Final Service

The carry-on weighed maybe eleven pounds, but Deb stood there in the middle of the international terminal feeling like she was hauling a piano. Snow came down slow and lazy past the big windows, dusting the wings of some 747 she would never fly on, and she thought, not for the first time that week, that a person could measure a decision by how heavy her arms got three days after making it.

Three days ago she had said yes to Singapore. Executive chef, flagship restaurant, a name on the door that was actually her name. Two years minimum, probably more. She had said yes on a Tuesday, in a phone call that lasted nine minutes, and then she had walked into the living room where Peyton was sketching a logo for a client and told him, and he had put the stylus down and smiled at her.

That smile had been the hardest part. It hadn't wavered. It hadn't even flickered. He had been happy for her, really happy, and he had also known exactly what it cost, because Peyton knew everything about her, down to the fact that she counted stairs in her head when she was nervous.

Now she spotted him across the terminal, walking fast with his coat half unzipped like he'd sprinted from the parking garage, and something in her chest did a complicated thing. He was 29 and looked like the day they'd met, four years ago at a restaurant opening, back when she was 25 and still burning her forearms on oven racks for somebody else's kitchen.

He saw her and raised a hand. "Hey! You made it!"

"Barely. Security took forty minutes and I almost had to argue with a man about a cheese knife."

"You brought a cheese knife?"

"Okay, a boning knife. It's in the checked bag, don't worry." She grinned at him, because that was how they survived things, grinning. "I'm four hours early. I checked three times."

They sat side by side at the worn brown leather stools at the far end of the nearly empty bar, her left knee resting against his right, which was how they always sat, even at home on the couch. Two businessmen nursed beers at the far end and didn't look over. The lights were dimmed for the late hour and the whole place had a hush to it, like a church with a liquor license.

The silence between them was not awkward. It was full. Everything had already been said, on Tuesday, on Wednesday when they talked about flights, on Thursday night when they held each other in bed longer than usual and neither slept much. So they just sat for a minute, watching snow eat the runway lights.

Then Peyton caught the bartender's eye and held up two fingers. "Two Old Fashioneds, please. Rittenhouse if you've got it."

"We do."

"Great. Great." He turned back to Deb and set something on the bar between their drinks. A small velvet pouch, dark green, with a drawstring. She knew it on sight. She would have known it in the dark, by weight alone.

"Oh," she said quietly. "You brought it."

"I brought it." He didn't push it toward her or make a show of it. He just left it sitting there, small and certain, next to the napkins. "I wasn't sure if you'd want it. But it seemed wrong to not bring it."

She looked at the pouch and her throat got tight. Thin brown leather, the one he'd bought her three years ago at a shop in Andersonville, early in their marriage, the one with the little brass ring and the clasp he could work one-handed. It had been in the top drawer of his nightstand since the night they'd started packing her things, because they'd both agreed without saying it that it went with him, not her. Singapore got the chef. Chicago kept the wife.

The bartender brought the drinks and left them alone. Deb wrapped both hands around her glass and the sugar cube was still dissolving at the bottom, a little storm cloud of bitters and bourbon.

"Peyton."

"Yeah?"

"Ask me. Whatever it is you've been circling since you sat down, just ask me."

He laughed, once, and rubbed his thumb along the rim of his glass. "You always could tell."

"It's a superpower. Married you, didn't I?"

"So." He turned on his stool to face her, and his voice dropped low, not a whisper but close, the volume of a man in a dim corner of an airport bar saying private things. "We've got maybe three hours before you have to go through. And I keep thinking about how we said goodbye last night, and it was fine, it was good, but it wasn't ours. It was just sad. And I don't want sad to be the last thing."

Deb's breath went shallow. She took a sip of the Old Fashioned so her hands would have a job.

"I want one last scene," he said plainly. "Here, or somewhere quiet, wherever you'd be comfortable. One last time. The safeword, the collar, everything the way it's always been. You say red, it all stops and we just have a drink and I walk you to your gate like a regular husband. But if you say yes..." He stopped, and she watched him choose the words. "If you say yes, I want to give you something worth carrying to Singapore. Not sad. Ours."

She set the glass down. Her hands were steady, which surprised her a little.

The truth was she had been thinking about it too, on the train to the airport, on the shuttle, all through security with her boning knife safely checked and scandalizing nobody. Not the sex exactly, though yes, that, obviously. The structure of it. The way everything got simple when he asked and she answered. The way the collar turned a room full of noise into one clear line between two people.

Three years of marriage, and he'd never once gotten it wrong. He asked. Every time, he asked.

"Yes," she said. "God, yes. I was hoping you'd ask. I've been sitting here rehearsing ways to hint at it, and I'm a terrible flirt, you'd have been waiting all night."

"You're an excellent flirt. You flirted me into a whole marriage."

"You fed me a stolen spoonful of sauce first, that's entrapment." She was grinning again and her eyes were wet and both things could be true at once, apparently. "Yes, Peyton. One last scene. Right here if the corner stays empty, we've got the whole back wall to ourselves."

He looked over her shoulder at the dim end of the bar. The two businessmen were deep in something on a laptop, headphones on, gone. The bartender had drifted toward the register.

"Okay," he said, and his voice was still quiet, but it had changed. Lower, slower. The other voice, the one she'd only ever heard indoors with the door shut. "Okay. Then drink some water first, because bourbon on a plane is a bad idea and I need you clear."

"Yes, sir," she said, testing the word out loud for the first time in weeks, and felt it land in her chest like a key turning.

He signaled the bartender for a water, and while they waited he picked up the velvet pouch and loosened the drawstring with two fingers. No