Down on Her Knees by Christine Bell

day after work, Courtney found herself staring at Cat, still in semi-shock as her friend shoveled a forkful of Cobb salad into her mouth. She swiped a napkin over her lips and tapped the pen against her knuckle as she glanced down at her smartphone.
    “Okay, we decided that double penetration is a hard no, right?”
    Courtney didn’t answer, the gravity of her circumstances becoming more apparent by the second. What the hell had she been thinking? With the dare in Rafe’s eyes and the fear of letting an opportunity slip through her hands, combined with her own false bravado courtesy of Sam Adams, it had felt so right.
    Terrifying, but right.
    But in the light of day, sitting across from her friend with a sheaf of paper between them now riddled with salad dressing and words like “spanking” and “anal,” she wondered if she’d lost her fucking mind.
    “Courtney?”
    “What?” she snapped back.
    “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Cat asked, leaning forward in her seat, the regret plain on her face. “If I’d known he’d given you an ultimatum or why you were avoiding him, I would never have told Shane and him it was okay to meet us. And once you told me…”
    “It was too late. I know. I should’ve told you sooner, and I already said I wasn’t mad. I’m just having buyer’s remorse, is all.”
    “Come on, it’s going to be fine. This is a generic list, something to give him a guideline. He probably isn’t even into most of this stuff,” Cat reassured her.
    “Says you,” she muttered miserably.
    “This is exciting, remember? That’s why you called me. You couldn’t wait until tonight to start filling it out. Now buck up and let’s have fun with it.”
    She hadn’t been able to wait because of crippling anxiety seeping in once she’d received Rafe’s e-mail that morning. Once she’d seen the kind of stuff on the survey he sent her, she’d needed Cat for moral support. But fun? No.
    Fun was finding a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of jeans you hadn’t worn in months. Fun was strawberry picking on a warm summer day and sneaking a few as you went. Sitting at a diner looking at a BDSM checklist online, sussing out the things she would or would not be okay doing with her new sex-on-the-edge instructor, and assigning them each a rating utilizing the world’s most complex system that ranged from 1-5 but also included question marks, backslashes, and a capital X? That was the opposite of fun.
    Cat sighed and set down her pen. “Look, let’s finish the task at hand, okay? Rafe wants this scanned and e-mailed back to him tomorrow afternoon. If you decide you want to change something, you can do it in the morning after you sleep on it. And if you decide you want to back out altogether? You can still do that too. Just don’t send him the list. No biggie, but at least let’s get it all together so that if you do decide to go through with it, you’re prepared, okay?” Her green eyes dimmed and she set her fork down. “Are you scared? If you’re scared and want to change your mind already, fuck it, we don’t need to—”
    “Nope.” Courtney shook her head and ran a finger around the rim of her water glass. “I’m not scared. Not of Rafe, at least. I’m scared of letting myself trust someone, though. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. And I’ve never done anything like this.” Maybe it was time to come clean with the rest of it… “Rafe was my first.”
    Cat sat back against her chair so hard it tipped, almost flipping her onto her back. “Shut the front door!”
    She shook her head furiously, “Wait, no, not my first first.” She took a long pull from her glass and set it down before meeting her friend’s curious gaze. “Before the other night, I’d never been able to…finish.” The last was a whisper that seemed to hang in the air like a thundercloud.
    “With a guy?” Cat asked, her brow wrinkled in confusion.
    “At all,” Courtney corrected