Chapter 15: Good Vibrations

Serena

Connie told her to bring her ID on a Saturday morning over breakfast without explanation.

Serena looked up from her congee. “Where are we going?”

“Shopping,” Connie said.

Margaret looked at neither of them and refilled her tea.

The store was called Romantix and it sat between a nail salon and a mattress store in a strip mall twenty minutes from the house with blacked out windows and a neon sign that Serena studied from the passenger seat with the focused attention she brought to anything new and unfamiliar.

“Ready?” Connie said.

“Yes,” Serena said. Then, “Does my hair look okay?”

Connie looked at her. “Your hair looks fine. You’re not meeting anyone. You’re buying things.”

“I want to look like an adult.”

“You are an adult. That’s why you have the ID.” Connie paused. “Which you brought.”

Serena produced it from her coat pocket. Connie nodded and they got out of the car.

The store was brighter inside than Serena had expected. Organized, well lit, the products arranged with the same practical logic as a pharmacy — categories clearly marked, nothing chaotic. A woman in her thirties sat behind the counter doing something on her phone and looked up when they came in and said, “Let me know if you need help finding anything,” and returned to her phone without any particular interest in them.

Serena stood just inside the entrance and looked at the store.

Then she walked into it.

Connie followed slightly behind, which Serena understood as intentional. This was Serena’s expedition. Connie was the navigator who had been here before and would answer questions. The decisions were Serena’s.

She moved through the aisles with her hands in her coat pockets, reading labels, studying options with the same methodical focus she brought to choosing a novel. She was aware of the strangeness of being here — the girl who had never been allowed to date, standing in an adult store on a Saturday morning — and underneath the strangeness was something else. Something that felt remarkably like being exactly where she was supposed to be.

She found the vibrators first.

The selection was considerable. She narrowed it quickly — she wanted the bullet style Connie had described, small and precise and controllable. She studied three options and chose the one with the clearest settings and the best reviews on the small card attached to the display.

She held it up. “This one.”

Connie looked at it. “Good choice.”

Serena put it in the small basket she’d picked up at the entrance and moved on.

The strap-ons required more time.

She stood in front of the display with her arms crossed and her head slightly tilted and read the descriptions with the specific focused expression she wore when she encountered a passage that required genuine attention. Size, material, mechanism, harness configuration.

“I want things as close to real as possible,” she said without looking at Connie. “I want to know what it actually feels like.”

“I know,” Connie said.

“So I want the cum function.”

She said it plainly, the way she had learned to say plain things, and Connie did not blink.

“Six inches,” Serena decided. “Not too much for the first time. But real.” She looked at Connie. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Connie said.

They found the right model together — Connie had opinions about the harness mechanism that Serena accepted as the more experienced party’s expertise. It went in the basket. The bottle of realistic semen went in beside it, Serena reading the label with the same expression she’d brought to the vibrator packaging: “realistic texture and taste,” nodding once as though confirming a fact she’d wanted to verify.