The Awkward Path To Getting Lucky

“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, and 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 quickly 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.

As much as I’m racking my brain here, I can’t find the intimacy in what we’ve been doing. We have a familiar kiss hello when he arrives, we sit beside each other at the table and on the couch, but we don’t cuddle or make out anymore. I’m not even sure we touch each other much.

A wave of sadness washes through my entire body. I miss touching. I miss the feeling of warmth from being physically close to someone. I miss the feeling of skin against mine. Cuddling up next to him used to be one of my favorite things.

I remember when things started tanking in the nookie department, Ryan took a noticeable step back from almost all apparent physical intimacy. When I asked him why, he said he didn’t want me to feel like he was pressuring me for sex I couldn’t even have.

At the time, I thought that was really sweet, and I appreciated his consideration.

Now I’m just feeling guilty. Like I made him afraid to try to hold my hand. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m also a little resentful, because I really miss that part of our relationship.

I hear my front door open and the familiar sounds of Ryan making his way through my living room to set take-out bags on the counter in the kitchen.

I pull the brush through my hair one more time, set it back down by the sink and head out to greet him.

I peek my head out of my bedroom and watch as he starts setting out containers and cutlery on the counter. He seems right at home.

If I’d agreed to us living together, I wonder if we would have lived here? We never made it that far into the discussion. He’d been hinting at cohabitation for a month or two before our second anniversary, and I liked the idea a lot, but with the onset of trouble in Vagville, I’d always sort of dodged the conversation.

I take a moment and stare at my boyfriend of nearly four years. He’s lovely, really. His green eyes are calm and content as he pops the lid off what looks like chicken makhani.

He used to have the sexiest floppy black curls that I loved. It’s part of what made me notice him in the first place. Around the time of our first anniversary, Ryan buzzed them off after growing tired of a coworker constantly saying he looked like Sherlock Holmes.

I would have taken this as a high compliment, but Ryan maintains that Benedict Cumberbatch looks like a bipedal lizard, and the comparison made him self-conscious.

Three years later, it’s still cropped short.

The anxious wave hits me again. If I’m longing for the warmth and touching and closeness, I can’t even imagine how he feels. Maybe he’s been suffering that wave for two years, waiting for me to get it together so he can have it again.

He looks up from the naan he’s arranging on a plate and finds me lingering in the doorway.

“Hey, babes,” he says with a smile.

“Well, hello there, sir,” I say, leaving my place of reflection and heading out to the kitchen. I lean over the bar counter for our welcome kiss.

It’s just like every kiss we’ve had for I don’t even know how long, but with everything at the forefront of my mind now, I can’t help but overanalyze it. My first thought is it’s quick. Perfunctory, even.

It’s a takeout-on-Wednesday-nights-at-my-apartment-for-three-years kiss.

Lady bits issues aside, it’s alarmingly clear to me now that Ryan and I are way past a simple rut. We’ve hit a relationship trench, and I’ve spent the last two years with a shovel in hand, digging us deeper.

And I refuse to hit that two-year drought mark. I just can’t let that happen. Which means Ryan and I are going to have to talk about this. It’s time. I’ve put this conversation off for nearly two years for reasons I can’t sort out at the moment, but I can’t ignore it any longer.

“So,” he says, grabbing glasses from my cabinet. “How’s life at the office?”

“I think we should see other people,” I blurt out, to the astronomical surprise of us both.

4

“Excuse me?” he says, still holding the two glasses.

Putting my hands on the counter for support, I blink awkwardly for a moment, trying to connect the words that just left my mouth to a fleck of sanity in my mind. “I think we should see other people,” I repeat, slower this time. “We should take a break.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asks. He doesn’t seem shocked or hurt so much as he seems to want a casual clarification. His lackluster, almost accepting expression makes me suddenly confident I’m doing the right thing, despite the utter lack of forethought I put into this decision.

“No,” I say calmly. “I’m saying I think we should take a break, and during that break, you should be free to see other people.”

He sets the glasses down, and his face falls into an expression of confusion.

He’s still dressed in his work garb. He works for an IT solutions company downtown, where the dress code is polo shirts and jeans at its fanciest. Belts are worn by those who want to put in the extra effort to shine.

I look at Ryan in his half-untucked gray polo and beltless jeans and take a breath.

“Look, I’m just going to address the sexless elephant in the room here.” I sigh, throwing up my hands. His eyes go wide. “We haven’t had naked time together in almost two years, dude. Did you realize that? In thirty-four days it will have been a full two years.”

Ryan’s face goes blank, and he tilts his head ever so slightly to the side as he digests the information. “Huh.”

“Exactly,” I say, crossing my arms. “And I don’t know about you, but that seems kind of not great to me.”

His confusion returns. “So, because we don’t have sex anymore, you want to take a break? A break for what?”

I shrug, feeling electrically charged and sort of sick to my stomach. “I need to get this sorted out, and I honestly can’t focus on what I need to do while feeling like the biggest ass in the world for not being able to fulfill my girlfriendly duties.”

He rolls his eyes. “If it’s been two years, it obviously doesn’t matter to me if it takes some time for you to get better. Although it’s nice to hear you’re thinking about it. I figured you just weren’t into sex anymore.”

I gape at him. “What?”

“I don’t know,” he says defensively. “You never bring it up, so I just assumed.”

“Well, you never bring it up, either!”

He throws his arms up and says loudly, “Why would I bring it up? It’s your problem! What am I supposed to do? Be the jerk who asks for sex you can’t have?”

My jaw flops down and I stand up a little taller. “Excuse you,” I snap. “My problem? If I recall, I tried to get you to work with me on the stuff my doctor told me to do, and you didn’t want to because it was too weird.”

Looking a little embarrassed, he regroups. “Look, I’m sorry, but sex isn’t supposed to be that complicated. And you told me she said the therapy was stuff you were supposed to do. You said you’d take care of it and let me know when things were okay again.”

Now I feel my face burning. “Well, things aren’t okay.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath that is irritatingly shaky. “What I’m saying is, I’ve gotten so caught up in life and work that I haven’t been able to make it a priority, and I want to take the time to focus on everything now.”

His eyes shift to the side. His trademark confused look. “That’s...good?”

Calmly I continue, “But I don’t want to feel like I’m keeping you on some sexless leash any longer. That isn’t fair to either of us. So let’s just call this a break. You go off and do your thing for a few weeks, and I’ll be here doing mine, and then we’ll regroup and see if we can’t get back to where we’re supposed to be.”

“For how long?”

I square my shoulders. “Until our anniversary.”

He stares at me, and I can’t tell if he’s just contemplating what I’m saying or preparing to argue again. I walk around the counter and close the distance between us. Reaching out, I put my hands on his forearms.

“I love you,” I assure him while silently missing his floppy curls all the same. “And I know I told you I didn’t want to live together until I got this vaginismus nonsense under control, and I meant that. But you said you’d keep asking on our anniversaries, and I really, really want to be able to say yes this time.”

“For the record,” he clarifies, “I love you, too. And I’ve always been okay with us living together, with or without the sex.”

“I know,” I say with a smile, “but I’m not. I need to fix this—for myself, and for us. I’m ready to move on to greater things, Ryan. This holding pattern isn’t good for anyone anymore.”

He looks frustrated, but doesn’t pull his arms away. A little calculator in the back of my head announces that this is the longest we have touched in months.

“And you want us to see other people?” he asks.

My eyebrows involuntarily twitch. “Yep. I mean, that’s more for you than me, as I’ll be involved in independent activities, but yeah. Go out. Get laid. You’ve waited long enough. And then on our anniversary, we’ll meet back up and get to where we should have been this whole time.”

Now he does move away from me. I awkwardly let my hands drop to my sides. “You’re actually telling me to go have sex with other women. Are you drunk?”

It’s my turn to roll my eyes. “No, I’m not. And yes, I am serious. I mean, I’d appreciate it if you were careful with protection and didn’t, like, actively seek to bang your way up and down the Midwest, but yeah, if you’re in a place where an opportunity arises naturally and you want to sleep with someone, I say go for it.”

He looks floored. “And you have no problem with that? With the idea of me having sex with someone else?”

I consider this, wanting to be as honest as possible. “It’s not my favorite, and I’m not going to go into great thought imagining you in whatever situations may arise, but yeah, I’m okay with it. I can’t stand the guilt hanging over me anymore, Ryan. You have needs that I’m not meeting, and it just makes sense to let you live your life while I’m getting my shit together over here.”

Ryan gently shakes his head, but seems very calm. He places his hands on the counter by the plates, and his fingers start tapping. Whenever he’s deep in thought, they tap out little non-rhythmic signals. He works with computers all day, so I like to imagine he’s subconsciously working through things by tapping out binary code or something.

“This is sick.”

I give him an encouraging grin. “I like to think it’s practical. And it’s only thirty-four days.”

Ryan stares at me for a long moment, fingers still rapping out a beatless sound, and I can’t read his thoughts in the slightest. He looks down at the food he was setting out before I came in and dropped a giant bomb of what-the-fuck.

“I got that veggie korma you like,” he says with a sigh, pointing to a tray of yellow sauce. “And the garlic naan.”

I’m familiar with this form of acceptance. Ryan is very go-with-the-flow, which is generally a good yin to my yang. Part of me feels a little bad for steamrollering him, but the rest of me knows I’ll be able to make it up to him with sweet, sweet lovin’ in thirty-four days.

“It smells awesome,” I say with a smile.

He seems to easily fall back into our comfortable Wednesday date-night routine as he hands me a plate. “So,” he says, spooning rice out onto a plate of his own, “how was work?”

I grab a fork and quietly let out a deep breath. This is going to work. I’ve totally got this.

Hell, I bet I won’t even need all thirty-four days.

5

“You what?” Shannon shrieks at me.