Closing Shift Confession

The last batch came off the drum at eleven forty, and I killed the machines and just stood there listening to the quiet. Forty-four years old, head roaster, single again, and the whole building mine for one night. I liked that feeling more than I probably should have.

Eileen was in the back room when I went to grab my coat. She's the night cleaner, forty-six, and she was wringing out a mop like it had insulted her.

"You're here late," I said.

"I'm always here late, hon. You just never stay long enough to see it." She wrung the mop again. "Rough shift?"

"No, good shift. Just don't feel like going home to an empty apartment yet." I hesitated, then figured why not. "You want a drink? I've got a bottle of terrible whiskey in the cabinet and nobody to share it with."

She laughed. "Terrible whiskey's my favorite kind. Let me finish this row and I'm in."

I went out front to lock up and saw Neal leaning against the bike shop wall next door, smoking. He's thirty-eight, owns the repair shop, and we've been doing the neighborly wave for about a year without ever saying a real word.

"Hey," I called. "You smoke outside because you have to, or because you like standing there looking mysterious?"

He grinned. "Little of both, honestly."

"Well, I've got bad whiskey and good company forming in the back room. Come be mysterious indoors."

He stubbed out the cigarette and crossed the little side street. "That's a better offer than my couch and a rerun, Pauline."

And then, because the universe was apparently feeling generous, Clint came jogging across with a pastry box under his arm. Forty-three, pastry chef at the bakery across the street, been bringing me day-old croissants for about a month now.

"Closing drop-off," he said, waving the box. "You're the last stop. What's all this?"

"You're just in time, actually. I'm hosting a very low-budget party in the back room. Whiskey's cheap, pastries are yours. You in?"

He looked at the box, then at me. "Yeah, I'm in. Who else is coming?"

"Neal from the bike shop and Eileen, our cleaner. That's the whole guest list."

"That's the best guest list I've heard all year," he said.

* * *

So that's how four grown adults ended up on the worn leather couch in my back room at midnight, passing around paper cups of whiskey that tasted like a campfire's regrets. The streetlight came through the front glass in a pale stripe. The room still smelled like the day's roast, which I think is the best smell in the world, and nobody else at that couch disagreed.

"This is awful," Neal said, after his first sip.

"I warned you."

"Awful in a good way," Clint said. "Like a dive bar."

"To the dive bar," Eileen said, and we all tapped cups.

I don't know what made me start talking. Maybe the whiskey, maybe the hour, maybe just the fact that I'd been carrying something around for a year and none of these three people knew my ex, knew the café, knew any of it. Clean slate.

"So," I said, turning my cup in my hands. "You all probably wonder why I'm always the last one here."

"Nobody wondered that, Pauline," Eileen said gently. "But tell us anyway."

I laughed. "Fine. I ran a café with my partner for seven years. We split last year. Not the business, just us. And there's a part of that story I never tell anybody, because it sounds like a confession."

Clint leaned forward a little. "Now you have to tell it!"

"Yeah, she has to," Neal said, smiling.

"Ok, but nobody laugh." I took a sip. "I loved being watched. That's the confession. In the café, when it was busy, when people were looking at me while I worked the bar, I felt more alive than I have ever felt doing anything else. And my partner, well, he hated that about me. Called it showing off. Said I needed attention like other people need air, and he said it like it was a disease."

Eileen set her cup down slow. "It's not a disease."

"You don't have to say that just to be nice."

"I'm not being nice. I've been cleaning this place at night for two years, hon, and I've got twenty years of marriage and four of being single behind me. I know what it is to want something and feel like you have to whisper it." She picked the cup back up. "Keep going."

"That's kind of it, though. The ugly confession is complete. He made me feel like a freak for it, and I believed him for a long time, and now I'm forty-four and sitting on a couch with three near strangers telling them my worst secret because the whiskey is bad and the night is long." I looked at all of them. "Sorry. That was heavier than I meant it to be."

Neal was quiet a second. "Can I say something? I watch you through that window, you know. When you're roasting. Everyone at my shop does, honestly. There's something about watching a person who's completely absorbed in what they're doing. It's, I don't know, it's a rare thing. You've got it."

"You're just being neighborly."

"I'm being honest. I've been divorced five years and I've spent a lot of that time trying to feel interested in anything. Watching you work is one of the few things that does it."

Clint cleared his throat. "I'll admit something too, since we're apparently doing that. I started bringing you croissants for selfish reasons. The first month I worked across the street, I watched you boss that roaster around like it owed you money, and I thought, I want to know her. That's it. That was the whole reason."

I felt my face go warm and I didn't try to hide it. "You're all going to make my head swell."

"Good," Eileen said. "Your head should swell. Now tell me something, since we're sharing. When you say watched. You mean people looking while you worked? Or do you mean something more than that?"

And there it was, the question I'd been circling all night. I could have dodged it. I didn't want to.

"More than that," I said. "I mean, yes, the café thing is real. But I've always, hmm, how do I say this without sounding completely unhinged." I looked around the couch. Neal was watching me, Clint was watching me, Eileen was watching me, and even that, right then, even that little ring of attention, was doing something to me I hadn't felt in years.

"Just say it," Clint said quietly.

"I like an audience. All the way down. I like being seen, and I like performing, and I don't mean on a stage. And my whole adult life I've pretended that was a small thing about me when it's actually the biggest thing about me." I drained my cup. "There. Now you know more about me than my own sister does."

Nobody laughed. That mattered more than I can explain.

Neal spoke first. "You know what's funny? That's the least unhinged thing anyone's said to me in years."

"Agreed," Clint said.

Eileen reached over and squeezed my knee. "So what are you gonna do with that, hon? Now that you've said it out loud to a room full of people who aren't running anywhere?"

I looked at her hand on my knee, at the stripe of streetlight on the floor, at three faces waiting on me.

"Well," I said, and my heart picked up, "I was thinking about that, actually. What I'd do with a room full of people who weren't running anywhere."

* * *

Eileen got up and came back from the sink with a pitcher of water and four glasses. "Nobody does anything brave on an empty stomach and two paper cups of this," she said. We all drank a full glass, Clint broke open the pastry box, and we sat another half hour talking about nothing, until every one of us was clear-headed and the whiskey was just a warm memory.

I stood up. Nobody said a word, which felt like a yes and no at the same time, so I asked out loud. "Everyone sober and sure? Say it if you're not. Because I'm going to take my shirt off, and I'd like to know that's ok with everybody."

"God, yes," Eileen said.

"Yeah," Neal said, and his voice had gone a little rough.

"Please," Clint said, and then looked embarrassed that he'd said please that fast.

I started at the top button. I'd worn the good shirt on purpose, the soft blue one, though I hadn't known at seven this morning why I'd picked it. I took my time. One button, look at Neal. One button, look at Clint. One button, look at Eileen, who had gone still on her end of the couch with her cup halfway to her mouth.

"This ok?" I asked again, halfway through, because I wanted to hear it.

"Yes," all three of them said, nearly together, and that made me laugh, which made my hands shake a little, which honestly made it better.

Eileen got up while I was working the last button. "Let me get the door," she said, and crossed the room in the dark and turned the lock on the front door with a click that sounded very loud. Then she turned off the little lamp behind the counter so the only light was the streetlight stripe across the floor. "There. Now it's just us!"

I let the shirt slide off my shoulders and drop on the arm of the couch. My bra was plain black and my stomach is a real forty-four year old stomach and I stood there in the pale light and let them look. I have never in my life felt anything like what that felt like. All three of them, looking, not pretending not to.

"Oh my god," Clint said softly. "You're beautiful."

"You don't have to flatter me."

"I'm not flattering you. I'm describing you."

Neal leaned back against the couch cushions. "You look like someone who knows exactly what she's doing."

"I have no idea what I'm doing," I said. "That's the fun part."

Eileen settled back down. "So what happens now, hon? You're the one with the audience. Direct us."

I looked at Clint. I had been looking at Clint in my head for a month, since about the third croissant, and I figured the room already knew it. "Clint. Come here."

He got up and came around the couch and stood in front of me, and he's an inch or two taller than me and he smelled like butter and sugar and that is one smell I will never get tired of. "Hi," he said.

"Hi. Do you want to kiss me?"

"Very much, yes!"

"Then kneel down and start with my legs, and work your way up slow, and I mean slow, I'm not in a hurry tonight."

He went down on his knees right there on the concrete floor, easy as anything, and I heard Neal exhale behind us. Clint kissed the top of my foot first, which I wasn't expecting, then my ankle, then up the inside of my calf with little unhurried kisses. His hands came around the back of my thighs and just rested there, warm, not pulling.

"Is this ok?" he asked against my knee.

"It's perfect. Keep going."

I looked over at the couch while he worked. Neal was watching us with his forearms on his knees and his paper cup forgotten on the floor, and the look on his face was the exact look I'd been missing for years. Not jealousy, not worry. Hunger with nowhere to put itself. He caught me looking and I grinned at him and he grinned back and mouthed something like keep going, so I did.

"You know," I said, to the room in general, because talking is part of it for me, I know that about myself now, "I used to do this in my head at the café. Stand at the bar and imagine somebody watching me like this. Really watching. It got me through some very slow Tuesdays."

"Slow Tuesdays," Neal said. "I believe that."

Eileen's voice came from the darker end of the couch, low. "Can I ask you all something?"

"Anything," I said.

"Would it be alright if I, hmm." She laughed at herself. "Twenty years married, you'd think I'd be