Margot 39

I spend my days finding the hole in someone else's sentence and closing it. I am thirty-nine, I have a glass office, and I am not interested in being conquered by a stranger who thinks a suit is a personality. Ian is forty-one. He is the man I chose, and what I chose with him is service I can step into after the folders are shut. A thin leather collar lives in my desk. It is not tight. It does not press my throat. It is a switch I ask him to throw. When it is on, I like being given small clear tasks and being used the way I have asked to be used. When I need the scene to end, the word is clause, and he treats it as final. He does not negotiate with it. After, he is the one who unbuckles me, and I become the woman who writes the contracts again. Both are mine. I do not confuse them with a client, and neither does he.