The lock was smaller than Noa had expected.
She had ordered it from a company that made them specifically for this purpose — small enough to be invisible under most clothing, light enough to forget, precise enough that only one key in the world opened it. The key was on a thin steel chain she wore around her neck, tucked under her shirt. She had been wearing the chain for three days, and the weight of it against her sternum had become, in those three days, the weight of an unspoken sentence.
Eli, who was twenty-four and soft in all the ways that mattered, was sitting on the edge of the bed with his knees together. He had on the cropped sweater and the pleated skirt he wore when he wanted to be looked at, and he was, in this moment, looking at Noa with the specific look he gave her when he was about to ask for something he did not know how to ask for.
“You can ask,” Noa said.
“I was going to ask if we could do it today.”
“Today.”
“I’m — yes. Today. I’ve been thinking about it since Sunday and I want it today.”
“Which day is today.”
“Wednesday.”
“You’ve been thinking about it since Sunday. Four days.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about what you’ve been thinking about?”
He made the small embarrassed sound he made when she asked him to narrate. She had learned, over the course of their year together, that the embarrassed sound was the sound of someone who very much wanted to narrate and was afraid of taking up too much space by doing it.
“You don’t take up space by talking,” she said. “You take up space by being quiet about it and then exploding later. Talk to me.”
He talked. He talked about the specific way he’d felt on Sunday morning, when she’d kissed the back of his neck before she’d gone to brush her teeth. He talked about how he’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror, afterwards, and touched the soft place under his navel where the lock would sit, and how the touch had made him hard, and how he’d had to make himself put his hand down before she came back into the room. He talked about the box on his dresser where he’d put the lock, unopened, and how he’d looked at the box on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and how each day the box looked heavier.
“I want it,” he said, finally. “I want it on me. I want you to know it’s on me. I want you to have the key.”
“Until when?”
“Sunday.”
“That’s four days.”
“I know.”
“Is that the right amount of time for a first lock.”
“I think so. We can make it shorter if I need it shorter.”
“Yes.”
“And we can make it longer if I want it longer.”
“Yes.”
“Can I —” he started, and then stopped.
“You can.”
“Can I give it to you.”
“Give me what.”
“The — the box.”
He reached under the sweater he was wearing and pulled out a small white cardboard box. He held it in his lap. Noa reached across and took it from him and set it on the bed between them. They both looked at it.
“We open it together,” Noa said.
“Yes.”
“And we go slow.”
“Yes.”
“And you tell me, the whole time, what you’re feeling.”
“Yes.”
“And the moment you say the word, even if it’s not red, the moment you say the word — we stop and we take it off and we don’t put it back on until we’ve talked.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the word?”
“Garden.”
“Tell me why you picked garden.”
“Because you grew up in one.”
She smiled. He smiled back, smaller.
“Open the box,” he said.
She opened it. The lock was a soft brushed steel, the size of a coat button, with a small hasp that fit, she understood immediately, around the base of him in a particular way. The key was a thin steel pin with a small rubber grip at the top. There was a sheet of paper in the box, printed on heavy stock, that listed the dimensions and the safety guidelines in five languages.
“I’m going to read this to you,” she said.
“Please.”
She read it. She read about how long the lock could be worn before a break was required. She read about the materials, the cleaning, the storage. She read about the warning signs — discoloration, numbness, cold at the tip — and what to do if any of them appeared. She read it twice.
“I’m going to put it on you now,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Lie back.”
He lay back. She knelt between his legs. She reached for the waistband of his skirt, slowly, and he helped her push it up. Underneath, he was wearing a pair of soft cotton briefs he had specifically chosen, that morning, for this. The briefs were pale green. He had thought about the color. He had picked pale green because pale green was the color of leaves in early spring, and early spring was the season he felt closest to himself.
She kissed him, first, on the inside of his knee. He made a sound that was almost the word garden, and then caught himself, and then laughed.
“Not yet,” he said.
“Not yet,” she agreed. “Soon.”
She took the lock out of the box. She set the hasp around the base of him, the way the instructions said, and clicked it shut. The sound was very small. It sounded, to Eli, like a single piano note played in a room where no one else could hear.
“How does it feel,” she said.
“Weird,” he said. “Heavy, kind of. Warm.”
“Does it hurt.”
“No.”
“Is it too tight.”
“No. It’s — yeah. It’s exactly tight enough.”
She kissed him on the stomach, just above the lock.
“I’m going to put the skirt down,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Going to put the sweater down too.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m going to get us both water, and you’re going to drink the water, and we’re going to sit on this couch and watch TV and we’re not going to touch you tonight.”
“Even by me?”
“Especially by you. The deal is the deal.”
“Okay.”
He drank the water. They watched the TV. The lock sat where the lock sat. After about forty minutes he reached down, very carefully, and touched the waistband of his briefs, and then pulled his hand back, and she saw him do it, and she didn’t say anything.
“That’s allowed,” she said, finally.
“Touching the waistband?”
“Touching the waistband. Not touching the lock. Not touching you. The waistband is yours.”
“Okay.”
He touched the waistband again, very lightly, with two fingers, while she held his other hand.
The week went.
She took the key off the chain at night and put it on the bedside table and he watched her do it and she watched him watch. In the morning she put the key back on the chain and the chain went under her shirt and the key went against her sternum and she watched him watch that too. On Thursday he made her coffee. On Friday he made dinner. On Saturday they went to the bookstore and he held her hand through the travel section and she let him hold her hand without pretending it wasn’t happening, which was new.
On Sunday morning she took the lock off. He had asked, on Saturday, if he could keep it on through Sunday, and she had said yes, and on Sunday morning, when she reached for the key, he had not said the word.
“How are you,” she said, before she unlocked it.
“More okay than I thought I’d be.”
“More okay is good.”
“I’m a little — I want you to touch me. Not there. Just anywhere. I want your hand on my head.”
“Okay.”
She put her hand on his head. He closed his eyes.
“Now?” she said.
“Yes.”
She took the key off the chain. She unlocked the lock. He made the same small piano-note sound he had made when it had gone on.
“It feels — empty,” he said.
“It’ll feel less empty in a minute.”
She set the lock on the nightstand, and the key on top of the lock, and she took him in her hand, very gently, and she held him, and he breathed, and she breathed with him, and after a while she leaned down and kissed him on the soft place under his navel, the place that had carried the lock for four days, and the place was warm.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what.”
“For the four days.”
“Thank you for trusting me with the four days.”
She stayed there. He stayed there. The lock and the key sat together on the nightstand like two halves of a sentence neither of them was in a hurry to say out loud.
“Next week?” she said, eventually.
“Week after,” he said. “I want to come back to it rested.”
“Week after. Tuesday?”
“Tuesday. Yes. Tuesday is good.”
“Tuesday,” she said. “I’ll put the chain back on Tuesday morning.”
He kissed the top of her head. She put her hand back on his head. They lay in the soft quiet of Sunday morning, with the lock off and the key beside it and the chain on the bedside table and the whole week, which had been the whole point, safely behind them.
“Soon,” he said.
“Soon,” she said.
The piano-note sound, they both thought, separately, was the best sound in the world.