Cork and Crepeline

The potluck had been going for about two hours when Callie hit her stride.

She was twenty-four, a cork stripper from Richmond, Queensland, which meant she spent her days peeling bark off oak trees with a hatchet and an axe. Diego was twenty-two, a paramedic, and they had been dating for two years, ever since they met at a mountain lodge and spent the whole weekend arguing about whose job mattered more. That was their whole thing, arguing. It was also the whole reason the other volunteers kept drifting toward the spice loft whenever the two of them started up.

The loft smelled like cumin and coriander. A long table held chafing dishes, and a 1905 crepeline fabric sample sat pinned to the corkboard near the spice racks, a leftover from the telephone booth restoration project they were all celebrating tonight. The final work party. Last chance to be insufferable about it.

"You couldn't strip cork if your life depended on it," Callie said. She was holding a plate of sausage rolls she had not paid for and had no intention of paying for.

"And you couldn't bag a trauma patient without throwing up," Diego said back. He was leaning against the spice shelf like he owned it. He did not own it. Nobody owned it. It was a community project.

"At least my job doesn't involve driving around all day with the siren on so people look at you."

"At least my job doesn't involve hitting trees with an axe and calling it a career."

"Careers take skill," Callie said. "You've got a uniform and a big mouth."

"Big mouth. That's rich coming from you."

The crowd had been drifting away earlier, but now they gathered again for the show. Callie noticed. Callie always noticed an audience. She reached for the bottle of shiraz somebody had brought, waved it over her head like a trophy, and the crowd cheered, because of course they did. People will cheer anything after two hours of warm wine and lukewarm sausage rolls.

"Prove it, then," she called. "Prove you can handle my work clothes. I dare you."

"Your work clothes?" Diego straightened up. "The shorts?"

"The shorts and the tank, mate. The full kit. You get in my cork gear right now or you shut up about my job forever."

Diego looked around the loft. He looked at the crowd. He looked back at Callie, and something in his face shifted, that competitive glint that had gotten them into every argument and every bet and every single mess of the last two years.

"Fine. But you wear mine."

"My uniform?"

"Your uniform, paramedic. All of it."

Callie grinned. She set the shiraz down on the table with a thump. The crowd made a noise like a football crowd at a questionable referee call, half delight, half horror.

"You're on," she said.

Diego yanked his paramedic polo off over his head in one motion and tossed it at her. It hit her in the face. She caught it out of the air on the second try, laughing, and then she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her work trousers and shimmied out of them right there in the middle of the spice loft, in front of the whole potluck, and threw them straight into his face.

The trousers smelled like oak dust and sweat. Diego peeled them off his head with the dignity of a man who had already lost this round and knew it.

"These are tiny," he said, holding them up. "Callie. These are tiny."

"They fit. That's the point of them."

"They are not going to fit."

"Wear them or shut up about my job forever. Those were the terms."

The crowd was chanting now, actually chanting, which Diego thought was a bit much, and then he thought, well, in for a penny. He kicked off his boots, stepped out of his work pants, and pulled on the cork-stripper shorts. They were tight. They were very tight. They were cutoff khaki shorts that ended high on his thighs and left nothing about his situation to the imagination, and the tank top that went with them was not much better, stretched white cotton over his chest.

The loft howled. Somebody's phone came out. Diego pointed at it.

"No photos. I mean it!"

"Put your uniform on, Callie," someone shouted, and the chanting started again.

Callie shrugged into his uniform shirt. He had left it buttoned, which was a mistake, because buttoned it looked like a tent on her, the sleeves hanging past her fingertips, the hem down near her thighs. She rolled the sleeves up to her elbows, took her time about it, and then unpinned the 1905 crepeline sample from the corkboard and cinched it around her neck like a scarf. Brown gauzy old fabric over a navy paramedic shirt. She looked ridiculous. She looked like she knew she looked ridiculous and was doing it anyway, which was the most Callie thing imaginable.

"How do I look?" she asked, arms out.

"Like a first aid kit wearing a curtain," Diego said.

"Better than you look. You look like a sausage that lost a fight."

The crowd loved that one. The crowd had been loving everything all night, and honestly the two of them had been performing for a while now, and everybody knew it, and nobody said it, because that was the deal with these two. You watched, you laughed, you did not ask what was actually going on under all the noise.

What was actually going on under all the noise was something else entirely, and it had been going on for two years, and it looked a lot like this.

Callie did a slow parade around the chafing dishes in his uniform shirt. She saluted people. She pretended to check somebody's pulse. The crowd roared. Diego stood by the spice shelf in her tiny shorts with his arms crossed, trying to look unbothered, and failing, because she was parading around in his shirt and nothing else visible below it and his brain was not doing great.

Then one of the older volunteers, a woman named Pat who had organized half the restoration project, stood up and clapped her hands.

"Right, that's enough culture for one night. Everyone who wants the good chairs, outside. They've got the courtyard set up anyway."

"It's freezing," someone said.

"It's Queensland, love, it's fine."

And just like that the crowd moved. It moved with the efficiency of people who had been waiting for an excuse, collecting plates and bottles and the sausage rolls, funneling out the loft door into the courtyard where the lights were strung up and somebody had brought a speaker. Within five minutes the loft was empty except for the two of them, the chafing dishes, the spice