Master Key

Ryan set the box on the table and would not look at me.

Dinner was done. The plates were in the sink, and both of our coffee mugs were still half full, his gone cold the way it always did when a shift had wrung him out. He stood with his hands on the back of his chair. The little cardboard box sat between us, taped shut, no bigger than a deck of cards.

“I bought something,” he said. “Two years ago. I never opened the conversation.”

“All right.”

“It’s a chastity device. For me. I want you to have the key.”

His voice stayed low and even, the voice he used on a bad call, except his thumb was white on the chair. I waited. He had nothing else. I pulled the box over, slit the tape with my thumbnail, and tipped it out onto the wood.

The cage part I left where it landed. I picked up the lock.

Under the kitchen light it was a sad little padlock, bright plating already flaking at the shackle, the keyway so wide I could see the pins sitting lazy in their holes. I turned it over. I turned it again. The key that came with it was stamped from thin metal and already bent.

“Ryan.”

“I know how it looks.”

“Sit down.”

He sat. I went to the junk drawer, found a paperclip, and straightened one end against the counter. Back at the table I set the lock under the light, worked the clip in, and counted without meaning to. Nine seconds. The shackle popped. I set the open lock on the table between our mugs.

“Who sold you this?”

He made a sound that started as a laugh and broke. He put his face in his hands and laughed until his shoulders shook, the kind of laugh that is one step from crying. I let him. When he came up for air his eyes were wet and he looked at the lock as if it had personally offended him.

“Some site,” he said. “Reviews were fine. I didn’t know what I was looking at.”

“You were looking at a toy.” I stopped smiling. The quiet in the kitchen changed. “How long have you wanted this?”

“Years. Before I bought it. I bought it and then I couldn’t say it.”

“Why now?”

“Because I keep almost saying it on the drive home, and then I walk in and you’re here, and I lose my nerve. Tonight I didn’t.”

I turned my mug, though I didn’t drink. “When you think about it, what do you think about?”

He looked at the table, then at me, and stayed with me. “You. Not a picture. You, with the key, and me not able to get out of it unless you decide. I think about calling you from the station and you having it in your pocket. I think about you forgetting it on purpose for an hour. I think about trusting you with that and you not laughing me out of the house.”

“I laughed at the lock.”

“I know.”

I didn’t answer. The fridge hummed. A car went by on the street. He waited the way he waited on a scene, hands flat, giving the other person the room. I watched the open lock and the bent key and the man who had carried this for two years without putting it in my hands.

“I need the workshop,” I said.

He followed me through the side door. The garage light was the hard one, the one I used for small work. He stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and didn’t come in. I opened the top drawer, then the next. Files. Picks in their roll. Pliers. Brass blanks in a tin I kept for jobs that needed a key cut from nothing.

“Erin,” he said. “If this is you being kind, I’d rather you said no.”

“I’m not being kind.” I set a blank on the bench. “I’m not putting my husband in anything I can beat with a paperclip. That lock is junk. I’ll test it properly tomorrow on the bench so I can tell you exactly how junk, but I already know.” I found the file I wanted and laid it beside the blank. “I’m going to make you a lock. A real one. It will have exactly one key.”

He was very still in the doorway.

“I’ll keep a spare in the van,” I said. “Not for me to use on a whim. For if something happens and I’m not here. You get a word. You say it, and this stops. Same day. I don’t argue with the word.”

“All right.”

I looked at the blank, then at him. What I said next surprised me on the way out.

“I like it,” I said. “The only key. I didn’t know I would. I thought I was going to fix your bad purchase and send you to bed. Instead I keep thinking about that key living with me. On me. And you knowing I have it.” I shook my head. “I sound like I planned this. I didn’t.”

“You don’t sound like you planned it.” His mouth moved, almost a smile. “You sound like you just found a mechanism you want.”

“Don’t get smug. Come here.”

He crossed the concrete. I didn’t kiss him yet. I set him on the stool and went to work, because if I stopped I might talk myself out of the plain thing I had just said. The file rasped. Brass dust gathered. He watched my hands and didn’t fill the quiet. Once he reached over and moved my coffee mug, the one I had carried out without noticing, so it sat clear of the vise. I let him.

When the key was the size I wanted, I took it out of the vise. I blew the dust off it. Under the bench light it was small, plain, and mine. I held it up between us.

“This is the one,” I said. “The spare gets cut after I cut the lock to match. Until then, this is a promise of a key.”

“I’ll take the promise.”

I stepped in. My hand went to the back of his neck. The key stayed between my fingers, warm from the work. He met me. The kiss was not careful. His hand came up into my hair. Mine found his wrist and stayed there, feeling the jump of his pulse under my thumb, and his other hand covered mine on the key so we were both holding it. He kissed me back like a man who had been waiting in a doorway for two years.

When we broke, his forehead rested against mine. Neither of us moved our hands.

“Thirty days,” he said.

“I’ll tell you when,” I said.

We went upstairs because the chain I wore lived on the nightstand when I worked, and I wanted the key on it before either of us could turn this into a joke. The hall light was low. At the top of the stairs I lifted the chain from where I had left it that morning, slid the new key onto it, and closed the clasp at the back of my neck. The brass settled against my collarbone, light, and already familiar.

Ryan stood on the last step and looked at it. He didn’t reach. He didn’t ask. He only breathed out, and the shame that had been in his shoulders at the kitchen table was gone.

“Come to bed when you’re ready,” I said. “The key stays with me.”

He nodded, and I left my hand on the chain a moment longer, feeling the shape of what I had just decided to keep.