Remember the days of All My Children’s “Tad the Cad” and Young & Restless’ OG mantrap Jill, back when characters actually seemed to enjoy sex? When you never quite knew who would end up in whose bed? Daytime has been sorely lacking in lustful players for years. Hookups stopped being fun and started being capital P Plot Points, nothing more.

But thankfully, one soap seems to remember that playing the field and fooling around has its perks, especially for viewers who love vicariously through its characters. Yep, we’re talking once again about Beyond the Gates.

We’ve written over and over about how grateful we are that the new show on the block doesn’t talk down to its audience, that it understands that pop culture is part of the vernacular, that it makes humor a must-have in its day-to-day, that it even managed to make a heavy cancer storyline emotionally rich rather than a leaden PSA. (Seriously, though, Beyond the Gates is so good, there’s no way it doesn’t come home from its first Daytime Emmys with a U-Haul full of statuettes in tow!)

Now, on top of everything else, it’s giving us a passion’s plaything. And ironically, the character who suddenly has the richest and most varied sex life in all of soapdom isn’t a supervixen or a Casanova, it’s the usually straitlaced Nicole. Off her divorce from Ted, she’s been having the dang time of her life with besotted suitors Carlton and Kial — and we’ve been having the time of our lives watching.

Nicole’s not using or abusing anybody, she’s just enjoying her freedom, drawing clear boundaries for the men in her life and making no apologies for the fact that she isn’t rushing into another serious relationship. (The other CBS shows could learn a valuable lesson from her: It is possible and can even be fun to date more than one person at a time.)

So once more, thank you, Beyond the Gates. You’re not just firing on all cylinders, you’re firing on cylinders that other soaps have altogether forgotten they possess.