Page 4 of All She Wants

Claire looked down at herself. She was wearing a cashmere sweater and dress slacks. Instead of winter-appropriate boots, she’d chosen her heeled boots because they made her legs look spectacular, a decision the snowdrift outside was about to punish. She looked prepared to host a charity luncheon, and somewhere beneath all that cashmere was a woman trying to summon the courage to buy a vibrator. She could leave. She could reverse out of this parking lot, drive back to the rental house, and spend Christmas Eve reading one of the spicy novels she’d packed. Nobody would know. Nobody would care.

But she would know. She would sit in that enormous house and know she had driven all the way here and couldn’t manage thirty feet of parking lot.

Claire turned off the engine. The silence was immediate and startling. Snow hissed against the windows. She gathered her coat, her bag, and whatever remained of her composure, opened the door, and stepped into the storm.

The cold hit her like a wall of needles. Snow drove sideways into her face, plastering her hair against her cheek and filling the collar of her coat before she could pull it closed. Her heels punched through two inches of fresh powder and found something treacherous underneath. She crossed the parking lot in a controlled scramble that bore no resemblance to the confident stride she deployed in courthouse hallways, grabbed the door handle, and pulled.

Warmth poured over her. So did the scent of a wood stove. Claire stepped inside, stamped the snow off her boots, and looked up.

The website had looked tasteful, even elegant, but Claire’s imagination had refused to believe it. She had still pictured blow-up dolls hanging from the ceiling, enormous rubber penises lined across the shelves, racks of cheap leather, and a bored cashier scrolling through her phone beneath garish pink lights.

This was not that.

The boutique was elegant and inviting, designed to make pleasure feel natural rather than embarrassing. Dark wooden shelves lined the walls. Only a few carefully chosen pieces occupied each one, giving Claire room to study them without feeling overwhelmed. Glass bottles filled with oils stood beside slim boxes in matte black and soft ivory. Candles sat in heavy ceramic vessels. Silk pouches in jewel tones were arranged across a table. A velvet armchair sat near a table stacked with actual books—spines she could read from here: titles about desire, anatomy, intimacy after loss. Small cards in brass holders offered discreet descriptions beside each display. Each was written in clean type, with no exclamation points and no ridiculous promises of fourteen simultaneous orgasms.

A wood stove glowed in the corner. Garlands of pine wound along the mantel, threaded with tiny gold lights that someone had clearly spent time arranging and then pretended were effortless. The floor was wide-plank pine, worn smooth and softened by a wool runner in deep burgundy. Everything felt considered and intentional, designed to make a woman exhale.

Claire exhaled. And then she heard footsteps, and a voice came from somewhere behind a display of frosted glass bottles.

“It’s terrible out there, right? I keep thinking it’ll let up, and it keeps proving me wrong.” A woman stepped into view, wiping her hands on a cloth she tucked into her back pocket as she came around the corner. “Come in, warm up. You look like you fought the entire mountain to get here.”

Claire’s first thought was clinical and orderly. This is the owner. The woman from the website. Her second thought was not clinical at all. The photographs had not adequately prepared her for how naturally beautiful the woman was.

Erin Zarelli was shorter than Claire had assumed, with thick dark curls that fell just past her shoulders and appeared to be conducting their own weather system, independent of the one raging outside. She wore black slacks that fit like they’d been built specifically for her curvy hips, gold hoops at her ears, and a collection of rings that caught the light when she moved her hands. Her hands moved as she spoke, pointing toward the wood stove and the coat rack before indicating the snow covering Claire’s shoulders. She showed no surprise at finding a customer on her doorstep so close to closing on Christmas Eve. If anything, she seemed pleased that Claire had made it safely inside.

Her face was open and expressive in a way Claire’s never was. She had brown eyes that broadcast warmth before she even said a word. One of her best features was a mouth that looked like it spent most of its time either laughing or preparing to. She had olive skin, a few lines around her eyes that suggested decades of enthusiastic facial expressions, and a blouse that revealed enough cleavage to distract Claire from the conversation.

Claire returned her attention to the woman’s face before the woman noticed.

“Here, let me take that.” Erin reached for Claire’s coat and gently helped her slip it off. She stood close enough that Claire caught a faint trace of expensive perfume. “The rack’s right by the stove, so it’ll dry fast. I’d offer you a towel, but you may need to stand beside the stove and rotate.”

Claire shrugged out of her coat, painfully conscious of the melting snow dripping from her hair onto her cashmere sweater. She could feel a cold rivulet sliding down the back of her neck and into her collar. Several strands of hair had escaped the low bun she’d pinned that morning, and she resisted the urge to reach up and assess the damage. She was certain she looked like she’d traded her SUV for Santa’s sleigh and taken the scenic route through the mountains.

“Thank you.” She handed over the coat and watched Erin carry it to the rack beside the wood stove, where she hung it as though snow-soaked strangers wandered in every day.

“Take your time looking around,” Erin said, turning back. “No rush. I’m just cleaning up from a holiday workshop we had earlier.” She nodded toward the far side of the store. “Holler if you need anything.”

Then she walked away. She didn’t hover, and she didn’t ask any embarrassing, pointed questions. There was no conspicuous display of products accompanied by a sales pitch. She simply returned to whatever she’d been doing and left Claire standing near the entrance with a clean line of snowmelt forming at her feet.

Claire exhaled and studied the shelves. No one hurried her toward a decision. She could choose any item in the shop. First, she had to admit what kind of pleasure she wanted, and she hadn’t prepared herself for that.

She moved toward the nearest shelf that held massage oils, each labeled with handwritten descriptions of scent and ingredients. She picked one up, turned it over, read the label twice without absorbing a single word, and set it back. She moved to the next display, which held beautiful candles in heavy ceramic vessels with names like ‘After Hours’ and ‘Slow Sunday’. She picked up Slow Sunday, smelled it, and pretended the act of smelling a candle required her deepest concentration.

From somewhere behind her, she heard Erin humming Christmas tunes.

Claire moved to a shelf of books. She read spines. Come As You Are. The Vagina Bible. Girl Sex 101. Then she drifted past a display of silk sleep masks and robes, paused at a table arranged with bath products, and found herself examining a jar of body scrub as though it might contain the answers to questions she hadn’t learned to ask yet.

She was stalling. She knew she was stalling. Worse, she suspected Erin knew she was stalling because Erin had almost certainly watched hundreds of women pick up the same candle and smell it for far longer than any candle required.

The actual products—the ones Claire had driven through a blizzard to buy—were arranged along the far wall in a glass-fronted cabinet and on several adjacent shelves. She could see them from here. Sleek shapes in matte silicone, tasteful packaging, nothing garish. They simply resembled small sculptures, almost. She would need to walk over there, and she would need to look at them as though she understood what she was looking at, and eventually she would need to ask a question, and the question would have to contain a word she had only managed to say to her steering wheel.

Claire set down the body scrub, straightened her sweater, and tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear. She headed toward the far wall. She made it approximately four steps before stopping in front of a shelf of massage candles and picking one up.

“Those are wonderful, actually.”

Claire nearly dropped it. Erin had materialized beside the adjacent display without making a sound, folding a length of velvet fabric over her arm.

“They melt into warm oil,” Erin continued, nodding at the candle in Claire’s hand. “You light them, let the wax pool, and pour it directly onto skin. The temperature’s designed to feel intense without burning.” She paused and smiled. “They’re one of our most popular gifts. Also, one of our most popular not-gifts.”