Base Leave

I turned sixty-two in March and I still work the night shift at Red Canyon Warehouse, out on the edge of Dry Mesa where the highway bends toward the base. It's not a bad job. You stack pallets, you scan boxes, you drink bad coffee at two in the morning and watch the desert go black past the loading dock. Fifteen miles away the lights of Fort Carson sit on the horizon like a town that never sleeps, and I used to wonder who was awake over there, doing what.

Mostly I wondered about myself, if I'm honest. Mostly I thought about how quiet my life had gotten.

Lucas came around some of those nights. He's forty, my supervisor, and we'd been sleeping together on and off for about six months by then. It was easy. He'd catch me by the time clock, we'd go to his place or the Desert Star, we'd fuck, and by morning it was like nothing had happened. He never asked about my day in a way that wanted a real answer, and I never gave him one. I told myself that was what I wanted at my age. Simple. No strings.

Some nights after he dropped me back at my car I sat in the parking lot with the engine off and felt like a pallet nobody had scanned. There, but not counted.

The kiss I kept coming back to was twenty years old. Chelsea Fischer, a party after night class back when we were both in our forties, both grown women with lives behind us already. We'd been friendly in a night-class sort of way, and that night there was cheap wine and somebody's terrible stereo, and she pulled me out onto a balcony and kissed me. Just once, soft, her hand on my jaw. I had a crush on her for a year before that and never said a word, and after that kiss I still never said a word. She moved away two months later for a contractor job overseas and it was finished. Twenty years of wondering what would have happened if I'd opened my mouth.

I'd heard she was back in town. Small town, you hear things. I didn't believe it until she walked into the break room.

* * *

It was a Thursday, around one in the morning. I was sitting at the plastic table picking at vending machine crackers when the door swung open and there she was, sixty-one years old, silver shot through her black hair, wearing a denim jacket like she'd never left Colorado. She looked older, sure. We both did. But her eyes were the same, dark and quick, and when they found mine across that ugly little room something in my chest went off like a forklift backing into a rack.

"Ella," she said. "God, look at you."

"Chelsea." I stood up too fast and knocked my coffee. She laughed and grabbed napkins, and we were both dabbing at the table like it was a spill and not me being a disaster.

"I heard you worked nights here," she said, sitting down across from me like she owned the chair. "I've been back two weeks. I kept meaning to come find you."

"Two weeks and you pick one in the morning at a warehouse?"

"I work weird hours too. Old habits." She smiled, and I felt it in my stomach the way I had at that party, twenty years ago, like no time had passed at all. "Are you free tonight? There's a bar at the Desert Star now. Can you believe that? Dry Mesa has a bar with a sign that doesn't flicker."

I said yes before she finished the sentence. Of course I said yes. Then I went and traded my Thursday shift.

* * *

The Desert Star sits on the edge of town, a two-story adobe place with a neon star out front that flickers, just like Chelsea said it didn't. We got a booth by the window and she ordered tequila and I ordered my usual, and for the first half hour it was easy talk. Her decades overseas, contracting work, bases in three countries. My warehouse, my apartment, my daughter in Denver. Lucas I didn't mention.

Then she set down her glass and got quiet, and I knew the easy part was over.

"Trent Halstead," she said. "You remember the name?"

"No. Should I?"

"You would if you'd been around. Base officer. Major, now, I guess." She turned her glass in a slow circle on the table. "I was with him for two years. It ended five years ago, badly. He told people things about me. Lies, mostly, and enough truth to make the lies stick. Cost me the contract, cost me friends I thought I had. I just got done testifying in an audit that made his life hell, and he still came out of it smelling like a rose."

"I'm sorry," I said. "That's rotten."

"It is rotten. And he's on leave right now, staying at his brother's place outside town, thinking he's safe and smug." She looked up at me and her voice went low. "I want to hurt him, Ella. Not with paperwork. With something he'll feel."

"How?"

"I want him to see me happy with someone else. Genuinely happy, that's the part that stings. And I want that someone to be you."

I stared at her. "Me."

"You. I show up everywhere he goes with a new lover on my arm. A woman from his hometown, a woman who looks like she's having the time of her life. He watches. He seethes. He comes crawling or he cracks, and either way I win." She reached across the table and took my hand, and her thumb moved over my knuckles like it had never stopped doing that. "And honestly? I'd like it to be real. At least some of it."

My heart was doing something embarrassing. I pulled my hand back, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to think and I couldn't think with her touching me.

"Chelsea, that's a scheme. You're asking me to be a prop."

"I'm asking you to be the person I should have kissed properly twenty years ago and didn't." She said it plain, no blush, no apology. "I thought about that balcony for twenty years, Ella. I was a coward then. I'm not one now."

"The money part," I said, because I had to say it. "If this involves money or favors between us, I want that settled before anything else. I don't work that way."

"There's no money. I've got my pension and my settlements. This isn't a deal, it's an ask. You can say no and we drink our drinks and that's the end of it." She leaned back. "You can say no and I'll still like you."

I looked at her hand on the table, at the scar across two fingers I didn't know the story of, at sixty-one years of living I'd missed while I stacked boxes. I thought about Lucas and how he never once asked what I wanted. I thought about that balcony and the year of crush I'd swallowed.

"If I do this," I said slowly, "we're honest with each other. Whatever happens between us is real and we say so, out loud, when it happens. No acting where it counts."

"That's exactly what I want," she said. "That is the entire idea."

"And nobody gets trapped. If I want out, I'm out."

"Done."

She raised her glass and I raised mine and we clinked, and the sound of it was so small for something that felt like it might change my whole life. She smiled at me over the rim, that same dark-eyed smile from the balcony, and I drank and tried not to look as rattled as I was.

"Tomorrow night," she said. "He'll be at the diner off the highway around seven, he always ate there when he was stationed here. We walk in together. We hold hands. We order pie and laugh at nothing." She grinned. "You ready to ruin a major's evening?"

I wasn't ready. I said yes anyway.

We sat in the bar another hour after that, talking about nothing that mattered. She told me about a market in Djibouti where she'd learned to haggle for spices. I told her about the year my freezer died and I lost two hundred dollars of elk meat. It was ordinary talk, the kind you have with an old friend, and every few minutes I'd catch myself forgetting there was a plan sitting under all of it.

Around eleven she paid the tab and we went outside. The Desert Star's neon star was doing its broken flicker, on and off and on again, throwing a stutter of pink light across the lot. Her car was a dusty gray rental parked under the awning. Mine was two spaces down, closer to the road.

"You could come back to my room," she said, casual as a weather report. "Not for anything. I've got a bottle in there and the bar's closing. Or you can drive home and I'll see you tomorrow at seven."

I stood there with my keys in my hand and thought about it. Really thought about it. The honest answer was that I wanted to go, and the other honest answer was that I didn't fully know why.

"I'll come up for a bit," I said. "Just a bit. But first I have to make a call, and it's not a short one."

"Take your time," she said, and she didn't ask whose call it was.

I walked to the far end of the lot and rang Lucas, who was on shift and picked up on the fourth ring over the sound of a forklift. "I'm ending it," I said. "Us. It's not about anything you did. Something has started to happen in my life and I won't do it with you still on the string. And my job and yours have nothing to do with this, I want that said out loud."

There was a long beat of forklift. "Never was a thing," he said. "Your schedule's your schedule either way. Well, hell, Ella. Okay. Thanks for telling me straight."

I went back to where Chelsea waited under the awning, and she looked at my face and said only, "All right?" and I said, "All right," and her smile said she knew what a bit might turn into.

Her room was on the second floor, end unit, facing the highway. It was neat in a way that said she'd lived out of bags her whole adult life. One suitcase open on the rack, bed made tight, a paperback on the nightstand. She poured two fingers of whiskey into motel glasses and we sat in the chairs by the window, and the talk went on easy until it didn't.

"Can I ask you something real?" she said.

"Go ahead."

"That night on the balcony. Do you think about it?"

"Sometimes," I said. "More this week than in the twenty years before it."

She laughed. "Fair enough." She turned her glass in her hands. "I want to do one thing tonight, and I want to ask first, because that's how it should be done. I'd like to kiss you. Down in the lot, under that stupid star, so we both know what we're walking into tomorrow. A test run. You can say no and we finish our drinks."

"You're asking me to kiss you so a man I've never met gets jealous."

"I'm asking you to kiss me because I've wanted to finish what I started on that balcony for twenty years. The major gets his own separate benefit from it. Two true things can sit in the same sentence."

I looked at her for a while. She didn't push. She just waited, and the waiting made me braver than I usually am.

"Okay," I said. "Let's do it."

We took the stairs down and stood in the middle of the empty lot, right under the flickering sign, and the cold came off the mesa and cut through my jacket. She stepped in close, took my face in both hands like it was something she was allowed to hold, and paused there a second, giving me one more chance to back out. I didn't take it.

Then she kissed me, and it was nothing like the balcony. The balcony had been quick and soft and over before my heart caught up. This one was slow and deep and deliberate, her mouth warm and sure against mine, one hand sliding into my hair. I heard myself make a sound into it, some low noise I hadn't planned on, and her fingers tightened just a little, and I leaned in harder because standing still was no longer an option.

When we finally broke apart I was breathing like I'd climbed the stairs twice. The neon star flickered off and we stood in the dark, and then it buzzed back on and lit her face pink.

"Well," I said.

"Well," she agreed. She didn't step back right away. Her hands stayed light on my shoulders. "For the record, that wasn't acting. I want you to know that. I told you we'd be honest about what's real."

"It's real," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "That's the part that's confusing me. I came up here tonight thinking I was doing you a favor with a side of curiosity. And now I'm standing in a parking lot at eleven at night with my pulse in my ears and I don't know which part of me agreed to which thing."

"Do you want to figure it out here, or do you want to sleep on it?"

"I want to sleep on it," I said. "If I don't go home now I'm going to do more than kiss you, and I'd rather know my own mind first."

She nodded, no argument, no pout. "That's a good answer. That's the kind of answer I was hoping