”Take them off and hold them out to me” I said to Trouble about the panties she was wearing. She slipped them off and did as she was told, looking at me with equal parts willingness and contempt, which is exactly what I wanted of her.
The metal cuffs made a clanking noise against the wrought iron rail and with every little movement we were closer to drawing attention to ourselves, to what was happening. The air was warm, sticky and it reminded for some reason of the beaches of Lake Huron, which I visited every summer when I was younger. Maybe it was the smell of her skin or her bare feet so delicately resting on the wrought iron, but for a moment, all of this was happening someplace else, in another time. Trouble and I didn’t have a future together and we both knew that, but I wished just then that we’d shared a past and just for a moment I was by the fire in Port Austin with her standing next to me.
I remember the sky always being the sort of blue that is so vibrant that it seems impossible because it’s really almost black. I remember stars and the sound of the water lapping at the shore as I folded the corners of the sheet of newspaper in on themselves and carefully pushed a toothpick through all four of them. I would turn it over and set it carefully on the fire, watching it expand with hot air and fly away as it burned. We called them “Hailey’s comets”, but I’m not really sure where or when that started. I was usually alone when I sent them up, but for a moment, she was standing next to me, watching them fade into the night sky.
The clanking noise of metal on metal brought me back to the moment and made me realize that I must be foolish, hopeless romantic at heart because in front of me there was a beautiful woman handcuffed to my balcony, holding her panties toward me and the place that my mind had taken us in that moment was to a beach that was a few thousand miles and almost two decades away.
