Winter May Come Tonight

Winter called at two in the afternoon while Dixon was folding laundry that belonged to him in a laundry room that did not.

"Tomorrow's still Friday?" she said, instead of hello.

"Yes, indeed, tomorrow is still Friday," Dixon replied with a grin on his face. He didn’t really know Winter at all, but he liked talking to people in general and he was happy to have someone on the phone.

"Then tonight's the night. Here's how it works. My kitchen, your menu. I buy nothing, I prep nothing, I lift nothing heavier than a glass. I've cooked eleven giant meals this week for people who put ketchup on things I won't repeat." There was a sound on her end like a dozen metal pans being dropped on the floor and making a huge crash. "I want to sit on my own counter and watch an older man work in my kitchen. Not a boy. A man. That's the whole evening. Can you deliver that?"

"I can deliver that. Sadly, I do fit the description of a man, rather than a boy. Although I hate to consider myself ‘older’ even if it is the case," he said lightly.

"GREAT! What are you making me?" Winter said very enthusiastically.

"It's August. I bet the tomatoes are perfect and I hate to say it but nobody respects them. So, tomatoes, some really good bread, burrata if I can find it, and a piece of fish I won't decide on until I see what looks right. I'll bring everything." Dixon would, in fact, bring everything. He was good at entertaining and he missed it.

"Huh,” Winter said with a short pause, and the pause had approval in it. "You said that like a person who cooks."

"I did tell you I cook," he said flatly. He often had to remind people that he was telling the truth. He didn’t like this about the world, but it seemed to be the case.

"Men tell me lots of things." Another crash behind her, and she yelled a few expletives at someone about being more careful with the fryer basket, and came back with her voice unchanged. "Seven o'clock. I'm off at six, which never happens, so don't be late and waste it. I plan to be worth the effort," she said, her voice carrying a sultry edge.

"One thing," Dixon said. "It's my last night with the dogs. The little one, Hip. She's thirteen and I don't love leaving her alone in the evening. She’s had an accident or two while I have been here. Juno will be fine at home, but I would love to bring Hip. Can she come? I promise, she'll sleep in a corner while we’re busy. You won't even know she's there. I promise."

The line went quiet for a second, as if she were considering what to say next. "You're asking if you can bring a chaperone," she said after a few beats.

"I'm asking if I can bring a six-pound dog," Dixon answered.

"Bring her," Winter said. "Honestly, I loved that little gal. Seven o'clock." And she hung up before he could answer, which he was learning was just how her sentences ended.

Winter's apartment was the top half of an old house off Division Street, up a flight of exterior stairs painted the dark red of theater curtains. She answered the door barefoot in tight blue jeans and a white tank top, hair down for the first time, and Dixon revised several assumptions at once and hoped it didn't show. Her hair was long, brown and curly. She was about 5 foot 5 inches tall with a body that looked like it worked hard, but rarely worked out. Her eyes were green with flecks of brown. She wore no makeup or jewelry, except for two piercings in her nipples that Dixon could see through her tank top.

Winter looked at the grocery bags, then at the dog carrier slung across his chest with Hip's head sticking out of it like a tiny ship's captain, and stood aside.

She made a wide gesture with her arms and said, "The kitchen's basically the whole apartment, except for my bedroom," which was true. There was one big room and the kitchen had eaten most of it: an old but professional-grade gas range was along one wall, a wall of pans in graduated sizes and knives on a magnetic strip in an order that meant something, was next to it. There was a small table set for two with a candle in a jar and cloth napkins. Dixon could feel the love for the kitchen and the effort put into making it perfect for herself.

Hip got lowered to the floor, performed one full lap of the large room as if conducting an inspection, selected a folded blanket on the floor by the front windows as her territory, and occupied it.

"She approves," Winter said with a smile. She leaned in toward Dixon and kissed him. It surprised him, but he liked it. Her lips were warm and she smelled freshly showered.

Dixon backed away slightly and started towards the kitchen counter. "She’s a good little baby baby girly and I love her so much," he said in a baby voice.

Winter laughed and boosted herself onto the counter by the window, poured two glasses of red, handed him one, and kept the other. "Okay, Boy Scout. Impress me."

Dixon set down the glass, not intending to drink it. He looked at her over the top of his glasses. "I was, actually," he said.

"Was what?" she asked.

"A Boy Scout." He unpacked tomatoes onto the counter in a row, ugly heirlooms in a variety of wild colors. "Eagle, technically. It comes up less than you'd think."

Winter looked at him over her glass for a long moment. "An Eagle Scout," she said, slowly, the way you'd say a winning lottery number. "You're kidding."

"Merit badges and everything," he said, pleased with himself.

"Which badges?" She leaned forward. "Be specific."

"Cooking, obviously. Camping. First aid." He was quartering tomatoes now and his attention was on the knife. "Pioneering."

"What's pioneering?" she asked with interest.

"Ropes. Lashings, knots, building things with poles and lines. I could build a stretcher and take you across a rope bridge over a creek, you know, if you had a creek."

Winter made a small sound into her wine glass. "Rope," she said, giggling slightly. "He has a rope badge."

"It's not called a rope badge."

"It should be." She drank and watched him work with great interest. "This is the best date I've ever been on and it's been nine minutes." Dixon looked up from his work. He didn’t quite know what to make of the comment, so he let it go.

He went back to cooking, which was probably the best part of his week, and it had been a pretty good week. Winter’s stove was serious business and her pans were carbon steel and everything in the kitchen was exactly where a cook would want it, so working there was like borrowing someone's perfectly broken-in boots. Winter sat on the counter the entire time and directed nothing, which she announced twice, like a person on a diet describing what she wasn't eating. She told stories about the cart, the other restaurants she worked in, about a line cook named Duck who had once fought a seagull and lost, and about the tyranny of brunch in general. Dixon told the alarm story with the sticky note, and she laughed so hard she had to put her glass down, and Hip looked on with keen interest.

"Okay, but the part I can't get past," Winter said, wiping her eye, "is that there was a note telling you the password was in the manual. And, yet, there was no manual."

"There was never a manual," Dixon said. "For anything. In fact, I’ve been learning that a lot in my travels. There’s no manual."

"True. That's every kitchen too." She looked at him for a second like she was going to say something else, then pointed at the pan instead. "Your fish is about to be perfect. Thirty seconds more and it’s done."

She was right, to the second, which he chose to find exhilarating. Dixon loved talented people. She was clearly talented at cooking, which he also loved.

Winter supervised his plating, which included artfully grating paprika on the edges of her large white plates. They sat and ate at her little table with the jar candle between them, tomatoes dressed in salt and really good oil and torn basil, bread toasted in the fish pan, the fish itself with a skin that crackled perfectly. Winter ate the way she had at the cart, fast and without ceremony, and then she slowed down, visibly, like someone remembering they were off the clock. She fed a fragment of fish skin down to Hip, who had relocated under the table at some point on her silent tiny feet.

"You're going to make her expect that," Dixon said.

"Good. She should expect things. She's thirteen, she's earned a treat here and there." Winter topped up her glass, and sat back with one bare foot up on the edge of her chair. "So. Eagle Scout. Question."

"Please. I will answer just about anything,” he replied.

"Back to the rope. All those knots. . ." She turned the glass by its stem, once, and looked at him over it. "You still remember them? Like, can you still tie them?"

"Sure. Bowline, clove hitch, square knot. Oh, I love a good square knot. You don't lose it. It's like riding a bike." He was making motions with his hands as he said this, wrapping imaginary rope around an imaginary piece of wood.

"That's the best news I've had all week," Winter said, and stood up, and walked over to a bookshelf. She came back and set a book down next to his plate, cover up, with an exactness. It was not dramatic. But it was certainly placed carefully and for effect.

The book was called Shibari You Can Use.

Dixon looked at the book. He read the title and crinkled his eyes and brows a bit. There was intricately tied rope on the cover, and the rope was on a person, and the person did not appear to be crossing a creek.

"I'm going to go change," Winter said, already walking, already unbuttoning her jeans. "Read fast, Boy Scout. Chapter three has diagrams that you will want to study." The bedroom door clicked, not all the way shut, and her voice came through a gap, cheerful as a tour guide. "Now do you get the joke about my week?"

Dixon sat very still at the table. Hip looked up at him from the floor.

"Ah. Tonight is the only night she's not tied up," he said to the dog, quietly. "That's what that meant." He thought about the whole Boy Scout conversation. He considered how interested she was in knots. He didn’t dislike the idea.

He picked up the book and started reading extremely quickly.

The bedroom was small and warm and lit by candles that were doing a great job of it, and Winter was standing by the window in a black leather corset, and Dixon's first thought, arriving before he could analyze it, was that she looked like she stepped out of a movie poster promising a much more intense evening than the one he was equipped to provide.

"Okay," she said, "before anything. Rules. Sit." She pointed at the edge of the bed.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Hip, who had followed him in, sat on the floor beside his foot with the identical posture, and Winter looked at the two of them sitting at attention and had to take a breath and start over.

Playing in this sceneSomebody Else's HandsThe Sit Boy Soundtrack Collection

►0:00 / 0:00

[verse]
All day long I run the line,
Sauce on my sleeve by half-past nine.
Every ticket comes flying,
It's a dance.
I can spot a lie at twenty feet,
I know what everybody needs from me.
Being needed's a beautiful cage...
Somebody else can turn that page.

[chorus]
Tonight I don't wanna be in charge of anything,
Don't wanna make one call.
Don't wanna hold the keys,
Don't wanna hold it at all.
I just wanna feel light... light,
Nothing on my shoulders but the night.
No weight, no wheel, no plans...
Just light, in somebody else's hands.

[verse]
I'm not asking to be rescued,
I don't need nobody brave.
I built this all myself, thanks,
And I like the life I made.
But steel gets tired of being steel,
And I forget the way it feels
To close my eyes and just be led...
To follow somewhere soft instead.

[chorus]
Tonight I don't wanna be in charge of anything,
Don't wanna make one call.
Don't wanna hold the keys,
Don't wanna hold it at all.
I just wanna feel light... light,
Nothing on my shoulders but the night.
No weight, no wheel, no plans...
Just light, in somebody else's hands.

[bridge]
Don't you dare call it giving in.
It takes somebody strong
To hand over the reins
And trust that nothing's wrong.
Letting go's the heaviest lift
And I'll let you lift me.
So take it slow, and take the wheel.
I just want to feel.

[chorus]
Tonight I don't wanna be in charge of anything,
Don't wanna make one call.
Don't wanna hold the whole thing up,
Don't wanna hold it at all.
I just wanna feel light... light,
Nothing on my shoulders but the night.
No weight, no wheel, no plans...
Just light, in somebody else's hands.

[outro]
Come Monday it's all mine again,
The line, the fire, the plans...
But tonight I'm just light...
Light, in somebody else's hands.

"Rules," she said again. "One. Tonight you're in charge. I spend sixty hours a week telling people what to do and where to stand and when they're wrong. On my night off I don't want to decide one single thing. You set the pace. You pick what happens. I just get to feel it." She held up a finger before he could speak. "Two. I like it to be spicy. But this is the fun kind of spicy. Sensation, yes. Pain, no. I want you to make me feel things, but I don’t want you to do anything scary, nothing mean. I have a bunch of fun toys. There’s ice, and feathers, and candles. You can use whatever you want off the dresser. Think of it as a tasting menu for the skin. Three. The safe word is ‘meatloaf.’ I say ‘meatloaf,’ everything stops, no discussion. You too. You can say ‘meatloaf.’ Boy Scouts get safewords too."

The dresser had been laid out like a mise en place, because of course it had: Valentine’s Day red soft cotton coiled rope, a long pink feather that had clearly been purchased for the utility of tickling, a small bowl waiting for ice, a blindfold, a plug-in vibrator that looked like it needed a permit to operate, and a squat candle already lit, its label facing out. Dixon picked up the candle which read: ‘Low-temperature massage candle. Melts warm, not hot. Hemp.’ There were also a pair of safety scissors, the type with the blunt ends, next to the rope. She at least had bought the safe ones, whatever they were for.

"Questions?" Winter said.

"Several hundred," said Dixon flatly.

"Pick one."

“Why ‘meatloaf’?” he said quickly.

“Because I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that,” she said, giving his nose a tap on the end with her finger.

“Ah, good, OK. What are the scissors for?” he asked.

“In case, you can’t untie one of your knots,” she answered plainly.

“OK, gotcha. Alright, the vibrator there, do I need a merit badge in heavy equipment for that one?”

“You’ll be fine, Boy Scout. I like a little more sensation than batteries offer,” she said grinning.

“And the ‘Spank Me’ paddle, I thought you said no pain?”

“I did say no pain. You were paying attention, but you can spank me if I am being bad.”

Dixon thought of Sloane at that moment. She had said she liked to be spanked too. Maybe this was a thing these days.

"What if I'm bad at this?"

Winter crossed the room, took his face in both hands, and looked at him from very close with those flat unembarrassed eyes. "You seem like a creative person. Just be creative," she said. "You're going to be fine. Now get your rope Boy Scout."

She sat on the bed. Hip sat on the floor watching.

“Alright, you’re right. I can handle this. Should I use a special voice or something?” he asked with a lot more lightness.

“I do love a good accent,” she said grinning.

Dixon looked down at Hip. He walked over to the dresser on the other side of the room and took his shirt off. He walked back and composed himself somewhat differently. It was something about the way he was standing. He stood taller. He took Winter’s hands and pulled her to her feet so they were facing one another. Without saying another word, he kissed her. It was a long kiss and he held both her hands throughout the length of it. Then, as suddenly as he had kissed her, he picked her up and tossed her into the center of the bed. She giggled and said, “Oh my.”

He picked up the rope and the book. He opened the book to chapter 3 and laid it out with the pillow holding it open. He gently brought her wrists behind her back and tied something like he saw in the pictures. His knot, some kind of bowline, was, objectively, an excellent knot. It was possibly the best-tied bowline in the history of this use of bowlines. It wasn’t quite Shibari, but it was well tied. He checked the slack three times until Winter said, "I think you’ve got it, Scout," and he stopped checking. He consulted the book again, the way you consult recipe cards, openly and without shame. Winter watched him flip pages with his brow furrowed and said, from inside the ropework, sounding delighted, "you're studying. In the middle of this. You're doing homework," she laughed. “Hey, do you want this lashed correctly or not," he said, and she laughed so hard she almost squirmed herself free.

From a later chapter, he found a way to tie her ankles and then tie the two sets of rope work together. She was lying flat on her stomach, immobilized, blindfolded, grinning. Dixon considered what to do next. The problem was that her legs were now tied together. He couldn’t access anything between her legs. He thought this Shibari stuff was a confusing sort of foreplay that was going to be hard to lead much further. So instead, he took the bowl to the kitchen and filled it with ice. He came back and started slowly running the ice cubes down her spine, between the black leather ribbing of her corset. She moaned lightly. He listened for her to say ‘meatloaf’ but she really seemed to be enjoying herself.

For a few minutes Dixon forgot to be nervous. He just let himself enjoy giving Winter the pleasure that she wanted so much. He loved this moment. He had spent the week caring for Hip and Juno and felt wonderful about that. Now Winter was soaking in his touch, his care, coming from his fingertips, and they both were joyful and free in that moment.

It was just about then that Hip jumped up onto the bed.

She landed in the middle of it with the light thump of a six pound dog arriving, wagged once at the general situation, and began walking up the mattress investigating the interesting smells.

"Is that the dog?" Winter asked, still face down, still tied up.

"Uh, yes, that's the dog." Dixon picked Hip up, set her on the floor, and pointed at the blanket he had relocated from the living room for exactly this purpose. "Bed. Please. That one. Thank you."

Hip sat on the blanket. Dixon returned to the ice. Winter moaned. Ninety seconds later Hip jumped on the bed again.

"She's back, isn't she," Winter asked.

"Yes, she's back." He set her down again. "Hip. You're killing me. Blanket. Please. Thank you."

The third time was the one that ended it, though the ending was Dixon's own work, and he would replay the choreography of it for years. Hip landed on the bed. Dixon turned to catch her with an ice cube still in his right hand. He set her down on the floor with both hands, the way you set down something precious, and then he came back up and pivoted toward Winter in the candlelight of an unfamiliar room, and his elbow found the nightstand.

The wine glass launched first. It caught the open copy of Shibari You Can Use and distributed a full pour of Willamette Valley pinot across its diagrams, the white duvet, and basically all of the bed, including Winter. Dixon lunged for the glass. But, unfortunately, the lunge took out the candle.

The candle did not simply fall. It spun. It tumbled in somersaults on its way down and dispensed its entire melted reservoir of wax in a spiral, like a lawn sprinkler, if a lawn sprinkler were filled with warm lavender-scented hemp wax, and the spiral crossed the duvet, the rug, the wine, one of Winter's tied hands, the nightstand, and Hip, who had not yet returned to the blanket and took the tail end of it across her back making her look like she had been tie-dyed.

The room went silent except for the tugboat sound of Hip shaking herself.

"Dixon," Winter said, very calmly, into the pillow. “Meatloaf.”

"I know. Yes, um. Small disaster here."

"Is the dog on fire?" she asked.

"No. Nothing's on fire. Hip is just fine. She’s a bit of a mess and seems to really like Pinot Noir." He was already moving, hands hovering over the disaster, unable to decide which casualty to attend first. "It's on you, it's on the dog, it's on the book, there's wine in the, the wine is in the wax, they've combined to make some new semi-solid liquid."

"Dixon," Winter said with much more urgency.

"Yes?!"

"I said Meatloaf," she said, "but like, administratively."

He considered grabbing the safety scissors, but instead he untied her in one graceful movement, the one part of the night that went exactly as his Scout training had taught him, and Winter sat up in her corset in the wreckage of the bed, wax hardening on her skin in smooth pink stripes, and surveyed the scene: the wine, the wax spiral, the ruined book, and a thirteen-year-old dog sitting in the middle of the rug, completely unbothered, with lavender wax cooling in her fur like frosting, licking at the pinot with a great sense of joy.

Winter looked at it all for a long moment.

Then she fell over sideways on the bed and laughed. It was not polite laughter. It went on and on, whole-body, tears at the ends of her eyes, and every time it wound down she would look at Hip and it would start again. "That was amazing!" she wheezed. "Hip. Hip looks. . .” she was gasping for breath, “She looks like a tiny cake." She wiped her eyes with the back of the waxed wrist, which set her off again.

Dixon picked up Hip, who switched to licking his face with her tiny tongue.

"I should. . .," he said. "The wax. . . she needs. . .I better take her and work on getting her cleaned up. . . it’s probably best to work it out before it sets. And she’s going to need a bath too." He said this with care for the dog and a hint of dejection for himself and Winter.

Winter caught her breath, sat up, and looked at him with an expression he had not seen from her yet, which was fondness with no sharp edges. "Go take care of your girl," she said, smiling. "Go. This was, and I am being completely sincere, the most memorable date of my adult life."

"That's not the ranking I was going for,” he said a bit sadly.

"It never is, but don’t worry, I still have my big vibe. I’ll be fine," she said.

She walked them to the door, barefoot, still in her corset, wax stripes on her skin, entirely composed, and crouched to give Hip a chest scratch that Hip leaned into shamelessly, cake frosting and all. At the door she caught Dixon's sleeve. "Hey," she pulled him close.

"Yeah," he said, looking into her eyes to see what he could gather about her emotions.

"The first hour and a half was a genuinely great date. The fish was perfect and you have excellent knife skills and your bowline was overkill but I liked it." She kissed him once, brief and precise, like a chef tasting something and approving it. "Text me from wherever you end up, Boy Scout."

Dixon went down the stairs with Hip in his arms and the leftovers in a shopping bag over his shoulder. In the car, Hip stood on the passenger seat looking out the window back at the apartment, still covered in wax, smelling of lavender massage oil, pink from the wine in her fur, wagging with the whole of her being.

"Not one word," Dixon told her.

It took forty-five minutes, two combs, some hot water, most of a bottle of dog-safe oil, and five towels to get the wax out of Hip's fur, and Hip enjoyed every minute of it, because from her side of the evening this was simply yet another massage. Two in one day would be a personal record for her. Dixon sat on the floor of Janet's laundry room at eleven at night working oil into the fur of the six pound dog, smelling of lavender and pinot and defeat, narrating quietly the entire time. "You had a blanket. We discussed the blanket. You sat on the blanket, which I now understand was a negotiating tactic." Hip licked her paw. Juno lay in the doorway supervising, having spent her own evening in more traditional pursuits.

His phone buzzed on the dryer. He assumed it was Winter, and it wasn't.

Dixon! So sorry, my flight got changed and I won't be home til Saturday night. Don't worry about a thing, Lorna will come at 9 tomorrow and stay with the pups til I'm back, so you can leave for your next sit on time. I’m sure you have been AMAZING. Can’t wait to see the pups! Thank you thank you. Safe travels!

He read it twice. Then he understood what it meant, and he sat back against the dryer with the phone in his hand and let it settle for a moment. He would be leaving at nine in the morning. Janet would not be landing until Saturday night. That meant he was never going to see her again. Three weeks in her house, her dogs asleep against him every night, her dishes reorganized by his logic, her refrigerator gleaming and empty of everything she had left in it, and the whole account would be settled without the two of them ever standing in the same room. He would never find out how she took the microwave. He was likely going to spend the rest of his life not knowing, and Brooklyn was going to find this very funny.

He typed several replies and sent the shortest one. It was an honor. Your girls are the best. Safe flight home.

In the morning he packed the car and it did not take long, because that was the point of everything now. He stripped his bed and started the sheets washing. He wrote a note for Janet that he rewrote twice to make it shorter. Then he took the borrowed key off his keyring, worked it off with his thumbnail the way he had worked it on, and laid it on the counter next to the note. His key ring went back into his pocket a little lighter than it had felt the last three weeks. Back to five keys: storage and mail and hardware to be on the move.

Lorna arrived at nine sharp with her coffee mug, took one look at him, and said, "you look like you’re a little sad to leave, Cowboy." And Dixon was a little sad to be leaving. Leaving had become sort of a constant for him. He had loved the time with the dogs and not moving for a few weeks. He would miss them.

Dixon gave Lorna the details in the kitchen. All the things he had learned over the last three weeks: feeding amounts, the walk routine, the number for the vet on the fridge magnet, the garage code she had given him herself. Juno leaned against Lorna's leg with all of her weight, knowing instinctively what was happening. Hip sat on Dixon's foot a little sadly. The humans were changing the guard.

"Oh, before you go," Lorna said. "Come look at this. I noticed Juno’s bed when I walked in and just about died."

She led him back into the living room, and there it was. Around Juno's blue bed, arranged with the careless magnificence of a dragon's hoard, was every shoe Dixon owned. The running shoes. The boat shoes with the melted soles. One brown boot standing upright, its partner flat on its side, and a single flip-flop from a pair he thought he had lost in the car. Juno stood over the collection wagging, tail going in the big slow circles of a dog whose work is finally being appreciated.

"She's probably been collecting them for days," Lorna said. "Janet told me once she only does that with people she really loves. Took her over a year to take one of Janet's sneakers." Lorna sipped her coffee. "Three weeks, she’s got your whole shoe collection in here."

Dixon crouched down and Juno came to him and put her head against his chest, and he held the back of her neck and said nothing at all for a minute, because there was nothing that needed to be said.

Then he collected his shoes, one at a time, out of the hoard. He left the flip-flop. Juno picked it up before he was out of the room and carried it back to her bed, and that was the last he saw of her, standing guard over one flip-flop, wagging.

Hip he carried to the door. He knelt and set her down and she looked up at him, tiny and ancient, and he cleaned the corner of her eye with his thumb one last time out of habit.

"You're a very good dog," he told her. "Don't tell Juno, but you're my favorite thing in this house."

He drove out of the cul-de-sac at 9:20 in the morning with the windows down. The car smelled like lavender massage oil. It was going to smell like lavender massage oil for a long time, and he was never going to be able to explain that to anybody, and at the first red light he caught himself grinning at nothing, a man with a text he owed a woman named Winter, two clean and happy pups behind him, and the satisfaction of having survived his first dog sit.