The Obedience List

The app said Sonny was fifty-two, a music professor, divorced, comfortable alone, and that his idea of a perfect first date was "an experiment." Which, honestly, is the kind of thing that either means serial killer or the most interesting man in town. I'm thirty-six, a paramedic, single by choice, and bored absolutely stiff with my own good behavior. So I swiped right and here we are.

His house was on a quiet tree-lined street near the college, one of those mid-century places with too many windows and a lawn that actually gets mowed on purpose. I sat in my car for four whole minutes doing the breathing thing we teach panicked patients. Then I laughed at myself, because I regularly talk strangers through the worst day of their lives, and here I was, sweating over a date.

Erica, get out of the car.

He answered the door in a soft gray sweater, silver at the temples, reading glasses pushed up on his head like a prop. "You must be Erica. You're early."

"I'm a paramedic. Early is my whole personality."

"And I'm a music professor. Late is mine. Come in, we balance out."

The living room stopped me dead. High ceilings, amber lamps already glowing even though it wasn't dark yet, and a grand piano sitting in the corner like it owned the place. Because it did, obviously.

"Okay, that is a real grand piano," I said. "You just have one of those?"

"Where else would I keep it? The garage?"

"I keep my bike in my kitchen, so I'm not a good reference point." I spun in a slow circle, taking it in. "This is the nicest room I've ever stood in. My apartment has a couch my cat ruined and a TV I got open box."

He laughed and steered me toward that ruined-couch-quality counterpart, a long low thing in mustard yellow that I sank into like a rock into mud. He poured us drinks at a little bar cart, bourbon for him, and when he asked what I wanted I said, "Whatever you're having, I'm not picky, I drink in ambulances' worth of stress," and he made me a whiskey sour that was frankly too good, and set a big glass of water beside it without comment.

We did the usual warm-up. He asked about the job, so I gave him the good stuff. Not the sad stuff, I save that for people who've earned it. The lady who called 911 because her husband swallowed a nickel on a dare. The guy who bit me while high on something and then apologized for three straight blocks.

"Bit you?" Sonny said, wincing into his glass.

"Right through the sleeve. Didn't break skin. He felt terrible. His wife made me a casserole the next week."

"Did you eat it?"

"Absolutely not, he bit me while on drugs. But it was a nice casserole. Lasagna, actually."

"And you're still single," he said, dry as chalk.

"I'm single because I like it that way. Mostly. Tonight's an experiment, remember? Your word." I pointed at him with my glass. "What kind of professor even are you? Please don't say theory. Theory people are a special kind of damaged."

"Composition, mostly. Some music history. I make graduate students suffer through eighteenth-century counterpoint and they pretend to forgive me."

"So you're the villain in someone's semester."

"Every year, faithfully."

It was easy. That's what threw me. Ten minutes in and it felt like we'd skipped the awkward part people are supposed to suffer through. He was funny in a low-key way, never filling silence just to fill it, and he watched me when I talked like I was actually saying something.

So naturally, I did the thing I'd been working up to. I pulled a folded piece of paper out of my jacket pocket and smoothed it on my knee.

"Okay," I said. "Here's my weird thing. Full disclosure."

"Is that a list?"

"It's a list. I made rules for tonight. Because I always do the safe thing, always, and I decided this week I'm done with that for one evening. So I wrote rules. And then I realized rules you make alone are just your own habits with better lighting. So here's the proposal. We each add one rule. Then we follow all of them."

He took his glasses off his head, put them on, and looked at the paper like it was a manuscript submission. "You're serious."

"Deadly serious. Terrifyingly serious."

"That," he said, "is the most interesting thing anyone has brought to a first date with me in eleven years."

"So you're in?"

"I'm in. May I?" He took the paper and read it. I watched his face for the verdict and got nothing, professor poker face, until one eyebrow went up.

"There are eight rules here," he said.

"Nine, if you count the header."

"'No lying.' 'No phones.' 'No apologizing for what you want.' Erica, these are good." He set the paper down between us on the coffee table, deliberate, as if moving a chess piece. "Now. My rule."

I leaned back and waited, heart doing a slow thud-thud. He glanced at the piano.

"No kissing until after the first song."

"First song," I repeated. "Played by you. On that thing."

"By me, yes. You don't want me listening to anyone else while we're in my house." He said it plain, no wink, and something about the plainness of it got me right in the sternum.

"Okay. I like it. Add it." He set the pen down on the coffee table after writing his rule, and I picked it up later. "Your turn."

And that's when it got fun, because my brain went through about nine options and landed on the one that made my own ears go hot.

"No removing your own clothes," I said.

He paused with the glass halfway to his mouth. "I'm sorry. Say that again?"

"If clothes come off tonight, they come off by the other person's hand. Not our own." I kept my voice level, mostly. "It's a rule. Rules are binding. You said you're in."

"Who wrote a rule like that on a first date with a man she met on an app?"

"A woman who's tired of being sensible," I said. "Also the bourbon helps."

He laughed, a real one, shoulders moving. He wrote it down under his rule. "There. Ten rules, and one clause in the margin: either of us says stop and everything stops, no explanation owed. Anything else, or do we sign?"

"There's no signing, this isn't a lease."

"Everything is a contract if you're a professor." He picked up the list and read all ten aloud, which was embarrassing and thrilling at the same time, my own handwriting coming back at me in his voice. When he got to "no apologizing for what you want" he stopped and looked at me over the glasses.

"This one's the hard one for you, isn't it?"

"Wow. Okay. Yes. Obviously."

"Good rule to keep, then." He set the paper down, stood, and walked to the piano. "It's nearly eight. If we want a song before any kissing happens, I should play now. Any requests?"

"Do you know anything that isn't eighteenth-century counterpoint?"

"I know several things. Sit still."

He sat at the grand piano, cracked his knuckles like an old boxer, and started playing something I didn't know, slow and warm, and the amber light did its thing and I sat there on the mustard couch with my whiskey sour thinking, well. This was either going to be the best or the worst decision of my thirties, and either way, at least it wouldn't be safe.

I looked at the list on the coffee table. No kissing until after the first song. His fingers were barely a minute into it.

Plenty of rules left. Plenty of night.

He played for maybe three minutes before I cracked and got up off the couch. I couldn't help it. The song was doing something slow and patient to the whole room, and sitting six feet away from it felt like watching a fire from the driveway.

So I stood beside the piano, my hip against the lid, close enough to see his hands properly. Big hands, careful ones. The silver at his temples caught the amber light every time his head dipped over the keys.

"Is this one yours?" I asked, quiet, because the song was quiet.

"Don't talk during the piece," he said, not opening his eyes. "Rule eleven."

"You can't add rules without writing them down. That's rule twelve."

"And who's talking during my piece now?"

"Fair." I shut up.

But the thing about standing that close to a man playing a slow jazz number is that you run out of things to do with your eyes. His face was right there. The line of his jaw. The way his mouth went a little crooked on the hard passages. The reading glasses he'd shoved back up onto his head, useless up there, purely decorative now.

And the whole time, that rule sat between us like a lit fuse. No kissing until after the first song. Which meant the only thing standing between me and finding out what that mouth was like was however long this piece turned out to be. I have never in my life wanted a song to end and also wanted it to go forever at the same time. It was genuinely uncomfortable. It was great.

His foot worked the pedal. The last phrase started building, this slow climb, and I realized I was holding my breath like I was about to receive bad lab results. He hit the final chord and held it, and held it, the sustain dying out into the amber quiet, and I thought, okay, okay, is he going to, and the sound finally faded all the way to nothing.

His hands lifted off the keys.

"The first song is over," he said.

"Rule's dead," I said.

"Rule's dead."

And neither of us moved for one second, which felt like ten, and then I was turning toward him and he was rising off the bench and we met somewhere over the middle C area, which felt right, the middle of everything. His hand came up and cupped my jaw like I was something worth not dropping, and he kissed me slow. Not testing-the-waters slow. Committed slow. Like he'd decided the pace and was prepared to defend it.

I made a small noise into his mouth that I'll admit to under no circumstances.

When we finally pulled apart I had to laugh a little, mostly at myself. "Okay," I said. "To be clear, that was worth the wait."

"You waited three minutes. Try eleven years." He said it dry, but his thumb was still resting on my jaw, so I didn't take it as a complaint.

"Is that a sad fact or a flex?"

"Both. It's both." His hand slid down from my jaw, along my neck, and settled at my waist, warm through my shirt, and my whole spine went on duty. "Rule eight," he said, quieter now. "No apologizing for what you want. So. What do you want?"

Oh, that rule. My own rule, coming back at me with a vengeance.

"I want you to keep doing exactly that," I said. "And I want the rug by the fireplace, because my knees are thirty-six years old and this floor is hardwood."

"The rug has excellent opinions in its favor." He took my hand and led me the six steps to the hearth, where a low fire was doing its low fire thing, and I realized he must have lit it before I arrived, which meant he'd planned for the possibility of a rug, which meant the confidence was not an act, which did things to me I'm not going to itemize.

We settled onto the rug, him sitting back against the front of the couch, me beside him, and the fire threw that flickery light over everything like the room was auditioning for a movie. His arm went around my shoulders. My legs folded under me. It was, absurdly, comfortable, given that my pulse was doing paramedic-workload numbers.

"Question," I said. "How many rules are we actually going to break tonight?"

"All of them, ideally. A rule you don't break is just furniture."

"You'd know. You own a piano."

He laughed at that, properly, and I felt it in his chest where I was leaning, and okay, fine, I liked that more than I should have.

So here's where I did the brave thing. Rule ten, the clothes one. No removing your own clothes. Which I had written myself, with my own hand, while sober, and which now meant that if I wanted his hands on my skin, I had to say so out loud, like an adult, to a man I'd met two hours ago on an app. My mother would be so confused.

"Sonny," I said.

"Mm?"

"Rule ten is still in effect."

He went still for a second, and then I felt him understand it, this slow yes moving through him. "You want me to do the