The Lighthouse Kink

My name is Francine, I'm thirty-six years old, and I've been married to Simon for twelve years. That's the boring part. The interesting part is what I'm doing right now, which is standing in my bathroom holding my grandmother's tin of buttons and asking myself if I'm really going to do this.

Here's the background, or most of it. Simon and I met when I was twenty-two, at a college music thing, one of those nights where everybody's crammed into a room and somebody's always tuning a guitar. He was twenty-four and playing bass in a band that was going nowhere, which is how I liked him. We dated two years, he proposed at a gig, and we got married when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-six. He drives for an organic produce co-op now. I clean teeth. Between those two facts there's a thing we have never done, even though we've been circling it for over a decade like moths at a porch light.

The thing is feet. Specifically, me worshipping his feet. I know, right? Of all the secrets a woman can keep, mine is that I have wanted to sit on the floor at my husband's feet and kiss his bare feet and maybe work my way up from there, and I have never once said this out loud in plain words. I've hinted. God, have I hinted. I bought him those leather sandals in year three. I gave him foot massages that got progressively less like massages and more like me holding his ankle with both hands and breathing weird until he asked if I was coming down with something. He'd look at me funny and I'd retreat, and he'd let me retreat, because that's what we do. We're polite people. We've been polite for twelve years.

And the thing about him, and I figured this out late. He's not oblivious. He's waiting. I think he's known for years that I want this, and he's been waiting for me to say it, because he doesn't want to be the guy who drags his wife into something. Which sounds sweet and is sweet, but also, twelve years, Simon. Twelve years of hints.

So tonight I'm doing something different. Tonight we're going to a lighthouse.

Not just any lighthouse. There's this old convent about forty minutes up the coast that got turned into a small music venue maybe eight years ago. Stone walls, amazing acoustics, a garden gone half wild on purpose, and out on the point there's an actual lighthouse, restored, that they do tours of. Simon played there once or twice back in the day and it stuck with both of us. They do an after-hours tour on Thursdays, small group, ends up in the lamp room at the top with the light off and just the low lamp glow and the sea doing its thing below you. My sister-in-law did it with her book club and said it was the most romantic place she's ever stood, which for her is saying a lot because she cried at a parking garage in Lisbon.

But the lighthouse isn't even the point. The tin of buttons is the point. Let me explain.

When my grandmother died I got her sewing box, and in the sewing box there's a little round tin of buttons, mother of pearl mostly, some glass ones, one brass military button that doesn't match anything. I used to play with that tin as a kid on her floor while she watched her shows. It smells faintly like her house still, that lavender and old fabric smell, and holding it puts me in a specific mood, which is the mood of a woman who is allowed to want things. Don't ask me how buttons got that job. They just did.

So here's my plan, and I'm aware it's insane. I bring the tin. At some point tonight, in that lamp room, I set the tin down in front of Simon, and I say what I'm going to say. The entire plan is that. There's no contingency. I told my friend Jo about it at lunch and she said, "So your seduction plan is antiques?" and I said, "It's a talisman, Jo," and she said, "It's a tin," and honestly she had me there, but a girl needs something in her pocket.

I got dressed three times. Settled on a skirt, which matters later maybe, and a top that Simon once said was good, and I put the tin in my bag, and then I moved it to my jacket pocket so I could feel it, and then back to the bag because I looked like a crazy person feeling my own pocket every thirty seconds.

Simon knocked on the bathroom door. "Francine? We gotta leave in like ten minutes if we're making the tour."

"I know. I'm doing my hair."

"Your hair looks great. Your hair always looks great. Are you okay in there? You've been in there a while."

"I'm fine!" Too loud. I took a breath. "I'm fine. Just deciding on lipstick."

There was a pause. "You don't usually wear lipstick," he said, and I could hear the smile in it, the cautious one, the one he gets when he's not sure where I'm going.

"Special occasion," I said.

"What occasion?"

"You'll see. Go start the car."

We took his van, because of course we did, the co-op van with the carrots painted on the side, because he had to have it back at the depot first thing in the morning and didn't want to double back for my car. So we pulled up to a former convent at nine at night in a vegetable van. Romance is not dead, it's just parked badly.

The drive was forty minutes of me being normal. We talked about his route, and a customer who tries to trade homemade jam for produce, and whether the guy who runs the venue still has that dog. Normal married stuff, the stuff that's actually good, and underneath it I was sitting on my hands as a child would at a recital.

At the venue there was a little crowd for the acoustic set, maybe thirty people on folding chairs. The act was a folk duo and they were fine. Simon knew the sound guy. I drank one glass of wine and made myself stop there, because if I'm doing this I want to do it with a completely clear head, and I want him to know that too. That's a thing I decided. Whatever happens, both of us sober, both of us sure.

The tour started at ten. There were six of us plus the guide, whose name was Liam, a lanky guy in his fifties who clearly loved this lighthouse the way some men love trains. He walked us through the garden, past the chapel shell, up the winding path to the tower, talking the whole way about the keepers and the storms and the Fresnel lens. Simon held my hand on the stairs. The stairs were spiral and terrible and everyone was breathing hard by the last flight, laughing about it.

The lamp room at the top was smaller than I pictured. Low curved ceiling, glass all around, the big lens in the middle dark and enormous, and one small lamp on a hook giving off this warm yellow that made everything look like honey. The sea was a black sheet with a few lights on it far off. Liam did his bit about the lens, let us ooh at it, and then a couple in the group asked about the garden and he lit up and said, "You know what, I can show you the herb beds, the night ones are worth it, the moonflowers only open after dark. Everyone alright waiting up here twenty minutes? I'll pull the stair door shut behind me so nobody wanders."

Everyone said fine. Simon and I said fine. The door clunked and their footsteps faded down the spiral and then it was just us and the lamp and the sea.

Simon went to the glass. "God, look at that. You can see the whole coast. Hey, is that the marina light? That has to be the marina."

"Probably."

"We should come back for a show sometime. Just us. They do that jazz night, remember, I told you about it. Get the good chairs this time, not behind the pillar."

"Simon."

"Yeah?"

I took the tin out of my bag. My hands were steady, which surprised me. I set it on the stone sill by the lamp, in the little circle of yellow light, and I turned it so the lid faced him.

"What's that?" he said. Then he saw it properly. "Wait, is that your grandma's button tin? Why do you have that here?"

"I brought it on purpose."

He looked at me. The lamp light was doing something nice to his face, or maybe I just thought so. "Okay," he said slowly. "On purpose. Why?"

"Because I needed a reason to be brave and this is it. Sit down."

There was a bench built into the wall, old wood, worn smooth. He sat. I stayed standing, which felt right, which felt essential.

"Francine, you're kind of scaring me."

"Good kind or bad kind?"

"There's a good kind?"

"Tonight there is." I put my hand flat on the tin lid. The brass button clinked underneath. "Do you remember the sandals? The ones I bought you like nine years ago, the leather ones."

"The ones with the strap that cut my foot? Yeah, I wore them twice."

"I didn't buy them because I thought you needed sandals, Simon."

There was a silence with just the sea in it. "Francine," he said, very carefully. "What are you telling me?"

"I'm telling you that I have wanted something for over ten years and I've been too embarrassed to say it in actual words, and I'm going to say it now, right now, and you're going to hear me out before you say anything. Okay?"

"Okay," he said. His voice had gone quiet in a new way.

I looked at the tin, and then at his shoes, and I made myself look at his face. "Take off your shoes," I said.

He blinked. "What?"

"Your shoes. Take them off. Please!"

He didn't ask why. I watched him understand it, actually watched it happen, his face going from confused to something else, something warm and startled. He bent down and unlaced his left shoe, slowly, like it might go off, and pulled it off, and then his sock, and his bare foot landed flat on the old stone floor of the lamp room, and he looked up at me.

"Okay," he said. "So you've got my attention."

"I know," I said. "I've had yours for years."

I reached down and slipped off my own sandals. I'd worn the flat ones, the soft brown leather, because I'd planned this down to the strap, and I stepped out of them slow, one foot and then the other, and stood there barefoot on the stone in front of him.

Simon made a sound. Not a word, just a sound, low in his chest, and his eyes dropped to my feet and stayed there.

"Francine," he said. "Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. It's feet. It's been feet the whole time."

"It's been feet the whole time," I said. "God, it feels insane to say out loud. Twelve years, Simon. Since before we were even married."

"You bought me those sandals."

"I bought you those sandals because I used to picture taking them off you. The entire fantasy, back then, was that. Just that. Kneeling down and undoing the strap and touching your foot and you letting me."

He looked up at me from the bench, and his bare left foot shifted on the stone, and I swear that little movement went through me like a wave. "You letting me," he repeated. "You said it like that. Like you needed permission."

"I did. I do. That's sort of the shape of it. I want