Good Karma (30 page)

She took the balls out and rolled them in her
palm. They were heavier than they looked, but not too heavy.

She lay upon the bed, lifted the waistbands
of her shorts and panties, and then slid the first ball around
until she found her entrance. Before Mark had taught her about her
G-spot, she hadn’t been accustomed to putting her fingers inside
herself, so it took a while to get the ball in place, and then,
just like that, it slipped inside.

She actually gasped. Hooray! Success.

In went the second, more easily than the
first.

Recoiling into the mattress and squeezing her
eyes shut, she slowly poked her finger more deeply and pushed the
balls in as the instructions said to.

She withdrew her finger and took a deep
breath. She’d done it. She’d accomplished another first. Then she
did her Kegels before taking care of her housework. Dishes,
laundry, vacuuming. Mark had said she could leave the balls in for
a while, which would help strengthen her inner muscles, so she
didn’t take them out.

As she worked, she worried the balls would
slide out on their own, but despite a slight heaviness, she hardly
felt them as she went about her business. After a while, she didn’t
feel them at all. She finished the laundry, cleaned the kitchen,
made a pot of chili, and read more from the books Mark had given
her. She was learning so much, such as how to give a whole variety
of hand jobs and the joys of anal sex. Yeah, anal wasn’t something
she would try any time soon.

By the time she finished the books, she would
know enough to be truly dangerous in the bedroom. But reading and
doing were two different things, and while all her new knowledge
sounded great in print, when it came to the rubber meeting the
road, would she be able to perform?

At nine o’clock, she figured it was time for
the Ben Wa balls to come out before she got ready for bed.

She went to her bedroom, put on a pale blue,
oversized nightshirt, and lay down.

The instructions had said she could maneuver
them out with her fingers or stand up, crouch, and cough. The idea
of doing a crouch and cough reminded her of a man’s prostate exam,
so she opted for getting squeamish with her finger instead.

Deep breath. Insert finger. Dig a little. Ah!
There was ball one. After a couple of tries, she hooked her finger
around it and pulled it out. Nothing to it. Now for round two. In
she went. Where was it? The tip of her finger grazed it. Gotcha.
Oops, no. Slippery little sucker. Visions of Julia Roberts shooting
a snail across the restaurant in
Pretty Woman
made her
smile. Okay, try again. Oops. Slipped away again. This wasn’t
funny, anymore. Come here you little bastard.

After five minutes, panic began to set in.
She couldn’t get ball number two to cooperate. Another five minutes
later, and she was crouching and coughing as if she had pneumonia,
but still no ball. Number two wasn’t budging.

What if the ball got inside her uterus? Could
that happen? What if she couldn’t get it out? Would she need
surgery? Oh God! How embarrassing would that be?

She rushed to her laptop and pulled up
everything she could find about Ben Wa balls, how to get them out,
and whether or not they were safe for prolonged use.

The good news was, they couldn’t get into her
uterus. That was a relief. There were a few other tips about how to
remove a stubborn ball, and it was apparently pretty common for one
to dig in its heels and not come out. She eventually found a thread
on a message board—a whole friggin’ thread hundreds of comments
long—devoted to posts from women who had suffered the same fate.
Most of them posted they’d had to get their husbands or boyfriends
to fish the stubborn thing out.

Great. Just great. She could hear that
conversation with Mark now. “Hey, could you come over and pull out
my Ben Wa ball?” As if it were the same as asking him to come and
clear a clog in her kitchen sink or help her move the
refrigerator.

No, she would do this herself. She tried a
couple of other suggestions, such as jumping up and down, as well
as bearing down like she was giving birth, and still the tiny,
seemingly innocent ball remained rooted firmly in place. Great.
Women could squeeze something the size of a small watermelon from
their vagina every time they gave birth, but she couldn’t even pop
out a marble-sized ball. Maybe she just needed labor pains and
someone standing over her telling her to breathe and push, and the
little sucker would shoot out like a torpedo. As it was, that
wasn’t happening.

She lay down on the floor and tried using her
finger again, but after another five minutes with the same results,
she gave up.

There was nothing more she could tonight. Her
insides were sore and irritated after so much prodding, so she
would give it a rest and try again in the morning.

And if that didn’t work…?

“Ugh.” She flopped her arms down on the
carpet and stared up at the ceiling as a heavy chill settled inside
her gut.

If she couldn’t get Ben Wa number two out on
her own, she would have to…

“Please, God, don’t embarrass me like
that.”

But that’s what it might come to.

Mark just might have to ride in on his white
steed, his silver armor gleaming in the sunlight, and save her from
the curse of the evil Ben Wa ball.

Chapter 25

Life is a
shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

-Voltaire

After struggling with the ball again before work the
next morning, without success, Karma dreaded the moment when Mark
would arrive back from Chicago. As soon as he saw her face, he
would know something was wrong.

It was almost ten o’clock, and all she had
done the entire morning was obsess over what she would say. How do
you start a conversation that would end with something along the
lines of, “I have a ball in my vagina and need your help to get it
out”?

Smooth. Really. Mark would die laughing.

“You look like you’re trying to figure out
how to tell someone you’re pregnant,” Jolene said, sliding up to
her counter like a viper. Her eyes even looked like snake’s eyes,
slit and menacing, as if she were preparing to strike. All she
needed was the forked tongue. On second thought, she already had a
forked tongue. What she really needed were the fangs.

Jo tossed her blond hair off her shoulder and
set down her coffee mug. “Is Mark the daddy?” she said, her voice a
jealous hiss.

Only if you count a Ben Wa ball as a fetus, you
snarky bitch.

Karma was beyond over Jo’s pissy attitude. Jo
had been nothing but a venomous scourge for over two weeks. And now
that Karma knew Jo’s special secret about her relationship with
Jake, she wasn’t about to be intimidated.

“Can it, Jo. I don’t need your shit this
morning.”

Okay, where had that come from? Surely the “I
am beautiful” mantra she had been repeating every morning hadn’t
turned her into a bitch, not unless beautiful meant bitchy.

I am bitchy, I am bitchy, I am bitchy.

Jo’s face wrinkled into a sour smile that
didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re just upset because Mark isn’t here,
yet, and you can’t
fetch his coffee
.”

Enough was enough. If this wasn’t one of
those times Lisa had been referring to when she told Karma she
needed to put Jolene in her place, Karma didn’t know what was.
“What is your problem, Jo? I don’t mind getting his coffee, and if
it helps him get his work done faster, then who gives a flip if I
get his coffee or not? That’s my
job
, Jo. And while most
executives get their own coffee nowadays, some still like their
admin to get it for them.”

Jo rolled her eyes. “But you’re not his
admin
, Karma.”

Karma leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.
“I am while he’s here. And that’s a directive from Don. So, if he
wants me to get his coffee, I get his coffee. What do you care,
anyway? He’s not asking
you
to do it. Oh, but that’s the
problem, isn’t it? He asks me to do it and not you.”

Let the gauntlet be thrown.

“You’re just a little brown-noser, Karma.”
Her words took on a more desperate tone, as if she knew she was
losing this battle.

“That’s pretty funny coming from you, being
that your nose is so far up Jake’s ass that you can tell what he
ate last night and check for cavities.” Now wasn’t the time to
reveal what she knew about Jo and her boss, but damn, did she ever
want to throw that ace on the table and throttle Jo’s world.

Jolene gasped. “How dare you—”

Karma got to her feet. “How dare
you.
Don’t you have enough work to do without bogging down your time
harassing me? Oh, that’s right. You’re so busy spreading gossip
around the office and causing trouble that
I
have to do your
job.”

Where this piss and vinegar was coming from, Karma
had no idea, but after over a decade of keeping her mouth shut, she
was done taking Jo’s shit—and everyone else’s. Maybe this
outpouring was just her soul’s way of putting out the trash.

Pure rage rose in Jo’s eyes, and her face colored
deep red as if she were an old-school thermometer about to reach
maximum temperature.

But Karma was beyond caring. She’d endured
enough. For the first time in her life, she actually looked in the
mirror and saw someone who wasn’t flawed. Someone she liked. She
felt empowered, more confident…maybe even a bit angry—no,
furious—that she had wasted so many years as a victim. Over a
decade of resentment and pent-up frustration needed an outlet, and
lucky Jo, she was in the right place at the right time to catch the
mental fallout.

And goddamn it! She had a tiny fucking ball
stuck in her vagina! This was not the day to fuck with her!

“How dare you,” Jo said again, apparently too
stymied to come up with something original. She picked up her
coffee and took a step back. “You have no idea what—”

“Oh, just stop it, Jo.” Karma leaned forward.
“You’re lazy. I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it. If you
worked as hard doing your job as you do at getting out of it, you’d
be employee of the year.”

Jo gaped, but Karma wasn’t finished. She was
digging the hole now. She might as well shovel down to the
requisite six feet to make a grave.

“You’re a gossip, a troublemaker, and a liar,
Jo. And you dump your work off on everybody else, especially me.
Everyone sees it, and I can’t believe I’ve put up with it for so
long. You’re the most unbelievably lazy person I know. How you’ve
survived this long without getting fired is beyond me.” Well, not
anymore. Now that she knew about her and Jake, Karma had a pretty
good idea how Jo still had a job at Solar. She speared eye daggers
at Jolene, only barely keeping a lid on her knowledge of Jo and
Jake’s affair. “Now, get out of my face before you really piss me
off.”

Speechless and blowing steam out her ears, Jo
spun and marched off, disappearing around the corner in a
flurry.

The tongue-lashing had been long overdue.
Karma had stood up for herself. She had finally had enough and
unloaded.

And then reality hit.

What had she done?

She had just pissed off the office gossip.
And even though she had major ammo on Jolene, Jo could still cause
big problems with her big mouth.

Mark wouldn’t be pleased with her
behavior.

Shit just got real.

As if she didn’t have enough to worry about
with the black Ben Wa ball from the fires of hell stuck in her
vagina, had she just kicked a sleeping dog?

* * *

It was thirty minutes later when Mark
appeared at the end of the hall. He turned the corner, smiled, then
frowned when he saw Karma’s face.

“Good morning, Karma.” He gave her a hard
look as he passed.

“Good morning.”

He was going to kill her for how she had
behaved with Jo.

As soon as he sat down at the conference room
table, he took out his phone.

An instant later, her phone vibrated with a
text.

What’s wrong?

She typed out a quick response.
I need to
talk to you.

A couple of minutes later, Mark poked his
head out the door. “Karma, could you join me, please.” He turned
and headed back to his chair.

She grabbed her notebook and a pen and
hurried into the conference room.

“I need your assistance on a confidential
project, if you don’t mind,” he said, not looking at her. “Could
you shut the door?”

She closed the door then joined him at the
table.

With their cover in place for anyone who
might have overheard, he looked up and smiled. “That’s a lovely
outfit. Green is a good color on you.”

“Thank you.” His compliment didn’t do
anything to ease her mind.

He sat back. “Okay. I see this is serious.
What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

The Ben Wa ball had become the least of her
worries after her exchange with Jo.

“I’m fine. Sort of.” She sat down and sighed.
“But something happened.”

“Okay?” Mark said cautiously. “Tell me.”

“It’s Jolene.”

Mark’s left brow arched as if he knew all
about Jolene already. “Let me guess. She’s stirring up rumors about
you.”

Karma nodded. “Not just me. You, too.”

Mark cocked his head. “I already know. I was
hoping it wouldn’t get to you, though.”

“You know?” Of course he knew. Mark was all
but a mind reader, wasn’t he? The guy had serious skills of
perception that bordered on the supernatural. Look at how easily
he’d figured Karma out that night they went to St. Elmo’s.

He nodded. “Not much gets past me, Karma. And
it wouldn’t be the first time someone tried spreading rumors about
me.” He studied her. “What happened?”