"Where are we going?” I was driving downtown to meet my friend Sara for lunch, or so I thought. “The sex toy place?”
“Yeah, haven’t you been there?” Sara said, her voice in and out on her cell.
“Well, I’ve walked by but I never went in…”
“I need to get something there for David and I.”
“But I thought things were going well...”
“They could use a nudge. Meet me there in ten.”
I waited outside, pacing back and forth ostensibly in front of the bagel shop, not the sex toy place, as if someone was taking notes. Minutes later, Sara turned the corner and, laughing, waved me over toward the shop.
Sara strolled from dildo to book to video and back again as if she were choosing the ingredients for dinner. Meanwhile, terrified that I might run into anyone I knew – Former boss! Current boss! Former boyfriend! Current husband! – I just tailed her with a placid expression, mumbling, uh huh, butt balls, now isn’t that something...
The truth was, my inner perv/slut was dying to emerge. My seething doyenne of sensuality, my mistress of lust, my raging fire of – oh, you get the idea – was clawing at her puritanical cage trying to GET OUT. At the same time, she was full of questions. What were butt balls, and they go where?? and moreover, why? Some things were just never meant to happen, to me.
Sara meandered past a hand-scrawled sign that said: “Great Deals on Dongs!” She hefted, held to the light, even smelled, a dozen different dildos: smaller ones like fat lipsticks, scary realistic big-boys out on bail and hunting up trouble, futuristic robo-dildos like missiles, smaller gents who, though slender, were fully at attention, glow-in-the-dark hard plastic gismos with complex attachments for other orifi. She settled on a perky neon green one called “Steve” (they each had names!), a video called Car Wash Sluts and some other purple thing I couldn’t identify (a cock ring? She did say: “anything can be a cock ring, if it goes around a cock.” Another Sara quotable!



