The Toy Between Us

It started on a Tuesday, of all days. I was looking for my harness because we had a session planned at the gym on Thursday and mine had gone missing, the way my things do when Tracie decides the closet needs reorganizing. She reorganizes the way other people do taxes, thoroughly and with a lot of muttering, and things never end up where they started.

I found the harness wedged behind her winter boots. I also found the pink silicone toy tucked into the side pocket of her gym bag, wrapped in a spare sock like that was going to fool anybody.

I handled it like a mature adult. I did not. I stood there in front of the open closet holding a stranger's sock in one hand and my harness in the other, feeling my face go hot at twenty-eight years old, and then I put everything back exactly the way I'd found it and closed the door.

Here is the part I haven't told anybody. I didn't feel embarrassed for long. I felt curious. Then I felt something else, something warmer and less polite, sitting on the couch that night while Tracie talked about a new route her gym was setting, and I realized I was imagining her using the thing. Alone. In this apartment, probably in our bed, maybe while I was out at my climbing meetup on Wednesdays.

We've been together two years. We met three years ago at a women's climbing meetup, when she was working the front desk at the gym and I was failing at a problem I now warm up on. She asked me out a year later, over bad coffee, both of us twenty-six, and it's been good. It's been really good. But we don't talk about that. What we do alone, I mean. It's never come up. It sits in the apartment like the box fan in summer, present and unmentioned.

So instead of asking, I did something a software developer with a routine problem would do. I opened my laptop, found a discreet shop, and ordered a matching toy in blue. Same model. I read the reviews like I was evaluating a library, which honestly is a habit I should be embarrassed about, and picked the one with the quiet motor and the rechargeable battery. Then I waited three days for the plain brown box, hid it in my sock drawer, and spent those three days being weirdly jumpy whenever she opened the closet.

She came home late on Saturday from the gym, the way she does the first weekend of every month when they run the beginner clinics. I heard her key in the door at nine, heard the thump of her bag, heard her call out that the new guy had torn a hold off the wall with his bare hands and nobody was hurt but the route setter looked personally insulted.

"Be out in a minute," I called back, lying on our bed scrolling my phone, which is exactly what I would have been doing anyway, so the lie was mostly decorative.

I heard her drop her shoes by the door, heard water run in the kitchen, heard her come down the hall. She leaned in the doorway in her gym hoodie with her hair flattened on one side, and she looked tired in the happy way, the way she gets after a shift where everything went right.

"You're in bed already?"

"It's nine," I said. "I'm twenty-eight, not immortal."

She snorted and came in, peeling off the hoodie, and I kept my eyes on my phone with about four percent of my actual attention. The other ninety-six percent was watching her in my peripheral vision like a hawk, which I want to note she did not notice, because she walked straight to the bed, said "move your feet," and sat down to pull off her socks.

Then she saw it.

I had left it on her pillow, wrapped in the hand towel from the bathroom shelf, tied off with one of my hair ties because I own nothing that qualifies as ribbon. She picked it up, weighed it in her hand, and went completely still.

"Freya."

"Mm?"

"What is this."

"Open it and find out."

She looked at me, then back at the towel, and unwound it slowly, the way she unclips carabiners, careful, both hands. The blue silicone sat in her palm. She stared at it. Then she laughed, one short bark, and dropped back against the headboard.

"You dork," she said. "You absolute dork. You found mine, didn't you."

"I found your gym bag reorganized," I said. "Extensively reorganized."

"Oh my god!" She covered her face with one hand, still holding the toy in the other, and laughed into her palm until her shoulders shook. "I wrapped it in a sock. I thought that was so clever."

"It was not clever."

"It was not clever," she agreed, and took her hand off her face. She was pink across the cheeks, and she was still smiling, and I felt the tight thing in my chest I'd been carrying for three days loosen up and let go.

She scooted up next to me and we sat cross-legged facing each other, knee to knee, both of us holding an unopened vibrator like we were comparing phones at a bus stop. Hers was pink and