Explicit Consent

Explicit Consent

The first sign of fire is an orange flicker in the windows, and threads of smoke that linger in the eaves like morning mist. The camera angle is wide and professionally framed to take in the whole house, a flat suburban with a double garage, that jars with the expanse of ancient desert that surrounds it.

Smoke thickens as the noise grows, and from within the snap and crackle of burning, comes a scream. A young woman in only a t-shirt runs two steps out the front door and falls, as if caught at the ankle by a devil inside. She screams as she rolls over and claws at her leg in vain.

Jump-cut. A close-up of the doorway lit by jets of flame. The woman’s skin is blistered and her hair burned off to the scalp. I gasp when she moves — she lets go of the chain that binds her foot and slumps back the floor — as tiny missiles of burning debris land on her skin.

The camera cuts wide again, just as the windows blow out in the heat. Now the fire roars as it peaks, and horns of twisting flame grow skywards, up and out of frame.

1

‘No marital carnage, I promise.’ Blake stood the bottle of beer on the edge of the bar. ‘My wife is away a lot for work, so we have an agreement.’

He looked into my eyes as he said this, as if he’d stepped onto a tightrope and couldn’t look down.

‘Sure you do.’

My bag was on my shoulder and one heel on the floor. The music had long cut out and I was an idiot to still be there with him, the last two stragglers in a closing bar.

‘Please watch this, Julie.’

He said my name with such seriousness that I laughed. As if to prove that after three hours of drinking he still remembered it. I made a solemn face and held his phone. On the screen was a woman with curly blonde hair and thin lips — like a nineties’ news anchor.

‘You’re a lucky man. But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hangover in the morning that I need to do some prep for.’

‘Just watch it.’ He smiled and turned up the volume. His wife was a bit older than me, maybe early thirties, but she flicked her hair across her face like a teenage girl practicing to look cute. Then she stared into the camera and spoke in one of those sweet-but-firm southern accents men fetishize so much.

I’m sure this is as awkward for you as it is for me. But I figured it would be the only way that both of us, meaning me and you, could really know. This video is to give my explicit consent, so that you know for sure that you have it. The only rules are these. That I don’t know you and it will just happen once.

‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

‘People don’t have open relationships in New York?’

‘I never said that. They just don’t make videos about it.’

‘That was my wife’s idea. I wasn’t sure at first, but it makes sense. She can be away for months and this way everyone is clear about how it is.’

‘And what if I’d wanted more?’ My words surprised me, but so had the fifth gin and tonic.

‘But you don’t, do you?’

‘I don’t now, that’s for sure.’

I was on both feet, ready to walk away from those green eyes and chalk it up to a nice chat. The bar staff were making less subtle noises now, and the next look I gave the barman he reached down and handed me the helmet I’d left with him.

‘You came here on a bicycle?’

‘I go everywhere by bike and I’m not leaving it outside overnight.’ I slipped off my heels and put on the flats from my bag. ‘But if you tell me your address, maybe I’ll meet you there.’

‘I’ve got a truck. Your bike will fit in the back.’

‘Of course you do.’

It was freezing outside. Not the southwestern warmth I’d been sold on. It was so cold, or I was drunker than I thought, but it took me some time to unlock my bike.

‘I’m happy to drive you home, but it’s too cold to be out.’

He looked adorable; a kind of all American caricature of good looking, in new jeans and plaid, standing by his shiny black Ford pickup with a huge chrome grille. Not exactly the kind of ride I’d expect a doctor to drive, at least not back east. I can’t remember if I said okay or if he decided for us, but after he swung my bicycle into the back of his truck, I turned and kissed him, pressing him against the door. It surprised him, but then he kissed me back, and when a hand came under my sweater, I pushed him away.

‘You show that video a lot?’

‘You’re the second.’

‘Sure I am.’ My laugh condensed in the air. ‘But I appreciate you didn’t try to say I was the first.’

He looked a little injured, so I put my icy hands over his ears and spun him around, inviting him to lift me up. I’d been in Albuquerque exactly three weeks and there I was, pressed against a pickup truck. It had a long bench seat and I sat in the middle with his arm hung over my shoulder as we cut across town. College kids stumbled from closing bars; guys in loose jeans and flat brimmed baseball caps; girls with bare legs in short skirts they pulled down against the cold.

Maybe I wouldn’t get a car but a truck, one that could hold my bike when I needed, and I’d lord over the road like a local, and in the summer, I could drive all two thousand miles across the heartland like a returning pilgrim to troll my Brooklyn friends. I picked up his phone from the center console, one of the giant ruggedized ones they market at riggers and ranchers, and I dialed my own number.

‘Relax, I’m not going to call you,’ I said. ‘I just want some kind of record of who I’m going home with.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘And while I appreciate the full disclosure, do you really need the video of your wife? Plenty of girls would go home with you without it.’

‘That’s one of the rules.’

Blake slowed for a yellow and two cars blasted past us seconds after it had changed. Red lights lost a little bit of their audience every hour until dawn in Albuquerque, but Blake drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes dead ahead, as if to underline his fidelity with impeccable driving technique.

‘I have to show it,’ he added. ‘It can only happen with women that otherwise wouldn’t.’

‘Good thing I was about to go home then.’

Although I wasn’t at all sure about that.

2

‘I don’t take guns to bars, Heather,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anything to do with them.’

You know about my mom, don’t you? That’s why you’re looking out for me?

The truth was I hadn’t told anyone in the studio. And even if Heather had known, we’d probably just’ve reached this point sooner. The pistol was silver and small, about the size of her hand, the barrel indented like something out of a cowboy movie. Heather had laid it out on the table and pushed it towards me like it was a great book she’d just read.

‘It’s not a bar, it’s a restaurant and I happen to carry everywhere I go,’ Heather said. ‘All I’m saying is that you should consider it too — you can’t be so trusting.’

‘It’s me I don’t trust. Some crazy driver almost knocked me off my bike on the way here, and I was so livid I don’t know what I might’ve done if I had a gun. Is it even legal?’

‘Totally legal — it’s you cyclists that should be outlawed. Don’t forget you’re not in New York City anymore.’

Heather grew up in Kentucky or maybe it was West Virginia, somewhere along the river that separates the two, and her accent got a little more Appalachian with every drink. It was hard to believe she was nine years older than me; she seemed way more comfortable being my friend than my boss. One of the last of the old school that had muscled their way into the business without the debt of college, Heather loved to play the sassy country girl with a hardscrabble youth that had learned a little more about life than she’d wanted to. Everyone in the studio was both afraid and in awe of her, and the gun was bang on brand.

‘Oh I know it,’ I said. ‘If you took out a gun in Brooklyn there’d be SWAT closing in. Will you please put it away?’ I looked over to see the same three guys in tech company polo shirts grinning at us. It was a Wednesday and we were almost the only women in the place, which meant there’d soon be a constant stream of interruptions. Heather’s beauty drew them like moths, but she was in a relationship and watching them flameout would be the entertainment of the night.

‘As your boss, I insist you take more care. The guy and his wife sound like total whackos, and that poor girl in Las Cruces was about your age.’

Even my uncle in Upstate New York mentioned Las Cruces when he’d called and he didn’t even own a TV. It took a pretty special crime to grab the nation’s attention in the age of kindergarten shootings, but the discovery of three mutilated bodies in the smoldering shell of a house outside Las Cruces had managed that and more. They’d been tortured for hours it was said, and only two of the bodies had even been identified — a good-looking young couple from Mexico, and the media captioned their happy social media with gruesome details of their slow deaths. The woman had been kept alive until the fire — chained by the ankle to a ring in the floor just long enough to hold her inside. The governor said it was a clear cartel reprisal, but that didn’t stop everyone that knew I’d moved to New Mexico from texting me to be careful, and it counted for little that Las Cruces was three hours south.

‘If you’re acting as my boss right now, then this is a work meeting,’ I said. ‘And while I’m willing to overlook the fact you brought a gun, I insist that you follow company policy and pick up the tab.’

I caught the bartender’s eye and gestured for two more of the same, which that night happened to be Moscow Mules. Heather had a knack for choosing the tackiest and most contrived places in town, which in Albuquerque, was no small achievement.

‘He pounced the second I left? I can’t believe I let you stay alone in that place. I wouldn’t have even been able to describe him to the cops.’

‘You don’t call cops, remember? Anyway, his name is Blake and he’s a doctor, and I think he was just a bit shy and needed a drink or two before he came over. He’s way better looking than anyone I’ve seen out here — older, but with a baby face and these bright green eyes — you would’ve ordered me to go home with him. We just clicked in a way I was beginning to think might never happen in Burque. And the sex was amazing. I think it was like four AM when we finally …’

‘Okay, okay. I’m just saying there’s a ton of crazies out there. Going home with a guy you just met may not be the brightest idea.’

‘They say that it’s safer to go to their place than bring a man home,’ I grinned. ‘Because it’s harder to dispose of a body than to slip out the door.’

‘You have the darkest mind of anyone I know and still you take the dumbest risks. At least the apartment Red Lion put you in has a doorman.’

‘The doorman does nothing but stare at his phone. I doubt he even knows what I look like, let alone anyone I might bring home. Anyway, Blake and I chatted for hours. He’s into rock climbing and cinema; Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock — he knows a ton about film.’

‘And home video. Did he play you that in bed?’

‘No, at the bar.’

‘And you’re totally fine with it?’

I realized I hadn’t asked myself. It was only ten hours ago I was in his bed and it was all still a bit of a high. I’d had three hours sleep, a long day at the studio, and now vodka was making light work of an empty stomach.

‘His wife is fine with it and that’s what matters. They got married young or something, but they don’t have kids. They live in this insane place, an old bank converted into a house, a circle of pillars in the middle where the tellers had been, and the bed is there, hidden behind these blood red curtains. It was pretty kinky.’

The mules came in beaten copper tankards, like they’d been dug out of a medieval village.

‘Kinky or vampirey?’ Heather squinted as she sipped. ‘And you say she’s in film, are you sure we don’t know her?’

‘I definitely don’t, but I guess you might. She’s a set designer and has an accent that reminded me of you, only more of the southern belle to it. Maybe that’s the reason he avoided coming over while you were there, but he did promise she doesn’t do work for Red Lion.’

‘Jesus, Julie. Don’t make a habit of it.’

‘Absolutely not. I intend to honor our agreement.’

‘I mean going home with guys with wives in the business. Make that guys with wives at all. And watching a video isn’t making an agreement.’

‘So this is going to sound really weird, but I swear it didn’t at the time. He made me record a video too.’

‘What?’ Heather almost spat me her drink.

‘Just on his phone. All I had to say was what she said, that I consented to her rules, and that I didn’t know her and it would only happen once.’

‘Oh my god Julie, the weird just tripled. Stay the hell away from him, okay? And pray you don’t end up on the internet.’

‘I have every intention of staying away, but I promise you it’s not going on the internet. And who would care if it did? I just said I agreed.’

‘With your clothes on?’

‘Very funny. I actually think their system makes sense. Marriage doesn’t have to be a sexual prison.’

‘Were those his words?’

‘I’m just saying it would be easier to disregard her rules if she hadn’t said them to my face.’

‘She didn’t say them to your face, she recorded them in a video and you watched that. I don’t even know what that is, but I know it’s not the same thing at all.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh shit, Julie. You want to see him again, don’t you?’

I was working up a protest when Heather’s eyes flicked onto something behind me and she broke out a smile. I turned to find one of the better-looking polo boys facing me. Heather’s resting bitch face could freeze planets, and so they always came to me first, hoping to work up from there.

‘I fear I’m interrupting,’ he cleared his throat, ‘but I saw you look over just now and I couldn’t help but notice how pretty you two ladies are …’

‘Are you married?’ Heather cut in, ‘but you share some kink with your wife where you seduce young women and get them to film obsequious videos of consent?’

‘Umm … no, Ma’am.’

‘Then I’m sorry, but you’re just not her type.’