Getting rid of a strap-on harness isn’t as easy as you’d think.

I had acquired it when I was fucking around with Jo, right before I left for Austin. Back when Jo was still a butch dyke. Before he became a dude. Right before he left for law school on the other side of the country.

I couldn’t really describe our relationship to people. I was dating a guy who was really good-looking and charming but whose primary interest was heroin. I was a little tired of it after a couple of years. Somehow, I managed to avoid trying heroin at all. It just didn’t interest me very much.

Jo was dating my friend Amy. Amy was an acquaintance really. I had met her and she was so gorgeous and mysterious that I idolized her. She had some serious baggage. I’d had a basically happy childhood and an unfailingly positive attitude and felt that nothing interesting had happened to me.

I dated Jo when I was sixteen. She introduced me to sadomasochism. I was so naïve about kinky sex. My only exposure had been the scrambled Playboy channel and The Joy of Sex. On our second date she loaned me the book Macho Sluts by Pat Califia. What the fuck is this about? Whips and chains? Not my thing. I read it anyway.

Then I decided it kind of was my thing.

I spent the next several months getting slammed into walls, regular spankings that resulted in purple marks on my ass, and my hair yanked and pulled while I got fucked. It was great.

Our relationship was sort of on-again, off-again. We were never in love again, but we’d have these fuck fests. The last time we had a tryst, Jo bought it for me at Toys in Babeland in Seattle, right before each of us left for other cities. I guess it had sentimental value because of that. We only used it a few times. She was great with a cock. She wanted me to suck her off and she would fuck my mouth porn-style, making me gag on it. Sometimes this made me laugh. It’s okay to laugh when someone is wearing a strap-on. It’s usually not okay to laugh when someone is using their real cock.

I ended up bringing it to Austin with me. I ended up bringing the junkie with me, because he got clean and it was his only chance and could I please just let him come with me? So I did. After I finally got rid of that motherfucker, I dated a few women here and there but didn’t really think they were worthy of the strap-on. Not that they were bad people or anything, it was just our relationship hadn’t reached that point yet. I did use it a few times for some two-girl shows at the lingerie studio where I worked. I also used it at this bachelor party a friend and I randomly got hired for, at a karate dojo. We made big money and the guys were really nice. For some reason, whenever I used the strap-on for money, I was always the guy.

So after I got married to my husband and we had our first daughter, I found the strap-on with a bunch of stripper clothes. It was in a white hatbox. I showed it to my husband. “Any chance you’ll let me use this on you?”

“Not a chance.”

“I hate to get rid of it though.” I examined the straps. It was such high quality. “Are you still adverse to a threesome?”

“I don’t see us ever doing that,” he said. “But how about if we do, we’ll use my penis. Since it’s real.”

“So what should I do with this?”

He shrugged. “Throw it in the trash.”

I gasped. “No way! These are expensive!”

“Ebay?”

“Ugh.” I put it in a Ziploc bag and put it back in the box. “I want it to go to a good home.”

Obviously I couldn’t give it to Goodwill. Then it hit me. Stella! At twenty-five, Stella had just discovered she was a lesbian. She always sort of thought she was a lesbian but just dated guys instead. I don’t know what took her so long. But I knew she was dating someone sort of butch. I emailed her. I hadn’t talked to her in a while but she was one of those people I could pick up with right away and it would be cool. So I asked if it would be weird if I asked her if she wanted my old strap-on. And then she asked if it would be weird if she said yes.

After clarifying that it was the harness, not the actual dildo, we set a date for me to give it to her. I put it in an old wine gift bag I had from Christmas — red and gold with red tissue paper in it.

Our eighteen-month-old daughter was wandering around the room performing various tasks, such as picking up a beach ball and putting it under a blanket. When they came to the door, my daughter said, “Who is that? A mommy?”

They had brought their dog, a one-year old healer mix. Their dog picked up the beach ball and punctured it. Our daughter didn’t notice because she had moved on to putting blocks near people’s feet. “One you,” she said, and dropped a block. “One you,” she said to the next person.

They sat on our couch. Stella looked embarrassed. Her girlfriend, Tam, looked guarded. She was a little butch, a little too soft for my tastes, but very cute. I smiled. “Good to finally meet you,” I said.

“Stella says you plan to write a short story about this.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, laughing. “I pretty much have to.”

We hadn’t seen each other for a while so we talked about people we used to know. Crazy Cassie, Oliver the manager at the Crazy Lady, other dancers we knew. We hadn’t seen any of them for a while. Stella was going to massage school. “It’s fascinating,” she said. “I love learning about the body.” I was going to make a joke but then I remembered this one time I made her feel bad because I made fun of her working at this dive bar on Riverside, so I didn’t. We made plans to go to dinner together sometime and really catch up.

We hadn’t talked about the strap-on the whole time. As she was leaving, I handed her the bag. “Well, here it is!”

“I cordially thank you,” she said.

Tam said, “Yeah, nice meeting you.”

I actually followed up a couple months later and she said they hadn’t used it yet. “I think we’re both a little afraid of it,” she said. “Also, we need to get a cock and we can’t agree on whether or not it should actually look like a cock or if we should get the kind that looks like a dolphin or a woman diving or something.” A few weeks later she emailed me that they’d broken up. She didn’t mention the strap-on, and I didn’t feel like it was polite to ask.

Erika Kleinman lives in Austin with her family. She has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Salon, The Apple Valley Review, and Baltimore Review. She is Essays editor at The Nervous Breakdown.