The Last Box

I've been dating Eveline Ayers for two and a half years now, and I want to state up front that I am forty-three years old and I have never once been good at big changes. New jobs, new apartments, new menus at restaurants I already liked. I teach high school history, which means I spend my days explaining to teenagers how everything used to be, and apparently I absorbed the lesson a little too well.

So when Eveline said, about two months ago, that it was time I moved into her place, I said yes the way a man says yes to a dentist. Glad it's happening, terrified of the chair.

We met at a teacher conference three years ago, when I was forty and she was forty-one. She's a graphic designer and she was there for some workshop on visual learning, and I was there because the district makes us go. We bonded over the coffee, which was bad, and the icebreaker exercises, which were worse. She drew a picture of me as a sad stapler and I laughed harder than I had in months. Six months later we were dating. Two years after that, here we were, carrying my life in boxes into a storage unit because her apartment has one closet and I apparently own forty sweaters.

The storage place was called Boxed & Stored, which is the kind of name that tells you nobody involved cared. It was a hot Saturday in September. The unit was maybe ten by twenty, concrete floor, one buzzing overhead light, and towers of cardboard stacked in no particular order. The air smelled like old paper and my own sweat. Eveline had rented it a month back as a staging area, and we'd been whittling it down every weekend.

I was taping a box marked KITCHEN MISC when she leaned against a stack of my book boxes and looked at me with the face she makes when she's about to do something to me.

"Phil. Put the tape down."

I put the tape down. Three years of practice.

"I hid something in here," she said. "A little box. Maybe eight inches wide. It's got a bow on it."

"Like a present?"

"Like a present." She crossed her arms. "Here's the bet. We both look. Whoever finds it first gets to set the terms for tonight. Whatever terms they want. No limits on the asking, only limits on the answering."

I should explain that Eveline wins things. She wins office raffles, she wins board games, she once won a trivia night by knowing the capital of Burkina Faso while the rest of us were still spelling it. And I lose things, mostly to her, mostly on purpose, because watching her gloat is one of my favorite hobbies.

"Terms for tonight," I said. "Define terms."

"Nope. That's part of the game." She checked her phone like it was a stopwatch. "Ready? Go."

I went at the nearest stack like a man looking for his passport in an airport. I opened boxes. I shook boxes. I got down on my knees and looked under the folding table we'd been using as a work surface. Nothing. I worked through the Christmas ornaments, the winter coats, a box of my old grading binders that I should have thrown out in 2019.

Eveline did not search. That was the part I noticed around minute six, panting on the floor with a roll of tape stuck to my forearm. She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, watching me, and she had this small patient smile like a cat watching a laser pointer she had personally placed.

"You're not even looking," I said.

"I am looking."

"At me."

"At you," she agreed.

Something about the way she said it made my ears go hot. I kept digging anyway, because I am competitive in the way that anxious men are competitive: I would rather pull a hamstring than lose gracefully. I got through the lampshades. I got through a box of cables that contained cables for devices neither of us had owned since the last presidential administration.

And somewhere in there it clicked. The box wasn't hidden to be found. It was hidden to be not found, or found late, or found by her, and the whole point was me, on my knees in a storage unit, working up a sweat while she watched. This was not a race. This was an audition, or maybe a lesson, and I was the course material.

"Having fun?" she asked.

"No," I said, and then, because lying to her has never once worked, "yes."

She pushed off the wall, walked past me to a stack I had already searched twice, and slid a medium box off the top. It was behind my winter coat, third layer in. She'd watched me miss it. She reached in and pulled out a small white box with a red bow, maybe eight inches wide, and held it up.

"There," she said. "Found it."

"That's cheating. You knew where it was. You hid it."

"I did hide it. Nothing in the rules said I couldn't remember." She turned the box over in her hands. "You looked good down there, by the way. Very thorough."

I sat back on my heels on the cold concrete and felt my face do something I couldn't control. "So what are the terms?"

"Oh, you're going to love this!" She sat down next to me, which meant sitting on the floor of a storage unit in a nice dress, and she never once seemed to notice things like that. "For one night, I make the decisions. All of them. What you wear, where you sit, what happens and when. But there's a catch."

"There's always a catch with you."

"The catch is you have to ask. For everything. If you want something, anything, you have to say it out loud, in plain words, and wait to see if I say yes." She put the box in my lap. "That's the prize. You get to want things out loud all night, and I get to decide."

I opened the box because my hands needed something to do. Inside was a pair of soft leather cuffs, a blindfold, and a note card that said, in her tidy designer handwriting, ASK NICELY.

I sat there holding the note card and thinking about the last three years. About how I'd spent most of my adult life being the reliable one, the prepared one, the guy with a backup plan and a spare phone charger. And about how the single most relaxed I had ever felt was the weekend Eveline took my phone away at a cabin in Vermont and told me I wasn't allowed to make decisions until Sunday.

"You've been planning this since the storage unit idea," I said.

"Since April, actually." She stood and offered me a hand up. "Well? Do you accept the terms, or do you want to negotiate?"

I did not want to negotiate. That surprised me less than it should have.

"I accept," I said.

"Good." She kissed me once, quick and proprietary, and picked up her purse. "Car. Now. First question of the night, and I'll give you this one for free. Do you want to drive, or do you want me to?"

"I want you to drive."

"See? You're a natural." She smiled and walked out of the unit, and I stood there a second longer with the box under my arm, feeling I had just found out the exam I'd been dreading was the one I'd secretly studied for my whole life.

The drive to her apartment took twenty minutes and she made me keep the box on my lap the whole way, cuffs and blindfold rattling faintly at every red light. At the apartment she poured us each a drink and told me to sit on the edge of the bed. Then she stood in front of me, arms crossed again, waiting.

"Go ahead," she said. "Ask me for the first thing."

I looked up at her, and my mouth went dry, and it took me three tries.

"Can I kiss you?" I finally said.

She smiled, took the box out of my hands, and set it on the nightstand. "You can," she said. "Ask for the next thing after that."

I kissed her, slow, her hand at the back of my neck, and when we broke apart she was already reaching for the blindfold.

"Next," she said.

She tied the blindfold herself, standing behind me on the edge of the bed, and the world went soft and dark. I could hear her move around the room. A drawer opened. Something plastic clicked. I sat there with my hands on my knees like a kid waiting outside the principal's office, except the principal was my girlfriend and I was about forty percent hard already.

"Stand up," she said.

I stood. Her hands found my shirt buttons and worked them one at a time, unhurried, like she was unwrapping something she'd paid extra to have shipped. She slid the shirt off my shoulders and down my arms and set it somewhere I'd never find it again. Then her fingers went to my belt.

"Phil."

"Yes."

"Breathe."

I breathed. She pulled the belt out slow, that leather whisper sound, and then my pants were open and she was pushing them down over my hips along with my underwear, and I stepped out of them into the dark. The air on my skin made the hair on my arms stand up.

"You're keeping the socks," she said. "It's a look."

"Thank you?"

"You're welcome. Now. There's a flattened box on the floor in front of you. Kneel on it."

I got down on my knees on the cardboard, which was surprisingly comfortable, all things considered. I heard her sit down on the bed behind me. Then her hands were on my shoulders, warm, and her mouth was close to my ear.

"Here's how this goes. I'm going to touch you. You're going to tell me