When nonbinary Orpheus leaves their much-loved asexual partner Tobi after 35 years, they have never dated sober, never had a casual girlfriend and never had sober sex. At the age of sixty-two, they’re good at marriage and making queer art and terrible at dating.
Sex-deprived, living out and proud as nonbinary and plural, they’re completely unprepared for middle aged lesbians and their complicated desires. Romance, flirting, love-bombing, control, seduction, desire roll into Orpheus’ life and wake up every possible opinion among their many vocal and vulnerable personalities.
Their very painful history gets woken up, too. As teenager personalities revel in the “queer prom that never was,” as Orpheus experiences a first kiss with a much younger trans person and then goes on to make out with a woman who confesses trauma in between flicks of her tongue, child personalities run for cover. The wise inner yoga teacher Kaye warns that none of them are ready to date, but Orpheus persists in dog paddling through the waves of dysfunctional urge-to-merge dating.
Then two friends die and their landlord sells their building, forcing them to move. Their now ex Tobi totals their car and breaks their back.
Will a Eurydice appear, Orpheus wonders, as they search the apps. Will this year ever quit being a disaster?
Then Eury shows up, arriving on a beach with a lump in her breast, heart problems, a live-in mother and disabled son. She likes to text and talk on the phone ever day. Soon, Orpheus and Eurydice are joined at the hip.
In week three, Eury professes love. At week six, she’s at saying this may be the great love of her life. At week seven, she’s talking about adding an addition to her house.
And Orpheus, who will say that they’re plural but won’t show it, who resists commitment only in their silences, goes to every medical appointment, every work occasion, every family party, as their personalities argue about whether to stay, whether to go, whether anything could possibly be right with this unhappy woman who soon begins to attempt to control every other relationship in their life.
