Leather and Light

Janie was thirty-four years old and she had a secret she'd told almost no one.

Well. Almost never. Her late husband Rob had known, sort of. He'd caught her running her thumb over a leather jacket in a mall once, back when she was twenty-eight, and he'd said "huh, you really like that thing" and she'd said "yeah, it's nice" and that was the entire conversation. Eight years of marriage and he never asked twice. Then three years ago he was gone, and the secret went back in the box with the rest of her widow stuff.

The secret was this: leather did something to her. Not jackets on hangers, exactly. More the heavy stuff. Corsets, cinchers, the smell of a tack shop, the creak of a good belt. She'd known since her twenties. She was thirty-four now and she'd told exactly nobody, which was fine, which was manageable, except for days like this one.

"Janie. Janie, he's eating something."

Tori was crouched on the gravel holding a leash, and at the end of the leash was Buster, a fourteen-year-old corgi with the moral code of a raccoon. Tori was thirty-five, a dance instructor, and currently dragging Janie through The Flea at Willow Creek on a crisp Saturday in October because her elderly neighbor needed the dog watched and Tori refused to waste a good Saturday indoors.

"Buster, drop it. Drop it, sir." Tori pried something out of his mouth. "Was that a chicken bone? Buster, we talked about this."

"He can't hear you talk about it, he doesn't read the group chat," Janie said.

"He knows. He knows what he did." Tori stood up and wiped her hand on her jeans. "Okay. Coffee first, then the booth with the weird hats, then I want to look at old doorknobs for the studio. I've decided the studio needs old doorknobs."

"You've decided that since when?"

"Since this morning. It's a living decision, it evolves."

They walked the rows, Buster's little legs churning. The market was big, a couple hundred vendors spread over a fairground, and the fall light came through the trees all gold and low. Janie liked it here. She sold industrial coatings for a living, which was about as romantic as it sounded, and Saturdays like this were the part of her week that actually felt like hers.

Then they came around the end of row four and Janie saw the booth.

It was a leather goods booth. Bags, belts, holsters, saddle stuff, and hanging off a rack at the back, in the shade under the canvas, a couple of vintage corsets. Real ones, boned, laced up the back. One was black. One was a deep oxblood red.

Janie's feet slowed without asking her permission.

"You okay?" Tori said.

"Yeah. Yeah, I just... that glass over there is nice." There was glass, actually. The next booth over was a stained glass restorer, and there was a big window panel propped up on an easel, catching the sun.

"Okay but you walked past that rack like it was on fire and also you owed it money."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did. You do this. You did it at that consignment store in Richmond, remember? You stood in front of a leather skirt for ten minutes and then bought a cardigan."

"That's not..." Janie trailed off, because Buster had found a french fry, and because arguing was going to go somewhere she didn't want it to go. Yet.

The stained glass window had stopped her for a different reason, and the reason was that it was, of all things, a woman in a leather bodice.

She was drawn in old-fashioned style, serious face, dark hair, wearing a black leather bodice with red lacing up the front, one hand on her hip. The glass worker had gotten the shine of it right, somehow. Where the sun hit it, the leather looked like it creaked.

"Huh," Tori said, next to her. "That's a whole statement."

"Isn't it," Janie said, and heard her own voice do the thing it did when she wasn't careful.

The booth man came around from behind his table. Sixty-something, wire glasses, cardigan over a flannel shirt, the kind of guy who has a story about every object and will use it.

"You've got a good eye," he said. "That's my best piece this year. Nineteen-twenties design, restored the leading myself. I'm Doug, by the way. Retired art teacher, did glass forty years."

"Tori. This is Janie. And the garbage disposal on four legs is Buster."

"Pleasure." Doug looked at the window the way other people look at grandchildren. "She's a fantasy figure, that one. Somebody's idea of a dangerous woman, back when dangerous meant a laced bodice and a look."

Janie could not stop looking at it. The light moved through the leather and it looked warm. It looked like something you'd want to be.

"How much?" Tori said.

"Tori," Janie said.

"What? For the studio. Over the front desk, where the little round window is. It's perfect. It's a dance studio, people pay me to be dramatic all day, I'm allowed one dramatic window."

Doug named a number. It was high but not insane, and he knocked a little off when Tori said "hmm" in her negotiating voice, which Janie had watched empty bank accounts before.

"Sold," Tori said. "Can you hold it? I've got a truck, I'll come back for it before we leave."

"I'll wrap it and keep it behind the table. Nobody's walking off with her."

Tori paid, and Doug wrote the ticket, and all the while Janie drifted, again without permission, back to the rack in the next booth. The oxblood corset was on the outside of the rack. She touched it before she decided to touch it. The leather was cool and stiff and heavier than it looked, boned through the front panel, the lacing in the back worn soft by somebody else's hands a long time ago.

Her pulse was doing something stupid. Standing in a flea market in October, dog on a leash, best friend twenty feet away, and her pulse was doing that.

"You've got taste," said the leather booth guy, an older woman actually, reading glasses on a chain. "That's a proper Victorian repro, steel boning. Forty if you want it."

"I'm just looking," Janie said, which she had been saying for about fifteen years.

"Sure, honey. Take your time."

Tori came up beside her with the ticket stub in her hand and Buster wheezing contentedly at her ankles. She looked at the corset. She looked at Janie's hand, which Janie realized was still on the leather, fingers spread on it like she was checking it for a fever.

"Janie."

"Hm."

"Can I ask you something, and you're allowed to lie, but you've never once lied to me so I don't know why I'm saying that."

"Okay," Janie said, and her hand was still on the corset.

"Is this a thing? Like a thing thing? Because you do the jacket thing, and you did the skirt thing, and right now you're touching that corset like it's a cat that might purr, and I've known you since I was twenty-one and I think I've just been slow."

The market noise went on around them. Somewhere a guy was hollering about tool prices. Buster sat down on Tori's shoe.

"Tori," Janie said.

"Yeah."

"Can we maybe... not here? Or here, actually, I don't know, because if we don't do it here I'll find a way to not do it in the car either."

Tori turned to the woman at the booth. "Ma'am, could we borrow a second of privacy, my friend's having a moment with your corset."

"Take two," the woman said, and went to fuss with a belt display at the far end.

Tori faced her. "Okay. Here. Now!"

Janie looked at the corset, because looking at Tori was going to be worse. "I like leather. Not like, I own a jacket, I like leather. It's... it's a whole thing for me, it always has been, and Rob knew and he never really..." She stopped. Started again. "I've never told anyone else. Out loud. Ever."

Tori was quiet for a second, which for Tori was practically a eulogy.

Then she said, "Okay, first of all, buy the corset."

* * *

She bought the corset. Forty dollars, the woman wrapped it in a grocery bag like it was a loaf of bread, and Janie carried it against her hip the rest of the morning and did not once forget it was there. It was like carrying a lit match.

"Told you," Tori said, as they walked back into the main aisle. "First of all buy the corset. I said it and it happened."

"You said one thing and it fixed everything, is what you're saying."

"I'm saying I have good instincts and you have a bag with a Victorian repro in it. Both things are true."

Buster seemed to know which way to go, apparently, because he leaned into his leash and dragged them left, past a table of cast iron skillets and a guy selling honey in mason jars and a whole booth that was just buttons, thousands of buttons in coffee cans. Janie let him lead. It was easier than deciding anything with her own brain.

"Can I ask a follow-up," Tori said, "or did the follow-up get used up on the corset."

"You can ask."

"Rob. When you said he knew, sort of. What does sort of mean?"

Janie watched Buster's little legs churn through the gravel. "It means I told him once, when I was twenty-eight. Five years in. He caught me, actually. Touching a leather jacket in a store, kind of... petting it, I guess. He laughed, but not mean. And I told him it wasn't about the jacket, exactly."

"And?"

"And he was kind about it. He was always kind. He just never did anything with it. We'd be... you know, and maybe I'd wear something, and he'd say it looked nice, and that was sort of the whole depth of