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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.
We’ve hit the boring part of being an old married couple without ever doing the marriage bit.
As determined as I am to make this break a short and singular one, there’s no love lost for the weird, distant aching that comes from sitting next to someone you love because you’ve been together forever and wondering if you’re maybe just there out of habit.
You order your chow mei fun and routinely ask who wants the last dumpling because you’ve always done it. And in the early days of being together, you really cared that the other person got that dumpling, because you had all the feelings for them and wanted to see them happy. But after a certain point, you’re secretly thinking, “Fuck you, that’s my dumpling.”
It’s never even occurred to me until now that we’ve reached the “Fuck you, dumpling” phase of our relationship. And I can’t help but feel like this is mostly my doing. I don’t know what caused my vaginismus, but I do know I haven’t made it any sort of priority to fix the situation over the last two years.
It’s breaking my heart. Ryan deserves better than someone who hoards her dumplings.
It’s only now, standing here with my friends and our hands full of sex toys, that I realize I miss that early stuff in a relationship. Well, not just the early stuff, I suppose. The good stuff.
I want to want to give away my dumplings.
Shit. I feel lonely. And a little pathetic.
Wiping the tears off her cheeks, Shannon tries to regain some adult composure. “Oh, we’re just messing with you, Kat,” she says. “I promise. We will only set you up with people with non-phallic names, okay?”
I look down at the dildo in my hand and feel unexpectedly sad. “No, you guys are fine,” I assure her. “I don’t know if the dating thing is a good idea, but I’ve only got thirty-three days left to make this happen.”
“So let us set you up!” Butter insists.
I sigh. “I think you’re putting the cart before the horse there, Butter.”
“No way! Besides, who cares what comes first, the chicken or the dick!”
From the front of the store comes the muffled sound of a crash, and we all freeze. Like the guilty people we probably are, we scurry around the prep table, through the door, back behind the customer counter. Ben Cleary is standing by the register, biting his lip, fighting a laugh and feverishly attempting to wipe up the coffee we served him no less than fifteen minutes ago.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, without looking up, his voice cracking from the laugh he’s trying to contain. “I came back because I forgot I needed to change my order for next week. I dropped this. I’m sorry.” He finally glances up at us, and all hope for composure is lost. He bursts out laughing—full-on, leaning-on-the-counter, unable-to-breathe laughter.
It’s only then that I realize every single one of us has some manner of sex toy in our hands. Some of us multiple. Oh my damn.
Liz screams. She actually screams. She turns tail and flees back into the kitchen, scurrying so fast I can hear her crash into the prep table. Shannon, Butter and I calmly try to fling the contraband behind our heads and back into the kitchen, but someone flings a bit too hard, and there is a spectacular metallic crash as a stack of mixing bowls comes tumbling down. Liz screams again.
Ben Cleary is trying his very hardest to get a grip, but it’s just not happening. We all straighten up and try to look as professional as we can, but there’s really not a lot we can do to save this. Ben has coffee dripping from his fingers, and there’s a puddle spilling over onto our side of the counter. Shannon and Butter are just staring at him, blinking. And just when I think he’s got a handle on himself, he splutters into laughter again. I fear he may rupture something.
Motherhood may have robbed Shannon of shame, but I don’t think anything could have prepared her for this.
I clap my hands together loudly. Butter and Shannon jump. Ben puts the back of his wrist over his mouth to stifle the sound of his chuckling. There are actual tears in his eyes. “Okay. Shannon, could you go grab a couple of towels and help Mr. Cleary get this spill cleaned up? And, Butter, could you go check on Liz and see if there’s anything you can assist her with in the kitchen?”
Butter giggles, and Shannon slaps her across the arm. “Yes, of course,” Shannon says, aiming for a professional tone, and they scuttle away.
“And Mr. Cleary,” I continue.
“Please,” he says, his voice still cracking. He clears his throat. “Call me Ben.”
I smile at him. He’s being a real sport about the situation, all things considered. The wrist cuff of his shirt has coffee staining the edge. I look closer and see the spatter all over the light blue fabric of the button-up and the gray of his tie. Poor bastard. Came in for a cup of joe, walked in on a cacophony of dick jokes. Didn’t stand a chance.
“You said there was an issue with your order next week? If you’ll step down here to avoid the mess, I’ll be happy to help you with that.”
He shakes the coffee off his hand onto the counter and makes his way down to the other end where I’m now standing, holding out a towel for him. “I really am sorry about that,” he says, gesturing toward the spill. “It slipped.”
I take the towel back from him and give him a little half smile. “I bet it did.”
Shannon reappears at the other end of the counter and silently starts mopping up the mess, refusing to look at either one of us, her eyes dancing with a pent-up burst of manic hilarity.
Ben shakes his head and bites down another laugh. “I wasn’t listening, I swear,” he insists. “I came back in and was about to ring the bell. But when I heard Butter say the thing about the chicken, I laughed, I spilled, and that was it. And then you all came running out with...” He tries to swallow down the guffaw, bless him. His eyes tear up again, and it all comes out as an unfortunate snort.
“I kind of hope you broke a rib just now,” I say, grinning.
He clutches the counter. “Oh my god, I’d deserve it. I’m sorry, but that was the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“We like to keep things fresh here,” I say casually. “We are a full-service shop.” His eyes pop open, and he makes a small choking sound. Shannon giggles and dives back into the kitchen, and I close my eyes in dismay over what I just uttered. “Oh, shut up. You know what I mean.”
“Someone getting married?” he asks, wiping the tears out of his eyes.
“What?”
“The, um, stuff. Bachelorette party?”
I involuntarily squint at him. “Yes. That makes perfect sense. Absolutely. Liz is getting married in October, so yes. That is exactly what those things were for.”
“Oh, it’s Liz? That’s nice. Good for her.”
“Ace. Now, you said you needed to change next week’s order?” I say, plastering on my best customer service smile. “Well, we’re on a roll here, fella, so let’s get down to it.”
6
“I can’t believe you told him those things were for my shower,” Liz pouts, stacking a tier of chocolate fudge onto a new platform. “That is so embarrassing.”
“Technically, I said they were for your bachelorette party, and he thinks we got them for you. So he probably thinks we are the dirty birds, not you,” I say with a wink.
The store phone rings and Shannon disappears. Butter adds, “I think this will be good. You’ll go home tonight, get your gear going, and soon you’ll have a happy vagina. Then we can stop making Liz flinch every time we say vagina.”
Liz scowls. I give her a sympathetic look. “You really do flinch.”
“Did you grow up in a house where you called it something else? Like a cutesy word?” Butter asks. “Bajingo? Minge? Foo-foo? Vagoo?”
My eyes narrow at her. “Vagoo? Really? That’s...unfortunate.”
“I dated a guy last year who called them vagoos. Two dates. I couldn’t get past that.”
“Nor should you have.” I shudder. “It’s unforgivable.”
Slapping her piping bag onto the table, Liz snaps, “Okay, fine. No, we didn’t say vagina. We said special, okay?”
“Aww, you called it your special?” Butter asks.
I consider this. “That’s actually kind of genius. I’d grow up thinking my business was like, the key to the universe or something. I wouldn’t let just any man near my special, ya know? I like that. My special.”
“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me or...” Liz trails off, biting her lip.
I hold my hands up. “I’m totally not! I’m all for proper term usage, but if you’re going to give it an alternate moniker, don’t use something lame like hoo-ha, call it the fucking special. I really like that. Hell, I might start calling mine that.”
Butter is looking down at herself. “My special. Okay, you’re right. That’s got a ring to it.”
Liz looks both horrified and oddly accomplished. She picks up her piping bag and sets back in on her cake just as Shannon comes running back in excitedly.
“Guys, oh my god, guess what?”
“We all just voted and we are all calling our vaginas our specials from now on,” Butter informs her.
Shannon stops midflail and makes an indescribable expression at Butter before remembering that she has news to share. She shakes off her confusion and turns to me and Liz. “Okay, but seriously, guess what?”
“What?” we ask.
“The Coopertown Ravens, the college basketball team? They’re looking for an official bakery for their stadium concessions, and they’ve asked us to audition for them!”
“What?” I trill. “That’s amazing!”
“It’s a huge contract! They’d sell our cupcakes at every event exclusively! We’ve got a month to present the designs, and they’ll do a tasting and make their selection. Guys, this would be massive for us. The advertising alone would be worth its weight in gold, but the actual contract, plus sales? Hello, big fat bonuses and me taking my kiddos to motherfreaking Walt Disney World!”
“Oh my god, a honeymoon!” Liz squeaks.
“I could fly out to see my Noni!” Butter gasps.
I bounce in place. “I have absolutely no grand aspirations I can think of right now outside of getting laid, but yay!”
“Kat, the art is all you, lady!” Shannon says, her eyes gleaming. “We can work together on the designs, and Butter, I’m counting on you for the recipes. We can do this, guys.”
“Who else is in the running?” I ask.
Shannon frowns. “I don’t know. But I’d assume The Cakery is, because of course they’d be.” The Cakery is a pretentious shop in the city that makes all their frosting out of olive oil and sea salt, and absolutely nothing has gluten. “And probably the usual bridal cake shops? Maybe Odessa.”
Butter perks up with a conspiratorial look. “We could scout out the other shops. Go and try their products and make darn sure we’ll kick their asses. We could use fake names and wear trench coats! I call Olga for my name.”
Squinting at her, I say, “Of all the names you could choose for your secret identity, you pick Olga?”
“What’s wrong with Olga?”
Shannon shakes her head. “Let’s call that plan B.” Looking a bit deflated, Butter fidgets with her glitter brush. “I don’t want to know too much and psych ourselves out. It doesn’t matter who we’re up against or what they make. What matters is that we’re going to give Coopertown the best goddamn cupcakes they’ve ever tasted or seen, right?”
“Right!” the rest of us cheer.
“Let’s start researching the team—everything we can find out to come up with colors, flavor ideas, themes, anything. We’ve got a month, so let’s make it count.”
I salute her. “You’ve got it, Captain.” I head over to the teeny desk we have crammed in between the fridge and the wall and open up our shop laptop. A picture of a breast-shaped cake appears. “Uh... Shannon? Why is there an edible tit on the laptop?”
“Oh, yeah. We got an order for a boob-cake for a party. Liz?”
Liz slumps. “I knew today was going too well.”
“What’s the boob-cake for?” Butter asks.
“It’s a breastfeeding support group thing. Their one-year anniversary of meetings or something? Looks doable.”
Liz comes up behind me and looks over my shoulder, wincing. “Yeah, I think I can do that with fondant pretty easily.”
“Boob-cake.” Butter shrugs. “Who knew?”
I sit back in my chair and click open a new browser tab. “I fucking love this job.”
I take my phone out and, for a moment, think of texting Ryan to tell him about the hubbub in the shop. Is that something we can do on a break? I never thought to ask how we’d proceed with the nonsexual trappings of coupledom while separated.
Suddenly I realize that he hasn’t texted me since we hit the bricks. Is he as conflicted as I am? I don’t know what to do with the sad feeling that comes with having to question whether it’s proper protocol to message one of the most important people in my life.
I quietly tuck my phone back in my pocket as Shannon, standing at her station scribbling in her notebook, looks up at me. “Okay, this is just a loose estimate here,” she begins. “But I’m pretty sure that with the money from this contract, we would be able to hire on another employee.”
I whip around. “Seriously? An actual, full-time employee?”
Looking back at her scribbles, she says, “I’ve been trying to make it work for weeks. I think we’re already at the point where we could take on someone part-time right now, but someone full-time would be tight, and I hate to risk it. But with the contract, I think we could absolutely do a full-timer.”
“Whoa,” Butter says, staring off into the void. “That’s the dream, baby.”
I lean back in the chair. “What would we even do with ourselves if we could split the schedule with a new person? Life not working eighty hours a week seems like crazy talk.”
“I think I’d hire a closer,” Shannon says, gazing moonily at me. “And then I could see my kids for longer than an hour every night before they have to go to bed. I could make it to more than one football game each season. I could cook actual dinners like I used to. Or at least be there to order the takeout.”
Considering the free-time possibilities, I offer, “I wouldn’t have to have only scheduled date nights with Ryan. Plus, I could stop using the whole married-to-my-job notion and maybe not let my special go ignored for two years.”
“That there is an important goal,” Butter says seriously. “I’d date, too. That’s all I’d do with my free time. I’d ask out all the pretty boys and girls. Then maybe my parents would shut up about the horror of me being single.”