Flirting With the Flinch

I got back to Fenton on a Thursday, two years almost to the month since I'd last slept in my own bed at my mom's place, and by Friday night I was already bored out of my skull and hungry for food I hadn't had to stand in line for. The Fork in the Road Diner is the only place in town that stays open past nine, and it hadn't changed a bit, same cracked vinyl booths, same smell of burnt coffee and fryer grease, same fluorescent hum that makes everybody look a little sick. I was twenty-four now, been stationed out of state the whole two years, and I eased into a booth with my jacket still on like any other night.

Then I spotted Anders at the counter.

He was sitting on a stool with his elbows on the laminate, working on a slice of pie, and he'd filled out since high school, forearms like bridge cables, the kind of build you get from six years of wrestling truck parts instead of paying for a gym. He ran the repair bay behind the feed store across the street now, took it over from his uncle when the old man's back gave out, everybody knew that, mom had told me half the town's news in the first hour I was home. He had a little logo stitched on his shirt sleeve and grease in the creases of his knuckles even at ten at night.

"Brett?" he said, turning on the stool, and then he grinned, that same crooked grin from high school. "No way. They let you loose?"

"Two weeks of leave," I said, dropping onto the stool next to him. "Figured I'd come see if this pie is still as bad as I remember."

"It's worse. Leigh retired and the new girl microwaves everything." He pushed his plate half an inch toward me anyway, like always, like we were still twenty-one and splitting fries in the parking lot of the community college. "What are the odds. Man, sit, sit, you're sitting. Good."

And that was it, honestly, that was the restart. We fell right back into it like no time had passed at all, talking about guys we both knew, who got married, who moved off, whose truck was currently up on blocks, and he asked a hundred questions about where I'd been stationed and I asked him if the feed store still smelled like molasses and diesel, and he said worse than ever and I believed him. The waitress, new girl, young, maybe twenty-two, refilled our coffees twice and gave up on trying to get a word in.

Somewhere in the second refill Anders got that look on his face, the one I remembered from every dumb thing we ever did in high school, climbing the water tower, knocking mailboxes, all of it. The dare look.

"You remember the flinch game," he said.

I did remember. It was this dumb thing we invented junior year, one of us would do something, anything, touch a hot pan, let a sparkler burn down, stare into a flashlight, and the other had to watch without flinching, and whoever flinched first owed the other a dare. I've got about seven years of unpaid dares saved up, and here he was, twenty-four years old with grease under his nails, raising an eyebrow at me over a cup of diner coffee.

"Say we're too old for it," he said. "Go on. I dare you."

"Oh, you're not getting out of it that easy," I said. "I was never the one who quit."

"You quit at the sparkler thing."

"I had a blister, Anders. That's different and you know it."

"Fine." He nudged the sugar caddy aside and set my coffee in front of me, fresh, black, still steaming. "New round. You finish that whole cup, black, no sugar, no milk, and you don't make a face. Not one. I'm watching you the whole time like a hawk. You flinch or grimace or spit anything back in the cup, you owe me a dare."

"This coffee," I said, picking it up and smelling it, "is famously terrible."

"Then this should be easy for a big tough soldier." He leaned his chin on his fist, grinning at me. "Or are you rusty?"

That's all it took, and he knew it. I picked up the cup and drank it straight down, all of it, the whole cup in maybe four long swallows, and it was genuinely awful, burnt and bitter and somehow also lukewarm, and I kept my face completely flat the entire time, staring at a spot on the back wall behind the register like it was the most interesting thing in the world. My stomach turned over once around the third swallow but I didn't let it show. I set the empty cup down on the counter with a little click and looked at him.

"No face," I said.

He squinted at me, leaned in close, actually studied my eyes like he was hunting for a tell, and I held still, and finally he sat back and shook his head. "Damn. Not even a twitch. Okay, okay, you win. What do you want?"

"I told you," I said. "A dare. Your pick. You owe me."

And I don't know what I expected him to come up with, some dumb stunt, chugging the ketchup, going across the street and standing in the gravel lot in his boxers, something he would have done back then. Instead he got quiet for a second, turning his coffee cup a slow half circle on the counter, and then he looked over at me, and something in his face was different, careful, like he'd been turning this over longer than the last two minutes.

"Put your hand on the counter," he said. "Palm down."

I did it, because a dare's a dare, and my hand was flat on the laminate between us and I still wasn't nervous, not really. Then Anders put his hand on top of mine.

Just his hand, on top of mine, and he started counting out loud, slow, "One, two, three," and I'll tell you, my heart picked up in a way I wasn't expecting, because his hand was warm and heavy and rough in all the right places, calluses across the palm from wrench work, and he wasn't squeezing or doing anything weird, he was just resting it there, and counting, "Four, five."

"Five," he said, and took his hand off, and we both sat there a second, and then he laughed, kind of short, and picked up his fork like nothing happened.

"God, your hands are cold," he said.

"Yours are like furnaces," I said. "You could solder with those things."

"Occupational hazard." He shoveled a bite of pie in and chewed, staring straight ahead at the coffee machine, and I stared at my empty cup, and we both ignored the fact that I had not flinched, not even close, or the fact that neither of us had laughed it off fast enough, or the fact that my palm was still warm where his hand had been, warm in a way that lasted a lot longer than five seconds.

"So," I said finally, because somebody had to. "That's what counts as a dare now? We used to jump off Dutton's bridge for less."

"You won the coffee," he said with a shrug. "I owed you a dare of my choosing. That was my choosing. Deal's square."

"It was a weird dare."

"Yeah, well." He turned on his stool a little, facing me more, and that crooked grin came back but slower this time. "Two years away, I figured you'd want something easy to start. Gotta rebuild your flinch tolerance. You're clearly out of practice."

"Out of practice," I repeated.

"Basic training's got nothing on the flinch game, Brett. Everybody knows that." He waved at the waitress for the check. "I've been keeping the tradition alive, you know. Made my cousin Rick hold a live sparkler at the Fourth of July barbecue back when we were eighteen. He cried. Well, he says he didn't cry, but everybody saw."

"Rick Arnold?"

"Same one. Still works at the co-op, still a baby about everything." He dropped a ten on the counter even though I reached for my wallet, and waved me off. "You can get the next one. Consider it interest on two years of debt."

Outside the diner the night had gone cool and clear, that dry inland cold that bites a little even in summer, and the streetlight in front of the feed store was buzzing the way it always had, and across the road the store sat dark, its gravel lot empty except for Anders's truck, an old green Ford I recognized from back when it was his uncle's. We stood on the sidewalk a minute, not really wanting to say goodnight, and I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets and rocked back on my heels.

"You doing anything," I said, "or were you headed home?"

"I was headed home," he said, and then he didn't move, just stood there with his keys in his hand, spinning them once around his finger. "Why, you got a dare in mind already? That was fast."

"Maybe I'm just getting warmed up."

"You'd better be," he said, walking backward toward his truck, still grinning at me under the streetlight. "Because I've got about seven years of unpaid dares saved up, soldier, and I've been going easy on you so far."

He dropped into the cab, and the engine turned over with that old familiar rattle, and I stood there on the sidewalk with my warm palm and my terrible-coffee aftertaste, thinking that two weeks of leave was suddenly starting to look a lot more interesting than it had an hour ago.

The truck didn't leave, that was the issue. It sat there idling at the edge of the lot, exhaust curling up in the streetlight, and I stood on the sidewalk like an idiot for a good thirty seconds before I got it. Anders was waiting. He was daring me, without saying a word, to be the one who crossed the road first, and once I figured that out I was already walking, because I'd be damned if I was going to let him win the opening move of the night. I rapped a knuckle on the driver's window and he cranked it down with that old hand crank, and the cab smelled like motor oil and the pine tree thing hanging off the mirror, and he looked up at me with eyebrows raised like he had no idea what I could possibly want.

"Feed store lot," I said. "Ten minutes. I'm daring you."

"To what?"

"To show up. That's the dare. If you flinch, you don't come."

"That's not a dare, that's an appointment."

"It's a dare if I say it's a dare. Ten minutes. I'm going to stand back there in the dark and if you're not there, you lose, and I never let you forget it."

He leaned his forearm on the window frame, and even in the dim light I could see him doing the math on it, the way he used to do back when we were eighteen, weighing how dumb a thing was against how good it would feel to win. "You're on," he said. "But if I show up and it's some lameass dare, I'm billing you for my time. Gas isn't free." He cranked the window back up before I could answer and pulled out, slow, taillights sliding down Main and around the block past the church, and I stood there and checked my phone and it was 10:42, and I walked across the road with my collar up and my pulse doing more work than it needed to.

The lot behind the feed store was all gravel and dark, except where the streetlight spilled around the corner of the building, and there was a tall chain-link fence along the back that caught a little of the buzz from the light. I took up a spot by the