Delivery at Dusk

The package sat on my passenger seat for the whole drive downtown, and I kept glancing at it like it might open itself. It was just a flat cardboard mailer, sealed with actual wax for some reason, the kind of thing rich clients pay extra for when they want to feel important. But I knew what was really inside it. Or rather, I knew what was really inside the building it was headed to, which was a man I had been talking dirty to on an app for six weeks and had never once seen in person.

His name was Cody. He was thirty-six, a lawyer, and he was flying out of Austin at dawn for a new job in Denver, which meant tonight was the only night either of us would ever get. He had set the whole thing up like a scene from a movie. Send the courier at eight thirty. Make sure she's the only one on the floor. Wait by the window.

I note here that I read the instructions three times before I believed them. Raquel, forty-four, divorced two years back after fifteen years of marriage, recently back on the kink scene after a very long dry spell of being somebody's wife and somebody's mother figure and nobody's anything else. I had been doing delivery work since the divorce, first because I needed the money and then because I liked the hours, and in all that time I had never once gotten a message from a client that made my stomach drop the way his did.

The law firm took up the top four floors of a glass tower off Congress Avenue. The lobby guard checked my ID, glanced at the delivery slip, and waved me toward the elevators without a second look. Twenty-six floors of quiet humming ascent. I watched the city fall away below me and tried to breathe the way anyone else would.

The twenty-seventh floor was dark except for one office at the far end, where warm light spilled across the carpet. The conference room next to it was empty, all long glass table and leather chairs, the windows behind it showing the whole downtown grid lit up like a circuit board. My heels were loud on the marble. Nobody told me to be quiet. Nobody was there to tell me anything.

Except him.

He was standing at the window of the corner office with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, and when I stopped in the doorway he turned around slow, like he had all the time in the world, which technically he did not. He was taller than his pictures. Broader in the shoulders. His hair was dark and a little too long, like a lawyer who wanted you to know he held views about things.

"Ms. Raquel," he said. "Right on time."

"Package for Cody," I said, and held it up like an idiot, like maybe I could just pretend this was any other delivery and walk out with a signature and my dignity intact.

He crossed the room and took it from me, set it on the desk without looking at it, and then he looked at me. Just looked. I have been looked at by a lot of men in my life and I would like to think I am not easily rattled, but this was different. He was studying me the way he probably studied contracts, line by line, and I could feel my face getting warm under the attention. I reminded myself, firmly, that I was forty-four years old, not twenty-four, that I had raised a son through braces and heartbreak and he was twenty-two now, that no man's eyeballs had ever killed anybody. It did not help as much as I hoped.

"You're shorter than I imagined," he said. "The rest is exactly right."

"You imagined me at all hours, apparently."

"Most of them." He smiled a little. "Six weeks of messages, Raquel. You've told me things you've never told anyone. I'd feel cheated if I didn't at least get to see you in person."

And there it was, laid out on the desk between us next to the wax-sealed package. I opened my mouth to say something deflecting and funny, the way I do, and nothing came out. The city glowed behind him. The office was so quiet I could hear the building's air system breathing.

"I have other deliveries," I said weakly.

"No, you don't. I checked the courier log. Your last job of the night ends here." He let that sit for a second. "I want you to stay. That is the entire request. Stay, or don't. Either answer is fine with me. The package is delivered and the slip is signed either way, nothing about your job or your account rides on this, and you walk out of here with nothing but a good story."

I stood there and did the math I had already done forty times in the truck. One night. One man I already knew better than some men I had dated for months. One version of me that used to exist before the marriage and had been clawing her way back ever since. He waited without rushing me, hands loose at his sides, and that patience did more to convince me than anything he could have said.

"Okay," I heard myself say. "Okay. I'll stay."

I walked back to the office door and turned the lock, and the little click of it sounded louder than it had any right to. When I turned around he had moved one of the leather chairs out from the conference table into the middle of the carpet, angled toward the window, and he was standing next to it watching me with that same careful attention.

"Kneel there," he said, pointing at the carpet beside the chair. "Please!"

There was no hurry in it. There was no threat in it. It was just an instruction, given plainly, by a man who had spent six weeks learning exactly what kind of instruction would undo me. And God help me, it did. I walked over on legs that felt borrowed and knelt down on the carpet, and the floor underneath was firmer than it looked, commercial padding over concrete, and my knees registered every bit of it. My palms rested on my thighs. I stared at the hem of his trousers because looking up felt like too much and looking away felt impossible.

"Good," he said quietly, and the word went through me like a current.

He reached down and ran a hand over my hair, slow, from my crown down to the nape of my neck, and I leaned into it before I could stop myself. He made a small pleased sound at that, and did it again. His fingers were warm. My whole scalp felt awake.

"Words still work," he said. "Anything at any time, you say stop and I stop. But we're going to need a proper word, because stop is a word you might say when you don't mean it. Pick one."

"Houston," I said, and he laughed, a real laugh, quick and surprised.