Cold Request

I was halfway through a boring email on my phone in the lobby when I spotted Wallace across the room, and I have to admit my first thought was not about the dog at all. It was about how out of place he looked, a dental hygienist from Ohio sitting in a marble hotel lobby in Milan, wearing a lanyard and a checked shirt, pretending to read a conference program. We were close in age, him twenty-six and me twenty-seven, though I like to claim seniority because I have been buying tea professionally since twenty-two, which sounds more adult than it is.

Anyway, the dog. My colleague Deva had brought this enormous shaggy mutt to the materials-science conference, which nobody could explain, and the dog had that afternoon bolted through an unlatched service door and vanished into the back corridors of the hotel. Deva was in a panic up in her room recalculating some graph, so the search had fallen to me, and I am not above recruiting help.

"Wallace!" I shouted across the lobby, probably too loud, and he jogged over looking pleased and confused at the same time.

The thing about Wallace is I knew him already, sort of. We shared a seminar two years ago at a summer program, and there was a party three years ago where we flirted for maybe twenty minutes and then both lost our nerve in separate directions. He never followed up. I never followed up. And now here he was at a conference about thermal insulation polymers, which is somehow a real field that real adults attend, and I had a lost dog and a free evening.

"Deva's dog got out," I told him. "Big shaggy thing, answers to Noodle, allegedly. He went through the service door by the ballroom. You're helping me."

"Am I," he said, but he was already pocketing his phone, so that settled that.

We went through the service door and into the back half of the hotel, which is all gray carpet and humming equipment and signs about authorized personnel. The dog had left a trail of disturbance, a knocked mop, a startled housekeeper who pointed us further in, and we followed it down toward the basement level where the hotel keeps its machinery. The hotel borrows a corner of the basement from the physics lab next door, an actual cold room, and they use it to store perishable exhibit samples for the conference. I know this because my samples live in there. I am at the conference in a semi-official capacity, sourcing packaging materials for tea shipments, which is a long story involving a client who thinks foil pouches are ruining the industry.

So we walked and talked, and honestly the talking was the best part. The conference had been four days of identical talks about thermal conductivity and I had reached the stage where I could not hear the phrase "insulation performance" without wanting to leave the building. Wallace felt the same, though he kept apologizing for feeling it, like the conference might be offended.

"You sat through the entire graphene panel this morning," I said. "I saw you. You had the face of a man being slowly pressed flat."

"I was being polite," he said. "There were maybe nine people in that room. It felt mean to leave."

"That's not politeness, that's hostage behavior."

He laughed at that, properly, and I remembered that I had liked him at that party three years ago for exactly this reason. He laughs like he means it.

Somewhere around the second basement corridor he started telling me about the dating apps, which I had asked about, because Wallace has the kind of disaster stories you cannot let pass. There was the woman who brought a spreadsheet of his perceived flaws. There was the man who ordered for him without asking and then critiqued his chewing. There was a woman who, on the second date, confessed she had been reading his sister's public social media for a year and held judgments about the whole family, and Wallace had sat there nodding like this was normal.

"You keep saying 'the whole family,'" I said, "like that's the strange part and not the year of surveillance."

"The strange part is she had notes," he said. "Written notes. In her bag."

"And you finished the date?"

"I finished the date. I paid, even. I don't understand myself either."

We found the dog eventually, or the dog found us, in the sense that we rounded a corner near the cold room and there he was, curled up asleep on the concrete outside the heavy insulated door like he had been waiting for room service. Noodle, big and gray and deeply asleep, one ear twitching at our footsteps.

"Well," I said, "that was easier than advertised."

I texted Deva, and she sent back about eleven exclamation points and instructions to keep him away from the vending machines, which apparently was a whole incident last year. So there we were, dog secured, and instead of heading straight back up, I did something self-indulgent. I needed to pull one of my sample boxes from the cold room anyway, the tea packaging samples, and I had the key on me because I am in and out of there at odd hours. I told Wallace he could wait or come along, and he came along, which surprised me a little and pleased me more.

The cold room is exactly what it sounds like, a big walk-in refrigerator the size of a small apartment, kept at about four degrees Celsius, all steel shelving and cold blue light. I grabbed a box, and Wallace stood there in the doorway shivering almost immediately, arms crossed, and I noticed he was in a thin shirt and I was in a cardigan and neither of us had dressed for this.

"God, how do you work in here," he said through chattering teeth.

"Quickly," I said. "And there's a coat hanging by the door if you're soft."

He declined the coat, out of some stubbornness I recognized, and then he did something I did not expect. He kept talking, standing there in the cold, and the talking wandered somewhere real. He said he had been reading about kink for a couple of years. Not doing anything, just reading, and taking quizzes he did not trust, and he said it in this careful way, watching my face like he was testing the ice before putting weight on it.

"I've never actually done anything," he said. "Real, I mean. With another person. I don't even fully know what I'd want. I just know the idea of it doesn't leave me alone."

And here is where I confess my own thing, because the cold room does something to people, maybe, all that blue light and quiet, or maybe I was just tired of being the person nobody asks. I told him I had been a dominant for years. Since twenty-one, which is six years of it now, mostly in a small scene in my city, carefully, slowly, with a lot of conversations that sounded exactly like the one we were having. I did not tell him to impress him. I told him because he had put something fragile on the table and it felt rude to leave my own hands empty.

He went quiet, and then he said, "You're kidding," in a voice that meant the opposite of kidding.

The dog had followed us in, somehow, and was sitting on a low shelf looking pleased with himself, so I picked him up and put him back in the corridor and shut the door partway. Then I stood there doing mental math I had no business doing, and Wallace was watching me do it, and for a second we both stayed quiet.

"Okay," I said finally. "Here's what happens now, if you want it. Nothing happens fast. Nothing happens unless you say so at every step. And the first thing is the most boring thing, which is that you learn a safeword."

"Red," he said, too fast, like he'd read about it, which he had.