I could see them across the lawn, sitting in a lopsided circle by the water, so I waved and walked toward them, slowly, glancing down occasionally to avoid goose shit. I would just stay for a few minutes, see how I liked it, and if it was too uncomfortable, I’d say I had dinner plans. I’d never met any of them before, but I recognized Aspie’s frosty blonde hair with cotton-candy-pink highlights from her Discord avatar picture. My own profile picture was a stock image of a beach sunset. Aspie saw me and waved, even though she had no way of knowing who I was.

I’d said that I was going to try to make it today and that I was looking forward to meeting everyone in the chat, but I’d also said that in June and in May and maybe even in April, and I’d never gotten up the nerve to drive to the park. Maybe I was the only person who kept enthusiastically saying she was coming in the chat and then never showed up, or maybe something about my face looked like a beach sunset. Every bit of me wanted to turn around and pretend I saw a friend sitting farther down the lake and bolt, but I forced myself to keep walking toward them. 

Aspie and the girl next to her, PJ, looked exactly how I expected ageplayers to look—childlike, naïve, colorful. They had matching dog collars, and PJ had pigtails and wore the type of jean jumper that I loved to wear in elementary school because it made me feel like a pioneer girl and was sturdy enough to play rough in. Across from them sat two men who looked like they’d just walked out of a summer Brooks Brothers ad, clad in olive-green and tan Chino shorts and blue polos. Next to them, two women in sundresses were sitting in beach chairs, elevating themselves above the rest of the circle.

The whole group was thin except for me and Aspie. I always noticed those things. Aspie was smaller than me, at least two sizes smaller on top. Her tank top was cream colored and translucent, and her dog collar was the same pink as her hair. She had one of those wide, flat chests that didn’t need a bra, and had two nipples pointing out in either direction. Men hated those types of chests, but I found them terribly sexy. Aspie motioned for me to sit down next to her, and then she rolled over on her stomach, letting her hips thump down onto the grass. 

She made it look so easy. I could never move like that, not even in private. There were fat people who seemed to bulldoze through any amount of discomfort, determined to move their bodies any way they wanted and take up all the space they needed. I was never one of those fat people. I trapped my body in a bubble, as if the slightest bump or bruise could kill me, or at least send me to a doctor who would blame me for my size. I sat down gingerly, like I might fall over, between Aspie and PJ, and Aspie handed me a blank nametag and pink magic marker. 

“Put whatever you want us to call you,” Aspie said. 

I wrote down my avatar name, Xenia, and pressed the adhesive onto my chest. My top was a mix of polyester and Lycra and as soon as I put the nametag on, the corners began to peel off.  

They called themselves the Players, and every first Sunday of the month (weather permitting) they picnicked on the north side of Green Lake for their munch. I’d found them on FetLife’s directory of Seattle munches and scrolled through asphyxiation, feet, cuckolding, impact play, pregnancy, and Doms and subs, looking to see which groups were current. The Players had one of the most active and up-to-date pages, and when I asked to join their group, I was accepted within minutes and sent a link to their Discord page.

I was curious about ageplay, Bigs and littles, and the ways age dynamics interacted with sexuality, but I knew that wasn’t the thing that had brought me to the FetLife directory. The only thing that really turned me on was shitty homemade porn of two women beating each other’s asses. If I was braver, I would’ve gone to a BDSM group, but the ageplayers with their crayons felt safe, and I could see myself finding some pleasure in it, too. 

Nobody in the group pelted me with questions, and most of them gave me small smiles. One of the Brooks Brothers bros and his sundressed wife were finishing up a story about their trip to Croatia and all the Game of Thrones filming locations they visited. The story might have been interesting if I knew them, but it dragged on—here’s a picture of when we went to the Trsteno Arboretum, here’s a picture of Klis Fortress. I glanced to my left at Aspie. She was ignoring them and playing with Silly Putty, stretching out a hot pink piece until it was translucent. She asked if I wanted a turn, and I said yes. I tried not to think of how many other people had held it, had stretched it, had wedged it between their fingers, as I balled it in my fist. But once it was in my hands, I didn’t care about the germs. I stretched the putty out until it was so thin that it broke into two pieces and then rolled it back up again, repeated the process, and fell into the peaceful rhythm of rolling and stretching. Something about rolling it back up gave me the same shot of satisfaction I’d get from popping each individual bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap. I handed it back to Aspie and smelled my palms, inhaling kindergarten classrooms. 

“I like the smell, too,” Aspie said, and I laughed. 

“It’s so familiar. Like I would know the smell of Play-Doh and Silly Putty and black cherry magic markers anywhere for the rest of my life,” I said.

She asked what brought me to the group, and I told her I’d seen them listed on FetLife and someone mentioned it to me at the Monday Munch, which was only half true. I had overheard someone mention the Players, but it wasn’t directed at me.  

“At the Westy? That’s a good one.” 

“It is,” I said, “it’s one of my favorites.”

That was a lie. My experience was limited to attending one Monday Munch that had involved eating a happy-hour cheeseburger and chatting with gay men in their late thirties. And I’d once agreed to spank a guy I met on Tinder because I wanted to believe I was a switch. I bailed on him at the last minute, and he messaged me saying that maybe I was the one who needed a spanking.

“It’s a good one,” she said. “Sometimes there are creeps, but I heard Dave kicked most of the assholes out of that Discord. There are some Doms that aren’t able, or well, interested, in keeping that mask at home, you know.”

I didn’t know, but I nodded along like I’d had all sorts of experiences with Doms. Aspie passed me a coloring book and a box of crayons and said I could pull out a picture if I wanted to. I selected a picture of two Care Bears holding hands walking across a rainbow. I’d never owned a Care Bear as a kid, but I remembered them from friends’ stuffed animal piles, and I liked how they had little designs of suns or rainbows on their stomachs. I took a teal crayon out of the box and began on the left Care Bear’s arm, bringing the crayon up and down in neat lines of light shading, neater than anything I would’ve done as a kid. Back then I wanted the pictures to be as opaque as possible, and I ground the crayons into them, trying to create a product more akin to an oil painting than a coloring-book picture. 

Aspie selected a picture of a knockoff My Little Pony and took a macaroni-and-cheese orange crayon out of the box. Her coloring was erratic, as if she only wanted to feel the sensation of crayon on paper and had no interest in the end result. Why should she have any interest in it—what were we going to do with these? Hang them on our fridge? 

I switched the teal out for a royal purple and started on the heart on the Care Bear’s stomach. The hamster wheel in my brain started slowing down, almost like I’d slipped half a Xanax in my water bottle. I zoned out the rest of the conversation, letting myself focus in on the hypnotic back-and-forth motion of crayon on paper. 

After an hour of playing with putty and coloring, the others started to pack up. 

“Some of us are going back to my house,” Aspie said. “We call it the clubhouse, and we just hang, smoke weed, maybe bake cookies, put in a movie, that sort of thing. You’re welcome to come.”

I wasn’t expecting that—I’d scoured the Discord before driving over and no one mentioned an afterparty. I knew that she would probably have extended this offer to anyone who seemed relatively non-creepy, but I let myself believe, for a moment, that it was because she wanted to tuck my hair behind my ears and kiss me. 

“I have dinner plans,” I lied, “but I could come for a bit.”

“Just so you know, some of us do change into diapers at the house. It’s not required or anything, but it’s a judgement-free zone.” 

“Of course,” I said. 

I had no interest in wearing a diaper, but the thought of that freedom for those who wanted it felt beautiful. It made me think of the nights in high school when I’d smoke weed with friends and walk to the playground, and the amount of joy we got from pumping our legs higher and higher on the swings, from tucking our bodies into logs and rolling down dewy grass hills, experiencing the little pleasures of childhood that weren’t always there the first time around.

*

The clubhouse was a two-story crumbling bungalow three blocks north of the lake on Chapin Place. There were mismatched curtains and bedsheets covering every window facing the street, with a collection of miniature stained-glass mosaics hanging from the kitchen curtain rod with yarn. The other houses on the block had been beautifully restored or bulldozed and replaced with ultra-modern flat roofs and floor-to-ceiling windows and rooftop balconies that went for two million. But the clubhouse teetered somewhere on the edge of shitty rental and condemnation, with the attic window boarded up and sagging rotten wooden steps leading to the front door. 

Aspie said she lived there with two other roommates who were out of town, backpacking near Mount Rainier. She fumbled with the key for a moment, jamming it into the door and pushing it to the left. She shoved her shoulder into the door, hard, and it opened.

We filed inside after her, and I watched the group settle into their seats before joining them and sitting on an upright yellow-print chair with faded daffodils. One of the legs wobbled, giving the chair a mild rocking sensation, like I might fall over if I leaned too far back. 

I waited for instructions, rocking anxiously, as if I was on the verge of being asked to spontaneously perform my favorite stand-up routine or carry furniture upstairs. The clubhouse exploded with furniture—a small television sat on the floor in front of a non-working fireplace with two tattered loveseats, one enormous sectional, and a half-dozen mismatched lamps resting on wobbly tables. One of the walls was covered with stacks of backpacking trail books, Lonely Planets, picture books, even a set of what looked like over a hundred old yellow hardback Nancy Drews.

My own apartment was barren by comparison—just a couch, table, two chairs, bed, and nightstand. Every house I’d ever lived in looked like that—white walls, bare-bones furniture, devoid of any character. Some part of me loved the impermanence of it, of how easy it would be to load up my belongings and leave, of how there was nothing on the walls to remind me of anyone when I needed to pretend that I was in a hotel, or a pit of nothingness. As a child there hadn’t been anywhere to go, but the urge to flee had always been there.

“We only have the one bathroom upstairs,” Aspie said to the group, “so if you want to get changed, you’re welcome to use it, or you can use a bedroom.”

Two of the men went to get changed, and the jean jumper girl, PJ, turned on the oven and asked if anyone wanted to help her make cookies. I said I would, eager to have a role, but regretted it when Aspie announced she was going to smoke outside if anyone wanted to join. I thought she’d stay inside with us. Maybe something on my face gave away my disappointment because PJ told me they’d be out there for a while. 

Plus, we didn’t really need two people to make the cookies. I let PJ mix most of the ingredients, and I took on the role of dumping an entire bag of chocolate chips into the dough. Sometimes as a kid I’d come home from school so desperate for sweets after starving myself all day that I’d search the cabinet for chocolate and eat the chips straight from the bag. If there were no chocolate chips, then I’d eat expired baking chocolate. Sometimes I’d open a sleeve of Pillsbury Cookie Dough and eat one raw perforated cookie, google “salmonella from raw cookie dough,” and then eat another. The shame of it made me want to purge, but I wasn’t nauseous at the end of those binges, just calm, like the sugar had banished all the lingering dread from my mind. 

PJ pulled a bent cookie sheet out of the broiler and we each rolled the dough into individual blobs. She was precise, rolling a nearly identical amount of dough into each cookie. My approach was much more haphazard, taking a glob in my hand, barely rolling it, and putting it down on the tray. 

“Do you want to change?” PJ asked. 

I told her I didn’t have anything to change into. “It’s my first time at this type of thing.”  

“I know.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Suddenly it was too warm to be standing next to the oven, and I could feel beads of sweat forming at my hairline. Was it so clear that I didn’t belong? I asked if she was going to change, just to have a response. 

She shook her head, moving the dog collar from side to side on her neck. 

“I have a leash,” she said, “but that’s not for just anybody to use.”

I thought about telling her about a girl I knew growing up who liked to play horse and get on all fours and gallop and jump over little hurdles, but I didn’t know if that would be insulting. 

PJ put the cookie sheets in the oven, set the timer, and asked if I wanted to go outside. I said yes. 

Aspie was on the porch with one sundressed lady and two Brooks Brothers bros who’d changed into t-shirts and diapers. She offered me the bong, and I sat down on a rusty beach chair to take a hit. 

“I’ve been trying to ration my supplies until I make it back up to Everett,” Aspie said to the Brooks Brothers bros. 

The weed emboldened me, and I asked what was in Everett. 

“It’s a medical supply store that sells adult sizes in bulk,” one of the men said. His nametag read “Kristoff.” I hadn’t thought about how expensive they were, but it made sense. Kristoff’s diaper had a print of tiger cubs wearing diapers on it. He saw me looking at it and smiled. 

“These are Crinklz, and officially they’re for adults with special needs, but if you look at the online reviews, it’s almost entirely from the ABDL community.”

“They’ve got to know,” Aspie said. 

I passed the bong to PJ, and she took a hit. Kristoff’s girlfriend, the sundressed lady, told me this was her first time at the clubhouse, too. 

“My name actually is Michele,” she said and pointed to her nametag, “I didn’t think to put an alias, but I’m just a guest.”

“I don’t use an alias either,” Aspie said. “Aspie’s a nickname for Aspen.”

The bong made its way back around to me. I took a hit and handed it to PJ, but she shook her head and passed it to Kristoff.

“I really want to thank you all for letting me join,” Michele went on. “Kristoff has been opening up to me so much about this part of himself, and it took me by surprise, but it’s really upped our connection in the bedroom.”

Kristoff exhaled and put his hand on Michele’s knee, giving it a squeeze. 

“She’s so supportive.”

The other Brooks Brothers bro, “Len,” said he was lucky. 

“I’ve got this girl I’ve been seeing for almost a year, and I know she’d leave if I told her about this,” Len said.

“Where does she think you are?” Aspie asked. 

“Biking. She thinks I go for long bike rides on Sunday afternoons. She fucking hates biking.”

“So that’s why you always bike to the lake?” Aspie asked.

“I like biking,” Len said. “I do bike before our meetup, but not for five hours every Sunday.” 

“What does she do on Sundays?” 

“Dog park.”

“For five hours?” Aspie asked.

“Beats me. I’m not asking questions.”

“What if you tried her?” Michele asked. “It took Kristoff ages to tell me, and what if he never did?”

“I know her,” Len said. “If I told her, she’d think it was some type of betrayal, like I was lying to her. She’d run straight to all her girlfriends and tell them the Amazon programmer is actually an adult baby and they’d tell her to dump him immediately. And like, I know it’s fucked up on some level.”

Michele nodded but didn’t say anything.

“That the lying is fucked up?” Aspie asked.

“I don’t really care about that,” Len said, “but I know I’m sitting here in a diaper because I’ve got daddy issues or mommy issues or both. All of us do.”

I could feel the tenor of the conversation change immediately, as if Len had switched us from a major to minor key. 

“That’s like saying all gay guys were molested as kids,” Kristoff said. 

“There’s no evidence to support that,” Aspie said. 

Len took the bong and inhaled, rolling his eyes. 

“How many scientific studies have you been part of?” he asked Aspie. 

“That can be your own personal experience,” Aspie said, “but we can’t make blanket statements, okay?”

Len said he was going to get a drink, and when he got up, some small part of me felt bad for him. I didn’t know if we needed to jump down his throat for saying something out loud that so many people thought about kink. But I guess he was a bit of an asshole for projecting his shit onto everyone else.   

On some level, I agreed with him. I didn’t want to agree with him, but I was afraid that the general consensus about kink was right and that even considering participating meant something was wrong with me. Maybe something was wrong with me. I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to give into the part of me that felt exhilarated by my bravery. I wanted to choose the joy, the excitement of something new, and banish the part of my mind always saying something was wrong with me. 

I didn’t know how much of my interest in kink, if any, came from my childhood. My mother once sentenced me to a spanking when I was four, but she didn’t go through with it. I have no clue what I did to warrant her anger, but I remember walking into the house from whatever errand we were on and lying down on my stomach on the white couch in the living room, waiting with some mixture of terror and excitement, while she answered the ringing phone, delaying the punishment. She came in a few minutes later and said that she wasn’t going to spank me because I was so good when she was on the phone, but even as a child I knew that the threat went against a rule she’d set for herself, and that perhaps whoever she was on the phone with (in my memory, it was always her own father) had something to do with her decision to amend her parenting. 

PJ announced that she was freezing and going to take the cookies out and put Aladdin on inside. Everyone else stood up except for me, and I said I was going to stay out for a few more minutes. I wasn’t sure if Len had left, but I didn’t want to go back to that group dynamic. 

“Do you mind if I stay, too?” Aspie asked.

“Not at all,” I said. 

The others went inside, and she sat down in the chair next to me. For a moment we were quiet. I thought about saying I had to go home and leaving through the back gate, not even going back into the house, just exiting without a word like I usually did. I shifted in my seat and glanced over my shoulder.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

I was uncomfortable. Not because of kink, but from daring to exist in this space alone. Of putting myself out into the world in this fat body that is supposed to be devoid of sexuality and saying, I am interested.  

There was a gentleness to her question, like she knew how much vulnerability it took for me to just sit here. Something in me opened, and I told her that the tiger print on Kristoff’s diaper made me want to cry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with being on a diaper, but the print feels empty. Like it’s an infomercial or a dead mall’s food court.”

“I get it,” she said, “there’s something hollow about it.”

We sat in silence for a minute, and the shame of my vulnerability, my openness about Kristoff’s tigers, began to flood my veins. What was I doing saying something so strange to a stranger? My face reddened, and I turned away from Aspie. 

“Xenia,” she said. I turned back to her. 

“Yes?”

“Would you like to see my leash?” 

*

She took me upstairs to her bedroom. She pulled the quilt up over the unmade bed and told me to have a seat. I didn’t think showing me the leash would take long enough for us to sit down, but I did as she said. 

“I have a few,” she said. “This is my favorite.”

It was pink, the exact shade of her dog collar and hair. She handed it to me, and I saw the stenciled pattern of dogs going up and down the leash—Poodles and mastiffs and Pugs. 

“It’s really cute,” I said. 

“Do you want to see me wear it?”

I didn’t know if this was an invitation to something sexual. The leash did nothing for me. I would’ve preferred for her to stroke my face and run her hand down to my chest. Yet some part of me wanted to witness her experience the leash. 

“I want you to do whatever you want to do,” I said. 

She slid the heart-shaped tag to the front of her collar, flipping it between her pointer and middle fingers. I did that with necklaces when I was young, constantly fiddling with them, even occasionally putting the silver pendants in my mouth, finding some odd comfort in the taste of metal. She hooked the leash onto the dog collar ring and handed me the other end. 

I thought she might want to walk on all-fours with it on, but she stayed seated next to me on the bed. I wasn’t the right person to walk her. She must have realized that nothing about my demeanor said Dominant. 

“Can I ask you something personal? You don’t have to answer,” I said. 

“Sure.”

“How’d you get into this?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Aspie said.

“You don’t have to answer.”

“No, it’s fine. But I don’t have some profound answer. It was just an idea that came to me one day when I was a kid, and it never really faded. It sounded nice. And then I tried it, and it was nice,” she said.  

“I feel like we’d all basically have the same answer,” I said. 

“So, what’s your story?” 

“I don’t think I really have one yet.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. I’ve never been to anything like this,” I said.

“Most people stay closeted their whole lives. They keep it to their porn, and that’s it. Showing up means something.”

It did mean something. It meant embracing this kinky part of myself, this desire to be dominated, that I kept deeply buried out of shame or disgust. “Okay,” I said, “I have a co-worker who mentioned to me that she went to a kink ropes workshop. We were grading papers, and she just says it like she’s telling me she went to the dentist. No shame, no weirdness, nothing. I just acted like going to a workshop where you learn how to tie up your partner with ropes was completely normal. And it felt so fucking good.” 

She nodded, shaking the end of the leash with her head. “Have you ever tried a diaper?” 

“No.”

“Would you like to?”

Would I like to?

No? 

Maybe?

Why not just say yes? 

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think mine would fit you. I’ll grab one if you want to try?”

She stood up and unfastened the leash from her collar and set it down on the bed. She told me she’d be right back. 

I didn’t tell her that when I was a kid, I would get excited just from looking up the word “spank” in the dictionary. I didn’t tell her how much I loved the sensation of rolling my Girl Scout Junior teal socks up to my knees. I didn’t tell her that I found nothing in this world more desirous than a beautiful, fat ass suspended in midair, flesh protruding through intricate rope knots. I didn’t tell her that one day when I was in high school, I waited for a bus in San Francisco while a boy in my class told each of the girls what he wanted to do to them sexually, and when he got to me, he said, “Role play,” and in that moment, I knew there was nothing random about that selection, but that there was something about me that I’d willed to be invisible that was, perhaps, visible to some.

Aspie came back with a large, plain white diaper. 

“No pressure,” she said. 

She handed it to me and left the room. I wasn’t expecting her to stay while I changed, but I was surprised to hear her footsteps go back down the stairs. This was only for me. I could leave it on the bed, walk downstairs, and leave. 

I picked it up. I took my shorts off but left my underwear on like I was trying on a swimsuit. I didn’t know why I was doing that—no one else was going to use this diaper. I slid my underwear off and put the diaper between my legs. I sat down without fastening it. It looked a size too small for the wings to comfortably reach the front, and something about fastening it seemed to push the moment too far.

The physical sensation wasn’t much different from a maxi pad. Just an enormous maxi pad. I sat there for a minute, waiting to see if I would feel something. I closed my eyes. Am I more comfortable? I knew the answer was no. I could understand why this would be comforting, but I felt the same hollow sadness I felt looking at Kristoff’s tigers. 

There was a quick knock at the door, and before I could say anything, Aspie turned the knob. I leapt up out of instinct, and the unfastened diaper dropped to the floor. 

“I’m not dressed!” I shouted as the door opened.

We stood for a moment in silence, her looking me up and down, as if trying to decide whether to apologize and back away or come into the room. Every bit of me was exposed, standing in the late afternoon light of the open bedroom window. My hand clamped down on my vulva, and in the clutching motion I thought of Manet’s Olympia and the forcefulness with which she holds herself, the way she commands her nudity. But Olympia was sexy. I was sweating, reddening, my bush was unshaved, not a full eighties bush, but still messy, and the bottom of my stomach hung out below my shirt. If there was any desire in Aspie’s face, I couldn’t find it, but why would there be? I was disgusting. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. 

I turned back to the bed and picked up my shorts and slid them on to cover myself. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said. 

“I said I wasn’t dressed,” I said, angrier than I meant it to be. 

“I thought you knew I was coming back.”

How would I have known that? Was that the protocol here? You put on a diaper and then the other person comes back into the room with their leash? And even if I knew this rule, didn’t I get to decide when she came back in? I thought this moment with the diaper was just for me.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I just don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“I’ll go,” she said, and as soon as the words left her mouth, I wanted to tell her to stay, to try again. I’d put the diaper back on and she could knock, and I would do the whole thing right. 

But I didn’t. I let her leave and shut the door, and I knew I wasn’t going to see her again. 

I dressed and looked for a garbage can. There wasn’t one in the bedroom, so I folded the diaper and put it in my purse. It felt like I had to leave without saying goodbye. I knew they wouldn’t have wanted that. They wouldn’t have cared that I wasn’t interested in their kink, but it felt overwhelmingly apparent that these things—not just the diapers, but the cookies, the children’s movies, the crafts—brought them something very different than the calmness and nostalgia they brought me. It was electric for them, leaving tingles of pleasure running down their arms as they dug crayons into stencils of Care Bears. This was the place where they took their masks off and lived as their truest selves, and I was just an observer, not even really a voyeur. To come back would be to pretend I felt otherwise. 

I went downstairs and yanked the stuck front door open. I told myself that maybe they didn’t hear it over the sound of the TV, but that wasn’t true. Some of them would have looked up and seen that new girl whose name they couldn’t remember go out the door.