The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo

The blindfold was thick and I couldn’t see anything and that was the point.

My wrists were secured above me and my ankles below and my arms were spread wide and my face was against the wood of the cross and the room was behind me, the warmth of it, the bass felt in my sternum, the leather smell, the specific heat of too many bodies doing what they came here to do. I had been here long enough that the room had stopped being strange and had become simply where I was.

That’s what I came for.

The flogger landed across my shoulders and I felt it as warmth before I felt it as anything, a diffuse spreading heat, the nerve endings registering impact and then registering the blood following, and then registering again, the same interval, the same weight, the same, my body learning the rhythm and beginning to move inside it. The warmth was building. Had been building for twenty minutes, maybe more. I’d lost track of time; your body had taken over the administrative functions and your head had finally, finally gone quiet.

I had chosen this. The restraints and the blindfold and the ball gag and the room full of people who were not paying attention to me because they were paying attention to their own things, which was its own kind of privacy. I had stood in the center of this room and said yes and felt something release in me, a long exhale, something set down.

Candle wax somewhere. Leather. Music I didn’t recognize with bass I felt in my chest. My back entirely alive, every nerve reporting. The warmth and the sting and underneath both of them something that wasn’t quite either, a heat moving outward from the center of me, my whole body in it, nothing standing outside watching.

The word was in my head. I’d had it before the restraints went on, before the blindfold, before the gag. I had it now.

I tried to say it.

The gag held it.

I thought: the signal. Three taps. I’d been told about it, from someone, before, in a room that was not this room, a different orientation, a green lanyard. Three taps on the frame.

I brought my fingers in and pressed them against the leather of the cuff, one, two, three, and waited.

The flogger kept landing.

I didn’t know if I’d done it right. I didn’t know what I was supposed to tap against. I didn’t know if the signal required the frame itself, or a held object, or something else I hadn’t been told. I didn’t know because the person running this scene hadn’t told me and I hadn’t known to ask.

I had no information.

I managed things. I always managed things.

The front desk. The pleasant face. The eye that read every room before anyone knew it was being read. Even here, even tonight, I had done research and arrived prepared and said yes with my whole considered self.

The management had been there before the kitchen doorway. I’d had it as a seven-year-old, as a ten-year-old, the same structures I’d built for reasons I hadn’t put a name to yet. That gave me a story that made sense of it. The story wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole reason.

And I could not say the word and I did not know the signal and the flogger kept landing and my body was doing what it did, processing, responding, the chemistry of sustained sensation doing its thing without consulting me, and my word was in my mouth and the gag held it and the frame was in my hands and I didn’t know if I tapped the right thing.

I wanted to say stop.

I wanted to say let me find my bearings, let me just know where I am, let me just.

Nothing came out.

The flogger landed. My back received it. The warmth and the sting and the body doing its complicated thing with both.

I had always known. Every room I’d ever walked into, I knew where the door was. Who was watching. What was coming. I’d kept that in my hands since I was nine years old, standing in a kitchen doorway, watching something I wasn’t supposed to see, feeling the floor go out from under me because there was nothing I could do.

I was nine years old right now.

The music didn’t stop.

No one in this room knew my name.

I should not have come alone.

I knew that.

I came anyway.

Over a year earlier I sat at a reception desk in a fracking company in Dallas, watching a clock that refused to move, when a couple came through the revolving door.

* * *

10:47 on a Tuesday morning.

I knew the exact time because I’d just checked, willing it to be lunch. It wasn’t.

I’d been in a bad mood since Sunday. The reasons were clear; nothing I could do about them. The kind of bad mood that had nothing to do with anything external and everything to do with being in a body that ran on a schedule it didn’t consult you about. I was managing it. I was always managing something.

He had his hand at the small of her back. Not guiding. Just there. Like it had always been there and always would be. She laughed at something he’d said outside, still laughing when the revolving door exhaled them into the lobby, and then she turned and he kissed her.

Right there. Twelve feet from my desk.

Not a peck. A real kiss. She had one hand flat against his chest and leaned into it like she’d done it ten thousand times and was still not tired of it.

I became absorbed in my spreadsheet.

Numbers. They meant nothing. I stared at them with the focused intensity of someone being paid to stare at numbers, which technically I was. In my peripheral vision, her hand on his chest, the silence they were making together in the middle of our loud lobby.