Latex Second Chance

I'm forty-two years old and I've been a paramedic for sixteen years. You'd think a job like that would keep a man from getting bored with himself, but the truth is the sirens and the blood and the old ladies who fall in their bathtubs all blur together after a while. The rest of my life runs on rails. Same takeout place on Fridays, same fishing trip with the guys twice a year, same quiet apartment with the same dead plant on the windowsill. I'm not unhappy. That's the strange part. I'm just predictable, and I've gotten tired of watching myself be predictable.

So when my phone buzzed on Tuesday afternoon and the screen said Sabrina Blackwood, I sat there in the break room for a good thirty seconds before I picked it up. We dated for two years back when we were young, I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two, and it ended clean when she took a job overseas. No cheating, no screaming, just two kids who wanted different continents. We kept loose touch over the years. Birthday texts, the occasional comment on her vacation photos. Nothing like this.

The message said, Tuesday evening, my place, eight o'clock. You remember what we never got around to. Wear something easy to take off.

I knew exactly what she meant. Twenty years ago, back when we were still sharing a mattress, she'd found the latex scene online and worked up the nerve to tell me about it. She wanted to dress me in it, seal me up head to toe, run her hands over me while I did the same to her. I was twenty-three and scared of my own shadow when it came to anything that couldn't be explained to a bartender. I laughed it off. She let it drop. It sat between us for the rest of that relationship like furniture nobody used, and then the relationship ended and the furniture got auctioned off.

I'm not desperate. I want that understood. I've had plenty of women since, decent years with a couple of them, and I don't sit around pining for Sabrina Blackwood. But she'd named the thing I skipped, the one night I said no when a yes would have cost me nothing, and I'm tired of being the man who always says the safe thing. So at eight on the dot I pulled my pickup into her driveway in that quiet suburb and sat there with the engine ticking.

Her house looked like her, tidy and warm, porch light yellow, a wreath on the door even though there was no holiday coming. The living room I glimpsed on my way in still had the leather couch, the worn brown one we'd picked out together at a secondhand shop when we were broke and happy about it. Twenty years and she kept the couch. That affected me in a way I wasn't ready for.

She answered the door in a black silk robe and nothing about her had changed enough to matter. Forty-one years old and she still carried herself like the smartest person in whatever room she walked into, which she usually was. Her hair was shorter. Her eyes were the same.

"Rafael Keller," she said, and smiled. "You actually came."

"You actually asked." I stepped inside and she closed the door behind me.

"I asked a long time ago," she said, taking my jacket off my shoulders like we'd never stopped. "You're just late."

She didn't offer me a drink. She didn't give me the tour. She walked me down the hall and straight into her bedroom, and there on the bed, laid out flat and shining under the lamp, was a black latex catsuit. Full body, feet to wrists, and attached at the neck a hood with pinprick eye holes and a mouth hole, all one piece. It caught the light like oil on water.

"You remembered," I said. My voice came out lower than I meant it to.

"Rafael, I've thought about that suit for eighteen years. I bought my first one a year after we broke up, when I was twenty-four, and I've never once worn it for the man I bought it for." She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. "Do you still want it? Say it plainly. I don't do guessing games with this."

"Yeah," I said. "I want it."

"Then get undressed and lie down. I've done this before and you haven't, so you're going to do what I say."

I stripped down to nothing while she watched, unbothered, and I'll admit it felt good to be looked at like that, like something she'd been saving room for. The room was warm, she'd cranked the heat before I arrived, which I only understood later, because latex doesn't go on cold and it doesn't go on dry. She had a big jar of talc and a bottle of lube on the nightstand, and she worked like a nurse with better intentions.

She started at my feet. She rolled the latex up my ankles and over my calves, and the smell of it hit me, that sharp rubber tang mixed with the talc, and something in my brain lit up that hadn't been lit in decades. The material gripped. Not painfully, but constantly, every inch of my legs at once, and every step of the way she talked.

"I used to imagine this exact evening," she said, smoothing a wrinkle out along my thigh with the flat of her hand. "You, on this bed, going into the rubber one limb at a time. I'd be pulling it up your hip and you'd make a face and I'd tell you to hold still."

"Is that what I'm supposed to do? Hold still?"

"Hold still."

The suit came up over my hips and she worked my cock through the molded sheath built into the front, snug and visible and slightly ridiculous and not ridiculous at all, and I felt the heat of my own body start to collect in the rubber. Arms next. She rolled each sleeve up to my shoulder, and my hands disappeared into fingers that were mine but stiffer, slower, gloved in black. She zipped the back seam from tailbone to the collar and then she picked up the hood.

"Last part," she said. "Breathe through your mouth. The eye holes are small and the world's going to get loud in your own head. If it's too much, you say red and we stop. Can you remember red?"

"Red. Got it."

She drew the hood over my head and worked it down until it sealed at my neck, and the room went dim and close. The ceiling fan blurred through the pinpricks. My own breath came back at me warm, fogging the inside of the rubber for a second with each exhale, then clearing, then fogging again. My heartbeat sounded like it was happening in a small room. Every part of me was touched by something and couldn't tell what.

Then she put my hands on her and I stopped caring about the fog.

She opened the robe and let it fall, and underneath she