A Girl Like You by vinnie Kinsella (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📕

pointing at the water where the Barbie doll had floated back up to the surface, a glob of pink frosting in her blonde hair.

We still joked about the capsized cake.

“So, Cameron, you’re a psych major?”

“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly taking his eyes off Madd to look at me. “Always wanted to be a school counselor.”

“That’s really great. So, you live on campus?”

“Nope, have a little apartment off Beacon Street.”

“It’s a really tiny place,” Maddy said. “He calls it a safe house because it’s so small and out of the way.”

“You can barely find it,” Cameron said. “I had to GPS it for a week just to get there.”

“Cam has a chocolate lab named Ruby. He calls her ‘Rhubarb.’”

“Cute.”

“Cam also loves to cook.”

“Grew up working in a Greek restaurant,” he said. “I’ll cook for you guys sometime. You like hummus?”

I smiled. The last time I’d had Greek food was the lunch special with Michael. Michael, in whom I’d apparently shown too much interest. The company wasn’t great, but the food was good. What had he said he needed to do to get away from me? Buy flowers? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was seeing my daughter and her very charming boyfriend holding hands at my kitchen table.

37

Ian was in Keene camping with his father, Madison was with Cameron, and I was incredibly bored. After giving it some thought, I realized I’d gone more than six months without sex. It was true; I’d set a personal record.

Being horny was much different from being lonely. OK, yes, I was both, but somehow the urge for sex had taken precedence. I did what I always did when I was faced with a sexual predicament: I texted Eddie.

“I told you to invest in a good vibrator weeks ago,” he replied.

“I wasn’t that worked up then. But I am now.”

Truth be told, I didn’t really want to get it on with a rubber-coated dildo, most of them purple for some reason. Nor did I want to straddle one suction-cupped to a chair.

“I don’t want one of those fake penis things,” I texted.

“There are hundreds of sex toys out there. Google it.”

I spent the next two hours scrolling through catalogs of every toy imaginable, in every size, shape and color (still predominately purple).

I wasn’t crazy about the double dildo, butt plugs with racoon tails, or floggers for dominant women to use on submissive men. I’d always known if there was going to be a dom/sub episode in the bedroom, I’d be the one submitting. That had been my fantasy for years, but I’d never met anyone who wanted to play that particular game.

I became frustratingly aroused looking at pictures of nipple clamps with chains like necklaces on them to tug on and keep the nipples hard. Equally interesting was a series of harnesses and buckles designed to hold a woman down, face up or face down. I’d never seen a leg-spreader but found it very intriguing.

But I was flying solo. No leg-spreader for me. The wide array of vibrators surprised me, from the palm-sized butterflies to little pulsing ones to put over your finger, to the ones with attached dildos.

Then I found the toy that would change my life: the wand.

The one I liked best was an innocent-looking white one that ran on batteries, with a fat head to hold against any area you wanted. It had ten different speeds and a heating element.

I placed my wand order and on impulse added a lightweight whip made with soft suede strips that didn’t look like it would actually hurt. It cost a ridiculous amount of money to expedite shipping, but I didn’t care. I was in dire need of an orgasm, and I was tired of rubbing them out by hand several times a week.

My fantasies about submitting didn’t include being hurt or left with strap marks all over my ass and thighs. But I had a particular fantasy about a man instructing me to undress, then inspecting me, then telling me to rub one out for him. The right man hadn’t come along, so that fantasy stayed only in my mind. A dom/sub relationship didn’t exactly fit in a long-term vanilla relationship.

I switched my cell screen to Tumblr, a pictorial site that let me choose how hardcore I wanted to go. I liked the images of public sex: a woman bent over on a hiking trail being taken from behind; a sex session in the back seat of a car, with the man pulling the woman’s long ponytail. Another, which appealed to me greatly, was a woman lying on a coffee table with her legs open, and a man in a business suit on the couch, watching. Just looking at her.

When the wand arrived two days later, I locked myself in the bedroom to try all ten speeds. I quickly learned the continuous pressure setting was too much, the feather-light tickle was too light, but the pulsating speed, with its teasing up/down pulses, was just right. And the heat button helped enormously. Best of all, the wand was soundless. It quickly became my best friend several times a week, bringing on wrenching orgasms that made my entire body quake.

I was satisfied, for the time being.

Would there be lots of sex in my future? There’d better be.

38

“Let’s just meet and get it over with,” messaged BMyBuddy, whose photo showed a young-looking man in a black jacket and baseball cap with a NASCAR emblem.

I had to give Buddy credit for straightforwardness. It was a rainy Thursday night with nothing going on. Ian was bent over his books in the way I always told him would result in a weak neck.

“Sure,” I messaged Buddy back. “Why not?”

We picked a bar right next to a mall with a brightly lit parking lot, so I knew I was safe. We decided on 8:00. I wrestled with the choice of mummy leggings or an army-green skirt, but the mummies glowed in the dark and might be too much for a dark