The stores downtown all have their Christmas displays up, and the potted sidewalk trees are strung with lights: white, blue, red, and green. We're window shopping. It's only two more weeks until Yule, and I have no idea what to get him for a present.

More specifically, I don't know which book would be perfect for him. I'm hoping something good will leap into my hands when I next visit a used bookstore.

Since we're downtown, the vast majority of the stores that are open (as opposed to being boarded up) are way out of my price range, and not too close to his ability to pay without causing critical damage to his finances, either. We are not here to do any real shopping. Mostly we're just looking at Christmas displays: elaborate train sets, giant Christmas trees, light displays, fake snow in fake wooded winter wonderlands. Bears dressed up as Victorian-era carolers. Our gloved hands reach for each other and embrace, creating a mingling of leather and acrylic yarn. A stray snow flurry lands on my cheek.

Something sparkling catches my eye, and we pause to look in the window. We're in front of a jewelry store.

"Oh, those are beautiful," I sigh, gazing in rapture at a pair of small, teardrop-shaped garnet and opal earrings set in white gold. They're my two favorite stones. The price of the earrings is surprisingly not obscenely high. No, neither garnets nor opals are considered precious, but the jewelry store whose window we're looking into has a reputation for charging its clientele a fortune.

"Would you like them?" he asks. "I'm still thinking about Yuletide presents."

"There wouldn't be much point. Those are studs. I don't have pierced ears. I'm surprised you hadn't noticed."

The snow starts to fall in earnest, in large, wet flakes. He has snow in his hair. As he leans in to kiss me, taking my face in one of his leather-clad hands, I reach up to brush the snow away.

We sit side by side on the couch, near the tiny tree he has set up on top of one of his shorter bookcases. The little white fairy lights shine through prisms we've hung from the artificial boughs, making rainbows scatter along the walls of the living room.

"You first," I say. I hope I'm cute when I wheedle. "Go on. Please?"

He smiles, kisses me lightly, and reaches for the larger of his two presents. I wrapped them in notebook paper because I couldn't afford wrapping paper after I bought his presents, but I decorated the paper with drawings of trees, to make it at least a little more festive.

"Baudelaire! In the original French, too, no less! Thank you. That was perfect. I'll have to read some of them aloud to you tonight. Have you ever read Les Fleurs du Mal?"

"Some of it. In translation. It's been a long time. I didn't quite get his poetry when I was a teenager. No doubt I was missing something. I did think it was beautiful, though, even though it mostly went over my head."

His "Litanies to Satan" gave me the creeps when I was sixteen, because I was still Christian at the time, but the stanzas were so gorgeous that they swept me away anyway. I'm sure there's more to Baudelaire than Satanism, though. He has a reputation. Which is why I grabbed the paperback copy of Les Fleurs du Mal to get Magister as a present when I saw it on display.

"Very beautiful. Also very strange, rather like us." He opens his other present. "A replacement silk! My tarot deck will thank you for it." He kisses me again, this time running the silk lightly across my cheek. "Although I might put it to other uses first. Your turn, eromene."

There are three packages, one large and long, one medium-sized, and one quite small, all of them wrapped in brocaded midnight blue and silver cloth, tied with braided silver fabric trimming. The fabric and trimming alone could be gifts; I could sew them into a pouch or a pillow, or maybe an altar cloth. Where on earth did he find them? The local fabric store wouldn't have something this precious, surely. Then again, if it carried silk gauze for my ritual robe, it probably has a wide selection of luxury fabrics. Sewing has never really been my thing, so I didn't really explore the store too thoroughly when I visited it.

I decide to go for the package that looks and feels like books.

They're books.

"The collected letters and writings of Abelard and Heloise?"

"Are you familiar with them?"

"No."

"In that case, I have some ideas for your next reading assignment." He smiles and strokes my jaw, until his palm rests against my cheek; I tremble and melt into his touch. "Go on. I want to see your face when you open the other two."

The small box looks suspiciously like a jewelry box, which sets off paranoid and no doubt silly worries about his having spent a king's ransom on me, so I pick up the larger box, which is about three feet long, and rather slender and flat. It looks like it ought to contain a bouquet of long-stemmed roses, and when I pull off the fabric wrapping, there is indeed a florist's logo on the box, but it's very heavy, much too heavy for flowers. How curious.

Inside, wrapped in multiple layers of tissue paper as if it were a floral bouquet, is a braided cat-o-nine-tails made of what appear to be many fine strands of black leather, interspersed with strands of rubber, both types of strands about three feet long, and with both the knotted braid ends and the rubber lash ends capped with tiny lead weights and smooth, sharply pointed tips of polished steel. The foot-long handle of the flogger is sterling silver. It's repousséd all over with patterns of climbing roses, some open, some merely budding, vines covered with leaves and thorns. The end of the handle is shaped, with loving anatomical detail, like the head of a phallus.

It looks like it belongs in the hands of a Dionysian priest, or maybe a crazed maenad. If Louis Comfort Tiffany had been into erotic pain, he probably would have designed something like this.

How could Magister possibly have afforded it? Even I, with my relative lack of experience in purchasing such items, can tell he spent a small fortune on it. No wonder we never bought Halloween candy this year, and hardly ever go out on dates. Dates cost money.

It's so beautiful that it brings tears to my eyes.

"It does come with a catch," Magister says quietly. "You must earn it. That whip came dearly, although once I saw it, I couldn't not get it for you - it was so beautiful that I decided it had to be yours; the roses, in particular, reminded me very much of you. Probably a bit rash on my part, but the handle and the lash ends were custom work. They, and the leatherwork for that matter, were done by a friend of mine who is a silversmith who makes a living selling jewelry and occult items at pagan festivals. He gave me the first chance to purchase it before he put it in his inventory of booth goods, I think because I'd told him I was in a relationship again for the first time in years, and I told him a bit about you. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone else buying it, so I bought it, despite the extravagant price. It seemed so very you, somehow. And really, who or what else would I spend my money on? I have everything I need, in terms of basic creature comforts, and a little bit saved against a rainy day, and beyond that, I see little point in hoarding money for its own sake. Well. The whip is yours now. It would be good to see it put to some use while we are partnered together as teacher and student, and there is only one of us here who makes an appropriate target for its blows."

Yes, once I laid eyes on the whip, I'd rather suspected there would be conditions of this kind.

Although I already know what the answer to my question will be, because I can see it with my own two eyes, I ask anyway. "This one you just gave me is nastier than the floggers you've used on me so far, isn't it?"

"Much."

My hand trembles when I caress the handle and the silver-tipped cords. He has several cat-o-nine-tailed whips; one of them is large and heavy and has a plethora of wide strands made of soft black suede, and looks intimidating, but it isn't all that bad. It's more for deep tissue massage than anything else. A "thud toy," he calls it. The others, however, aren't so innocuous. The one that gets the most frequent use is the one with thin leather braids that he used to work me over during my initiation ritual, and just thinking about it makes me want to squirm. This one is "much worse?" How much?

Well, I might as well brave the last package. I pick up the small parcel and untie the silver trimming that keeps the cloth wrapping shut. As I suspected, it's a jewelry box.

Inside it are the earrings that I was sighing over when we were looking in the window of the jewelry shop.

"How am I going to wear them?" I ask, knowing that I'm missing something obvious.

"I thought I'd pierce your ears for you."