You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to come up with a theory of why a guy who's been dragged through the mud by a angry and determined harridan might find the idea of tying up a woman kind of appealing. At least that's the way I understood it at first. I figured it would pass.

But it didn't go away. It seemed to have taken a surprisingly firm grip on my imagination, to the point where I was haunting online chat rooms and actually purchasing equipment and gear. My attraction to D/s seemed to be deep and visceral and connected to feelings I'd had for as long as I could remember, and I began to wonder if my first analysis of my fascination had been right. Maybe this was more than a symbolic desire for revenge.

But I was finding it very hard to meet a woman who shared my interest in the slightest. I didn't have enough experience to approach people on the internet, and my attempts to broach the subject with the women I saw socially had all been failures, of which Mandy was just the latest. I didn't want to plunge into a D/s relationship all at once, body and soul. I just wanted to see what it was like. I just wanted to try it. It was very frustrating and discouraging.

So when I met Virginia I was just about ready to forget the whole thing. And without the curiosity about D/s to motivate me, I really wasn't very interested in finding a woman for female companionship. The pain of the failed marriage was still too sharp. So no bells started ringing, no rockets went off when I met her. It was nice to meet someone new in the neighborhood, and I liked her immediately.

Nothing might have come of it had it not been raining one morning a week or two later. It was a good, solid rain, partly frozen, and it was falling on the remains of the winter's snow, coating everything with sleet and turning the streets and sidewalks into swamps of freezing slush. A nasty, nasty day.

I was standing under my umbrella waiting for the bus when I heard someone call. I turned around and there was Virginia, waving out of the door of her shop. "Nice weather, huh?"

"Yeah. Beautiful." I said, smiling bitterly.

"Come on," she said. "You want to wait inside?"

"Christ yes!" I said, and I hurried over.

The shop was warm and as fragrant as it had been last time, and now there was the smell of something else too.

"Oh God! Is that coffee I smell?"

She laughed, and as she washed out a cup for me she asked, "How'd the flowers work out?"

"Great." I said. It was early and I still didn't have my wits about me, so I added. "Well, I guess you could say the operation was a success, but the patient died."

She handed me a cup of coffee and looked into my eyes with a directness and curiosity that surprised me. "She didn't like them?"

"Oh no, she liked them fine. It was me she couldn't stand."

She smiled ruefully. "Well, sorry. Too bad I can't give you a refund."

I laughed.

I let one bus go by, then another. It was a nasty day, everyone would be late for work, and it was nice in there with her, sitting in the tropical warmth and looking through the steamy window at the frozen misery outside. Virginia seemed happy for the company as she puttered around with her flowers, drink coffee, and took an occasional call.

The next day I stopped at the bakery and brought some rolls as a way of paying her back, and she invited me in again, pleased to see me. The coffee was already on. It didn't take long for this morning coffee to become a daily ritual. I'd bring some bagels or croissants on occasion, just to do my part, and though Virginia hardly ate them, she humored me and acted pleased.

After a while I started stopping in occasionally after work too on one pretext or another, and then I dropped the pretexts altogether. I became her one and only regular, and I'd sit on the stool she kept next to the counter surrounded by flowers-flowers bursting from vases, flowers cascading down from above, flowers laying in bunches on the counter.

It turned out that she lived right in the back of the store. That's how old the place was; it was built in the days when shopkeepers lived on the premises. She was a widow. Her husband had died a year or so before she opened the store; that's where she got the money. She never seemed to do much business, though she said most of her money came from supplying some of the local restaurants with fresh flowers and that's what paid the nut. Still a lot of it went unsold. When I left at night I could see piles of dead flowers out in the dumpster behind her place. That always made me sad.

I even started stopping in on Saturday. By then we were so close that she let me run the register, not that the opportunity arose that frequently, but I began to feel almost like her partner. If I was expecting a package or something, I'd have it sent to her shop. It gave me an extra excuse to drop in.

I was pretty hooked on her by now, and I figured she must feel the same way about me too. Why else would she put up with me? But the relationship seemed to stop at about arm's length and go no further, though by then I wanted it to. We were good friends and that's the way she seemed to want it. She just never showed that spark for me, that fire. It just never developed. It was like trying to push the wrong end of a magnet against another magnet. I could get so close and no closer, and I couldn't put my finger on the problem.

I asked her out a few times but she declined, gracefully, but with a smile that seemed to stop just this side of pity for me, as if she knew something that I—poor boy—would never know. After the third refusal I stopped asking her. I figured she must still be in mourning. That's what it felt like.

It was a windy evening in April with clouds scudding across the sky, casting moving shadows on the bare streets. Spring was in the air and there was that frantic, almost frightening feeling of life getting ready to burst out again, a feeling you only get in places that have severe and destroying winters. You could just feel things changing, the world accelerating. Even the flowers in the shop seemed unusually alive, their colors vivid.

I stopped by the shop when I got off the bus and found her arranging a centerpiece in the table against the back wall. In contrast to the feeling of activity outside, she seemed unusually tense, not her usual self.

"A package came for you today." she said. "It's behind the counter."

I wasn't expecting any package and didn't know what it could be. The return label said "Specialty Products, Inc." I shook it. It was fairly heavy, but something moved inside.

Virginia walked over, wiping her hands on her smock. "You might want to take that home to open it." she said.

I didn't understand.

She said: "I know that place. I used to order things from them too."

And then I remembered. Specialty Products was the dummy name used by a manufacturer of bondage equipment. There were whips inside. Handmade whips I had ordered weeks ago and totally forgotten about. My face got red.

"You did?"

She nodded.

I looked at her but she had turned back to the centerpiece and was cutting down roses, again wearing no gloves. Her hands were already covered with little red spots of blood.

"For Christ's sake, Virginia! Don’t you have any gloves to wear?"

She shrugged. "It doesn't bother me. It's the price you pay for working with roses. I almost like it, really."