Seventeen

By my sister, Holly Peck:

On a temperate day in August my sister told me she had never orgasmed. She was seventeen,

and had been intimate with previous partners. Something, she confided, was blocking her ability

to revel in her own sexual liberation - to feel herself and the budding woman curves of her

sensuality. She felt ashamed and embarrassed.

I was shocked — initially — then angry. “What?” I yelled, taking hold of right arm and looking

deeply into her eyes. “But I thought that time in Italy?” “Nope,” she replied, defeatedly.

That afternoon we rode the bus to The Art Of Loving, a quaint but well-known sex shop in

Vancouver’s west side. Trepidatiously, she browsed aisles flanked with plastic cocks, curiously

examining oddly shaped butt plugs before slotting them back into their plastic display supports. I

talked to the store owner casually, half-perusing a magazine about pleasing the tip of your lover

with your tongue. After a nervous twenty minutes, my sister settled on her prize: a purple, 4”

vibrating dildo. A few weeks later — from a more seasoned, masturbatory vantage point — she

would realize she had accidentally bought a butt plug.

We rode the bus home. Nikki looked out the window, painfully self-aware. She explained the

experience was exhausting. When we got home, she went upstairs to take a bath.

An hour later, she came downstairs in a housecoat. Her face was red — her eyes a graveyard

of tears. She hugged me and cried.

Her voice broke. “I came,” she said. I hugged her back harder.