enough that we can complete the job of shaking them off.
My knees and hands released, I slither to the floor completely, and lie there, stunned. Sheila kicks off her shoes and sprawls on the floor beside me with a sigh, and Erin collapses along the bench like a lion in an Acacia tree, limbs dangling on the floor.
“At ease, soldiers,” says Sheila dreamily to the ceiling.
“Holy goddamn fucking holy shit, Sheila!” says Erin, all muffled with her face smooshed into the bench.
For some reason this strikes me as absurdly funny, and I laugh until tears run into my ears and the room goes all wobbly. When I get myself under control and look up, Sheila’s regarding me with kind and knowing eyes, while my brother-in-arms reaches out with a smile and smacks me on the leg. “Well, we lived through it,” she says.
Later, as we put on our boots at the door, Erin offers me a lift home. I accept. As we walk down the driveway, she turns to me and says, “Hey, man, maybe you could come over and help me fix my TV.”
“Huh?” I look sharply at Erin, but her face is serious. “Fix your TV? What in hell’s wrong with it?”
“Well,” she says, patting my aching gut and exhibiting a sudden gleeful grin, “I’m having problems with my horizontal hold.”
I chase Erin the rest of the way to her car.
Jane’s Bonds
Shanna Germain
It comes to her by mistake. Although it’s her address on the plain brown envelope, it is someone else’s name; perhaps the house’s previous owner. She and Derek have lived here for almost five years, but they still get mail for the people that owned the house before them, people they’ve never met. She’s about to stick the envelope back in the mailbox with a PLEASE FORWARD notice on it, when something below the name catches her eye: OR CURRENT RESIDENT. Oh, that’s me, she thinks. It looks like junk mail of some sort, but she opens it anyway.
Inside the envelope is a purple catalog, offering “sexual satisfaction for women.” She lies down on the bed and starts flipping through it—she’s never seen so many women-oriented sex toys in her life. Sure, she’s been to Fanta-She’s-R-Us downtown (once even with Derek) but it always seemed like all the products were geared toward men—videos that offered nothing more than fake boobs and way-ugly men grunting, those ridiculous-looking fake mouths, rows and rows of cock rings.
But in this catalog (which, she realizes with little surprise,
is from a woman-owned company), there are tons of toys for women—cool tie-dyed dildos in pink and purple, lipstick-shaped vibrators, even videos directed by women. She flips toward the back and there, tucked away on the last page, is a toy that catches her eye: two purple cuffs lined with fake fur.
She traces her hand along the page, imagining the cuffs’ fur-lined softness against her skin. She’s never used toys like these, but she’s thought of it often, when Derek sometimes takes her hands and presses them to the bed during sex. She wonders if he’d go for it—probably not. Her husband’s a wonderful man, but is still sometimes stuck in his religious upbringing, feeling guilty for anything outside of the missionary position. He’s grown a lot since they met (getting him to go to Fanta-She’s-R-Us was a big one) but still, he balks at things that are outside the mainstream (going to a strip club together for instance) and she never wants to push him too far or too fast. Still, she sighs as she runs her hand over the cuffs on the page, a few toys would be nice.
She reads the description: “Soft and delicate, yet tough in all the right ways, these fur- and silk-lined bonds are sure to please.” And there’s even a matching blindfold. She wonders if she should just buy them, let Derek find them somewhere in the house and act surprised. Or maybe she should put them on her wish list—her thirtieth birthday is coming up.
An image pops into her head of opening a