My most recent sexual experience was two years ago in a barn in Kentucky with a photographer I had met in Ohio eight days before. I was temporarily living on a farm in Independence the day he drove from Columbus to spend the afternoon with me.

I bought a bottle of Larceny bourbon the night before in preparation and had consumed half before he arrived. I had never had sober sex with a new partner, and I wasn’t about to start with a guy I barely knew.

I know many people are adept at this sleeping-with-strangers thing. I have never known how to do this. I have never known how to go from, “So what’s your name?” to having you in my bed or me in your bed or us in the back of a car in the parking lot of a Target.

The photographer and I had sex twice, in one evening. It was everything television and film tells me sex should be: Spontaneous. Unhesitating. In an exotic (read: not domestic) location.

It was on a wooden bench swing near a river in the trees behind the barn. And then it was in the barn, in the summer heat and humidity.

Afterward, we walked hand in hand down the main road leading to town, giggling while we watched the fireflies appear and disappear around us in the fading daylight. It was romance and whirlwind. It was sweat and sweet.