The Spice Keeper

The warehouse smelled like nutmeg and something darker, maybe cardamom, maybe the dust of a thousand sealed drums that had been sitting on those shelves since before I was born. It was nine at night and I was alone in the spice warehouse of a man I had met exactly twice, a family friend of Michael's named Whit who had handed over the key with the weary expression of a guy who had stopped asking questions around 1998. I stood between the towering shelves and listened to the building tick and settle, and I thought about why I was there at all, which was jealousy, plain and ugly jealousy, and I wanted to be honest about that even in my own head.

Her name was Collette. She was twenty-nine, a new climbing partner Michael had picked up at the gym where we both worked, or he worked, technically, and I just answered phones at the front desk. They were matched on speed and weight class and apparently on some effortless chemistry that I could see from the counter every Tuesday and Thursday, the two of them laughing on the wall, spotting each other's knots, Collette touching his forearm when she wanted a demo of a move. It was nothing. I knew it was nothing. He came home to me, he told me things, he kissed me first thing in the morning with sleep-breath and all. But knowing a thing and feeling it are different animals, and by the third Thursday in a row of watching them float up the wall together I had a low-grade fever of it that no amount of telling myself to knock it off would cure.

So I did what I always do with a fever, which is pick a fight about something adjacent. He took it well. Better than well. He listened, he asked what I actually wanted, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation, standing in our kitchen at midnight, I heard myself say that I wanted one night where I was not the receptionist or the girlfriend or the reliable one, one night where I got to be somebody else and he had to work for me. He went quiet in that way he goes quiet when he is already building something. Michael has been doing magic as a hobby since he was a teenager, which I mention only because it explains the props he owns and the patience he has for a slow build. Two years together, since I was thirty-one and he was thirty-three, and I still had not fully mapped that patience.

The plan we landed on, half mine and half his, was this. For one night in the warehouse I was a trickster, a stranger with no name and no history with him, and he was a magician who had blundered into my territory and had to earn his way back out. Rules were set on the couch first, separately and soberly, like we always do. What was on the table, what was not, what word stopped everything cold. We have been exclusive and tested for two years, so there was no condom talk to have. We settled it before anything was proposed twice, and then we kissed like idiots and I went home to pick out a costume that did not exist in my actual wardrobe.

That costume was on my body now, under a coat, and the coat was going to come off the second I heard the loading dock door. I checked my phone. No text. He was supposed to arrive at nine thirty and it was nine twenty four and my stomach was doing the thing it does before a drop on a rollercoaster, that long lift-chain clanking feeling. I looked at the alcove near the loading dock, the one with the curtain and the single metal chair, our stage for the evening. There was a steel support pipe running floor to ceiling beside it, industrial and ugly and, per the plan, load rated for far more than either of us. (I checked the specs. I am submissive, not stupid.)

Here is a thing I do not say out loud much. I like being told what to do. Not in life, in life I am a nightmare of competence, I schedule the dentist appointments and argue with the insurance company and remember both our mothers' birthdays. But in play, when Michael drops his voice half an octave and just states a thing like it is weather, some part of my brain unclenches so fast I get lightheaded. The jealousy had shown me something, or maybe just reminded me, which is that what I actually missed was not attention in general but his attention aimed at me like a beam. I did not want him to stop climbing with Collette. I wanted to be the thing he was careful with.

The loading dock door rattled up at nine twenty nine, because of course he was early. I killed the little work light I had set up and stepped back into the shadow between the drums, heart going, and I heard him come in with that familiar hitch-step he gets on concrete, and then I heard him stop, and then I heard him say, to the empty warehouse, "Okay. Okay, I'm here," in a voice that was trying to be the magician and mostly was just Michael being nervous, which I found so endearing I almost broke character on the spot.

* * *

He was carrying a duffel bag dusted white with flour, which was the first wrong note, because the plan had not involved flour. He set it down with the care of a man transporting something alive and unzipped it, and I came out of the shadow with my coat already off because curiosity beats drama every time. He had brought a pie. A lattice-topped, golden-brown, criminally photogenic pie, packed into the duffel with towels around it like a relic.

"You said earn my way out," he said, holding it up. "I won this at the county fair in August. First prize, stone fruit category. I baked it again this afternoon so it would be ready for tonight. I did not have a reason to bake it twice until now." He paused. "Tonight is the reason."

I should stop and explain the pie, because it is very Michael. Every summer the fair has a baking contest judged by blind tasting, and two years ago Michael, who could not bake then, entered a store-bought pie re-crusted over with his own lattice and took third place out of eleven entries, and he has been insufferable about the phrase award-winning ever since. This year's was real, apparently, a genuine blue ribbon after months of secret practice, which he had photographed and sent to me from the fairgrounds while I was at work, and I had replied with a thumbs up because I am a terrible partner sometimes.

"Hi," I said, dropping the stranger voice for one second. "You made a pie."

"You said a stranger with no history. A stranger with no history gets a pie." He set it on the metal chair in the alcove, squared the tin, and then looked up at me and the voice changed, that half-octave drop, and my spine did the thing. "I don't know you," he said. "And you're in my friend's warehouse."

And we were off.

* * *

Playing the trickster turned out to be the most fun I have had standing up. I had a script in my head and abandoned half of it in the first five minutes because the improvising was better. I told him the warehouse was mine, that every drum of sumac and saffron on those shelves was under my protection, that a magician who could not even palm a key had no business trespassing. He played it earnest and slightly dim, which is a choice, and at some point I got tired of the game's own slow pace and decided to speed it up, because the whole night had a shape and I knew where I wanted it to bend.

"Listen," I said, and I slipped the little brass padlock key, the one that matched the padlock on the alcove curtain, down the front of my bra, into the left cup, where it sat warm and obvious against my skin. "The only way out of my territory runs through here. Come take it if you can."

I expected him to cross the space in two steps. That was my first mistake of the night and honestly my favorite one. Instead he looked at the key, then at me, and shook his head slowly like I had offered him a stale cracker.

"That's not a challenge," he said. "That's a shortcut. You don't want the shortcut."

I opened my mouth to argue and he was already moving, not toward me but past me, to the coil of climbing rope he had stowed by the loading dock earlier under the excuse of gear. I watched my boyfriend, the man I have watched flake rope a thousand Tuesday mornings, measure out four arm spans of it with his hands and then hold it up so I could see he had arranged it without knots, loose and ready.

"Wrists," he said. "Behind you. Against the pipe."

I want to describe what that one word did to me, the single flat syllable of it, but language sort of fails there. I turned around. I put my wrists behind me at the base of the steel pipe, cold against my knuckles, and I heard him crouch and then the rope was on me, and Michael ties like he climbs, unhurried and exact, a wrap and a cinch and a wrap, checking tension with two fingers under the rope like the gym taught him, asking once, quietly, "Good?" and I said yes and he kept going. The knots sat where they would not press on anything delicate. That was the plan and the spec sheet and the two of us being careful people, and none of it dulled the fact that I was bound to a pipe in a spice warehouse by a man holding a pie.

He stood, looked at his work, and then picked up the pie tin off the chair. My pulse picked up. He cut a slice with the little knife from the duffel, eased it free, and came back to me, and then he did the thing I had not seen coming at all.

He balanced the slice of pie, plate and all, flat on my stomach, just below my ribs, where the fabric of my costume dipped, the key still warm against my skin.

"Rule," he said, stepping back. "Don't flinch. Don't spill it. If it stays put for as long as I decide, you eat it. If it falls, I eat it in front of you and you get nothing."

He sat down in the metal chair across from me with the rest of the pie on his knees, took the fork, and settled in like a man watching television.