The Adjuster's Appetite

The apartment is not what I expected. I expected a hotel lobby, a guy in a suit holding a sign. Instead I get a code punched into a door in a converted factory building in downtown Oakland, and a narrow staircase that smells like somebody's stir-fry, and a one-bedroom with a mattress on the floor.

Hayden is sitting on that mattress like it's a throne.

"Hi," he says. "You must be Lorrie."

"How did you know that?"

"You're the only person who's ever looked that scared in this room." He smiles. "Connor gave me your name. Sit down, please. You don't have to, but you're hovering."

"I'm not hovering. I'm standing."

"You're standing like a woman doing an inspection." He scoots back against the brick wall and pats the mattress. "I still make everyone nervous. How old are you, if I'm allowed to ask?"

"Thirty-two," I say. "I'm thirty-two."

"There. See? Now we know two things about each other." He's twenty-nine, Connor told me, which makes me feel old and young at the same time, which I did not know was possible.

I sit down on the very edge of the mattress. My purse is in my lap like a shield. Somewhere below us a car horn goes off and doesn't stop, and a guy down the block yells something, and I realize the walls in this building are basically paper.

"So," Hayden says. "Rules."

"Rules. Okay. Good. I like rules. Rules are..."

"Lorrie."

"I was going to say structure. Rules are structure."

He laughs. It's a real laugh, not a professional laugh, and it makes me feel stupid and better at the same time. "Rule one. Anything you don't want, say so, and it stops. Rule two. Same for me. Rule three, and this is the big one. Nobody here is performing anything. Connor and I talked, you and I are talking, and what we do with tonight is yours."

"That's a lot of pressure."

"That's actually less pressure. If you want to sit here and talk about your cat for an hour, we talk about your cat."

"We don't have a cat."

"Then we'll talk about something else for an hour." He shrugs. "I've been doing this five years, with couples who find me through the group. I've done weirder."

I look at my hands. Outside the single window, which faces a brick wall about six feet away, there's a light that flickers, some kind of sign on the other side of the alley.

"I've never done this before," I say. It comes out before I decide to say it, the way things do when I'm nervous. "I mean obviously I've never done this before, that's the whole point, but I mean ever. Anyone. There's one person. My husband. Since I was twenty-four. He's the only..."

"Okay," Hayden says. "Thank you for telling me."

"Is that weird? Is that a problem?"

"It's Tuesday," he says. "It's the most common sentence I hear. Well. That and 'don't tell my wife,' which is a different conversation."

I laugh, and then I stop laughing because he's just looking at me, calm, waiting, and it occurs to me that this is his whole method. The sitting and the looking and the waiting.

"Can I ask you something," he says. "What do you want?"

"What do I..."

"From tonight. What do you want?"

"I don't know. That's a huge question."

"It's a small question. You've just never answered it out loud."

I open my mouth. I close it. Downstairs somebody's stir-fry gets louder, which means a window opened, which means I can hear their TV too, some game show, a host saying numbers.

"I want to not be bad at it," I say finally. "God. That sounds terrible!"

"It sounds honest."

"Connor is always... he's never said I'm bad at it, he would never say that, but I can tell. I've been with one man my whole life. I was twenty-four when we got married. He's my college boyfriend, that's it, that's my entire resume. And I feel like I'm fumbling around like a kid and he knows it and it's embarrassing. I want to walk into a room and feel like I know what I'm doing. Even once."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"That's a real answer. Most people can't get there in a whole hour." He shifts around so he's facing me, legs crossed. "So here's what I know about that feeling. It doesn't come from technique. I could teach you twelve techniques tonight and you'd forget eleven by Friday. It comes from knowing what you want and saying it. That is the entire trick. People who seem like they know what they're doing are just people who say what they want out loud."

"That's it? Just say it?"

"That's most of it."

"Connor never asks me to say it. He just... he does things. Nice things. And I never know if I'm supposed to react a certain way."

"You're not supposed to react. You're supposed to act." He tilts his head. "Try it. Right now. Tell me something you want. Small. Stupid. Anything."

"I want you to stop looking at me like that."

He grins. "See, that was perfect. Did it hurt?"

"...No."

"Did the world end?"

"No."

"Did you feel it? That little click? That's the muscle. We're going to work that muscle all night."

The game show downstairs gets an answer right and the audience cheers. I put my purse on the floor because my hands are sweating around the strap.

"Can I ask you something," I say. "Does Connor seem sad to you? When you talked to him. Did he seem sad?"

"He seemed like a man who'd thought about this for a long time. He asked me more questions than most wives do. He wanted to know how I screen the couples I meet, what I do if somebody cries, what I do if the husband cries." Hayden shrugs. "He cried a little, at the end of the call, I think. He handled it."

"Oh, God."

"Lorrie. He wasn't sad. He was nervous. There's a difference and it matters." He looks at me for a beat. "Why are you asking about him right now?"

"Because I'm stalling."

"I know. Good stalling, though."

And then he leans in. Slow, so slow I can count it, the way a door opens one inch at a time, and he stops maybe two inches away and says, "Yes?"

"Yes," I say, and my voice cracks on it.

"Say it as a sentence."

"Yes. Kiss me. Please!"

The please comes out on its own and I could die, but then his mouth is on mine and I forget about dying. It's different. That's the thing nobody tells you, that it's so different. Eight years of one mouth, one rhythm, one way of doing it, and now this stranger's mouth is soft and unhurried and his hand comes up to my jaw like he's holding something breakable, and my knees actually go, I'm sitting down and my knees still go weak, I feel them loosen.

"Oh," I say against his mouth.

"Yeah?" he says, still close, not pulling all the way back.

"That's so different. It's so..."

"Different how?"

"Good different. Weird good. Connor kisses like he's arriving and you kiss like..."

"Like?"

"Like you've got all night and you're deciding something."

"I am deciding something. I'm deciding how fast." And he kisses me again, and this time his hand slides into my hair, and somewhere below us the game show audience loses its mind over a jackpot, and I hear myself make a noise into his mouth that I have never made in my life.

He pulls back an inch. "There it is."

"There what is?"

"That sound. Do it again later." He grins. "Now. Your turn. What do you want?"

"You just did it."

"I did. So now you do one." He sits back, patient as anything, brick wall behind him, flickering light in the window. "Small. Out loud. First thing that comes."

I look at him, this twenty-nine-year-old stranger on a mattress on the floor of a borrowed apartment, and the muscle clicks.

"Kiss me again," I say. "And this time don't be so slow."

He laughs, actually laughs, and I worry for a second that I've done it wrong already. But then he kisses me, and it's not slow. It's a real kiss, his hand tight in my hair, my hand landing flat on his chest without me deciding anything, and the game show downstairs drones on under us while the flickering light from the sign slides across the wall.

"Good," he says against my mouth. "Now keep that hand there. Tell me what you feel."

"Your heartbeat. It's fast. That's... are you nervous? You don't seem nervous."

"I'm a little nervous. It's a good kind. Keeps me honest." He puts his hand over mine and presses it flat. "Feel that? That's for you. Not for him down the hall. You did that."

Down the hall. Right. Connor is in the hallway, somewhere in this thin-walled apartment where you can hear the game show through the floor, which means he can hear everything. I don't know how I feel about that and I decide, right here, not to decide.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, keep going. I mean. I want you to keep going. See, I said it."

"Look at that. Eight years of marriage and nobody taught you how to ask." He smiles and takes my wrist, and my heart does something complicated. "May I move your hand?"

"You already..."

"No. I ask. That's the deal, both directions. May I?"

"Yes."

He slides my hand down from his chest, slow, over the buttons of his shirt, and I realize my fingers are shaking and he realizes it too and doesn't say a word about it. Down to his belt. He stops my hand on the buckle.

"This is where a lot of people freeze. So we go slow. Untuck the shirt first. Feel the heat through it. Then you decide."

I untuck his shirt. It sounds stupid but my hands feel enormous, like gloves, like I've never unbuttoned anything before. The game show audience claps. Through the wall I can hear the stir-fry smell from downstairs, garlic and something burnt, and it's so mundane that it helps. This is just a room. This is just a Tuesday.

"Okay," he says. "Now the belt. Take your time!"

I pull the belt out of the loops and it makes a noise, that leather slide noise, and Connor's belt makes the same noise, every belt makes the same noise, and for a second I'm laughing and he's laughing too.

"What's funny?"

"Belts. Belts are all the same. That's so stupid."

"It's not stupid. That's exactly the thing people need. It's just a belt. It's just a person. The panic comes from making it sacred." He takes my hand again. "Now the button. And Lorrie. I want you to look at my face while you do it, not down. Looking down makes it a task. Looking at me makes it yours."

I do the button looking at his face and he watches me back, steady, and the zipper comes down and then my hand is at the waistband of his underwear and I stop.

"Pause," I say.

"Paused."

"I'm just... thinking."

"Think out loud."

"I don't know what I'm supposed to..."

"You're not supposed to. But if you want to touch me, touch me. If you want to stop, stop. One sentence, remember?"

I swallow. The flickering sign light strobes once across his face. Somewhere down there the host says a number and a woman screams with joy.

"I want to touch you," I say.

"Then do it."

And I reach into his underwear and take hold of his cock.

Okay. So. Here is the thing I did not know. Eight years, one man, and I knew him by feel the way you know your own pillow, the exact weight of it, the way it fills my hand, and I thought all of them were roughly that. Like a shoe size. And this is not. This is heavier. That's the word that comes to me, heavier, sitting in my hand, warm and heavier, and different in a hundred small ways I couldn't list, longer maybe, or just shaped different, the head softer, the skin moving different over the shaft, and my hand fits around it and it doesn't fit the way Connor's fits. It's someone new. It's a whole new fact about the world.

"Oh," I say. "Oh, wow."

"Yeah?"

"It's heavy. That's such a dumb thing to say. It's just..."

"It's the best thing you could have said. That's a real reaction. Nobody fakes that." His breath has gone a little short, which I notice, which I like more than I expected. "Feel the weight of it. Get used to it."

I do. I hold it and get used to it and then I move my hand, just a little, an experiment, and the weight shifts and his stomach tightens and I did that. Me, boring Lorrie from claims, and I did that with one experimental tug.

"Okay," I say. "Okay, that's..."

"Yeah."

"I always thought I'd be bad at this. At a new... at