Chapter Eight
Nora texts first.
That's the part I keep turning over. I had her number two days and I was still building the message in my head, drafting and cutting and drafting again, trying to find the version that sounds easy instead of the version that sounds like a man who practiced.
And while I'm doing that, sitting on the couch Tuesday night with the cage on under the smooth underwear and my laptop open to nothing, the phone lights up on the arm of the couch.
this is going to sound weird but I already forgot half of what you said about the midnight guy with the wet hands and it's been bugging me all day. tell me the rest.
I read it three times. Not because it's complicated. Because nobody texts me first. In ten years of this, the woman texting first is a thing that happens to other men.
I type back the rest of it. The bit about how the engineers in Germany write the warnings like threats and it's my job to make them sound like a person who wants you to keep your fingers.
She sends back a laughing thing and then, a minute later, ok that's actually a good job.
you make the difference between a guy keeping his hand or not. that's more than most people can say.
We go back and forth for an hour. It's easy in a way I don't trust at first and then stop not-trusting because I'm having too good a time.
She's dry. She lands a joke and then gets out of the way of it instead of standing there waiting for the laugh.
She tells me she works out what things are worth after they break, and I say that sounds bleak, and she says it's the opposite, most things are worth more than people think once you actually look at what's still holding.
I sit with that longer than she probably meant me to.
Around eleven she goes quiet, then comes back with something that isn't a joke.
can I say a weird thing. I've lived here almost a year and you're the first number I've given anybody. I'm not like, telling you that to be a lot. I just realized it typing this and it surprised me.
I look at that for a while. She isn't performing it. That's the thing about her I keep catching on. She says the true thing and then doesn't dress it up or take it back. She just leaves it there and trusts you not to make it weird.
that's not weird, I write. I'm bad at this too. we can be bad at it in the same place next time.
next time, she writes back. ok. yes. I'm holding you to that.
I put the phone face down on my chest and lie there.
The cage is a small steady press between my legs.
The underwear is smooth and close over it, everything flat, everything handled.
There's a woman ten minutes away who texted me first and said I was the first number she'd given anyone, and I'm lying on my roommate's couch in women's underwear with a padlock on the one part of me that would have to work if any of this ever went where she thinks it might go.
I don't look at that too hard. It's late. I'm happy. I let myself just be happy.
Down the hall Graham's light is still on. He reads late. I hear him turn a page.
* * *
The site visit is Thursday.
It's for the dishwasher manual, the big one, four hundred pages of a machine that runs eighteen hours a day.
My editor wants photos of the real unit in a real kitchen, not the clean renders the manufacturer sends, because the renders never show where the tired guy at midnight actually has to reach.
So I drive out to a restaurant that's between lunch and dinner, dead quiet, and the kitchen manager walks me back and shows me the machine and then leaves me to it, which is how I like it.
I'm caged. I've been caged since morning.
Graham didn't take it off last night and I didn't ask, and by now that's just how the day starts.
Under my work pants there's the smooth underwear and the little pink shell, flat and hidden, nobody's business.
I've done a hundred ordinary things caged by now.
Grocery store. Dentist. The whole quiet double life running under the pants while I'm out being the guy who's good at his job.
But this is the first time I've had to work caged. Really work, on my feet, with a client watching.
I'm crouched down photographing the drain assembly under the counter, the part the manual gets wrong, when the manager comes back with a line cook to ask how long I'll need.
So I stay crouched and I talk to them over my shoulder, professional, easy, and I go to shift my weight to get the angle and the cage drags.
It's nothing anyone can see. That's the whole point of it, small and flat and hidden.
But crouched down like that with my thigh up against it, when I move, the ring shifts behind everything and the little shell presses in against me and there's a half-second where all of me is aware of it, the padlock, the smooth fabric, the fact of what's under the pants, while a man in an apron is asking me a normal question about a dishwasher.
I keep my face doing its job. I answer him.
Twenty minutes, tops, I say, I just need a few more from down here. He nods and goes.
And I stay crouched a second longer than I need to, not moving, feeling it sit there. Then I take the shot and stand up like a man who takes a shot and stands up.
In the car after I text Nora a picture of the machine, this ancient dented workhorse with a hand-written sign taped to it that says DO NOT OPEN WHILE RUNNING IDIOT, and she sends back he sounds like he's been through some things and then do you live alone or with people? trying to picture where you go home to.
I look at that longer than the question deserves.
roommate, I type. known him forever. good guy, found the apartment, cooks. I got lucky.
lucky roommate is rare, she writes. mine in college microwaved fish.
I don't tell her the rest of it. That the good guy who found the apartment is the reason I'm sitting in a parking lot caged and plugged-adjacent with a wet spot I'll have to explain to no one.
That "I got lucky" is the truest thing I've said to her and she'll never know how.
I just put the phone down and drive home to him.
* * *
He's got something laid out on my bed when I get back from cleaning up after dinner.
I dried, he washed, same as always. Then he said, easy, "There's a thing on your bed, go try it and come show me," and went back to the couch with his wine like he'd asked me to check the mail.
It's folded on the duvet. When I pick it up it's a camisole.
Thin, pale, the same soft nothing-color as the underwear, with a little seam of lace along the top edge where it would sit across the chest. There's a matching pair of the higher-cut panties folded under it, the lace kind, the kind he asked about once and I quietly bought the plain ones instead.
I stand there holding it. This is past the underwear.
The underwear I could always explain. Seamless, practical, guys wear them under suits, he had a reason ready before I could argue.
There's no reason for this. It's not hidden under anything.
It's a top. It's the top half of me, out where you'd see it.
I put it on anyway. I don't fully decide to. I stop deciding not to, which is how all of it happens now.
It slides on cool and light and settles across my chest, and the lace sits right where the seam was made to sit, and the thin fabric hangs loose to my waist over the smooth underwear and the cage.
I keep my own plain panties on underneath.
I leave the lace ones folded on the bed.
I don't know why except that it's the one small no I've got left in me tonight, the same no as the plain cut in the store, and I take it.
I look in the mirror over the dresser.
I don't have a word for what I look like.
Not a woman. I still know the face and the shoulders and the arms. But the thin pale camisole and the lace across the top change the shape of the person in the glass into something softer than a guy in a shirt, something presented, and low in me there's that flicker again, the one from the underwear, the warm pull I never let myself name.
I stand there half in it and half out of it, wanting to look longer and wanting to take it off, and I make myself walk out before I can do either.
Graham looks up from the couch. He takes his time. He looks at the whole thing, the camisole, the lace at the top, how it hangs, me standing there with my arms not sure what to do.
"There," he says. Warm. Unhurried. "You look good like this."
He says it like a true thing about the weather. Not a line. Not pushing. Just naming what he sees and letting it be a fact in the room.
"It's a lot," I say.
"It's a top," he says. "You've been wearing the bottom half for weeks.
This just matches." He tilts his head, easy.
"You want to know the truth, it suits you better than the shirts do.
The shirts always looked like they were on loan.
This doesn't." He nods at me to turn, and I turn, and I hate that I do it as smoothly as I do.
"Yeah. See, nothing on you is fighting it.
That's the tell. When a thing fits, the person stops arguing with it. "
He notices the plain underwear. I watch him notice.
His eyes go down and catch that I'm not in the lace ones, and there's a beat where I think here it comes.
And it almost does. Something pulls tight at the corner of his jaw, quick, a man finding a thing set down wrong.
Then he smooths it back under before it's all the way up, and it doesn't come after all.
"Kept your own on," he says. Mild. Not a question.
"They're comfortable," I say.
"Sits right," he says, and lets it go, warm, like a man letting a kid keep one small thing. And somehow him letting me keep it is worse than if he'd made me change, because now the no is his to allow, and he allowed it.
Then he does the other thing.