We were on our second Margaritas when Melissa caught me looking at her cleavage. She smiled and leaned across the little bar table, her brown, curly hair hanging in ringlets around her pretty face: "Hey, can I tell you a secret?"
She and I weren't really going out, not exactly. I didn't know what the heck we were, to tell the truth. I'd met her because I work with a friend of hers, and a few times she'd come out for drinks with a bunch of us from my office. I guess we hit it off; we both know an insane amount of detail about the Star Wars universe, and we're both really into archaic console versions of Mortal Kombat. (I still think it's kind of amazing that a girl is into stuff like that.) So we always found a lot to talk about.
So now we were meeting for drinks sometimes, after work. We would usually meet at this bar on Kearny Street called Murphy's Pub, partly because it was close enough to where each of us worked, and partly because she liked hearing the Irish accents. (The bartenders and the waitresses are mostly from Ireland, for real. They do not like it much when someone orders a Margarita in their Irish bar, but they'll serve you anyway.)
I figured that I'd been friend-zoned, and I didn't really care. Melissa was nice, and she was cute, but she was just someone from my loose circle of friends, and I wasn't really looking for a new girlfriend anyway. We'd sit and drink and talk about stuff; surprisingly, she actually wanted to talk about graphic novels and old video games and what a shame it was that the newer Star Wars movies didn't use much from the Star Wars Expanded Universe. She may have looked kind of like a magazine cover model, but she'd been in her high school Star Wars club and the Math club, and she loved to sit around with me and talk geek.
It was fun, but if she was flirting with me, I didn't sense it. And every week, after we'd been through a couple of drinks, we'd say "see ya" and I'd head home. Just a casual friendship.
Well, until last week.
It had started feeling a little date-y that last time. We weren't doing anything, no touching, no kissing, no talk of dating, nothing like that. But you know how you get that sense that something's going on? I was getting that sense. I wasn't sure what I thought about the idea of dating Melissa, but I didn't think it really mattered anyway; I wasn't looking for that. And so we'd had our drinks, and despite any new vibes I may have been picking up, we just said "see you later" and went home (my case) or out with girlfriends (her case).
It was a week later, and here she was, having seen me sneaking a glance at her sizable boobs, wanting to know if she could tell me a secret.
"Yeah," I said. "Sure."
Melissa turned her head, apparently to make sure no one was listening. I couldn't figure anyone could hear us in a loud bar anyway. Then she turned to face me again, looking kind of serious.
"I induced lactation," she said.
I just sat there for a second, not completely sure what she just told me. "You ... sorry, what?"
She had started to smile. "I induced milk. In my boobs. You know."
I must have had the most perplexed look on my face. "I don't think I do know."
"Oh, c'mon," she said. "I know a few girls who are doing this; you must have heard of it."
I just gave her a blank look. "So do you mean—" I started.
"I'm lactating, yes."
Finally the initial shock wore off, and I started to feel like I understood the conversation we were having. "But you have to have a baby to do that!"
Melissa stifled a giggle. "No you don't. You can induce. Any girl can do it, you know, like, after a certain age and whatever."
"Just like that?"
"Oh, god no," she said. "It took me almost two months."
"Wait, um, how would you even do that? What do you have to do?" I paused. "You don't care if I ask that, do you?"
She gave me a casual, pretty smile. "It actually took less work than I expected. I'm taking this herb a few times a day. I have to do a, uh, kind of massage. But it was taking forever to get anything, and so a few weeks ago I started pumping, like, in the morning, and night, and if I'm working from home then I do it during the day, too. And that did it. It got me started.
"Oh, and—" she looked around again, quickly, then looked back at me, excitedly. "I just got an electric pump, a dual electric!"
"Pump?"
"Oh, boys are so stupid," she said, still grinning, silly. "A breast pump, to pump milk from my boobs. It really works good, so now I can just turn it on and pump while I'm on the Internet or watching Netflix or whatever."
At this point I sat back and took a big hit off the Margarita. What the hell was I suppose to make of this, and what was she even telling me for? I mean, I was all for boobs and everything, but I'd never thought about a girl learning to make milk if it wasn't for her own baby.
After a moment: "So why did you do this?"
Melissa looked demure. "For the same reason most girls do it."
"Um," I said. "Which is what? Sorry, I don't think I really get it."
She leaned over the table again, long ringlets of hair hanging over part of her face, covering one of her eyes. She pushed the hair aside. "They induce because they want to nurse their partners. And, you know, their partners want to nurse from them."
I just sat there with a look on my face that must've matched what I was thinking, which was something along the lines of: what the fuck, really? People do that?
"I think," Melissa was saying, "that it's kind of a side effect of taking Vitamin E. You get these ideas. Although I used to think about this, kind of fantasize about it, a long time ago."
What Melissa meant by "Vitamin E" is actually a prescription pill for girls (or, uh, women) called the NeoEstrus. Most of the girls I knew, who were all in their 20s or maybe early 30s, took it, or at least said they took it; the pill doesn't really do anything for guys. But girls, well, there were pretty much two reasons they went on it: one, it apparently mixed really well with alcohol; the euphoria it created for females was supposed to be amazing. The second reason was the real one, though: it made them horny, as wild and horny as a guy. All the time.
I hadn't known that Melissa was on Vitamin E, but it wasn't a huge surprise. Lots of girls were on it, and usually you could tell; even when they weren't out to have sex, it made them seem more sensual.
I'd never been completely sure what I thought of this pill. Women's sex drive had never made sense to me anyway; if they could have multiple orgasms—endless, back-to-back orgasms, like my ex-girlfriend Mary—then why weren't they all a lot hornier? They should want to have sex all the time. The NeoEstrus pill fixed that. Girls on Vitamin E, sometimes abetted with a drink, would proposition guys with abandon, and have no remorse or even mixed feelings; it diminished the guilt and the slut-shaming that our stupid social rules had built up over the years. They wanted to go at it, with no strings; they wanted orgasms. It gave a guy's freewheeling libido to a woman's sexual capacity.
I'd been approached, sure. A girl would talk to me in a bar for a few minutes, and it all felt innocent enough. Then almost out of nowhere, she'd ask me if I wanted to go somewhere and fuck. Maybe I could go down on her? Please? She really wanted a guy to make her come. I always turned them down; for one thing, I just hadn't been in a place mentally where I was going to do something like that. And secretly, they scared me.
Confession: I'd never actually been with a girl on Vitamin E. Mary and I were together when it came out, but she had no interest. She said it was because she was a good Catholic girl, although that made no sense; she fucked like a rabbit, and so why would a libido pill be a sin? Anyway, she never tried it, didn't want to get a prescription. The birth control pill she would take, but not the NeoEstrus. The thing is, I think she could've used it. Sex wasn't the reason we fell apart, not really, but the last few months we were doing it maybe once a week at most. Once you got her going, yeah, she really had a good time; she could come and come. A few times she had hands-free orgasms while she was giving me a blowjob. It wasn't that many times, but it was still pretty amazing that she could do it at all. If she got aroused enough, she'd just come, even without being touched. You'd think that experiences like that would have made her a horny girl, but no. It took wine and romantic movies and dinner dates and stuff before she'd start warming up.
So now, Melissa was sitting here telling me that she was on Vitamin E, and it'd given her some "ideas." Ideas that other girls had, too, she'd said. Ideas that had led other girls to, um, activities. Ideas that had apparently led Melissa herself to action.
I sipped on my Margarita and then leaned back against the brick wall. I looked at Melissa, who was still working on her own drink. The crowd noise had gotten noticeably louder.
"So," I started. She perked up and raised her eyebrows. "It worked?" I asked.
