Chapter 26: Leaning in
The tequila had dried into sticky rings on the bar top, and Alex was on his knees with a trash bag, collecting lime wedges off the carpet. His thighs ached. Somewhere behind his eyes a small, pleasant fog still lingered from the night before.
Stacey came down the stairs in a tank top and socks, carrying two mugs. She set one on the bar and nudged the bag with her toe.
"You're cleaning up like a bartender closing out."
"Somebody has to." He dropped a wadded napkin in. "Blossom already wiped the pole down. I think she used my shirt."
"That sounds like her."
She sat on the couch, and the leather sighed under her. The room still smelled faintly of salt and citrus and something warmer underneath.
Lola came down a minute later in her silk camisole, hair still flat on one side from sleep. She carried a brown paper bag from the hardware store and set it on the bar with the deliberate care of someone unpacking a gift.
"Morning," she said. "Don't get comfortable. The room needs a lock."
Alex looked up. "A lock?"
"On the stairs door. Top and bottom." She pulled a brass deadbolt out of the bag and laid it flat. The metal clicked against the wood. "I've been thinking about it since the estimate came in. This is a private room now. It's not a den for guests to wander into."
Amber appeared at the top of the stairs, hair a wild blond cloud, and slid down the last four steps in one jump. "Did somebody say lock? Because I was going to say lock."
"You were going to say lock."
"I was going to say lock." She grabbed the deadbolt and turned it over in her hands, delighted by its weight. "My parents are coming up for the homecoming game in October. My dad pokes around everywhere. He opened my underwear drawer sophomore year and asked if it was a physics experiment."
Blossom came down last and said nothing at first. She stood in the doorway with her gauze robe loose at the shoulder, looking at the brass bolt in Amber's hands the way she might look at a wasp on a windowsill.
"A locked door," she said finally.
"One locked door," Lola said. "In the house. For this room."
"We built this place on the idea that nothing here gets hidden."
"Nothing does." Lola took the bolt back. "The rest of the house stays open. This is downstairs and it has a wet bar, a pole, and no windows. It's not a hiding place. It's a door."
Blossom considered this for a long moment. Then she nodded once, slowly, like she'd filed it away to think about later. "Fine. But I want a say in what goes inside."
"You already do."
They spent the afternoon on it. Lola drilled the brackets herself, standing on a milk crate with the drill braced against her hip, and Stacey held the plate level while she worked. Sawdust scattered across the concrete. The bolt threw home with a heavy, satisfying chunk.
Then the rules, written on the back of the contractor's invoice in Lola's precise hand and taped inside the bar cabinet where anyone could read it. Locked when not in use. Nobody's parents. Nobody's roommates from campus. Nobody's friends from the gym. If you bring a guest into the house, the door stays shut and you say so.
"That's the whole list," Lola said. "It's short because I trust you."
The additions came over the next three days, four packages, each one arriving in its own way.
Blossom's came first, delivered in a coffin-sized crate that the two men from the freight company had to wrestle through the side gate. Inside, wrapped in plastic and smelling of new foam and machine oil, was a black Liberator chaise, all curved slopes and one arched rise in the middle, low to the floor and wide enough for two people to lie sideways without touching.
"It's a wedge," Blossom said, running a palm along the rise. "Western medicine doesn't know what to do with a body that wants to be held in a certain shape." She looked up at Alex with her pale green eyes. "I put it here so we can stop making do with couch cushions."
Amber's arrived in two boxes. She set up the camera on a tripod in the corner, a small dark unit with a glowing red eye, and ran the cable along the baseboard to a projector mounted under the ceiling beam. She clapped her hands when the wall display lit up, six feet of glowing white.
"It doesn't record," she said, bouncing on her toes. "I checked like four times. It just shows. So you can watch yourself." She turned to the pole. "Watch me."
She stripped off her shorts and climbed the pole in her underwear, and the wall filled with her. She hung there sideways, one thigh hooked, and studied her own body on the screen like a gymnast reviewing film. "God. My shoulders look insane from this angle." She slid down and pointed at the display. "Okay, whose turn."
Stacey's cabinet came flat-packed, and she assembled it on the floor with a screwdriver between her teeth. Glass doors, four shelves, satin nickel hardware. Then she filled it, methodically, like stocking a tool crib. Two wands, a smaller bullet, a curved glass toy, a silicone ring, a small pump bottle of lube, and a black leather collar she hung on a hook inside the door. She stood back and looked at it.
"Lock for that too," Lola said.
"Already bought one."
Lola's own addition arrived on a dolly, in pieces, and she hired two men to anchor it to the concrete wall. Black iron, eight feet tall, a cross of bolted steel with rings at the four points and a padded back panel that smelled of new leather. When they finished and left, she stood in front of it with her arms crossed and said nothing at all.
Alex studied the thing. "Where did you even find that."
"I know a man in Fells Point who sells to gyms." She glanced at him sideways. "Don't ask what kind of gyms."
They broke it in that evening because Amber wouldn't stop asking.
She went over the chaise first, face down on the rise, hips propped high on the arch with her weight settled into the foam. Stacey knelt behind her and pulled her underwear down to her knees, and the display threw the whole thing across the wall in glowing color. Amber watched herself in it, chin on her folded arms.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's, the camera's mean. Look at my face."
"You're supposed to look at the camera," Stacey said, and worked two slick fingers into her, slow, twisting. Amber's breath hitched and her hips rolled against the arch. The foam creaked.
"Screens," Blossom said from the couch, cross-legged, a glass of wine balanced on her knee. "I like it. A room that shows you to yourself."
Alex watched from the bar with his shirt off and his hands flat on the wood, hard enough that his jeans had gotten uncomfortable. Lola noticed. She always noticed.
She let it go on until Amber came with a sharp little cry against the chaise, thighs shaking.