Hickey Factory

The cupping kit is a wondrous invention, but it leaves hickies, and those can be hard to explain.

I bought a cupping kit to use at home on sore muscles. While some kits are glass and require the use of fire, mine are simply plastic suction cups. Put one on a muscle with a knot in it, suck out the air with the special air-sucking gun, leave it on for a few minutes and the knot lets go. I use it on Wyatt's deltoids when he lifts weights too much, and I use it on my shoulders whenever they get stiff.

Afterwards it looks as if you've been loved up by an octopus - you're left with perfectly round, purple circles. They look like bruises but they're not sore like that. Wyatt has fair skin that stays scarlet for a week and half after a cupping treatment.

Several months ago Wyatt was in pain from lifting weights, so I cupped his back and shoulders. A couple of days later we went to the gym. On the way back to the car afterwards, he told me he'd struck up a lively conversation about Virginia Tech football with another guy in the locker room. But Wyatt said he noticed when he got out of the shower and went to get dressed, that guy no longer wanted talk.

"It's just occurred to me these hickeys must have scared him," he said.

About a week and half after this incident, Wyatt and I were at the gym doing time in the sauna. After several minutes we both needed a break, so we went to sit in some chairs by the pool. Across the room a man walked out of the dressing room and started staring at me. I looked back. He kept staring. Do I know him? I thought. No, he doesn't look familiar. Is he trying to pick me up? Maybe I'd better look away before Wyatt thinks we're flirting. The man kept looking at me until he went through the door to the weight room.

"That was him," Wyatt said. "That was the guy who stopped talking to me."

Then it all made sense. Sort of. I assume he was staring because he'd identified me as the hickey monster, but I don't know if he was staring in amazement, horror, or in an attempt to get me to offer to hickey him.