Stockings on him, my hands

I buy the stockings myself. Not because he can’t—he can, and he still goes red at the self-checkout—but because I like picking them. Black, twenty denier, wide lace tops, two sizes too big for me. They hang near the tights at Target and I drop the packet between the milk and the cheddar he likes.

The dressing ritual is mine, not his. He could do it alone and sometimes has to, in the bathroom, quick and ashamed. On Saturdays when nothing else is planned I do it with my own hands. It feels different. Like buckling a saddle.

He stands in the middle of the bedroom, naked except for the cage that always looks more obvious when lace is about to go around it. I sit on the edge of the bed. He lifts one foot onto my knee the way you rest a shoe on a chair to tie a lace. I gather the stocking into a ring, slip it over his toes and smooth it upward. Slow. Palms along the calf, the knee, the soft inside of the thigh where he always twitches.

I spend longer than needed straightening the lace band. I run a finger under the edge, watch how the black sits against skin that was just my husband’s leg yesterday and is now something else. He looks down at my hands. Breathes through his mouth.

Same with the second leg. Then the thong. I hold it open, he steps in, I pull it up and settle the fabric over the cage. The cage under black lace is its own kind of sight; I still don’t have a polite word for it. His ears are bright red.

“Walk for me.” Those are the second words I say. The first were just “foot.” He crosses to the window and back. His steps shorten on their own, hips moving differently. He isn’t trying to walk like a woman; the stockings simply make him move that way. I stay seated and watch. I never laugh at this part—laughter would break it—and I look at him the way you look at something you made that turned out right.

“Turn around.” He does. I stand, walk over and rest my palm on his bare cheek just under the thong. Nothing more. No slap. He goes so still I can hear the kitchen clock.

What he feels is shame and want at the same time, and they don’t fight; they add up. I see it in the way the cage shifts under the lace. He wants and can’t, and the can’t makes it stronger. What I feel is steady. Warm and settled and mine. There he is, all of him, and my hand on him.

He stays dressed like that for the rest of the evening. He makes dinner in the stockings and thong, sets my plate down, then sits on the floor by my chair because the couch is off-limits in this outfit. Between bites I rest my foot on his shoulder. He kisses the ankle. That’s all. Nothing else happens tonight and he knows it.

I don’t undress him. He takes everything off himself before bed, folds it neatly and puts it in the drawer where his stockings live—his, not mine—then lies down beside me. He won’t touch me on stocking Saturdays. I can feel him awake for a long time.

On Sunday he is especially gentle. I know why. He knows I know. We don’t talk about it.