Page 8 of Wraith

I look at him in the mirror. He looks back. He has a kind face, actually. Round, with reading glasses pushed up on his nose and tired eyes that suggest he’s heard most things and isn’t easily rattled.

I think about lying. I am, historically, not a great liar, but I have been through enough in the last year that I feel like I’ve earned at least a few decent fibs. But I’m also tired and I’m frantic and there’s a man tied to my radiator with dish towels and bath towel scraps and the creative output of my panic, and he will not stay tied with dish towels and bath towel scraps and the creative output of my panic, because he has already demonstrated that once tonight, and I need actual restraints before he wakes up again, and the kindness in this cab driver’s tired eyes is the first kindness I’ve encountered tonight that hasn’t come attached to a lock pick and a history of emotional abuse.

So I tell him most of the truth.

“I need to tie someone up,” I say. “Like, properly tie them up. I have someone at my place and I need to make sure they stay put, and I used everything I had, which was dish towels and blankets, and it will not hold.”

He stares at me in the rearview mirror for a long moment.

“It’s a game,” I add. “A game. That my boyfriend and I play. He’s my boyfriend. We’re playing a game.”

The silence that follows is the specific silence of a man who does not believe a single word I’ve just said but is weighing whether it’s any of his business.

“A game,” he repeats.

“Yes.”

“At midnight.”

“We’re night people. And it’s a sex thing.”

Another silence. He blinks.

“I need rope,” I say, gesturing at the closed hardware store with what I hope is casual, game-playing energy. “For the game.”

He looks at me for another long moment. “For the sex game?”

“Yes. For the sex game.”

Another pause. Another blink.

“OK, my wife and I like sex games, too,” he says, and he hesitates for a long moment and I worry he’s going to invite me and Wraith to be thirds and fourths in whatever kinky stuff he and his wife get up to, but then he says, “And I think I might know a place.”

“OK, can you take me there, please?”

The car leaves the parking lot of the hardware store. In the blink of an eye, he takes me to a sex shop.

It’s called The Love Hole, and it’s sandwiched between a closed nail salon and a payday loan place on a strip of road that gets seedier the further you go from downtown Ironwood Falls. The sign is hot pink neon, and the windows are blacked out, and there’s a bored-looking bouncer sitting on a stool by the door who doesn’t even look up when I climb out of the cab.

“I’ll wait,” the driver says.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll be fast.”

“Take your time,” he says. “The meter’s running.”

Right. Yes. Take my time. Be casual. Because there’s nothing to worry about, I’m just spending my first night of responsible adulthood in a sex shop at midnight buying restraints for my abusive ex-boyfriend who I’ve already knocked unconscious twice tonight with a lamp.

This is fine. Totally fine.

The bouncer holds the door open without making eye contact, and I walk into a wall of lavender air freshener and low red lighting and the faint throb of something with too much bass playing from a speaker I can’t locate. The shop is bigger than it looks from the outside, which is either impressive or alarming; I haven’t decided. There are aisles. Multiple aisles. Organized with a thoroughness that suggests whoever runs this place has powerful feelings about erotic product categorization.

The music pulses through my body; the diligently organized sex toys swim in my vision; I don’t have time to be overwhelmed by this.

But I am.

Because The Love Hole is big and weird and deep.

Pull your shit together, June.