ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Keti Shea (she/her) is a neurodivergent lawyer and writer who lives in Northern Colorado with her family. She is currently working on a novel, Small Birds In The Woods, about friends turned lovers. Her fiction has been published in Reverie Mag, Swim Press, Oranges Journal, Cosmorama, and Inside Voice. An excerpt from her novel is forthcoming in Twenty Bellows. You can find her on Instagram @ketishea.
The name he gave was Tom, which was certainly not his real name because he would have to be even dumber than he looked to use his real name. Tom was just the name she knew him by, the one she penciled in to her leather-bound appointment book next to all the other Toms. The Matts, the Marks, the Daves. The Mikes. She often wondered whether giving a boy such a bland and over-used name made them grow into men who were bland and over-used, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If their mothers had named them something more winsome, hinting of ambition and ingenuity, would they have morphed into men less destined to disappoint? Would they have risen to fill the contours of a more illustrious name and been more charming in conversation?
Of course these weren’t her clients’ real names. These were just the names they opted to hide behind, hoping for anonymity and discretion. They lived in a big enough city, metropolitan by any standards, but you never knew who knew who. And so she buffered each appointment with a thirty-minute window to ensure no clients ever encountered each other in the carpeted hallway outside her apartment. The nervous ones, vibrating with a crystalline excitement shot through with fear, showed up early. Though it’d be terrible for business, she liked to imagine two clients meeting, one on the way out, the other on his way in: eyes locking in fright, circling each other with jumpy limbs, the frenetic musk of their anxiety tenting the air.
That thought made her laugh, and didn’t that make it all worth it?
Their first time, “Tom” had breezed into her foyer without immediately taking off his shoes and proceeded to speak about the weather and ask how she was doing. Green as can be. She didn’t mind it so much in the beginning because it made the euphoria of his pain greater—every time he mentioned the weather forecast or asked an open-ended question, she tallied his missteps. She stepped on his neck a little harder, a millimeter past the safe word, in the space beyond the excitement and into the membrane of fear where his breath hitched in his throat.
Bad boy. So disappointing. So predictable. She despised the predictable ones. Tom’s breath when it came was a ragged howl, a coyote made wild by the red-bellied walls of a desert canyon. Only then did she ease off the gas and lift her booted foot from his spine. So there, she laughed, she did have empathy, contrary to what her mother had said about her as a girl.
Tom, this Tom, was her first client. So he’d been a bit of an experiment for her, a learning experience. During the months he’d graced her one-bedroom apartment slatted with natural light, every other Thursday afternoon, she gleaned so much from him. His early ebullience quickly turned to quiet, as if the treatments had turned him inward, inside out. Maybe that meant the sessions were working, though she was never able to gauge the full effects of her medicine: She never followed clients outside her apartment door. She was left to imagine them wandering the rain-slicked city streets. Did she make them whole, or did she break them down? Was she a real thing to them or merely a cipher?
She didn’t care, not really. The money was good, and it allowed her to work from home. The lack of benefits and paid time off didn’t matter. She had savings finally. Her soul was intact, which was more than she could say for some others of her kind, those with meager office jobs, sad little desks with potted succulents, wilting under fluorescent lights. She didn’t want a sad little desk. She didn’t want to attend meetings with ice breakers.
After that first time with the first Tom, she became more professional. She learned to give clear instructions ahead of time, which she knew they read thoroughly, eager to participate. They were puppies needing training, except they didn’t respond to positive reinforcement. They preferred correctives to be delivered with blows, a hard feminine pressure. Their muscles beneath her gloved fingers quivered; they fizzed with anticipation, basked in the aftershock of agony. She understood the need for punishment all too well, and that proved a challenge, because she couldn’t cant toward pity. Not that.
She taped a sign to the door of her apartment that read No Shoes: Please Remove Upon Entering. She didn’t tolerate outdoor bacteria on her indoor parquets. Her neighbors, a dreadlocked white couple who emanated a heady perfume of cheap incense, detergent stink, and dank nugs, found the sign hilarious. She overheard their scattered whispering while she read on her couch most nights. She knew they walked to the convenience store for snacks each evening after pulling from their bong. Their voices reached her inner sanctum, her reading hours, interrupting her concentration. She knew they thought her an uptight bitch, a real cold cunt, because she often heard them talk about her at the mailboxes or in the hallway when they thought she couldn’t hear.
“In need of some dick,” the male neighbor said one pale, starless evening. She could practically hear him eating his Funyuns. “Killjoys like that need a good rough fucking.”
His dreadlocked partner shushed him in that laughing way that women use when they realize their man is acting too alpha, too callous, for public propriety. She often overheard them having sex, so she knew this woman mewled. Feminists on the outside, simpering kittens on the inside. She supposed that was the intended effect of the male gaze—to turn women against one another in their effort to win the prize. The prize being a man’s approval, his desire to stick his parts inside a woman’s holes. But she knew that approval was never constant, that it curdled easily. One wrong comment, one time of not putting out. A few extra pounds at the midsection, the purple flare of a varicose vein. A once-slim ankle braceleted in coarse hair. Men resisted mortality by surrounding themselves with a carousel of younger women. She found it all sad, a hint of desperation, both of them attempting to project New Age enlightenment. Anyway, they were the type of aging hippies that didn’t weather the storm of their drug-fueled partying days well.
Personal hygiene was another matter that required some coaching. Even if she never touched them, she preferred her clients clean-shaven, beards shorn, nails tightly clipped and filed. She didn’t want to see dirt underneath their half-moon nails; she needed no reminders of their filth. She required, prior to each visit, that their clothing be laundered in detergent free of synthetic fragrance—at least three times. Some balked at this demand, but when, nostrils flaring, she sent them on their way, denying them their coveted pain while still demanding payment (it was stipulated in the contract), they soon returned to her, smelling pleasantly of nothing. The dance of outdoor air, a hint of petrichor, and mercifully nothing else. After entering the foyer and removing their shoes that no doubt teemed with the spackle of dog shit, chewing gum residue, piss both human and animal, she directed them to wash their hands surgeon-style in the hallway bathroom she’d devoted to this purpose. They often emerged from the bathroom with the solemn air of monks, made pure by ablutions and certain of their sanctity.
Only then did she brutalize them.
She’d had many relationships before devoting herself to her present hermetic life. Mostly men, some women. Men wore their emotions, what little they possessed, on the surface. She preferred their honesty, ruthless at times, but still preferable to the sly witchcraft female lovers demanded. Pulling her close, then casting her away. Needing space, then immediately texting her. If men needed space, they just broke up with her. She preferred their simplicity. She and Phil had dated for eight solid years, each year hooking into the next. Many people get together and break up after long stretches of time, but she hadn’t expected it. The shock of the separation had been worse than the separation itself. Things with Phil hadn’t been so bad, she’d thought at first, but then she found she didn’t miss him at all after he was gone. If anything, she felt relief.
She’d liked Phil for his sense of humor, how easily he fell into a joking banter. There was a comforting familiarity to how he was with her. They met at a bookstore in the city, where she perused the tempting spines. He had rushed around the corner just as she stood from a crouch, brow knit in contemplation, and they’d collided. Oh, the romance of it! she thought at the time. The folly of bumping into an attractive man in a bookstore. A story that would be told to their future children. Right away, she was embarrassed to admit, she’d given in to the forecast of future offspring. He was shaggy-haired and moon-faced, with the soft round cheeks of a frat-boy alcoholic. He introduced himself and offered to buy her coffee, and she’d startled herself by accepting.
It was only towards the end of their relationship that she’d seen through the scrim, finally seen Phil for what he was. How his voice took on a jeering lilt in the company of his friends. The way his eyes held a different cast, like he felt superior to her, after she’d worked up the courage to tell him of her diagnosis. And how much courage that confession had demanded. Her worries had clinked in her skull like ice cubes. She’d only offered up the information as an opening to understanding her better, an offering of herself, to show her loyalty to him. See, she was saying, this is how much I trust you that I let you behind the mask. But then he weaponized her diagnosis against her, lobbing it as leverage in their petty domestic squabbles as a means to undermine her, to ridicule her stark intelligence, to cut her authority right out from under her, causing her to topple.
They’d invited Phil’s friends over for dinner at their apartment on one of those sweltering, wet nights of late August when the city crawled, sick with humidity. It had gone without a hitch at first: everyone with a glass in their hand, a plate with snacks, superficial conversation spreading like wildfire. As Phil’s longtime girlfriend, she’d attended to the food, the earth-toned dips and aromatic hummuses, so many hummuses, all the while ignoring the wash of anxiety hiccupping through her. The party was Phil’s idea, and she had relented because her lack of a social life had become a source of derision. The month prior, Phil had mentioned that his friend’s wife had taken up yoga at a new industrial-looking studio around the corner, and maybe she would like to go. The tone of his voice had unsettled her. Twisting and twizzling her body in front of others, her awkwardness—on display? No, she never went to yoga.
On the night of the dinner party, she’d buttressed herself in a bohemian dress of brown crochet, form fitting and criminally uncomfortable. She figured the softness of the fabric would make it easy on her skin, but the insides of it were lethal; the stitching had come undone so that rogue threads became dangling spider legs against her back. She thought to change but stopped herself, knowing Phil would disapprove. Didn’t he say he liked her in this dress? And he didn’t appreciate what he called her rigidity, her aversion to small talk. She took this to mean she wasn’t fun, not spontaneous. Unlike the blowsy blonds draped over arms at this party. Draping themselves on Phil’s friends in a way that seemed to lay claim to their men while also signaling their sexual availability. Anyways, it wasn’t that she didn’t like small talk; she just found it boring and performative, a series of ritualistic and empty questions. The cultish repetitions: You have any travel plans? Summer plans? Travel? Travel? Travel plans? She tried not to pity them, what with the limitations of their neurotypes, but Phil’s friends irked her with their uneventful monotony. She’d much rather discuss eco-grief or the works of obscure feminist novelists. The intricacies of local politics. Collective liberation, though sadly that would have to include the neurotypicals to count as universal.
Lost to her thoughts, she swept empty glasses from the table and stuffed crumpled napkins in the trash, refreshed drinks. She refreshed her own as well, enjoying the vibrato bubbling of the alcohol, the way it jangled her muscles and made her looser. Yes, maybe she did need to be more fun, spryer in conversation. The alcohol would loosen her tongue and release the glut of stopped-up words in her throat.
One of Phil’s friends, a meaty ham hock of a man with unnaturally fleshy calves, tapped at her elbow, angling for more drink. She was leaning into the kitchen counter and blocking the assortment of alcohol bottles, their glint of oblivion.
“Excuse me there, little lady. Just looking to top up here.” He leaned forward, his heft straining against his shirt, and she caught a whiff of him: rank, a touch of road kill. Under the spritz of some foul body spray his body’s natural odors lurked. Sweat, more than a few hours old, hint of cheap aftershave. She shook her head, as if to forgive him—after all, it was a hot night. She tried to be understanding.
The man gentled a tiny burp from his innards, trawling a note of garlic with it. “Great party, Cath,” he said.
Her name wasn’t Cath, it wasn’t remotely Cath. She didn’t even think she looked like a Cath. She pushed that thought aside. She had to prove herself to Phil by being charitable to his friends, even those who never bothered to learn her name.
“You work in research, right? Science shit or something. I thought Phil said you were a scientist.” The man scratched the soft mound of flesh above his pubis, an area she didn’t wish to conjure in her mind’s eye.
She shrugged. “Something like that.” Another of Phil’s jokes, telling his friends she was a scientist. “I’m a research librarian, actually.”
The man’s eyes glazed over, glassine with impatience. He jostled his waistband further up his midriff, moving as if to amble away. He had the soft lumbering movements of a bear. An animal, but harmless.
She labored forward, ignoring the man’s attempted retreat. “I help academics, historians and grad students usually, with their research. Tracking down newspaper articles, interviews, old microfiche. I studied comparative literature and speak several languages, so mostly it’s helping people track down out-of-circulation books and obscure translations.”
“Aha, so you find things that are hard to find.” A glimmer of interest peeked through his eyes. She realized, as if for the first time, that Phil’s friends might actually be as bored at these parties as she was. She tried to locate the man’s name in her grey matter.
“It’s Derek, right?” she asked over her shoulder as she poured herself an inch or two of liquor and held the bottle out to him. Why not.
The man bristled, and she saw his neck gather color. His ears tinged a pale rose. He poured himself two fingers of whiskey. “Yes. It is. Derek. We’ve only met once before. Surprised at your memory.”
She held up her glass in mock salute and tapped two fingertips to her temple. “Yes, I have a good memory. It freaks people out.” She often pretended not to recognize people she’d met years before.
Derek eyed her. “Freaks people out? Man, what I’d give to remember names. I’m not good with them.” He leaned in close to her ear, conspiratorial in his buzz. “I put my foot in my mouth constantly, calling people by the wrong name. You’ve got a gift.”
Derek shifted his bulk and sniffed. From the pause before he spoke, she deduced he was about to share a secret. “Is there someplace private I could smoke? I told Phil I quit, but I’m needing just one smoke right now.”
Her heart twanged for this man in this moment. Hiding his secret to avoid Phil’s reprimand. She directed him to the bedroom, a room other guests were forbidden to enter, and to the small balcony that jutted from it. They sat side by side, sharing a cigarette and looking out on the street’s bustle below.
“Why do you have to lie to Phil about smoking? What does it matter to him?” She exhaled a stream of smoke through her teeth and batted it away with one hand.
Derek grunted. “I think the real question is why am I such a doormat.” He fixed his gaze at some unreal point at the horizon, the sun glowing red in its descent. It would be dark soon. “Phil caught me smoking behind the office the other day. He gave me a hard time about it. I don’t know, he’s not my supervisor or anything but he is an office manager, and I don’t want any trouble. He could write me up on my performance review.” He cut her a pleading look that reminded her of her childhood dog, a terrier named Skip who often dragged ticks into the house. She’d once found a tick feasting on one of Skip’s testicles and had to remove it with tweezers. “I told Phil I was quitting smoking, but that was more aspirational. Don’t tell him I said that.”
They sat for some minutes in amiable silence, the type of silence that requires no interruption. He offered her another smoke, which she declined. She offered him another drink, which he declined, patting the hard drum of his belly. “Need to watch my calories,” he said.
A noise behind them startled them both. They swiveled their heads in unison. Phil padded into the room, ostensibly to take a drunken piss, and was staring them down on the balcony. She waited for it: the swell of disapproval she knew was her due. Inviting a guest onto the balcony. Smoking.
Phil smiled, a weak performance of affability, and leaned toward the entrance to the balcony. “Is she talking your ear off?”
Derek waved, too eagerly. “No, man, not at all. I was just asking about her work. Research librarian. This one’s a wealth of information.”
Phil smiled. “Be careful. She’s either catatonic or talking your ear off. You get her going about something obscure, there’s no stopping her.” He opened his eyes into two round earths, mooning exhaustion.
He lurched into the bathroom to let loose a stream of urine whose scent she detected even from the balcony. He hadn’t bothered to close the door, and Derek turned away, hoping to avoid the sight of his coworker’s penis. Phil left them to it on the balcony.
When they rejoined the party a few minutes later, one of Phil’s college buddies turned to Derek, looking him up and down with an alcohol glaze. “You two been fucking?” He laughed, and she couldn’t help but see the wet insides of his mouth. The soft place she didn’t care to witness, the source of so many unpleasant noises.
From across the room Phil’s eyes on her sizzled. “Not Lily,” he said. “She’s not the girl my friends try to fuck.” He laughed at himself, before telling a story about an ex-girlfriend. She gathered, from Phil’s cocksure tone and aggressive stance, that this ex-girlfriend was a woman his friends would want to fuck. She drifted farther away, toward a corner of the room, hoping to melt into the walls. She heard Phil mutter softly, and the room erupted in laughter. Several heads turned to look at her, guiltily hunched over their drinks. An acid burn washed over her chest; her whole body leached of color. They were laughing at her; she was sure of it. Just as surely as she’d purchased all this alcohol, made the food for this party, taken a half-day off work to prep the apartment.
In a flash she was returned to her twelve-year-old body, armpits slick with nervous sweat: the time the popular girls had invited her to the river to swim. She’d worn her best suit, a bubblegum pink one-piece splashed with rainbows. So what if the elastic was a bit puckered at the edges. So what if it dug unflatteringly into her butt checks. She loved its sharp burst of colors, the scattered fractals of rainbow. She didn’t yet see herself as childish or silly, gullible or wide-eyed. Not one bit. She saw only her unfettered joy: the joy of a suit that flashed bright in the sun, the joy of friendship bracelets, of shared gossip. She only began to feel unease when she arrived at the designated meeting place at the designated time, a place the girls were known to sun themselves. It was empty, the pebbled shoreline barren. A flash of panic jolted her, but she quelled it with uneven breaths. She waited for them, plunking down at the river’s edge and testing the water with her toes. She was worrying her foot into the chill of the shallows when she heard scrabbling and stifled giggling behind her.
She understood right away, sick with shame, with an icy sinking that sucked the air from her lungs and settled in her stomach: They’d played a prank on her. Behind the tree line splintered with dune grass, the popular girls stood, eyeing her. One laughed into her palm. Of course they wouldn’t include her. Of course they wouldn’t invite her into their coven, let her stretch herself next to them, those sun-sleek sirens, anointed with the rays of popularity. So she’d sat on that shore forever, swirling her feet in the water. She refused to turn around, to fold herself over her knees, to let them witness her crumple and cry. She would give them no such satisfaction; she would give them nothing. She waited them out, the sniggering dying down as girls peeled themselves one by one and returned home. Only when it was dark did she return home herself.
At school on Monday she ate lunch alone in the toilets, and she learned to be less trusting after that. It proved a valuable lesson in her peers’ ruthless social mores. It was a lesson she would draw from, in sips and in gulps, quite often over the ensuing years.
Later, after their guests had left, they sifted wordlessly through the leftover food and drink in the kitchen, wrapping up the hummus scraped through with crackers, dumping the uneaten celery sticks into leftover containers even though neither would eat them. Phil moved to take the trash out to the bins when she asked him why he’d said what he’d said about her talking too much. She didn’t think she talked too much at all. If anything, he was always griping that she said too little. It bothered her, corroded her fine layer of confidence. Say more, talk less, be less intense, but also more animated. She never got the balance right.
Phil looked up from the open maw of the trash bag he was clutching in one hand. “Come on, I was joking, babe. It’s called a joke.” He twisted the bag closed. “You know what a joke is, don’t you?”
He did that from time to time after she’d told him about her autism diagnosis: implied she wasn’t capable of comprehending the intricate codework of social interaction, of adult communication. If she questioned something he said, he claimed she’d misunderstood him. When she insisted on taking a couples vacation, just the two of them, after all that was what they’d planned on, he rolled his eyes deep in his skull.
“What?” she’d asked. Didn’t he want to go on vacation with her, her bikini-clad body unmediated by friends? Free sex.
“You’re so rigid, so black-and-white. We can never deviate from plans.”
She’d thought to object with some choice words, but they locked up in her throat, creating a traffic jam. She almost always deferred to Phil’s choices, Phil’s tastes. She downshifted her vocabulary in his presence, knowing he needed to feel at least as smart as her. Phil, who went to a state school, flexed his shoulder blades when she mentioned her own higher-ranked college, from which she’d graduated number two in her class, a double major who never studied. If he wanted to go out to the movies instead of staying in to binge-watch true crime documentaries, she’d obliged. Even though the sound of people chewing popcorn with open mouths roused a storm of bees in her brain. If she balked, though, he accused her of being sensitive, difficult, prickly. And so she forced herself to approximate fun, even as she engaged in the activities she hated most.
And none of her work friends had ever complained, had they? On her birthday two years ago, her last at the library before she resigned, Marcie and the others had baked her a cake. “Glutton-free and lactose-free!” they’d laughed, knowing she couldn’t stomach gluten or dairy. They’d piped icing, red and green and blue flares, on the top in intricate lacework. A riot of dairy-free decoration. She’d been so moved by the cake, by their eager efforts to celebrate her and accommodate her dietary restrictions, that she’d wept over her slice of cake, the paper plate quivering in her palm. They’d thought she was sad to leave her job and took turns hugging her. She’d told them she wanted to take some space to reflect on herself, maybe write a novel. Heal her inner child. They had lapped it up.
Instead of writing a novel, a lesser form of revenge since it was all lies, she became a professional dominatrix. Given name: Aubrey. The word play made her laugh. And what better way to cope than to laugh, especially when she’d so long been the butt of every joke.
Phil was a distant memory now. She’d replaced him with a titillating array of disposable clients. At first blush, they were interchangeable as guppies, though she quickly memorized their individual features. They were like river rocks to her—on the surface, all the same. But after closer inspection, she found they had rounded or not-rounded edges, their contours varied tremendously. Some were flecked with metallic shine. Like river rocks, she enjoyed the soft sway of their edges beneath her gloved fingers, the way she might rub them for comfort in her palm, and the way, once she was done with them, she chucked them into the dark suck at the center of the hungry river. She never worked with a client for too long because that was the only way to ward off attachment, theirs or hers. She wasn’t sure which possibility bothered her most.
After resigning from her post as head research librarian, she’d made a social media account offering her services. She’d got the idea from Marcie, whose niece was on OnlyFans. Over coffee in the break room that smelled of sour milk and stale bagel, Marcie had bemoaned her niece’s wanton lifestyle, her profligacy and laziness. How she filmed herself on the internet and let men watch it! Marcie had flinched as a frisson of disapproval moved through her: “She touches herself on camera and these men pay for it. Sickening voyeurism, and her, well. Masturbating.”
She was only half-listening to Marcie. In between the words, in the soft white hollows the words left out, she heard something else: flexible hours, work-from-home, financial liberation. A workplace free from sensory overwhelm. And what did Marcie know about laziness, she’d wondered. Marcie, who was fifty-two years old, firmly in boomer territory, still beholden to the myth that working harder got one ahead in life. She knew Marcie failed to understand the basic math of inflation, the rising death toll of late capitalism, from the relative ease of her garden suburb home. A home that was purchased, she knew, with her husband’s family money. Still, the conversation had proved fruitful.
And so it was, thanks to Marcie’s niece, that she found herself one clear morning, shortly after her last day at the library, sitting in front of her laptop. She uploaded a picture of herself, filter-mossed, and described her services. She was precise and very detailed, and unsure whether her social media post would elicit a response. She wasn’t the least bit concerned about someone she knew recognizing her because she had worn makeup in the photo, which she never did, and her face was obscured by a latex mask and a ridiculous filter that fattened her lips. And because no one, not a single person who knew her, would have guessed. Then again, she realized, when the prospective client emails began rolling in, there wasn’t anyone in her life that ever knew her, really knew her. And, it seemed, that could be an asset.
She was due to meet a client that morning. Given name: Ted. They had met once already, a standard procedure, to discuss preferences and dislikes, a safe word. She’d balked at intake meetings at first, believing it killed the mood for later sessions. But the transparency of it all, the precision with which clients shared their parameters and the care with which they selected their words, made her giddy with delight. Such authenticity, such transparency of desire. Never had she experienced such euphoria in common conversation. For her part, she was able to specify, with lethal precision, her requirements, right down to the texture of clothing a client must wear to a session. On this last point she was unflinching: pale linens and earth-tone tees, of organic cotton or bamboo. Denim was out of the question. She wanted clients to know what it felt like to be constricted by one’s own clothing, how torturous or freeing a fabric might feel on the skin.
“That won’t be a problem,” this Ted had said, grinning into his face.
She liked Ted right away because he was keyed-up with a nervous agitation that gave way to a sleepy-eyed calm. And he was doe-eyed, an underrated feature in men, she felt. It would take very little work to break him. He was easy money. She was sure to schedule him around her more demanding sessions, the ones who took an entire hour to bring to tears. Those were the ones she urinated on, a troublesome procedure she charged extra for because she had to tarp the living room floor and mop after. During the intake, Ted’s requests ranged from the obvious (spanking with a paddle) to the less obvious (being humiliated while he sang an ABBA song on repeat). She was intrigued by his need to sing the same song, wondering whether the repetition was a somatic balm or a mindless torture. A ritual maybe. She herself often listened to the same song on repeat to calm her nerves, or to cut the boredom of washing dishes and folding laundry. Her curiosity about him stirred her; never before had she outlined the life of a client in her imagination.
When Ted arrived, he removed his shoes in the foyer, the white rubber soles spotless already, and deposited them on the tray she left out for this exact purpose. His movements were methodical and neat, his muscles under his shirt compressed. An aura seemed to emanate from him, leaving his body in waves and entering hers. Silly. She was being silly. Whatever affinity she felt for this client necessarily must come from the anticipatory release of the session. As she forced him to strip, bound and gagged him, she counted the freckles constellating the hiccups of his spine. Images of Phil—his face silent and disapproving, and others, her mother, her second-grade teacher, the girls by the river—flashed like bursts of starlight in her vision. These visions often descended on her at the outset of a session, in between sessions too, and she knew the only way to disappear them was to beat the man before her, prone and supplicant, his body an offering.
Ted writhed, still far from his safe word. Garbled words escaped his lips, though they were muffled by the silicone ball gag she’d washed in warm, unscented soap before his arrival. A high priestess performing a sacred ceremony. It struck her then, as his back tensed under her ministrations, that she received just as much from this work as did her clients. They left a session whole, complete, fully surrendered. And what about her? Did she leave each session whole and complete, fully satisfied in her fantasies for revenge? A piece of her floated about, vaguely knocking against her ribcage, a pesky thought. She cleared her head of these distractions and beat the man in front of her harder, letting a slow trickle of blood mix with his sweat.
It was only towards the end of their session when, in accordance with his specifications, she removed the gag, and with one latexed finger pressed into his chin to hinge his jaw open wide. She leaned forward and spit in his mouth. The way one might hawk onto a sidewalk. She removed his blindfold and looked directly in his eyes, slate grey tilting to green. Their eyes met, and it was in that moment that she clocked him for one of her own. It was unmistakable, his look of recognition reflecting hers.
She cleaned after Ted left, using a cloth to wipe down his sweat, his blood. His tears like a precious, rare rain she hoped to collect in a glass jar and keep next to her bed. If only she could gather their tears. The anger she was used to calling up in these sessions had remained, even after Ted squeaked away in his sneakers, even after she scrubbed and scrubbed. Even now, as she lay in the bath and vibrated with discomfort. She’d had to end the session early, a professional breach for which she’d offered a full refund. She’d sent Ted an email to explain she was unable to work with him going forward and was happy to recommend an alternative domme better suited to his needs. But even that was disingenuous: She would do no such thing. In all her meticulous preparations, she hadn’t once contemplated this precise set of circumstances, which struck her as sloppy, impossibly careless. She’d locked eyes with Ted, her spit mixing with his own, his wet mouth an open receptable, and she had seen him for what he was, the same as what she was. How could she contribute to the pain body of her kind?
It was clear to her that Ted was autistic, that he suffered from a latent shame that compelled him to pay people to subjugate him. Other clients explained the catharsis of humiliation, her working them over left them free of their egos. This was different, though. Ted was tormenting himself, and she was complicit. She moved her legs to create waves in the bath, a habit from girlhood that left the bath mat sopping and her mother furious. She worked up a good wave and ducked her head underwater, into the space where sound was muted. She found her best thoughts underwater.
When she emerged from the bath, glistening like dew, she’d resolved to right the situation. Phil’s voice was in her ear, his alto tones morphing into her mother’s. She felt the heat of the schoolyard, the deadened eyes of her classmates searching her. No. He was a lamb for the sacrifice, and she wouldn’t allow it. Violence such as this could be met with only one thing. She unfogged the mirror with her palm and stared at her reflection, the anger in her giving way to something softer, something lighter. If she didn’t know better, she would say it was something like tenderness.
He responded immediately to her second email, which she sent after her bath. They’d scheduled to meet in a park in the city center in a few days’ time. On the designated day she wore a jumpsuit, a rich goldenrod, with a ribbed tank underneath. Her day clothes, as she thought of them. She’d never before allowed herself to dress for comfort on a date, had opted in the past for floral dresses that draped her collarbones, accentuating the swell of her breasts and hips. Dresses that left her gasping for relief at the night’s end. She couldn’t help but smile when she spotted him from across the green, carrying what appeared to be a hand-picked bouquet of flowers, Gerbera daisies poking through at odd angles like spokes.
The park was crowded, filthy with sunbathers and clumps of young people blaring music. She found it obscene, but it was Ted, whose real name was Levi, that suggested they relocate elsewhere.
“The music,” he said, shaking his head as if in apology. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stand it when people play music in public. The entitlement of it. It gives me a headache.”
Stunned, her laughter bubbled just as she felt the urge to cry with relief.
They ended up at Levi’s apartment, safe from music and a short walk from the waterfront. In the past, she wouldn’t have dreamed of going to a strange man’s apartment. But she’d seen the insides of Levi’s mouth, heard the perversions of his mind. Entering his apartment felt oddly like a homecoming. It was only early afternoon, but they both were hungry, so he made them a supper of curried lentils and brown rice, bok choi on the side. She was unaccustomed to eating a man’s cooking and enjoying it. In fact, all of Levi—and the contents of his apartment—surprised her. Under pretext of peeing, she studied the guts of his bathroom medicine cabinet. Nothing illicit, everything spotless. She ran one finger over the top shelf of the linen closet, running the tap to cover her snooping, and her finger turned up clean. The man dusted his shelves. Later, in the kitchen as Levi cooked and told her about his job as a public defender, she’d inspected the spice jars on the counter. Though the jars weren’t labeled, he’d alphabetized them, she noticed. His surroundings were neat without being overly clinical. He had positioned the furniture around natural light. She noted the hoodie draped over a chair in the living room, a breach that Phil would never have tolerated.
They ate at a table in the corner of the kitchen, Levi explaining how he’d converted his dining room space to an office for the days he worked from home. She tried to quell the anticipation blooming in her chest, the thought that this man—this man right here before her—might actually see her. By the time they’d finished eating and cleaning up, Levi washing while she dried and stacked, the sky had torn itself open and let loose a slurry of rain. In her excitement she’d forgotten an umbrella, and so, quite easily, with the smoothness of water, Levi suggested she spend the night. It struck her then: how easily she said yes. There was no pluck of fear, no ice down her spine, no hackles raised in anticipation of this man’s advances. Whatever advances he might make, she realized, she would accept gladly, greedily even. Her body couldn’t deny it. She felt sated, the soft parts of her she kept hidden were on full display, and yet she felt no fear.
After she brushed her teeth with the toothbrush Levi provided, they’d fallen asleep with their backs to each other, two commas, the windows opened to the lullaby of rain. In the morning she woke first. The sunlight against her eyes blinded her, making her blink. Levi’s leg was propped over hers, ankle to ankle. Next to her, Levi stirred. In the burst of star-white light, the fizz of a bright morning, she dared to imagine it: a life with her in it. She imagined a woman whose body melted into a man’s, blended knees and arms in sheets, the man making coffee each morning in some elaborate machine the woman would tease him for. The man heading to work, dressed simply and smelling of lemon. The woman would head to a home office, what had once been his office, to work on a research project that had occupied her mind for decades. There would be microfiche to track down, obscure translations to ponder, the joyful enigmas of language to unknit. Her mind whirred a film in her head. She would give this man pieces of her research to read, to critique, which he would do with care, and they would laugh at their efforts, her efforts made his now, and afterwards they would fall into bed together. In the soft amber light, his sheets would be unwrinkled. She would never need to tell him to turn his music or lights down. Here was a life she could live in, she thought, a life worth living in. And it was all hers for the taking.