Holy heck, one look at Kallum naked and all of a sudden,Iwas the Viking. I wanted to grab him and feel him and make him help me with this new ache deep in my belly, and oh my God, I needed to get back to my room right now.Thiswas the feeling I’d been needing to get started; this was what I’d been looking for!
Kallum emerged from his bathroom with his towel around his waist, but I was already going back through the door. “I’m so sorry for walking in on you!” I apologized over my shoulder. “I really am!”
“No worries, Winnie Baker,” he said comfortably. “Come back anytime.”
I barely made it back to my old room before I was tearing off my shoes and ponte pants and then crawling onto my bed with my laptop. No time for the wine or the candle right now; I needed to strike while the iron was hot.
I had Kallum’s video pulled up faster than I’d ever done anything on a computer before and once I pressed Play, I turned the volume up just enough to hear his voice come over the speakers.
“Are you sure?” Sex Tape Kallum asked the woman filming him from the bed.
They were the first three words of the sex tape, and even though they comprised a question, they didn’t sound hesitant or uncertain. Not when his jaw was that tight. Not when his fingers were that deft as he unknotted his bow tie. Instead, the question soundedhot. Like it mattered to him that his partner was all in, because he was about to give them the full Kallum treatment.
Sex Tape Kallum left his tuxedo shirt on, but rolled up the sleeves and unbuttoned the top two buttons, and then bent down to make out with the woman on the bed. She was in a bridesmaid’s dress, and as they kissed, she turned the phone so the viewers could see Kallum’s hands disappearing under the skirt of her dress. So they could see the cords of his forearms flexing as he did something under her skirt to make her whimper.
Breathing hard, I paused the video and reached a hand under the blankets of my bed, thinking of those flexing forearms. I pushed my fingers inside my panties and immediately encountered... wetness. Like, so much wetness. Too much? I couldn’t remember ever being slick like this. Not that I touched myself very often in the past; only when I’d needed to check my cervical mucus to see if I was ovulating or not.
But it didn’t feel bad. It felt good, actually, like my body was telling my brain that it agreed Kallum had great forearms too, and a great butt, and that he’d feel so good on top of me, holding me down, and that the hair on his thighs would feel so good on my skin as his body moved against mine.
With a deep breath, I pushed a finger inside myself.
And then stopped, impaled on my own hand, not sure what to do next.
Should I move it in and out, to mimic intercourse? Should I add more fingers? Surely, this couldn’t be that hard. People must like masturbating because it feels like intercourse, and intercourse was a mechanical process I was very familiar with. In and out, in and out, harder and faster was better, et cetera et cetera.
I tried a few different things—I even tried flipping over onto my stomach and grinding against the bed like I sometimes woke up doing—but slowly, the heat in my stomach evaporated and the urgency todo somethingabout the churning throb between my legs faded away.
I sat up, shook my hair out of my eyes, and thought for a minute. How could something that teenagers figured out with zero help be beyond a lady in her thirties? Growing up, pastors had made self-pleasure sound like something anyone was at risk of doing at any moment, but I’d just tried valiantly for fifteen minutes to follow in Onan’s footsteps and couldn’t make a single thing happen.
I flopped back against the pillow, defeat crawling up my spine, with its cousin embarrassment slithering just behind it. Maybe I was broken. Maybe there was a reason my body couldn’t do this. Even as a married woman, I’d never crossed the finish line with Michael, and he was objectively hot and with enviable stamina. Even when I’d been eager to get into bed with him, convinced thatthiswas the time I’d have great sex and finally reach those promised shores of godly married pleasure, I could never seem to translate that eagerness into, well, satisfaction.
Addison would still be on the QVC set on the West Coast, so I couldn’t call her to beg for her help, and even if I could, I had no idea what I’d say.
Help, I don’t know how to have sex with myself?
Help, I saw my coworker’s forearms in a video, but now I can’t get off thinking about them even though I really, really want to?
She’d just tell me to vodka about it anyway. Vodka and—
Inspired, I pulled the laptop back over, and with my left hand, tapped out a question in the search bar.Google is your fri-e-endwas Addison’s singsong rebuke whenever someone asked a stupid question. Well, tonight, Google was going to be more than a friend. It was going to be my accomplice.
I typed in:How to masturbate with a vagina?
The results were more serious and clinical than I would have thought. Articles from well-known magazines interviewing sex therapists, videos from people talking about how to masturbate after illness or surgery, sites that sold sex toys and sex aides.
But I was a simple girl, so after skimming the first page of results, I went back to the first link and clicked it.
It was a wikiHow article, and it had illustrations, and wow, wow,wow, there were so many ways a person could get the job done. A rolled-up towel between the legs.
Nipple pinching. Even... cucumbers?
But one illustration caught my eye, and after studying it for a moment, I looked past the laptop to the heart-shaped Jacuzzi tub at the far end of the room.
Yeah, I wasn’t about to look a Jacuzzi horse in the mouth. Because everything else sounded more like PhD level diddling, but I needed a remedial class. And the idea of sitting in front of something mechanical and letting it do all the work sounded like just the ticket.
I schlepped my laptop and candle over to the table by the tub, lit the candle, and started filling the thing with water. While I waited, I undressed and watched another few minutes of Kallum’s video, feeling my body kick back intodo mezoneafter watching him kiss his way up the bridesmaid’s thigh to where her lace thong met the crease of her thigh.
“Your beard tickles,” she whispered as Kallum kissed around the edges of the lace.
