Naked by Megan Hart Page B

some?”
    “Umm…yes?”
    “If I broke up with my boyfriend, you’d take me out dancing, right?”
    “Of course.”
    “I love fabric. I have a fabric addiction. I crave buying yards and yards and bolts and bolts of material.” Sarah pointed at the pile on my table, then gestured around the room. “All of this? Is from two boxes in my storage unit. Do you want to know how many boxes I have?”
    “Okay. I get it!” I laughed, but she wouldn’t let me go.
    “Guess, Liv!” she demanded.
    “Ten.”
    “Thirty,” Sarah confessed in a whisper, as if she was ashamed, though her grin gave her away as anything but. “Thirty boxes of fabric, Olivia. Take this off my hands. Please. So, help a sistah out here.”
    The faux “urban” accent had grated my ears coming from Patrick’s neighbor, Nadia, but from Sarah it made me laugh. “Fine. But I owe you.”
    “Of course you do,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t worry, I’ll make you pay.”
    Together we sorted the fabric into piles. She’d picked all complementary fabrics, even colors I’d never have thought would go together, but did. Purples with reds and rusts, browns and blacks together. She lined up the fabrics and pulled out a single box of nails.
    “Huh,” she said, looking at the box. “These won’t do much good without a hammer.”
    “Or the furring strips.”
    She looked around the room. “And a ladder. And hey, don’tyou have any big, strong men to help with this? Especially ones who’d be happy to work shirtless?”
    I sighed. “Yeah. Right. Believe me, if I had a big, strong, shirtless man in my life who liked to use tools, don’t you think I’m bringing him around you. I’m keeping him for myself.”
    “Selfish bitch.” Sarah chuckled and hopped up on the table to swing her legs back and forth.
    “I’ll see what I have in the back room as far as tools go. I have a ladder there, too.”
    “Make sure you don’t have a hunky handyman back there,” she called after me as I headed to the rear space I used as a storage place, dressing room and small kitchen.
    I flipped the switch on the wall, which turned on an old standing lamp I’d put in the corner. I needed to replace the overhead fixture. The small circle of light from the lamp wasn’t enough to really see what was in all the boxes, some of which I hadn’t even opened since moving in. I knew what was in most of them. A few contained untold mysteries, probably not of the Orient, but you never knew. I was pretty sure I’d stashed a toolbox someplace on one of the shelves.
    After a couple moments scrambling, I found a box of tools, but not of the hammer and screwdriver variety. I unsnapped the locks and lifted the hinged, plastic lid. From the other room I heard the sound of Sarah’s phone and low-pitched laughter.
    Inside the box lay a huge, flesh-colored cock, complete with balls and a handy-dandy suction cup to keep it secured to a table or wall. Beneath it in other compartments were all sorts of sex gadgets—a butt plug still in its original package, boxes of novelty condoms in flavors and shapes, samplepackets of lube with names like Slippery Nipplez and Cherry Popper.
    This box had been a bridal shower gift to me from a group of college friends. It had gone with me from my dad’s house to my first apartment, the one I’d meant to share with Patrick but had ended up living in alone. And now, somehow, it had found its way with a bunch of my other crap to the storage room in my studio.
    I looked at it for a while. It had been a joke when I got it, and had become more of a joke later, though I’ll admit it had taken me a long time to see it as funny. I’d put it away when I couldn’t bear to see it, not because of the contents but because of what the gift had been meant to celebrate.
    I ran a finger along the monstrous dong and shook my head, laughing. Something like this was too funny to be kept locked away. And after all this time, if I couldn’t break out the huge