Cuffing Kate. Alison Tyler

      Cuffing Kate

      “I can’t fucking believe it!”

      A debate is a game. There is always a winner and a loser. This is why I don’t debate. Sonia sees things differently. She never loses.

      “What’s up?”

      My roommate slammed into my bedroom so hard that the door hit the wall. Another ding in the plaster. I shoved the dirty book I was reading under my pillow, but Sonia didn’t even look my way. She was already pacing. I kept quiet about the fact that she’d entered my room without knocking. Sonia loves to make an entrance, which means that she rarely ever knocks.

      “The fucking bastard.”

      I stared at her, curious. I’d never seen her like this before. Well, that’s not entirely true. Sonia’s hot-tempered. She gets all riled up during debates about war in the Middle East or why tofurkey is the wonder food. But this was different. Her cheeks were flushed a bright fuchsia and her dark espresso-hued eyes looked huge and wild.

      “Did you have a fight?” I asked tentatively.

      “A fight? No, not a fight.” She bit off each word as if chewing on a piece of that nasty papaya fruit leather she buys at the local health food store. I watched her stomp out of my room, heard her clomping toward the kitchen in her vegan no-cows-were-killed boots. Silently I trailed behind her, dumbfounded as she pulled a Guinness from the fridge—one of my beers. I’d never seen Sonia drink an alcoholic beverage.

      “Then what happened?”

      “The bastard. He actually tried to…”

      She swallowed a huge gulp of the brew and leaned against our fridge. The Well-behaved Women Rarely Make History magnet was poised over her head on the freezer. It read like a caption. I waited, but she didn’t continue.

      “Tried to…” I prompted.

      “He really thought I would let him…”

      “Let him…” I echoed, faux helpfully.

      “Never mind. Chalk the experience up to a bad fucking date.”

      “What did he try to do?” And why did I care so much?

      Sonia strode into the living room, threw herself onto our thrift-store sofa and grabbed the ugly comforter her great-aunt had crocheted. She was calming down. I could tell. Maybe she wouldn’t tell me the rest. Sometimes she kept things from me. This is why I read her diary on a daily basis.

      “He was kinky,” she said with finality.

      Sonia was decidedly not kinky. That’s mostly what I’d discovered by reading the tightly cramped handwritten pages in her recycled-paper journal. She wasn’t kinky, and she wasn’t that into sex, and she wasn’t that into men. But she didn’t seem to realize this last fact yet. Maybe when she discovered the latter the former would change.

      “What do you mean, ‘kinky’?”

      She shrugged and turned on Bill Maher, dismissing me by not responding. I thought of pushing the issue, of trying to take our roommate status to a higher level. Sonia considered us good friends, but we weren’t. She never shared her feelings with me, and she didn’t seem to care about my own. Mostly she preached her beliefs in my general direction—trying to guilt me into giving up things that she thought I shouldn’t do, or eat, or drink, or think.

      I went to my room, consumed by visions of the man she’d been out with. Jules Rodriguez. I knew him from school. Senior. Handsome. Of course, I understood perfectly why he’d asked Sonia on a date. She looked as if she’d be hellfire in bed. Anyone with an ounce of imagination could envision her in the heat of the moment—long twists of black curls spiraling as she moved, huge eyes glazed with lust. Aside from that, she dressed like sex on wheels: tight clothes in electric colors, earrings that jangled when she walked. Men were drawn to her. She baited them, and then dismissed them. Over and over and over.

      I thought again about the recent one. Jules. What naughty thing had he suggested to Sonia? And why did I so desperately want him to try that same thing out on me, whatever the trick might have been?

      My mind made an instant laundry list of deviant possibilities: Spanking? Anal? Sex toys?

      For a moment, I considered returning to the living room. Sonia was drinking her first beer, after all. Maybe she would have looser lips than usual. But I didn’t feel up to listening to a full-on rant. Hopefully she would write about the situation in her diary. Tomorrow when she went to class, I could sneak in and read every filthy little detail.

      Except maybe I couldn’t wait that long.

      * * *

      Jules lived in an apartment down the hill from campus. I knew because I’d known him before Sonia. We’d shared one class together—a cozy little 500-student Art History class. I also served him his daily caffeine infusion as barista at the central campus coffee bar. From my vantage point, I could spy him often in the quad. I hate to admit that I followed him, so let’s just say that one day our paths crossed in town, and I watched as he entered a retro white stucco apartment with wrought-iron railings on the balconies.

      Sonia may look like she’d be a good lay—but I thought Jules looked like he knew how to get inside a woman’s head. He was tall and lean, given to dressing simply in battered blue jeans and a khaki jacket. In between serving up shots of espresso, I’d drawn pictures of the two of us entwined. My canvas: white paper napkins. To my dismay, he simply hadn’t chosen the right woman.

      What had he asked her for? What had he wanted to do?

      “I’m going out,” I told Sonia as I passed behind the sofa to the door.

      “Where?”

      “A walk.”

      “If you go by Juiceeze, pick me up a smoothie,” she said. “Carrot and ginger, please. That beer was foul. You shouldn’t drink those.”

      I didn’t answer. I worship Guinness.

      “And you don’t need any more coffee,” she added as I began to shut the door. “Putting caffeine in your body is like depositing counterfeit money in your bank account.” These were the pearls of wisdom Sonia tossed out every day. I let them roll under the dresser like dust bunnies on roller skates.

      Without a plan, I walked by Jules’s apartment. Then I stopped and looked at the