Ink and Ember

I post poems on a forum nobody's heard of. That's everything, really. A little hidden corner of the internet where people write dirty verse under fake names, and I've been one of them for two years under the name Inkwell_Dee. My real name's Dee, I'm twenty-four, and I work the night shift at a late-night bookstore, which is about as glamorous as it sounds.

The poems are the thing. The ones I publish there, I mean. I write about wanting to be wanted, which sounds pathetic when I put it like that, but there it is. I write about being undressed by somebody patient. I'd never let anybody I know read that stuff. My own drawer at home has a notebook with pages I've never even typed up.

Online it was different. Invisible and exposed at the same time, which was the whole appeal. Some guy in Germany could read a poem about me kneeling and it meant nothing, because he'd never see my face. But he'd read it. Somebody always read it.

Last Tuesday night, around two in the morning, I checked the comments on my newest post. The poem was called Register Key, and it was about the fantasy I'd never told a living soul. A woman comes into the store near close. She's covered in tattoos and she doesn't buy anything. She just watches me fumble with the register, the way I fumble at everything, and instead of laughing at me she leans on the counter and starts telling me exactly what she sees. And what she sees is that the stammering is not the whole story.

Four comments. Three were the usual one-word replies. The fourth was from Ember_Ink.

*You wrote my Tuesday. I know that counter. I know that register. Ask yourself who leans on it.*

I sat there with my coffee going cold and read it about six times. It wasn't the usual comment. It wasn't even flirty, exactly. It was specific. She knew the counter. I looked at the post again wondering if I'd written anything that gave the store away, and I hadn't. I'd never named the store. I'd never said I worked retail at all.

So it was coincidence, or it was luck, or it was something else. I typed a reply before I could talk myself out of it.

*Who leans on it?*

The answer came in twenty minutes.

*Someone who's been coming in at closing for a year, buying one cup of coffee worth of patience, watching a nice guy pretend he isn't writing smut on her breaks. I could be wrong. Am I wrong?*

I didn't answer that night. I went home and lay in bed staring at the ceiling of my apartment, going through every regular who came in near close. There were maybe six. A retired guy who bought westerns. A nursing student. A woman with a dog. And then there was her. The barista from across the street. Tattooed arms, a nose ring, a septum ring actually, dark hair shaved on one side. Jamila, twenty-seven, name tag said JAM, came in around eleven most nights after her shift, bought whatever was on the discount table, and talked to me like I was a vending machine with a speech impediment.

She'd never said two full sentences to me. But she watched. I'd caught her watching more than once, and every time I'd assumed she was judging me. That's the default setting in my head. Maybe she wasn't judging. Maybe she was reading.

I didn't sleep much. Wednesday morning I wrote back.

*Not wrong. Terrifying, but not wrong.*

*Good,* she wrote. *Now the real question. That poem is a fantasy. Whose is it? Yours, obviously. But who's it for? Because it reads like a letter with the name torn off.*

We went back and forth for three days like that. Never names, never anything too specific, a mutual agreement neither of us had to speak out loud. It was the best conversation of my life and neither of us existed. On Friday she said, *Let's write it. The story under the poem. You write a paragraph, I write a paragraph. We find out what happens when the woman at the counter gets what she wants.*

I said yes in about four seconds.

The first paragraph was mine. I wrote the woman coming in, rain on her jacket, ten minutes to close. I gave her tattoos because I'd been caught staring at real ones and figured honesty was the point now. She wrote back the woman's opening line.

*"Don't ring anything up. I'm not here to buy."*

*What's she there for?* I typed.

*You tell me, Inkwell. You're the one who's been rehearsing this in your head. I'm just the delivery system.*

So I told her. I wrote the clerk saying something honest for once, that he'd noticed her, that he'd been noticing her for a year and was too much of a coward to say so. And she wrote the woman's reply, which was the woman walking around the counter, slow, and standing close enough that the clerk could smell her perfume. One paragraph at a time, back and forth, all night, until the sun came up and I had to be at work at four.

The story grew a world. The store became the whole setting, every aisle a chapter. She named the woman Rook. I kept the clerk as me in everything but name. We traded scenes where Rook made him read his own poems out loud to her, standing right in front of her, and made him keep reading when his voice shook. That one took me two hours to write my half of and I had to get up and walk around my apartment twice.

*You're good at this,* she wrote at one point. *Why the night shift at a bookstore and not an MFA?*

*Coward. Same reason the poems are anonymous.*

*Cowards don't write what you write. They just wish they had.*

I saved that message. I'm not embarrassed about that.

By the second week we had about nine thousand words. The clerk had confessed everything in the story that I'd never confessed anywhere. Rook had answers for all of it. She wasn't a fantasy exactly anymore. She was a character with a laugh and a way of sitting on the counter and a rule she'd stated in chapter three, plain as day, that she never touched anyone until they asked her to, and that once they asked, she asked back before every step. Jamila's politics, maybe, or just good writing. Either way I underlined it.

Then on a Thursday she dropped a message that stopped me cold.

*The clerk in our story is you. I've known it since paragraph one. Question is, who do you think Rook is?*

*You're not allowed to answer,* she added a minute later. *Or rather, you are. But think first. Because I know which coffee shop is across from which bookstore, and I know what a man looks like when he's reciting smut in his head instead of stocking shelves.*

I read it at work, actually at work, standing behind the register at nine at night, and I felt my face go hot in a way it doesn't usually go hot, in a good way, which never happens.

She was across the street right then. I could see the coffee shop through the front window. And at some point, whether tonight or tomorrow, she was going to walk in ten minutes before close and lean on that counter, and I was going to have to be a person about it.

I typed back with shaking hands.

*Rook. It's you, isn't it.*

*Ten minutes to close,* she wrote. *I'll bring the rain.*

Three days she left me hanging after that. Three days of me walking past the front window every hour like a dog checking the fence, and the coffee shop just sitting there being a coffee shop, and Jamila or not-Jamila in there pulling shots like nothing in the world was happening.

I kept the story going, because what else was I going to do. She'd write a scene and I'd write back and I'd type her name into the character like it was a fact I'd already verified. Rook put her boots up on the counter in chapter six. Jamila does that. I've seen her do it eleven times, I had the receipts, I'd counted.

On Sunday it rained for real. The kind of rain that comes sideways off the avenue and turns the awning into a drum. Ten forty-eight. Twelve minutes to close.

The bell over the door went and I knew before I looked up. I want to tell you I played it cool. I did not play it cool. I knocked a stack of bookmarks off the counter with my elbow and had to crouch down and get them while she stood there and let me.

When I came back up she was leaning on the counter exactly like the story. Rain on her jacket. Hair flat on the shaved side. Septum ring doing its thing.

"Hey, Jam," I said. My voice did a thing. Not a full crack, but close.

"Hey, clerk!" She looked around the empty store. "Where's the register key."

"In the register."

"Cute." She set her hands flat on the counter. "Dee. Right? It's on your name tag, I've read it about a hundred times. Dee."

"Yeah."

"I'm Jamila. Which you already knew, because you worked it out Thursday night and sent me a message with a typo in it."

"There was no typo!"

"There was absolutely a typo. It was adorable." She was smiling now and it was nothing like the smirk from the counter. This one had weight to it. "So. Nine thousand words. You want to tell me which parts were real or do I have to guess?"

"Most of them," I said. "The part where the clerk has a heart attack at the counter, that one was documentary."

"Good. Because I wrote that one and I based it on the real thing." She drummed her fingers once and stopped herself. "Okay, before this gets anywhere, I need to say a thing, because I've thought about saying it for a