The Lesson Plan

My name is Morgan Griffin, I'm twenty-four years old, and until last Tuesday I would have told you I was a pretty easygoing person. I teach kindergarten, which means I spend my days negotiating with small people over glue sticks and wiping paint off things that were never meant to be painted. You would think that job would drain all the fight out of a person. Apparently it doesn't. Apparently it just banks it somewhere, and all it takes is one loud idiot in a flannel shirt to withdraw the whole balance.

Here's how it happened. Tuesdays are my low-key night, my one beer and one basket of fries night at The Snug, the bar three blocks from my apartment. The Snug has sticky wooden floors, a long oak counter that a hundred elbows have worn smooth, and a jukebox that has been stuck on nineties alt rock since before I could legally drink in the place. I like it because nobody bothers me. Or nobody bothered me, past tense, because last Tuesday a guy in flannel was sitting four stools down and he was not quiet.

I wasn't eavesdropping. I want that noted officially, meaning I wasn't trying to, but he was projected for the whole room. He was telling his buddy, this half-shouted bro confessional, that he could size up any woman in five minutes flat. Her limits, her ceiling, the whole map of her. Then he nodded at me, actually nodded, fries in my mouth, and said I looked like the type who'd never tried anything new in her life. A prude. He used that word. Then he bet his friend fifty dollars on it, a bet that got made and settled right there at the bar, cash and everything, before I'd even finished chewing.

I finished chewing. I paid my tab. I went home. And then I lay in the dark getting angrier and angrier about a fifty dollar bet between two strangers, one of whom I could not pick out of a lineup now, which honestly makes the anger funnier in retrospect. But sitting with it that night, I found something I didn't know was in me. A little competitive fire, banked down low, the kind that kindergarten teachers aren't supposed to have. Somebody had declared my limits in a bar I was sitting in. Fine. I would blow the roof off my own limits just to spite a man who was probably asleep by ten.

* * *

The complication, and there's always a complication, is Burton. Burton Lindstrom, thirty-one, works part-time as a barback at The Snug, which means he hauls kegs and ice and restocks bottles with the expression of a man doing long division in his head. I found out later he used to be a competitive parkour instructor until he wrecked his ankle at twenty-nine, which explains the way he moves, this controlled quiet walk, like the floor owes him money. I had never spoken to Burton. I had definitely noticed him, because I'm twenty-four and not dead, but that's beside the point.

The point is the following Tuesday, a week later, I came in early for my fries and there was nobody at the bar yet except the regulars and Burton, wiping down the oak, and two of the regulars were chatting with him. And I heard my name.

I heard Burton say, in this flat bored voice, that the teacher from Tuesdays was probably the kind of woman who thought anal was a myth. He said it like a joke, low, for the regulars, and they laughed, and I sat there with my basket of fries feeling my ears go hot. Look, it wasn't kind. It wasn't even clever. But something in me went click, the same click from the week before, the fire finding fresh oxygen. Because now there was a face on the insult. A face with forearms, even.

I could have confronted him. A reasonable person would have. I finished my fries instead, and I spent the whole walk home building a plan that was, I will admit, about forty percent reasonable.

* * *

Wednesday evening I went back. He'd assume the bet was from Tuesday's flannel guy, I figured, because what else would he think, and honestly that misunderstanding was going to do my work for me. The Snug was dead before eight. Burton was in the back room, the storage one, the one with the kegs and the boxes of coasters, because the regulars had mentioned he does inventory Wednesday nights while it's slow. I knocked on the doorframe and he turned around with a case of limes in his arms.

"Hey," I said. "Got a minute?"

He set the limes down. He looked at me the way you look at a customer who wants to complain about the jukebox. "You're Tuesday fries," he said.

"I'm Tuesday fries, yeah." I had rehearsed this on the walk over and my rehearsal was evaporating fast, so I just went with the blunt version. "Look, I heard what you said. About me. Yesterday. I wasn't hiding, I was in my seat."

Something shifted in his face, not quite embarrassment, more like recalibration. "Okay," he said slowly. "That was out of line."

"It was. And here's my thing. I've been getting told all week what I won't try, what my limits are, and I'm sick of it. So." I took a breath, because this is the part where I say the thing. "I want you to teach me something new. Specifically anal. Like, training, working up to it, the whole patient program. I figure a guy who talks like a coach can coach this."

Silence. Burton picked up one lime and put it back down. I watched him decide several things in a row.

"You think I took that bet," he said finally. "Tuesday. You think this is about the fifty dollars."

"Don't you?" I said, because I had built my whole plan on that assumption and I wasn't ready to renovate it mid-sentence.

He rubbed his jaw. "Sure," he said, and something in his voice had changed, dropped lower, this teacher cadence I'd later learn meant he'd shifted gears. "Okay, Morgan. I'll train you. But we do it my way. We go slow, we check in, you say stop and we stop, for good, and I mean that. Yes?"

"Yes," I said. My heart was loud in my ears, and my palms were sweating, and none of it felt like fear. It felt like the first day of a new job.

"Then come here," he said, "and let's see what we're working with."

I crossed the back room, over the concrete, past the kegs, and stopped close enough to smell the cold air off the beer cases. He looked down at me for a moment, then said, quiet, "Last check. You want this?"

"I want this," I said, and I meant it so hard it surprised me.

"Good girl," he said, and reached past me to slide the bolt on the door.

* * *

His apartment was four blocks from The Snug, second floor of an old brick building, and it looked exactly like a former parkour instructor lived there. Sparse furniture. A pull-up bar bolted into a doorframe. A foam roller on the couch like a pet. He'd told me Thursday, his place, and I'd spent two days talking myself in and out of it in roughly equal shifts.

I brought my own bottle of lube anyway, because I'm a kindergarten teacher and we come prepared. Burton looked at it when I handed it over and said, "Good. Silicone, water based, either works. This one's fine." Then he set it on the coffee table like lab equipment, and that, more than anything, made it real.

"Ground rules again," he said. He was standing, I was sitting on the edge of his couch, and he talked with his hands a little, the way I imagine he used to coach. "Slow. Numbers. You tell me where you are, one to ten, anytime I ask. Stop means stop, no renegotiating. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Then lie back."

I want to lay out how it actually went, because nothing about it was what I'd pictured in my head on the walk over. In my head it was going to be urgent and embarrassing and over fast. In reality Burton sat on the floor beside the couch, calm as a man defusing nothing at all, and started with just his finger against me, barely inside, coated in lube, waiting.

"Breathe out," he said. "Let it happen. Don't grip."

"I'm not gripping."

"You're gripping. There it is. Good, feel that? That's the release." His voice was level, patient, that same coaching cadence from the storage room, and I lay there on his couch with my jeans around one ankle thinking, okay, this is a lesson, this is practice, I can do a lesson. I've sat through professional development seminars that were worse.

He worked one finger in slow, tiny movements, pausing at every little resistance, asking "number?" every so often, and I'd say two, or three, or four, and he'd adjust. It wasn't much to look at from the outside, I'm sure. A woman on a couch, a man concentrating. But somewhere around the ten minute mark, when he added a second finger and my body actually accepted it instead of arguing, something in my brain rewired on the spot. The competitive part of me, the part that had marched in there to prove a point about a bet, went quiet, and the part that had been lonely and curious