After Hours Set

The last track was fading out and Burton let it go, letting the synth trail off into nothing rather than cutting it clean, because there was nobody left in the warehouse to impress and it felt courteous. The string lights overhead had been switched to their half setting, the one the manager used for close-down, so the whole space had gone from busy Saturday market to dim amber cave in the space of about ten minutes. He unplugged his laptop, wound one cable around his elbow out of habit, and looked out over the empty floor where the vegetable stalls had been an hour ago.

"You finished?" a voice said, and he turned to find a woman standing at the edge of his little corner, holding a paper bag of popcorn that she was still eating from. She looked to be twenty-nine, dark hair pulled back, a folding table's worth of jewelry boxes stacked under one arm. He had noticed her stall earlier, mostly because she'd been the only vendor playing music of her own, and hers had been better than his warm-up set, which had stung a little.

"That's all she wrote," he said. "You liked it?"

"I liked the last hour. The first hour was a bit safe, if you want my honest opinion." She popped another piece of popcorn in her mouth. "But the last hour, you loosened up. I was folding scarves over there and thinking, well, finally."

Burton laughed, because it was true and because it was a funny way to put it. "The crowd thins out and I stop worrying. Every gig, same story. I'm Burton, by the way."

"Lois. Jewelry, aisle three, the stall with the purple cloth."

"I know the purple cloth. I looked at it when I walked in and thought, that person has their act together."

"Ha. The purple cloth is because it hides the coffee stains." She glanced toward the main doors at the far end of the warehouse, the big roll-up one, then toward the smaller side door by the produce cold room. "Huh. Did you see the manager walk past? Alissa, dark green jacket, she said she'd come get me when she locked up."

"I haven't seen a human being in twenty minutes," Burton said, "unless you count the guy who collects the compost, and he left a while ago."

They walked to the side door together, the both of them carrying their stuff, and Lois tried the handle the way you try a door you already know is locked, pushing it once and then again harder as if the door might change its mind. It didn't. The main roll-up was down and latched, and through the gap at the bottom Burton could see Alissa's station wagon was gone from the lot, which was not a promising sign.

"Okay," Lois said, calm about it, setting her jewelry boxes down on the nearest empty stall. "So she locked up and forgot us. It happens. She does the whole circuit on Saturdays, market all day, her kid's soccer after, she's probably halfway home with her phone in the cupholder."

Burton got out his phone and called the market manager's number, the one printed on the volunteer sign-up sheet he'd filled out weeks ago. It rang four times and went to voicemail, and he left a message that was maybe too polite, saying hey, this is Burton, the DJ, we seem to still be inside the warehouse, no rush, whenever you get this. Then he called again in ten minutes after they'd given up on the side door for a second time, and got voicemail again.

"There's a window in the bathroom," Lois offered, "but it's the kind that opens about this much," and she held her thumb and finger an inch apart, "and it's up by the ceiling, so no."

"Fire exit?"

"Alarm, and it opens onto a loading dock with a six-foot drop. I'd rather wait for Alissa than explain a broken ankle to my health insurance."

So they did the reasonable thing, which was to give up on escaping and settle in. Lois dragged a plastic crate over to her stall and sat on it, and Burton pulled up an overturned milk crate from the dairy vendor next door, and she handed him the paper bag of popcorn and a bottle of water that she made him take the first drink of, which he thought was a nice gesture from a total stranger. The warehouse at night was actually kind of pleasant, once you stopped fighting it. The string lights made little pools of warm orange down the aisles, and there was that smell the place always had at close, cut flowers and popcorn and the faint green odor of whatever the compost guy had missed.

"How long have you been doing the market?" Lois asked, tucking her legs up under herself on the crate.

"Since April. So, what, seven months. You?"

"Three years, give or take. Started when I moved here after, mm, after some things." She waved a hand like she was clearing smoke. "It's been good to me. Quiet work, you know, making things with my hands, talking to people who want to talk and leaving alone the ones who don't."

Burton nodded at that, because he knew the feeling from the other side of the booth. "And the scarves? I saw those, the silk ones on the rack at the back."

"That's the part that actually pays rent, don't tell the earrings." She reached over and lifted one off the display rack to show him, a long square of blue silk that caught the string light and turned it into something richer. "Hand dyed. I do them in batches in my kitchen sink and my landlord thinks I'm running a meth lab, which, no, just a lot of indigo."

"It's good work," Burton said, and meant it, and she took the compliment with a little nod and folded the scarf over her fingers, and then she went quiet for a second in a way that made him look up from the water bottle.

"Can I say something slightly weird," she said, "now that we're locked in a warehouse together and you can't leave?"

"That's the ideal setup for slightly weird, yeah."

"I've been thinking, for a while now, about trying something, and I never say this to anyone, obviously, market vendors do not open with this at eight in the morning next to the honey guy." She turned the scarf over once more in her hands. "I've been curious about being tied up. Like, actually tied, by someone who knows what they're doing or at least wants to. Two years since anything, really, anything at all, and somewhere in there I went from thinking about it occasionally to thinking about it a lot, and I keep selling these scarves and looking at them and thinking, come on, Lois, at some point."

Burton set the water bottle down on the crate between them, mostly so his hands had somewhere to be. "Okay," he said. "Weird, yes, but the good kind!"

"You don't have to say anything."

"I'm going to say something, though. I've never done it. Tied anyone up, I mean, never been on that side of it at all." He rubbed his thumb along the water bottle's label. "I was married for two years, it ended fine, we just weren't, whatever, we weren't that, and the whole time I had this thing in the back of my head, wanting to be the one in charge, wanting someone to hand me that, and I never asked. Never once asked. So when you say curious, I'm sitting here thinking, I'm curious too, just from the other chair."

Lois looked at him for a moment, and then she smiled, and it changed her whole face. "The other chair," she said. "Okay. Well. We've got a locked warehouse, some string lights, a crate each, and a rack of silk scarves that are, I promise, very strong, I test them."

"You test them?"

"I yank on them before I sell them. Quality control." She stood up, still holding the blue one, and looked down at him on his milk crate. "So if you wanted to try, tonight, with me, we'd do it properly. We'd talk first. We'd pick a word, a word that means stop everything, no takebacks, and we'd use it if either of us needed it, and nothing happens that we don't both say yes to out loud. Does that sound like something you'd want, or am I about to feel very silly in aisle three?"

"That sounds like something I'd want," Burton said, standing up to meet her, his heart doing more work than a heart should at nine on a Saturday. "I'd want that a lot."

"So the word," Lois said, wandering a slow half circle around her own stall like a woman giving a tour of a house she'd just bought. "It should be something we'd never say by accident in the middle of things. Not no, not stop, those are everyday words. Something dumb and cheerful." She stopped at the rack and frowned at her own inventory. "Honey. Like the honey guy. Nobody says honey in a warehouse at night."

"Honey," Burton repeated, testing it. "Yeah. Honey means everything stops, hands off, talk first."

"Honey means everything stops." She pulled a second scarf off the rack, a deep red one, and laid it over her arm next to the blue. "And if I can't talk, for whatever reason, I'll snap my fingers twice. Same meaning. And this goes both ways, you know. If you say honey, I stop too, even if I'm the one tied to things."

"Understood." He watched her consider the scarves and realized his hands knew what they wanted to do next and had no place to go, so he put them in his pockets like a man at a party. "Which one?"

"The blue. It's the softest and it's my favorite, which is the point." She held it out between them, the silk sliding through her fingers, and her voice lost a little of its showroom polish. "Here's the strange part, and then I'll stop narrating. I've thought about this so long that I have, like, a whole idea of it, and the idea isn't really about the rope or the scarf. It's about, mm. About being able to stop deciding. I make a thousand tiny decisions a day, every bead, every