The Last Tide

Cecelia had rehearsed the ask for two months before she finally made it.

She was fifty-two years old. She had intubated strangers on highway shoulders. She had held a man's hand while he died with his boots on. And she could not, for the life of her, say a simple sentence to Roy about what she wanted.

She got there eventually. It took three glasses of nothing and a Tuesday.

Roy didn't say no. That was the scary part. He listened, nodded, looked at the stove for a while, and said, "Let me think on it." He thought on it for eleven days. Then he called her on a Thursday and said come by Saturday, low tide, bring nothing.

So here she was. Saturday. Walking the last block of Water Street with her hands jammed in her coat pockets, trying to figure out why the hell she was nervous. She knew this cottage. She'd been inside it maybe forty times over two years of dating. She'd cooked dinner in his kitchen. She'd fallen asleep on his couch during a football game neither of them cared about.

But tonight was going to be different, and her body knew it before her head caught up.

The truth, which she'd only admitted to herself around week six of the rehearsing, was that it wasn't about punishment. She didn't want to be hurt. What she wanted was to be held so firmly that she could stop holding herself. She wanted someone else to carry the weight for one night. She wanted to be broken open gently, like a jar with a stubborn lid, and have someone reach in and take the whole thing seriously.

Roy took things seriously. That was his whole deal. Thirty years on a trawler before he retired at fifty, four years of quiet fishing and woodstove fires since. He didn't joke past a thing that mattered.

She knocked. The door opened before her second knock landed.

"Come in, Cece," Roy said. He was fifty-four, big through the shoulders in the way old deckhands got, gray in his beard. "Coat on the hook. Boots off. Come sit."

She did all three. The woodstove was going but low, more promise than heat. The windows rattled in the salt wind. On the table there were two mugs and a piece of paper, face down.

He turned the paper over and set it where she could read it.

"Rules," he said. "One. This happens tonight, this cottage, no cameras, nothing recorded, nobody else ever hears about it. Two. You get a safeword. You pick it. You say it, everything stops, no questions, no sulking from me. Three. At dawn you put your coat back on and you go home to your own place. We don't make this a routine. One night. That's the deal I can offer."

Cecelia read the paper twice. Her mouth had gone dry somewhere around rule two.

"Why dawn?" she asked. Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

"Because I'm fifty-four years old and I know my own limits," Roy said. "I can give you a night. I can't give you a life like this. If we make it a habit, it stops being a gift and starts being a job. I won't do that to you. Or me."

"That's it? That's the whole structure?"

"That's it. Safeword?"

She thought about it. She'd heard good ones on calls, in the worst possible contexts. "Lighthouse," she said.

Roy nodded once. "Lighthouse. Good. Anything else you want to say before we start?"

"Tell me I'm not crazy for wanting this."

"You're not crazy. You're the most levelheaded person I know, which is why I said yes." He stood. "Blindfold's on the table. Red silk. Was my mother's, actually, a scarf. If that's a problem, say so now."

"It's not a problem."

"Then put it on and kneel by the stove. Not on the rug. On the boards. You'll feel the cold. That's on purpose."

She picked up the scarf. Her hands were steadier than she'd expected. She tied it over her eyes and the cottage went to orange dark, the firelight bleeding through the weave.

Then she knelt on the floorboards. The cold came up through her jeans immediately, a bright clean shock.

For a while, nothing. She heard Roy move. He built the fire up, she figured, because she heard the wood bin open, the clatter of split logs, the thunk of one going in. Then the scrape of a match. Then a pause that lasted long enough that she started counting her own breaths.

She lost count around forty. The waiting did something to her that she hadn't predicted. With the blindfold on and Roy moving silently somewhere behind her, her whole world shrank to the cold under her knees, the heat on her right cheek, the sound of the wind. It was the closest thing she'd felt in years to the quiet after a shift ends.

Then his voice, right behind her. Close. She hadn't heard him cross the room.

"How are the knees?"

"Fine. Cold."

"Good. Stay there."

Something soft dragged across the back of her neck. Leather. Narrow, maybe an inch wide, doubled over. She felt the air of it before she felt anything else.

"Tell me what this is," Roy said.

"A strap."

"Tell me what it's for."

"My thighs. You're going to use it on my thighs."

"Do you want that?"

"Yes!" It came out steady. That surprised her.

The first blow landed on the backs of her thighs, low, just above the knee. It wasn't a whipcrack. It was slow, heavy, almost lazy, like Roy had all night, which apparently he did. The sting bloomed and spread and settled into a warmth that pulsed with her heartbeat.

"Breath," Roy said.

She breathed. The second one came a little higher. The third one matched the second. He laid them down like he was setting shingles, one after another, patient, even, no hurry at all. The cold floor under her knees, the fire heat on her face, the strap warming her thighs. It built into a strange weather system that was all hers.

Somewhere around the fifteenth stroke her breath caught and came out as a gasp. She heard Roy stop.

"Color," he said. Not a question exactly.

"Green. Green, don't stop, that was a good gasp."

He made a low sound that might have been a laugh. The strap resumed. By the thirtieth she could feel her skin burning through the denim, hot and tight, and she was leaning forward on her palms with her forehead nearly touching the boards, and she realized her hips had started to move, just slightly, riding each stroke the way you'd ride a wave you couldn't get out of.

"That's enough for tonight," Roy said, and set the strap down on the table where she could hear it land. "Up. Slowly. Bed."

She rose on legs that felt borrowed. He guided her by the elbow, four steps, five, and sat her on the edge of the iron bed frame. She heard it creak under her weight, the old familiar complaint of it.

"Jeans off. Everything off, actually. Then face down on the bed, arms out in front of you."

She stripped with the blindfold still on, which turned the whole thing into a fumbling comedy she was glad nobody could see. One sock resisted. She swore at it quietly.

"Trouble?" Roy asked, dry as driftwood.

"Not a word."

"Uh huh."

She got there eventually. Face down on the quilt, arms stretched toward the headboard. The strap marks met the cold sheet and she hissed.

Then his hands took her wrists. He wrapped them in something soft first, cloth of some kind, and then rope over that, cinched to the iron frame with short deliberate knots. She tested the bind without deciding to. It held. Of course it held. A man who'd spent thirty years tying knots against weather wasn't