SeXplosive I'm sure no one has ever called the town of "Umatilla" erotic before. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not the Paris of the Pacific Northwest or anything. But I needed something special for Lycia. We met last year on the Fourth of July. Fort Vancouver had one of the biggest fireworks displays in the country. I had the bright idea to, um, augment some of the Fort's fireworks with some flash powder I'd gotten my hands on. There was still some crappy country band playing on the stage, which was thankfully pretty far from the launch platform. I'd just hopped the fence when I saw this thin woman hunched near some of the mortar tubes, cursing like a drunken sailor with Tourettes. She had a big bag of black powder behind her, but she was struggling with a shell. I asked her what was wrong, and she dropped the shell back in the tube; there was a moment we both stared at each other, wide-eyed, surprised we weren't exploded. She'd forgotten her knife. I lent her mine. We went to work, sprucing up the Fort's fireworks display. She was just like me, a big explosives enthusiast. She got a job at Blackjack before it went under, which was where she got her completely awesome Class A explosives (but hey, I'm comfortable enough with myself that I don't mind not being the primary big bang bringer). The conversation was the sexiest foreplay ever, and I found myself pounding more and more powder into each shell as it got playfully competitive. The last shell was for the big finale, and we put so damned much boom into it that we had to like hug ourselves around it to get the casing shut. We put the shell into its tube, and there was a moment where we were panting, and staring at each other, and there were just fireworks in our eyes. We burst into each other, half-smashing our faces in a way that was more painful than sensual, but I figured as we rolled in the moist grass that I could probably roll with that. We rolled downhill far enough that when the actual fireworks started we didn't have to run for our earplugs. I didn't look at the sky once; I like to think she didn't, either. The climax of the show came and went; our show was still going on. We might have kept at it for the whole night, but one of the park services people caught us and we had to leg it. I guess terrorism had been a bigger concern since 9/11, but two horny kids sneaking in and fiddling with their fireworks scared them so much they cancelled the '09 show. But Umatilla, yeah. We've been together since then, coming up on a whole year. During that time we've definitely lost our security deposit in our apartment, and voided the warranty on at least seven different mattresses. But this is the anniversary. It needed to be big. I racked my brains for months. I mean, hell, we'd started with our finale, and equaling it (let alone topping it) was no small order. But Umatilla. Famous for the Chemical Depot. How we got into the Depot is a story not worth telling, involving a distant cousin and a stack of very low-quality porno tapes (I can't imagine why he demanded VHS instead of DVD). The making of the grand finale include several felonies and making contacts that will almost certainly have me on terrorist watch lists for the next several years; it consisted of twice as much black powder as she'd brought to the Fort, and the longest bout of sex without a nap between ever. But I knew it was completely worth it, as she lay in my arms in a sex-coma while I carried her out to my truck, bound for the Tillicum Inn (and yeah, that's its actual name).