The Last Night Alone

I was flat on my back at six in the evening, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks. Not real cracks, you understand. Imaginary ones. Our ceiling doesn't have cracks. It does have a water stain shaped sort of like Ohio, and I had been looking at that stain so long that Ohio had started to feel like an old friend.

Kenneth was asleep next to me. Actually asleep, at six, snoring lightly with one arm thrown over his eyes. Who naps at six on a Tuesday? A man who works at the plant and gets up at four-thirty, that's who. I work nights at the restaurant, so my body clock is upside down anyway, and here I was on my first full week off in two years, bored out of my skull by day three.

Two years, that's how long since my last full week off. Five years married to that man, married when I was twenty-four, and somehow in all that time we had never once done the "drop everything and be lazy" thing. You'd think being lazy would come easy. It does not. Lazy turns to bored by about hour six, and bored turns to me poking my husband in the ribs.

"Ken. Hey. Ken."

He grunted. The arm stayed over his eyes.

"What do you want to do tonight?"

"Sleep," he said, into his elbow.

"You've been asleep since four. That's cheating." I poked him again. "Come on. I'm going crazy here. We could drive somewhere. We could go to that Vietnamese place out past the fairgrounds. We could finally fix the porch step before somebody breaks an ankle."

"We could sleep," he said, but he moved the arm, so I'd won a little. His eyes were half open, squinting at me like I was the sun. "You're really wound up tonight."

"I'm bored, not wound up. There's a difference. Bored is worse. Bored is when you've already scrolled your phone for an hour and thought about reorganizing the spice rack and decided against it."

That got a laugh out of him, which felt like a victory. He rolled onto his side and looked at me properly, and something crossed his face. I think he looked like he was deciding something, but he'd probably say I'm making that up after the fact.

"Actually," he said. "There is something."

"Something? What something? Good something or bad something?"

"Give me a minute." He got up, scratched his belly, and padded out of the room in his socks. I heard the back door, then the garage side door, then a bunch of small sounds like a man opening and closing things. Our garage is Kenneth's kingdom, all pegboard and labeled bins, tidier than my knife kit, if you can believe that.

He came back carrying a black nylon bag, the kind you'd take to the gym, and set it on the bed with both hands like it might bite him.

"What's that?"

"It's a bag."

"I can see it's a bag, smartass. Whose bag? Why do you have a bag?"

"It's mine. Been mine for about six years." He sat on the edge of the bed. "I bought it before we got married. Kept meaning to say something. Never did."

Now, a lesser wife would have heard "I've been hiding a bag from you for six years" and gone straight to divorce attorney mode. But I know my husband. The man alphabetizes his screwdrivers. Whatever was in that bag, he was nervous about it in a way that had nothing to do with another woman. So I unzipped it.

Inside, on top of some black fabric, were leather cuffs. Wrist cuffs, I mean, with buckles and little rings. And under those, a paddle. Flat, black leather, about the size of my hand times two, with a nice stitched edge. Honestly, it looked well made. The man does not buy junk.

"Okay," I said slowly. "So these are..."

"Cuffs. And a paddle." He rubbed his jaw. "It's a whole thing, Jam. There's a word for it. People do this. Consensual, adults, all that. I've been reading about it for years and I never knew how to bring it up because you'd look at me exactly like you're looking at me right now."

I was probably looking at him like he'd handed me a raw chicken in church. In fairness.

"People do this," I repeated. "People being who?"

"Couples. Lots of them. There's whole communities online." He was talking fast now, the way he does when the water heater's on the fritz and he's explaining the parts he needs. "It's about trust, mostly. One person gives up control, the other one takes it. Nothing happens you don't agree to first. Nothing leaves a mark you didn't ask for."

I picked up a cuff. It was soft inside, padded, and it smelled faintly of new leather. Well made, like I said. Six years in a drawer and it still looked new, which told me he'd opened that bag plenty of times and just... put it back.

"You wanted to do this to me," I said. It wasn't really a question but he answered it anyway.

"I wanted to do it with you. To you, with you, whatever the grammar is. Yeah."

Here's an ugly true thing: my first feeling wasn't shock. It was relief. Five years of takeout containers and porch steps and the same twenty positions, and my husband had been sitting on a whole secret box of interesting. I was annoyed about the hiding part. I was also, and I don't know how else to put this, curious down to my teeth.

"Why parsley?" he said.

Wait, that's out of order. Let me back up.

Before anything happened, we sat cross-legged on the bed and he talked me through it. Safeword, he said, was the non-negotiable. A word that stops everything, no questions, no hurt feelings. He suggested a few and I vetoed them because they were foods I cook with daily and I didn't want to hear "quinoa" and think of Tuesday prep.

"Parsley," I said finally. "Nobody yells parsley in my kitchen. It's the garnish nobody respects. Perfect."

"Parsley," he agreed, and something in his shoulders came down about two inches, like he'd been holding that breath for six years.

Then he stood, took the cuffs and the paddle back out of the bag, and looked at me.

"Kneel on the rug for me? Right there, by the bed. Just to try it. Ten seconds, and if you hate it we put it all back and order Vietnamese."

"You'd really put it back?"

"I'd really put it back."

So I slid off the bed onto the rug, onto my knees, hands on my thighs, and looked up at him. And okay, I expected to feel silly. Kneeling on a rug in an old t-shirt and shorts, that's the setup for a joke, right?

Except I didn't feel silly. I felt quiet. My brain, which had been doing laps around that ceiling stain all day, went still. I was looking up at my husband and he was looking down at me like I was the only thing in the room, and something about that arrangement felt almost embarrassing in how right it was.

"How's it feel?" he asked, quiet.

"Weird," I said. "Good weird. Don't let me sit here all night, my knee's clicking."

He laughed, and buckled the first cuff around my wrist, and checked the fit with two fingers the way you'd check a trotter's bind in a smoker. My husband, the man who labels his bins.

"You still okay?" he said.

"I said parsley's the word, not the whole alphabet," I told him. "Get on with it."

He did not get on with it, actually. He took his sweet time, and that, I was about to learn, was very much the point.

He buckled the second cuff and then clipped the two together behind my back, quick and quiet, the way he does everything. Then he sat back on his heels and just looked at me.

"Too tight?"

"No."

"Move your hands around. Fingers, wrists, all of it."

I did. The leather held but it didn't bite. Padded inside, like I said, and warm already from my skin. My hands sat behind my back like they'd been invited there and decided to stay.

"Okay?" he asked again.

"Kenneth. If you ask me okay one more time I'm going to bite you."

"Noted," he said, and I swear the man smiled.

He stood up from his heels, which took him two tries because his knee does a thing, and walked around the bed to where I could see him. He'd taken his shirt off at some point. When? I don't