The Pleasure Pact

Marisa Kruger was thirty-four years old, and she had spent eleven of those years being the most trustworthy woman in Bracken-Hollow.

It paid well. It paid very well. Her practice on the west end of the square had a waitlist three months long. Mothers brought their grown daughters to her for dream-tangles. Merchants came to her to be unknotted from guilt. The ethics board had cleared her three years ago, after the whole mess with a misfiled dream-tangle that nearly cost a client a year of memory, and the town had collectively decided to forgive her, which was almost worse than being hated.

The point was, everyone trusted her. And trust, she had learned, was a kind of cage with very soft bars.

She was buying plums on a Monday when Donny Hampton's voice came across the cobblestones.

"You're thinking about it too."

Her stomach dropped. Not because he was there. Because she knew exactly what he meant.

She turned with a plum in her hand and her face arranged into polite blankness, the face she used on clients who cried. Donny stood at the edge of the square, near his own practice on the east end, all long legs and easy grin, thirty-six and infuriatingly handsome in that rumpled way he'd never bothered to fix since grad school.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"Sure you do." He sauntered closer, hands in his pockets, and stopped at a respectful market distance. Mostly respectful. "You get a look on your face during sessions. I've seen it through your window sometimes. It's the look of a woman who wants to stop being good for one hour."

"Donny."

"Say I'm wrong," he said.

She looked at him. He was wrong about plenty of things. He had been wrong about therapeutic distance back when he dated Corinne, Marisa's rival, for two years, and their breakup over it had been famous in their cohort. Corinne believed in walls. Donny believed in windows. Marisa had always privately thought they were both cowards about it.

She was not going to tell him any of that.

"You're wrong," she said, and paid the fruit seller, and walked away, and hated that her heart was loud the whole way home.

That night she did not sleep well. That night she lay in her narrow bed in her apartment above her office, in the dark, with the town's lanterns glowing orange through the shutters, and she thought about it.

The offer he hadn't made. That was the maddening part. He hadn't actually offered anything. He'd just said you're thinking about it too, and left the whole shape of it hanging in the air between their two practices, and she had filled in the shape herself, all night, and the shape was obscene.

She thought about a room. Some rented room above the market, the kind with a bolt on the door and a bed that had seen better decades. She thought about walking in and locking that bolt behind her and not being Marisa Kruger, trustworthy, for exactly one hour. She thought about Donny closing the distance the way he'd wanted to close it across the square, and she let the fantasy go wherever it went, which was everywhere.

Her hand slipped under the waistband. She was already wet, which annoyed her. Eleven years of being good and her body kept its own books.

She thought about his mouth. She thought about his hands, which were big and always looked slightly ink-stained from his notes, and she thought about what it would feel like to have those hands on her hips, pulling her down, no negotiation, no intake forms, just want. She thought about saying things out loud she had never said aloud, the fantasies she filed away in the locked drawer of her own head, the ones that made her blush at herself in the mirror.

"Oh, hell," she whispered, fingers working her clit in slow circles, hips lifting off the mattress. "Oh, hell, Donny..."

She came fast and hard, biting the pillow so the tenants below wouldn't hear, and lay there after, chest heaving, feeling thoroughly ashamed and thoroughly alive at the same time.

This was the problem. Three years since the ethics board sat her down in a beige room and asked her questions and eventually stamped a form, and she hadn't touched anyone since. Not because she didn't want to. Because she couldn't be good and want that badly at the same time, and she'd chosen good.

It had been a fine choice. It had been a boring, airless, fine choice.

She stared at the ceiling and thought, with sudden clarity, that she was going to say yes.

The note came the next morning. She found it Tuesday morning, slid under her office door, lying on the welcome mat inside like it had always lived there. Cream paper. His handwriting, which she remembered from shared lecture halls, still terrible.

An address. Above the cobbler's, on Tanner's Row. A time: Friday, eight o'clock. Nothing else. No explanation.

She didn't need one.

She stood there holding it, in her office behind the enchanted window that showed the town a calm little library, and she read it three times. Then she laughed, once, out loud, at the sheer audacity of him.

"Sliding notes under doors," she said to the empty office. "We're thirty-four. He's thirty-six. We're grown adults with licenses."

But she folded the note into her pocket, and she caught herself smiling at her first client of the day, which unsettled the poor woman, who asked if everything was alright.

Everything was more than alright. Everything was terrifying in the best way.

Friday took a geological age to arrive. She worked. She ate soup. She changed outfits four times and settled on a dark green dress she hadn't worn since before the ethics board, which fit a little differently now and fit well. She brushed her hair. She put on perfume and then wiped most of it off, because this wasn't a date, or it wasn't supposed to be, or she didn't know what it was, and perfume felt like admitting something.

At five minutes to eight she stood outside the cobbler's on Tanner's Row, looking up at the lit window above the shop.

"Don't be weird," she told herself. "Be practical. You're practical."

She climbed the outside stairs and knocked.

The door opened on the first knock. Donny stood there in a plain shirt, sleeves rolled, looking exactly as nervous as she felt, which helped enormously.

"You came," he said.

"You doubted me?"

"I doubted everything," he said, stepping back to let her in. "Come in, Marisa. Door's bolted. Room's mine for the month. Nobody knows we're here."

The room was small and warm. A bed, a table, two candles, a window looking down on the market lights. He'd brought wine, cheap wine, the kind they'd drunk in grad school, and she huffed at the bottle.

"You remembered the swill."

"You complained about it for two years. Corinne's whole thesis defense, practically."

"Don't," she said, and he held up both hands.

"Sorry. Sorry. No ghosts!" He poured two glasses anyway. "Okay. Ground rules first, and then, um. Then whatever we want."

"Ground rules," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed because her knees ached with their own stubborn will. "Fine. Rules."

"Nobody hears about this. Ever. Not from me, not from you. Whatever happens in this room stays in this room, and it has nothing to do with our practices."

"Agreed."

"We say what we actually want. Out loud. No reading between lines, no empathy tricks." He pointed at her. "I know you do the mind-reading thing. None of that. If I want to know, I'll ask."

"That rule I like," she admitted.

"And either of us can stop anything, any time, no explanation, and the other one just... stops. Full stop. No sulking. Five sessions, and then we decide whether it ends."

Marisa looked at him over the wine. The candlelight made him look softer than the square ever did. "That's it?"

"That's it. That's the whole pact." He swallowed. "Except the part where we finally say the things. I told you I'd go first, back when I was brave enough to plan this."

"You were never brave enough to plan this."

"I was brave at two in the morning, which counts." He set his glass down. His hands were actually shaking a little, and seeing it steadied her more than any rule could. "Okay. Here's mine. I want a woman who doesn't need me to be careful with her. I want someone who wants it as badly as I do and says so. I've spent my whole career being the safe one, the gentle one, and I want, just once, to be wanted without anybody needing me to be gentle about it."

The silence stretched. Marisa put her own glass down.

"My turn," she said. "I want to stop performing. I want one hour where I'm not the trustworthy one. I want to say what I want in bed without flinching, and I want..." She stopped. Started again. "I want you, specifically, because you've gotten under my skin for thirteen years and I'd like to finally do something about it."

Donny stared at her.

"So," she said, pulse hammering. "Are we doing this, or are we going to drink bad wine and talk about Corinne all night?"

He crossed the room, stopped an arm's length away, and asked, plain as anything, "Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," she said. "Please!"

He kissed her the way he did everything. Carefully at first.

Then not carefully at all.

His hand slid into her hair. She made a noise she'd deny in court, and he smiled against her mouth, and she felt it, and she pulled him closer by the collar.

"Okay?" he murmured.

"Shut up and keep going."

So he did. He kissed her until her back found the wall, until the wine glass wobbled on the table behind them, until she had to pull back just to breathe. Her chest heaved. Thirteen years. Thirteen years of professional nodding across a market square.

"Right," she said. "So."

"So," he agreed.

He didn't grab her. That defined Donny. Even now, red-mouthed and shaky, he waited. He looked at her like she was the one holding the leash, and she realized with a jolt that she didn't want to hold it.

"Can I say the other part now?" she asked.

"You've got more parts?"

"I have an entire cellar of parts." She steadied herself against his shoulder. "The thing I actually want. The real one."

He nodded. Sat down on the bed. Gave her all his attention, the way he did with clients, and she almost hated him for it.

"When I'm with someone," she said, "I decide everything. I read the room, I manage the mood, I check in. I've done it for eleven years. I do it in bed too. I can't stop." She laughed, short and ugly. "Three years ago the ethics board cleared me and I still haven't touched anyone since, because if I'm in charge, I have to be good."

"And if you're not in charge?"

"Then I don't have to decide. I just have to... do what I'm told." Her face was burning. She said it anyway. "That's what I want. Tell me what to do. Nothing I haven't agreed to. But I don't want to think for one hour. That is the entire fantasy. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid." His voice had changed. Lower. Steadier. "It might be mine too, actually. The mirror of it." He stood. "Okay. Rules for tonight, then. You'll do what I ask. Nothing I haven't checked first. You say stop, we stop, and that's it for the night. Deal?"

"Deal." Her voice cracked on it.

"Colors," he said. "Green means keep going. Yellow means check in. Red means stop."

"You've thought about this a lot."

"At two in the morning? Constantly." He smiled, then dropped it. "Green, yellow, red. Say them back."

"Green, yellow, red."

"Good. One more thing to check. Can I call you 'good girl'? It's fine to say no."

"Yes."

"Good girl."

The words went through her like a bolt of lightning. Her knees actually buckled. He caught her elbow, quick, and something in his face said he'd noticed.

"Oh," he said, soft. "That works, does it."

"Green," she managed. "Very green."

He walked her backward to the bed. Sat her down on the edge. The candlelight did something kind to his face, or maybe she'd just stopped fighting it.

"Take off your dress," he said. "Slowly. I want to watch."

She reached for the hem. Stopped. "Condom," she said. "I don't... I haven't been with anyone in three years, and we haven't talked about tests, so."

"Bag by the bed. Already there." He said it plainly, no embarrassment, and she loved him a little for that. "Nothing happens without one until we ever decide otherwise. Agreed."

"Agreed." She pulled the dress up over her hips, her waist, over her head. She'd worn good underwear under it, black, and she saw his breath