I do. I also know where she thinks the dirt is and where it isn’t. People often confuse shame with evidence.
She moves first, stepping away from the door and walking past me toward the center of the room. She stops on the seam where the padded floor gives under your bones without letting you sink. She looks at the mirror wall, then away. The face she wears in groups is deliberate; the one she’s wearing now is less arranged, as if the tour downstairs used the muscles she usually spends on defense. I don’t rush. I do nothing quickly in this room unless I am interrupting harm.
“What do you do here?” she says. “In sentences that would make sense to someone who doesn’t speak your language.”
I open one of the panels. Inside are the implements that make donors blanch when they catch the wrong rumor: cuffs lined in suede; a length of robe-quality cotton rope coiled like a question mark; blindfolds—two that are thin and black, one heavier and brown; a set of graduated weights, powder-coated, shaped like river stones; a down feather in a glass tube; silicone spatulas the color of flesh because they clean easily and don’t return bruises unless I choose it; an Oximeter; a bottle of grapeseed oil, and aftercare blankets rolled tight, secured with leather straps.
“We do sensory integration,” I say. “We build containment where there wasn’t any. We let people who live with their hands on the wheel all the time put them down and feel a road that isn’t fighting them.”
The words have been honed against a thousand critics, regulators, board members, survivors, and staff. Underneath them is the more accurate line:We make you safe from the thing that hurt you. We take back the instrument and we retune it.
Her eyes go from object to object, reading, cataloguing, and daring. She doesn’t flinch at the cuffs. The rope makes her throat move. The blindfold gets a longer look than she means to give it. When she lifts her eyes to me again, I see the calculation in them—the same one I recognized last night in the small room full of candles: cost, benefit, and the third column no one admits to when they do math on paper.Want.
“You do this with survivors,” she says.
“With some,” I say. “When talk is an insult and touch is a threat until it’s not. When the body is the only door and you can’t knock with words.”
“And you brought me here to do it with me.” She does not frame it as a question.
“I brought you here to offer it to you,” I say. “Because I think you could use a place to put the hands you keep white-knuckled around your own throat.”
Her mouth opens and closes. She looks at the mirror again and then she looks at me like the mirror is me.
“What does it mean in the currency of this room, to trust you?”
“That you let me guide you,” I say. “That you let your body be my job for a while. That you agree to stop managing everyone else’s reaction to your edges. That you hand me your need and let me tell it what to do. And that if you want me to stop, I stop.”
She swallows. “What does stop look like in here?”
“Words,” I say. “Any time. No penalty. We can use a safe word if you want one that’s not going to come out by accident. A physical cue in case words go away: three taps anywhere I can feel them. If you tap three times, we reset. If I ask if you're here, you answer. If your breath goes wrong, I hear it. If your color changes, I see it. If you fight and you mean no, you say no. If you fight because your body wants to push against something steady until it quiets, you fight and I steady.”
“You’ll know the difference,” she mumbles.
“I’ll ask,” I clarify. “And I’ll err on the side of stopping.”
“What won’t you do?” she asks, and that is the right question.
“I won’t humiliate you,” I say. “I won’t use pain to punish. I won’t leave you alone. I won’t show you to anyone else. I won’t take you so far that you can’t come back by yourself. I won’t take anything you don’t hand me.”
She exhales. The line of her shoulders eases by a fraction. Her attention returns to the drawer. She reaches out, not touching, just hovering a finger over the suede cuffs. Then the blindfold. Then the rope. When her hand hovers over thefeather, she makes a soft, involuntary sound that nearly undoes me because it is both apprehension and relief.
“Say the word,” I tell her. “If it’s no, say it and I’ll walk you upstairs. I’ll stand in the doorway of your room while you draw. I’ll send away the questions and let you keep your speed.”
She looks at me for a long time. I do not fill the space.
“Show me,” she says at last. The words are not reckless. They’re considered. A consent given by a woman who has learned to count the teeth behind every smile and still puts her hand near the mouth.
I nod slowly so my body doesn’t celebrate. “Then we start,” I say. “We set a word. Pick one that has nothing to do with us.”
She scans the room like she’s looking for a noun. Her eyes catch on the mirrored wall, then the garden beyond the glass, then the row of drawers. “Blue,” she says, and I know she’s thinking of the dots on the baseboards that led to doors.
“Blue,” I repeat. “Three taps if words are gone. One tap if you need slower. Two if you need more.”
She nods. I close the drawer with a soft push. I open the next. Soft cotton cloths folded with care that used to make me feel ridiculous, before I learned how much an edge matters when the world has only offered you corners.
“Shoes off,” I instruct. “No rush.”
She puts her hand to the back of a heel and hesitates, then bends to unstrap and step out of them. She lines them up by the door with a neatness that wasn’t there yesterday. She stops with her toes at the seam where the mat hides under oak, as if she knows more about thresholds than anyone has taught her. When she steps onto the padded surface, her weight distributes in a way that makes me think of yes.
