All the Rage Read Online Free Page B

lips in tender places can be tender. Even in the rush and stroke of the moment, it’s only simple, only tenderness.
    Nothing else would be required.
    Something else would be an insult.
    I wanted to explain this, because it was important, but nobody I’d want to hear me was there to listen.
    I peered from behind the hoopla section until Mandy had pounced on another woman and led her away. They were chatting back and forth as I supposed they were intended to, taking advantage of a female-friendly emporium and an informative and unembarrassed ethos and I didn’t care about my position per se, but it still made me angry, nevertheless.
    Although this was a setting unsuitable for rage.
    And anger is always the second emotion, something else having always been there first.
    I wish I’d never learned that.
    Fear and pain being the most usual precursors.
    I would rather not notice the signals that prove I’ve been hurt or frightened.
    Nothing else for you today? – I couldn’t quite understand how Mandy had ambushed me again. I’d been heading to the penis area to abandon mine – it was not mine, but was burdensome enough by then to be taken personally – and I’d hoped to be free soon, but there she was – Ready? – the pert and relentlessly outgoing and dreadfully helpful Mandy. I’ll take you across to the cash desk. As if I was an invalid, imbecile, had never visited a shop.
    I could see the cash desk. I did not wish to visit the cash desk. I did very much wish to leave.
    The easiest option was simply to buy the thing.
    Buy it and get out.
    We’re a Canadian company. I don’t know why I had to be told this. We do things the Canadian Way. Inexplicable. The young man at the till – I am now of an age, apparently, when the men at tills in sex shops will seem perceptibly young – created some kind of merry personal tension with Mandy. His name badge announced John . Mandy and John eyed each other across me as if they were a remarkably blasé couple, looking forward to an evening of not sex.
    John – We like you to be happy – dextrously unpacked the penis and – I’ll pop these in – did indeed pop batteries – several – inside it before scooping one of my hands off the counter and setting the already-thrumming thing across my palm. Mandy smiled and took over – There we go – adjusted the settings up up up and down down down. This being of no use to me.
    I had not intended to stand in public holding an electric penis while it performed keenly, then gently, then sluggishly, then not.
    This way you know it works and is what you want.
    John repacked it – More batteries? – Mandy was meanwhile incredibly – in the sense of being unbelievably – pleased by this whole turn of events – We have a deal on batteries.
    I threw everything away once I got outside.
    And the entire palaver didn’t matter, was unimportant.
    I know.
    There may be no Canadian Way and perhaps they were only a couple with a kink working through it together in a ludicrously ideal location. Or they were making a joke of me. I don’t care about them.
    Except that they were more strangers intruding and I am tired of that.
    I am so tired. Contributing factor.
    I go to bed and hope for fifteen hours uninterrupted and they don’t arrive in the same way that there is no snow, or no fun in snow, or no miracle about it.
    I get so angry.
    Uninterrupted fury is a constant.
    It flickers near and far, but stays with me beneath superficial variations.
    Which is why this preposterous shop – this preposterous story about this preposterous shop, preposterous strangers – it’s why I hold them tight.
    I hold them until I sweat with holding and I can have faith there is something in my arms, against my arms.
    I hold on until I have confidence again in the truth of sweet and voluntary touch.
    Even in its absence I can believe.