The whole situation terrified me. She was 18 years older than me, she was my landlord, and the magnetism between us was disturbingly noticeable from the start. On New Year’s Eve, a few days after I moved in, she got me alone in a hallway, and hidden from the other partygoers, gave me a deliciously sensual embrace. Happy New Year. Life in her house became filled with more and more innuendos that, being young and Sapphicly naive, I didn’t quite register.

Or perhaps I did know what she was hinting at, but felt my only way of having any power or control in the situation was by concealing the depths of my attraction to her. (Ultimately, I was scared of confronting the fact that I might be a lesbian.) She kept mentioning she needed a lover and dropping lines like, “You must have some Scorpio in you; they’re very calm on the surface, but inside they’re just boiling away with passion.” One afternoon she took me aside and informed me that she wasn’t sure she wanted me living in her house. She said I was loud and rude to her friends. When I asked her for specific examples, she could only come up with one or two minor incidents. When I asked her if she wanted me to move out, she hastily replied, “We’ll give it another couple months . . . we can work on some sort of compromise . . . it could be rather interesting.” I guessed I would have to leave if I didn’t become her lover.

Her need for control was simultaneously a turn-on and an annoyance for me as her hints grew less subtle (like the evening she was getting her clothes out of the dryer and showed me her crotchless panties: “I hope I have a chance to use these sometime soon!”). I felt she had power because she was older and more experienced, yet I had a power I was unaware of: If she were to approach me and I rejected her, she would look like a dirty old lady. In the end, the real power was in our connection, whether we dealt with it honestly or not.