Last night we’d made a verbal list prioritizing next steps. Number one was going back over to my place and looting it, May’s choice of words, and the three of us went back over through our backyards.

  The Grants had been the “young couple” that moved in next door to my parents while I’d been moved out, and they’d been on good relations with them until the end. Mother and Mrs. Grant had liked to talk to each other across a waist-high fence while they worked on their narrow yards, even joined the yards with a garden gate so they could go back and forth to each other’s back doors easily.

  When the Grants had decamped to Florida and the Seevers had moved in, I’d expected them to replace the fence with a higher, sight-blocking fence with no gate. That hadn’t happened; May had loved the fence and especially the gate. Their first year here I hadn’t done much yardwork (I’d paid a service), but after my recovery part of my health routine was to fire the service and do it myself and this last summer May and I had talked a lot across that fence while I trimmed hedges and she did things with her flowers.

  “Papers,” May said as we stepped into my study. “All your important papers, stuff you’d take with you or store if you were really leaving for an extended stay somewhere else and planned to rent the place. Anything else you want to take, too.”

  That included my desktop, my laptop, my family photo-albums, my watches though I couldn’t imagine wearing any of them again, several sets of clothes, shoes, my phone charger. . . and I hadn’t gone anywhere in awhile and was stumped by all the personal keepsakes I thought of as uniquely mine that my parents and I had accumulated.

  In the process of packing toiletries I’d never use, I cleaned the tub, which smelled of pee and looked like Sasquatch had shed in it. As I dithered back downstairs, May put Steph down on a blanket in the living room and went back to return with a bunch of office boxes, the kind you’d store files in. “All the personal stuff,” she said. “That includes books you consider heirlooms. If this takes more than a day, it’ll take more than a day. Hand off to me and I’ll pack.”

  We fell into a system, me handing her items and her packing them in the boxes or setting them aside to box when we came back with packing material to protect them. We worked in silence (we were silent, Steph was not) for a couple of hours until May stood up and dusted her hands off.

  “Break time, do you have any iced tea?”

  I did, pulling the pitcher out of the fridge and topping our tall glasses with ice cubes. She sat at my counter with Steph in her basket beside her. “I’m going to go back and feed her, you can continue to pile stuff up if you want. Um.” She looked around the kitchen.

  “Um? I don’t think I need anything from here. Well, maybe my chocolate.” Chocolate in all its luxury forms was my one, rationed, sugary indulgence now.

  “Good idea, there’s room in the pantry. But that’s not— Um.”

  Now I was a little worried; May was never at a loss for words. For a single, stupid second, I thought that maybe she’d suddenly realized how much this all was, that she’d changed her mind about The Plan and didn’t know how to tell me. Which was dumb, dumb, dumb, and knowing that didn’t stop the flutter of panic; I couldn’t think of anything else that would stump her.

  “Yeah,” she finally said, looking me in the eye. “Yeah. Carl and I heard you last night.”

  The words didn’t make sense until they did. “You—what?”

  May, May, was blushing furiously. “I have nanny cams for Steph and I put one in your room last night with the camera disabled, I thought you might have a nightmare up there with, well with everything, and the sound insulation is good and I wouldn’t hear you and I didn’t hide it I just forgot to tell you about it.”

  “A nanny cam?” I repeated back.

  She nodded. “Set for noise alert for if you, you know, woke up screaming or something. The alert went off just as we were getting to sleep and it took us a moment to realize what we were listening to.”

  “Oh my God.” My burning face had to be fire-engine red. I had to have blushed more in the last couple of days than I ever had in my life. “I didn’t scream.”

  “Lots of girls don’t, outside of pornos. But you— That was— You came, didn’t you? Because honey, if you didn’t, then going all the way might kill you.”

  I buried my face in my hands. She’d—they’d—heard me gasping and crying and making whatever sounds I didn’t remember. Reaching up and pulling my hands down, she looked at me wide eyed.

  “I am so, so sorry. If it helps, I covered Carl’s ears as soon as I realized what we were hearing.”

  “Oh, my God! Carl!” And I was laughing. Hysterically. May’s mouth opened and closed with no words, making me laugh harder.

  Tears running down my face, I finally forced myself to stop. And almost started again; the look on May’s face was priceless. “Hold on,” I said, and got a tissue to wipe my eyes and nose. “God that felt good.” My DefCon One blush had receded but I was probably just as red now from laughter. “How could Carl even look at me this morning?”

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  May snickered. “He did leave a little fast even for him. But.” She sobered. “As mortified as I am to have spied on you like that—I’m glad? Not that we heard it, but that you did it?” Reaching over she grabbed my hand. “Sweetheart, I’m so proud of you. I thought—the way you were acting yesterday I thought it would be forever before you were comfortable enough with yourself for that. And that would’ve been fine.”

  “I wasn’t comfortable at all,” I admitted. “It was scary almost every moment.”

  She looked confused. “Then why did you do it?”

  “I—” Suddenly I was the one fumbling verbally. “I got impatient with myself, I guess? I think— It was like I’d developed a sudden absolute phobia against even thinking about . . . stuff. And practically having panic attacks over looking at myself or touching myself in places just to get clean.”

  “Hun, it’s perfectly natural that after what’s happened you’d feel that way.”

  “Yes, but it’s a thing that isn’t going to go away on its own—sooner or later I’ll have to push through it.” I’d learned that much over the last year, at least. “So I did.” I took a long sip of my iced tea, searching for words. “I didn’t start out to . . . to go all the way? I just wanted to get over not being able to touch myself there.”

  I laughed. “You know, the whole saying ‘With age comes wisdom,’ is bullshit. Before you two moved in . . . I was as dumb at fifty-eight as I was at twenty-eight. My parents were long gone, I was used to being alone, I had a business to run, that was my life and that was all my life was ever going to be. With experience comes wisdom, and I just . . . avoided most of the life experiences I should have had.” I looked down at my hands. They were so small now, the books I’d been pulling and stacking earlier so big in them.

  “But I did learn a few things, especially this last year, and one of them is if you’re stuck with something that won’t fix unless you fix it, then you fix it. You don’t put it off, you don’t avoid it, if the only way out is through then you push through and deal with the consequences after.”

  “So you . . . pushed through.” The deep concern had bled from her voice and now she sounded just a bit amused. Sitting back, she sighed. “Okay, good. I do feel better about this now. It’s not something I’m sure should always be your go-to move, sometimes it’s best to take things slow, but okay. So.” A gleam came into her eye. “Spill. What did you do? How did it feel?”

  “I—what?”

  “How did you overcome being afraid of your own body enough to rub one out? Spill. We’re girls, we talk about everything!”

  I gaped like a fish. “. . . You want a blow by blow?”

  “You were soloing, no blowing going on. Yes! This is what we live for!”

  “To overshare?”

  “Mm-hm, it’s a female bonding thing and I’m not your mother which is the one excuse you could use!” She was bullshitting me, she had to be. She was also giving me beseeching puppy-dog eyes and that just wasn’t fair.

  “Well . . .” I squirmed. “I just started touching what I’d been afraid to touch. Starting upstairs. I didn’t— I didn’t focus on my nipples, that felt too weird. Just overall, you know? And when I started getting warm, I . . . went downstairs.”

  “What did you fantasize about?”

  “Nothing! I was just trying not to think at all, just focus on what I was feeling and getting used to it.”

  She eyed me skeptically. “And just that got you there all by itself? When you hit your clit?”

  I shuddered slightly. “Actually, I didn’t like that part. All around it was nice, but it was almost painful. I—” I was blushing again, probably fire engine red. “I came with my finger inside me. When I was really . . . worked up, I touched something there and boom.”

  “Boom. And you were freaking out the entire time?”

  “Most of it! I, I really got scared with what I was feeling down there, but by that time I was just so worked up, I guess?” It had felt so different a big part of me had wanted to pull the ejection cord and bail, but the other part . . . yeah.

  She studied me for a long moment and then patted my hand. “Okay. So, for the record, wow. Since you were laughing at the end, I can only conclude your feelings afterwards were nothing but positive? Also, you’re a very lucky girl—I didn’t have my first real bone-shaking orgasm until college.”

  “Really? How? With who?” She’d introduced Carl as her husband and high school sweetheart, I’d always assumed there’d never been anyone else but it had taken him that long?

  “Carl,” she confirmed, giggling. “My upbringing didn’t leave me very experimental, and I’d thought I knew what I was doing but Carl studied. And set out determined to conquer.” Another giggle. “Boy, did he ever. Did you know that repeated orgasms can make you go blind? Mm-hm.”

  She wasn’t serious. She was serious. “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Or maybe just one big orgasm with a long edging run-up, that’s happened too. We panicked so hard when it first happened to me, but it’s only temporary, obviously. I researched the science after that first time—Carl wouldn’t have touched me again if I hadn’t figured it out it was harmless.”

  “Going temporarily blind is harmless?”

  She laughed at my bogglement. “You’d think not, but yup. See, orgasms release adrenaline and noradrenaline in your blood. That causes your blood vessels to constrict, which ordinarily isn’t a problem but some people's blood vessels are more sensitive than others and enough of those chemical signals will temporarily constrict them more. It’s called ‘vasospasm.’”

  “And that—”

  “Yeah, and that temporarily restricts blood flow to the capillaries in my eyes, causing temporary blindness. Just one or two minutes. It’s like when you sit or lie on your leg wrong and it falls asleep, but for your eyes. So yeah, my darling husband can fuck me blind. He tried last night. You inspired him.”

  “No.” I was beyond fire engine red, now.

  “Yes. I’m sorry—” And she actually looked apologetic. “—it was so wrong for us to hear you, but you inspired me, too. It’s not at all true that the male sex drive is stronger. We’re slower starters, but if something gets us going . . . I was going to have to take care of myself after your performance if Carl didn’t do it for me.” She hummed. “Well, he did it for me. I think he wanted to make me laugh like you did.”

  Still burning with mortification, I found myself giggling back. “Did you?”

  “Only because he was being so ridiculous about it. He still took the win. And see?” She laughed. “Bonding. How does it feel?”

  “Uh, mortifying? And I sort of feel like the whole last couple of days has been bonding. I mean—”

  A shadow passed over her face but she smiled. “I know what you mean, hun,” she said softly. “You almost— But I feel the same. And now, I hope you’ll be just as forgiving again but I did something else I didn’t tell you about. I’m really glad that you had your experience last night, it’s going to make this so much easier.”

  “. . . What’s going to be easier?”

  “I made an emergency gynecologist appointment for you today. It’s just before lunch, we need to leave in an hour.”