After the Marathon

"You snore a little."

Bobbi opened her eyes to a ceiling she did not recognize, fluorescent tubes in a fixture that had probably been installed in 1987. Her whole body ached in that deep, well-earned way, from her calves all the way up to her shoulders. Somewhere behind her, a dishwasher hummed.

"I do not snore," she said.

"You do a little. Not bad. Like a small engine idling." Alison was sitting up on the futon beside her, hair flattened on one side, still wearing the staff t-shirt from the night before. "Also you steal blankets. Just so you know, going forward."

"There is no going forward. There is right now, and then there is me getting my shoes."

Alison laughed and swung her legs off the futon. She was thirty-six, two years older than Bobbi, and she had the kind of face that looked better tired, Bobbi had decided sometime around hour nineteen of the marathon. "Your shoes are by the sink. You took them off at hour eleven and said, and I quote, my feet have resigned."

"That sounds like something I'd say." Bobbi sat up and immediately regretted moving that fast. Her dance clothes were stiff with old sweat and the whole back room smelled like a locker room that had hosted a coffee tasting. "God. What time is it?"

"Almost eight. I opened at nine yesterday too, so I'm running on four hours of sleep and spite. You want coffee? The roastery down the street opened at seven."

"From the place where we met."

"Same place. Same barista, even. He saw my face and just started pouring."

She left, and Bobbi lay back down and stared at the ceiling and tried to build the morning into some kind of order. Twenty-four hours of dancing. She was thirty-four years old and a nanny by trade, which meant her whole life was built around other people's schedules, other people's kids, other people's dinners and baths and bedtimes. The marathon had been the first thing in years she'd done purely because she wanted to. She'd signed up alone. She'd planned to leave alone around hour ten, once her knees had their say.

Then Alison had come over during a slow song, holding two paper cups of water, and said, "You're the only other person here who actually knows how to dance instead of sway," and that, plus one good coffee conversation six months earlier, had been that.

Alison came back with two cups and a paper bag. "Croissants. Day-old, but they're free because I know the owner of the cafe that sells them, which is me, I buy them there."

"You own a cafe that buys croissants from another cafe."

"I own a board game cafe. I make one food item and it is pretzels. I outsource everything else." She handed over a cup. "Two sugars, no cream. I remembered."

"You remembered from one conversation six months ago?"

"It was a good conversation." Alison sat down cross-legged on the floor instead of the futon, which Bobbi noted she did not have to do, and ate her croissant in small bites. "So. We won."

"We won."

"Twenty-four hours, both of us on our feet the whole time, and the nearest team dropped out at nineteen. You were incredible, by the way. I want to say that sober and in daylight, because last night at about hour twenty-two I said it and it came out sounding like a much different sentence."

"It was a different sentence."

"It was," Alison agreed, not looking away. "But the compliment stands on its own."

Bobbi drank her coffee. It was very good and very hot and she held it with both hands like it might keep her honest. "I don't do this," she said. "For the record. Whatever this is. I watch kids for a living and I go home and I stretch and I go to bed. I don't win dance marathons and then..."

"Then go home with the cafe owner," Alison finished for her.

Bobbi looked around the back room properly for the first time. Metal shelves stacked with game boxes, sorted by color of spine. A folding table with a cash box on it. A futon that had clearly seen committee meetings and inventory nights before it saw anything else. And on the top shelf, at the end, something small and pale that didn't match anything else in the room.

She got up, coffee in hand, and looked at it. A dollhouse, maybe two feet tall, painted a faded green. Real shingles on the roof, tiny and neat. Little curtained windows.

"Where did that come from?"

Alison followed her over, still eating. "My grandmother's. She built it herself, in 1958, from a kit she ordered out of a magazine. My mom had it in her attic for thirty years and I claimed it when I opened this place."

"For decoration?"

"For luck, honestly. The day I signed the lease I carried it here on the bus like an idiot. People on the bus had questions." Alison reached up and steadied it with one finger on the roof. "Grandma ran a rooming house her whole life. Rooms full of strangers. I like thinking about her when the place is packed."

Bobbi leaned closer. The little house had a porch, and a front door with a handle painted on in black ink, worn faint from somebody's thumb. "It's beautiful. Look at the shingles. She did every one."

"Four hundred and eleven. My mother counted them once to settle an argument."

Bobbi laughed, and the sound surprised her, loose and unguarded in a way she hadn't managed in front of another adult in a long time. Then she saw Alison's face change, just slightly, the way a person's face changes when they've decided something.

Alison touched the tiny front door with one fingertip.

"You know," she said, "I never showed anyone the secret room."

Bobbi felt it go through her, low in the stomach, a flutter that had nothing to do with dollhouses and everything to do with the way Alison said it. Quiet. Careful. Like an offer being set down on a table between them with both hands.

"Secret room," Bobbi repeated.

"Behind the fireplace wall. Kits from that era sometimes had them. Grandma kept her good sugar in there, according to family legend, where the roomers couldn't find it." Alison slid her finger down the door and looked at Bobbi instead of the house. "I found it the first week I had it. Sat on my kitchen floor at midnight with a flashlight."

"What's in it?"

"That depends," Alison said, "on whether you're leaving right away or whether you have some morning left."

Bobbi looked at the dollhouse. Then at the futon. Then out through the doorway, where the main floor of the cafe waited in the dark with its chairs still stacked from the marathon, twenty-four hours of chalk on the scoreboard and her own name on it in her own handwriting. She had a job offer in another city sitting in her email, unanswered for nine days, and she had not mentioned it last night and she was not going to mention it this morning. This had always been shaped like a one-time thing. She'd known that going in.

"I have some morning," she said.

"Okay." Alison set her croissant down on the cash box table and wiped her hands on her jeans. Then she turned and stood in front of Bobbi, close but not touching, and waited. That was the part that undid Bobbi a little, the waiting. Twenty-four hours of watching this woman run a whole event, handle every close call, and now here she was standing still with her hands loose, letting Bobbi make one.

"I don't know what I'm doing this morning," Bobbi said. "I want to say that upfront so it's fair."

"Neither do I. I know what I'd like. That's not the same thing and I know it."

"What would you like?"

"You," Alison said, plain as a menu item. "Slowly, if you'll let me. Right here on that terrible futon, if you're willing. And if you're not, I'll drive you wherever you need to go and we'll have won that marathon and that'll be a true thing either way."

Bobbi set her coffee down next to the croissant. Her hands were steadier than she expected them to be.

"Ask me," she said.

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yes."

Alison's mouth was warm and tasted like day-old croissant and she kissed the way she'd danced at hour twenty, patient, no wasted motion, one hand coming up slow to Bobbi's jaw. Bobbi had been kissed maybe four hundred times in her life by a handful of people and none of them had waited to be asked and every single one of them had been in a hurry.

She pulled back an inch. "Okay," she breathed. "Okay. That's..."

"Yeah."

"Don't stop doing that!"

Alison pulled back just far enough to look at her, and Bobbi saw her own wanting reflected there, plain, which should have been frightening and somehow wasn't. "Come here," Alison said, and led her to the futon, which was exactly as terrible as advertised, some ancient foam thing with a plaid cover gone thin at the corners. They sat. The springs complained.

"Before anything else," Alison said, "I need to show you the room. Because I got this far in my head dozens of times and never once got past the showing."

"Got how far?"

"Further than this. A lot further than this." Her ears had gone red. Bobbi watched the color travel down her neck and thought, well, that's interesting.

"Show me," Bobbi said. "All of it."

Alison got up on her knees and reached the dollhouse down off the shelf with both hands, set it on the futon between them. She pressed something at the back of the fireplace wall, a spot Bobbi couldn't even see, and a whole section of the little house swung out on a hidden hinge, no bigger than a matchbox. Inside, tucked into the dark, was a small velvet pouch, deep purple, with a drawstring.

"That's not sugar," Bobbi said.

"No!" Alison worked the drawstring loose. Inside was a glass thing, smooth, rose-colored, with a narrow stem and a flared base, small but unmistakable. She held it in her palm like it might warm up and fly away. "Glass. From a shop downtown, three years ago. I bought it, brought it home, hid it in here, and never once did anything about it."

"Not even alone?"

"Not even alone. It felt silly. A grown woman, thirty-three years old at the time, hiding a..." She gestured vaguely. "In her dead grandmother's dollhouse."

Bobbi reached out and touched the base of it, cool and hard. "Why the dollhouse?"

"Because nobody would ever look there. And because it felt like a joke only I was in on." Alison's thumb moved across the velvet.