Hair as the Only Tether

The grant rejection came on a Tuesday, and by Thursday night I was watching Veronica slap her palm flat on the sticky bar top of The Pit like she was trying to kill something with it.

"Double whiskey," she said to the bartender. "Two. No, one double. Whatever. Double!" Then she caught my look and added, "One. That's my one. I'm not stupid."

The bartender, a big guy with a neck tattoo of a snake eating its own tail, just nodded and reached for the bottle. He'd seen worse. The Pit sits in the basement under the Vex, the rock club upstairs, and the whole place is lit by one fluorescent tube that flickers like it's considering quitting. The floor is always tacky with old beer. The air smells like cheap gin and burnt sugar from the candy machine somebody installed in the corner for reasons nobody has ever explained to me.

Veronica is twenty-eight, teaches art history at the college across town, and I have known her for about five years now, ever since a conference where she asked me if my band's name was a reference to a Baroque painting and I said no, it was a reference to being drunk in a parking lot. We've been friends since. Not close friends. Coffee every few months. She helped me move a drum kit once and complained about it for a year. I helped her carry boxes into her apartment two years ago and she fed me pizza and that was more or less the shape of the thing.

Except tonight she'd called me at four in the afternoon, which she never does, and said the word "grant" in a voice like a flat tire.

So here we were.

The whiskey showed up. She drank half of it in one go and set the glass down hard enough that the bar top made a wet smack sound where her palm peeled off it.

"Three years," she said. "Three years of work on that application. I had the budget sheets laminated, Terry. Laminated."

"That's a red flag right there," I said. "Lamination is a cry for help."

"I'm serious." She turned on her stool to face me. She had her hair down tonight, which she usually didn't, dark red and long past her shoulders, and she was wearing a black dress I'd never seen because Veronica in normal life dressed like somebody's very organized librarian. "The committee chair said, and I am quoting, that the project showed promise but insufficient scholarly maturity. Insufficient scholarly maturity. I have published nine papers. I am twenty-eight years old and I have nine papers and a man named Brett told me I need to mature."

"Brett sounds like a wart on the whole institution," I said.

"He is a wart. He is the wart. He has a office with a plant in it and that plant has seen more scholarly output than half the faculty." She drained the rest and, to her credit, switched to water with a lime in it. Over maybe an hour, while I nursed my beer and she nursed her pint glass of tap water, she went through the whole grief menu. Anger, obviously. Then a weird bargaining phase where she explained how she could maybe reapply in the spring if Brett retired or died. Then something quieter, her elbows on the bar, her chin on her hands.

"It's not even the money," she said, mostly to the beer taps. "It's that I did everything right and it didn't matter. I want one night where nothing I do matters. Where nobody's evaluating anything."

The fluorescent light buzzed. Somebody upstairs dropped a guitar amp and the ceiling hummed with it.

And then she turned and looked at me with an expression I'd never gotten from her before, and I want to be careful how I describe it because it wasn't flirty exactly. It was more like she'd decided something and was checking whether I'd flinch.

"Terry," she said. "Do me a favor. Forget we know each other."

"That seems easy enough given my drinking habits."

"No, I mean it. Right now. This whole night. Pretend we just met. You're a guy in a bar and I'm a woman in a bar and we are strangers, and strangers don't have history, and strangers don't have to be appropriate or mature or whatever the hell Brett wants." Her hand went up and gathered her hair off her neck, all that dark red pulled back and held in her fist. "Strangers can want things out loud."

I put my beer down. Okay, I thought. This is either the worst idea of the year or the only good one anyone's had in my presence for months, and either way she was looking at me waiting for an answer, which mattered. She wasn't assuming. She was asking.

"And what do strangers do?" I said.

"Strangers touch." She lifted her chin and held her fistful of hair out toward me, an offering, absurd and strange and dead serious all at once. "Touch this and I'm yours. That's the rule. The hair is the only tether. Everything else is new."

The Pit was mostly empty. A couple hunched over gin at the far end, the bartender polishing a glass with the enthusiasm of a man being paid by the hour. Nobody was going to evaluate us. That was sort of the point.

I reached out slow, so she could see it coming and take it back if she wanted, and she didn't take it back. I wrapped her hair around my fist. It was heavier than I expected, warm from her neck, and it slid through my fingers like it had been waiting all night for exactly this arrangement.

Then I gave it a sharp tug.

Her gasp was the best sound I'd heard all week. Her eyes went wide and her whole body tipped toward me across the barstool, and her hand came up and closed around my wrist, not to stop me. Just to hold on.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, okay. That works!"

"Hi," I said, because we were strangers now. "I'm Terry."

"Veronica." Her voice had gone low and a little rough. "You have strong hands for a stranger in a basement."

"You have a rule about your hair and a double whiskey behind you, so I'm going to assume you're dangerous."

"Assume correctly." She hadn't let go of my wrist. Her thumb was moving over my pulse like she was taking a reading. "Here's the rest of it. Strangers say what they want. Out loud, before anything happens. That's the deal. Nobody grabs, nobody guesses. You want something, you say it."

"Seems reasonable."

"And if I say stop, it stops. All of it, no negotiating, no pouting. Forever if I mean it." She said it plainly, like reading terms off a receipt, and I liked her enormously for it. This was Veronica the laminator. She'd probably rehearsed the rules in the car.

"Same goes for me," I said. "I'm not just the tug guy. I get a stop word too."

"Fine." She smiled and it was a different smile than the coffee-every-few-months smile. "Strangers it is. God, that's better. You have no idea how heavy five years of being sensible gets."

"One more rule from me," I said. "One whiskey and an hour of water. I'm asking once more, sober to sober. You're sure about this?"

"I'm sure. I'm clear-headed enough to be a professor, which is the worst kind of clear."

"Is that what I've been? Sensible?"

"You've been a friend, which is a kind of sensible." Her hand slid down from my wrist to my forearm and stopped there, over the tattoo on my inner elbow, tracing the outline of it with one finger like she'd never seen it before. Which, in the rules we'd just made up, she hadn't. "Strangers don't owe each other sensible."

Her fresh water arrived with another lime. She settled the whole tab herself, threw a couple bills down, insisted on it, and I remember thinking even through the game that she was right to do it. We'd settle the tab clean before anything else got settled, and it had nothing to do with what came next. That's just how she was wired and I respected it. Then she picked up the glass, saluted me with it like we'd just closed a merger, and drank.

"So," she said, sliding off the stool and standing close enough that I could feel the heat off her. "Stranger with the strong hands. Are you going to keep holding my hair all night, or is that the whole repertoire?"

I wound it once more around my fist and pulled her in an inch closer, her mouth a breath away from mine, and I asked first, because those were the rules and honestly because asking felt like half the fun.

"Can I kiss you, Veronica?"

"Yes," she said, already leaning. "God, yes, ask me again later too!"

And she tasted like whiskey and burnt sugar, and upstairs the band started their soundcheck, and the night went long from there.

* * *

The alcove happened about twenty minutes later, and I couldn't tell you who found it first. There was a hallway off the back of The Pit, past the candy machine and a busted jukebox, and it dead ended in a little pocket of dark where the fluorescent tube didn't reach. Somebody had shoved a couple of barstools back there years ago and nobody had missed them since. Veronica found it on her way to the bathroom that didn't exist and came back out with a look on her face that I can only describe as a discovery.

"Come here," she said. "Stranger. I found something."

The floor down there was tacky under my boots the way it always is in a basement bar, beer and spilled gin making every step a small negotiation. In the alcove the dark was total except for a sliver of light from the hallway, and it smelled like old concrete and that burnt sugar drifting back from the machine. She backed into it and pulled me after her by the fistful of hair still wound around my hand, which was a hell of a way to lead a man.

Then her back hit the concrete wall and I kissed her.

It wasn't the polite version from the bar. This one was teeth and tongue and her nails finding the front of my shirt, and I wrapped her hair around my fingers in loops, slow at first, then tighter, winding it until I had her whole head