I Like You Just the Way I Am (20 page)

In real life, when you first meet someone, you can project all sorts of bullshit narratives onto them to suit your fancy. However, once you are married, that leeway goes out the window. There’s no room for a new story. You know the story.

By no means am I trying to dissuade you from getting married. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have my husband. But the hard truth is: You can’t have both. Eventually a woman has to choose between deep, meaningful, occasionally platonic love and hot, dangerous, “Please don’t break my heart, because I know you probably are hiding another family” sex.

Most men can pop in a low-grade porn and get hard the second they see a faceless pussy staring back at them. But women require more mental stimulation. We want a story to get wrapped up in. That’s why whenever I watch porn with my husband, I insist we sit through the beginning narrative.
Look, if I’m gonna care about two dudes coming on a chick’s face at the same time, I at least need to understand how they all know each other.

Oscar Wilde said: “Everything in the world is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power.” E. L. James knows about the importance of the power/sex dynamic. She understands that the hottest thing about fucking someone’s brains out is the psychological chess game you had to play—and win—to get there. Long story short: E. L. James is a hero. She is a goddamn humanitarian—and pretty much the Robin Hood of female libidos.

After zipping through
Fifty Shades Darker,
the second book in the trilogy, I was doing things I hadn’t done in years, like shaving all the blond hairs off the back of my thighs, closing the bathroom door when I peed, and seducing my husband with more than just a simple: “I feel like we’re supposed to be having sex.” I was a rabid, insatiable animal. And by that I mean I wanted sex more than twice a week.

*   *   *

Hot as things had
become between me and my husband, something was still missing. Despite our best efforts, we still weren’t like the characters in the book. I was talking too much, and Jason’s hitting me over the head with a pillow felt more like he was trying to suffocate me so he could go back to playing with his iPad. Christian and Ana also had things that we didn’t have.

What is a sexual deviant without toys?
I thought one afternoon while taking photos of my labia to send to him at work.

Admittedly, I go through phases where I get super passionate about something, throw myself 100 percent into whatever it is, and then ditch the whole thing a couple weeks later, when I’m waylaid by the next shiny object. And for the most part, my husband has always been supportive, even though the outcome is usually just me wasting a bunch of money on shit I end up giving to my maid’s daughters. Like when I went through my whole Nag Champa–burning, meditation-crystal-collecting, vision-board phase. Or when I got an arm tattoo, then freaked out that it made me look like a biker and started getting it lasered off. Or when I took up pole dancing and hired a guy sitting outside Home Depot to come over and turn our guest bedroom into a “champagne room” one night while Jason was on Ambien. Exciting as it was initially, that phase ended rather abruptly when I busted my knee, reenacting the scene from
Striptease
where Rumer Willis walks out on stage in the middle of her mom’s routine, resulting in a tit-heavy meltdown as Demi realizes the negative impact her lifestyle is having on her family and her soul. (Don’t worry: I always made Jason play the kid.)

Knowing full well where my overzealous nature could lead, I tried hard to stay rational as I sped into the parking lot of my local sex store.

My heart started racing the moment I got out of the car. No matter what your age, a sex shop has this uncanny ability to make you feel like you are about to get busted for every depraved thing you’ve ever done. Holding my sunglasses tightly between my teeth, I walked through the front door.

Before this, I went to sex shops only to buy slutty Halloween costumes, and batteries for my mom’s vibrators. This visit, however, was of a completely different nature. With determination, I walked past the sexy schoolgirl outfits and Pocket Rockets disguised as lipsticks and marched directly to the hard-core shit. I was browsing through the bondage aisle, filling my arms with weapons of mass seduction, when I came upon something called a “spreader bar.” Looking at the price, I gasped.

Three hundred bucks? I have a whole dungeon to decorate!

“Excuse me,” a voice chimed in behind me.

Guiltily, I turned around.

It had to be so obvious from the looks of me (nonthreatening person over thirty donning a wedding ring) and the contents of my arms (bondage fuck fest) that I was reading
Fifty Shades
.

“Would you like a basket?” a salesgirl asked, like we were at fucking Whole Foods. I hate how calm sex shop workers are, as if sex is the easiest thing to talk about in the world. I’m sure during training they get coached into talking about clits the way some people talk about coffeepots, but the rest of society doesn’t operate that way. And I just find it a little stressful to have someone looking at me with a straight face while asking questions like, “Have you ever tried an ass egg?”

By the end of my supermarket sweep, I’d settled on one ass egg, forgiving nipple clamps, some reasonably priced cock rings, two giant vibrators, a latex bodysuit, and a blindfold. On my way to the register, I noticed some small golden orbs sitting in a case near the glass dildos. They were Ben Wa balls. In
Fifty Shades,
James writes about similar balls in a steamy scene where Christian forces Ana to insert them into her vagina and wear them to a black tie event.

Fun!
I thought, grabbing a pair and tossing them into my basket of vices. The heavily pierced girl behind the register nodded approvingly at my choices, tested the batteries in my new Rabbit Pearl, instructed me on how to clean my gimp suit, and then rung me up.

Back in my car, I was already plotting how I was going to ravage my husband. I felt like Wile E. Coyote mapping out a plan to capture the Road Runner and then ass-egg him to death.

When I got home, I did what I always do when I’ve gone shopping. I ripped the tags off everything and put it all on. I danced around the room in pain, trying to acclimate to the teeth on my new nipple clamps, then busted out the strange gold balls and shoved them inside my vagina. They were cold and heavy and kind of made me feel like I had two super-plus blood-drenched tampons in at once. Feeling both pride and shame that my vagina was wide enough to fit both balls, I tiptoed around the room, waiting to have some sort of Sting–Trudi Styler tantric cum explosion.

Just then, I heard the garage door opening. My husband was home! And was he in for a treat!

I threw a pair of boxers and a T-shirt over my bondage gear and ran downstairs to greet him, like any good dominant/submissive wife with a surprise might do.

The front door swung open, and I was suddenly face-to-face with my husband and an uptight, Aryan Youth–looking business acquaintance named Judd who kind of reminded me of the villain from the
The Karate Kid
.

Perhaps it was the surprise of seeing a near-stranger when I had XXX-rated plans in mind; perhaps it was my bouncing down the stairs; or perhaps my vagina was just that fucking big, but at that moment, my body decided it was time to purge the balls. I stood there, speechless, watching my pussy turn into a gumball machine.

Bap … Bap.

The metal balls hit the hardwood and rolled into the kitchen, only to find my innocent housekeeper, Lita.

“What the fuck!” Judd screamed like he’d just witnessed a home birth.

My husband’s jaw hung open in horror as I charged after the orbs and ducked into the kitchen.

“Feels like maybe this is a bad time…,” I could hear Judd whisper to Jason as I scampered after my miscarried Ben Wa babies.

By the time I got to the kitchen, Lita already had one in hand.

“Oh! You can just throw those in the sink,” I said, trying to play it cool.

I shamefully slunk back upstairs and waited for my husband to come ask me what the fuck was going on. I didn’t see him until three hours later, when he eventually walked in, holding the balls.

“Lita was under the impression that these could go in the dishwasher,” he said, smiling at me the way people smile at dogs and old people.

“Are you mad?”

“Mmm. No,” he said.

“Can I whip you?”

“No.”

Then he got in bed next to me and pulled me close. “You know what’s hotter than you dressed as a scary dominatrix doing vagina parlor tricks for my friends?”

“What?” I asked coyly.

“Everything,” he sighed, and then kissed me on the mouth intensely.

*   *   *

It was another phase,
come and gone, and yet again, my husband managed to survive. The Ben Wa balls went the way of the stripper pole (to my maid’s daughters), and our sex life returned to once a week. Sure, there’s the rare night that I turn over in bed and wish I were staring at anybody else. But I think that’s normal. And let’s be real, would anybody else be able to shit my initials? I think not.

11.

Nobody Wants to Be Your Fucking Bridesmaid

Well, some girls do.
But those are also usually the friends you keep around because they aren’t as cute as you, have no significant other, and would brush your hair with their teeth if asked. I am not that girl, especially for my sister. It’s not just because I’m cuter than her, it’s also because I don’t plan events.

When women ask you to be in their weddings, they might as well just say, “give me a check for a thousand dollars and all your attention for the next six months.” But they don’t. Instead, they try to spin it, making you feel like a giant honor is being bestowed upon you. When the reality is, it’s all leading up to you looking pregnant on Facebook in a fucked-up empire waist dress from J.Crew bridal.

My sister, Amanda, asked me to be her maid of honor less because she wanted to and more because she’d been mine. She knew getting into it that I wasn’t good with booking reservations, sending invitations, or talking numbers with anyone who knows how to add or subtract. But she asked anyway, probably because she knew that if anything went awry, she could fall back on her girlfriend Sheri.

Sheri was the girl who’d give Amanda a cat bath with her tongue if called upon to do so. They met five years prior, when they were both assistants at a modeling agency, and became fast friends, bonding primarily over the fact that they both loved Amanda. If Amanda needed a ride to the airport, Sheri was there. If Amanda needed someone to watch her do jury duty, Sheri took three days off work. I always appreciated Sheri’s involvement because it often meant less work for me.

Unlike me, Amanda was a traditional bride. She insisted on having an engagement party, a bridal shower, a bachelorette party, pre-wedding drinks, and a post-wedding brunch.

“Sheri is eager to get started on either my bachelorette or my shower. Which one do you want to throw?” Amanda asked one night over the phone.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in throwing either. Both seemed like a clusterfuck to plan, and both events meant being on group e-mails with Sheri. An e-mail exchange with Sheri is like Chinese handcuffs, or maybe a Turkish prison: Once you are in, you are never getting out. She goes off topic and has to have the last word, even if that last word is just a series of emojis winking at each other. If I didn’t choose, however, I’d find myself in a worse position: getting phone calls from Sheri. In haste, I opted for the bachelorette because I didn’t really know what a bridal shower was, and at a bachelorette I could at least get away with pinning a dick on Sheri.

*   *   *

A month went by,
and I did little more than buy edible penis necklaces and a heat lamp for the backyard. Then one night I got a crazed text from Sheri.

“Change of plans. I’ve convinced Amanda to do Vegas for the bachelorette! I’ll hook you up with rooms at Planet Hollywood!”

Before I could respond, a flash mob of emojis exploded on my screen. What I assume was supposed to be five girls flying to Las Vegas looked instead like three Arabs and two tap-dancing twins crashing into the World Trade Center.

“I have work events every weekend this month, so I won’t be able to go, but you guys are gonna rock it out! Woot, Woot,” she wrote, followed by a champagne flute ejaculating onto a girl who just stabbed herself in the head with a pair of scissors.

After some consideration, I decided Vegas wouldn’t be any less annoying than throwing a bash at my house. I was going to be stuck entertaining my sister regardless. In Vegas, I could escape to my own hotel room when she started referring to her vagina as her “hoo-hoo.”

Since I was hosting, I insisted we invite my best friend, Simone, and my sister-in-law Veronica. Always looking for any excuse to pour herself into a bandage dress, Simone jumped at the opportunity. Veronica wasn’t planning on flying to L.A. to hang out with “a bunch of uptight cunts whose parents paid for college,” but as soon as she heard I was taking the cunts to Vegas, she too was in.

Amanda asked six girls, three of whom accepted: Ruthie, Roxy, and Garabaldo.

Garabaldo obviously wasn’t her first name; it was Maxine, but she went by Garabaldo because people refused to call her anything else. Garabaldo was short and voluptuous with a huge personality that was eclipsed only by the size of her earrings. She liked doing things in excess—drinking, eating, talking. She was Amanda’s freshman-year dormmate at Cal State Long Beach and the type of hot mess who instead of sleeping in her bed usually just passed out on a pile of hangers and shoes.

Ruthie and Roxy were sisters. They lived across the hall from Amanda and me when we tried living together for a year. They were homebodies, partly because their third roommate was a three-foot-tall homegrown cannabis plant. Ruthie was blond like Amanda, with big Texas hair made bigger by Jessica Simpson clip-ins. Roxy was five years older. She was the type of girl you’d expect to meet on a beach in Thailand, carving Jerry Garcia’s face into a log of driftwood.