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She hums a questioning sound as her finger travels down the spine of another book. I shift and the bed creaks. I am too big for this space. Or it’s the space that’s too small. Lulu’s presence, her smell, her things,her, take up all the oxygen in the room.
Lulu hands me four books and sits beside me on the bed. She talks about each one like it’s an old friend, some of them she loves, others she begrudgingly accepts. Like they’ve been in her life for so long there’s no point in removing them now. She taps the book on top, the one by Jacques Derrida, and explains how the first time she’d ever heard the name she was sitting in on one of her father’s graduate seminars during Take Your Daughter to Work Day. A grad student had argued with her dad about the philosopher’s theories and she’d been so incensed that they’d dared to offer a counterpoint to her incontrovertible dad, she picked up the book to be able to argue for him. It’s so like Lulu to use a book like a white knight uses a sword. She laughs as she talks about trying to understand it at thirteen, picking it up again at fifteen, for a third time at twenty-one, then finally realizing that she actually agreed with the grad student after all at twenty-five.
Like all the other times Lulu has run off on a tangent, she looks a little embarrassed once she’s done. I don’t know what to say to her to convince her she shouldn’t be. Already the sound of her voice is familiar, the cadence comforting. I can predict when she’ll pause for laughter or agreement, the husky tone her voice takes on when she’s making a particular kind of innuendo, the swoops and valleys of her laughter.
It’s dark outside the small window above her kitchen but the room is golden from the bedside lamp. The books in my hands are well-loved. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of them.” When I look back at her, I notice how close we’re sitting. That she has a scar near her hairline and a thumbprint-sized birth mark behind her ear. “I guess I should get going.”
I don’t get up.
“Or you could stay?”
“What do you want to do?” I ask. She doesn’t have a television. I’m not much for board games. We need more people to play euchre.
She stares studiously at my shoulder. “Maybe something we can’t write about in our friendship journals?”
I tip her chin up to meet my eyes. “I thought you weren’t cut out for breaking rules?”
“I think we’re technically just bending them.”
“Why do you really want to do this, Lulu?” I ask when she won’t meet my eyes again. It’s not that I don’t want to. I just want to make sure it’s for the right reasons.
She flops back on the bed. Her baseball T-shirt rides up, revealing her soft tummy. I want to press my nose into the skin there, just below her belly button. “When you were in high school did you ever just, like, call up your best friend and pick them up and drive around for hours? Just drive and drive even though gas was expensive and there was nowhere to go and now you feel pretty bad about your contribution to climate change? And you’d listen to music and sing and talk about nothing and solve all the world’s problems and by the time you dropped them off, you just felt better? Lighter? Like being seventeen wasn’t the worst fucking thing in the world anymore?”
George used to pick me up in his dad’s Corvette. I could barely fit and had to push the seat all the way back. He’d take the car out to an empty stretch of road and drive too fast until I begged him to slow down, my knuckles white around the “holy shit” bar. But when he was done scaring the shit out of me, he’d be happier, lighter. Exactly like Lulu describes. “You want a distraction,” I say.
“Friends let friends be distracted,” she counters, defensive. And she has a point. Or maybe more accurately: this friend is willing to distract her even if what he needs is a distraction from her.
I sigh, like I’m quite put out by the whole thing. “Well, better take your shirt off,” I say as I peel off mine. She laughs, struggling with her own, and I help her pull it over her head, her blond hair fanning out over her shoulders and standing on end from static. Lulu wears a plain black cotton bra. Faded from too many washes, it looks devastatingly soft, like I know the skin underneath will be.
We can’t touch each other but I can’t go another round without doingsomething. I press the heel of my hand against my dick. “Do you have like...?” I gesture at the drawer beside her bed.
She frowns between me and the furniture, her pants half-undone.
“Do you have toys?”
“Under the bed.”
“Can I use one?” I ask. “On you?”
She nods quickly. “Yeah.”
I waste no time dropping to my knees to pull out what can only be described as a treasure chest of sex toys from beneath her bed. She leans over the bed, biting back her smile. “A woman I worked with in the UK had one of those Ann Summers parties for her hen do,” she explains. “It’s like a Tupperware party but for sex toys. And the sales rep somehow wrangled me into buying one of everything.” She groans at my incredulous face. “I felt bad, OK? No one was buying anything! But now I have all this. You have no idea how much it costs to ship all these sex toys across the ocean. What even is this?”
She picks up a ball gag with her index finger.
“We can work up to that,” I say, putting it back into the plastic bin next to a harness that makes me think about things that friends shouldn’t and a frankly beautiful pink rose glass plug. “Have you used any of these before?” I ask. “What do you like?”
She points to a silicone vibrator the size of my palm, a color that’s probably advertised as raspberry or plum. “That’s the only one I’ve ever used,” she says. “It’s nice.”
One side is flat, the other has a pointed tip. I cup it in my hand, pressing the button to feel the different levels of vibration. It’s intimate and unassuming, easily cupped between legs and over bodies. I find a pump bottle of fancy lube. The kind that calls itself a “personal moisturizer.” Sitting on the bed next to her, I pour lube over the silicone toy.
“Do you want me to—”
“Should I—”
She seems nervous, her hand a fist between us, her toes curled. She jumps when I turn the vibrator on. “You OK?” I quickly turn it off again, my fingers fumbling from the lube. “We could just talk,” I offer. “Or watch a movie. Friends do that.”
“I’m pretty sure a movie is what got us into this in the first place.”
