"Yes. Bedroom?”
She smiles and she is stunning.
“No, here."
"In the kitchen?”
“Yes. Fuck me here.”
I let out a breath. I can’t get over how eroticfuck mesounds when it comes from her mouth.
"Okay."
She turns the burner off.
She moves the pot to the back.
"Take the robe off."
She unties the belt. She lets the robe slide off her shoulders. She lets it pool at her feet on the kitchen floor. She steps out of it. She is naked in the lamplight in my kitchen.
I look at her.
I let myself look. I let myself take a long count. I let her see me looking.
"Stay there," I say.
"Yes."
"I'll be right back."
"Yes."
---
I go to the bedroom.
I shut the door three quarters. I pull off my henley and my undershirt and my belt and my jeans. I leave them on the chair. I open the bottom drawer of the dresser where I keep what I keep. I take out the harness and the strap. I sit on the edge of the bed and I put it on the way I have put it on a hundred times in fifteen years, leg through, leg through, cinch the belt at my hip, buckle to the worn notch, the same notch she ran her thumb along last night.
I stand up. I look at myself in the mirror over the dresser.
I look at the woman in the mirror in nothing but a black harness with a black silicone cock at her hips, and I think about the woman in the kitchen waiting for me, and I thinkthis is my favorite thing in the world to do,and I have not let myself say that sentence in a long time. I have not had a woman in this cabin to do it with. I have not had a woman I wanted to do it with at all. I have done it as a thing I knew how to do and I have done it well and I have not loved doing it. I love doing it with her. It is the greatest pleasure of my life.
I tighten the strap once more at the worn notch.
I think about the first time I ever put a harness on. I was twenty-three. I was in a room that was not this one. The woman who taught me how to buckle it stood behind me in the mirror and put her hand flat at the front of my hip and pressed once, and said,that's where it sits,and I did not understand for ayear what she meant. I understand now. The leather sits on a place that is mine. The silicone sits on a place that is for the other woman. They are two pieces of the same thing. I have not thought about that in fifteen years. I am thinking about it tonight with Evangeline down the hall who is naked at the island waiting for me.
I breathe out.
I walk out.
---
She is where I left her.
She is naked at the edge of the kitchen island, one hand on the counter, watching the door I came through. Her body is elegant and graceful lines. Smooth curves. Her pale pink nipples are erect. I want her so much. When she sees me her breath goes out. Her eyes go down to the strap and back up to my face and back down to the strap. Her lips part.
"Oh," she says.
