Free Men and Dogs by Katie Crouch

spending a large amount of salaried time flirting with one another and deconstructing the latest episodes of Gossip Girl .
    SweetJane, the company Hannah and Jon started together, is an overpriced line of luxury sex toys. (“Get it?” Jon likes to say to investors. “Sex is now a luxury!”) The company was originally Jon’s idea. The notion came to him after they’d been living together awhile. The sex, he said, was getting boring. In an effort to solve this—Jon is a solver—he decided to buy Hannah a vibrator. But his search was fruitless; he found his shopping experience so unsatisfying that he came away empty-handed,
save for some upscale lubricant and a nicely illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra.
    “I wanted to get you something nice,” he said. “But then I was at Good Vibrations. All of these hippies worked there”—Jon is a staunch hippie hater—“and all they had was this crappy purple plastic.” Hannah and Jon looked at each other, eyes wide, realizing instantly what he had done. For months, they’d been searching for a new business idea. Biodeisel stations, too messy. Oxygen bars, too stupid. And now he had found it. There were no sex toys for rich people . And hence, SweetJane (Jon’s shout-out to Lou Reed) was born.
    Creating the brand was surprisingly easy; Hannah basically just merged Southern taste with all-purpose raunch. The latter she approached like a true Stanford MBA, hiring call girls as consultants and paying them by the hour to participate in focus groups. Satin hand ties or silk? (Silk.) How tight should the handcuffs go? (Not very.) What are butt plugs, and are they something rich men would buy? (They buy them on the sly. Don’t bother.) In the end, they came up with a full range of products:
massage oils, candles, and blindfolds. The most popular item by far, though, is the signature platinum vibrator. Looking less like a penis than a cigar out of some space-age humidor, it sells for a cool $575, $625 engraved.
    And the money. Money! SweetJane made Hannah and Jon lots of money. Of course, at the time it seemed impossible not to make money. They started the company in 2004 . The post 9/11 dip was officially over, and there was money everywhere—the kids at Google and Facebook and Oracle didn’t know what to do with it all. San Francisco Magazine ran an article on Hannah and Jon (“How the Bright Young Things Do It!”), and suddenly everyone wanted to invest in their dildos.
They made a profit within a year, within two had paid their investors back and then some.
    Unfortunately, because they’ve been in the black for so long, Hannah has stopped paying attention to the big picture of late,
and due to her inability to put together a decent profit-and-loss statement, the company has been drifting dangerously in financial no-man’s-land. She should plug the latest sales into the spreadsheets now, she really should, but the hour has arrived to go to Palmer’s. I’ll do it tomorrow, she resolves—as she does at the end of every recent workday—and shuts the laptop. At least Jon doesn’t know (yet) that she’s been fucking up in this particular area.
    She showers, puts on a decent “look-I-am-not-crazy” skirt, and borrows Daisy’s car to go to her brother’s house. Palmer lives in downtown Charleston, near where he and Hannah grew up. Doing so, even for the moderately rich, is just barely affordable;
her brother only manages it by clinging to the very top of the peninsula, the increasingly fashionable area high above Calhoun
Street in a neighborhood near the Citadel. This neighborhood was strictly black when Hannah and Palmer were kids, but now ballooning prices have made it OK for whites and blacks to live together on the same block. If you’re young, and you don’t want to leave downtown, and you have a decent amount of money but haven’t totally made it yet because you’re sort of waiting on your stepfather to expire and leave you a fairly staggering inheritance,