Exposed in the Factory

You ever walk into a big empty building and think, huh, this place is a stage? That was me, last Thursday, standing in the main floor of a decommissioned bristle factory on Pulau Macan, thinking exactly that. I'm Sandra, I'm thirty-three, and I have known about this particular itch of mine since I was twenty-one, when a boyfriend and I got up to some consensual flashing nonsense on a college trip and I discovered that being watched, really watched, does something to me that I have never managed to feel bad about. Which brings me to the factory.

The place was cavernous. Rows of drying racks still stood in lines like they were waiting for bristles that would never come, and there was this giant steel vat in the corner that could have bathed a small horse. The ceiling went up forever. Somebody had strung lights along the racks for the occasion, which was the handover ceremony of the willow bark stelae from a closed wicker workshop, and don't ask me to explain the paperwork behind that because I disinfected phlebotomy carts for a living and even I couldn't follow it. I was there as the visiting rep for the handover, which mostly meant standing around in my piqué cotton vest with the mother-of-pearl studs, trying to look official.

There was a whole display of those vests, by the way. Somebody's idea of a theme. Piqué cotton and mother-of-pearl studs, laid out on a table next to the stelae like the two things had anything to do with each other. Indonesia, am I right? Every ceremony has a wardrobe requirement nobody warned me about!

So there I was, in my official vest, feeling the space around me the way I always do in big rooms. All that empty air above. All those sight lines down the rows of racks. And that little warm itch started up, the one I get when a space feels like it wants something to happen in it.

That's when I caught his gaze. First time, across the room, over the top of a stelae that some man in a linen shirt was holding up like a trophy.

I should back up. His name was Ollie, I learned later, and he was thirty-six and worked at a medical supply company, of all things, and was in town looking at investment property. At the time all I knew was that there was a tall guy in a rumpled button-down standing near the vest display, and he was not looking at the vests, and he was not looking at the stelae, and when my eyes found his he did not do the polite thing and glance away. He just kept looking. Straight at me. Like we'd already agreed on something and I'd missed the meeting.

Well! What do you even do with that?

What I did, embarrassingly, was smile. And then he smiled back, this small crooked thing like he was surprised at himself, and I felt my cheeks go hot and had to pretend to inspect a drying rack. A drying rack! For bristles! I don't even know what bristles look like before they're brushes!

Let me tell you about the ceremony, because it was the strangest hour of my working life and also, as it turned out, the setup for the best evening I've had in years. The man in the linen shirt, who ran the wicker workshop before it closed, gave a speech. The man receiving the stelae gave a longer speech. Somebody's uncle said a blessing over the willow bark, which smelled like rain and tree sap, and everybody clapped in that polite way people clap when they're mostly waiting for the food.

And through all of it, Ollie watched. Me, I mean. Not the stelae. I kept testing it, because I could hardly believe it. I'd drift to the left, and his eyes would drift left. I'd drift right, and there his eyes went, patient as a lighthouse. He wasn't hiding it, either. That was the part that got me. Most men who stare do it with the corner vision, the sneak peeks, the whole coward's repertoire. This man just watched me openly, across a factory floor, during a willow bark ceremony, like watching was the entire reason he'd come.

And oh, my friends, the thrill! That warm nervous fizz starting at the back of my neck and rolling down. I stood there listening to a speech about wicker heritage and thinking about being looked at, and the two things should not have gone together at all, and yet there I was, breath a little short, pulse doing its thing.

Could he tell? Did I look flushed? I hoped I looked flushed. That's the level of problem I have, honestly.

The speeches finally wound down and people broke into clusters, the way people do. Tea appeared. I positioned myself near the vest display, because my cart-disinfecting instincts said a table was a good place to stand, and because Ollie was near it, and I was not going to pretend otherwise to you or to me.

He came over after a decent interval. Stopped about a polite conversational distance away, hands in his pockets, and said, "You're the one here for the stelae handover, right? The visiting one?"

"Guilty," I said. "Sandra."

"Ollie." He nodded at the vests. "Do you understand what these have to do with willow bark? Because I've been standing here twenty minutes trying to make the connection."

"Twenty minutes, huh?" I said, and I could hear myself laugh a little too fast. "Maybe you weren't here for the vests."

He had the grace to go a bit pink, which I found enormously encouraging. "Maybe not," he said. "Sorry. That was obvious, wasn't it?"

"Very obvious," I said. "It's fine. I don't mind."

And he looked at me then, really looked, and said, "You don't?"

And here's where I did the thing. The deliberate thing. I'm telling you flat out, because that's what I do in these stories, no sneaking around in my own narration: I reached up and unbuttoned the top two studs of my vest. Slowly. Mother-of-pearl through cotton, one, then the other, while a man I'd spoken eleven words to watched me do it in a factory full of strangers. The vest loosened and fell open a little at the collar, and I knew exactly what he could see now, the top of my collarbone and the skin dipping down from it, nothing scandalous, nothing you'd get tossed out of a ceremony for, but chosen. Offered. That is the entire difference, isn't it? Chosen.

His eyes went to my collarbone and stayed there. He didn't look away. He didn't do the flick-down-and-guilt shuffle. He just held his gaze where I'd put it, and something about that honesty nearly did me in on the spot.

"You really don't mind," he said again, quieter, and it wasn't really a question anymore.

"Ollie," I said, "can I tell you something a little strange?"

"I feel like you're going to whether I say yes or not."

"Probably!" I laughed. "Here it is anyway. I like being watched. Not, um, in general, I'm not going to climb on the drying racks for the tea crowd. But when someone looks at me the way you've been looking at me all afternoon, it does something for me. I've known this about myself a long time. So no, I don't mind. I mind the opposite."

He blew out a breath. "Well," he said. "That's the most direct thing anyone's said to me at a handover ceremony, and I've been to four others."

"Four! You collect them?"

"Property investments," he said. "It's a long story with a boring ending. Sandra, can I ask what you're doing after this? Because I have a feeling it involves neither of us staying for the buffet."

I looked around the factory floor, at the racks and the vat and the uncle still holding court by the tea, at all that wide-open space with its hundred sight lines, and then back at him.

"Are you asking me to stay and be watched some more?" I said. "In this building?"

"I'm asking if you want to," he said. "Only if you want to. Say no and we'll eat the buffet and talk about vests."

Reader, I did not say no. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so hold that thought. I'll tell you what happened next, and it was a lot, and I buttoned exactly zero of those studs back up.

The buffet people started drifting toward the folding tables, and that was our cue, or at least I decided it was. The uncle had his tea. The linen shirt man was being cornered by someone with a clipboard. Nobody was watching the racks.

"So," I said, "tell me about this factory while we pretend to look at things."

Ollie fell into step beside me and we wandered along the nearest row of drying racks like two tourists. "Right, so it made brushes," he said. "Bristles, hence, you know, the name on the sign."

"I did connect those dots, thank you."

"Boar hair, mostly. They'd hang the bundles on these racks and the whole floor would smell like..." He waved a hand. "I read a plaque."

"A plaque! You're a historian."

"I'm an office guy at a medical supply company who reads plaques when he's nervous," he said, and grinned, and the grin was good on him. "What about you? How does a person end up carting stelae around Indonesia?"

"Phlebotomy. I disinfect the carts at a clinic, and apparently I'm also the person who volunteers for weird errands, so here I am, escorting carved willow bark to its new home." I ran a finger along a drying rack and it came away dusty. "Twelve years of blood draws and swabbing things, and this is my big adventure."

"You don't sound mad about it."

"I'm not mad about it." And I wasn't, because standing in a cavernous dead factory with a stranger who watched me unbutton my own vest was the most interesting Thursday I'd had in a while. My hands, though. My hands had their own views, and they were restless. I kept touching the edge of my vest without deciding to, thumb rolling along the placket, and then, because I am what I am, I pulled it open an inch. Just an inch. A draft of factory air moved across my sternum and