Chastity Bet

Nadine here. I'm twenty-six, I wait tables at Dewey's Diner on Main Street in Cutler, and I want to tell you about the bet, because people around here still ask me about it and I figure I might as well set the record down somewhere. My last relationship was with a mechanic named Ray. We lasted two years and ended it at twenty-six with no hard feelings, which is more than most people in this town can say. Ray was a decent man. He just never pushed back at me, and it turns out I need someone who pushes back.

Cody pushes back.

Cody is twenty-nine and works the counter at West Feed & Grain, which sits catty-corner from the diner. He dated a college cheerleader for one year when he was twenty-two, and he has mentioned this to me approximately four hundred times, as if a cheerleader from seven years ago is a personality. He's been single since. He comes into Dewey's every morning at seven fifteen, orders coffee black and eggs scrambled, and sits at the counter where he can talk at me while I work. He is cocky in a way that should have gotten old years ago and somehow hasn't. I've been flirting back for weeks and telling myself it doesn't count as flirting, which is a lie I've told myself before and will probably tell again.

It all started the Wednesday before the church fair. Half the town was already buzzing about the fair, so the diner was loud, and Cody sat there smirking at me over the rim of his coffee like he had a secret. He always has a secret, and the secret is always nothing. I slid his refill across the counter harder than I needed to and a little sloshed over onto the saucer.

"Careful," he said, grinning. "You'd hate to lose a good customer."

"You're not a good customer, you're a loud one."

"I'm a winning customer. I've never lost a bet, Nadine. Not once in my life. Ask anybody at the feed store."

I should have let that go. I want to write that down because the whole mess that followed came from me not letting it go, and I've had time to think about whether I'd do it again, and the honest answer is yes, every time. There is something about a man announcing he's never lost that makes me want to be the loss. I've been competitive since I was a kid, and at my age I've stopped apologizing for it. Ray used to let me win at cards, which he thought was sweet and which nearly ended us a year early. Cody would never let me win at anything. That's his whole appeal, if I'm being plain about it.

So I looked at him and I made the dare. I'm not going to act like I thought it through. I had been to the pharmacy on a whim two weeks earlier, after one of our mornings, and bought a thing I had no plan for, and it had been sitting in my dresser since, and when he opened his mouth about never losing a bet, that thing jumped up in my memory like it had been waiting.

"Prove it," I said.

He asked prove what, and I leaned on the counter and told him. I told him I bet he couldn't stay locked in a chastity device for one full week. One week. Seven days. He couldn't touch himself, couldn't take it off, couldn't do anything about it, and I would hold the key. If he lasted the week, I'd buy his breakfast for a month. If he gave up or got himself off, he'd owe me a month of breakfasts and he'd admit at the counter, out loud, in front of whoever was in earshot, that he lost a bet to a waitress.

The diner was loud enough that only Dale, who washes dishes and is half deaf anyway, was close enough to hear. Cody's smirk did something interesting. It stayed on his face but it went tight at the corners, the way a smirk does when the man wearing it has stopped being certain.

"You're bluffing," he said.

"I never bluff. Ask anybody at Dewey's."

"Nobody at Dewey's is going to back you up on that."

"Then ask me again in five minutes."

I went back to the kitchen and stood by the warmer and thought about what I'd just done. My hands were not steady. The fair was Sunday, which meant the whole week ahead was going to be busy and loud and full of people, which is maybe why the dare felt safe, or maybe why it felt dangerous, I still haven't decided which. I dried my hands twice because once didn't settle them.

He said yes. Of course he said yes. A man who has never lost a bet to his own knowledge cannot say no to a bet, it's practically a medical condition. Then I pulled the device out of my apron pocket, and I watched his face go through about four expressions in two seconds, and I'll tell you, watching Cody lose the ability to talk was worth the pharmacy trip by itself. I'd done a little reading, bought the plastic kind, the light one, the kind a man can wear under his clothes without anybody being the wiser. It's not my fault that nobody being the wiser was never actually the plan.

He took it into the diner bathroom, and I stood outside the door listening to him fumble around and grumble to himself, and after a few minutes he came out looking as if he had just signed something without reading it. The lock had a little brass padlock on it, small as a thumbnail. I put the key in my apron pocket, and then when I got home I put it on my keyring next to my car key, which meant every single time I drove anywhere that week I was going to be reminded of it. Some part of me understood that when I did it. Some part of me wanted that.

Day one he was smug. He came in at seven fifteen, ordered his black coffee and scrambled eggs, and acted like nothing was happening, which was itself an act, because nothing was happening for him in a very specific way and we both knew it. He talked about the fair. He talked about feed prices. He talked so much about feed prices that I understood he was filling air so he wouldn't have to think about anything else.

Day two the smugness cracked.

He came in later, around eight, and sat down and shifted on the stool twice before he even ordered, and then he leaned over the counter and told me, in a low voice, that the thing was uncomfortable, that he hadn't slept right, that whoever designed it should be shot, and could I please, please reconsider.

I told him no, and I did it sweetly, which is the worst way to be told no, and I know that because it's how I'd want it done to me.

"It's been one day," he said. "One day and I'm already dying."

"You said you'd never lost a bet. I'm just helping you keep that streak."

"This is different and you know it."

"How is it different?"

He didn't have an answer for that, and I didn't expect one. What I did instead surprised me more than it surprised him. I told him to prove it was still on. Right there, standing at the counter, in the diner, with the lunch rush starting to trickle in, I told him I didn't trust him and he needed to show me.

He looked around like a criminal and then went back to the bathroom, and I followed him to the door, and I'm not proud of what happened next, but I'm also not sorry, so maybe proud and not sorry can sit in the same chair. He had it out through the fly of his boxers, the plastic ring and the cage and the little brass lock, and I asked if I could check it, and he said yes through his teeth, and I checked it. I put my fingers on it. I turned the lock with my thumbnail and felt the whole weight of him in my hand, trapped and warm and not going anywhere, and he made a sound like he'd been punched, quiet, through his teeth.

"That's enough," he said, but his voice didn't sound like it meant it.

"Lock's good," I said, and I washed my hands at the little sink in there, slow, while he stood there not being able to do one single thing about it.

Day three I barely saw him. He came in at seven fifteen because he's a clock about that, but he ate fast and left fast and didn't say much, and I decided to let him marinate. A man like Cody needs to believe he's winning, and the second he stops believing it, that's when you get him. I'd learned that from watching my brother lose at cards for twenty years. So day three, nothing. I smiled, I refilled his coffee, I charged him for the coffee, and I watched him walk out the door like a man trying to remember how legs worked.

Day four was when it got fun.

He came in and ordered, and I noticed he'd started eating his eggs slower. That's how I knew something was coming, because Cody inhales food like a horse. He pushed his plate around, made two runs at talking, gave up twice, and then on the third try he got it out.

"So I've been thinking," he said, turning his fork over. "A week's a long time. For a first bet. Maybe we scale it back. Like a trial run. Half a week, and we call it a win for the sake of the argument."

"Half a week. So four days."

"Today is day four."

"Nice math. No."

"Nadine," he said my name like it hurt him. "Come on. You've made your point. You've humiliated me, fine, I've accepted that, I'll carry that, but there's no reason to drag it