Show Me

The package had been sitting on my desk for three days, still in its plain brown box, when Maya finally asked about it.

"You know you're allowed to open that," she said from her bed, not looking up from her laptop.

I'd bought it on a whim at two in the morning, two weeks into senior year and one breakup out of a relationship that had never been very exciting. Twenty-one years old and I'd never owned one. Ordering it had felt bold. Opening it felt like something else entirely.

"I don't even know how it works," I admitted.

Maya closed her laptop. "Okay," she said, and something in the way she said it made my face go warm. "Bring it here."

I almost said no. I almost made a joke and shoved the box under my bed with the winter sweaters and never thought about it again. Instead I picked it up, crossed the six feet of carpet between our beds, and sat down on the edge of hers like I was turning in homework.

Maya had been my roommate since sophomore year. I knew how she took her coffee, which songs she sang badly in the shower, and that she'd had a girlfriend for most of junior year and nobody since. I knew she talked about sex the way other people talked about the weather, easily and without lowering her voice. I had always liked that about her. I had never let myself think too hard about why.

She slid a thumbnail under the tape and opened the box like it was a birthday present. Inside, nested in tissue paper, was a small curved thing in a deep plum color, smooth as a river stone.

"Oh, you did good," she said. "This is a nice one."

"I read a lot of reviews."

"Of course you did." She turned it over in her palm. "Okay. First rule. Charge it before you do anything. Nothing kills the mood like a dead battery."

"Noted."

"Second rule. Start on the lowest setting. Everybody wants to go straight to the top, and that's how you end up numb in thirty seconds and annoyed with yourself."

She pressed the button. It hummed softly in her hand, a low purr I could feel through the mattress. She held it out and I took it, and the vibration ran up through my fingers into my wrist.

"That's it?" I said. "That's the lowest?"

"Put it against the inside of your wrist."

I did. It was different there. Softer, deeper, something you felt more than heard. My skin prickled all the way up to my elbow.

"Most people think it's about pressure," Maya said. She was watching my face, not my wrist. "It's not. It's about patience. You don't go straight for the obvious spot. You wake everything else up first."

"Everything else," I repeated.

"Thighs. Hips. Your stomach. Anywhere you'd want someone's hands." She shrugged, like this was ordinary information, like she wasn't sitting close enough that I could smell her shampoo. "Your body has to want it before it'll really feel it."

I clicked it off. The quiet afterward was louder than the hum had been.

"Can I ask you something embarrassing?" I said.

"You're holding a vibrator on my bed. I think we're past embarrassing."

I laughed, and some of the tightness in my chest let go. "With Ben, it was always kind of fine. Nice. But I never felt the way people describe it. Like I was supposed to end up somewhere in my head and I never got there."

Maya didn't laugh. She didn't do the thing where people go soft and sympathetic and weird, either. She just nodded slowly.

"That's not you being broken," she said. "That's nobody ever taking their time with you."

Something in me went very still.

"You could show me," I heard myself say. "If you wanted. I mean, not... I don't know what I mean."

For a long moment she didn't answer. The radiator ticked. Somebody's music thumped faintly through the wall.

"I think you do know what you mean," she said quietly. "So I'm going to ask you properly. Do you want me to show you?"

"Yes."

"And if you want to stop, at any point, you say so and we stop. No weirdness tomorrow. We're still us."

"Okay." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "Yes."

She reached over and switched off the overhead light, leaving only the string of warm bulbs we'd hung over the window in September. Then she took the little plum thing out of my hand, set it on the blanket between us, and kissed me.

It was nothing like kissing Ben. It was slower, for one. She kissed me like she had all night and intended to use every minute of it, one hand resting light on my jaw, her thumb tracing the edge of my ear until I shivered. When I finally kissed her back, really kissed her back, she made a small surprised sound against my mouth that I felt all the way down.

"Lie back," she whispered.

I did. She switched the toy on, lowest setting, and I heard the hum before I felt it. She started at my knee. That was the first surprise. She drew it slowly up the outside of my thigh, over the hem of my sleep shorts, across the strip of bare skin where my t-shirt had ridden up. My stomach jumped under it. She laughed softly and did it again.

"See?" she murmured. "Waking everything up."

She took her time. She took so much time that I stopped wondering whether I was doing this right, stopped thinking about Ben, stopped thinking about anything except where the warmth would land next. My hip. The dip below my ribs. The soft skin just under my belly button, where she let it linger until my breathing went uneven. She leaned down and kissed my neck while she did it, open-mouthed and slow, and I felt the hum and her mouth at the same time and made a sound I had never heard myself make.

"Arms up," she murmured.

I lifted them. She pulled my t-shirt over my head and dropped it on the floor. The air in the room was cool. Her hands weren't. She drew the toy in a slow circle around one breast, never quite where I wanted it, then the other, watching my face the whole time like she was reading a map. When she finally let it brush across the center, I arched right up off the mattress, and she laughed low in her throat and kissed me hard to keep me quiet.

"Thin walls," she reminded me against my lips.

"I don't care."

"You will tomorrow."

She worked her way down. The inside of my knee. The inside of my thigh, slow and close and then gone again, back and forth, a little closer every time, until my hips were lifting off the bed to chase it and I was the one reaching for her wrist.

"Tell me," she said.

"Please."

"Please what?"

I told her. My face burned, but I told her exactly, and she kissed me while I said it. Then she eased my shorts down over my hips, settled in beside me with her mouth at my ear, and did exactly what I'd asked.

I don't know how long it lasted. Long enough that the hum turned into a kind of heartbeat. Long enough that I forgot to be shy, forgot the thin walls, forgot everything but the slow pressure of it and her voice in my ear telling me to breathe, telling me I was beautiful, telling me not to rush. She turned it up one setting at a time, so gradually I barely noticed, until all at once I noticed everything. My heels dug into her mattress. My hand found the back of her neck and held on. When it finally broke over me, it came in long rolling waves, and I grabbed a fistful of her blanket and said her name in a voice I didn't recognize as mine. She didn't stop right away. She eased me through every last bit of it, her forehead pressed to my temple, murmuring something low and soft that I couldn't make out and didn't need to.

Afterward we lay tangled up on her narrow bed, the toy forgotten somewhere near our feet, the window bulbs glowing gold against the dark.

"So," Maya said eventually. "Good review?"

I laughed so hard I nearly rolled off the mattress. She caught me by the waist and pulled me back against her.

"Five stars," I said into her shoulder. "Would recommend."

"Mm." She pressed a kiss into my hair. "Lesson two is Thursday."

"What's lesson two?"

I felt her smile against the top of my head.

"You show me."