Page 3 of Beds and Blades

I imagined him stepping closer, his height swallowing mine whole. At five foot four, I’d fit against him too easily, my body aligning with his six-foot-four frame in a way that felt inevitable.

The more I thought about his body, the more my mind turned to my list. I was a person who made lists.

I started a list the night my last relationship ended. I opened the Notes app and gave myself permission to be forensically honest about what I had wanted and had not been getting.

I titled it Conference Materials 2023. Academic training had taught me many things, but perhaps the most useful was how to disguise deeply embarrassing material beneath a layer of administrative boredom.

The folder contained two things.

First: a list of what I wanted from a man. Not intellectually. Physically. The kind of list a woman makes after years of being quietly, consistently, almost insultingly undersupplied. It specified the grade of stubble I preferred, the shape of a mouth, and—because I had stopped apologizing for it—entries that used words like girth and length.

Second: a library. Months of carefully bookmarked links, organized into subcategories I had developed organically as my research expanded. I used the word research with total sincerity.

The subcategories had names. Broad shoulders. Picked her up. Pinned her down. Says her name. Eye contact. Finished inside.

There was a subcategory simply titled Yes that had become the largest folder and the most accurately labeled.

I preferred videos featuring a certain type of woman—women who were small the way I was small, with curves in the places I had curves. Women who looked, in other words, like they could have been me.

I was, to be precise about it, one hundred and eighteen pounds. My waist was small. Above it, firm. Below it, the architecture of a woman who was petite everywhere except where she was emphatically not.

The men, meanwhile, tended toward a different extreme. Large. Muscled. Broad shoulders. Large hands. The sort of physical scale that generally extended to other measurements.

My enthusiasm for this particular category of man eventually forced me to revisit a belief I had once held with confidence.

The belief in question: size does not matter.

Unfortunately, I am not a woman who can leave a hypothesis untested. I am a woman of empiricism.

So, I tested the assumption.

I purchased a dildo that came with audacious dimensions and approached the experiment with an open mind.

The first time I used it, I made a sound I had not previously heard myself make. The initial discomfort gave way to something else—deep, full, inexorable. A heavy, throbbing pleasure that built until my fingers found my clit and the whole overwhelming experience of it collapsed into the correct answer to a question I had been asking for years.

Full. Completely, overwhelmingly full. In a way my fiancé had never once managed.

I revised my conclusion: size mattered enormously. It was not, however, the only variable under consideration.

I wanted a man for whom my body was not a logistical challenge. I wanted effortless strength. The kind that made lifting me, moving me, or holding me in place feel less like exertion and more like a matter of course. I wanted hands that already knew what they were doing before they arrived.

Which brought me, somewhat inevitably, back to James Calloway.

The more I contemplated the matter, the more James Calloway appeared to satisfy the specifications with alarming precision.

I imagined his hands at my waist. At my hips. Spread wide across my lower back.

This was not the time for this!

Focus, Meghan Callahan.

Scipio Africanus, military history.

Click.

***

“The Zama campaign,” I said, pulling my attention back to the slide, “is the culminating proof of the argument. By 202 BC, Scipio had done something no Roman commander had previously attempted. He had taken the war to Africa. He had forced Hannibal, who had been operating in Italy for sixteen years, who had won at Trebia and Trasimene and Cannae, who had destroyed Roman armies with a consistency that should have been statistically impossible, to abandon Italy and return home to defend Carthage.”