Breaking the Pacts

Karen, twenty-eight, white, aquarist. Clayton, twenty-nine, Black, mail carrier. Together two years, ever since we met at that custom-puppet exhibit in the spring when I was twenty-six. We keep a list of rules for our sex life, written on the back of a takeout menu, taped inside my closet door. Twelve rules. We wrote them the first winter, when things got weird and we both got scared, and we never once crossed one out.

Until last night.

I got to the workshop a little after nine. It used to be Jeb's Auto Body, on the shore road, and when Jeb died the building went to his nephew, who rents half of it to Eugene, who builds marionettes. Eugene is the one who introduced me to Clayton, back when the exhibit came through town. He was Clayton's mentor too, sort of. More of a father, honestly. He died in March and we've been carrying a box of his ashes around ever since, waiting for a good day on the water.

Clayton was at the workbench with a marionette laid out flat in front of him, oiling the shoulder joints with a little brush. He had his hearing aids in, which was my first clue he knew what was coming.

"Hey," he said, not looking up.

"Don't hey me!"

"That bad, huh."

"You know what you did." I sat down on the paint-stained stool by the door, the one with the busted cushion. "Rule nine. You turned your phone back on. Midway. While we were..."

"I know what rule nine is, Karen."

"And?"

He set the brush down and finally looked at me. He had sawdust on his forearm and that look he gets when he's about to argue a point he already knows he lost. "My battery died. In the hearing aid. I had to swap it or I couldn't hear you at all, and you were saying things I wanted to hear."

"That's not the point and you know it."

"It's kind of the point."

"Clayton." I waited until he put the brush all the way down. "The rule exists so that when we're doing that, nothing else exists. No phones, no doorbell, no nothing. You broke it. You broke the only rule we never even came close to breaking."

"I know." He picked the brush back up, worked it into the little wooden shoulder, and the marionette's arm swung loose like it was waving at nobody. "I'm not saying I was right. I'm saying I know why I did it."

"Why."

"Because it felt like the last three minutes were the best three minutes we've ever had, and I got scared."

That sat there for a while. A car went by on the shore road. Somewhere in the back of the shop Eugene's dog sneezed.

"Scared of what?" I asked.

"Of how much I..." He trailed off and shrugged, which is his way of ending a sentence he doesn't want to finish. "It doesn't matter. I broke it. What's the penalty?"

"We never set penalties. That was the entire idea. The rules were supposed to make it so we never needed penalties."

"Well, we need one now."

I thought about it on the drive over, honestly. I had been thinking about it since six in the morning, standing in my kitchen in my aquarium polo, feeding the cat, going over the whole thing. And somewhere between the coffee and the car I came up with something, and it wasn't a penalty. It was a move.

"Okay," I said. "Here's the deal. You broke rule nine, so now I break rule four."

He stopped oiling. "Rule four is the weekday one. No midday on a workday."

"Yep. Tomorrow. Wednesday. My lunch break, back tank room, one o'clock. I have the key and Patti's covering the desk."

"Karen, that's..."

"That's the scale balancing. You broke nine, I break four, and then we're even and we talk about what's actually going on instead of punishing each other with rules."

He put the brush in the jar and wiped his hands on a rag, slow, like he was buying time. "The back tank room. Where the nurse sharks live."

"The nurse sharks are on the other side of a concrete wall, Clayton. They won't see anything."

"I'll hear them."

"You'll hear the pumps. You hear the pumps in your sleep."

He laughed at that, a real one, and some of the tightness went out of his shoulders. "Fine. Tomorrow, one o'clock. Rule four, broken by the most rule-abiding person I know."

"Somebody has to keep this competitive."

I left him to his marionette after that. He walked me out, and at the door he did the thing where he kisses my forehead instead of my mouth when he knows I'm still mad, which is somehow worse and better at the same time. Then I drove the ten minutes up the coast road to the aquarium and clocked in and tried to be a normal employee for an hour and a half.

It didn't really work.

At eleven I went into the back tank room to check the nurse sharks, which is a job I actually like. It's a low concrete room, all pipes and pumps, one big round tank with a viewing panel, and it stays about fifty-five degrees year round so you always end up goosebumped in there. Patti calls it the wine cellar. The sharks don't care about my personal life, which is one reason I like them.

I stood at the panel and watched the big female, the one we call Dolores, do her slow lap, and I thought about rule four and why we wrote it. We wrote it because of my old job at the fish market, when I was working doubles and Clayton was on his route, and a midday hookup felt like something we'd be stealing. Like getting away with something. The rule was about fairness, we said. Nobody's lunch hour counts more than anybody else's.

But that was two years ago and the reason had rotted out from under it, same as I suspected half the list had. Twelve rules, and I could probably tell you the real reason we wrote maybe five of them. The rest were fear wearing a uniform.

Patti stuck her head in around eleven thirty. "You're doing the thing," she said.

"What thing."

"The face you make when you're planning something you think is scandalous. It's the same face from when you planned Clayton's birthday."

"Tomorrow at one," I said. "You're covering the desk. Nothing scandalous is happening, I just need the room."

"Uh huh. The room with the one locked door and the concrete walls." She looked at Dolores, then back at me. "Does he know about the sharks?"

"He thinks the sharks are watching. I told him they can't see through concrete."

"He's gonna stand there the whole time thinking about them."

"He's a mail carrier, he'll survive."

She went back up front and I finished my rounds. Tested the salinity, hosed the floor, logged the temps. Ordinary stuff. But the whole time there was this low hum under everything, the same way the pumps hum, and I knew what it was. It was the list. It was twelve rules and one broken and one about to be broken on purpose, and underneath all of it the thing neither of us had said out loud yet, the thing Clayton trailed off about at the workbench.

Scared of how much I.

I knew how that sentence ended. I'd known for about eight months. I'd just never had the nerve to finish it, and neither had he, and the rules were the wall we'd both agreed to hide behind, and now he'd knocked a hole in one and I was about to knock a hole in another, and after tomorrow there was no telling what the list even meant.

Wednesday crawled. At twelve forty-five I texted him. Phone, texting, so on and so forth, rule nine's ghost can rest. *One o'clock. Side door. Bring nothing.*

He answered in under a minute. *Nothing like what.*

*Nothing. Just you.*

*That's ominous.*

*That's the point.*

I put the phone in my locker, took the key off the hook, and went down the hall to unlock the side door, and I left it standing open a hand's width, the way we used to at my old apartment before any of the rules existed, before either of us got so careful. Then I went and stood at the tank panel in my aquarium polo with my arms crossed, watching Dolores make her slow, patient lap, waiting for the door to click.

The door clicked at ten past one. I heard him lock it behind him, which was very rule-following of him, and then he came around the corner of the pipe gallery and stopped when he saw me by the tank panel.

"You're still in the polo," he said.

"I'm at work. Technically."

"Technically." He set his bag down by the door. Nothing in it, he'd kept his word. "So this is it. The wine cellar."

"Patti's word, not mine. And the sharks can't see us."

"You're sure about that."

"Concrete, Clayton. They're nurses. They sleep eighteen hours a day anyway."

He came over and stood next to me at the panel. Dolores did her lap like she always does, unhurried, like she owns the place, which in a way she does. His shoulder touched mine. Fifty-five degrees in that room and his shoulder was warm through the polo.

"Rule four," he said. "Broken properly this time. Not a text, not a maybe. You drove here and took your lunch hour and everything."

"Somebody has to keep it competitive."

He turned me around by the hip, slow, so I had time to say no, and I didn't say no, and that was the entire conversation right there. We kissed against the pipe rail, which was cold and painted over about six times and smelled like chlorine and old paint, and I got his jacket off him and he got my polo untucked and then I remembered the floor.

"Wait. It's concrete. My knees are not doing concrete."

"There's a mat by the pump housing. I saw it walking in."

"You scouted the room."

"I always scout the room. It's how I didn't die delivering mail in winter."

We dragged the rubber mat over and he laid me back on it, and I'll say this for the cold room, it does something to you, every point of skin that gets touched feels like it's the only warm thing in the world, his brown hands on my pale hips, the tank's blue light moving over both of us. He worked his way down slow and I stopped narrating after a while.

We'd done this enough times that we don't ask every single step anymore, that was never a rule, the rule was always verbal consent for anything new. So when he lifted my hips I said yes out loud, plain, and when I reached for his belt he said yes too, and the condom came out of his jacket pocket because he is a creature of habit even when he's breaking rules.

That's when the hearing aid went.

I didn't notice at first. I was on my hands and knees on the mat, hands braced on the rubber, and he was inside me with these long slow strokes that were making it very hard to think, and I got a word out that came out mostly air.

"Clayton."

Nothing. He kept going but he didn't answer, and when I turned my head he wasn't looking at my mouth.

I reached back and touched his knee, two taps, our old signal from before we ever had a list, and he stopped immediately and leaned down so I could see his face, and he was already reaching up to his ear with that sheepish look.

"Dead," he said, way too loud, the way he talks when he knows he can't hear himself. He pulled the battery out and the spare out of the little case he carries, and there was this minute where we're both half dressed on a rubber mat in a shark room and he's squinting at a battery like it's a puzzle.

"Spare's dead too," he said. "I meant to replace it."

"You're telling me both of them died."

"The world is telling you that. I'm just the messenger."

So there it was. Rule eleven, the one we wrote the first winter, always verbal consent, anything new gets said out loud and answered out loud. He couldn't hear me. Not a whisper, not a word. We wrote that rule after a bad night early on when I froze and he didn't notice, and I'd defended it for two years as the one rule that could never bend.

And he was looking at me, waiting, one hand flat on my back.

"We can stop," I said, loud and clear, and he read my lips fine and shook his head.

"We don't have to," he said back, too loud again. Then he tapped my hip, once, twice, and pointed at my mouth, and pointed at his eyes. Say it so I can see it.

"Keep going," I said, slow, and he watched my lips and grinned and did exactly that.

It was different with him half deaf. I couldn't whisper to him and he couldn't murmur in my ear, so it all had to be hands and eyes and mouthed words, and it turned out that was its own kind of loud. He watched my face the whole time like the words were written there. When I wanted him faster I pulled at his hip. When I got close I said it over my shoulder and he felt me say it more than anything, and when we finished I laughed into his shoulder because I couldn't help it.

"What," he said, too loud.

"Rule eleven just died in a shark room."

"We can write a new one." He pulled out and dealt with the condom, tying it off like always, and lay down next to me on the mat, which nobody would ever design for two people, and we lay there looking at the underside of the pipe rail. "Verbal consent. We still did it. Just, louder."

"You couldn't hear me at all."

"I could see you. It counts." He rolled his head to look at me. "It always counted, Karen. The rule was never about the sound."

I didn't have an answer for that so I kissed him instead, and afterward I checked my phone, which is allowed now apparently, and I had nine minutes left of my lunch hour.

"We're going back to work sweaty," he said.

"You're going back to work sweaty. I get the staff shower."

---

The next morning I came by the shop early, before my shift, with coffee for both of us and the cat hair all over my coat as evidence I'd stopped home. Clayton was already at the big workbench with Eugene's last marionette, the one he'd been repairing since March, and the dog, Eugene's old dog, who lives with the nephew now and visits like he owns the place, sneezed at my shoes in greeting.

"Careful," Clayton said without looking up. "He's marking territory."

"He's sneezing."

"That's how he marks it."

I put the coffee down and he took a break and we stood there drinking it, and he said, out of nowhere, "I keep thinking about Eugene's unfinished