The Last Motion

The first time Tessa asked me to write down what I wanted, we were sitting on the floor of my living room eating pad thai out of the cartons because the oak table had no finish on it yet and I was paranoid about rings, and I laughed at her, actually laughed, a short ugly laugh that came out before I could stop it, because I am thirty-eight years old and I spend my days cross-examining witnesses and drafting motions and I could not picture myself opening a document at ten at night and typing out my own desires like a man writing his will.

She didn't laugh back. She just wiped her fingers on her jeans and looked at me the way she looks at a board she's checking for warp, patient, level, waiting for me to come around to true.

"You laughed," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "I did. Sorry. It's just, I do this for a living. Terms and conditions. I get paid two hundred an hour to write things down and here you are asking me to do it for free."

"Rory." She put the carton down. "I'm not asking for a brief. I'm asking what you want so I don't have to guess at it. I've guessed before and it went badly and I don't do it anymore. So write it. Type it, whatever, I don't care. I want it in your words, not out of your mouth in the middle of something when you'll say anything."

So I got my laptop and I opened a blank page and I stared at it for a while and then I started typing, and somewhere around the third line the laughter went out of me and something quieter came in, and I kept typing for maybe twenty minutes while she sat on the floor beside me with her legs stretched out, not reading over my shoulder, not rushing me, just there the way lumber is there, solid and not going anywhere.

* * *

That was four months ago, and tonight is a Thursday in October, and she is here in my loft, kneeling on the folded moving blanket in front of the leather chair she picked out for me two years back when I bought the place above the furniture workshop, and I am standing in my own living room in socks and a button-down with my sleeves rolled, holding two printed pages and reading aloud like a man reading his own deposition.

Her hair is down and she's thirty-four and she is not moving at all. Her hands rest open on her thighs, palms up, and her eyes are on the middle button of my shirt, which she says is easier than staring at my face while I do something hard.

"Item one," I read. "Hard limits. No humiliation. No name calling, either direction. No marks that show above a collar. No anything involving work, no ties to the job, no deals, nothing owed. Money is money and this is this and the two never touch."

"Good," she says. "Keep going."

"Item two. Safeword is red, yellow for slow down, and I can use either one at any time for any reason or no reason and everything stops, no questions, no sulking, no negotiation after the fact. And if I can't speak, three grunts. We agreed on that."

"Three grunts," she repeats. "I remember."

"Item three." My mouth is dry and I take a breath and she waits, she is so good at waiting, carpenters must learn it young, that patience with a thing that will not be hurried. "The three things I want. One, I want to be told what to do. Not asked, told. Two, I want to be held down, or tied, or both, and I want it tight enough that I know I can't get out, because I've never once in my life been unable to get out of anything and I think about that a lot. Three."

I stop there. She lifts her eyes to my face.

"Take your time," she says.

"Three, I want it to last longer than I think I can stand. I want to be taken past my own estimate of myself. That's the whole, that's the center of it, everything else is details around that."

She is quiet for a moment, kneeling there on the blanket, and the loft is so still I can hear the workshop below, somebody running a sander on a piece that should have been finished yesterday, even though it's Thursday, a long slow hiss through the floor.

"One amendment," she says. "Item one, the no humiliation clause. The way you wrote it, you said no degrading acts. I want to rephrase it. No degradation of you as a person. I can still be rough with your body, I can still use words that are about what we're doing, but nobody is going to call you less than what you are. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I say, and it comes out faster than I expected, and she doesn't ask why, which is one of the ten thousand things I love about her, she just nods once like a cut confirmed with the square and moves on.

"There's a reason I," I start, and she shakes her head, small, and I close my mouth.

"You can tell me sometime," she says. "Not tonight. Tonight is for doing, not for explaining. Stand up straight."

I am already standing but I stand straighter, shoulders back, chin level, the posture I use in court, and she almost smiles at that, the corner of her mouth moving.

"Good," she says. "Arms behind you. Wrists together."

I put my arms behind my back and cross my wrists and she rises off her knees without hurry, and I hear her take the rope off the chair, the coil of cotton rope she brought over in her tool bag three weeks ago and set there and never mentioned, and the sound of it uncoiling is soft, a heavy whisper.

She comes around behind me. I feel her fingers first, checking the position of my wrists, adjusting them a half inch so the bones aren't stacked on each other, and then the rope, flat against my skin, warm from sitting on the leather, and she wraps it, once, twice, three times around both wrists, and her hands are strong, I have watched those hands drive screws and lift a hundred and sixty pounds of walnut slab down a ramp, and now they are working on me with the same unhurried exactness.

She cinches it. Not brutal, not cruel, just snug, snug enough that when I flex my wrists there is a quarter inch of give and no more, snug enough that the cotton sits into my skin and I feel it every time I breathe, and I feel the moment the last slack goes out of it and I understand that I could not get out of this, not by twisting, not by strength, and my breath goes deep on its own, deeper than it has gone in weeks, months maybe, the way a house settles when the last shim goes in.

"There it is," she says quietly, and I can hear that she felt it too, the exhale, the drop. "Feel that?"

"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out lower than I meant it to.

"Don't fight it," she says. "You'll want to at first, around minute ten or so, your shoulders will start to think for you. Don't listen to them. Tell me your color."

"Green," I say.

"Green," she repeats, and she comes around to face me, and she reaches out and unbuttons the top button of my shirt, one, slow, watching my face the whole time, and the rope shifts against my wrists and I breathe deep again and she nods like she just saw the level bubble center.

She walks around me once, the full circle, slow, the way she walks a wall she just hung a door on, checking the plumb of it with her eyes before she ever touches it, and I stand there and let her look, and the strange thing is how easy it is, standing still while a woman circles me with my wrists tied behind my back, easy in a way court has never once been easy. She stops in front of me and puts one hand on the back of my head, just her palm, warm, her fingers sliding into my hair, and she closes her hand into a loose fist and pulls, gently, and my head goes back and my throat opens and I look at the ceiling, the old beams of it, and the whole time she is watching me, I can feel her eyes on my face the way you feel weather coming.

"Down," she says, and there is no question in it, and my knees go before I decide anything, the rope shifting behind me as I settle onto them on the bare subfloor, the boards cool through my socks, and she keeps her hand in my hair while I kneel there, stroking now, slow passes from my forehead back over my ear, and it is nothing, it is almost nothing, a hand in a man's hair, and it lands in me like a verdict.

She holds it longer than I think she will, and then, right at the point where I would have said something, she pulls back and crouches in front of me, forearms on her knees, and her face comes level with mine, close, and she says it plain.

"What's the word?"

"Red," I say. "Red stops everything. Yellow slows it down. Three grunts if I can't talk."

She nods once. "And you're green right now?"

"Green."

"Good," she says, and she stands up and goes to the tool bag by the chair, and I hear the zipper and I hear wood knock against wood and then something heavier come out, and when she turns around she is holding a paddle, not a hairbrush or a wooden spoon or any of the improvised things I had half imagined, but a broad leather paddle, black, with a handle she has wrapped in the same cord she uses for her tool grips, and I know without asking that she