House Key

The first thing you learn about housesitting is that the house never sounds right. I'd been there for three nights and I still jumped every time the furnace kicked on. My friend Dev runs hot and leaves the thermostat at sixty-six, and the whole place pops and clicks like it's trying to tell me something in a code I never learned.

I'm Fern, I'm twenty-eight, I cut tattoos for a living, and up until six months ago I thought I was going to marry a man named Derrick. I don't want to make that whole thing into a story of its own. The short version is that he moved out in February and took the good coffee maker and most of my sense of who I was, and I've been slowly refilling the space ever since. Housesitting helps. Dev's house is quiet, and it isn't mine, so nothing in it reminds me of him.

That's the trick of it, actually. You'd think sleeping in a strange bed would be worse. It's better. Derrick and I picked out our mattress together, and every spring in it had a memory. Dev's guest bed just smells like laundry detergent and feels like a favor from a friend, which is what it is.

So that night, my fourth in the house, I was doing my usual tour of the place. I do it every night, I don't know why. Check the stove, check the lock on the back door, say goodnight to Dev's ridiculous collection of ceramic frogs. It's a ritual with no religion behind it. And on this particular night, on my way past the basement door, I noticed it was cracked open.

That stopped me, because it hadn't been before. I'd looked at that door every night, a plain white six-panel with a brass knob, and every night it had been shut and I'd assumed locked. Now it was open a few inches and there was a wedge of warm light on the stairs, which meant somebody had left the light on down there.

I want to be careful with how I explain what I did next, because I know how it sounds. I didn't go down there to snoop. Okay, that's a lie. I went down there partly to snoop. Dev is an art professor and her basement had been the one part of the house I hadn't seen, and there's a certain kind of person, of which I am one, who cannot walk past an open door with a light on in it. I told myself I was just going to turn off the light and close the door. That's what I told myself, anyway, and the version of me that says things like that has never once been honest.

I pulled my phone out for the flashlight and went down.

The stairs creaked the whole way, and at the bottom I got my first surprise, which was that the basement was finished. Nice carpet, drywall painted a soft gray, recessed lighting. Not a creepy cellar at all. It looked like a small studio apartment with no kitchen. There was a couch against one wall, a little fridge humming in the corner, and a door at the far end that stood ajar.

And then I opened that door the rest of the way and stopped thinking in words for a second.

I don't know what I expected to find in the basement of a house I was babysitting. Storage boxes. A dehumidifier. Maybe Dev's old graduate school paintings. What I found instead was a room with a padded bench in the middle of it, bolted to the floor, and a wooden frame thing I later learned is called a Saint Andrew's cross, and a wall of hooks holding leather cuffs and ropes and things I had no names for. Everything was clean and organized and clearly expensive. This was not a junk drawer of kink. This was a hobby done seriously, the way some people do woodworking.

I stood in the doorway with my phone light shaking a little and just looked. Here's the honest part, the part I keep coming back to: I wasn't grossed out, and I wasn't scared. I was fascinated in a clinical way first, like reading an anatomy chart, and then under that, in a place I hadn't visited in a while, something warmer stirred. Derrick and I had never done anything like this. I'd thought about it. I'd thought about it alone, in the shower, plenty of times, and always filed it under someday, with someone, later. And here was an entire someday, installed in a friend's basement with a dehumidifier humming two rooms away.

I touched the edge of the bench. The leather on the cuffs was soft and broken in. Somebody used this room regularly, and cared for it, and that made it stranger somehow. Not a secret shame. A maintained practice.

That's when my phone buzzed and I nearly went through the ceiling.

It was a text from an unknown number. I read it twice before my heart slowed enough to parse it.

"Hi Fern, it's Andreas. Dev gave me your number, sorry to bother you so late. I left a research notebook at the house last week, small blue one. Any chance you could leave it by the front door and I'll grab it in the morning? Apologies again."

I knew the name, sort of. Andreas had been at Dev's party two years ago, some visiting researcher, and I remembered a tall quiet man who stood near the bookshelf the whole night. We'd said maybe ten words to each other. I typed back, "Sure, I'll leave it out front. Blue notebook, got it."

Then I stood there in the doorway of that room with my thumb still on the phone and a thought landed on me like a dropped anvil.

The notebook was probably down here.

If the notebook was down here, then Andreas used this room. Not Dev. I mean, maybe Dev too, that's her house, but the cuffs were worn in a way that suggested one particular set of hands, and Andreas was the colleague who'd been visiting, and I was standing in what was functionally this man's private play space with my phone flashlight on like a burglar with a ring light.

I backpedaled out of there so fast I hit my hip on the doorframe. Turned off the light, pulled the basement door shut, checked it twice, and stood in Dev's hallway breathing like I'd run a mile. The ceramic frogs judged me from their shelf.

Okay. Think. The man needs his notebook. He asked politely. He knows Dev, Dev trusts him, Dev trusts me with her whole house. The reasonable adult response is: find the notebook, put it by the door, text him it's there, go to bed, never mention the basement to anyone as long as I live.

Except that in order to find the notebook, I'd have to go back down there. And I did not trust myself to go back down there and only look for a notebook. I'd already spent ninety seconds in that room and come out with a whole secret about myself I hadn't unpacked yet. Going back felt like a person on a diet walking through a bakery with a blindfold on.

I made tea I didn't drink. I texted Dev a totally normal question about where the extra toilet paper was, just to have contact with sanity. I sat on the guest bed and thought, with humiliating clarity, about the leather cuffs and how soft that leather had looked.

In the end I went back down, because he needed the notebook and I was not going to be weird about it. That's what I told myself on the stairs. I found it in about four minutes, sitting on the little desk beside the couch, small and blue and very much not hidden, which meant Andreas expected to come back for it and expected the space to be private and here I was, holding it, having seen everything.

I set it by the front door and texted him. "Found it, it's on the front porch next to the blue pot." Then I added, because apparently my thumbs work independently of my brain, "Nice basement."

I stared at that message for a full minute. Delete it. Don't delete it. I sent it, then turned my phone face down on the nightstand like that would undo anything, and lay in the dark listening to the furnace click and thinking about how tomorrow morning a calm, quiet stranger was going to walk up to Dev's porch, pick up his notebook, read the words "nice basement," and know exactly what I'd seen.

I fell asleep sometime after two. I'd like to tell you I dreamed of anything else, but I'd be lying, and this whole story is me trying to stop doing that.

I woke up the next morning to a text I'd been half hoping for. It was from the unknown number. "Thank you for finding the notebook. And for the compliment." No emoji, no question mark, nothing. Just that. I read it forty times and made coffee and tried to be a tattoo artist about it, meaning I traced a design for a client and thought about leather cuffs the whole time.

Here's the part I have to admit before anything else happens in this story. I'm twenty-eight, I've been single since Derrick moved out in February, six months of a numbness I kept describing to people as being tired, and what I felt looking at that padded bench was the first thing resembling hunger I'd felt in half a year. That's the real story. The basement is just where I found it.

He texted again around four. "I couldn't make it this morning after all. I'll be by around seven to pick up the notebook, if that's alright. I know you're staying there. I can be quick."

I typed "sure" and then spent three hours deciding what to wear to hand a man a notebook, which is insane, and settled on jeans and a flannel, which is what I wear to do everything, so at least I was honest.

He showed up at seven exactly. Tall, quiet, same as the party, gray at the temples a little, a canvas bag over one shoulder. I opened the door before he could knock because I'd been standing in the hallway like a sentry. He smiled, small and polite, and held out his hand.

"Thank you again. I'm sorry to interrupt your stay."

"You're not interrupting." I gave him the notebook. Our fingers didn't even touch. Then he looked at me, just a second longer than politeness asks for, and something in my face must have given me