Trusting the Fall

Magnus locked the door behind them and stood there a second with his hand still on the bolt. The tower was one room, windows on all four sides, and the afternoon light came in flat and gray through all of it at once. The woodstove in the corner had already been lit by the rental guy, so the place smelled like pine smoke and old dust.

"Twenty-nine years old and I still check a lock twice," he said.

"You do. I've watched you do it at hotels," Flo said. She was twenty-eight and had her boots off already, standing by the bed in wool socks, holding something behind her back. "I have your first dare."

He turned around. "Already? I haven't even sat down."

"That's the point of dares. They don't wait." She held out her hand. In it was a braided leather cord, about two feet of it, dark brown, with a little loop at one end. She'd made it herself. He recognized the braid from the belts she made in the winter. "Tie it around your wrist. Then give me the other end."

Magnus looked at the cord for a while. Flo watched him look at it and didn't say anything, which was her way. She was a park ranger and she could stand still in the woods for an hour without getting bored, and she brought that same patience home with her.

"Okay," he said finally. He looped the cord around his left wrist, twice, and worked the end through the loop. He'd watched her tie knots enough times to get it snug but not tight. Then he held the free end out to her.

Flo took it and wound it once around her own fist. "There. Now you're mine for the weekend. Safeword is still red?"

"Red."

"And if you say yellow I slow down and check in. If you say red, everything stops, cord comes off, no questions, no sulking from me."

"That's the deal we made," he said. "I remember. I was there."

She smiled at that. She had a plain smile, nothing dramatic, but Magnus had been married to her for five years and it still did something to his chest every time. They'd met when she was twenty-two, back when he was doing the small auction hall on Saturdays and she'd come in to bid on a set of topo maps for her district. She'd outbid him on his own lot. He'd told her later that was the moment.

"All right," Flo said. "Second dare. Stand at the window there. Face out."

"The window? People can see this tower from the trailhead."

"It's four miles to the trailhead, Magnus. Nobody's binoculars are that good and nobody's out here in November anyway." She paused. "But that's the dare. You can say no."

He thought about it. The cord hung slack between their wrists. He walked over to the east window and stood facing the glass. His reflection looked back at him, pale and a little uncertain, and behind it the gray slope of the foothills went down into the trees.

"Hands at your sides," Flo said. She came up behind him. He felt her breath on the back of his neck before he felt her hands. "I'm going to undress you. You don't help. You don't turn around. You just watch yourself in the glass and tell me if any of it is too much."

"Okay," he said. His voice came out lower than he meant it to.

She started with his flannel shirt. She unbuttoned it from the collar down, one button at a time, taking her time about it, and each time her knuckles brushed his chest through the undershirt he could feel it as a sudden flare of heat. When it was open she slid it off his shoulders, folded it, and set it on the foot of the bed. Then the undershirt, folded the same way. Then his boots, which meant kneeling for her to work the laces, and his socks. His jeans last. She unfastened them and pushed them down over his hips and he stepped out of them and stood there in his boxers, watching himself in the window, and the man in the glass looked steadier than he felt.

Flo folded the jeans. She set them with the rest of the clothes in a neat stack, everything squared off like she was packing a pack, and then she came back and stood behind him and put her hands flat on his bare back.

"You're shaking a little," she said.

"It's cold in here."

"It's sixty-eight degrees in here, you liar." She laughed against his shoulder. "It's okay to be nervous. That's not a failure. Yellow means slow down, remember."

"I know. I'm fine. Keep going." He watched her hands come around into the reflection, hook the waistband of his boxers, and draw them down. He stepped out of them and stood naked at the window of a fire tower in the Cascade foothills, four miles from the nearest human being, tied to his wife by two feet of braided leather, and his reflection looked embarrassed and pleased at the same time, which he hadn't known a face could do.

"Good," Flo said. "That was good. You did exactly what I asked."

* * *

The floorboards were cold. That was the first thing about the third dare. The stove was warm but the boards around it were still November, and when Flo sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed at the floor in front of her, Magnus felt the cold through his knees right away.

"Kneel there," she said. "And I want you to tell me about your favorite item from last week's auction. The whole story. You're an auctioneer, you're good at talking, so talk."

He knelt. She was still dressed, which was its own strange thing, except she was down to her wool socks, and after a minute she stretched one leg out and rested her foot on his thigh. Her heel sat right there against his bare skin, warm from the sock, heavier than he expected.

"The tambourine," he said. "The one from the Hartwell estate."

"The tambourine." She sounded amused. "Go on."

"Eighteen nineties, brass frame, all the original jingles. Provenance papers and everything. Estate lots like that are mostly furniture and box lots of nobody-knows-what, so when something like that comes up you build the whole sale around it. I put it eighth, after the warm-up stuff, when the room was awake but not tired." He kept talking. About the two collectors in the third row who'd been circling each other all afternoon, about how he'd let the opening bid sit too long on purpose, about the woman on the phone bidder line who finally took it at eleven hundred and how the room actually applauded, which almost never happens. He talked with his hands, which was a habit, and the cord between them lifted and settled every time he did it.

Flo listened with her chin propped on her hand. Her foot stayed on his thigh the whole time, and once she slid it an inch higher, just to watch him lose the thread of a sentence, and he did lose it, and she said "keep going" and he did.

"You're good at that," she said when he finished. "I like watching you work. Even kneeling on my floor, you're working."

"Whose floor?"

"Mine this weekend." She got up off the bed and went to her duffel and came back with something in her hand. It was a small wooden paddle, flat, maybe a foot long, sanded smooth. She'd made this too. Magnus had seen it in her workshop and never asked what it was for, because some part of him had known.

"Now here's the dare," she said, and sat back down on the bed. "You're going to warm my thighs with this. Not hard. Twenty on each side. You count out loud, every one. And Magnus, look at me. I'm asking you to do this. I'm not making you do anything. You can hand it back and we'll watch the stars instead and that's a fine evening too."

He looked at the paddle. Then at her thighs, where her leggings were still on, and at her face, which was open and calm and waiting.

"I've never hit anybody," he said. "In my whole life."

"I know. That's why it's a dare and not a chore." She held out her hand for the paddle. "And it's not hitting. It's warming. You'll feel the difference under your hand after about six."

He took it. The wood was lighter than he expected. He stood there like an idiot for a few seconds and she waited him out, patient as a trailhead sign, and then he said, "Okay. Okay. Tell me if I do it wrong."

"Then I'll lie face down across the bed. That's how I want it."

She slid her leggings off and folded them, and stretched out on her stomach, and he knelt on the bed beside her, awkward at first until she guided his knee into place with a hand, and the cord pulled taut and then slack as he settled. Her bare thighs were pale in the stove light, and the first slap landed on bare skin and sounded louder than he'd meant it to.

"One," he said.

"Harder. That was a pat."

"Two." Harder. Her skin came up pink and she made a small sound, low in her throat, and shifted her hips.

"Three. Four." By ten he had a rhythm and she was