Forgotten Spark, Rediscovered Joy

I got home at six in the morning like always. Four years of night shifts at the warehouse and my body still hadn't made peace with it. I made coffee I didn't need and sat at the kitchen table until the light outside went from gray to plain.

Cain had left at five that morning for a claims adjuster convention two hours away, so the house was empty and quiet. I shuffled around doing nothing for an hour. Dishes, mostly. Then I went into the bedroom to put away a sweater that had been sitting on the chair for two weeks, and that's when the drawer stuck.

The bottom drawer of my dresser sticks if you don't pull it straight. I yanked it crooked on purpose, the way you do, and my hand hit something hard and smooth under the folded socks.

It was the vibrator. The little purple one from Maui.

I sat down on the floor right there and held it. I hadn't seen it in probably two years. It still had a faint smell of sunscreen on the cap, or maybe I imagined that. I pressed the button without thinking and it buzzed to life against my palm, and I laughed out loud in an empty house at seven in the morning.

Because I remembered the beach. Cain and I had met four years ago at a resort in Maui. He was thirty then, I was twenty-seven, both of us there alone for a week and stupid about it. One night in a tourist shop he picked this thing up off a spinner rack and said, "Twenty bucks, tax free, think about it," and I bought it and we went back to his room and, well. That was the vacation. Two weeks, actually, because we both lied about our return flights. I remember telling him things on that balcony I've never told anyone else, and I remember feeling like a completely different woman. Reckless. Sure of myself. The kind of person who buys a vibrator with a man she met four days ago.

Then we came home and were normal about it, which meant we almost lost each other. He moved to Denver a year later and we've been dating seriously for three years now. It's good. It's the best thing I have. But somewhere in the last three years I turned back into the careful woman who works nights and puts sweaters away.

So I sat on the bedroom floor holding a purple vibrator and thought, what the hell.

I checked my phone. Cain didn't get home until five in the afternoon, Tuesdays. It was barely past seven, and the convention would run all day. I had the whole house. I closed the blinds, took off my work clothes, and got into bed with the toy and a memory.

It worked faster than I expected. The batteries were old but the thing still had enough in it. I ran it over my nipples first, the way I had that first night in Maui when I was too nervous to go lower and Cain had watched me with that grin and said nothing at all. My skin woke up. I got wet quick, and I slid the toy down my stomach and over my clit, and my hips came off the mattress on their own.

I thought about the balcony. The ocean noise. The way he'd said my name like it was something he'd just learned. I pressed the toy harder and breathed out slow and felt, for a minute, twenty-seven again. Reckless. Legs open in a bright room in the middle of the day with no thought about tomorrow.

I was close. I was actually close, one hand working the toy and the other pulling at my own nipple, when I heard the front door.

Then footsteps. Then the hallway.

I froze with the thing still buzzing against me, which was the worst possible move, because it kept buzzing, and the house is small, and then the bedroom door opened.

Cain stood there in his work jacket with his laptop bag still on his shoulder. He looked at me. I looked at him. The vibrator hummed away like a fly in a jar.

"Claims adjuster convention got cancelled?" I said, because I am an idiot under pressure.

"Cancelled. Half the speakers got snowed in, so everybody went home." He did not move. "So. Hi."

"Hi."

"That's the Maui one."

"Yes!"

"From the spinner rack."

"Twenty bucks, tax free," I said, and he laughed, and I turned the toy off and pulled the sheet over myself like that would undo anything. My face was burning. "I'm sorry. I thought you'd be at work until five. I don't know why I'm sorry, it's our bedroom."

"It is our bedroom." He set the laptop bag down by the door. He was grinning now, that same grin from the shop four years ago, and I hated how much it still worked on me. "You want to tell me why you're hiding under a sheet like I caught you stealing?"

"Because it's embarrassing."

"It's really not."

"Fine." I sat up and kept the sheet across my lap, which fooled nobody. "I found it and it made me think of that trip, and I got in bed with it because I wanted to feel like the woman you met on the beach. The one who did stuff like that in the middle of the day. And instead you caught me like I was sneaking a cigarette."

"First of all, you're thirty-one, so nobody's sneaking anything. Second." He sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped toward him. "That woman is the reason I moved here. So maybe don't talk about her like she's gone."

"She's not gone. She just works nights now."

"Sure." He reached over and picked the vibrator up off the blanket, turned it over in his hand like he was inspecting a claim. "Batteries still