Surprise Delivery

I got the promotion on a Tuesday, and by the time I pulled into our lot the sun was already going down behind the storage units across the street. Twenty-three years old and now a supervisor at the Halverson warehouse. I'd been a line picker for a year and a half and I still smelled like cardboard no matter how much I washed my hands.

I came through the door of our apartment half-shouting before I even saw him. "Guess what, guess what."

Louis was on the couch with his laptop, twenty-four, hair sticking up the way it always does by the end of the day. He closed the lid and grinned at me. "You got the job?"

"I got the job. Eighteen percent more. Plus I get my own lanyard. A different color and everything."

"Babe." He got up off the couch. "That's huge. Come here."

He hugged me and I felt him sort of vibrating, which I figured was just him being happy for me. Then I dropped my bag on the floor by the door and saw it. The big cardboard box marked MOVE - LIVING ROOM was open, except it wasn't full of books and lamps anymore. It had stuff laid out in it like a museum display. Fancy stuff. Shiny stuff.

"Oh no," I said.

"Oh yes," Louis said.

"Louis, what did you do."

"I found your delivery." He was walking toward the box with the manner of a game show host. "It came yesterday. I signed for it because I thought it was the bookshelf hardware. Then I opened it, because it was addressed to both of us, technically, and I have never seen so much silicone in one place in my life."

I could feel my face going red. "I was gonna explain that."

"Were you?"

"I ordered it a couple weeks ago. For my birthday. I just never told you because it felt embarrassing to type into a website, let alone say out loud."

He picked something up out of the box. It was purple and kind of enormous. "So this one," he said, holding it up, "was your birthday present to yourself."

"Okay, put that down."

"What does it do?"

"Louis."

"I'm asking a genuine question, Mabel. What does it do? It has buttons."

"It has ten settings," I said, and then immediately regretted knowing that.

"Ten." He looked at it with respect. "Ten settings. And you were going to hide this in a moving box and let me find it in six months when we unpacked the living room."

"That was the plan, yeah."

"That's the worst plan I've ever heard. Happy early birthday, by the way. Because we're gonna do this now, right? You got promoted. I got a box of treasures. This feels like a both-hands situation."

I laughed and sat down on the arm of the couch. Everything in me was still buzzing from the job, the good kind of buzzing, and looking at that box was doing something to the buzz. "Okay," I said. "But you gotta know I bought all this with zero plan. I just went down a list on some website at one in the morning and clicked everything that looked interesting."

"So it's a mystery box."

"It's a mystery box."

He got down on his knees on the rug in front of the box like a man with a very adult set of Legos, and started laying things out in a row. Lube, a little wand thing, some beads, a thing with a remote, and this curved glass piece that caught the light from the blinds.

"Okay, supervisor," he said, looking up at me. "Pick your favorite. First one we try. You're in charge, it's your promotion."

"You're not in charge of your own stuff?"

"Not tonight. Tonight you're management."

I pointed at the glass one. "That one. I don't even know why. It just looked the nicest."

"Good taste. It's the most expensive one, I checked." He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. "This is gonna need some warm water, it's glass, it gets cold otherwise." He looked at me and got serious for a second, in the way he does. "You're sure? We can eat dinner first. We can do this tomorrow. I don't want you thinking you owe me a celebration just because you told me about the box."

"I'm sure," I said. "I got promoted today. I wanna feel good tonight. That's the whole thought in my head right now."

"Then stand up and let me see you."

I stood. I kicked my work boots off by the door, the left one landing by the door like always, and then I peeled off my warehouse polo, which smelled like cardboard and tape no matter what I did, and dropped my jeans. I stood there in my bra and the gray underwear I'd had since before we moved in together, feeling kind of ridiculous with all the moving boxes around, and also not ridiculous at all.

"Come here," he said, and I crossed over to him. "Can I take the rest off?"

"Yeah. Go ahead."

He reached up and undid my bra, slow, like he had all the time in the world, and let it fall. Then he hooked his thumbs in my underwear and pulled them down and I stepped out of them. He stayed kneeling there for a second, looking up at me.

"You got a promotion," he said. "This is so hot. My wife's a supervisor."

"Stop!" I was laughing but my face was hot.