This was probably late 2022 or early 2023; I was around 45, living in Los Angeles, and I had mostly fallen out of love with Feeld. Feeld had started as an app for couples looking for threesomes and had evolved into a place for people whose sexual interests generally required a little more explanation. If Tinder was a bar, Feeld was the dingy, sticky-floored room in the back of that bar.
More and more, that room was full of things that didn’t interest me, but occasionally I’d venture back there and see who was lurking around. That’s how I met a 24-year-old grad student named Kynlee.
Her profile mentioned that she had grown up very sheltered in a Mormon community. She’d been the first person in her family to leave the enclave and attend a non-Mormon university in the non-Mormon hellhole of Los Angeles.
Kynlee’s pictures all had this Harajuku-anime-hentai-manic-pixie-girl vibe. She was tall, Caucasian, really pretty, with pinkish hair. In one photo, she had cat ears on, tongue out, eyes crossed in this exaggerated anime expression I would later learn was called ahegao – basically the cartoon face of being so sexually overwhelmed your eyes stop cooperating. At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing. I just thought, This is making me feel a certain way, and I like it.
Her bio said something like: Cat girl. More interested in balls of yarn than strings. My quite literal read was that she maybe owned a cat or liked cats and was looking for fun with no attachment. We matched. One night around 12:30, she messaged me with one word, or rather, a sound.
“Meow.”
“Hey.”
I said hey because I wasn’t going to meow. I also didn’t want to mock her. She said she’d been waiting for me to reach out, but realized that she had to take matters into her own hands. She asked what I was doing.
“Getting ready for bed,” I said. “I have stuff in the morning.”
“Can I come over?”
This was literally our first conversation. The next morning I had to mentor students at a prestigious Los Angeles educational institution. Lately, I’d been attempting, however sporadically, to conduct myself like an adult.
I said, “Generally I don’t hook up the first time I meet somebody.”
She said, “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Then she told me she was in Long Beach. Long Beach is not a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It is a fucking 45-minute journey.
I explained that by the time she got there, it would be incredibly late. She was relentless. I offered my availability several nights, weeks into the future. She didn’t want to hear about them.
“I’d really love to meet you tonight.”
I put the phone down, started tidying up, turning off lights, basically preparing to have a wank and go to bed. Then I looked at my phone again. Another message.
“Wanna see my tits?”
Sure.
“FaceTime me.”
So we exchanged numbers and I FaceTimed her.
She answered. She was very cute. She propped up the phone, looked directly into the camera and said:
“Meow.”
Then she lifted her shirt.
Predictably, I said, “I’ll send you an Uber.”
All of a sudden I saw the flesh, and it reminded my flesh of the flesh. Apparently I was now willing to revise my sleep schedule.
Forty-five minutes later she arrived dressed up in knee socks, Mary Janes, a tiny skirt, and one of those sweaters that has long sleeves but ends before the sweater has completed its principal responsibility.
She was much shyer in person than I’d been expecting. We smoked a joint and talked on the couch for a while. Then she moved closer, put her head against my shoulder, and started literally purring.
Not fake sexy purring. Purring. Until this moment, I didn’t know I liked this. But I definitely did. The problem was, I had absolutely no idea what my role was supposed to be.
I’m a dog person. In fact, my dog was looking at me like, Dude, what the fuck is her problem? I was looking back at him like, I don’t know, man. We’re all learning something tonight. We started making out.
Then she said, “Wanna see what I brought?”
She picked up this innocent-looking shoulder bag, turned it upside down, and dumped the contents onto the floor.
There was a butt plug with a tail. Cat ears. A collar. Pink fuzzy handcuffs. And a pile of dildos.
Everything was pink. Her socks were pink. Her hair had pink in it. Her eyeshadow was pink. The sex toys were pink. One pink thing is a color. When everything is pink, you have entered a system.
She put on the ears. She put on the collar. And we proceeded to have one of the strangest and, frankly, most enjoyable sexual experiences of my life. I had assumed the cat thing would be basically decorative. Ears on, fuck normally, everybody goes home.
But no.
She continued her transformation from a human grad student into a cat. She purred. She curled up. She licked her fingers like paws. She rubbed her face against me. She rubbed her face all over my cock. Sucked it and licked my balls while purring. She presented her bare ass in these extremely feline postures. The cat thing was not an accessory to the sex. It was the sex.
Meanwhile, I was trying to be a supportive scene partner while having absolutely no idea what scene we were in. Having a background in improv, “Yes, and” was basically my strategy and it served me well.
We stayed up until around four in the morning. Then she suddenly switched back into being a 24-year-old grad student and said her roommate would wonder where she was.
I sent her home in an Uber. I assumed this had been a bizarre one-off. It was not.
She came over four or five more times. Eventually I asked her about the cat thing because I wanted to know if there was something I was supposed to be doing.
“Hey,” I said. “I recognize your thing, and it’s sexy and fun. I’m just not sure how to enhance it for you.”
She looked at me.
“Oh, no. It’s not a game.”
That changed the conversation.
She explained that she wasn’t particularly comfortable with people and only really connected with a few of them. With men, sexually, being a cat was the way she felt most comfortable interacting. With women, she said, she wasn’t like this at all.
So, okay. I had been approaching this as a kink I was supposed to participate in. She was telling me, no, you don’t need to become a cat. You don’t need a character. This is just how I am with men.
Fine. In some ways that actually made my job easier.
Later she revealed another detail.
“I haven’t been honest with you.”
Oh boy.
She had a partner. Her partner was a woman. They were romantically committed, but the woman was asexual, and Kynlee had permission to go elsewhere and, in her terminology, “play with balls of yarn.”
So that’s what that meant.
We developed a routine. She’d usually come over when school was stressing her out. Sometimes she’d request sake or soju. Sometimes snacks. She vaped, which I found gross and annoying, but occasionally she’d ask me to pick one up for her. Then we’d sit on the couch and watch a movie. When she first arrived she would be Kynlee and we’d talk.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Good. School’s crazy.”
Nothing deep. No anecdotes. No jokes. No bits. We’d smoke a little weed or have a drink. Then, slowly, she’d curl up beside me. There would be a look. A “meow.”
And that was basically my cue.
