Needle and Groove

I woke up on the leather bench with a blanket tucked around me and a dull ache everywhere that mattered. The back room smelled like coffee, so at least he'd figured out the machine. My shoulders were stiff. My hips were worse. I lay there a minute and took inventory, the way you do after a night you don't fully have words for yet.

Kris was at the front, by the record player. I heard the needle drop, then a soft pop, then something slow and warm I didn't recognize. Jazz, maybe. It figured. The man got snowed in at a tattoo parlor and still found the one shelf with decent records on it.

I sat up slow. The blanket slid off and the cold hit me, and I grabbed his flannel off the floor. It was his, obviously. Mine were the ones on the floor next to it. I pulled it on and padded out front, barefoot on cold boards, hair a disaster.

He looked up. Twenty-five years old, stunt coordinator, built like someone who falls off things for money, and he was standing in my shop holding two mugs like it was any other Tuesday.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning." I took the coffee. It was good. Of course it was good. "What time is it?"

"A little after eight. Power held. Road's still a wall of white, I checked."

"Of course you checked."

"I get up early." He shrugged. "Habit."

I drank my coffee and didn't look at him. There was a big fat thing sitting between us and we were both pretending we hadn't seen it. Last night. All of it. The blizzard, the one beer each, the conversation that turned into a confession that turned into me face down on the bench in the back room with my wrists hooked to the restraints I'd installed and never once used on a client.

I'd known Kris three years. Met him at Daisy's party, back when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, and we'd been friends ever since. Late-night texts. Bad movies. He'd watched me fail at skiing. I'd watched him fail at dating. Never once had anything crossed the line, and then last night the line just... wasn't there anymore.

"We should talk about last night," Kris said. He set his mug down on the counter. "If you want to do it again, I need to know your terms."

I nearly choked. "Straight to it, huh."

"I'm a direct person. You knew that when you handed me the cuffs."

"I didn't hand you anything."

"You handed me a confession, same thing. Semantics." He wasn't smiling, exactly, but there was something warm in it. "Talk to me, Dot. No pressure. We can also just pretend this was a one-time blizzard thing and never mention it again. But I don't think that's what you want, and I know it's not what I want."

I looked at my coffee. Steam curling up. Very interesting steam.

"I liked it," I said finally. "Being tied down. Being told what to do. You know that already, you were there."

"I was there. I'd still rather hear you say it."

"Fine. I liked it. A lot. I liked all of it." My face was hot. "Happy?"

"Very." He let that sit. "And?"

"And I'm scared, Kris." There, out loud. "We've been friends three years. Three years of nothing going wrong, and I don't... if we keep doing this and it goes bad, I lose the whole thing. Not just the sex. The texts at two in the morning. The bad movies. All of it. You don't get that back once you break it."

He was quiet for a second. Then he set his mug down and came around the counter, and instead of standing over me he knelt. Right there on the old floorboards, beside the stool I was on, so we were eye to eye. Snow came down sideways outside the big front window. The record played on.

"You want to know what I think?" he said.

"I guess."

"I think you've been running this shop alone on a county road for two years, and you're the most stubborn person I know, and you trust about four people on this earth. I'm one of them. That didn't change last night. If anything, you trusted me more last night than you ever have, and I don't take that lightly." He kept his voice level. "So here's my offer. We make it boring. We put rules on it. Rules are how we keep the friendship safe, not how we lose it."

"Boring," I repeated.

"Very boring. Paperwork-level boring." He held up a finger. "One. We pick a safeword. Something you'd never say by accident. When you say it, everything stops, no questions, no arguing, done."

"Okay."

"Two. Colors. Green means keep going. Yellow means slow down or check in. Red is the same as the safeword, full stop. You can use them anytime, and I'll use them too, because this goes both ways. I'm not a mind reader and neither are you."

"Both ways," I said. I hadn't actually thought about that part, that he might need out of something too.

"Three. We check in before every scene. Out loud, face to face. What we want, what we don't, what's off the table today. No ambushes. No assuming last night's yes covers tonight." He paused. "And four, maybe the most important one. The friendship isn't collateral. If either of us wants to stop, permanently, we stop and we're still us. That's the deal. That's the whole shape of it."

I stared at him. The record changed songs. Somewhere the wind hit the side of the building and moved on.

"You really thought about this," I said.

"I've been up since six. There's not a lot to do in a blizzard."

"You could've made breakfast."

"There's no food here. You have six pens, a jar of pickles, and expired hot sauce."

"That's a pantry."

"It's a crime scene." He grinned, and just like that some of the knot in my chest came loose. This was the part I kept forgetting about him. Under all the calm and the shoulders he was still the guy who ate my expired hot sauce on a dare and didn't complain.

I put my mug down. "Okay. The rules. I'm in."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, I'm still terrified. But it's the good terrified. The kind where you do the thing anyway." I pulled his flannel tighter around me. "What's the safeword, though? You didn't say."

"That's yours to pick. It has to be yours or it doesn't work."

I thought about it. "Needle," I said. "Nobody says needle. Not in my shop, not in my bed, nowhere."

"Needle it is." He nodded, slow, like he was filing it somewhere permanent. "Green, yellow, red.