The Stranger at the Feed Store

The apartment was quiet in the way Magda had stopped noticing months ago. One plate in the sink. One glass on the drying rack. The ceiling fan turning the same slow circle it always turned, pushing warm air around a room that didn't need it cooled.

She sat on the futon with her feet up on a milk crate and thought about how a month ago there had been two glasses on that rack. Albert had moved to Tucson in July for a job that paid real money, and the rack had been half empty ever since. He was twenty-three and gone and texted her pictures of cactus sometimes, and the friendship now consisted of nothing else, from nine hundred miles away.

Magda was twenty-two, a bank teller, good at her job, single on purpose for her whole life so far. She had never had a serious anything. Boys in high school had been friends, nothing romantic. College had been four years of telling people she was busy. And now it was late August, two years past graduation, and she sat in a quiet apartment on a Thursday night with an itch under her skin she couldn't scratch by cleaning the sink again.

She knew what the itch was, sort of. She wanted to be wanted. Not politely. Not the way the loan officer asked about her weekend. She wanted somebody to look at her like she was the thing happening in the room. And she wanted to be told what to do for once, by somebody who wasn't a supervisor and wasn't her mother and wasn't a form she filled out.

That was the part she never said out loud, even to Albert. The wanting-to-let-go part. She'd read enough on the internet to know it was a normal thing to want. She'd just never done anything about it.

She looked at her phone. Nine o'clock. The feed store closed at eight, but Geoff stayed late on Thursdays to do the stock, and she knew that because she'd been banking at the plaza for six months now and he told her things. He was twenty-four. He was the one person in this plaza who talked to her as a person rather than a deposit slip. Nothing had ever happened between them. Nothing was going to happen, probably.

Probably, she thought, was not the same as never.

She put her shoes on.

The walk took eight minutes. Main street was brick storefronts with most of the windows dark, and the cicadas were going hard in the trees by the hardware store, that late summer noise that sounded like the whole town humming to itself. The feed store had one light on in the back.

She let herself in the front door, which Geoff never locked while he was inside, and stood among the smell of seed and straw and dusty wood. The fluorescent hum was loud after the street.

Geoff came around the shelf of livestock mineral tubs with a clipboard in his hand and a look on his face that went from casual to confused. He was twenty-four and built like someone who stacked fifty-pound bags all day, flannel sleeves rolled up even in August.

"Magda? It's nine at night. Everything okay at the bank?"

"Yeah. Fine. The bank's fine." She wiped her palms on her jeans. "Can I ask you something weird?"

He set the clipboard on a pallet of pine shavings. "You already sound weird. Go ahead."

"You know how we're friends. Right? Friends."

"Pretty sure, yeah."

"So this is a one-time ask and I need you to be straight with me if it's a no, and it can be a no and we still get coffee on Mondays and everything's normal."

"Okay," he said slowly. "Now I'm nervous!"

"I want you to pretend to be a stranger tonight. A stranger who takes over. Who tells me what happens and I just do it. Here, now, tonight, and then tomorrow it never happened and we're back to coffee on Mondays." She got it all out in one breath and then stood there with her ears hot.

Geoff was quiet for a second. The cicadas came through the door glass.

"You want me to boss you around," he said.

"Basically."

"For one night."

"One night. No strings. No repeats. I'm not drunk, I'm not upset, I've been thinking about this for weeks. I'm twenty-two and I've never once let anybody take the wheel and I want to know what it feels like before I turn into a person who never asks."

He looked at the clipboard like it might have advice on it. Then he looked back at her. "What's in it for me, besides the obvious?"

"That IS the obvious. You get to do the thing you've maybe also been thinking about. Don't pretend you haven't. You've been buying me a coffee every Monday for six months and last month you wrote your number on my receipt."

"That could be a coincidence."

"Geoff."

"Fine. It's not a coincidence." He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. "Okay. Rules. We need rules or I'm not doing it."

"Good. That's why I asked you."

"One, we use a safeword. You say it, everything stops, no questions, no sulking. Two, if you say wait or slow down, I wait or slow down. Three, it's tonight only, and tomorrow morning I make you coffee and we're regular people. Four, you tell me if anything I do isn't working, even in the middle of it. Deal?"

"Deal. Safeword is Mercy."

"Mercy. Got it." He put the clipboard down on the counter and turned to face her fully. "Last check. You're sure. Say it plain."

"I'm sure. I want this. I want you to take control for one night."

"Then from right now, don't talk unless I ask you a question. Your safeword always counts, and so does any real no."

And the thing was, the second he said it, her whole body went quiet and ready, like someone had flipped a switch she'd been looking for her whole adult life. She nodded, and the nod was a yes.

He crossed the room in about four steps, took her by the hips, and walked her backward until her thighs hit the feed store counter, that old scarred oak thing where he rang up chicken scratch and deer corn every day. Then he leaned in close, not touching anything else, just his hands on her hips.

"Here's how tonight goes," he said, voice low, and he wasn't the coffee guy anymore. "You're mine till we're done. I say where you stand. I say what you take off. I say what happens to you. You don't get to decide anything in here. That sound good?"

"Yes, I want that," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

"Good. Stay there."

He stepped back and pulled something off a nail by the stock room door. A length of binder twine, the orange plastic kind, maybe three feet of it. He wound it around his