You’d be lying if you told me Michelin-starred menus didn’t make you horny. “Fine dining” establishments are modeled to elicit appetite—hunger as a double entendre. There’s the aphrodisiac quality of it all: sultry lighting, finger foods, James Blake-adjacent playlists. You’re Dressed-with-a-capital-D, tonguing oysters, the mere width of a table separating your body from your date’s. What on earth are you to do with all that carnal tension? Wait until you get home?
I’ll tell you what you do: Fuck in the bathroom.
My first dining rendezvous took place between the amuse-bouche and the appetizers at a French restaurant housed in a Lower East Side hotel. On the evening in question, my then-boyfriend, Max*, and I were dining with another couple—old friends of his. He’d been out of town for nearly a week, so we hadn’t been alone together in a small eternity—certainly long enough to feel like we’d amassed a surplus of pent-up, um, desire. Since we’d met, some years earlier, we’d shared a particular affection for toying with sexual tension in rooms full of other people—all that poetic, eye-fucking-from-across-the-room-at-a-party, sexting-under-the-table-at-family-dinner shit. Hardly original; you get the gist.
Right then, mid-martini, swallowing salt and brine and oyster flesh, I felt Max, seated opposite me, reaching for my knee under the table—then further north, further north, further north, until he was toying gently with the lacy edges of my underwear. He was telling a story about a jacket he bought on Grailed, or the Safdie brothers, or some other categorically similar subject matter. I was nodding politely, waiting to see if he’d break character, feeling so lethally turned on my skin hurt. I ate the olive from my martini glass just to do something—anything, expel energy—while his fingers feathered back and forth between my legs until it was impossible to sit still any longer.
“I’ve got to run to the restroom,” I announced to the table, perhaps too abruptly. “Max, will you show me where to go?” Ever the gentleman, he stood, placing his cloth napkin beside his plate and guiding me by the small of my back—at first gently, then with some force—towards the bathrooms.
I held my breath waiting to learn what, exactly, the restroom layout might turn out to be. Would we find ourselves cramped in a stall, doing our best not to jostle the doors while unassuming restaurant clientele pissed gently beside us? Would we pick the men’s room or the women’s room? Would we leave our clothes on? Would we even have sex—or was I being overzealous?
We hesitated outside, unsure which bathroom to enter. We stood opposite one another, positively radiating electricity, feeling pheromones between us as if they were some kind of palpable pollution in the air. Finally, someone emerged from the men’s room (a sign, surely), and in we went.
Inside, urinals lined the wall—but the stalls, unlike those in, say, a high school bathroom, were properly floor-to-ceiling enclosed. Without pause, we entered through the nearest threshold and he pushed me against the door, clicked the lock, and sank down to his knees, pulling my underwear down around my ankles as he lowered himself. He kissed my upper thighs, ever inward, until his tongue was a whole other organ in my body. Then, in a movement swift enough to make me believe this was not his first bathroom sex rodeo, he lifted me onto the sink and unbuckled his belt. The sound I made as he entered me was just loud enough that he clapped his hand over my mouth.
Is there anything hotter than a man who has never been anything but tender, covering your mouth with the palm of his hand? I bit his fingers and we stayed like that until he finished—quickly, of course. But that’s the point: promptness—at least when you have a couple waiting for you at a dinner table mere meters away. No, I didn’t come, and even so, it was, at the time, the most sultry tryst of my life. Don’t ask me how that’s possible. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
But wait. Let me tell you what chicken-crepes-for-two taste like after a man you love has been inside you—quickly, quietly, covertly—spitting distance from the table at which you’re eating: Like butter. Like a million dollars. Like, Holy fuck.
Our second offense transpired less than a week later, out to eat with friends at one of those buzzy Dimes Square restaurants preceded by its reputation, attended only by verified hot people. I’ll be honest: I’d selected the venue, above all else, for its bathroom. Lined with painted tiles reminiscent of the cover art on Renata Adler’s Speedboat, this was the sort of stall-less, single-occupant restroom practically designed to alleviate some of the complications that come with fucking in a stall.
We were drinking wine; bubbles to start. On the table: Shrimp toast and olives. And amidst all the clambering, watery din of the room, all of us sucking olive meat from pits, I felt Max beside me, tightening his grip around my thigh. My phone buzzed with a text: “Go to the bathroom. Now.”
Once again, I excused myself, biting my tongue, disappearing into the restroom and breathing heavy with my back against the door until I heard a knock, followed by a quiet, “It’s me.” He slipped in, kissed my neck, and began to unbutton me hungrily (I was wearing a jumpsuit, so I had no choice but to strip naked—an arousing inconvenience of its own). He lifted me up against the door, my legs wrapped around his waist, then set me down, flipped me around, and entered me from behind, pulling my hair, kissing my chin, clapping his hand, once again, over my mouth.
He finished quickly, both of us panting, and I remember marveling at the notion that sex need not always operate as a means to an end. That at times, the sheer, rapturous adrenaline high of an encounter like this one could be enough.
He helped me back into my jumpsuit, the two of us finger-combing one another’s hair so as not to arouse suspicion, giggling. “You first,” he said, kissing me hard on the mouth. I emerged feeling radiant, almost holy (ironically enough), and slipped into my seat, sliding back into whatever groove of conversation had been carrying on without me. Minutes later, Max, too, returned to his seat, a fresh bottle of wine at the center of the table, along with a bowl of steamed, curried mussels and two plates stacked with rounds of sourdough.
Have you ever tasted something in your whole body? Tongue, sternum, fingertips? Here’s the secret: Have sex first. After all, what is fine dining without the lord’s intended palate cleanser between courses?
*Name has been changed.
