The Professor's Dare

I stood in the dark hallway of the office building, my hands in my pockets, wondering if this was the strangest birthday I'd ever planned. Which sounds dramatic, I know, but let me back up. I'm Quentin, I'm 43 as of that Tuesday, I do tattoos for a living, and until about two months ago my idea of a wild birthday was extra guac. Then I matched with Allison on that dating site, the one where everybody puts their weird little flags in their bio and hopes somebody salutes.

Her flag was vintage lingerie. Mine was transformation, which is a polite way of saying I like wearing things I'm not supposed to wear, always have, since long before I had the words for it. We traded messages for weeks. She was 39, an art history professor, and she wrote as someone who had read everything and been impressed by almost none of it, which I found wildly attractive. Somewhere around message forty she asked what I wanted for my birthday, and I, being an idiot with a keyboard, told her the truth.

Her answer was an address, a time, and one sentence: come to my office building after hours and bring nothing but yourself.

So there I was, ten past nine on a Tuesday, in a hallway that smelled faintly of old coffee and floor wax, listening to the radiator tick like it was counting down to something. Every classroom door was shut and dark except the one at the end of the hall, where a strip of warm light leaked under the frame like the building was keeping a secret. I checked my phone one more time, no new messages, took a breath that did absolutely nothing for my nerves, and walked down there.

The door opened before I could knock.

Allison stood in the frame wearing a silk robe the color of champagne and a smile that made me forget the English language for a second. Her hair was down, which it never was in her photos, and the lamp behind her turned the whole doorway honey-colored. Behind her I could see an empty classroom, chairs shoved to the walls, a projector screen pulled down, a single desk lamp doing all the work.

"Happy birthday, Quentin," she said, and stepped aside so I could come in. "You came. Part of me thought you'd lose your nerve in the parking lot."

"I almost did," I admitted, walking past her. "There was a solid minute where I sat in my car negotiating with myself."

"Did you win?"

"Clearly not."

She laughed and shut the door, and the click of the latch did something to my spine that I'm still thinking about. The room was warm and quiet, just the hum of the projector and the little sounds her slippers made on the tile. There was a table set up near her desk, and on it, laid out with the care of a museum exhibit, was a single high heel. Black, pointed, a heel on it like an exclamation point. Just the one.

She picked it up and held it out to me like she was offering me a glass of wine. "Dare number one," she said. "Put it on."

I looked at the shoe, then at her, then at the shoe again. My heart was doing its thing, which I will not describe in detail because you can imagine it. "Just the one?"

"Just the one. That's the dare. One shoe. I want to see how you carry it." Her eyes were bright and completely steady, and I realized she'd thought about this more than I had. She'd probably rehearsed it. The idea that this confident professor had sat in her office rehearsing how to hand a tattoo artist one shoe made me feel warm all over, honestly.

I took the shoe and sat on the edge of her desk to put it on, which took some doing, because I have never in my life worn heels and my feet filed an immediate protest. But it went on, and I stood up, and immediately discovered that the floor and I were no longer on friendly terms. I wobbled. I caught myself on the desk. Allison made a small pleased sound.

"There we go," she said, and started to circle me, slowly, the way you'd walk around a sculpture you were thinking about buying. I stood there in one shoe and one sock, forty-three years old, and let her look. It should have been humiliating. It was the opposite, and that's the part I still can't fully explain. She circled twice, and I could feel her eyes on my leg the whole time, tracing the line the heel made from my ankle up through my calf, changing the whole shape of me with one small piece of leather.

"You have good legs," she said finally, stopping in front of me. "The heel suits you. Look at that line." She reached out and ran one finger from the back of my knee down to my ankle, light as anything, and I stood very still and let the shiver happen. "How does it feel?"

"Taller," I said, and she laughed, head back, and the sound bounced around that empty classroom like it belonged there.

"Good. Keep it on." She walked to her desk, and I watched her do it, the robe moving around her, and I understood I was in trouble of the best kind. She opened a drawer and came back with something folded in tissue paper, and she unfolded it right there on the desk in the lamplight. An ivory lace bralette, delicate as anything, and matching panties, laid out flat like she was setting a table for two.

"Dare number two," she said, and her voice had changed, softer now, like we'd crossed into a quieter room even though we hadn't moved. "Behind the screen, please. Take your time. I'll be right here."

I picked up the lace and it weighed nothing. It weighed nothing and it was the heaviest thing in the building. "You bought these for me?" I asked, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

"I've had the collection for years," she said, sitting on the edge of her desk like this was a Tuesday like any other, which I suppose it was. "But yes. I picked these with you in mind. Ivory on your skin. Go on, birthday boy."

So I went behind the projector screen, which glowed faintly with the shape of her lamp behind it, and I changed. I heard her humming while I fumbled, some tuneless little thing, unhurried, and the humming helped more than I can say. It told me she wasn't pacing. It told me there was no clock on this. My work shirt went over a chair, my jeans followed, and then I stood there in the glow holding lace that some other version of me would have called costume and this version of me, this one-sock-and-one-heel