With that I hit the ‘log out’ button and rose from my chair with a yawn. I wasn’t lying when I told Faelyng that I was ready to go to bed. It had been a very trying day, and I looked forward to slipping beneath my soft sheets, and heavy comforter.

I shuffled down the hall and fumbled for the light switch on my bedside table. I tried to keep a clean house, but I could never get a handle on clutter. There were always books on my kitchen table, notes and receipts on my nightstand, and an extra sweater strewn across at least one piece of furniture. My bedroom was no different, but I always enjoyed coming back to it.

If someone didn’t know anything about me, being in my room for five minutes would give one a fairly thorough introduction. Almost every available piece of wall had been covered with posters and wall scrolls of things I liked: Star Trek, anime, Disney… After Bill had left I placed posters of Marvel’s Wolverine and Marv from Sin City where they were easily visible from my bed.

A shelf above my headboard was lined with toys, dolls and action figures of my favorite fictional characters. I shared about a quarter of my bed space with roughly a dozen stuffed animals, and plenty more were scattered on the floor near my bed. Messy, chaotic, and childish I was just as proud of this room as I was my mermaid lavatory.

I laid my robe across a chair in the corner, already piled with a week’s worth of clothing, and shivered as I struggled to put on my gray flannel pajama pants, and blue tank top. I graciously dove into my bed immediately wrapping myself in the sheets. I was grateful that I’d decided to wash them yesterday, as they still smelled fresh. Today had been a disappointment, but a good night’s sleep in clean bedding can do wonders for one’s morale.

Although I was physically drained, my mind was still very much awake. To unwind I decided to mentally retreat to my latest bodice-ripper novel, imperiously titled “The Viking Captive.” The plot was predictably sophomoric: a Celtic girl kidnapped from her home in Ireland, by raiding Vikings, meant to be the personal thrall of a Viking chieftain. The Celtic girl having no family, no home and no money, reluctantly submits to her new life of servitude. The Chieftain is firm, and overbearing, but also kind and generous, to her. In time they develop feelings for one another, and eventually the Chieftain lures her to his bed furs. The novel was full of melodrama, dominant men, chains, a little S&M, and lots of sex. I would call it a guilty pleasure, if I felt guilty about it at all.

Several pages into the next chapter, and I had reached a particularly steamy scene. The leading female of the story was perpetually kept in chains and shackles, which the leading male often took advantage of at dramatic intervals. Like the heroines of so many romance novels the young woman of this story had been reluctant to accept the leading male’s affections – a common trope that I usually overlooked as nothing more than a plot device.

The chieftain held the maiden’s shackled wrists high above her head with one hand, and used the other to pull her delicate frame to him. She tried to pull away, but his grip was too strong, and his scent too enticing. His fingertips made her flesh tingle as he untied the laces of the dress at her backside, and stroked the gentle curve of her spine. Between them their breath mingled, hot and labored, as something stiff poked between her thighs. The maiden gasped, but the chieftain silenced her with his own lips.

I dropped the book, pages down, next to me on the bed. My own breath quickening as my right hand crept beneath the sheets and under my pajama pants. My fingers crawled downward inside my soft cotton panties, and found the swollen bead of flesh there. I moaned softly as I stroked it, my center already moist and welcoming.

Writhing beneath the sheets at the pleasure of my touch, I shamelessly imagined my own chieftain warrior; Viking, orc or otherwise, all muscle, hair and calloused hands stroking my curves. A firm chest heaving above me, dripping with sweat, and skin always hot to the touch. I imagined him poised between my legs, stroking my thighs with his thick fingers, and his lips following after. Wiry facial hair would tickle my tender flesh, and make me gasp as his tongue gently lapped at the ‘v’ of my thighs. He would continue to suck on the hardened pearl at the apex of my sex bringing me closer, and closer, to that eagerly sought state of bliss. Just before I would burst into mindless climax, he would kneel between my legs, and position his member at my hungry slit.

Frantically, I rummaged through my bedside drawer for a not-so-little something I’d purchased as a break-up present for myself. Costing half as much as my rent, its value to me was worth twice that. Naturally it seemed to be stuck somewhere in the back of the drawer, and I had to shuffle some debris around to jostle it free. There appeared to be a thick piece of paper stuck somewhere in the drawer, jamming it so that I couldn’t open it all the way. My fingers made contact with the offending paper, and with a quick yank I managed to pull it out. The drawer flew open in response, spilling old bills, hair ties, several expired condoms and other objects onto the floor.

I frowned at the item in my hand. It was a rumpled picture of Bill and me from when we first started dating. Of course. It had been taken at an amusement park; I was 10 lbs lighter, wearing denim shorts and a big smile. Bill had on his signature “Han Shot First” t-shirt. I sighed, and let the photo fall to the floor as I realized how well that phrase summed up mine and Bill’s sex life. My beloved toy was now free, but I closed the beside drawer deciding I was no longer in the mood.

Most days I didn’t think about Bill anymore. A trained habit –I forced myself not to think about him, and typically my mind obeyed. Did I dare to let my mind wander back to our relationship again? If the evening’s events were any indication it seemed I was doomed to do just that. It was usually on cold, miserable nights like this that I wanted to think of Bill the least, but usually ended up thinking of him the most. 

I’d first met Bill when he decided to join my friend’s Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It was not love at first sight; I’ve always been too oblivious for that and frankly so was Bill. Bill was a computer programmer, a coworker of our mutual friend Joel, who ran our D&D game. He told cynical jokes that appealed to the pretentious attitude characteristic of my mid-20s. I understood the nerdcore references printed in white comic sans print on the black t-shirts he always wore. He drove a car that was less than five-years-old, and always seemed to have enough money to buy the new video game he wanted.

Bill wasn’t handsome by typical standards. Stocky in build, a little “fluffy” around the mid-section, with a wiry but neatly trimmed reddish-brown beard lining his round face, he could have been the poster child for the guys in my college anime and gaming clubs. None of these features were off-putting to me; I never cared for “pretty” boys, preferring a more rugged, less-polished look in the men I dated, but he was nevertheless unremarkable to me on first glance. Bill was just a guy in my D&D group, who occasionally bought the group pizza, rarely talked about himself, but played a very entertaining dwarf bard named Modin.

Meanwhile I was a 24-year-old girl, recently displaced from her bustling college town back to her sleepy hometown. Half-orphaned only a few months prior, I was trying desperately to re-establish an existence that excluded one parent, and included the decision to move back to a place I’d sworn I was done with after high school. I did, however, have a decent paying job at a bank and had just moved into an apartment that was much bigger than the one I’d had in my college town, and didn’t require roommates to make rent. On the weekends I could afford to shop at the farmer’s market; furnish my apartment with furniture I actually purchased at Big Lots, rather than snatching mismatched, unwanted items from the curb, and still had time to play a bad-ass half-orc barbarian with my friends on Saturday nights. All things considered I felt like I was actually achieving “grown-up” status.

I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but I was low-key looking for a relationship. Low-key, because admitting we’re seeking a relationship almost assures that we won’t find one. Furthermore I was interested in what I deemed at the time as an “adult” relationship, but if someone were to have asked me what that looked like I wouldn’t have had much of an answer. At the time, however, simply being not-a-college-relationship had a considerable amount of significance to me, and I guess I’d determined that I’d know what an adult one was when I saw it.

It was in the middle of a particularly hot June that I decided Bill was a reasonable candidate. Joel’s air conditioning wasn’t working, and though he’d claimed to have contacted the landlord about it earlier in the week, having known Joel since high school I suspected otherwise. Joel was a good friend, hard-working in his field and a terrific Game Master, but not the most motivated individual.

Thus the party members opened some windows, turned on a few fans, and drank lemon-flavored wheat beer for the evening. I was grateful that I’d decided to wear a thin cotton top that day, meanwhile Ashley (Joel’s girlfriend) looked like she was melting in her black, David Bowie t-shirt.

“We could just relocate to my place,” Ashley suggested, fanning herself with her character sheet.

“Yeah, but then we’d never get everyone focused again,” Joel replied behind his Game Master screen.

Ashley groaned. “Fine… but if it’s not fixed by next week, we’re having it at my place.”

“Maybe you should just wear lighter colors,” Joel muttered.

“As if,” Ashley snorted. “You know I only wear black.”

“We’re not turning the campaign into a wet t-shirt contest, Joel,” I said.

Joel feigned a look of offense over his GM screen. “What? Me? Perish the thought!”

His melodrama was interrupted by Ashley chucking a paper wad at him.

“C’mon GM, hurry up and start trying to kill us off before I actually die of heat stroke,” Ashley muttered, grinning at him. Joel returned the look

“Yeah let’s get this moving along. I can only handle so much more of this heat…” Bill muttered running a palm through his sweaty hair. He then opened the top button of his light blue polo that afternoon to reveal a surprisingly thick patch of chest hair, the same color as his beard, beneath.

For once I was grateful for Joe’s negligence.

I must admit it hadn’t been particularly difficult to get Bill into bed with me, and I was not smooth by any means. My attempt at showing romantic interest involved me awkwardly asking him out for coffee after D&D that night, while nervously wringing my hands behind my back. He blinked at me a few times, meanwhile Ashley cast surprised, but amused, looks at me over Bill’s shoulder.

“Can it be iced?” He asked.

I choked down a laugh and agreed that it could be iced coffee. Knowing that Bill was just as awkward as I was eased my nerves, as we sat there discussing the game, the new Star Trek franchise, and how Nintendo Wii had impacted the casual gaming market. Enough that I dared to reach across the table at Starbucks and lightly brush his knuckles with my right pinkie finger. I did this while looking at him over the rim of my glasses, and through lazy eyelashes, and telling him how much I loved the way he roleplayed his dwarf bard…

Two weeks later I was moaning into that chest hair.