Fire Watch

I'm Olivia, I'm thirty-four, and I want to state up front that I did not want to go on this retreat. Sergio called it culture building. I called it two nights in the woods with people I already see forty hours a week.

But I said yes, because I always say yes. That's sort of my whole personality. I'm the graphic designer who turns in clean files, never spills wine, never says the wrong thing at the holiday party. Well. Almost never. There was one holiday party, three years ago now, that I'll get to later maybe.

The lodge was forty minutes down a gravel road from the nearest town, and the road got worse the whole way. Sergio drove, and Vladek rode shotgun and complained about the radio stations, and Alexis and I sat in the back and talked about fonts, which is what we always talk about when we're nervous.

"There it is," Sergio said, and pointed.

It used to be a hunting lodge. Somebody had turned it into a retreat center, which mostly meant they'd added wifi and taken out the animal cages. The deer heads were still on the walls. There was a stone fireplace big enough to stand in, and a wrap-around porch looking out over a dark valley full of pine.

"Cozy," Vladek said. "Creepy, but cozy."

We hauled our bags in. The guy who ran the place showed us the kitchen and the bedrooms and told us dinner was at seven, and then he got in his truck and left, and it was just the four of us and the wind.

I'm Alexis's work friend, going on three years now. We met at a design conference when she was twenty-nine and I was thirty, four years ago now, over bad hotel coffee at six in the morning. Sergio's the art director, been there four years. Vladek freelances for us and has known Alexis for seven years, which is a fact I only learned on this trip, and which I thought about later, a lot.

Anyway. Six o'clock, first night. Nobody had cell service. Sergio was making dinner because Sergio always cooks. Vladek had found a shelf of old board games and was reading the back of a box. Alexis was building the fire. And I was standing on the porch with a whiskey, looking at the dark valley, wishing I had stayed home with my sketchbook.

That's the truth. I was bored before the first campfire even happened. My sketchbook was in my bag upstairs and I was halfway tempted to go get it, but going to your room alone at a work retreat reads as rude, so I stood there and drank.

Alexis came out and leaned on the rail next to me.

"You okay?"

"Great," I said. "Riveted."

"You're the worst liar I know."

"I'm a great liar. I'm just bad at lying to you."

She grinned. She's thirty-three, a year younger than me, and she has this way of looking at people like she's already thought of three things to do with them. It's unsettling if you let it be. I'd learned not to let it be.

"Whiskey?" she asked.

"I've got one."

"More whiskey?"

"...Fine."

She took my glass, topped it off from her flask, handed it back. We watched the valley. Somewhere down there a bird made a sound and quit.

"So I brought something," she said.

"A game?"

"A game. Sort of. I want to run it by you first, actually."

That was new. Alexis doesn't run things by people. Alexis proposes and dares you to object.

"It's called truth or touch," she said, watching the valley and not me. "It's like truth or dare, but the dare side is touch. You can always pick truth instead. You can always skip a turn. You can always stop the whole thing."

"Stop the whole thing how?"

"Just say the word. Anybody. Game's over, everybody goes back to cards."

I drank. My pulse did a thing it doesn't usually do at work retreats.

"Touch how?" I asked. "Like, elbow touches?"

"Like whatever the card says. And there's a blindfold involved for some of them. Voluntary. It's about not knowing who's who."

"The hell, Alexis."

"The hell what? It's four adults, we're all single, there's no cell service, and it's going to be a long night regardless. I figured I'd offer an option."

"I'm not single by accident," I said. "I'm single on purpose. It's a whole project."

"I know. I've watched the project for three years." She turned and looked at me straight on. "That's why I'm asking you first. If you say no, we play Monopoly and nobody ever hears about it."

I looked out at the valley some more. The honest answer was that my heart rate had gone up when she said blindfold. The careful answer was Monopoly. I've given the careful answer my whole life and it has kept my life very smooth and very gray.

"Who else knows?" I asked.

"Sergio and Vladek know there's a game. Not what it is. I wanted your read first."

"Because I'm the responsible one."

"Because you're the one who never says yes to anything."

"That's not true. I said yes to this trip."

She laughed. "Under threat of HR."

"Under mild HR pressure," I admitted. "Okay. Fine. Run it. But I'm keeping my veto."

"Deal." She touched her flask to my glass. "Dinner first. Nobody consents on an empty stomach, that's just science."

Dinner was Sergio's thing, some pasta he'd hauled up in a cooler, and it was good, and we ate too much of it. Then Vladek dealt us into a card game to kill the last hour, and Alexis kept checking her phone for signal she didn't have, which is how I knew she was a little nervous too. That made me feel better, in a mean way.

At nine we moved to the fireplace. Sergio stacked wood and got it going and the room went orange. There's something about a fire that makes decisions for you. You sit closer than you meant to. You talk lower.

"Okay," Alexis said. She'd gone upstairs and come back with a drawstring bag and a soft black blindfold, which she set on the coffee table like it was a fruit bowl. "Rules one more time. Everyone adult, everyone sober enough to drive a sentence, everyone can pass a turn or end the game with one word. Touch cards are about hands, mostly. Nobody does anything anybody hasn't asked for out loud. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Sergio said.

"Agreed," Vladek said, and I noticed he'd already moved his chair closer to the fire. Closer to Alexis, if I'm honest.

They looked at me.

"Agreed," I said, and my voice came out normal, which I was proud of.

Alexis shuffled the cards. There were maybe forty of them, printed off at home, cut crooked. I could read some upside down. TRUTH: WHAT'S THE LAST THING YOU TOUCHED THAT YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO. TOUCH: KISS THE BACK OF A HAND. TRUTH: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUT OF TONIGHT.

That last one made my pulse thump again, hard, sitting right there in the firelight with three coworkers and a crooked deck.

"Who's first?" Sergio asked.

"Olivia," Alexis said. "You never go first at anything. House rule."

I laughed, because it was true, and because the alternative was admitting my hands had gone warm. I reached into the deck and drew.

The card said TOUCH.

I turned it around so they could all see. KISS THE PERSON ON YOUR LEFT. MOUTH TO MOUTH. OR PASS.

On my left was Sergio. He'd been at the fire, poking it with a poker, and he stopped. Four years we'd worked together. One holiday party, three years ago, when I was thirty-one, we'd kissed for about four seconds in the coat room and never once talked about it, and every December since I'd caught him looking at me for exactly one beat too long.

"Well," Sergio said, setting the poker down.

"I can pass," I said.

"You can," he said. "Nobody's gonna think anything."

"Speak for yourself," Vladek said. "I'm thinking plenty."

"Shut up, Vladek," Alexis and I said at the same time.

I looked at Sergio. He looked back, steady, and waited. That's the thing about him, he never pushes. He just makes room.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Yes."

He smiled, small, and leaned in, and put one hand light on my jaw, and kissed me, slow, like we had all night, which I suppose we did. His mouth was warm. The fire was loud. I heard Alexis say, quiet, "There she is," and I didn't open my eyes until we were done, and when I did, Vladek was fanning himself with his cards and Sergio had gone back to the fire as a man who had just been handed a very good hand of cards himself.

"Your turn next," Alexis told him, and cut the deck.

Sergio drew next. His card said TRUTH. He read it, turned it face down, and told us the last thing he'd touched that he wasn't supposed to was a truffle at a client tasting in March. Everyone laughed and the room loosened up one notch.

Vladek went after that and drew a TOUCH card about kissing the back of a hand, and he made a whole ceremony of it with Alexis, down on one knee like a proposal, and she snorted wine through her nose, which she took well. Then Alexis drew TRUTH: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUT OF TONIGHT, and she said, "To stop being careful for one night," and looked right at me when she said it, and I felt that in my chest.

Somewhere in there Vladek had gotten up and come around the coffee table and settled onto the couch on my other side, under the excuse of the fire being warm. There was one big blanket draped over the armrest and he pulled it across his legs and then, casually, across mine too. I let him. The fire popped. Sergio fed it another log.

We kept playing. The cards got sillier. Alexis had to confess the worst gift she ever gave, which was a framed photo of herself to her own mother. Vladek had to name the coworker he'd thought about most, and he said "passing," and Alexis said "coward," and he said "correct," and we all laughed.

And then, during one of the laughs, Vladek leaned over and said, low, just to me, "Can I put my hand here?" and touched the blanket over my thigh with one finger. I nodded. His hand came to rest on my thigh.

Just that. His hand, over the blanket, on the middle of my thigh, light as a leaf landing. He didn't squeeze. He didn't move it. He kept talking to Sergio about some illustration job like nothing was happening, and his hand just sat there being warm through the blanket, and my entire body went quiet and aware.

I didn't move away.

That was the decision, right there, and it took me about three seconds to make it. Three seconds of weighing it, the way I weigh everything, and then I felt myself tip over into the other scale and stay. His fingers shifted, barely, a slow drag of an inch closer to the inside of my leg, and still I didn't move, and my pulse was in my throat and in my ears.

Alexis saw it. Of course she saw it. She looked at my face, then at Vladek's hand, then back up, and her eyebrows went up a little, and she drew her next card without saying anything, which was somehow louder than saying something.

"TRUTH," she read. "Or I can take a touch." She set the card down. "I'll take truth. What do you want out of tonight, Olivia. That's the card. It's the same one I got, I stacked the deck a little, sue me."

The blanket was warm. The hand was warm. Sergio was watching me from across the fire with the poker idle in his hand, not pushing, just present. Vladek had gone still and was waiting too, and I realized his thumb had started a slow small circle that I could feel through two layers of fabric and one layer of my own skin.

"I want to not be the responsible one," I said. "For one night. That's it. That's the truth."

"That's a good one," Vladek said, quiet.

"It's my truth," Alexis said. "You can't have it."

"I'm not taking it. I'm sitting next to it."

Sergio laughed at that, low, and set the poker down, and I looked at him and he looked back and neither of us mentioned the coat room. We didn't need to. It was in the room with us, three years old and three Decembers old, warm as the fire.

Alexis put her cards down on the table. "Okay. I'm going to do something off-book. It's not a card. You can all pass."

"Off-book," Sergio repeated. "You're amending your own game."

"I wrote the game. I can amend it." She turned to face me, cross-legged, knees near mine. "Olivia. I want to kiss you. Mouth to mouth. Right now, in front of these two, because I've wanted to since the hotel coffee four years ago and I've been careful about it every single day since and I'm tired of careful."

The fire cracked. Vladek's thumb kept its slow circle. My mouth was dry and I said, "Yes," and it came out steady, and I was proud of that too.