Catalogue Night

My name is Stephanie, I'm forty-two, and I've been married to Shane for seventeen years. We met in a graduate seminar when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four, and we've worked at the same insurance firm for most of that time too. He does claims, I do underwriting, and we ride the same elevator every morning like it's a bus stop.

That Thursday night we were the last two people in the building. Quarterly reports were done by eight, and the cleaning crew had already been through, so the whole floor just hummed with the vents. I sat at my desk looking at a spreadsheet I didn't need to look at anymore, and Shane sat ten feet away doing the same thing with his.

"We could just leave," he said.

"I know. I don't want to yet, though. Weird, right?"

"No, I get it. It's quiet!"

That was the problem. It was quiet, and I'd had a secret burning a hole in my briefcase since about February. I'd been carrying this thing around for months with the nervous secrecy of a crush, and I finally decided, what the hell. So I dug it out and slid it across my desk toward him.

It was a catalogue. A glossy one, the kind that comes in a plain brown mailer so nobody at the office knows what it is. Shane picked it up and turned it over twice before he understood what he was holding.

"Steph. Is this..."

"Yeah. That."

"When did you order this?" He was already opening it, which told me a lot.

"Months ago. I've been carrying it around waiting for the right nerve to show up." I took a breath. "There's one thing in there I keep looking at. Page thirty-eight."

He flipped through, and I watched his face. He'd get interested in a page, then remember he was supposed to be skeptical, then get interested again. It was honestly better than television.

"You bought this and didn't tell me?" he said.

"I wasn't hiding it exactly. I just wanted to decide first if I was actually going to ask you, or if I was going to chicken out and shred it." I leaned back in my chair. "Page thirty-eight, Shane."

He got there. It's a small thing, a bullet vibe with a remote, nothing dramatic. Silicone, matte finish, the picture doesn't do it justice. He turned the page, then turned back to it.

"Silicone feels different than the plasticky stuff," I said. "Warmer. It doesn't have that smell either."

"You'd know this how?"

"I did research. Lots of research." I felt my face go warm, which at forty-two is embarrassing but there it is. "It's shaped so it just... sits where it should. And the remote works from across a room. That's the part I keep coming back to, honestly. The remote."

He closed the catalogue and set it down, and I braced for the polite no. Seventeen years, you learn where the polite no lives.

"Okay," he said instead.

"Okay what?"

"Okay. Where is it?" He looked genuinely confused when I laughed.

"I haven't brought it home yet. That's the catalogue, Shane, but I ordered it three weeks ago."

He stared at me. "You carried that catalogue around for months and then ordered it behind my back?"

"It took me that long to hit the button. Ordering it felt like it would make it real. Which is stupid, I know."

"It's a little stupid." He grinned, though, and I remembered why I married him. "So go get it. Or..." he glanced down the dark row of desks toward the conference room, "or we figure something out tonight."

Well. That changed the temperature of the room fast. I don't know who stood up first. It might have been both of us at once, the way you both reach for the check at dinner.

We took my briefcase and his keys, and I ducked into the locker room to grab the box I'd hidden there, then walked down the hall to the conference room. Nobody's meeting, I can tell you. Shane turned the little thumb lock on the door, and I heard it click, and something in my stomach did a flip I hadn't felt since we were twenty-five.

There's one desk lamp in there. That's all the light the room ever gets, because the overheads are on a motion sensor and it kept trying to decide we weren't there. The windowless walls and the lamp made it feel like a room that exists nowhere, which was exactly right for what I had in mind.

"Take your shirt off," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "That's new."

"Everything tonight is new. Off. And then I want you to hold my arms. Not hard. Just hold them, so I can't cover myself. I want to feel... exposed. I've been thinking