The Glass Shelf

I should say upfront how this got started, I guess, except I hate that word upfront, so I'll just say it plain. Keiko and I have known each other for ten years. We met at a library science conference back when she was 24 and I was 25, and we both got drunk on bad conference wine and argued about metadata for two hours, and after that we were just friends, the kind that stick. We dated for about four months in there, somewhere around year two, and it ended the way a lot of those things end: we both realized we were better at liking each other than at dating each other, and we shook hands on it more or less, and kept going.

She works at the Wilton Rare Book Archive now. Has for six years. It's in the basement of the main city library, past three locked doors and a hallway that always smells like dust and old glue, and it's full of leather-bound volumes that cost more than my car. I'm a data analyst, which is a fancy way of saying I make spreadsheets behave, and I don't have much business in a rare book archive, but Keiko invites me over maybe twice a year to look at whatever weird thing she's cataloguing, and I always say yes.

So when she texted me on a Tuesday, "come by after closing Thursday, I have something to show you, don't ask questions," I didn't ask questions. I figured it was a manuscript. Some 1700s diary with a dirty limerick in the margin, that kind of thing. She gets excited about weird stuff and I get to stand there and watch her light up, which honestly is most of why I go.

Thursday I showed up at 6:40 and the front doors were already locked, so I knocked and a minute later she opened them herself, 34 years old, hair pinned up with what I think was a letter opener, wearing her work cardigan with the sleeves pushed up. "You came," she said, like there had been doubt.

"Where else would I be on a Thursday," I said, and she laughed and locked the door behind me.

The walk back to the archive takes a couple minutes and she talked the whole way, fast, the way she does when she's been sitting on something for weeks. She kept almost telling me and then stopping herself and saying no, no, you have to see it, which drove me a little crazy, and I think that was the point.

The archive itself is one big room with a reading table and then a smaller room off the back, and that smaller room has always been locked. In ten years I'd never been in it. She had keys on a lanyard around her neck and she got them out while I stood there like an idiot, and she unlocked the room, and then she unlocked the cabinet.

I want to describe the cabinet right because it matters. It's a glass-fronted case, the kind you'd see in a museum, waist high, with a lock, and inside it there's a shelf lined with dark red velvet, and on that velvet there are rows of things I did not expect to see in a rare book archive. Glass toys. Silicone ones. A couple of pieces of old polished wood and metal that I could tell were very old and very much the same category of object. All of it clean, all of it arranged like somebody had spent hours deciding the order, which I later found out she had.

She swung the little door open with a flourish, both hands, like a game show host, and then looked at me and waited.

"Well?" she said.

I laughed. I didn't mean to, it just came out, a nervous sort of bark, and then I leaned in and looked closer and laughed again because there was so much of it. Rows and rows. Curved things and straight things and one enormous glass piece at the end that I honestly couldn't believe existed as a real object a person could own.

"Keiko, what the hell," I said. "This is, how long has this been back here?"

"Four years," she said. "The collection started four years ago. The cabinet came later, I had to special order the velvet." She was grinning at me and I could tell she'd been imagining this exact reaction for weeks and was enjoying every second of it.

"You've been keeping this locked up behind the manuscripts?"

"Some of it's antique. Reproductions of antique, mostly, the real ones stay in conservation. But most of it's just, mine. Things I've collected. Things I've, researched." She said that last word with air quotes she didn't actually do with her hands but I heard them anyway.

I should mention that somewhere in here my brain was doing two things at once, the first thing being this is the funniest and best thing that has ever happened in this dusty basement, and the second being a much quieter, warmer thing I didn't have a name for yet. Keiko was standing close to me in front of an open case full of sex toys and she was happier than I'd seen her in years, and some part of me noted that and filed it somewhere it didn't usually file things about her.

She reached in and picked up a curved glass piece, clear with a slight blue tint to it, a smooth S-shape about eight inches long with a bulb at each end. She held it up to the lamplight like she was grading a diamond.

"Victorian style," she said, her voice dropping low and quick, the voice she used for her favorite manuscripts. "Borosilicate glass. You can boil it, you can cool it, it's completely nonporous. And the curve, look at the curve. One end for the G-spot, angled just right. And if you flip it, the other end sits against the perineum, or inside a partner, so you can use it both ways at once. It's elegant. It's the most elegant object in this case and I include the 1880s French pieces when I say that."

She was holding it out toward me before I'd even decided to reach, and then my hand was there and my fingers were on it, and it was warm from her grip and smoother than anything I've ever touched, glass that didn't feel like glass, more like water that had agreed to hold a shape.

"Yeah," she said, watching my hand. "Everyone does that. Touch it. Follow the curve, go on, all the way around."

I ran my fingers along the whole length of it, down into the bend and back up to the far bulb, and she nodded like I'd passed a test.

"See? No seam. Nothing to catch. It's perfect engineering and somebody had to invent it a hundred and thirty years before we had the words for it." She put it back in its velvet slot with the care of somebody shelving a first edition, and I realized my mouth had gone a little dry.

Then she reached deeper into the case and came out with something else, a wand, matte white, modern, about the size of a