Chapter One
Brooke
Deferred Revenue: liability arising upon the prepayment for goods and services yet to be delivered.
September
I didn't thinkI'd see the day it happened. I didn't think I'd cross this line.
But here I was, standing on my deck in the middle of a weekday, wearing the short kimono robe I'd lifted from a roommate years ago and wondering how my life was reduced to this. My hair was wet, my feet were bare. My thirty-fourth birthday lurked on the other side of today's sunset and I couldn't remember the last time I sat down to eat a meal.
And I'd jackhammered my orgasm right out of existence.
I never would've believed such a thing was possible if I hadn't spent the morning plowing through my toy box only to discover those toys weren't getting me where I needed to go.Again.The floor of my bedroom was littered with vibrators, some of them still buzzing away.
I'd hoped a shower would check some boxes on both the hygiene and gratification fronts. I was as clean as any person could be after aiming a steady blast of water at her clit until her hand cramped and her fingers went numb.
Clean and wet and crawling out of my skin.
By my math, it added up.
My best friend was living with her own personal Ken doll, bound to get engaged any day now, and she repeatedly rejected my suggestions of forming a sister-wife arrangement.
My job was a remote game of Battleship that involved shifting mind-blowing sums of money around the globe with the dual purposes of making more money and upstaging every banker boy who'd called me Blondie rather than Brooke.
My father was suffering from frontotemporal dementia and couldn't remember how to use a fork.
My mother was six years gone (icy driveway, lights out) and I couldn't remember the last time I'd spoken to her before she died.
I hadn't had sex—the kind that rearranged organs, made ears ring, and required a recovery protocol—since coming home two years ago to this tiny seaside village that looked like a postcard from coastal Maine and felt like a prison sentence against progress.
And I was trying to get off in my childhood bedroom, the one still decorated in cloyingly virginal shades of rose pink and mint green.
Even the best vibrators were no match for all that.
It wasn't an issue of taking matters into my own hands. My hands were managing this matter—until I'd desensitized the shit out of my clit. Nothing worked for me anymore.
That wasn't a fair statement. I couldn't say nothing worked when I hadn't triedeverything. As far as buzzy buddies went, I had one in every shape, size, and horsepower. I was game for fingers, showerheads, and a rainbow of porn—but only the , respectful, tasteful, feminist stuff.
If I could do it alone in my bedroom of childhood innocence, I'd done it.
With the small exception of good old-fashioned sex with another person.
I wasn't one for abstinence. Aside from my present drought, I hadn't gone more than a few weeks without since I was seventeen or eighteen. If I'd wanted to have sex, there was always a dick available for the catching. And that dick accounted for nearly half of my life.
It was no wonder the mechanical options failed me.
But catching some dick in Talbott's Cove, Maine was fundamentally different than doing it in my true hometown of New York City, an island designed for casual sex. Think about it: young people flocked there with the hopes of making it big, only to discover the real world was boring, cruel, and unfulfilling. Alcohol and drugs—legal and otherwise—were as common as coffee and bagels. Cabs and car services ran nonstop, making late-night visits easy and early morning escapes discreet. You had to put a concerted effort intonothaving sex under those conditions.
The most dangerous consequence of casual sex in the city was running into that person at a bar—worse, a bodega without the cushion of loud music and liquor—and making the snap decision whether to ignore or acknowledge. That was it. An awkward moment. New York City was beautifully efficient in its ability to absorb good and bad and everything in between, and spit out overripened cynicism.
Talbott's Cove offered no such mechanism.
There was no illusion of privacy here. Everything happened out in the open, even that which occurred behind closed doors. Lies festered and secrets didn't keep. Not when your neighbors lived in your back pocket and personal business was subject to public purview.
It wouldn't surprise me to find the demise of my orgasm in this week's edition of the Talbott's Cove newspaper and that was the exact reason I hadn't hoisted my dick-catching net and headed off to the area's man forest.
I didn't need to run into my second grade teacher and the high school softball coach while they discussed my sex life over honey-dipped crullers and coffee tomorrow morning at DiLorenzo's Diner. I didn't need my mother's friends sharing shock and horror at my wanton ways at their next bridge game. There was more than enough on my plate right now, and putting out small town slut-shamey fires wasn't the side dish I was willing to order, even if I didn't know how to experience shame much in the way some people didn't notice their bad breath.
