Salt and Silk

The salt flats have always insisted on clarity. That was the first thing I thought when I got out of the truck at the observatory, and it was the same thought I'd had the last time I was out here, three years ago, before I knew Mikey Ford the way I know him now. Nothing hides under that sky. The white stretches out flat in every direction and the light doesn't soften, it just sits there and tells you what everything is. The dome of the observatory caught the last of the sun and threw it back orange, and I stood next to my truck for a minute and let the place look at me.

I'm Cyndi Wyatt. I'm twenty-nine. I guide people up rock faces for a living, which means I spend most of my working life reading other people's bodies, their fear, their grip, the exact moment their nerve goes or comes back. People think the job is about strength. It isn't. It's about knowing when somebody is lying to you about what they can handle, and then deciding what to do about that. I'm good at it. Ask anyone who's climbed with me, though most of them say it in a way that sounds more like a complaint than a compliment.

Mikey asked me to dinner by text, which was so much his style that I almost said no out of principle. He'd just ended a casual thing with a woman named Nan, an amicable breakup by every account, no kids, no shared property, nothing tangled. He called it a custody-free breakup dinner, which I guess was his joke with himself about how clean it was. And he asked me. Of all people. The woman he'd been arguing with at every craft fair, job site, and potluck for going on four years now.

I said yes before I thought about why. Then I thought about why for three days straight and it made me twitchy, so I stopped thinking about it and packed the truck.

He arrived twenty minutes after I did, in that beat-up gray F-150 of his, and I watched him get out and stand in the flat light and I could tell he'd come straight from a job. He still smelled like cedar when he got close. That's a carpenter smell, sawdust and clean wood, and on him it always made me think of the one project we did together, a table for a charity auction, four years ago, back when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-six, and we managed to work an entire weekend without killing each other. Mostly. There had been a glance across that table that I'd filed away and not looked at again, on purpose, for a long time.

"You picked a dinner venue two hours from anywhere with a single road in," I said when he reached the table. "Romantic or paranoid?"

"Efficient," he said. "If it goes bad, nobody has to drive far to get away from each other. Also there's no neighbors to hear you insult my wood joints."

"At least I didn't bring rope to a breakup dinner."

"You brought rope to a breakup dinner."

It was sitting in the bed of my truck in a duffel, and we both knew it, and he'd known I'd bring it, which was probably the point of the whole invitation. I smiled. I felt my face do it without asking my permission, which annoyed me, so I sat down before he could study it.

The table was already set. Someone at the observatory does private dinners, apparently, and someone had done this one with a sense of humor, because the centerpiece was a single ladle lying across a folded napkin like a sword at a knighting. Just the one utensil. We looked at it together for a second.

"Your doing?" I asked.

"Mine," he said. "It felt right."

He didn't explain that and I didn't ask. That's the thing about Mikey. He's a carpenter, thirty years old, hands rough and calloused from heavy labor, and he has this habit of doing something precise and symbolic and then refusing to discuss it, which should make a person insufferable and somehow doesn't, most of the time. The other times it makes me want to tie him to something and make him discuss it. That thought used to be a joke in my head. Lately it had been drifting toward a plan.

We ate the appetizers. Some salt-baked thing, fitting for the location, and the flat white nothing outside the window went from bright to violet as the sun went down. The stars started showing up one at a time, and then all at once, the way they do out here where there's no light for a hundred miles. He ate as if he'd been working all day, fast and without ceremony, and I let the quiet sit for a while because I wanted to see how long he'd last before he brought up the real reason he'd asked me here.

It was four minutes. I counted.

"So I've been reading," he said, and set his fork down.

"Reading," I said. I put my water glass down too, and gave him my attention the way I give it to a client on day one of a big route, all of it, no blinking, and watched him decide whether that was a comfort or a threat.

"About the kind of thing you do. With rope. With people. There's a whole world of writing about it, it turns out. Negotiation. Safe words. Limits. Aftercare. I read for like two weeks and took notes like it was a certification course."

"And what did your certification course teach you?"

"That you're supposed to talk about all of it before anything happens. Limits. Hard limits. Soft limits. What you want and what you'll never do." He was looking at the ladle when he said it, not at me. "Which felt funny, because we've never once talked about anything directly in four years. We just argue."

"We argue well, though."

"We argue like it's foreplay, Cyndi. It's been foreplay since the supply closet at the Hollis wedding."

That was three years ago. I was twenty-six, he was twenty-seven. We'd both been hired for the same event, he to build the arbor and me to run the climbing wall, and we'd spent the day competing for the bride's attention. We'd ended up in the supply closet at the same moment reaching for the same box of linens, and we'd kissed, once, hard, and then never mentioned it again. He was the one who walked out first. I'd never forgiven that and never told him so.

"So talk," I said.

He looked up at me then. The dome caught starlight and his face was half blue and half shadow and he was nervous, I could see it in his hands, but he didn't look away, which I'll admit counted for something.

"Hard limits, for me," he said. "Anything that leaves marks people at work would see. No blood. I don't want to be marked where I can't control who sees it. And no humiliation in front of other people, ever. Anything private, I want to find out where my lines actually are, because I honestly don't know yet."

"All right."

"That's it? All right?"

"That's a start. That's how a negotiation starts, Mikey, not how it ends." I turned my glass a quarter turn on the table. "Safewords. You read about them, so tell me what you'd pick."

"Something boring. Traffic light? Red, yellow, green?"

"Fine. Red means full stop, everything, no questions, and we're done for the night. Yellow means slow down and talk. Green means keep going and stop asking so much. And if you can't speak, you drop something. We'll pick what."

"What if I argue with you mid-scene? I'm going to argue with you. That's what I do."

"Then you'll argue with a safeword in your pocket. Arguing isn't a no. Bratting isn't a no. There's a difference and you'll learn it." I leaned back and looked at him across the ladle. "My turn. Hard limits. I don't do anything without explicit consent for each new thing, and I mean each, and I don't care how it interrupts the mood. I don't share unless we've talked about it weeks in advance. And I don't play with anyone who's had more than one drink, so if you were planning to loosen up with a drink tonight, don't."

"I had one sip in the truck and regretted it."

"Good."

"You really did bring rope."

"Mikey." I waited until he looked at me properly. "Why did you ask me here? Not the breakup dinner. The real reason."

He took a breath, and out past the glass the salt went white under the stars like it was lit from below, and the whole flat world out there just waited with me for his answer.

"Because I've been arguing with you for four years and I'm tired of it being the closest thing I have to touching you," he said.

He said it plainly and then looked down at his plate like he hadn't just handed me the biggest thing anyone had handed me in years. I let the silence run. That's a habit from the mountain. You ask a client to state their fear out loud and then you let it sit, because if you rush to comfort them they learn the fear is unmanageable, and if you wait they learn it's just weather.

"So the dessert course came," I said finally, because the kitchen had knocked.

The dessert was some chocolate thing with salt on it, which felt like a joke the chef was playing on both of us, and we ate it and made small talk about his F-150 and whether it would make it back down the gravel road in the dark. I knew he was stalling. He knew I knew. That was part of it too, and part of me loved him for it, and I'm not going to dress that word up, because it had been sitting in a closet for three years and it wasn't going back in.

When the plates were cleared I moved the ladle off the centerpiece spot and set it beside my right hand, and I watched him track the movement. A carpenter notices tools. He'd put it there himself, out of everything in that dining room, which told me his unconscious was doing work his mouth hadn't gotten to yet.

"Are you ready to learn something?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. Then, because he was Mikey and couldn't help himself, "But I won't make it easy."