Drawstring and Denial

I'm Russ, twenty-eight, and I run the gear library in the old railway tunnel at Karioi. Ropes, harnesses, cams, all of it checked in and checked out by me. I've been doing it two years now and I know every drawstring in the place, which is why what happened this morning drove me insane.

Keisha works at a lab in town, something with pipette tips, and she climbs at the gym where we met six months back. We've been arguing since day one. She's twenty-seven and stubborn as a rusted bolt and she thinks her rack is the gospel truth.

It was setup morning for the wharf-carving ceremony, low tide day, when the whole town walks out on the mud and carves ship names into a fresh piling. I had tables to set and bins to open, and I was in the tunnel doing inventory when I saw it.

A linen laundry bag hanging off her pack. Faded stripes. Green and cream.

"Okay, that's mine," I said.

Keisha looked up from her harness. "What's yours?"

"The bag. The striped one. That's my gear bag."

She pulled it off her pack and held it against her hip like I was going to lunge for it. Which, fair, I was. "Russ, I've had this bag for three years. My sister gave it to me before she moved to Auckland."

"Then your sister stole it, because that bag has been in my kit since before you and I ever met. There's a burn mark on the bottom from when I hung it too close to a camp stove at Mount Sefton."

"You did not just invent a burn mark."

"Look at the bottom."

She looked. She went quiet for a second, and then she said, "That could be any burn mark."

"Any burn mark," I repeated. "From any camp stove. On your sister's bag."

"There are literally hundreds of bags like this in New Zealand."

"Not with a bleach stain shaped like a duck on the side."

"It's a blotch, Russ. Not a duck."

"It is a duck. I've pointed that duck out to at least four people."

Down the tunnel, Simon and Tane were sorting quickdraws into bins and pretending very hard that neither of us existed. The acoustics in that tunnel are a nightmare. Everything echoes off the old brick, so my voice came back at me off both walls, which made the whole argument sound twice as stupid and also twice as serious. Somebody's headlamp swung around and swung away again. Nobody wanted a piece of this.

"Look," she said, "even if it was yours, which it isn't, I found it in the lost bin three months ago, so possession is nine tenths."

"You found it in the lost bin because somebody borrowed it and put it back in the wrong place. Probably you. The lost bin is on my side of the tunnel, which means it came home to me."

"That's not how lost bins work."

"That's exactly how lost bins work."

She shouldered the bag. She actually shouldered it, like she was going to walk out with my duck-stained laundry bag into daylight and never look back. "Tell you what. Winner of the race to the piling gets it."

"There's no race. The ceremony doesn't start for two hours. Nobody's racing."

"Then I guess it's mine."

"Give me the bag, Keisha."

"Come and get it."

Looking back, I handled it like a mature gear librarian. I did not. I grabbed the drawstring and she yanked and we both went backwards. The bag was half full of my old cordelette and it had some heft to it, so when she twisted and pulled I had to step in or lose it, and that's when she got the genius idea to duck under my arm and spin, which is a real move for the gym but not for a tunnel with bin racks down both sides.

She caught her heel on the lip of the rope bin and went over backwards into about forty meters of nine mil, and because I still had the drawstring in my fist, I went with her.

The bin is a big plywood job, half a meter deep, built to hold coiled rope. It does not hold two adults. It holds rope. We went into it like two cats in a sack and the rope went everywhere and her elbow caught my ear and my knee found the bin edge and we ended up tangled together in a pile of line, her half on top of me, my hand still welded to that stupid drawstring.

"Let go," she said, right in my face.

"You let go."

"It's my bag."

"It's my bag."

"Your bag has a duck on it, then. Describe the duck."

"A fat duck. Facing left. Bleach, third of the way up the side."

She stopped. Because she'd seen the duck, obviously. She knew the duck. And she was close enough now that I could see she was trying not to laugh, and failing a little, and her breath was hot on my face and mine on hers, and neither of us moved.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, so."

"So."

"You stole my bag."

"I did not steal your bag. I reclaimed your bag from the lost bin, which makes me a public servant."

"You're sitting on my cordelette."

"You're lying on my elbow."

The rope had us pinned good. Her knee was over my thigh, my arm was behind her back because that's where it landed, and the whole tangle meant that getting up would've taken coordination neither of us had. Her hair was coming loose from her ponytail and a strand of it fell across her cheek and she blew at it and it didn't move.

"You're breathing fast," she said.

"You threw me into a bin."

"You tackled me into a bin."

"Yeah, well. You stole my bag."

And then the echo carried her laugh down the tunnel and back, and somewhere in that echo I stopped being angry about the bag. I'd like to tell you exactly when that switch flipped. Somewhere between the duck and her knee. She was looking at my mouth. I was looking at hers. Six months of arguing and every single argument had been building to this exact stupid bin, apparently.

"Russ," she said.

"Yeah."

"Are you going to kiss me or are we going to lie here quoting burn marks at each other?"

"That depends. Whose bag is it?"

"Kiss me and find out."

I kissed her. Or she kissed me. It started as one thing and turned into the other inside a second, furious and clumsy, half fight and half hunger, and her hand came up and grabbed a fistful of my shirt like she was still trying to win something. I got my other arm working and rolled us a half turn so I had her pinned back against the bin rail, and she made a sound into my mouth that I felt in my chest, and then her teeth caught my bottom lip, gentle, just enough to make a point.

"Ow," I said, not meaning it.

"Sorry," she said, not meaning it, and pulled me back in.

Somewhere down the tunnel Tane said, very loudly, "I'm going to go check on the tables," and Simon said, "Great idea," and two headlamps bobbed toward the light at the mouth of the tunnel like they couldn't get out fast enough. Good. Let them go. The tide was out and the whole town was on the mud and we had a tunnel to ourselves.

When we came up for air she was grinning, flat