buzzes.

I would look you in your blue eyes — I stalked your Instagram : ) — and if I could tell you were on your knees out of intentional desire rather than thoughtless impulse, I would slide my chair back, open my legs slightly, and wait for whatever you were going to do next with curled toes. 

John feels more relief than arousal. He and Jill have tiptoed around the ethical concerns that would be raised by crossing this line, so he was unsure how she might react if they left the theoretical behind, and with it, plausible deniability. Professional principles aside — John would have to find a new subject — she knew he was married and had a son. 

After their first phone call, John and Jill ended up texting, discussing whether the concept of fidelity might be a useful tool in answering the orienting question of his essay: Is sexting sex? John asked Jill if sexting while in a monogamous relationship is cheating. 

At first, she avoided a definitive answer, saying it depended on the situation, but eventually she concluded that, after her experience with Jack, in which she felt feelings more intense and real than she had felt in many in-person relationships, Yes, sexting without prior permission is cheating. 

Then, Jill turned John’s question back on him. At first, he agreed it was difficult to classify the act without context, but he eventually posited his hypothesis: Sexting is just a more dynamic and immersive iteration of age-old forms of sexual communication that have always existed in gray areas. He copied and pasted a note he had taken when outlining his piece: If sexting is cheating, then so is barroom dirty talk, erotic letter-writing, or leaving a hot cave painting behind for another caveman to find. Eventually, with his conclusion teed up, John wrote, No, sexting is not cheating because it’s not sex; it’s multiplayer pornography. 

There was a pause in their back-and-forth. John got up to pee. When he returned to his phone, Jill had asked, Have you had positive experiences sexting? 

John briefly regretted allowing Asher to talk him into accepting the assignment. Actually, I don’t really have any experiences sexting. 

Jill responded, Ahhh, I see.

A man approaches John’s bench and takes a seat. He looks like the father of one of Jacob’s classmates from last year, but John isn’t sure. They exchange nods, granting each other permission to return to their phones. John angles his screen away from the man and types. 

I would sit under the desk, waiting to hear the clicking of your keyboard. Once it was clear you’d gotten back to work, I would reach up your thighs and slowly pull down your underwear. I’d enjoy this view for a while, long enough that you might begin to think, Maybe he just wants to look. And then, just when you were in the middle of some important email and had nearly forgotten I was there, I would lean forward and bring my tongue to your clitoris.

After tapping send, John immediately regrets not shortening the word “clitoris.” He looks up and sees Jacob playing with Matthew, a regular at this playground. The boys are jumping up and down as hard as they can on the jungle gym’s bridge in order to make it difficult for other children to cross. They hold onto the railing with both hands, slamming their heels down with as much force as they can muster. 

A young girl, probably two years old, her entire life lived during a pandemic, toddles over to the bridge. As soon as she lowers her foot onto the bouncing bridge, she falls backwards onto the cushion of her diaper. 

John stands up to tell Jacob and Matthew to cut it out, but Matthew’s nanny is already walking over. She helps the girl to her feet and tells the boys to stop jumping. 

You’re older now. Older kids have to look out for younger kids. How would you feel if you were just learning how to walk and the ground was bouncing?

The boys soften, and the girl crosses the bridge. As soon as Matthew’s nanny is gone, Jacob and Mathew resume their game with slightly less vigor. 

John’s phone buzzes.

That would make me lose my breath. Once I adjusted to the shock of your tongue, I would push my hips forward into your face, letting you bury yourself into me. I would be staring at my computer but unable to read the words on the screen. I’d be typing gibberish.

The idea of sexting with Jill did not occur to John until a second follow-up conversation, yesterday’s text message exchange. John had asked, What made sexting with Jack so fulfilling? 

Jill said, It was collaborative and creative, refreshingly direct. 

John asked if she was comfortable elaborating. 

She explained that Jack was kind of a dom and she is kind of a sub. When she was mind-numbingly bored in New Jersey, he would text what to do and how to do it, not like an order, more like instructions. It turned out she loved instructions. They fell into a power dynamic in which Jack would message her, sometimes in the middle of a workday, telling her to get up from her desk and spank herself hard ten times, or walk to the kitchen and use an ice cube to make her nipples erect, or go to the bathroom to quietly orgasm even though her father was watching TV just feet away. She would complete the assignment and send back evidence of having diligently done so. 

John tried to respond to Jill with a straightforwardness he hoped would show he was unfazed by her disclosure — Thanks for sharing that — but it was at this moment, imagining her cooped up during lockdown, obeying some stranger on her phone, that made John begin looking for a path from talking about sexting to actually sexting. 

Jacob and Matthew, realizing no matter how much they stomp, the bridge is not going to break, run off to another part of the playground. 

John types.

I’d lick you slowly and softly to start. As you got more turned on, I would speed up, applying pressure with my tongue, listening to make sure you were still being productive. If at any point I got the sense you were slacking off, I would stop licking your clit and start biting your thigh. Soon you’d realize the only way to get what you want is to be a good employee. 

Jill responds.

I like this game.

John types. 

Me too.

This text echoes in his head, and slowly morphs from sounding like a mid-coital whisper to the social justice hashtag. He sends another text to preserve the mood just in case she hears it, too. Back to work, Jill.

A minute goes by. He wants to give her a chance to contribute her own ideas and desires to the under-the-desk fantasy, but there are no ellipses on his screen to indicate she is typing. He waits, wondering if he has misstepped or if she has been distracted by something at her office. He starts to type what could happen next but as soon as he does, Jill’s ellipses appear. He deletes to let her go first. Then Jill’s ellipses disappear. John waits again, and when she does not start again, he retypes what he just deleted. Her ellipses reappear. John deletes. 

Their messaging has been so fluid and easy until this point, falling into a natural cadence as soon as they began. John considers writing “lol” to make sure she is aware that he is aware of this moment of awkwardness, but clicks the button on the side of his phone that puts the screen to sleep.

Looking up at the playground, a quick scan of Jacob’s usual spots comes up empty. John puts his phone in his pocket and walks over to the other side of the jungle gym. He does not see Jacob. He circles the jungle gym, checking the large, spinnable wheel near the monkey bars, looking in and under the tubular slide, getting on his knees to peek below the bounceable bridge. He circles the jungle gym again, this time surveying the benches that line the circumference of the playground. No Jacob.

This is strange. Jacob knows and even takes pleasure in enforcing the family rules regarding helping, kindness, responsibility, supervision, and safety. Sometimes, if John takes his shoes off in the living room, Jacob reminds him that shoes go on the rack by the front door. At home, boundaries are tested — Jacob can be a pain when he wants to be — but out in the world, he is cautious; if anything, a little too preoccupied with the possibility of getting kidnapped or hurt. 

John calls out his son’s name and gets no response. He calls it louder, causing people to look in his direction. A small but potent dose of nausea makes his tongue sweat and his testicles hug his body. He has seen other parents in this moment, when they think they have lost their child. Their panic always strikes him as premature, their reactions overreactions. The child always comes waltzing out from behind a big tree a few seconds later, confused by their parent’s intensity. 

This thought does not calm him. His brain stops conjuring thoughts at all and enters a simpler mode of function: focused, empty, almost nonverbal. He yells his son’s name again, but this time only the first syllable comes out, which makes it sound like he is searching for some other boy entirely: Jay!

John speedwalks to the playground restrooms even though Jacob never goes to a public restroom without a chaperone and hates this particular facility so much he once held in a bowel movement until it forced itself out during a game of tag. The men’s side is empty. The women’s side is empty except for an elderly lady who seems scared of John, either because of his presenting gender or because of the crazed look in his eyes.

He jogs to the playground’s exit, which is only a hundred feet from a busy avenue of pedestrian and car traffic, framed by two faux Grecian pillars. This avenue, always chaotic, seems more chaotic than usual, a little infernal, the pillars like cairns marking the border between what is bearable because it is temporary, and what is not because it is forever.

John runs toward the pillars, head on a swivel. There’s a Parks Department shed on his left, a shitty, shabby building he has never noticed before. He weighs the chances that Jacob is in the shed versus the number of seconds he will have squandered if he is not. A numberless equation spits out a wordless answer: John turns toward the shed. He expects the door to be locked, but it swings open. In the middle of the dark and dingy space, surrounded by lawnmowers, shovels, and bags of the grass seed that seeds the lawns on which John’s family picnics every weekend of every summer, are Jacob and Matthew. Jacob stands, eyes closed, pants and underwear around his ankles. Matthew is on one knee like a knight receiving an honor. His eyes are open. His mouth is touching the tip of Jacob’s penis. 

Matthew jumps up. He is past John and out the door before John’s brain comes back online. Jacob pulls up his pants. He is hunching his shoulders and biting his bottom lip, hands in pockets, eyes on his sneakers. It is a posture of boyish embarrassment that strikes John as maddeningly well-executed, as if Jacob, in this frightening moment, has unconsciously defaulted to something he has seen on TV, his behavior informed by cartoons and sitcoms.

John feels like shaking him, telling him to act normal, to be himself. Instead, he grabs his son by the hand a little harder than he means to and pulls him out of the shed. As they walk, he reaches for his phone to call his wife. This is the sort of parenting challenge they generally handle together, so he wants to have a family discussion with her on speaker phone or, at least, discuss what she thinks he should do. 

He sees the time; she is in the middle of the big fundraising meeting, the whole reason for the trip out west. He considers sending a text but decides against it when he sees her phone is on Do Not Disturb.

John walks his son past the playground, deeper into the park. His adrenaline is returning to homeostasis, a relieving but harsh comedown that will almost certainly result in a headache. When they arrive at the empty brown field where Jacob plays tee ball in the spring, they find a spot with slightly more dead grass than hard dirt and sit down, cross-legged, facing each other. 

John tells Jacob he is not angry about what he saw in the shed. He says the only reason he is upset is because Jacob left the playground, and when he could not find him, he got scared something bad happened. He says Jacob knows not to go somewhere out of sight without telling him or another adult. He says there are reasons why families have rules.

Jacob mumbles an apology.

It’s okay, John says. He says It’s okay a few more times while he figures out what to say next. How does one teach a child about what is safe and appropriate without fucking him up for the rest of his life? John does not know what to do now but does know that, regardless of any good-parenting consensus, he wishes he had opened the shed door gently, closed it quietly, and waited outside for the boys to finish their consensual exploration of nascent sexuality.

Jacob is nervously chewing and sucking on the drawstring of his favorite sweatshirt. The drawstring is a controversial issue in their family. Every time John’s wife catches Jacob with it in his mouth, she tells him to spit it out and reminds him that it is an unsanitary habit. Every time John is present when this occurs, she reminds him to periodically remind their son that it is an unsanitary habit. Sitting in the field, John lets Jacob chew and suck. 

He decides to ask questions. What were you and Matthew doing in the shed?

Jacob mumbles that they were playing a game called Aliens. 

John asks, How do you play Aliens? 

Jacob stuffs more drawstring into his mouth and explains the game with excitement he is unable to strategically stifle. His enthusiasm and the quantity of braided cotton in his mouth make it difficult to understand what he is saying, but John can gather enough to get the basic premise: the aliens live on a bridge; the aliens are allergic to the water below; if the aliens touch the water, the only way to avoid a certain and gruesome death is for another alien to love their tentacle. 

John asks, Who came up with the game? 

Jacob goes quiet, shifting his focus from answering questions to extracting as much stale saliva flavor from the drawstring as possible. 

A gust of wind blows through the field, causing John to shiver, which causes him to realize Jacob’s puffer jacket is back at the playground. John opens his coat and motions for his son to come. Jacob knows the drill: he walks to John, turns around, and leans back into his father’s chest, arms crossed like a mummy. John buttons his coat up with Jacob inside. It is a tighter fit than the last time they did this routine. 

John straightens his legs and lies down on the dead grass, Jacob’s head below his chin, both of them looking up at the overcast sky. He catches a whiff of his son’s hair, still sweaty from running around, and remembers the way it smelled when he was a baby. He and his wife used to pass their newborn back and forth like a joint, bringing their noses to his head, trying to describe the smell: like the primordial soup of life simmering on a stove, but not gross; like heaven’s petrichor, if it rains there. 

Jacob starts to squirm inside John’s coat. He has trouble being still for long. They once had him evaluated for ADHD but decided against medicating. 

John kisses his head. Why did you want to play Aliens?

Jacob stops squirming. John can sense that he is making the face he sometimes makes when he is thinking, a thousand-yard stare, scrunched nose, tongue protruding from pursed lips. Then he spits out the drawstring and says matter-of-factly, Because my penis is sad.

John wraps his arms around his son, still inside his coat, and squeezes. He slowly increases the pressure of the squeeze until Jacob realizes what is happening and starts to giggle. John says, You’re trapped, my boy. I guess you’re so loved you’re gonna explode. 

In between giggles, Jacob pleads for mercy. John releases his grip and they both catch their breath, lying quietly for a while. It suddenly occurs to John that he is inside a moment he will soon feel acute nostalgia for. He has felt this in the past, mostly when Jacob was younger. He has felt it with his wife, too, mostly in their first years together. He never knows what to do with this awareness, what prophylactic steps can be taken now, while still in the present, to soothe a future ache. 

The sun is fading behind the clouds. John needs to figure out what he is going to feed his notoriously picky son for dinner. He frees Jacob from the warm prison of the buttoned coat. They get back on their feet, ready to retrieve the puffer jacket. 

John reaches into his pocket to check the time. He has three texts from Jill and three from his wife. His thumb, instead of offering its print to unlock the phone, locks it via the side button. His hand, instead of placing the device back in his pocket, shoves it down his pants, into the crotch of his underwear. 

He puts Jacob on his shoulders. They leave the park and play “I Spy” on the walk home.