Dare Mountain

Ingrid Jorgenson was twenty-three years old and her back hurt. That was the joke of it, she figured. She'd spent the whole week on her knees under other people's sinks, pulling hair clogs out of drains in the retirement condos over on Route 9, and now her lower back was making its feelings known. Not that she said that word. She'd learned in plumbing school you never complain to other plumbers about your back. Everybody's back hurts. That's the job.

So she parked her van in the gravel lot at the Silver Fir Lodge at 7:40 on a Friday night, late spring, snow gone from everything but the top of the mountain, and sat there for a minute with her hands on the wheel. The lodge was half empty this time of year. The lot had maybe nine cars in it. One of them was Riley's Honda with a cracked taillight, which meant he'd actually come, which meant the weekend was really happening.

She went in. The bar at the Silver Fir was wood-paneled and dim, the way it had been since the seventies, and it smelled like pine and old fireplaces. Nicki was finishing her shift at the taps, and Lucille was on a stool next to the bar proper, legs crossed, phone out. And there was Riley at a corner table, hat pushed back, grinning at her like he'd been waiting all day.

"There she is," he called. "Ingrid Jorgenson, plumber to the stars."

"There's no stars out here," Ingrid said.

"Plumber to the raccoons, then. Sit down. We ordered you a shot."

She sat. There were four shot glasses on the table, already full, some kind of whiskey by the color of it. Lucille, Nicki's girlfriend of two months, gave her a wave and went back to her phone. Lucille was twenty-two and visiting for the weekend, and Ingrid didn't know her well yet, but she seemed all right.

"How was your week?" Riley asked.

"I pulled a tennis ball out of a main line on Tuesday. A whole tennis ball. Don't ask me how."

"That's not a story."

"It is a story. That ball traveled forty feet of pipe. Somewhere in this world there's a dog that misses it."

Riley laughed and pushed a shot glass across the table at her. "Drink. You look like you need it."

Ingrid picked it up, then put it down again. "Hold on. I've been driving. Give me ten minutes."

"It's one shot."

"It's a Friday and I drove ninety minutes. Ten minutes, Riley."

Nicki leaned over the bar. "She's got a point," she said. "You want a water, Ing?"

"Water and the shot. I'll catch up."

So they sat and talked for a while, about Nicki's slow season, about Lucille's seasonal job down at the outfitter, about Riley's ski school shrinking down to nothing once the snow did. He was between contracts, basically, and living out of his Honda until summer work started. He had a way of making that sound fun instead of sad, which was a thing he could do.

Then, somewhere around the second round, he pointed at her.

"You know what your problem is, Jorgenson?"

"I have several problems. Which one?"

"You're twenty-three and you act forty. You've got an old soul. Old souls shouldn't drink alone in cabins, it makes them sixty."

"That's not what old soul means."

"It's exactly what it means. You go to bed at ten. You own a crockpot."

"The crockpot works."

"See?" He turned to Nicki and Lucille. "She has a crockpot and she defends it."

Lucille looked up from her phone. "My mom has a crockpot."

"Thank you," Riley said. "That's my point."

Ingrid felt something prickle in her chest, and it wasn't quite annoyance. It was more like the feeling of standing at the top of a run she hadn't done before. "Fine. What do you want?"

"A dare. One dare. You do it, I'll drop the old soul thing all weekend."

"Or?"

"Or you admit you're basically sixty."

Nicki brought another shot over and set it down in front of her, and Ingrid noticed Nicki was smiling and not stopping this, which was its own kind of permission.

"Fine," Ingrid said. "Dare."

Riley folded his arms on the table, pleased with himself. "Take that shot without using your hands. No hands at all."

"That's the dare? That's the oldest dare there is."

"Then it should be easy."

It was not easy. She leaned down over the table, got her mouth around the rim of the glass, and tipped it up, and the whiskey hit her lip and ran a little down her chin before she got the angle right. She choked, set the glass down with her teeth, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve while Riley howled.

"There's whiskey on the table," Nicki said. "Some of it's on the table."

"It counts," Ingrid said. "I drank most of it."

"You wore some of it."

"I drank most of it and I wore the rest. It counts." She sat back, face warm, and pointed at him. "Your turn. And no old soul talk for the rest of the weekend, that was the deal."

"Deal's a deal." Riley took his own shot the normal way, like a coward, and set the glass down. "Okay. Your turn to dare me."

She dared him to tell Nicki he was her favorite bartender, straight-faced, which he did, and Nicki told him to buy another round, which he did. Then Lucille dared Riley to text his mother a compliment with no context, which he also did, which was somehow the most embarrassing thing anyone had done all night. His mother texted back a thumbs up and a question mark.

The table was loose now. Lucille had put her phone away. Nicki was leaning on the bar doing nothing, because there was nobody to serve, and the overhead lights were the low amber kind that made everybody look better than they were.

"Okay," Riley said, and he had that look again. "Round two. My dare."

"I did my dare."

"New round. You in or you out?"

Ingrid looked at the table. "What is it?"

"I bet you can't tell a dirty joke to this table without blushing. Full joke. Setup, punchline, the whole thing."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"I tell worse than that on job sites daily."

"Then it's free money."

The thing was, on job sites the jokes weren't hers, they were just things she laughed at. Telling one yourself, on purpose, to a table of four, was different. She thought about it anyway.

"Fine," she said. "But if I do it, you have to do one too."

"Deal."

She put her elbows on the table and got serious, the way you do when you're about to dig a hole in a yard you haven't surveyed yet.

"Okay. So there's this guy, and he goes to the doctor, and he says, doc, I've got this problem, my..." She was already losing the thread. She'd heard the joke a hundred times in a break room somewhere and now she could not remember the middle. "He says, my wife thinks I'm a sex addict, because I think about it all day at work."

"That's the joke?" Lucille said.

"I'm not done. And the doctor says, well, how often do you think about it, and the guy says, every hour, maybe more, and the doctor says, sir, that's not..." Ingrid stopped. The punchline had left her completely. "There was a part about a bus. Or a garden hose."

"A garden hose," Riley said, delighted.

"Shut up. The doctor says that's not an addiction, that's just being a guy, or something, and then the guy... oh, I don't remember. He does something with the garden hose."

The table looked at her.

"So the punchline is a garden hose," Nicki said.

"The punchline is implied by the garden hose."

Lucille laughed, not mean, just laughing. "That's cute. You're cute when you tell dirty jokes."

Ingrid felt her ears go hot before she even registered the words. "I'm not cute."

"You're blushing."

"It's the whiskey."

"It's the garden hose," Riley said. "Your ears are purple, Jorgenson."

She turned to face him, and the prickle was back, that top-of-the-run feeling, stronger now. "Okay. That's two. You owe me a joke now, and if you blush, I win the round."

Riley cracked his knuckles. "Oh, I don't blush. I've told jokes at funerals."

Riley told a joke about two priests and a canoe that was genuinely funny and completely clean, which was somehow worse, because nobody could prove he had cheated. Nicki ruled it a technical loss for Ingrid, and Lucille ruled it a win for comedy, and they got a second round anyway.

It was past nine by then. The lodge stayed half empty. An old guy at the corner table paid his tab and left, and his headlights swept the gravel lot and were gone. Ingrid checked her phone, saw it was 9:15, and was surprised. Normally she'd be home by now, hair wet, crockpot leftovers, asleep by ten. She put the phone face down on the table.

"Okay," Riley said. "This one is the big one. This is the dare that ends round three."

"Why does it feel like you've been saving it."

"Because I have." He turned his chair to face her fully. "I dare you to let me kiss you. On the mouth. Just a quick one, for the table."

The table went quiet in a specific way. Nicki picked up a glass and started polishing it with a rag that was more decorative than functional. Lucille leaned her chin on her hand.

Ingrid thought about it longer than she meant to. Not about whether. About why her stomach was doing the thing it was doing.

"For the table," she said.

"For the table. It's basically charity."

"Fine. Quick one. For the table."

He leaned in and she leaned in and it was awkward for about half a second, noses figuring themselves out, and then his mouth met hers and it was not awkward at all. He tasted like whiskey. His hand came up and rested light on the side of her neck, just resting, nothing else. She counted in her head without deciding to. One, two, three. He pulled back on three exactly, like he'd been counting too.

The bar was very quiet.

"Well," Nicki said, and went back to polishing.

Ingrid sat there. The kiss had lasted three seconds and her whole face felt rearranged. It was a dare, it was supposed to be a dare, a dumb thing at a dumb table, and instead there was this warm line running from her mouth down through her chest to somewhere lower, and she could still feel where his hand had been on her neck, like the skin was keeping a receipt.

"Your ears are purple again," Riley said.

"It's the whiskey."

"Sure it is."

"That was way more than a quick one," Lucille said. "I was counting."

"You were counting?"

"Somebody had to. You two were busy."

Ingrid took a drink she didn't need. The thing she felt wasn't embarrassment exactly. It was closer to the feeling of standing at the top of a run you'd just been dared down, except the run was the rest of the night, and she was already pointed downhill.

"Okay," she said. "Round four. Someone dare something so we can move past this."

"Moving right along," Nicki said, with a face that said the opposite.

***

They closed the place out early, meaning Nicki announced last call to a bar containing four people and one corner table that had ordered water. Lucille had work at the outfitter in the morning, some inventory thing, so she and Nicki took off first in Nicki's Subaru. Lucille hugged Ingrid on the way out and whispered, "he's been looking at you like that all night, just so you know," which Ingrid pretended not to hear.

That left the two of them standing in the gravel lot next to Ingrid's van and Riley's Honda with its cracked taillight. The sky was doing that late spring thing where it never fully gets dark, just a deep blue with a few stars in it like someone forgot to turn them off.

"I'm a mile down the road," Ingrid said. "Cabin. You could walk over, we could do a movie or whatever."

"Or whatever."

"Don't make it weird."

"I would never." He got in the Honda and followed her dust the whole mile, headlights in her mirror, and she was aware of them the entire time, the way you're aware of someone behind you on a ladder.

The cabin was small and honest about it. Kitchenette, couch, bed behind a partial wall, wood paneling that matched the lodge. She'd left a spoon in the sink that morning and she rinsed it while Riley looked at her bookshelf like it was a museum exhibit.

"You have four books about the history of plumbing."

"They're interesting."

"One of them has a bookmark made of a pipe fitting catalog page."

"It was convenient."

He sat on the couch. She brought two waters because they'd had enough whiskey to need them, and sat on the opposite end, and for a while that was fine, and then it wasn't fine, in the sense that she could feel three inches of couch cushion between