Boxed In

I signed the lease on a Thursday and slept on a mattress on the floor that same night, and I have never in my life felt so pleased with myself. Twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, and finally living somewhere that nobody else had any claim to. After the breakup with Molly, which had been the kind of messy that leaves you apologizing to mutual friends for six months, having a door with my own name on the buzzer felt like a small act of revenge against the entire concept of relationships.

The apartment was a one-bedroom in a mid-century building with radiators that clanked and an elevator that made you take the stairs. It was mostly empty. Half the rooms were still stacks of cardboard boxes held shut with tape I'd applied in a hurry, and bubble wrap kept shedding little staticky balls onto everything I owned. I didn't care. It was mine.

Which brings me to the box.

There was one box, medium sized, unmarked, sitting in the corner of the living room behind the futon frame, that contained pretty much the entire reason I had wanted my own place in the first place. Ropes. A pair of padded cuffs. A blindfold I'd bought online at two in the morning during finals week of junior year and never had a single opportunity to use. I'd been reading about rope work and restraint for years, mostly on forums where everyone talked like they were giving safety lectures, and I'd built up this entire private library of things I wanted to try and nobody I wanted to try them with. Molly had not been that person. I'd never even worked up the nerve to mention it. So the box had traveled with me from the dorm to the shared house to this apartment, always packed last and hidden first, like some embarrassing relic.

Now, with my own four walls, there was nowhere it needed to hide. Except that habit is habit, and I'd still shoved it behind the futon frame, which turned out to matter a lot, because the doorbell rang on Saturday morning.

I opened the door to a woman about my age holding a basket. She had dark hair cut short and the kind of direct look that makes you straighten your posture without meaning to. She was, I'd guess, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.

"Hi. Corinne, three-oh-seven, across the hall. You're the new guy." She held up the basket, which contained what appeared to be baked goods and a small jar of honey. "Welcome basket. The old lady in 3B does these, I just deliver them. Also I heard you dragging furniture around at eleven last night, so I figured you're doing this alone, and nobody does this alone successfully."

"I'm Adam," I said. "And I'm doing fine, actually."

"You're doing fine with a futon frame and forty boxes." She peered past me into the apartment. "I'm offering help. You can say no, but you'll look stupid lifting that dresser by yourself, and then I'll have to watch."

I said yes, obviously. She was funny and confident and holding baked goods, and I am weak. What I did not factor in, in the moment, was the state of my living room. I did a quick mental inventory while she stepped inside and set the basket on the counter. Box of dishes, out in the open, fine. Box of books, fine. The unmarked box, behind the futon frame, in the corner, theoretically out of sight.

Theoretically.

We worked for an hour or so, and she was good at it, brisk and chatty, asking which shelf went where and telling me which neighbors to avoid. The dresser got up the stairs with only one incident involving the landing, and by the time we were both sweating over the last of the kitchen boxes, I had almost forgotten about the corner. Almost.

Then the futon frame got moved, and the unmarked box behind it tipped, and a coil of rope that I had apparently left sitting loose on top, in a moment of truly criminal laziness, slipped off and landed on the floorboards with a soft thump. It was six millimeter hemp, well-oiled, the kind of rope that does not look like it came from a hardware store. It did not look innocent. I froze mid-box, holding a stack of plates, watching Corinne look at it.

She picked it up. She ran a few feet of it through her hands, the way you'd test a rope, and smiled in a way that I can only describe as knowing. There is a difference between a person holding a rope and a person holding a rope, and this was the second kind.

"Hemp," she said, weighing it. "Somebody conditioned this."

I considered several answers. Lying was the obvious one, and also impossible, because she was still holding it and I was still frozen. "Yeah," I said. "It's, uh. Mine."

"I can see that." She coiled it back up neatly, better than I coil it, which stung a little. "Question. Have you ever used it on anyone, or is this aspirational?"

The directness of it knocked something loose in me. Most people, finding a stranger's rope, would either pretend not to see it or make a joke and move on. Corinne was doing neither. She was just standing there in my half-unpacked living room holding my secret, waiting for an honest answer like it was the most normal request in the world.

"Nobody," I admitted. "Never had the chance. Never had the, I don't know, the nerve. It's been a lot of reading and not a lot of doing."

"Three years I've lived across the hall," she said, leaning against the counter now, rope still in hand, "and you're the first neighbor I've ever caught with decent rope. Most people own the white nylon kind that gives people rope burns. So. Here's my thought." She set the coil down on the counter, deliberately, like she was putting a card face up. "I know what I'm doing with this. I could demonstrate. On you, unless you'd rather watch, but you don't strike me as a watcher."

My pulse did something complicated. I want to be careful how I describe this, because it wasn't a swoop or a rush, it was more like a door I'd been leaning against for years suddenly swinging open. "You're serious."

"I'm serious. And I'm also not crazy, so we'd do this properly. Sit down."

I sat down on a moving box, which creaked alarmingly, and she laid it out while I listened with my heart going hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. Two hours, she said. That was the shape of it. Two hours, starting after lunch, in my apartment, with the door of hers unlocked in case either of us needed to walk out for any reason. She would tie, I would be tied, and nothing was going to happen that we didn't agree on first. No sex, she said, unless we both decided separately and later, and she meant it, she wasn't fishing. She asked what I wanted out of it and I gave the only honest answer I had, which was that I wanted to find out what it felt like to hand over control to someone who actually wanted it, because everything I'd read said the wanting had to go both ways.

"Safeword," she said. "Pick something you'd never say by accident. Not no, not stop, those get used for real during scenes and I'll ignore them on purpose. Pick a word."

"Bubble wrap," I said, because there was a sheet of it right there and my brain grabs whatever's nearest.

She laughed, a real one. "Bubble wrap.