Hands-On Education

The sun was going down over the Ibarra place and I was out at the far fence line with a spool of wire and a pair of pliers, sweating through my work shirt and cussing at a post that had decided to lean after standing up straight for years like it had something better to do now. I'm thirty-two years old, I've been working cattle since I was twenty-two, and I will tell you straight that fence mending in August in central Texas is the kind of job that makes a woman reconsider her whole life plan. The cattle were lowing in the far pasture and the wind turbines on the ridge were doing their slow creaking thing, and I had just gotten the wire twisted off when I heard tires on the caliche road.

Tomas came rolling up in his old Ford, dust boiling behind it, and he leaned an arm out the window with a six-pack hanging from his fingers and that look on his face he gets when he's about to say something smart. He's thirty-four, grew up on the ranch next to this one, and we've been friends since we were nineteen and both suffering through an ag science course at community college, him on the pre-vet track and me just trying to pass. He parked, got out, and looked me over head to boot.

"Well hell, Loren, you look like a thundercloud with a pair of pliers," he said, and handed me a beer without asking, because that's how it works between us.

I took the beer and popped it and sat down on the tailgate of his truck, because my porch was two hundred yards away and my legs were done for the day. "That post has been leaning since spring and I finally had time to deal with it, and then the wire snapped on me twice, so yeah, I'm real pleasant company right now."

He got himself a beer and sat down beside me, close enough that his knee bumped mine, which was normal, and we drank for a while watching the light go orange over the pastures. It was the kind of quiet where a person talks when they wouldn't otherwise, and I guess that's why I started in about the date I'd had Friday night.

"So Benny from the feed store," I said, "turns out he thinks a woman coming hard is something that happens if a man just keeps at it long enough like he's jackhammering concrete."

Tomas made a face into his beer. "That's never once worked in the history of the world."

"Yeah well, I know that, and he doesn't, and the whole thing was twenty minutes of my life I'm not getting back." I took a long pull and then, because I was tired and hot and my filter was already destroyed from the day I'd had, I said the thing I've never said out loud to anybody. "And before you get any bright ideas, it's not just him. It's everybody. I've never finished with a single partner I've been with, Tomas. Thirty-two years old and I've faked it every damn time, and I'm getting real tired of it."

I expected him to laugh or to get weird about it, and he did neither, he just nodded like I'd told him one of my heifers was off feed, which I guess is the vet in him.

"Okay," he said. "That's actually really common, you know. It's not broken, it's just that nobody ever taught you the mechanics of your own body, and most men sure as hell aren't going to do it."

"Don't get clinical on me."

"I'm a veterinarian, Loren, clinical is what I've got." He turned on the tailgate so he was facing me, all business. "Here's the thing though. I've thought for a while that you approach pleasure like it's a job, same way you approach everything, all braced up and fighting it. Maybe you've been doing it wrong this whole time, and maybe somebody could just show you. I've got a bag in the truck from my trip to the city, actually."

I stared at him. "You brought sex toys to my ranch."

"I brought educational materials," he said, and I had to give him credit because he didn't even crack a smile.

My pride was up on its hind legs immediately, telling me to tell him to go to hell and drink my beer in peace, but I'll be honest with whoever reads this, I was curious too, and curiosity has always been the thing that gets me in trouble. So I did what I always do when I'm cornered, which is set terms like I'm negotiating a hay price.

"Fine," I told him, pointing the beer bottle at his chest. "But here's how it's gonna go. You don't touch me. Not once, not anywhere. You talk, you show, I do. You keep your hands in your pockets the whole time like a schoolteacher, and if I say stop, we're done and we never mention it again."

"That's a deal," he said, no hesitation, and finished his beer and stood up. "Your cabin or out here?"

"Cabin, because if anybody drives past this ranch and sees me getting an anatomy lecture on a tailgate I will have to move to another state."

So we walked up to my little ranch-hand cabin in the last of the light, the cattle going quiet out in the pasture, and I unlocked the door and let him in and felt strange about it, because Tomas had been in my kitchen a hundred times over the years but never in my bedroom. He went in ahead of me, set his bag on the foot of my bed like he had permission, which he sort of did, and unzipped it.

He laid three things out on my quilt one at a time, still in their packaging until he cut it open with his pocketknife, in a neat row on the quilt my mother made me, which was an odd sight and I'm not going to forget it. The first was a slim toy, maybe six inches, smooth all over with a slight curve at the end.

"This one's for the outside first," he said, tapping it. "Curve like that is for the front wall, about two inches in, but honestly for most women the outside matters more, and this is gentle enough that you can build up without going straight to