It was Christmas and it was snowing. Well, it wasn’t exactly Christmas - it was the Christmas break. I was at university working towards a degree that was probably going to be in Computer Science. I lived in residence and wouldn’t be going home for several days. Meanwhile, just about everyone else had finished exams and departed.

One of the few people left in residence was my buddy Chris, who was sitting in the single chair in my room. I was sitting on my bed, propped up against the wall while we watched a movie on my pitiful 12-inch black-and-white TV. Since the campus was almost deserted, we were killing the evening, shooting the shit and sucking back brewskis.

We weren’t best buddies, but we did spend a lot of time together. We took many of the same courses, put in a lot of time in the computer centre, went to the residence parties, and had a bunch of common friends. Right now, we were both wearing sweatshirts and beat-up jeans. The most obvious thing that set us apart was that I was a guy and Chris was a girl. Not that I really paid much attention to that. I never really thought of Chris as a girl, not as one of those mysterious, delicate, desirable, incomprehensible creatures that lurked on the periphery of my existence.

Chris was just one of the guys. She wasn’t pretty - not that she was ugly, she just wasn’t anything - plain, I guess you’d say. She had long, straight brown hair, a round face, never wore makeup or dressed in anything but jeans or sweats. She never giggled but would laugh. She drank her beer out of the bottle. I suppose she had tits, but she never tried to make you aware of them. In short, she was a classic tomboy.

So there we were, watching the TV and getting a nice little buzz going. I don’t remember what the movie was, and we weren’t paying much attention anyway. Chris started poking through a pile of magazines that was lying on the table when she suddenly said, “Jeez, you look at this shit?”

She pulled a magazine out of the pile and held it up for me to see. It was an issue of Hustler. “You don’t really read this crap, do you?” she asked.

“No one reads it,” I said, “they just look at the pictures.”

“You like looking at it? These are gross, I can’t believe anyone pays for this,” she exclaimed as she flipped through the magazine.

“It’s not my favourite, but if there’s nothing else around, I’ll look at it. And besides, I didn’t buy it, Bob gave it to me when he left.” I explained.

“Oh, come on, you don’t look at this shit, do you?” she said as she looked up at me.

“Hey, I don’t have a girlfriend, I have to make do with something.”

“And what’s that mean?”

It must have been the beer, because I replied a little more honestly than I might have, “Well, I’ve got to get some relief somehow. It’s not like I’ve got a girlfriend to take care of my needs.”

She looked at me for a moment as she realized what I was talking about. It was like she was seeing me a little differently. Then she said, “Why don’t you find someone?”

“It’s not like I don’t want to. I don’t exactly have a lot of time to socialize with our homework load, and I’m not doing too well at the parties.”

It wasn’t like I was a total social washout, just that residence parties are the same group of people every time and tended to follow a predictable pattern which ended up with me going home alone. Well, except for one time the previous year when Karen and I both got blitzed at a party and she came back to my room. But that’s another story and I can’t remember any of the details anyway due to excess inebriation.

I expanded on my point, “It’s like living in a small town here. You spend a night with someone and everyone knows the next day. I don’t have time for a girlfriend and I didn’t feel like fucking Charise.”

Charise was one of the few girls in residence that screwed around and would always have one or two guys trying to take her home at each party.

Chris threw the magazine on the table and leaned back, saying, “I know what you mean. I haven’t seen my boyfriend since we broke up in the summer. It’s not like I’m getting any action either.”

Now, I had never thought about Chris as having a need for ‘action’. I guess this was because I’d never seen her as a sexual person. I mean - as far as I knew, she was a normal, healthy young woman with normal needs - I’d just never looked at her that way. I didn’t even know she’d had a boyfriend.

So this thought of Chris needing to get relief ran through my head, and being intrigued about what girls did about it, I asked, “What do you do about it?”

“Oh, like I’m going to tell you!”

“Why not? You know about my magazines.”

“Okay, if you really need to know - I spend an evening with Artie.”

Thinking Artie is some guy she visits, I asked, “Who the hell is Artie?”

Chris didn’t answer for a little while. Maybe she thought she’d said too much. But I wasn’t going to let it go by, especially as I’d already made my confession to her.

“Come on, ‘fess up, who’s Artie?”

Chris gave in and mumbled, “Artie is my artificial stimulator.”

“What do you mean, ‘artificial stimulator’?”

Chris looked at me, somehow combining annoyance and embarrassment in her voice as she said, “It’s a vibrator, Shit-for-brains!”

This sure shut my mouth for a while. I sat there thinking about Chris needing to get off and using a vibrator. Some images went through my head of Chris in her bed using a vibrator, and I started to get really horny.

After a while, I figured I had to say something, so I said, “Well, there you go, you’re all taken care of. It beats not having anything.”

She looked at me, probably deciding if she wanted to keep talking about it, then said, “Yeah, right, a piece of plastic and a battery! Like that’s a replacement. You get a real warm, cozy feeling with that. Try getting friendly with your refrigerator sometime, why don’t you?”

I paused for a moment, and then said, “We’re a real fucking pair, aren’t we? Having to jerk off in our rooms because we don’t have the time to get laid.”