A very strange moral dilemna: (Warning: A bit raunchier than most of my posts!)

I've been talking to an ex over facebook the last few weeks, little three-sentence messages where we catch up with our respective lives.  It wasn't a particularly messy or angry breakup, mind you, but we had been together for a long time when it happened, and I think we both needed a bit of space.  And now, just shy of two years' later, we're able to kind of look back on things.

It's kind of nice.  And it's got me thinking about those times of old, some funny, some not.  I've decided to share one of my particularly uncomfortable stories with you all, for your amusement.  Apparently, it's my job in life to make you ingrates laugh, regardless of my personal comfort with everything. 

Actually, let's call a spade a spade.  I'll do anything for a laugh.  This is a true story, only slightly embellished for comedic effect - I've compressed a few events and tweaked some dialogue, here and there.  Otherwise, it's a completely factual re-telling.

Here goes.

It started with a dildo. 

We had been together for a few years, living together for maybe a year, when we decided we wanted to kind of broaden our sex lives a bit.  We did the usual things that couples do in such situations - I won't go into the gory details, but it was really the standard stuff.  Blindfolds, a bit of rope, and some Star Wars costumes... I won't divulge any details, but one of us was Boba Fett.

After a few months of this, it was decided that we'd pick up a Dildo for her.  You see, my girlfriend had never used one of these "self pleasuring devices", but we both decided it'd be kind of fun to play around with one in the bedroom.  Use it on her as sort of a foreplay thing.  However, after some searching through the busy store, she seemed very nonplussed with the offerings.  So, she turned to me and said something that she probably meant as a compliment.

"These are all way too big.  Why isn't there one more your size?"

Bear in mind, she said this in a fairly crowded place of business.  My face went red, and I went into "inadequate male" mode.  Seriously, if I had felt any more inadequate, I'd have been driving a sports car and talking about quarterbacks.  I wanted to throw something in the air and shout "It's a perfectly normal size!" and then rush out, screaming. 

Instead, I looked nervously at my shoes and smiled awkwardly at the woman working there, counting down from five until my girlfriend realized what she just implied.  Then she got to play a very awkward game those in politics refer to as "Damage Control".

"What I mean is, yours is the perfect size for my, um, no, uh, yours is more than enough, er..."

"Oh god..." I kept muttering to myself, trying to figure out an escape plan.  Throw the mannequin wearing crotchless panties through the window, push those lesbians buying a strap-on out of the way, and make a break for it...

The girlfriend kept going on, "It's about this large, a perfectly normal size" she said, announcing to the room.  "About six inches or so.  Which is much better than these monstrous, huge..."

This went on for about five minutes, by which time I was halfway dead of embarrassment.  This was worse than the time I called my teacher "mom" in the fifth grade, and he decided to tell my parents about it.  This was worse than the time my dad found an issue of Playgirl in my backpack (put there by a friend who thought it'd be the funniest prank ever... actually, it was).  This was even worse than that time I had really bad allergies, and everyone thought I was crying during an assembly about losing your virginity.

Luckily, the saleswoman came to my rescue.  "If you want, there are kits that you can buy, so you can make the perfect replica of your lover."

We all agreed this was a great idea, although I think my contribution to this conversation consisted mostly of tiny yelps and frequent glances at the door.  And so, we ordered one of these kits, and waited for about six weeks for it to be delivered.

It's called a "Clone A Cock" kit, which is probably the best name EVER.  When we got the kit, we were pretty excited, and flipped through the instructions like kids flipping through a dirty magazine- lots of nervous tittering, pointing, and trying to figure out exactly what all the pictures meant. 

I won't go into the details on how we went about making "Newt #2".  Because it involves a large amount of nudity and what those in the adult entertainment industry refer to as "fluffing".  But at the end of the process, we had a near exact replica, save for a single air bubble.  And Newt #2 went on to have an illustrious career, which again, will not be detailed here. 

And then, one chilly spring morn, the girlfriend and I broke up.  It sucked, but we both knew it was coming, and we've since both moved on and generally became happier people. 

Anyways, we were dividing our stuff one day.  We divvied up our DVD collection.  Our book collection.  Our music collection.  Utensils, plates, pictures, furniture. 

And then came Newt #2.  Who gets to keep it?  After all, she had been the only person to use it.  But it was completely inappropriate for her to keep it - basically, she no longer got Newt #1, so why should she keep Newt #2? 

And so, I kept it.  Sitting in my bedroom, in the nightstand by the bed, for about a year.

I know, I know.  I should have thrown it out.  There was no use for the thing - I obviously couldn't use it with the next girlfriend.  How would you even introduce such a thing?  "Hey, baby, this was used on a different girl, now I want to use it on you".  There's a reason there's not much of a market for second-hand sex toys, y'know. 

But every time I decided I was going to chuck it, scenarios began to run through my head:  what if the garbageman finds it?  My garbage bags are see through - what if the neighbours see it?  I'm a single male, what will they think? 

I thought about destroying it, but that just felt wrong.  After all, it looked very much like Newt #1, and I'm a pretty big fan of Newt #1's work.  Tearing it in half, or even just slicing off the tip, didn't really sit well in my head (either of them). So it sat there for maybe a year, slowly being forgotten by yours truly until it was nothing more than a hazy memory. 

And then, almost suddenly, I was dating the Special Lady.  One night, we were in my bed, doing all sorts of fun things that are detailed on all sorts of websites that are not this one.  The Special Lady whispered those magic words that every guy likes to hear, and I replied with haiku-like brevity "they're in the nightstand". 

It was dark, and all I could hear were some fumbling noises.  Papers were overturned as she rifled through the contents.  And then:

"What the hell?"

I hadn't caught on yet.  "What's wrong?"

"What is this?"

"aw, crap."

She tittered nervously.  "Is there, um, something I don't know about...?"

This was embarrasing.  It was more embarrasing than that time I called my teacher "mom" in the fifth grade.  It was more embarrassing than the time I got my tongue stuck to the flag pole in front of the school.  It was even more embarrassing than the time my girlfriend implied I had a tiny wang in front of a bunch of sex perverts in a "love shop". 

What do you say in such a situation?  I went for that oldest of guy's cliches:  "It's not what it looks like."

The lights came on.  We got dressed.  And I told her the whole dirty story.  And this lead to the usual questions:  why would you keep it?  do you still love her?  why don't we do dirty stuff like that?  is it me? 

And so on, and so forth.  I slept on the couch that night.  In my own apartment.

We threw out newt #2 the next morning.  It was double-bagged.