The Florist's Lesson

The iron gate of the rental had roses worked into the bars. Alexia noticed that the first night and thought nothing of it. Now she stood in front of it with a bag of figs and her stomach doing something complicated.

Silas had rented the place in Trastevere back in April. Four floors up, tile floors, shutters that banged in the morning wind. He said it was for the light. She said sure. It was maybe for the light.

It was also where tonight was going to happen.

She was 28 and she'd been circling this thing for two years. Not dating. Two years ago, in his apartment in Milan, when she was 26, he'd laid out silk rope on the bed and asked her if she was sure. She had said sure the way you say sure to a dentist. Then she'd cried in his bathroom and told him she needed time.

He'd given it. Two years of it, patient as a stone wall. She kept waiting for him to push. He never pushed. Somehow that was worse.

She pushed the gate open. The courtyard smelled of jasmine, which the listing had promised and she'd assumed was a lie. It wasn't. Rome in June was ridiculous like that.

"You're home late," Silas said from the doorway of the apartment. He was 31, barefoot on the tile, holding a glass of water as if he had never once been nervous in his life. He was probably nervous. She'd never actually seen it.

"The market took forever. I bought figs."

"Good figs?"

"Very good figs." She set them on the heavy wooden table in the main room. That table. She'd been avoiding the table all week. "Silas."

"Alexia."

"Is tonight still..."

"If you want it, yes." He set down his water. "Say it or don't say it. Either is fine with me, and I mean that."

That was the problem with him. He meant things.

She looked at the ceiling beam. There was a hook in it, old brass, the kind of thing old Roman apartments had for hanging plants or hams or whatever people hung. Silk rope hung from it now, coiled loose, cream colored. It had not been there when they arrived. She'd noticed it the day before and said nothing and he'd said nothing and they'd eaten pasta under it like a couple of normal tourists.

"Where did you even get rope in Rome?" she asked, because she needed to say something that wasn't a yes or a no.

"There's a market on Via... something. Wednesday morning. An old man sells fabric and notions. I asked for silk, he sold me silk. It cost almost nothing and he seemed pleased with life." He crossed the room and lifted the coil down, held it in his hands. "I checked the strength. I checked the weight. It's soft, it won't bite into you. Harley looked at it too."

Harley. Right. That was part of tonight too.

Harley Newton was 33, one of Silas's old colleagues from the Milan project days. They'd worked together when Silas was 28 and she was 30, and Harley had known about his kink side since roughly five minutes after they met, apparently. She was in Rome for work this month and she'd agreed, over a long dinner two weeks ago, to be the witness for tonight. Alexia hadn't fully understood what a witness was until Silas explained it.

"A person who knows the plan," he'd said. "Who knows the safeword, who knows the boundaries, who isn't in the room but is reachable. So that if something goes wrong, it's not just you and me and the honesty of the moment."

She'd thought it was excessive. Then she'd thought about herself, two years ago, crying in a bathroom instead of using her words. Then she'd thought it was probably not excessive at all.

"I keep almost wanting to say the thing," she told him now. "And then my mouth dries up."

"Say it anyway. Dry mouth and all."

She sat down on the leather chaise. The leather was warm from the shutters being closed all day. The apartment held heat like a bottle.

"I'm sure," she said. It came out small. She tried again, louder. "I'm sure. I want this. I've wanted it since Milan and I ran from it and I'm done running, I just need you to understand that my hands are shaking and that's not a no, it's just my hands."

He sat down beside her. He didn't touch her yet. He held up the rope so she could see it in the last of the light through the shutters.

"It's yours too, you know. This isn't me taking something. This is you handing something over, and you can take it back at any second. That is the entire architecture of it. I design buildings, Alexia, I don't design traps."

"I know."

"Safeword is 'Fiore.' Flower. You picked it, so I know you'll remember it. You say it, everything stops, no discussion, no sulking from me, nothing. Anything less than Fiore, and I decide what happens. That's the deal. Nod if you have it."

She nodded.

"Also, you say yellow if you need a pause. Slow down, check in. Not a stop, just a breath. Yes?"

"Yes." Her mouth was dry again. He was right about that being no obstacle.

"Good. Then that's settled." He coiled the rope back up and set it on the table next to the figs, which struck her as the most absurd domestic image of her life. "Harley comes at eight. We eat first. Do not argue with me about the figs, we're eating them."

The door buzzer went at eight exactly, which told her everything about Harley Newton that dinner hadn't.

Harley came up the stairs two at a time and came through the door talking. "Silas, you look terrible, you've been working, I can tell."

She nodded at Alexia. She was tall, short dark hair, wearing linen like she'd been born in it. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and a small envelope in the other. "I brought red. I'm not staying for it, it's a house gift."

"Thank you," Alexia said. "You didn't have to..."

"I absolutely did have to, showing up empty handed to a thing like this would be barbaric." Harley put the wine on the counter and then turned and looked at Alexia properly. Not looking her over. Just looking at her. "You're nervous. That's fine. Nervous is fine. Can I ask you one thing before I go?"

"Sure."

"Say the safeword for me. Just once, out loud, right now. Not because I doubt you. Because saying it once with your mouth, in the room, before anything starts, makes it yours. Silas taught me that trick years ago and it works."

Alexia almost laughed. Almost. Then she said it. "Fiore."

"There. Now it's yours and nobody else's. Say it whenever you need it and mean nothing by it except 'stop.'" Harley smiled at her, warm as anything. "He's one of the good ones, you know. I've watched him turn down three people who deserved less patience than he gave them. Take your time tonight. Take all the time in the world."

Then she hugged Silas, said something low to him that Alexia didn't catch, and left. The door clicked shut behind her and the apartment went quiet except for the jasmine and a scooter somewhere down in the courtyard.

Silas picked the rope up off the table again.

"Last chance to change your mind," he said. "And if you did change it, I'd feed you figs and we'd watch something stupid on my laptop and it would be a perfectly fine evening. I need you to know that's true."

"I know it's true." She stood up. Her legs worked, which was a small miracle. "I'm not changing my mind. I'm... I want to hand it over. That's what I keep trying to say. I want to not be the one deciding for one night."

He looked at her the way he looked at blueprints. Then he set the rope down and reached for the buttons of her shirt.

"Then we start slow," he said. "And I decide the pace."

He worked the buttons out one at a time. Slow. Deliberate. Like he had all night, which, she realized, he did.

"Arms up."

She lifted them and he drew the shirt off over her head. The heat of the room hit her bare skin. Not cold at all, which surprised her. She'd expected to shiver.

"Skirt. Shoes. Everything else," he said it like he was reading off a schedule. Maybe he was. She wouldn't have put it past him.

She stepped out of the skirt and pushed everything else down and stood there in the middle of his rented living room, four floors above a courtyard full of jasmine, naked except for the goosebumps she couldn't do anything about.

He didn't look at her the way she'd feared he would. He looked at her the way she'd hoped he would. Like a site plan that had come in under budget.

"Turn around."

She turned.

He came up behind her and she felt something soft go over her eyes. Silk. The blindfold was silk, folded thick, tied at the back of her head with a knot she couldn't have undone if she tried. She hadn't expected the darkness to be so total. The shutters were closed but there'd still been a line of amber light along the floor. Now there was nothing.

"Oh," she said.

"Too much?"

"No. No, it's..." She breathed. "It's more than I thought. Good more."

"It's supposed to be. Your eyes have been doing all your deciding for you. We're giving them the night off."

She heard him move away. Drawers. The soft clink of something set down on the wooden table. Then his footsteps coming back, bare feet on tile, and she could track him by sound, which was strange and wonderful and made her feel like a bat.

"Stand still," he said. "Arms out."

Warm oil. That was the first thing. Warm oil on her shoulders, and the smell of it hit her a second later. Lavender. Not the fake kind, either. The real, green, almost bitter kind.

"Breathe," he said. "Slow. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. I'm going to count."

He counted. In four, out six. His hands worked the oil into her shoulders in circles and her breath dropped lower with every count until she felt almost stupid with calm. This was the trick of it, she thought. He wasn't rushing her toward anything. He was slowing her