Late Bloom

I got there forty minutes early, which was dumb, but I'd rather sit in a parking lot than be late. My car said 4:12 when I shut it off. Three hours from Seattle and my back was screaming, and I just sat there with my hands on the wheel trying to remember why I thought this was a good idea.

I am sixty-four. Henri is forty-two. We met on a kink forum eight months ago, and in all that time we'd never been in the same room. Just messages, some late-night calls, one video call where I chickened out and wore a scarf the whole time. He never said anything about the scarf. That's the kind of man he is.

The gallery is Faye's, the Davenport, a converted warehouse off the water in Portland. I teach life drawing in the back studio twice a month, so technically I have a key. Technically I could have walked in whenever I wanted. Instead I went around to the loading door like we'd agreed, because Faye doesn't know anything about any of this, and if she saw Henri coiling rope in her studio I'd have to explain myself, and I would rather die.

Through the window I could see him on the platform. The wooden one, the model stand, with the north light coming across it all gold because it was almost evening. He was laying out rope in neat loops, and the sight of it did something to my stomach that I haven't felt in years. My hands started shaking so bad I dropped my phone twice trying to type.

here, I finally sent.

Came back fast. Good. Door on your left.

I sat with that for a solid minute. Well, I thought. This is it. You drove three hours, Jenna, you're not sitting in a parking lot now.

Inside smelled like coffee and dust and whatever cleaner Faye uses on the concrete. Henri was standing at the edge of the platform, and God, he's taller than he looks on video. Dark hair going gray at the temples, which somehow made it worse, in a good way. He was wearing a plain black shirt with the sleeves pushed up.

"Jenna," he said.

"Hi. Hi. Sorry, I'm early, I know, I sat outside like a weirdo for forty minutes."

"I know. I saw you pull in." He smiled a little. "I gave you the time to change your mind."

"Oh. Well. That's either very considerate or very sneaky."

"Both, probably." He came down off the platform and stopped a few feet away. "How was the drive?"

"Long. My left hip has opinions now, apparently, it didn't used to."

"Sit down later, I'll get you water first." He looked at me for a beat, not rushing me, and I realized my hands were still shaking so I shoved them in my coat pockets. "Before anything happens, I want to say this out loud, once, and then we're done with it. You can stop at any point, for any reason or no reason. Yellow slows things down, red stops everything. Nod if that's still what you want."

"Yes," I said. "I mean." I nodded. "Yes. It's still what I want. I have wanted it for eight months, that is the entire problem, and I talked myself out of it about nine times before I even left Seattle."

"What stopped you?"

"Honestly? I kept thinking, he's forty-two, he'll see me in the light and realize he made a mistake with the pictures."

Henri didn't laugh, didn't reassure me with something glib. He just stepped closer and put one hand on the side of my face, thumb along my jaw, and kissed me. It was a measured kind of kiss, unhurried, like he was introducing himself. My knees did something embarrassing.

"Was that a mistake?" he asked.

"No," I said, quieter than I meant to. "No, that was not a mistake."

"Good. Then here's what happens next, and you tell me if any of it is wrong. You're going to take off your coat, your shoes, your dress. Underwear stays on. Then you stand on the platform facing the window, and you wait for me. You don't turn around. You don't talk unless I ask you something. Can you do that?"

I swallowed. My whole mouth had gone dry. "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Oh. Um. Yes, Henri?"

"Try again."

"Sir," I said, and the word came out of me like it had been sitting in my throat for thirty years waiting.

"Good girl." He turned me gently by the shoulder toward the platform. "Go on. I'll be right here."

I took my coat off first, and that was fine, and my shoes, and then I stood there with my hand on the zipper of my dress for what felt like a full minute. Thirty years with Frank, and I mean thirty, we met when I was thirty-one, and he never once looked at me the way this man had looked at my profile pictures. Frank touched me the way you check whether the oven is off. Efficient. I ended it three years ago and I still flinch at my own reflection some mornings.

"For God's sake, Jenna," I muttered, and unzipped the dress.

It dropped to the concrete and I stepped out of it and walked to the platform in my underwear like I do this every day, which I do not, I have not been undressed in front of anyone new since before my marriage ended. I climbed up and faced the window. The harbor was going copper and pink. Behind me I heard him fold my dress over a chair.

"Beautiful," he said, conversationally, like he was commenting on the weather.

"You don't have to lie, you know."

"Jenna." His voice changed, lower. "I don't lie. Turn your head, look at me."

I turned my head. He was standing right behind me now, and he reached past my shoulder and turned my chin back toward the window with two fingers.

"I said face the window. That was a rule for one minute and you already broke it. I'll allow it this once." A pause. "You are beautiful. There's gray in your hair and lines around your eyes and I have thought about seeing you like this for eight months. Do you understand me?"

"...Yes, sir."

"Good. Arms behind your back."

I did it, and my breath went short before he even touched me. I heard the rope first, that soft rasp of jute, and then his hands, warm, steadying my wrists together. He wrapped the rope around them slow, three passes, and I felt each one settle like he was wrapping something valuable instead of just a sixty-four-year-old woman who'd driven three hours to be brave.

"Too tight?"

"No. It's. God. It's good."

He tied. I couldn't see any of it, which was somehow the whole point, I just felt it, the tension, the way my shoulders had to roll back to make room for my hands. He'd told me once on the phone that rope is a conversation and the knots are sentences, and I'd thought that was forum-poetry, but standing there I got it. Every knot got a little tug, a check, his fingers testing it, and each time he murmured "okay?" and each time I said "okay," and somewhere in the middle of that my shaking stopped.

"Breathe," he said, near my ear.

"I am breathing."

"You're holding it at the top. Let it out. There."

I let it out and something in my chest unlocked that I didn't know was locked. My eyes had gone hot, which was stupid, I was not going to cry in a gallery in my good bra.

"Jenna. Are you crying?"

"No."

"That's a lie and we talked about lying."

"It's the light," I said. "The north light in here is famous, Faye brags about it, it does things to people."

"Faye," he said, amused. "The gallery owner. She'd faint if she saw this."

"She'd faint, then she'd lecture me, then she'd ask if you're single, honestly, she would, she's thirty-seven and she thinks every woman my age needs rescuing, bless her."

"And do you?"

I thought about it, wrists bound, facing a pink harbor. "No, sir. I don't think I do."

His hand settled between my shoulder blades, warm and heavy, right over the rope. "No. I don't think you do either."

"Kneel."

The word landed on my back before his hand did. I just stood there for a second, because nobody had ever said that to me, not once, not in sixty-four years, and apparently I needed a moment to process it.

"Sir, my hip," I said.

"It's going to be graceless. Fair warning."

"Kneel anyway. I'll catch you."

He did, sort of. I went down onto the platform, knees on the wood, hands still tied behind me, and it was graceless, my left hip gave its little complaint, but his forearm came across my chest and steadied me until I settled. He knelt beside me, close enough that I could smell the leather of the thing in his hand.

"This is a flogger," he said. "Suede, fairly soft, I bought it for you specifically. I want you to feel it before I do anything with it."

"You bought it for me?"

"Eight months ago. Before I knew if you'd ever make the drive." He dragged the falls across my thigh, light as a ribbon. "There. That's all it is, to start. Say yellow if it's too much, red if it's a stop."

"What if I don't say anything?"

"Then I keep going until you do. That's the deal, Jenna. You talk or I stop." He waited until I nodded. "Good. Face the window."

The harbor was nearly all copper now, the pink draining out of it. I felt him move behind me, felt the fall of the flogger settle over my shoulder and hang there, down between my breasts, cool against my sternum. Just resting. Just being a weight.

"Look at that light," he said. "Tell me what you see."

"I see. The water. A boat, maybe, that little tug."

"And what do you feel?"

"I feel like I'm going to embarrass myself."

"Good," he said, and the flogger lifted off my chest.

The first stroke landed across my upper back and it was not what I expected. I'd expected pain, or I'd told myself I expected pain, but it was more like the memory of pain, a warm spread that bloomed and faded and left me tilting back toward it. I made some sound. I'll deny