For a year Daniel had asked, carefully and in a hundred small ways. Nadia had listened, laughed, changed the subject – and thought about it far more than she let him see.
On their tenth anniversary she put a key on the table between the wine glasses.
"Hotel room," she said. "Saturday. You get what you asked for. But from the moment you walk in, I make the rules. All of them."
He looked at the key as if it might burn him. "What are the rules?"
"You'll find out on Saturday." She smiled. "Rule one: you don't get to know in advance."
The chair
The room had a single armchair by the window, turned to face the bed. Nadia had moved it there herself.
"You sit," she told Daniel. "You don't stand up unless I say so. You don't speak unless I ask you something. And if anything is ever wrong – for any of us – the word is winter, and everything stops."
He sat. She noticed his hands were shaking a little, and she loved him for it.
The other man was called Leo. They had met him twice before, for coffee and then for dinner, and talked for hours about exactly this evening. He was calm, polite and amused by the whole arrangement, and he understood very quickly who was in charge. It wasn't him.
Watching
Nadia had never felt like this. Every few minutes she looked at her husband in the chair – at the colour in his face, the way he held his breath – and asked him a question.
"Is this what you wanted?"
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
"Yes. Thank you."
She hadn't expected that the best part would be the power. Not over Leo – over the whole room, over the story her husband had been telling himself for a year. She decided how close, how slowly, how much he saw. She decided when Leo's hand moved and when it stopped. What happened after that stays in that room. Daniel never once left the chair.
Afterwards
When Leo had gone, she sat on the arm of the chair and took Daniel's face in her hands.
"Rule two," she said. "Now you tell me everything you felt. Even the parts you're ashamed of."
He told her. Jealousy, for about thirty seconds. Then pride. Then something he didn't have a word for, which made her kiss him very slowly.
"Rule three," she whispered. "Tonight you belong to me."
They keep the key in a drawer at home. Sometimes she takes it out and puts it on the table without saying anything, and watches him go quiet.
