Shannon grins. “I’ll take him.”
“The hell you will.” I snort. “Last time you dealt with a jerky customer, you flung a cupcake at him.”
“It slipped,” she says, casually flipping through the papers in her hand.
“It slipped a good five feet and landed with surprising precision on his chest,” I correct her. “We had to pay for his dry cleaning. And Mr. Capuzo is too old to have you throw baked goods at his face—or his face through a window—so no, I will take the Capuzo when he comes in.”
Liz looks moderately terrified. Shannon smiles. “Kat is our Mouth,” she explains. “Butter cries, I throw things, Kat keeps us from getting sued.” Liz considers this and shrugs with apparent satisfaction. Shannon looks back at her list. “Okay. Is everybody good? Meeting over?”
“Actually, really quick,” Butter says, “I was thinking about doing the coconut cuppie with pineapple curd and candied bacon as the headliner tomorrow.” She can turn damn near anything edible into a gourmet cuppie. “When you’re out on deliveries, could you pick up some supplies?”
“God, yes,” Shannon agrees with an enthusiastic nod. “I think that’s my favorite of your recipes. Could you make an extra half dozen so I can take them home to Joe and the kids? They love those so much.”
Butter beams. “Sure!” she says. I foresee that extra batch getting the royal edible glitter treatment.
Looking around the shop, Shannon asks, “Is that everything?”
Butter and Liz nod. Shannon takes in a deep breath, smiles and sets her pad down. She takes another glorious sip of coffee.
“Oh, hey,” I add casually. “There is one thing.”
It’s very slight, but I swear I see her wince. “What did I forget? Is there another order?” She starts pulling invoices off the stack on her workstation and flipping through them.
I shake my head. “No, it’s nothing like that.”
Shannon sets the papers down and lets out a gust of air. “Okay, good. What’s up?” she asks, lifting her coffee mug to her lips again.
“My vagina is broken and Ryan and I haven’t had sex in almost two years and it’s really distracting. Help.” A strangled, rupturing sound escapes from Shannon, and suddenly it’s raining coffee in the kitchen.
2
“Wait...” Butter asks, her eyes aghast. “What do you mean your vagina’s broken? How do you break a vagina?”
Liz, looking horrified, leans toward me and whispers, “Did you fall on it or something?”
I blink at her. “No. No, I didn’t fall on it.” Shaking my head, I answer, “It’s a disorder. Well, that’s what my doctor said two years ago, anyway.”
Shannon stops mopping the spit coffee off her station and points her towel at me. “Is it vulvodynia? Vaginismus? Vaginitis?”
My jaw flops to my chest. “Vaginismus. How could you possibly know that?”
She barely restrains an eye-roll as she resumes wiping down the coffee-splattered counter. “Oh my god, when you said your vagina was broken, I thought it was something like cancer, you dork.” She moves down the station and pushes her towel across the coffee-splattered floor. “I went through vaginismus after Heidi was born.”
Butter wheels around. “Wait! Your vagina is broken, too?”
“It’s been broken for seven years?” A very unfortunate whimper escapes me.
She looks up at us with that semi-irritating mom expression she uses when we push her patience a smidgen too far. “Guys. No. I was having trouble for a few months after I had Heidi, and the doctor said it was vaginismus. So I went to a physical therapist for maybe three months, did the rest of the therapy at home and I haven’t really had any issues since.”
I’m gaping at her. “How did I not know about this?”
Shannon grins. “Sorry. Next time one of my reproductive parts shorts out, I’ll be sure to bring it up at a staff meeting.”
I stick my tongue out at her.
“Wait,” Butter interrupts. “Physical therapists...for your...vagina?”
“Yes.”
“But...” She blinks at me, and then at Shannon. “For your vagina.”
Shannon lets out a deep sigh. “Yes.”
“They have those?” Liz squeaks. Shannon nods. “Around here?” She nods again.
Butter explodes. “Are you freaking kidding me? We don’t have an Olive Garden, but we have vagina therapists? What even is real life?”
Shannon ignores Butter’s outrage and focuses on me. “How have you had this for two years? You’re with Ryan!”
“We’ve been in a...dry spell,” I say evasively.
“Honey, you guys have gone two years without sex?” Shannon asks, awed. Liz’s eyes get wider.
“Technically,” I say with a huff, “it’ll be two years in thirty-four days. The last time we tried was on our second anniversary.”
Clutching her glitter brush like a security raft, Butter looks traumatized. “Tried? As in, you couldn’t even do it?”
As I’m trying to think of a way to explain this to her without causing her irreparable mental harm, Shannon moves in front of Butter. “It’s like this,” she says. Shannon holds up her hand and points a finger at Butter’s face. “If I try to poke you in the eye, what happens?” As she moves her hand closer, Butter instinctively slaps it away.
“If you poke me in the eye, I’ll punch you in the boob.”
I stifle a snort as Shannon continues. “Go with me here. If I move my finger toward your eye, what happens?” She waves her finger past Butter’s eye, and thankfully, no one is boob-punched.
“I blink.”
“Okay,” Shannon says, slowly. “Now, even though you know it’s coming, and you know I’m not going to actually poke you in the eye, what happens?” Moving her finger at a glacial pace, Butter’s eye still slams shut of its own accord. My knees clench a little.
“That’s vaginismus.” Shannon says, shrugging.
“Oh my god, you poor things!” Butter says, clutching her heart.
“Hey, I’m fine now,” Shannon says, throwing her hands up. “Kat’s the one with the broken hoo-ha.”
“You know,” I say, taking a long pull of my coffee and wishing it was spiked with bourbon, “you’re kind of stealing my vagina thunder here.”
Shannon goes over to the pot and refills her own mug. “I just can’t believe you’ve gone two years like this. Didn’t you do the therapy?”
Liz, sort of looking like she wants to be set on fire, quietly asks, “What does that mean, exactly?”
I shrug. “My doc said it was all about retraining the muscles or something.”
“So why didn’t you?” Shannon insists. “I mean, two years, hon.”
“I did try!” I say, feeling defensive. “Well, I tried. It wasn’t one of the finer moments of our relationship. She gave me this little packet of things to try with Ryan, and we did for a while, but it was weird, and he seemed really uncomfortable. So I decided I’d figure it out on my own when I had time to focus on it.”
Everyone is staring at me. Finally Butter says, “And how’d that work out for you?”
My brows furrow. “I just sort of lost track of time, I guess.” If I weren’t so annoyed by the look they are all giving me, I’d have to laugh at the perfect unison in which they all started giving it.
Shannon’s face looks like she’s trying to solve a complicated math problem in her head. “Wait, your second anniversary? Is that why you told him you weren’t ready to live together?”
“Could you for once not remember every tiny detail of everything?”
She gasps. “Is that it? I figured you were just being stubborn about commitment!”
“Oh, stop it. It’s not that. But when we tried the therapy stuff, it was so goddamn awkward, a
nd I just wanted to be super sure that when we do try again, it actually works. All the failed attempts didn’t do wonders for my self-esteem.”
Shannon frowns. “I can see that. You need to be comfortable when you go for it.”
“See? It’s not like I didn’t want to get it sorted. I just didn’t have the time to invest. Now it’s been nearly two years, and Ryan is supposed to ask me to move in together, and I want to say yes, but I can’t until I fix this, and I’m five months away from thirty, and I don’t want to end this decade with a broken vagina, you guys. I just really don’t.”
“That’s not good decade juju, no,” Butter adds as I suck in a lung-piercing breath.
“And you can’t just say yes and actually take the damn time to work on it while you’re living together?” Shannon asks.
“No!” I yelp, surprising even myself with my vehement tone. “When you move in with someone, it’s supposed to be all happy and exciting and horizontally mamboing on every surface of your new place. Not awkwardly sleeping together, wondering when one person is going to get their nethers back on track. I don’t want that hanging over us if we do this.”
Butter is lightly pulling the bristles of her glitter brush back and forth across the top of her station. “So, you and Ryan aren’t doin’ it, but you’re—I mean, you guys do the other stuff, right?”
For the first time in this conversation of horrors, I blush. “Not exactly,” I mutter.
“Kat.” Shannon looks astounded.
“It’s too weird!” I shriek. “Okay? It’s bizarre. We’d kind of hit that comfortable relationship place where there wasn’t like, a ton of making out and stuff, so it felt too random to do that stuff knowing how it wouldn’t end.” I realize Ryan and I never discussed it, but somewhere along the line, we definitely stopped doing anything in the sex category in a mutual way. “That’s why this is so important! I don’t know how it all got so messed up, but I have to fix it. Now. This is not how relationships are supposed to go, and this is on me.”
While Shannon and Butter consider my stance, Liz swallows hard. “Is it possible it just...fixed itself?”
I stare at her, dumbfounded that I haven’t considered this possibility sooner. “Um. I don’t think so? I’m not sure. Can that happen?” A tiny flicker of hope appears.
Butter looks around desperately. “Look, I didn’t even know you could break a vagina!”
We all turn to Shannon, who looks perplexed. “Come on,” I say. “You’re the resident vagina expert, apparently. Can it?”
Shannon closes her eyes and makes a face that I am pretty sure I’ve seen her give her kids a few times. She calmly pulls her phone out of her apron pocket and starts typing. I know she’s hitting Google hard. We all squish over into her station to read over her shoulder.
“Okay,” Butter says, reading from medical websites as Shannon scrolls. “It’s like you said—there are therapists, and therapies you can do yourself. This is something that is almost one hundred percent treatable. So, wow. Like you said, the muscles just sort of...clenched up there, didn’t they?” I close my eyes and take a deep, calming breath as that flicker of hope poofs away, and Butter looks slightly hurt at my expression. “Well, sorry. I’m trying to catch up. And the disorder keeps you from letting anything, ahem, in, so that’s what the therapy does. You just keep training the muscles until they are used to, erm, the in things. It doesn’t say anything about it just going away, but I guess the only way to know would be to...check.”
“So,” Shannon says plainly, “grab Ryan tonight and go for it.”
I blink at her. “As much as I am in desperate need of getting some—and I definitely considered the grab-and-go option—I refuse to give it the old college try with him just to have it not work. Again. I can’t do that to either of us.” I wave my hand at the phone. “I’ll just have to go a different route.”
“How are you going to do that without your boyfriend?” Liz whispers.
I fight the urge to pat her head while Shannon stares at her. Butter is gaping.
Clearing my throat, I delicately say, “There are boyfriend substitutes, you see.”
It takes her a second, but she gets there. Her face turns bright red, and she takes a large drink of her coffee.
“You sweet summer child,” Butter says, shaking her head. “So, Kat, you do that, and then you’ll know!”
“Unfortunately,” I reply, “I’m lacking the appropriate stock for these experiments. That’s not exactly my style.”
I’m getting the side-eye from Shannon. “Really? You’ve been boinkless for that long and you don’t have any...gear?”
I scoff, “What? I’m more of a right-click-your-mouse than power-up-your-hard-drive kind of gal. So?”
Liz makes a noise, and I’m certain she’s going to faint.
“Sweetie,” Shannon says, putting her hand on Liz’s shoulder, “if you want to leave this conversation, I swear none of us will hold it against you in the slightest.”
“No!” Liz insists. “I’m okay! I just...my friends don’t normally talk about this stuff. But I’m fine, really! I want to help.”
Shannon pats her on the back. “Teamwork. I admire that.” She turns back to her phone. “When I was doing my own therapy at home, I had a stash of things I could use that weren’t that far off from what one might use to ‘power their hard drive,’ as you say, so maybe you can kill two birds with one dildo.”
Butter snorts into her coffee and starts choking spectacularly.
“You did not just say that.” I shake my head.
“Pumpkin, I’ve got two kids. More people have seen my vagina with a human being coming out of it than I care to admit. I haven’t peed alone in nine years. I have no shame. This stuff happens. When I had my gallbladder out last year, you were right there bringing us food and watching the kids and manning the shop and being the best damn friend in the world to me and mine. We don’t pick our challenges. You’re like family and I love you—you have a problem and I’m here to help. If that help involves dildos, bring it on. I’ve fucking got this.”
This is certainly our liveliest employee meeting to date.
3
After the shop closed for the night, Butter and I hit up the Naughty Market over on Fourth Street. Then I raced home and, with the help of a newly acquired phallic device, made the discovery that my lady bits were indeed still on the fritz.
This did not start my evening with Ryan under an umbrella of joy.
We have standing date nights on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. If we find some extra free time, we try to meet up more, but working eighty-ish hours a week at the shop doesn’t grant me a tremendous amount of time off. Having the together moments scheduled in advance helps make sure I put the piping bag down and remember to have a life. Well, on those three days of the week, anyway.
With a tiny gray storm cloud floating over my head, I carefully stow away all evidence of my experiment in my nightstand before I set to prepping for Ryan’s arrival.
I’m feeling uncomfortably electrified about seeing him tonight. For a moment, it reminds me of the jitters from the way back parts of our relationship. When we had a date and I was excited to get ready before he picked me up.
This isn’t that. There’s an anxiety brewing inside me, knowing it’s time to shout until we are both fully aware that the emperor has no clothes and a broken thang.
The more the determination churns in my stomach, the clearer it becomes to me how this has carried on for two years. There’s a comfort in our consistency. Our routine may not be dripping with platitudes and romance, but it’s ours, and it’s soothing.
I toss my flour-covered shirt and jeans into my hamper and change into a nearly identical outfit, sans flour. Taking a look at myself in the mirror, a wave of panic flashes through me.
I quic
kly yank off my T-shirt and toss it back into a drawer. I have to dig pretty far into the Narnia region of my closet, but I finally find something that’s more blouse than T-shirt. At the very least, the cut of the neckline implies I’m aware I have breasts, which is a big step up, really.
Walking up to the mirror in my bathroom, I pull my hair out of my uniform ponytail and grab a brush. Even my hair is efficient. I keep my chocolate-hued locks just long enough that I can whisk them into a ponytail at any height on my head, but not long enough that I have to put in the effort of actually styling them every day.
Plus, when I let my damp hair dry tied back, it finishes all smooth and shiny, if slightly dented. Otherwise I’d have to use blow-dryers and serums, and there’d be frizz to tackle, and I’d just rather spend that twenty minutes sleeping.
As I brush out my hair, a tiny part of my brain wonders when it was that I stopped putting forth any effort in the looks department. I’m expecting some sort of vagina miracle, but I can’t even be bothered to make an effort to look nice for our nights together?
Maybe that’s what’s missing. My vagina misses the joy of getting all dolled up for a night out.
A slightly louder part says it was probably right around the time sex started feeling like a below-the-belt root canal sans anesthetic.
When did Ryan give up?
Did he, though? Is he still putting forth all the best boyfriend maneuvers, but I’m too strung out from work to even notice?
We’ve fallen into a comfortable groove the last few years. Our date nights are simple, but nice. He brings over takeout, we sit together and talk about our jobs and life and the world that happens around us that I rarely get to take the time to notice. We curl up together on the couch with a couple glasses of wine and watch Netflix or a movie or just keep chatting.
It’s nice. These nights are the least stressful parts of my week. I love my time with Ryan, and I can’t imagine my life without these moments of Zen with him.
But the more I analyze us, the more I realize there’s nothing here that screams “relationship.” I could be doing these exact things with Shannon or Butter and have that same feeling of soothing calm.
The Awkward Path to Getting Lucky Page 2
