The Butter Dish

My flight was supposed to land in Dublin. Instead the pilot announced Shannon. Some weather thing up north. Two hundred miles from where I needed to be, at eleven at night, with one backpack and a phone at four percent.

I'm Kaitlyn. I'm twenty-three. Keep that in mind, because what happened that night mattered a lot more to me than it would to most women my age. I'd been a wife at twenty. A widow at twenty-two. Two years married to a soldier, then a flag, then nothing. I hadn't touched a man since the funeral. I hadn't wanted to. But that night, somewhere over the Atlantic, I decided Ireland was going to give me one good story before I went home.

So. Shannon. Empty terminal. One rental car counter still lit, and the woman there said every car was gone. Of course they were.

There was a farmer though. Big older fella loading coffee into a truck, and I asked him if there was any hotel within walking distance, and he laughed at me. Kindly. Kind of.

"Nothing walking distance out here, girl. Where you headed?"

I told him. He winced.

"That's a long drive. Look. There's a place. A strange place, but dry, and a man named Geoffrey keeps an eye on it. He lets travelers rest there sometimes. I can drop you on my way."

I should have said no. I know how that reads. But he was sixty if he was a day, he talked the whole drive about his sheep like they were coworkers, and something in me was just done being careful. Also, honestly, I wanted the story.

He dropped me at the edge of a field and pointed. "The tinaja. See the shine? Rock pool. Fills with rain, dries in summer. Tiny shrimp live in it, older than the dinosaurs, they say. Geoffrey's partial to it."

Then he was gone. Taillights. Sheep smell. Me.

The tinaja was beautiful, I'll give the sheep man that. A shallow bowl of stone, maybe thirty feet across, holding a few inches of water that caught every star in the sky and doubled them. Little creatures skimmed the surface. Tadpole shrimp, I learned later. Living fossils. The whole pool looked like a second sky you could dip your hand into.

I was crouched at the edge looking at them when a voice came out of a shadowed alcove in the rock behind me.

"You'll want to not fall in. The mud's worse than the water."

I about jumped out of my skin.

He stepped out. Mid-forties, tall, gray at the temples, cardigan over a shirt like he'd dressed for a meeting with no meeting in it. He had a canvas bag over one shoulder and the calmest face I've ever seen on a person.

"Geoffrey," he said. "The farmer rang me. Said I'd have a guest. I'm Geoffrey, and you're safe, and there's tea."

"Kaitlyn," I said. "Twenty-three, stranded, and apparently taking tea from strangers in a rock."

"Forty-five," he said. "And it's weak tea. I don't lie about the tea."

He spread a flat towel on a wide rock and nodded me onto it. Then he set a thermos down, and beside it, this dish. Ceramic. Shaped like a snail shell, spiral in the middle, glazed green. I stared at it.

"That's a butter dish," I said.

"It is a butter dish," he agreed. "I don't keep butter in it."

"What do you keep in it?"

He poured tea into the thermos cup and handed it to me. Weak, like he said. He let the question sit while I drank.

"I use it as a token," he said. "When I play with someone. A guest, a partner, whatever word you like. If they touch the dish, at any point, everything stops. Instantly. No questions, no arguing, no hard feelings. They touch the shell, the night is over."

My stomach did a thing. A warm, low, embarrassing thing.

"You do this often?" I asked.

"Rarely. Carefully. Never with anyone I haven't talked to for an hour at least." He looked at his watch, then at me. "We've got most of an hour yet, and the shrimp don't mind."

I laughed. I don't know why that got me, but it did.

So we talked. He asked what I did and I told him wine, back home, cellar work, and he actually knew what brettanomyces was, which has never happened to me with a man in a cardigan. He asked about the ring I don't wear anymore and I gave him the short version and he just said, "I'm sorry," and didn't make it a whole moment. I liked that. I liked him, in the way you like a stranger you'll never see again, which is the most honest liking there is.

And the whole time there was this hum in me. Giddy, almost. The stars doubled in the water. The shrimp doing their little circles. This strange polite man with a butter dish. I felt loose and bright and like anything could happen, and I knew exactly what I wanted to happen, which was new for me.

"So," I said, setting the cup down. "This playing. What does it look like? The everything that stops?"

He took his time. He always took his time. I'd learn that about him.

"It looks like you giving me your body for a while," he said. "Your clothes come off. You kneel where I put you. I tie your wrists. I decide what happens to you and how fast and how long, and you don't get a vote until the end, when I'll ask if you want more. You get no control tonight. In exchange, you get to stop thinking entirely. Some people find that... restful."

"Oh," I said. My voice came out funny.

"You can also say no, and we drink weak tea and watch shrimp, and that's a fine evening too."

"I'm not saying no." I swallowed. "I'm saying yes. One condition."

"Name it."

"You use the dish." I touched the rim of the thermos, not the dish, not yet. "I mean. Keep it where I can reach it. All night. Whatever we do. Where I can see it."

"That was always the arrangement," he said. "But I'll say it out loud, because saying it out loud matters. The dish stays between us. You touch it, everything stops, and I will thank you for it. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said.

He took a last sip of tea, capped the thermos, and set it aside. Then he stood, unhurried, and looked down at me.

"Stand up, Kaitlyn. Take off your clothes. Fold them, don't drop them. You'll kneel on the towel facing the water when you're done."

My hands were shaking a little as I pulled my sweater over my head. Not scared shaking. The other kind. The air was cool and the rock was warm under my bare feet, day heat