Red Onion Shift

Rafael here. I'm thirty-one, I cook the line at the Red Onion, six years now, and Patsy Jansen cuts hair and has cut mine for a while even though we live together. We met two years ago when she came in for a late dinner after a shift and I brought her free garlic bread until she agreed to give me her number. That part I remember exactly. Most other things I remember wrong.

It was a Thursday, which I know because we do stock on Thursdays and the delivery guys had already come and gone. The kitchen was shut down, boards scraped, hood off, floor wet from mopping. Patsy was sitting at the counter keeping me company while I broke down the last of it, and she picked up a red onion off the cart like she was going to help, which she never does, and took it to the sink.

"You remember that time I said you should tie me up with the twine?" she said, rinsing it under the tap.

I laughed. It came out easy because it was a joke. She'd said it a year ago, maybe longer, both of us half asleep on the couch, and I'd snorted into a pillow and nothing had come of it. "Yeah," I said. "And I said the twine is for roasts."

She turned the water off. She was still holding the onion. She looked at me over her shoulder and she wasn't smiling the way she smiles at jokes. I've had two years to learn her smiles and this one was new, or old, I don't know. Serious. A little scared around the edges maybe.

"I mean it," she said. "I've been thinking about it. I want to try it. With you. Here, tonight, before we talk ourselves out of it."

I put down my knife. That's a big deal, me putting down a knife mid-shift brain, and she knew it, and I think that's partly why she picked that moment.

"Okay," I said. My mouth was dry. "Okay. Tell me what you want. All of it. Because I've got my own thing I've never said out loud and if we're doing this I don't want to guess."

She set the onion on the board and wiped her hands on her apron. She was twenty-nine and had a smudge of flour on her hip from the bread basket I'd brought her, and her hair was up in the clip she wears at the salon.

"I want to not be in charge," she said. "For once. I'm in charge all day. Everybody's head in my lap, everybody's opinions about their own hair, and I hold it all, and I come home and I'm still holding it. I want somebody else to hold it. Tie my wrists. Tell me what happens next. That's it. That's the whole thing I've wanted since I was, God, since I was twenty-two and dated that guy Jeff who was into rope and I chickened out."

"You never told me about Jeff and rope."

"There wasn't much to tell. We talked about it once and I got weird and then we broke up for other reasons. But I never stopped thinking about it." She looked at her hands. "So. Yes or no."

"Yes," I said, faster than I meant to. Then I had to say the rest of it. "And I want the same thing, kind of. From the other side. There was a woman, Dominique, when I was twenty-four, who offered to teach me, and I said no and I've regretted it in a low-grade way ever since. So if I'm going to tie you up I want to do it right, and I want you to tell me if I'm doing it wrong, and I want us to maybe swap at some point if it goes well. Not tonight. But I want that on the table."

She grinned then, a real one. "Look at you. Full sentences."

"Shut up. Safeword."

"Orange," she said right away. "Not red, orange. Red's confusing, the restaurant is red."

"Orange. Anything hurts, or you're done, or you just don't like where it's going, you say orange and I stop. Everything stops. I untie you, we sit on the milk crates, whatever you need."

"And you get one too. Same word. If I'm doing something to you that you don't like, orange, and I stop."

"Deal." I went and got the twine off the shelf. It's the kitchen roll, cotton, food safe, but I checked it anyway. I unspooled a length and ran it through my fingers and sniffed it, which was dumb, and then I remembered the twine had sat next to the fryer oil for who knows how long, so I cut off the outer few feet and threw it in the trash and used the clean inner roll. Patsy watched me do all this and didn't say anything, but she had a look, like she was pleased with me, which is not a look I get often from anyone.

"Also," I said, "the door. I'm locking it. Front and back. Nobody comes in."

"Good." She set her bag on the counter by the clock, slow, like she was giving me time to watch, and I did watch.

* * *

The dry storage room is off the kitchen, past the walk-in. Cans stacked to the ceiling on the far wall, the dented prep table in the middle that nobody uses anymore because it wobbles, one hanging bulb with a pull chain. It smelled like cardboard and old garlic. It's the ugliest room in the building and I've been in it a thousand times and that night it looked different. I don't know how to explain that. It just did.

Patsy went in first and pulled the chain and the bulb came on with a hum. She stood by the table and turned around and put her palms flat on the dented steel.

"I'm trusting you," she said. "Don't make it weird."

"I don't even know what that means."

"Neither do I. Just. Don't narrate it like a cooking demo."

"I was going to say preheat," I said, and she laughed, and the laugh broke some of the tightness in both of us, and I was glad she'd let it happen.

I had the twine over my arm like a waiter with a towel. I had looked up exactly none of this, which in hindsight was insane, but I knew hands. I knew knots from the delivery schedule, from bundling, from years of tying down boxes in a truck bed in my twenties. I figured wrists were wrists.

"Come here," I said, and my voice came out lower than usual, and Patsy raised her eyebrows like she'd noticed, and came.

I took her hands and turned them over and looked at her palms like I was checking something. I wasn't checking anything. I was stalling. She let me.

"Ask me," she said quietly.

"Can I tie your wrists?"

"Yeah," she said. "Please!"

I looped the twine around both wrists, crossed, in front, not tight, then not as loose as I'd thought either, somewhere honest in the middle. I tied a flat knot, then a second one, then checked with two fingers that she had circulation, which she rolled her eyes at and let me do anyway. The twine was rough and her skin went pink at the edges of it and she looked down at her own bound hands like she was reading something surprising about herself.

"Oh," she said. Just that. "Oh, okay. This is."

"Yeah."

"Yeah," she said.

I told her to turn around and face the table and she did, right away, no sass, which for Patsy was its own kind of event. The bulb swung a little when the door draft caught it. I put my hand flat between her shoulder blades, slow, where she could feel it coming, and she pushed up on her toes a little, into it, and let her breath out long.

"Orange stays live," I said into her ear. "Say it anytime. Even halfway through. Even if you think I'll be disappointed. I won't."

"I know," she said. "That's why it works."

Then she said, "Well? You've had me bent over a prep table for a full minute and you haven't done anything. I picked a talkative cook."

I laughed, and something in me settled, and I stopped stalling.

I untied the front knot and had her put her hands behind her back instead. Wrists crossed, small of her back, which turned out to be harder for me to tie than in front because I couldn't see what I was doing and I had to work by feel. The twine slipped once and I caught it and started over, and Patsy stayed still the whole time and let me figure it out, which was its own kind of gift. The knot came out ugly but it held. I checked it with two fingers again and she didn't roll her eyes this time.

"Tighter," she said, and grinned over her shoulder, but the grin was nervous. I could tell because she does a different grin when she's nervous. She bites the corner of her lip.

I took another length and wrapped it over the first, snug. "Say if it burns."

"It burns a little." A pause. "Keep going."

So I did. I wrapped and tied and checked, and her wrists went pink above the cotton and she flexed her fingers and breathed and stood there bent slightly over the prep table with her hands bound behind her, and I had the strange thought that I had done this. Me. The guy who once turned down Dominique because I got scared in a coffee shop. Seven years ago now. She'd offered to teach me and I said no thanks and went home and didn't think about it for years, which is a lie, I thought about it plenty, I just told myself I didn't.

"Okay?" I asked.

"Okay," Patsy said. "Wow. Okay!"

The prep table wobbled when she shifted her weight and I put my knee against the leg to steady it and told her not to lean so hard. Then I looked around the room for the next thing, which was stupid, because I was the one who was supposed to know the next thing. I was flying this thing by feel and hoping she couldn't tell. I think she could tell. I think that was part of what she wanted, actually, watching me improvise.

"Floor," I said finally. There was a rubber mat by the walk-in door, the anti-fatigue kind, the one the dish guys fight over. I dragged it over and laid it flat in the middle of the room under the bulb. "Kneel."

She looked at the mat, then at me. "On that? My knees will thank you, actually. Usually I kneel on tile when I'm begging."

"Patsy."