Last Exit Before

Don Carroll was fifty-four years old, and he had spent most of those years holding the needle instead of the rope.

That was the joke he told himself, alone in his shop at closing time. The needle he could handle. The rope, never.

He had texted Kellie Wilcox on a Tuesday. Three words, and then three more, because three wasn't enough. I want it. Then, before he could delete it: Tie me up.

She called him nine minutes later. He counted.

"You're serious," she said. Not a question.

"Kellie..."

"Don. Are you serious."

"Yes!" His voice cracked on it. "Yes. I'm serious!"

There was a long pause on the line, and Don sat on the stool in his shop and stared at the flash art on the wall and waited for her to laugh. She didn't laugh.

"Fine," she said. "But not here and not now. I want a weekend. I want the road. You take me out to that town where you got your first ink, the one you never shut up about in '98. Burnt something. And I set every rule."

"Burnt Draw. It's Burnt Draw."

"Every rule, Don. You follow them or we turn the truck around."

He said yes. Of course he said yes.

So now it was Friday, and Kellie was fifty years old and driving his twenty-year-old pickup through the high desert of eastern Oregon, and Don had not spoken in over an hour.

She'd taken the keys off him at his own front door. Tossed his duffel in the bed under the camper shell herself. "You ride shotgun," she'd said. "That's the whole trip, in case you were confused about how it works."

He hadn't been confused. He'd been quiet ever since.

The two-lane stretched out ahead, flat and gray in the dusk. Abandoned gas stations slid past. A motel with a vacancy sign that flickered like something dying. Stale coffee smell in the cab, leather, his own bergamot aftershave fading off his skin. He kept his eyes on the road because watching her drive was too much. Her hands on the wheel. Small hands. He remembered them.

He remembered the last night, too. Twenty years back now, both of them thirty-something and stupid in her apartment, and her sitting on the edge of the bed with a length of rope in her hand. Soft rope, braided, the color of sand.

"Give me your wrists," she'd said.

And he'd laughed. Actually laughed, like it was a bit.

"Come on, Kell. That's not... that's not really my thing."

She'd looked at him for a while. He could still see it, her face going still the way it did.

"It could be," she said. "You'd like it. You'd like it so much it scares you."

"I don't do that," he'd told her. "I do the tying. That's how it works."

"Yeah," she said, and her voice went flat, flatter than he'd ever heard a voice go. "You don't want what I want."

She'd stood up. Set the rope on the dresser. Got dressed while he sat there arguing with a wall. And that was the end of a whole year, gone over a piece of braided hemp.

Now she reached over and turned the radio off. She hadn't looked at him yet.

"You really think you can follow an order from me?"

Don's mouth opened. Nothing came out for a second.

"I think," he said, "I want to try."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know what you asked."

"Then answer it."

He looked out the window. Scrub and rock and a fence line running nowhere.

"No," he said. "I don't know if I can. That's kind of the point."

Kellie made a sound, almost a laugh, not quite. She took the next turn without slowing, down toward a fuel stop that turned out to be dead, pumps wrapped in plastic, windows dusty as chalkboards.

"Great," Don said. "You picked a ghost town."

"Hardware's still open. Saw the sign a mile back."

It was. Barely. A bell over the door and a man behind the counter who looked up once and went back to his paper. Don followed Kellie past seed racks and oil cans, and then she stopped in an aisle that smelled like decades and ran her fingers along a coil of hemp rope on a nail.

Don's chest did something complicated.

"How long do you need?" he asked, and his voice came out wrong.

"Thirty feet," she said. "Maybe forty. Be safe."

She pulled a length off the spool and the man weighed it and she paid cash and then she turned and put the coiled rope in Don's hands.

"Carry it," she said. "Don't say a word."

He carried it. Out the door, across the gravel lot, to the truck. He set it on the seat between them and got in and shut his mouth the whole way, and Kellie drove on with the sun going down behind the ridges, and every so often he glanced at the rope and then at her and then back at the road.

The rest stop came up out of nowhere. A gravel pullout, a concrete picnic table, a garbage can with no liner. No other cars. Nothing but wind and the last orange light.

Kellie pulled in and shut the engine off.

"Out," she said. "Both doors. Meet me at the back of the truck."

Don got out. His knees felt like they belonged to someone else. She came around the tailgate and leaned against it, arms crossed, rope in her bag over one shoulder, and looked at him under the fading sky.

"Kneel," she said. "On the gravel. Right there."

He hesitated one full second. Then he went down. The stones bit through his jeans and he knelt on them anyway and looked up at her, and the wind moved her hair across her face, and she waited.

"Say why you're doing this," she told him. "All of it. Don't polish it."

"Kellie..."

"Start talking or we get back in the truck."

"Okay. Okay." He swallowed. "I'm doing this because I asked you to. Because I texted you like an idiot at one in the morning because I couldn't say it to your face twenty years ago and I still can't, apparently, except I just did."

"Keep going."

"Because I've spent my whole life being the one in charge. In the shop, with the clients, with every woman I've dated since you. And it's..." He stopped. The raw part was right there and he could feel it climbing his throat. "It's exhausting, Kell. It's so exhausting. And I think about that rope on your dresser more than I think about most things, and I think about what you said. You don't want what I want."