Oil Change Confessions

I'm twenty-three, and up until last Tuesday I would have told you I was a reasonably stable adult with a job, a cat, and a functioning grasp of my own emotions. Then I came home early and found my boyfriend of three years on the couch with my roommate, and the stable part went out the window.

His name was Nathan. We had been together since I was twenty. I don't want to spend a lot of time on him, so I'll just say he cried a lot when I moved out and that somehow made everything worse.

Anyway. That's how I ended up storming into Steve's Wrench & Wheel with a letter in my jacket pocket and a plan in my head that, looking back, was not a plan so much as a symptom.

* * *

The shop sits on a back street in town, the kind of place you'd never find unless your car was already making a noise it shouldn't. It smelled like grease and oil, because of course it did. There was a beat-up couch in the little office and a calendar of classic cars on the wall. The owner was Steve, thirty-eight, arms like somebody who lifts car parts for a living, and he took one look at me and said, "You're not here about the car, are you."

I'm not sure how he knew. Maybe it was the way I walked in, or the letter wadded up in my fist. I had written it that morning. It was four pages long and it was vicious, and I had addressed it to Nathan even though I had no intention of ever sending it, because what I actually intended, God help me, was to walk into a stranger's shop and let him do whatever he wanted to me against the hood of my Honda. That was the plan. Revenge by hood. I had thought about it for two days and it had seemed, in a dark and furious way, like the correct move.

Steve talked me down. That's the short version. The long version involves me sitting on the arm of the couch in his office, shaking, telling him the whole thing, the roommate and the crying and the four pages, while he changed a tire out front in between checking on me like I was a kettle he didn't want boiling over.

"Here's what I think," he said, wiping his hands on a rag. "You wrote that letter so you wouldn't do the other thing you came here to do. Am I close?"

I hated that he was right. "I don't know what I came here to do."

"You know. You just haven't admitted it to yourself yet. Get your car looked at sometime this week, the belt's squealing." And that was it. He went back to work. I drove home and read the letter again and it read like a woman screaming into a pillow, and I didn't send it, and I didn't sleep much either.

* * *

I went back the next Saturday to get the belt done, mostly because I didn't know what else to do with myself. While he worked I asked him, in a fit of honesty I still don't fully understand, why he hadn't just gone along with it. Plenty of men would have.

"Because you'd have hated it," he said, not looking up from the engine. "You'd have hated me, and worse, you'd have hated yourself. And for what? Some guy who doesn't deserve the electricity you're spending on him. You don't want to be used, Clair. You want to be the one in charge. Big difference. Most people never figure it out. You're already halfway there, you just don't have the words yet."

"Whose fault is that?"

"Nobody's. But I could teach you, if you wanted. Took a workshop on this stuff years back, when I was thirty-one. Tantra, of all things, for singles. Sounds ridiculous, I know. The useful part stuck though. It's about patience and control, and who holds them. I do letters. One a week, for a month. You write back or you don't, your choice every time. No shop visits, nothing physical, not yet. If you want to quit, quit. Deal?"

I said yes before I'd properly thought about it, which, fine, is sort of my whole personality right now.

* * *

His first letter came Monday. It was written in pen on actual paper, which felt very formal for a man covered in brake dust.

Clair,

Rule one: you do not owe me anything. Not a letter, not an answer, not politeness. If you write back, it's because you want to.

Here's what I think happened to you. For three years you were generous with a man who didn't know what to do with it. Now you want to burn the whole idea of generosity down. Understandable. Wrong cure. What you actually want, I'd bet my shop on it, is to be the one holding the leash for once. The one a man has to ask. The one who says when.

So, first exercise. Write me a list of what you actually want. Not what you're supposed to want, not what a magazine says. What you want. Graphic detail, no editing, no crossing things out. You're a graphic designer, so you know what a rough draft is for. This is a rough draft of yourself.

Steve

P.S. The belt is fixed. That's the last free thing you get.

I laughed for the first time in two weeks, which annoyed me, and then I sat down with a legal pad and didn't write anything for an hour, and then wrote for three hours straight.

* * *

Dear Steve,

Fine. You asked for it and you're getting it, unedited, and if you laugh I will find your shop and key something rude into the paint of every car in the lot.

Here is the list. What I want is a man who has to ask. Every single time. I want to make him wait. I want to make him want it so badly he can't think straight, and I want him to know I'm doing it on purpose. I want him on his knees in front of me, asking nicely, and I want to tell him maybe. I want to tell him maybe for so long that his voice breaks when he finally says please.

I want to tell him to touch himself while I watch and then tell him to stop when he gets close. I want to do that three times. I want him to beg, actually beg, the word please coming out of him like it costs him something. I want to be the one who decides when he gets to come, and I want him to thank me for it. I want my hands in his hair and his mouth saying my name and I want the whole balance of power sitting in my lap like a cat.

I want to feel what it's like to be wanted that much and to hold it, not spend it. I have spent three years of wanting on a man who fumbled it. Now I want to hold.

There. That's the list. It took three hours and I'm not taking a word back.

Clair

P.S. You better not be the kind of man who reads this and gets smug.

* * *

His reply came the following Monday, tucked inside an envelope that had, I swear, a Torque Specs sticker on the flap.

Clair,

Noted on the smugness. I read it twice and I'm not laughing.

Good list. Better than good. You skipped straight past the part most people fumble for years. What you described has a name and it isn't cruelty, it's control, and control is a skill. Skills get practiced.

So, exercise two. This one's private, you don't report back unless you want to. Tonight, alone, you take care of yourself. But here's the condition. You think about exactly what you wrote. The man on his knees. The word maybe. The stopping. And when you get close, you stop. Hands off. Count to sixty. Then start again.

Do it three times. The third time, you can finish, and I want you to notice what it feels like after waiting. That's the lesson. Wanting is a thing you can hold. Now go prove it to yourself.

Steve

I read the letter three times at my kitchen table, put it down, looked at my cat, who was no help at