Diapered by the Twins Next Door

The neighbors moved in on a Tuesday, and I told myself I would be a good one. Bring cookies. Wave. Keep my distance.

I lasted nine days.

It started because of the noise. Bass thumping through the shared wall of our duplex at two in the morning, the kind that lived in my teeth. I am thirty four. I run a payroll office with eleven people under me. I knew how to send a firm email. So I crossed the strip of dead grass between our doors in my work shirt and my reading glasses, rehearsing something calm and adult, and I knocked.

Two of them answered. Same face, twice. One leaning in the doorframe with a glass of wine, one a step behind with her arms crossed and a slow smile already starting.

“You must be the quiet one,” the front one said. “I’m Cass. That’s Renny. We were taking bets on how long you’d hold out.”

I opened my mouth to say something about the hour. What came out was thinner than I planned. Cass looked at me the way you look at a price tag, and the back of my neck went hot, and I hated that it went hot.

That should have been the end of it. A noise complaint between strangers.

Instead I kept finding reasons.

A package of theirs on my step, which I carried over. A bulb out in their porch light, which I offered to change because I am tall and they are not. Each time the door opened and there were two of them, and each time the wine glass tilted toward me, and each time I left with my collar damp and a feeling I would not name even to myself in the shower.

The night it tipped, it was raining, and Renny called my phone. I had given them my number for the package thing. Innocent. Practical.

“Our power tripped,” she said. “Cass is scared of the dark. Come reset the box, it’s in our hall.”

It was not in their hall.

I knew that the second I stepped inside and the door clicked shut behind me and the lights were, in fact, on. Warm and golden and on. Cass was on the couch with her bare feet tucked under her, and Renny stood between me and the door I had just come through, turning the deadbolt with two fingers, slow, watching my face while she did it.

“There he is,” Cass said. “We’ve been so patient with you.”

Run. The word arrived clean and loud, the only sensible thing in my whole body, and I did not move toward the door. My feet stayed planted on their welcome mat like the mat owned them.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding,” I said. The payroll voice. It came out cracked down the middle.

“No,” Renny said behind me. “You understand fine. You’ve understood for nine days. You just need us to say it so you can stop pretending you didn’t come over here for this.”

Cass uncurled from the couch and crossed to me. She was a head shorter and she made me feel like the small one. She put one finger under my chin and tilted my face up into the light, turning it left, then right, the way you check fruit.

“Look at him blush,” she said to her sister, not to me. “He’s already gone pink. We barely touched him.”

My face was on fire and lower down my body had its own opinion and the two facts together made me want to fold in half. I was hard. Standing in a stranger’s living room with the door bolted, being inspected like livestock, and I was hard, and they could both see the shape of it through my work trousers, and Renny laughed low.

“Oh,” she said. “Look at that. You don’t even get a vote, do you. It already said yes.”

I want to tell you I said no. I want to tell you I shoved past her and walked home in the rain and slept in my own bed.

What I did was stand very still while Cass walked a slow circle around me, one hand trailing across my shoulders, my back, the small of it, and stopped behind me with her chin almost on my shoulder.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said into my ear. “We’ve watched you for nine days come over here all stiff in your little manager shirt, so proud, so polite, and the whole time you’ve been dying for somebody to take it off you. The decisions. The being in charge. You hate it. You’re terrible at it. You come home and you don’t even know what to do with yourself.”

Every word landed on a thing I had never said out loud to anyone. My throat closed. Some animal part of me wanted to argue, to list my eleven employees, my mortgage, the firm emails, and I could not get a single one of them to my mouth.

“We’re going to take all of it,” Cass said. “And you’re going to thank us. But not tonight. Tonight you just have to do one thing.”

Renny had moved while her sister talked. When I turned my head she was holding a bag, a soft pink shopping bag with tissue paper, the kind that comes from a store that smells like vanilla, and she set it on the coffee table and folded back the paper with two fingers.

Lace. Pale, cool, folding-water lace, and silk under it that caught the lamp, and a pair of stockings still rolled in their crinkle of plastic.

“You’re going to put these on,” Renny said. “Right here. And we’re going to watch.”

The floor tilted. “I can’t,” I said, and my voice did the cracked thing again. “I’m not. That’s not what I am.”

“Pick it up,” Cass said, soft, behind me. Not a question. She had stopped asking me anything the moment the deadbolt turned.

My hand moved. I watched it like it belonged to a different man. I watched my own fingers, the ones that signed timesheets, reach into a stranger’s pink bag and close around silk, and the silk was so light it was almost not there, and a sound came out of me that I have never made before.

“There it is,” Renny breathed. “Look at his hands shake.”

This is insane. The thought ripped through clean. Walk out, you grown man, the bolt is a half second of your hand, you have a meeting at nine. And under it, drowning it, slow and thick and worse than anything, was the part of me that did not want the bolt. The part that had crossed the dead grass nine times. The part that was already lifting the silk and that wanted Cass to keep telling me what I was because she was so sure, and she was right, and being right she had taken the weight of it off my chest for the first time in years.

“The shirt first,” Cass said. “Unbutton it. Slowly. We want to watch the manager come undone.”

My fingers went to my collar. The top button. I undid it and my breath shook on the way out and Renny made an approving sound, low in her throat, and Cass came around to stand beside her sister so they could both face me, two identical pairs of eyes, two slow smiles, while I stood there working the second button with hands that would not hold steady.

“Good,” Cass said. “Keep going.”

Third button. The work shirt fell open and the cool air of their living room touched my chest and I had never felt so naked with my trousers still on. They did not move to help me. They wanted me to do it. That was the whole thing, I understood it then with a sick swooping drop in my stomach. They wanted me to take myself apart with my own hands while they sat back and watched the proud one do it for them.

“Look at you,” Renny said. “Nine days of waving at us over the recycling. And here you are, taking your clothes off in our living room because we told you to, and you’re harder than you’ve ever been in your life. Say it.”

“I’m not.” It was barely sound.

“Say what you are.”

I shook my head. One small refusal, the last one I had, and it cost me everything I had left to make it.

Cass stood. She crossed to me and she took my face in both hands this time, firm, tilting me down to her, and her thumb dragged across my bottom lip slow enough that my knees nearly went.

“That’s all right,” she said, gentle, almost kind, and the kindness was the worst part because it meant she was not even worried. “You don’t have to say it tonight. You’ll say it when we’ve got you on your knees in the lace with your wrists behind you, and you’ll mean it, and you’ll be begging us to keep it on you. We have all the time in the world. We live right through that wall.”

She let go of my face. She picked the stockings up off the table and pressed the little plastic roll of them into my open palm and closed my fingers over it one at a time.

“Now,” Renny said, and she sat down on the couch, and Cass sat down beside her, and they both looked up at me standing half undressed in the middle of their rug with silk in one fist and stockings in the other and my whole body screaming two different things at once. “Put them on for us. From the top. And when you’re done, we’ll show you what the lace is really for.”