The Long Lunch

I turned 54 in March, and a month later I ended the longest relationship of my life, and I'd been rattling around in my own head ever since. His name was Dev, I'd met him at a bar when I was 42, and for twelve years we were comfortable in the way an old chair is comfortable: you stop noticing it until one day the cushion goes flat and you realize you've just been sitting on wood for years. When I told him it was over he didn't even argue, just nodded and helped me box up my plants, and I went home to my apartment and thought, well, that's that. Except it wasn't that, because ever since then I'd been sitting at my desk at the firm with this dull ache in my chest for the past six months and this other thing, this flicker, that I'd never once said out loud to anybody.

The flicker was the problem. It had been there for years, honestly, probably since before Dev, a little warm itch at the base of my skull when a man spoke in a certain low, sure tone, and I'd spent decades folding it up small and shoving it in a drawer. But after the breakup the drawer came loose on its own. I'd be proofreading a deposition and my mind would drift to something I couldn't name, something about being told what to do by somebody I trusted completely, and then I'd flush and go refill my water bottle and tell myself I was fifty-four years old and had a retirement account to think about.

It was a Tuesday in October, one of those gray afternoons where the downtown light comes through the blinds in flat gray bars and nobody has anything due. I was staring at the same paragraph for the fourth time when a coffee cup appeared at the edge of my desk, and I looked up and there was Josiah, holding it out with that half smile he's worn for the eleven years we've worked here.

"You looked like a woman negotiating with a hostile witness," he said, setting the cup down by my keyboard. "Decaf, don't panic, it's after two."

"You're a saint," I told him, wrapping my hands around it. He's a paralegal, I'm a legal secretary, and we've been taking coffee breaks together so long that the newer associates think of us as a matched set. He dated a woman briefly about five years ago, it ended fine, and since then it's just been him and his crossword puzzles and me and my spreadsheets.

He pulled a chair up and sat, which he doesn't usually bother with, and studied my face a second. "Okay, out with it. You've got the look."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you're chewing on something and it isn't a brief." He waited, and Josiah is good at waiting, it's one of the things I like about him. "You've had it for months, Miriam. Since, well. You know."

I looked into my coffee and surprised myself by opening my mouth. "I've been thinking about something weird."

"Weird how? Weird like you want to quit and open a goat farm, or weird like something else?"

"Something else." I said it quietly and felt my face go warm, and he leaned in a little, elbows on his knees, and I could tell I had his full attention. "I don't even know how to say it."

"Try," he said. "I've heard worse. I worked the Kellerman case, remember."

I laughed, because the Kellerman case was famous around the office, and then the laugh died and I was just sitting there with my heart going in a way I hadn't let it go in years. "Can we not do this at my desk," I said. "Can we do lunch tomorrow, somewhere with a corner table and nobody we know at the next booth?"

"Sure," he said, easy as anything. "You pick the place."

* * *

I picked the little café two blocks over with the back corner by the window, and we got there at noon on Wednesday and ordered, and I nursed my iced tea like it was going to talk for me. Josiah waited until the food came and we'd both taken a bite, and then he just looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and there was no getting out of it after that.

"Okay," I said. "So. There's this thing I've thought about for a long time. Since before Dev, even. I want to submit to someone. I want to be told what to do, and I want to be spanked, actually, that's the specific thing, and I want it to be somebody I trust so much that it doesn't scare me." I took a breath. "There. I said it. God."

Josiah put down his fork and was quiet for a moment, and I watched him decide to take me seriously, which is not something every man my age would have done.

"Thank you for telling me," he said finally. "That took guts. Why now?"

"Because I'm single and I'm fifty-four and if I don't try it once I'm going to wonder my whole life." I stirred my tea. "That's the reason. I'm not asking you to date me, I'm not in love with you, I just don't know anybody else I trust like this."

"And you thought of me," he said, and his voice had a quality, not smug, more like careful. "You want me to do it. Once."

"Yes. If you're willing. If it doesn't wreck the friendship, which I don't think it will, because it's you."

He sat back and looked out the window, and I used the time to panic quietly and eat my sandwich. Then he turned back around and said, "Okay. Here's what I need from you, because if we do this, we do it right. Rules first. It happens once, today if you want, and after it's over we go back to being exactly what we were, coworkers and friends, coffee breaks and all. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

"You say red, everything stops, no questions, no arguing, we're done. You say yellow, I slow down and we check in. Do you understand those?"

"Yes."

"Nothing between your legs. Nothing sexual, nothing with your clothes off, and your underwear stays on. This is about the spanking and only the spanking. And afterward, right there in the room, we talk for a minute before we leave, so you're not walking out of it alone with your head spinning."

"Yes," I said again, and then, because he was looking at me like he expected a real sentence, "I understand all of it, Josiah. I've thought about this for twenty years, I've had time to be sure."

"All right," he said, and finished his tea. "We'll use the private restroom on fourteen, the one with the key kept in the trial supply closet. I'll book us out of the office for the afternoon, tell them we have deposition prep. Finish your lunch."

* * *

The fourteenth floor was empty that time of day, the skybridge to the courthouse deserted, and the little private restroom sat at the end of the hall with its one door and its one sink, built for witnesses who needed a minute before they took the stand. Josiah unlocked it with the key from the trial supply closet, held it open for me, and then stepped in after me and turned the lock, and the click of it went through me like a bell that had been struck.

"Look at me a second," he said, and I did. "Last chance to change your mind, and nobody would ever know, and it changes nothing between us."

"I don't want to change my mind," I said.

"Then bend over the sink. Hands flat on the counter, and lift your skirt up in back. Underwear stays on, like we said."

My fingers shook a little doing it, the cool porcelain under my palms and my face looking back at me in the mirror, flushed and fifty-four and not ashamed of it for once. I heard him move behind me, unhurried, and then his voice came low and steady, that certain tone I'd been hearing in my head for two decades.

"Good. That's exactly right. You stay like that, and you keep breathing, and you count for me out loud, understand? First one's just a warm-up."

"Yes," I said to the mirror, and waited, and the waiting was its own kind of answer.

The first one landed lighter than I expected, just his palm flat on my right cheek, a soft thud more than a slap, and I counted "one" to the mirror in a voice that came out steadier than I felt. "Good girl," he said, and that, more than the slap, made heat bloom low in my belly, because I had imagined that exact phrase for years and it still hit harder than anything I had prepared for.

The second was firmer, and the third, and by the fifth I was resting my cheek against my own shoulder to watch him in the mirror, this calm gray-haired man in a button-down with his sleeves folded back, watching his own hand land on me like he had all the time in the world. He paused after each one, three or four seconds of nothing but our breathing, mine quick and his slow, and the pause was somehow worse and better than the spank itself, the whole second of not knowing when.

"Color?" he asked after ten, his hand resting warm on me.

"Green," I whispered, and I heard him nod even though I couldn't see him nod.

"Then we go on. Eleven." That one was harder, and twelve matched it on the other side, and I gasped, just a small quiet thing that the mirror heard and he heard and nobody else in the world would ever hear. He kept that rhythm after that, steady and deliberate, one cheek and then the other, and never two in a row without a breath of a pause in between, and never once did he go faster when I got loud, which I did, a little, somewhere around twenty. My skin was getting hot under the skirt I'd pushed up, a spreading warmth that ached and throbbed and pooled somewhere further down than I was supposed to let it, given the rules, and I gripped the counter and breathed and counted and stayed green the whole way.

"Say it back to me," he said around twenty-five. "What are we doing right now?"

"Being spanked," I said, breathless. "By you. In a bathroom on fourteen. On a Wednesday."

"And why?"

"Because I asked. Because I wanted it once, with somebody I trust."

"Good. Twenty-six." Smack. "That's exactly the right head to have on your shoulders." Smack. He talked like that through most of it, unhurried little sentences laid over the rhythm, and it steadied me more than anything else could have, because it was Josiah, the same Josiah who had been talking to me over coffee for eleven years, and my body knew his voice and did not argue with it.

Somewhere around thirty my legs were trembling, not from pain exactly but from everything, from standing braced and counted and watched, and he must have seen it in the mirror because he stopped mid-swing with his hand in the air and said, "Yellow check. Talk to me, Miriam."

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm more than okay, I'm..." I laughed, shaky. "I don't have the word. Green. Please keep going."

"Thirty-one, then." The last four or five were the firmest, each one a bright line of heat, and I counted them louder than the rest because counting them loud felt like holding onto them. Then his hand stopped and stayed, just rested warm and heavy across the middle of me, and we stood there in the quiet, the fan humming overhead and the courthouse skybridge empty beyond the little frosted window, and I watched my own face in the mirror go slowly from flushed to flushed and soft.

"All right," he said. "That's the end. Come up slow." He reached past me and pulled my skirt down over my knees, careful, not touching me anywhere he hadn't already touched, and then he put both hands flat on my lower back and rubbed, slow circles, and that was somehow the part that undid me, the gentleness after, the way his big square hands went soft the second it was over. "Are you okay? Look at me and tell me true."

I turned around and I was leaning back against the sink and my eyes were closed and I was nodding before I could get words out, and when I finally did all I had was, "Thank you," which felt too small and also exactly right. He handed me my cardigan from the hook on the door without being asked, because he knew, he had known for eleven years, that I get cold in air conditioning after anything emotional.

We washed our hands at the little sink, side by side, in total silence, pink soap and paper towels and my hair a mess in the mirror that neither of us commented on, and it was the most companionable silence I can remember sharing with anybody. Then he unlocked the door and held it, and I stopped in the doorway, because neither of us said the thing about what happens now, and he didn't pretend there was a thing to say, and the unfinishedness of it hung there in the hallway, warm and strange and fine.

"Deposition prep runs till five," he said, deadpan, and I snorted, and we rode the elevator down like two coworkers who had definitely been reviewing exhibits.

* * *

Back at our desks the afternoon was just an afternoon, phones ringing and associates wandering over with questions and the copy machine jamming the way it always jams on Wednesdays, and nobody looked at us twice because nobody in the world had any reason to. I sat down in my chair and hissed at myself, quietly, and then spent the next four hours half-aware of the warm ache every time I shifted, which was every few minutes, which meant I thought about it roughly ninety times before five o'clock, and every single time it was like a coal I cupped my hands around.

At about three he came past my desk with a stack of exhibits to file, the same as any day, and set them down, and we looked at each other for exactly one second with no words in it at all, and that second held everything, the counter and the counting and the rubbing afterward and the years of wanting this, and then he said, "These need to go in the Hollis file," as if nothing had ever happened in his life, and I said, "Sure, I'll get to them," as if nothing had ever happened in mine, and we were both grinning inside our professional faces, I'd have bet the firm on it.

At the coffee machine at four he stood next to me and said, "How are you doing? Truly. Not the polite answer."

I stirred in my sugar and thought about it honestly. "Settled," I said. "Like something in me sat down after years of standing. Is that a weird thing to say?"

"It's the best thing you could have said," he told me, and squeezed my shoulder once, the same as he's done a hundred times over eleven years, except now I knew what those hands could do and my whole self paid attention to it.

We took our regular break at ten to the hour, sitting on the window bench in the break room like always, and talked about the Hollis file and his nephew's wedding and whether the cafeteria had gotten worse or we had just gotten older, and it was so normal that I caught myself laughing at one of his terrible puns and realized the secret wasn't heavy at all, it was light, it was a little lit lantern I carried around inside me and nobody else could see it or needed to.

Before he headed for the elevator at five he stopped at my desk, and I waited to see if he'd say something about today, about later, about ever again, and he just said, "Same time tomorrow, coffee?"

"Wouldn't miss it," I said, and he nodded and went, and I sat there a minute after the doors closed, doing nothing, feeling the chair under me and the faint sweet throb underneath everything and the deep quiet satisfaction sitting in my chest like it had signed a lease.

I packed up my bag, turned off my lamp, and walked out past the empty conference rooms into the October evening, fifty-four years old and single and no longer wondering, and I want you to know that I smiled the whole six blocks to my car, and that I slept better that night than I had in months, and that the next morning at ten to the hour I was already at the coffee machine when he came around the corner, and we both said "regular break?" at the same time and laughed, and that was how it went back to being exactly what it was, except that I knew now, finally, after all this time, and nothing about me was ever going to be the same kind of quiet again.