Trying to hide my blush, I reached for the stylus and calledthe projector up. An image popped onto the giant screen running along the western wall of the room. It quickly displayed my title page. In big, bold letters, it read:
Welcome to the Rest of Your Fucking Life, Hudson Bailey.
“Essentially, sex toys fall into roughly six categories. Vibrators, dildos, partnered toys, penis toys, anal toys, and BDSM materials.” With each introduction, I clicked to a new slide and pointed to the corresponding toys on the table. “I’m sure with your time here so far, you’ve gotten a rough idea of those groupings, but seeing as you claim ignorance on all of these in practice, how familiar are you with them in the abstract? What’s your baseline?”
He scanned the toys, then glanced up at me from beneath hooded eyelids.
Oh God. He was going to turn this horny, wasn’t he? Gone was the sterile teaching environment I’d tried to harbor. We were in full-on foreplay now.
“Vibrators vibrate on your clit.”
Your.Notthe user’sorthe person’sclit.Your.
An image flashed through my mind. Hudson’s cock buried deep inside me while he held a vibrator against my clit, forcing me to orgasm.
I cleared my throat. “And can be used internally for the G-spot, yes.”
Rising from his seat, he took a firm grip on a moderately sized dildo. How had he known that was my favorite model? As he lifted it, another thought occurred: him working it inside me while mouthing my pussy.
Fuck, I was already getting wet.
Correction: I’d already slicked through three sets of underwear today, just anticipating this night with him. Now I was well on my way to walking home without them, as I’d run through my emergency pairs.
“And this fills you up.”
“We’re not talking about me here,” I whispered, trying to maintain my composure.
Tilting his head in afair enoughgesture, he continued his slow stride around the table toward me and gestured to the toys he’d been eyeing earlier.
“These I’m not familiar with.”
“They’re for penises,” I said, my hand shaking as I clicked through my PowerPoint. As a last-ditch effort to keep from melting on the spot, I turned my back on him and kept my eyes on the screen. “This is a masturbator. This one’s a blowjob simulator. This one’s a cock ring. Fleshlights, pumps, and vibrators. And these?”
We reached a new set of slides.Click, click, click…
“Anal toys, I’m guessing.”Click.That slide popped up on screen and Hudson watched intensely, eyebrows lifted behind his glasses. “And is that—”
“A strap-on, yes,” I replied. Was it getting hot in here, or was my brain’s imagined scenes of Hudson bent over a table, taking a long length of a strap-on deep inside him just making me blush? “They can be used anally or vaginally, depending on your partner’s parts.”
One of the best things about Hudson was he never let dead air hang in a conversation. When other people let my words linger in silence, I always got that twitchy sense that I’d screwed up somehow. Ruined the social interaction. Hudson never did that to me, never made me feel weird or out of place for anything that came out of my unsocialized mouth.
Now, though, as he shifted his eyes from the projector showing a variety of strap-ons down to The Lover, our top-of-the-line harness-and-dildo combination, he didn’t say anything.
In my line of work, particularly when it came to focus group research and fuck reports, I’d noticed that more men than I ever could have imagined were into the idea of penetration or ass play. However, the stigma kept most of them from sharing that fact with even their most intimate of partners.
One of the most important parts of my job at BuzzCorp was breaking downallstigmas around sexual health. Not just for women or people with vaginas, as Mr. Ose had suggested in our sales meeting, but foreveryone.
“Is this…” I asked, hoping I sounded as supportive as I felt, “…an area that interests you? The other day I mentioned it, and you saidDon’t threaten me with a good time, if I recall correctly.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I’ve never really thought about it before. Not seriously. That was just a joke.”
“Think about it,” I said with a small, encouraging nod. “I’ve heard they’re really enjoyable. Our testers think so, anyway.”
He nodded once, then moved farther down the table to the next set of equipment. I clicked through my PowerPoint to match. BuzzCorp didn’t do much by way of BDSM materials, but we had a few nipple clamps for him to peruse.
It seemed, for a moment, that the sexual tension had left us. That we could return to emotional and verbal distance.
That moment passed, though, when Hudson reached the final set of toys. The ones closest to me. Not wanting to back away and admit the effect he was having on me, I held my ground, which only resulted in his hovering proximity, his body not touching mine but keeping me lodged between the table and his warm presence.
