This week’s S L I C K is curated and edited by Carolyn Yates.

Content notes: tentacles, sex toys, friend sex

I’d never seen anything like the tentacle in the box Ari handed me: a blue and green shaft with purple and orange freckles, covered in knobby feelers, coiled up like a fern. The shaft was thick as my forearm and tapered into a pencil-thin point. The base ended in a three-pronged copper plug, where it could be plugged into my body. It was almost two feet long. I shut the box and handed it back to Ari.

“That one’s a bit much,” they said, placing the box next to them on the bed. “I grabbed it anyway, to give you a sense of the range.”

We were sitting on my bed, which doubled as my couch, and Ari had unpacked a duffel bag with a suite of cellophane-wrapped attachments. A camera on a tripod waited next to the bed.

I had met Ari last year in an insurance-company-mandated info session ahead of our respective surgeries. We were an unlikely pair: I was here because I h...