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Ryan’s face goes blank, and he tilts his head ever so slightly to the side as he digests the information. “Huh.”
“Exactly,” I say, crossing my arms. “And I don’t know about you, but that seems kind of not great to me.”
His confusion returns. “So, because we don’t have sex anymore, you want to take a break? A break for what?”
I shrug, feeling electrically charged and sort of sick to my stomach. “I need to get this sorted out, and I honestly can’t focus on what I need to do while feeling like the biggest ass in the world for not being able to fulfill my girlfriendly duties.”
He rolls his eyes. “If it’s been two years, it obviously doesn’t matter to me if it takes some time for you to get better. Although it’s nice to hear you’re thinking about it. I figured you just weren’t into sex anymore.”
I gape at him. “What?”
“I don’t know,” he says defensively. “You never bring it up, so I just assumed.”
“Well, you never bring it up, either!”
He throws his arms up and says loudly, “Why would I bring it up? It’s your problem! What am I supposed to do? Be the jerk who asks for sex you can’t have?”
My jaw flops down and I stand up a little taller. “Excuse you,” I snap. “My problem? If I recall, I tried to get you to work with me on the stuff my doctor told me to do, and you didn’t want to because it was too weird.”
Looking a little embarrassed, he regroups. “Look, I’m sorry, but sex isn’t supposed to be that complicated. And you told me she said the therapy was stuff you were supposed to do. You said you’d take care of it and let me know when things were okay again.”
Now I feel my face burning. “Well, things aren’t okay.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath that is irritatingly shaky. “What I’m saying is, I’ve gotten so caught up in life and work that I haven’t been able to make it a priority, and I want to take the time to focus on everything now.”
His eyes shift to the side. His trademark confused look. “That’s...good?”
Calmly I continue, “But I don’t want to feel like I’m keeping you on some sexless leash any longer. That isn’t fair to either of us. So let’s just call this a break. You go off and do your thing for a few weeks, and I’ll be here doing mine, and then we’ll regroup and see if we can’t get back to where we’re supposed to be.”
“For how long?”
I square my shoulders. “Until our anniversary.”
He stares at me, and I can’t tell if he’s just contemplating what I’m saying or preparing to argue again. I walk around the counter and close the distance between us. Reaching out, I put my hands on his forearms.
“I love you,” I assure him while silently missing his floppy curls all the same. “And I know I told you I didn’t want to live together until I got this vaginismus nonsense under control, and I meant that. But you said you’d keep asking on our anniversaries, and I really, really want to be able to say yes this time.”
“For the record,” he clarifies, “I love you, too. And I’ve always been okay with us living together, with or without the sex.”
“I know,” I say with a smile, “but I’m not. I need to fix this—for myself, and for us. I’m ready to move on to greater things, Ryan. This holding pattern isn’t good for anyone anymore.”
He looks frustrated, but doesn’t pull his arms away. A little calculator in the back of my head announces that this is the longest we have touched in months.
“And you want us to see other people?” he asks.
My eyebrows involuntarily twitch. “Yep. I mean, that’s more for you than me, as I’ll be involved in independent activities, but yeah. Go out. Get laid. You’ve waited long enough. And then on our anniversary, we’ll meet back up and get to where we should have been this whole time.”
Now he does move away from me. I awkwardly let my hands drop to my sides. “You’re actually telling me to go have sex with other women. Are you drunk?”
It’s my turn to roll my eyes. “No, I’m not. And yes, I am serious. I mean, I’d appreciate it if you were careful with protection and didn’t, like, actively seek to bang your way up and down the Midwest, but yeah, if you’re in a place where an opportunity arises naturally and you want to sleep with someone, I say go for it.”
He looks floored. “And you have no problem with that? With the idea of me having sex with someone else?”
I consider this, wanting to be as honest as possible. “It’s not my favorite, and I’m not going to go into great thought imagining you in whatever situations may arise, but yeah, I’m okay with it. I can’t stand the guilt hanging over me anymore, Ryan. You have needs that I’m not meeting, and it just makes sense to let you live your life while I’m getting my shit together over here.”
Ryan gently shakes his head, but seems very calm. He places his hands on the counter by the plates, and his fingers start tapping. Whenever he’s deep in thought, they tap out little non-rhythmic signals. He works with computers all day, so I like to imagine he’s subconsciously working through things by tapping out binary code or something.
“This is sick.”
I give him an encouraging grin. “I like to think it’s practical. And it’s only thirty-four days.”
Ryan stares at me for a long moment, fingers still rapping out a beatless sound, and I can’t read his thoughts in the slightest. He looks down at the food he was setting out before I came in and dropped a giant bomb of what-the-fuck.
“I got that veggie korma you like,” he says with a sigh, pointing to a tray of yellow sauce. “And the garlic naan.”
I’m familiar with this form of acceptance. Ryan is very go-with-the-flow, which is generally a good yin to my yang. Part of me feels a little bad for steamrollering him, but the rest of me knows I’ll be able to make it up to him with sweet, sweet lovin’ in thirty-four days.
“It smells awesome,” I say with a smile.
He seems to easily fall back into our comfortable Wednesday date-night routine as he hands me a plate. “So,” he says, spooning rice out onto a plate of his own, “how was work?”
I grab a fork and quietly let out a deep breath. This is going to work. I’ve totally got this.
Hell, I bet I won’t even need all thirty-four days.
5 (#uab22ad16-deff-5c50-a72b-43434ffdf7d5)
“You what?” Shannon shrieks at me.
Our morning meeting ended, and I decided to break the news of my master plan to get my vagina back on track.
“I told him to see other people,” I repeat, running my finger around the rim of my coffee mug. “We’re on a break.”
“How the hell is that supposed to help you?” she shouts at me. “You’re trying to have sex again, so your plan is to get rid of the guy you could be having that sex with?”
“Will you calm down?” I ask, feeling a bit annoyed at her reaction. “I am going to work on the therapy myself. And I have an appointment with my gynecologist next week. I just want to get things sorted on my end before I jump back into bed with him. I want to make damn sure it all works before we go for it. I’m not putting either of us through another failed roll in the hay, okay?”
Liz looks like I just told her the Earth is actually flat.
Butter looks concerned as she asks, “And how did Ryan take all of this?”
I shrug. “He was okay with it, actually,” I answer. “He’s a free agent until our anniversary, and by then, I will bloody well have things in working order, and we’ll pick back up again.”
I swear I can see smoke rolling out of Shannon’s ears. “Part of getting through my therapy had a lot to do with Joe helping me through things, Kat. There was a lot of trial and error!”
“That’s you guys,” I snap. “You’ve been together forever and you have kids and it’s all kinds of different, okay?”
“Everybody chill out,” Butter says, holding up her hands. “There’s no reason to get loud with each other.”
“But she’s being ridiculous!” Shannon argues.
“Lady, calm down,” Butter demands, “or I’ll hit you with my glitter brush.”
Shannon can’t help it. The side of her mouth twitches with a hint of a smile. “Well,” she says at a far more human volume, “are you going to see other people, too?”
“No. Why would I? That’s the whole point. It’s a ‘Me, Myself and I’ kind of therapy.”
“Yeah, but the actual having sex thing isn’t,” she says. “And doing the therapy is very different from sleeping with someone. It’s not like you’re going to be able to just hop back in that saddle after a few weeks of work and everything goes smoothly, you know? It can take a few tries.”
I gasp. “You never told me that!”
Shannon looks around wildly. “When would I have had a chance to tell you? How was I supposed to know you’d run home and break up with Ryan?”
“Glitter brush, guys!” Butter warns.
Shannon takes the kind of breath that I have seen her take many times before when dealing with her children. “I’m just saying that in this case, practice really does make perfect.”
“Since he’s going to be seeing other people,” Butter offers, “why don’t you see other people, too? Then you could...uh, practice.”
Looking like she’s giving this thought way more consideration than it deserves, Shannon says, “That could work, actually.”
I look at them like they’ve each grown three heads. “How am I supposed to date someone new with all this going on? ‘So, this is great—however, it’s possible I can’t have sex with you, but let’s go ahead and give that third date a go anyway’?”
Shannon frowns. “Yeah, you’d want to try with someone you were really comfortable with, for sure.” With a frown directed squarely at me, she adds, “Which is what I assumed Ryan would be.”
I glare at her. “Will you stop? This is hard enough without added guilt from you. He seemed okay with the situation.”
I think he was, anyway. And I think I am.
I am, aren’t I?
We are all standing here, sipping coffee and contemplating what Shannon has said when the back doorbell dings. Morning deliveries. Shannon sighs and sets down her mug, giving it a longing look before she heads out to sign for everything.
Liz, her white-blond hair pulled back tightly into a chignon today, starts fiddling with a ball of lavender-colored fondant. Butter takes her brush out of her apron pocket and pokes at the inside of a nearly empty glitter pot on her station. Both of them are clearly avoiding my gaze, which is more than a little awkward.
Then Shannon comes running back in with a mischievous smile on her face and a stack of boxes in her arms. She’s practically skipping as she sets them down on her station.
“Whatcha doing?” I ask.
“What’s up with you?” Butter asks. “You didn’t even finish your coffee.”
“They came,” Shannon says gleefully, bouncing on her toes.
Butter gasps. Liz blushes. I glare.
“What came?”
They fly at the boxes, and suddenly it’s like Christmas morning, but with powdered sugar dust flying everywhere in lieu of snow. There’s a rustling of paper, squealing, a gasp from Liz, and a few seconds later, Shannon and Butter emerge, hands clutching a variety of sex toys.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Look what we got!”
I shake my head and rub my temples. “I see what you got. Why did you get them?”
“Well, seeing as you waited two years to take matters into your own hands,” Shannon says with an exaggerated wink, “we decided we’d step up and give you some motivation. I remember all the things my doc suggested I use, so we ordered you everything! There are dilators, different kinds of lubes, faux-penises in varying sizes, natural and synthetic materials—all the things a gal could possibly need to stroll her vagina down the road to recovery!”
She and Butter are standing there in our tiny kitchen, a dildo and bottle of lube in each hand, held proudly over their heads in triumph, looks of absolute glee on their faces. Liz’s face slowly drops its look of horror as she edges closer to the boxes and peeks inside.
“You guys are the best friends a vagina could have.” I smile. “This is also the weirdest thing I’ve ever been a part of. You had sex toys overnighted to our bakery. Why’d you have them delivered here?”
“Because I couldn’t carry all of this on my walk to work,” Butter says as she starts loading my arms up with fleshy implements.
Shannon hands me a bottle of all-natural lubricant. “And if they came to my house, my kids would have thought they were early birthday presents. Back when I was in this scene, they were both too little to notice, but now they wouldn’t think twice before tearing the boxes open. And that would be hard to explain to Child Protective Services.”
“Fair enough.”
“And!” Shannon continues like a demented game show host. “I forgot to tell you, what with the Ryan news, but last night I printed off a whole bunch of instructions on the different techniques for you.” She reaches under the prep table and pulls out what can only be described as a home-printed encyclopedia of vaginal information.
I flip through some of the pages. There are diagrams, full-color schematics of anatomy and pages upon pages of different therapy tools, which could also be confused with a sex-toy police lineup. The devices are all assorted by length, girth and so on—and presented in a clinical manner that’s both hilarious and a bit unsettling.
“The next time any of you has an even slightly embarrassing condition, you just wait,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s so on.”
“Now we just need to get you a date!” Butter adds.
I drop a dildo. “Excuse me?”
“A date! Come on, we just talked about this! So when your noonie is at full capacity, you’ve got someone ready to test it out with!”
Shannon jabs a dilator through the air. “I’m coming around on that, actually. Things were definitely easier for me since I had Joe to practice with, so what if we set you up with someone? Because I know this guy Richard from City Planning, and I have always thought he’d be perfect for you.”
Butter chokes on a laugh, and her hands, still full of flesh-colored rubber penises, fly to her mouth. I shake my head. “Shannon.”
“What?”
“Richard? You want to set me up with a guy named Dick? Come on.”
Her face goes still as she processes, and then she doubles over laughing, her ponytail of golden curls flying by my face as she cackles toward the floor. “I swear I didn’t think of that,” she gasps without looking up. “But, oh my god, that’s amazing.”
Letting her own guffaw loose, Butter adds, “I knew a Willy in college. I bet he’s still single. Want me to give him a call?”
Liz giggles over the boxes. “One of our groomsmen is named Peter.”
Jerking up to a standing position, Shannon has tears streaming down her face. “What about Rod who does deliveries on Thursdays? Or, okay, there’s a guy who works at the butcher shop by my house, and cross my heart, his name is Lance Johnson.”
She flops over onto the prep table, completely taken by hysterics. Butter is making strangled sounds as she tries to pull in air through her laughter, and even Liz has lost it.
“Hardy-har, yes, it’s hilarious, they all have names like penises,” I say, shaking my head. My coworkers are all in various states of collapse, clutching sex toys, laughing like ten-year-old boys, and while sure, Lance Johnson is actually pretty hilarious, I’m not feeling very chuckly at the moment.
It really has been forever since I’ve even been out with a guy who wasn’t Ryan. Even worse, it’s been forever since I’ve been out with Ryan himself. I can’t remember the last time he and I went out on what would be considered a date. We hit that too-comfortable stage even before my giblets went on strike, and half the time we spend together is ordering in and eating from take-out containers on the couch because neither of us wants to bother with dishes later.
