As I pull into the parking space for my apartment, I imagine Vance sulking as he walks throughout the offices of the Dover News Journal where we work. Vance is a sports columnist there who dabbles in editing, and I’m a photographer, and although I made sure to submit my photos before I left the office, I wouldn’t put it past Vance to create a reason to need me this afternoon. Like Juliana said, he and I have been going through it lately. We’ve been together for seven months, but can’t seem to get on the same page lately. It feels like I’m on page two hundred and he’s still stuck on page one, but we have love for each other and we’re trying to work it out. That’s what tonight’s dinner is really all about. We need some alone time with a big splash of romance and hopefully a heaping helping of sex to bust through this wall we’ve been up against. I, for one, am ready to bust, pun intended.

The sexual problems Vance and I have been having aren't a mystery to me. I’m also not complaining about the typical things women criticize when it comes to the men in their lives. It’s not that he can’t get it up, or that he’s not good in bed. He doesn't have a little dick that’s just not enough to satisfy me. Vance has an average-sized dick, with a decent stroke to his name, and he has no problem getting it up. It’s just … well, I’m the problem. I’m an avid reader of erotic romance, and over my extensive time as a reader of all things smutty, some of the things I’ve read have helped to open my mind to kinkier things that I hadn't thought about before I met Vance. Maybe I’ve evolved a bit—all the way to page two hundred—while Vance is still in the same place he was in at the beginning. It’s not Vance’s fault, but sexually I’m starting to desire a little bit more.

It may make me sound crazy, but I have something dark that lives inside me, and every time I read one of these perfectly written novels about a domineering man who sexes a woman crazy, that darkness gets a little stronger. It speaks to me, and it takes total concentration to block out the sound. Sometimes it’s so loud it’s all I can hear. It craves something. Something … forbidden … and painful.