Dares After Dark

I'm fifty-two years old, and until a year ago the most reckless thing I did on a Friday night was leave the dishes until Saturday.

There, I said it. Rina Newell, freelance editor, rural Wales by way of thirty years of London that never quite stuck, owner of one cat, zero houseplants (they die out of spite, I swear they plot it), and a career built entirely on other people's sentences. I fix commas for a living. I make sure the hero reaches for the door handle in chapter four so she can use it in chapter nine. Exciting stuff!

My neighbors out here are sheep, mostly, and a scattering of farmers who wave at you from tractors like they're hailing a passing ship. And Drake Sikes. Drake is the exception to everything, and I'll get to him, because I have to, because this whole mess is his fault.

Drake is forty-six, a grain inspector, which is a real job I also thought was made up until I moved here. He inspects grain. He drives out to silos all over the county and pokes it and tests it and presumably tells farmers whether their grain is being grain correctly. He's broad, loud, laughs like a door coming off its hinges, and he adopted me within a week of my arrival by leaving a bag of potatoes on my doorstep with a note that said "these are from my garden, sorry about the garden."

We became friends the way you do in the country, I had no choice in the matter and now I'd fight a bear for him. Well. A medium bear.

You'd like him, probably. Unless you were trying to have a quiet evening, in which case you would not like him at all.

Which brings me to the Thursday night in question. It was raining the way it does here, which is sideways and personally. I had a cold mug of tea, a manuscript about competitive cheese rolling that was somehow worse than it sounds, and a backlog so deep I'd started referring to it as "the shelf." Then came the knock. Not a polite knock. A Drake knock, three bangs and a shout of "Rina!" through the actual door itself, a man who has never once trusted a doorbell.

I opened it and there he stood, dripping, holding his laptop above his head like it was a baby and the rain was a dragon.

"Your wifi," he said.

"What about it?"

"It's out. Ours. Has been since four. I've got quotes due tonight and Bruce the farmer is sending me his moisture readings and I cannot do a single thing."

"Oh no," I said, and I'll admit I enjoyed it a little. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

"Don't be smug, woman, let me in."

I let him in. I made him dry off, I made him tea because I'm not a monster, and I pointed him at my dining table where my router blinked its little green blink of welcome. He was typing away for maybe ten minutes, muttering at Bruce's numbers, and I went back to the cheese book and thought that was that.

It was not that.

"So," he said, in the tone he uses when he's about to ruin my life. "What's on the shelf these days? Still drowning?"

"Always drowning. Why?"

"Because I'm good with my hands and I'm bored out of my skull in the evenings and I'll tell you another thing, I type faster than you think I type."

"You want to... do my editing?"

"Proofing! The easy bits. Typos, spacing, that kind of thing. You'd check my work, obviously. And in exchange." He spun my spare chair around and sat on it backwards like we were in a music video. "You play a game with me."

I should have thrown him out then. I want that noted. Instead I said, "What game?"

"Dares. Little ones. Nothing mad. We're at it anyway, you and me, we're always daring each other about something. This just makes it official."

"We are not always daring each other about something!"

"Last month you bet me I couldn't carry both your hay bales at once."

"That was a bet, and you dropped one on your own foot."

"And I walked it off. Rina. Come on. You know you want in. You've been here a year and your idea of adventure is decaf after six."

That stung, which was the point, and Drake knows exactly where to poke because he's been poking me for twelve months and I keep letting him. I get stubborn. It's my worst quality and also, when Drake is involved, apparently my only one.

"Fine," I said. "What kind of dares?"

"Small ones to start. Sing a line of something. Hold an ice cube. Whatever. And one bigger one later, my pick, reasonable, nothing you'd actually hate." He held out his hand. "Deal?"

"I will supervise every comma you touch," I warned, shaking it.

"Wouldn't have it any other way."

And that, dear reader, is how I signed my own doom with a handshake over a mug of tea, while the rain hammered the windows like it knew something I didn't.

Now. Here's a thing you need for later. There's a place up the hill from both our houses, an old observatory, great white dome on a hillside like a golf ball dropped by a giant. Nobody's looked at stars through it in decades. A few years back some local musicians fixed it up, put a mixing desk where the telescope used to be, sound baffles on the curved walls, and now bands rehearse and record in there. The acoustics are apparently incredible. Gregor Benson runs the sound side of it, a careful, dry-humored man of fifty-four who I've met maybe four times and who has never once laughed at one of my jokes, which I respect.

The band that uses it most is Fathom. Fathom is fronted by Estelle Wiseman, forty-eight, voice like gravel soaked in honey, hair going silver at the temples and entirely unbothered about it. I have heard them drifting up the hill on rehearsal nights and I have thought, more than once, that she has the kind of voice that makes you want to stand very still.

I mention all this because Drake, the absolute villain, knows all of it too.

Friday night, first dare. He turned up at eight with his laptop and a grin I should have charged admission for, and we did two hours of actual useful work, I'll grant him that. He's not bad. He caught a "she site by the window" that I'd missed twice, and I only had to fix eleven of his commas.

Then he stretched, cracked his knuckles, and said, "Right. Dare one."

"I'm braced."

"We're going up the dome."

"It's nearly nine."

"They rehearse late Fridays, I heard them load in at seven. Here's the dare. You walk in, plain as anything, and you compliment Estelle on her vocal warm-up. Directly. To her face. Without stammering, without hedging, without doing the thing where you talk about the weather halfway through."

"Drake, they'll be in the middle of a session."

"They'll be in the middle of a break, I checked with Gregor this afternoon, we're expected."

"You CHECKED?"

"I'm thorough, it's why I'm good at grain." He was already holding the door open, the rain behind him like an audience. "Come on. It's one sentence. You edit sentences for a living. This one you just say out loud."

"And what do you get out of it?"

"The pleasure of watching you do something brave," he said, entirely too pleased.

I got my coat. I want it understood that I could have said no, that the deal said nothing I'd actually hate, and I could have argued this qualified. But there was a voice in my head, my own voice, annoyingly, that said, when exactly did you last walk up a hill in the rain to do something stupid and new, Rina Newell? When did you last do anything that would make a good story?

So we walked up the hill, Drake carrying an umbrella like it was a parasol at the seaside, me muttering the sentence over and over under my breath. "That warm-up exercise sounds lovely. Estelle, that warm-up sounds lovely. Hello Estelle, lovely warm-up." Drake kept snorting every time I said it, which did not help.

The dome door was propped open and the noise rolled out down the hill at us, a bass line and then, cutting through everything, that voice, warming up, sliding up a scale and holding the top note like it owed her money.

"Still with me?" Drake asked.

"I hate you."

"Great. In we go."

And the dome swallowed us, all curved white walls and cables and that huge voice bouncing off the ceiling, and Estelle Wiseman turned around mid-scale to see who'd come in out of the rain.

"Hello," she called over the feedback whine. "Visitors. Gregor, we have visitors."

Gregor Benson looked up from the mixing desk with the expression of a man who had expected us, because he had. "Rina. Drake. You're dripping."

"It's Wales," Drake said, shaking the umbrella out the door. "We're always dripping."

Now was my moment. Now or never, or at least now before my nerve did its usual thing and evaporated. I marched across the floor, past a drum kit and a wall of amplifiers, and said, "Estelle? Your warm-up sounds lovely. Really lovely."

There. Said it. Whole sentence, no stammer, no weather.

She lit up like a stage light. "Oh, aren't you sweet. You're Rina, aren't you? Down the hill? Gregor's told me you've got ears." She tapped her own ear to demonstrate. "He says you caught a hum in the monitor feed nobody else could hear."

"I did mention that at the pub, yes," Gregor admitted from the desk. "Once."

"You've mentioned it four times, Gregor." Estelle laughed, and the whole band laughed with her, and somehow I was being hugged by a woman who smelled like cigarettes and bergamot, and Drake was watching from the door with the face of a cat who had successfully knocked something off a shelf.

That was dare one, complete, and I got a handshake and a "well done" and about thirty seconds of feeling invincible before he said, "Right then. Dare two."

Already? We'd been in the building ninety seconds!

Gregor, who apparently was in on all of this now, waved us both over to the mixing desk. It was a huge thing, faders in rows like piano keys, little lights blinking. "Stand there," Drake said, pointing at a spot directly next to Gregor's elbow, "and ask him what that fader does." He pointed at one, somewhere in the middle. "That one. Nicely. Like you're interested."

"Why that one?"

"No idea. Pick an interesting-looking one, Gregor."

Gregor considered this for a moment, then touched a fader near the top left. "This one. It's the high shelf on the vocal bus."

"Perfect," Drake said. "Ask away, Rina."

So there I stood, fifty-two years old, a woman who once edited a four-hundred-page shipping logistics report without blinking, feeling my pulse jump because I had to ask a sound man about a slider. "Gregor," I said, "what does that fader do?"

He brightened. You could tell nobody ever asked him. "Ah. Well now. That's the high shelf on the vocal bus, which means it lifts everything above about eight kilohertz, evenly, across the whole vocal group. Air, we call it. Turn it up and Estelle's voice gets that sparkle, that sheen on the top. Turn it down and she sounds like she's singing through a wool jumper."

"Can I hear the difference?"

He absolutely lit up. He played a few seconds of the rehearsal recording they'd captured, flicked the fader up, down, up again, and honestly? The difference was obvious once he pointed it out, as obvious as a clean window compared to a dirty one. Estelle's voice got shimmery. It got expensive-sounding.

"That's remarkable," I said, and I meant it, and Gregor looked like he'd been handed a present.

"She means it," Drake said. "She's a terrible liar. Ask her about my commas sometime."

"Your commas are a war crime," I told him.

"See? Terrible liar." He checked his phone. "Break's in about ten minutes, by the look of it. Dare three comes after the break."

"What is dare three?" I asked, and immediately regretted asking, because the grin came back.

"You'll see. It involves a rug."

"The rug by the wall?"

"The very same."

Ten minutes later the band broke for tea and biscuits, because apparently every rehearsal in this country runs on tea and biscuits, and Drake steered me toward the curved wall where a rolled-up rug leaned like a fat orange sleeping bag. He tipped it flat onto the floor. It unrolled about halfway and lay there like a challenge.

"Sit," he said.

I sat. The rug was rough under my palms and smelled faintly of dust and old varnish. Estelle was across the room at the little fridge, pouring milk into a mug, and Gregor was doing something inscrutable behind the desk with his back to us.

"Here's the dare," Drake said, crouching to my eye level, which he seemed to find hilarious given he's six inches taller than me. "Gregor's going to play back the song they just recorded. All the way through, about four minutes. Your job is to keep eye contact with Estelle the entire time. She has to agree to it first, of course, and she will, because I already asked her in the pub this afternoon and she laughed for about a minute and said, quote, 'oh, I'd pay to see that.' But it only counts if you don't look away. Blinking is fine. Looking at your hands is not."

"Drake. Four minutes of staring at a woman I've met once?"

"It's not staring if it's a dare," he said, with the solemnity of a judge. "It's a game. Games have rules. Rules make staring legal."

"That's not how anything works."

"Estelle," he called, rising. "You in?"

She came over mug in hand, looking down at me sitting on this half-unrolled rug like a pupil at assembly, and there was that laugh again, warm and low. "Oh, this is going to be