Satisfaction Guaranteed

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  “It’s all about the sexual excitation system,” Selena said. “You know how most people, when they’re stressed out, they don’t want to have sex? Kind of like if you’re camping in bear country and you hear something outside your tent, you lose your boner?”

  Not an experience Cade had had.

  Selena went on. “But me, if the bear’s outside the tent, I’m like, I can fuck this bear away! Anyway, after my ex and I broke up, I kind of fell apart. I was stressed, and I just went at it. One hookup at a time. Like I tried to cover all of Portland. It’s not that I made bad health choices. But everything else was a mess. I was crashing on Becket’s sofa. I didn’t have a job. Some of the people I slept with liked me.”

  That wasn’t hard to believe.

  “I hurt some people. They thought we were going somewhere, but I was just spinning in circles. So I made my vow. Get my shit one hundred percent together. Then think about dating and sex.” Selena cocked her head to the side. “I think that’s why Ruth willed me half her shop.” She gestured to the room. “This is getting my shit together.”

  If a bankrupt shop full of YOLO pillows, muffin trays, and dildos was getting her shit together, Selena was in trouble.

  “But I’m not saying there is anything wrong with having all the sex you want,” Selena added quickly, as though she might have offended Cade, as though Cade had lines of lovers going into her apartment and thought Selena was criticizing her lifestyle. “I just wasn’t enjoying it emotionally. Physically I’m dying for it.” Selena exhaled heavily. “When I break my vow, I’m going to explode.”

  The thought sent a startling pulse through Cade’s body.

  None of my business.

  Selena hopped off the counter.

  “This vibrator”—she picked a seashell-shaped thing off one of the shelves where it was hidden between two fluffy teddy bears—“is my go-to. Love it. What’s your fave?”

  Cade coughed.

  “Ah, shit!” Selena said. “I’m sorry! I’m used to talking about sex, and Ruth and I were always like, Have you tried this? Have you tried that? But I made you uncomfortable. That was inappropriate.”

  “Not at all. Totally cool.” Cade scanned the shelves for an answer that wasn’t I’m a twenty-nine-year-old almost-virgin and none of this stuff works for me. Luckily Cade sold art at a high-end gallery, and a lot of selling art was standing beside people, nodding thoughtfully, while they deliberated over their purchase.

  “That kind,” Cade said, nodding thoughtfully toward one shelf.

  Selena walked over to the shelf and picked up a vibrator that looked like a turtle mounted on top of a dolphin mounted on top of…a banana with jellyfish-like tentacles? And there were also straps like maybe you wore it underneath your clothes.

  “This one?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Say it with confidence.

  “Wow.” Selena raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know anyone who knows how to use that one. We’ve never sold one. You’re a real pro.”

  Chapter 9

  Selena stirred beneath her black satin sheets and the quilt Becket had sewn for her out of Crown Royal bags. Ruth would be calling soon to tell her to get up and come to the house and make coffee. Then they’d walk down to the shop, admiring the gardens they passed, Ruth nipping off sprigs of hydrangea and clematis to root and grow in her garden.

  Selena opened her eyes and remembered. She would never have coffee with Ruth. They would never walk to the store or peruse sex toy distributors’ websites. A lump formed in her throat. Ruth was gone. But Selena would be working with Cade. That was a consolation.

  Cade had looked confident leaning against the counter, her hands in her pockets. Nothing could go wrong with a woman like that in charge. And the fact that Cade was handsome and her blond hair looked like heavy silk and she had an adorable way of pursing her lips and widening her eyes when she was thinking…there was no harm in appreciating an attractive woman. Selena wasn’t going to do anything about it, and Cade wouldn’t be interested if Selena tried. There were beautiful accountants in New York with 401(k)s—whatever those were—who would lure Cade into their beds. But that made it safe to have a little, tiny crush. Just for fun.

  On the way to the store, Selena stopped at Out in Portland Coffee and bought two double caramel mochas from the rainbow-tattooed barista. She and Cade could start with chocolate and whipped cream. Then maybe they could talk about a sidewalk sale or some new class offerings. Then they could have lunch at the Thai place that served crickets. The crickets weren’t that good, but Selena had felt very worldly the two times she’d had them. Yes, I eat all the way to the bottom of the food chain to save the world. Cade would be impressed.

  When Selena arrived at Satisfaction Guaranteed, Cade was kneeling on the floor surrounded by boxes. Her gray, ribbed sweater hugged her body just enough to hint at muscular shoulders and soft breasts. She looked like an old-money New Englander—or what Selena imagined wealthy New Englanders looked like—mixed with a genderqueer boi. It looked good on her.

  Selena handed her a coffee.

  Cade looked at the tower of whipped cream.

  “That’s a meal,” she said.

  “You don’t take it black, do you?” Selena asked. “Why would you have black coffee when you can have joy?”

  “I take it black, but thank you.” Cade took a sip.

  Selena sat down next to her.

  Cade’s blond hair was perfect, her skin dewy. She looked freshly washed, maybe freshly dry-cleaned. But she had soulful-Norwegian-actor shadows under her eyes.

  “Tired?” Selena asked.

  “I was up late.” Cade reached onto a low shelf, removed a merman Christmas tree ornament, and put it in one of the boxes.

  Each merman was a kind of gay man—a bear with his leather vest, a boy with a martini glass, a man wearing the BDSM flag. They did rely on stereotypes, but they captured the stereotypes perfectly. And they were mermen. Who didn’t love that?

  “Did you go out?” Selena asked.

  Cade gave a little laugh. “Working on Ruth’s accounts. They are epically screwed up.”

  “No one should be up that late thinking about accounts,” Selena said. “You should have come over to my place and drunk absinthe.”

  “Somebody has to think about accounts.” There was an edge to Cade’s voice.

  She was probably just tired.

  “Sorry,” Cade added. “There’s just a lot to do. We’ve got a month until her creditors can claim her assets, if we can’t find a way to get that money and get the store looking like the kind of place Swing Set wants to give a break to.” Her face wrinkled in a frown. “I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off.”

  They were sitting close together on the floor, and Selena wanted to put her hand on Cade’s knee. Thank you for staying.

  “But you’re tired. You want to go get tots?”

  “Tots?”

  “Tater tots.”

  They were always an answer.

  “We need to open the store.”

  Selena pulled her phone out of her pocket and flipped it open. “In an hour. You can eat a lot of tots in an hour.”

  Cade pulled a protein bar out of her pants pocket. “Breakfast.”

  “People eat protein bars to punish themselves.” Selena hoped Cade would smile. “We’ll go to lunch today. How about that? Thai Lotus has amazing noodles and they have crickets.”

  “Crickets?” Cade’s brow furrowed. “We’ve got to get this place in shape. I’ve drafted a marketing plan. Let me get my laptop.”

  Cade retrieved her laptop from the counter and sat back down on the floor beside Selena. Cade took another sip of her coffee.

  “Enough empty calories to kill someone, but it is good.” Cade opened her laptop to a spreadsheet. “These are the financials.” She flipped through several tabs of numbers. “I’ll handle that part. And this is the physical marketing plan. I was hoping you could do that part.”

  The slide showed two
columns. Each featured a list of products and a percentage, some struck through.

  Sex toys—75%

  Sexual accessories—11%

  Sexual costuming—10%

  Other clothing—< 1%

  Books—4%

  Home décor—< 1%

  Cards and stationery—< 1%

  Cookware—< 1%

  “These are product categories based on percentage of total sales,” Cade said. “We’re lucky that sales correlate to a consistent brand image.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About three-quarters of the inventory is off-brand and wasting shelf space.”

  Suddenly Selena saw what Cade was doing. Cade was boxing things up. She was clearing the shelves. She was getting rid of things Ruth loved.

  “I’m going to try to find a discount store that’ll take this stuff,” Cade said. “We’ll lose money on it, but it’s better than nothing.” Cade put another merman Christmas tree ornament and put it in a box.

  “That’s Jonathan.” Ruth had named the mermen after the Fab Five. “We can’t get rid of him.”

  Selena took Jonathan out of the box.

  “Next year, we were going to get a Christmas tree and do it all in gay pride stuff,” she said. “Ruth didn’t give up. Even when the doctors said it was over, she talked about next year. Right up until the last day, when she told us not to cry at the funeral. No. We have to keep everything. This is her.”

  Cade looked distressed.

  “We have to rebrand.”

  Cade had already filled several boxes. Now she took a basket of sand dollars off a shelf and added it to a box.

  “But people love Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Selena looked at Jonathan’s smiling face.

  “They don’t buy anything.” Cade pushed her laptop toward Selena. “Look.”

  “You can’t pack this stuff up. This is what we sell.” Selena took a sand dollar out of the box. Perfect. No one found perfect sand dollars on the Oregon coast except Ruth. “You can’t get rid of these.” She felt tears rising.

  Cade picked up her coffee and stood. Selena stood with her.

  “You can take them home.” Cade sipped her coffee.

  This time she grimaced, which was ridiculous because the human body was biologically programmed to like caramel mochas. They were at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid.

  “Making a profit means maximizing shelf space and having a clear brand image. You can’t have these”—Cade tapped the shelf in front of the Twist Clit & Nipple Triple Sucker set—“and also sell those.” She waved her coffee in the direction of the breathing cats, the air bladders inside their chests rising and falling. “What are they anyways?”

  “Cats,” Selena said.

  “They’re kind of creepy.”

  Ruth usually switched the cats off at night, but they’d been breathing for weeks now. Two of them had run out of batteries. It made Selena want to cry.

  “People like them,” Selena said.

  They didn’t. Only Ruth thought they were cute. She patted one. It wasn’t that bad. It didn’t feel like those creepy rabbit’s-foot keychains…not too much like that. Selena snatched it up and clutched it to her chest to show Cade how cuddly it was. (It wasn’t.)

  Cade rubbed her forehead. “They look like taxidermy that’s not quite dead.”

  “But what do you want this place to look like?” Selena asked. “This is Ruth’s vision.”

  Cade shrugged. “A gallery. Clear shelves. A few high-end products. Brighter lighting. Like Target.”

  “Ruth hated Target.”

  “How can you hate Target?”

  “Big box stores are a capitalist conspiracy.”

  Selena didn’t like the way Cade sighed. Alex had sighed like that. How can you be so impractical, Selena? Some of us live in the real world. You’re not a child.

  “This stuff is not what I want when I’m thinking about…” Cade shrugged.

  “Sex?” Selena filled in.

  “Yes, sex.” Cade ran her hand through her hair. “Can you imagine”—she pointed to one of the sleeping cats—“being with someone with this breathing next to you on the dresser or something?”

  Selena would not admit that Cade had a point. She would certainly not tell her that Becket had been urging Ruth to clean up the store for years. Ruth was dead. She and Ruth would never gather sand dollars again. The Fab Five belonged on the shelves until Christmas, when she would buy a tree from Ruth’s favorite tree farm and string it with lights and cute gay mermen.

  “Running a business isn’t just about profits,” Selena said.

  Selena felt like an avalanche had started. Ruth was dead. Cade would pack up all these beautiful things that were Ruth’s. The store would be blank, Ruth erased. Then Cade would do it to the house. And if Cade was right, they’d lose the house and the store anyway. And there’d be no reason to walk down Wisteria Lane. And everything would be over. Really, really over. There wouldn’t even be a place to put her memories.

  “It actually is about profits. Right now it has to be.” Cade’s face said, I don’t want to fight with you about this. “I’m really sorry. I know this is fast, but we don’t have time to be sentimental.”

  Selena set the breathing cat on a shelf and stomped across the store, although there wasn’t really anywhere to go. She settled for taking a stand behind the counter.

  “You can’t change Satisfaction Guaranteed,” Selena said. “This is Ruth’s place.”

  “Ruth was a good person.” Cade looked around. “But this doesn’t work.”

  “You don’t know about Satisfaction Guaranteed,” Selena said.

  It was a good thing Selena had taken a vow of celibacy, because she was stressed, sad, and overwhelmed, and Cade was pissing her off, and Cade was hot. Before Selena’s vow that was exactly when she would have slept with someone. Probably Cade.

  “Everybody wanted me to help.” Cade set her coffee on the counter in a way that said I’m not drinking the rest of this stuff.

  They stared at each other from opposite sides of the counter.

  “I know how to run a business,” Cade said. “People won’t shop here because they don’t feel comfortable. Men, masc women, trans men…they won’t feel comfortable. Everything here says cis, white female Red Hat Society, YOLO. Literally everything says YOLO. All this stuff says one kind of person belongs here.”

  “Ruth loved everyone!” Selena shot back. “And people don’t feel uncomfortable here. You feel uncomfortable. It’s 2021. You’re picking up dildos like they’re going to bite you. They’re not fucking sea cucumbers.”

  Selena didn’t mean it. Cade hadn’t picked up the Titan in any particular way. It was just the kind of dumb thing Selena said when she was mad. But as soon as the words left her mouth, she saw Cade’s face fall. She stuck her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders protectively.

  “I do not feel uncomfortable,” Cade said.

  Selena knew that look on their customers. The shy ones. The scared ones. She was extra careful with them. She didn’t know what people had been through or how much it took for them to walk through the door. If Cade was nervous, she deserved that care too. Selena should slow down. If you’ve had experiences that make this a challenging place for you…

  But Selena had a gift for fucking things up, so instead she said, “You come in here for two hot seconds and think you know what to do with the store, but you don’t.” She put her hands on her hips. “This is more my shop than it will ever be yours.”

  “Thank god,” Cade said.

  “And I know what Satisfaction Guaranteed needs. We need events. We need music and burlesque and Vagina Monologues. I’m going to teach a paint-your-vulva class, and this place is going to be packed.”

  “No one is painting their vagina in this store.”

  “They’re not painting their vaginas; they’re painting their vulvas.”

  “I don’t care. They’re not painting anything here.”

  “They w
ill, and it will be awesome, and if I say we’re not getting rid of anything, we’re not getting rid of anything,” Selena went on. “You don’t have Ruth’s vision. You swept in looking all hot, uptight, genderqueer prep-school boi in your gray sweaters.” She hadn’t actually meant to say that either. “This place has a soul. Ruth had a soul. You are a soulless capitalist.” No. It was wrong to identify the whole person with one trait or disability. “You’re acting like a soulless capitalist. We’re not going to save Satisfaction Guaranteed by turning it into Target. We’re going to save it by letting it be what it was meant to be.”

  Selena sounded authoritative. That was a surprise. She’d never won an argument with Alex, and Cade’s cool efficiency reminded her of Alex. But unlike Alex, Cade didn’t answer Selena’s outburst with a cutting remark.

  Cade yanked her hands out of the pockets of her perfectly pressed, subtly pinstriped trousers.

  “Fine. I’ll get new batteries for the cats. They’ll look less creepy if they aren’t dead.” She whirled around. Then, as though she decided she wanted to get the last word in, she turned back.

  “Sea cucumbers,” she said, “do not bite. Everyone knows that.”

  With that, she pulled her gray overcoat off the rack by the door, swung it around her like a cloak, and stomped out. If Selena hadn’t been mad at her, she would have been half in love with the fabulous exit.

  Chapter 10

  That evening, Selena stomped up the metal staircase to the Aviary artists’ co-op like it had personally offended her. The staircase had once been a fire escape. Rainwater shook off the steps as they rattled. Inside, a few painters were working at their stations, their projects illuminated by lamps. The high windows were dark. It had been a warehouse once, back when warehouses needed natural light. The space smelled of turpentine and clay. Familiar smells. She could almost feel a brush in her hand.

  “What’s up?” Becket emerged from behind a rack of costumes. She was wearing a bra with a beaded fringe that hung down to her waist.

  The center of the warehouse floor was full of ornate, mismatched furniture and Turkish rugs. Selena threw herself down on a gold settee.