Juggling Acts

My name is Bert, I'm thirty-four, and at the start of this story I was pulling shots at an espresso cart on the convention floor of the Gaston Convention Centre in Sudbury, like a jackass. That's the honest setup. I'd been doing coffee work since I was twenty-five, mostly at a roastery back in the day, and when the roastery job dried up I took whatever catering gigs came along. A weekend comic con espresso cart was one of those gigs. Long hours, weird costumes, and a lot of people asking if I had anything "stronger." I did not.

I'd been single for six months by then. My ex, Rae, left me after two years, and I won't bore you with the details except to say it ended messy and I spent a lot of nights telling myself a fresh start was possible. So when the cart manager offered me the Sudbury weekend, I said yes before he finished the sentence.

I was restocking cups around ten Friday morning when I heard the elevator alarm going off over by the service lift. You could hear it all the way across the concourse, this sad little buzzing that sounded like a dying wasp. The lift that connected the main floor to the lower exhibitor hall was old and slow and it failed on the regular, so I figured somebody was just stuck and annoyed.

Then I saw her. A woman in her early thirties, dark hair pulled back, blazer over a con t-shirt, standing by the stuck doors with her arms crossed. She had a lanyard on and I could read the badge from twenty feet: Claims Investigator. She was thirty-three, though I didn't know that yet, and she had the look of somebody who had been standing there long enough to memorize the fire evacuation map.

I made her a cortado without being asked. Felt like the right call. Double shot, cut with milk, served in a real cup instead of a paper one, because I had real cups and nobody ever used them.

"House special," I said, walking it over. "For the prisoner of the service elevator."

She turned and looked at the cup, then at me. "You cannot possibly be open yet. Your sign says ten."

"I'm open. The sign's a liar. Here, no charge, con rate."

"Con rate," she repeated, taking it. "Meaning free."

"Meaning I felt bad for you. That alarm's been going for what, ten minutes?"

"Fifteen." She sipped and her eyebrows went up a little. "Okay, that's actually good. I'm Marcia, by the way, and I'm technically working, so if you see a woman in a blazer wandering the floor with a clipboard, that's my coworker and please do not mention this coffee."

"Secret cortados. Got it."

"I'm serious. Angelica is twenty-six and enthusiastic and if she sees me accepting beverages from a handsome cart guy she will want the entire story and I don't have the story." She said it fast, like she'd said too much and knew it, and then covered it with another sip.

I let the handsome part go because pointing at it felt like it would end the conversation. Instead I leaned on the cart. "What kind of claims does a convention even generate?"

"You'd be surprised. Broken displays, slipped on stairs, a guy last year whose signed comic got ruined when somebody spilled a soda on his backpack." She shrugged. "There's an entire ecosystem of misery at these things and my company underwrites it."

"You investigate spilled sodas for a living?"

"I investigate everything. Soda, fireworks, a vendor booth that caught fire because somebody brought their own hot plate. The soda guy is my favorite though. He claimed the comic was worth four thousand dollars and I found the same issue online for forty bucks plus shipping."

"Forty bucks?"

"Plus shipping, Bert." I hadn't told her my name yet and she must have read it off the cart sign, which had BERT'S on it in big letters because I hadn't designed it myself. She grinned at me over the cup and I felt something in my chest I hadn't felt in a while, kind of a warm jolt, like the first pull of a good shot.

The repair guy showed up around then, a lanyarded fellow with a toolbox, and the doors ground open and let her out of her sentence. Marcia drained the cortado, dug in her blazer pocket, and pressed a five into my tip jar.

"Keep the change, cart guy. I'll find you later."

She walked off toward the escalators and I watched her go like an idiot, then went back to steaming milk for a guy dressed as a barbarian.

* * *

She came back around two. The lift had been fixed, apparently, since she'd spent the middle of the day downstairs doing whatever it is investigators do, and she wandered up to the cart with her badge flipped around backward like that made her invisible.

"Cortado again," she said. "And then I have a question for you."

I made it and slid it over. "Question away."

"What time does your shift end?"

"Six. Why, you need a witness statement?"

"I need a drink. There's a pub two blocks from here, the kind with a patio and no Comic-Con branding anywhere. You in?"

Now, in my defense, I'd spent six months being sad on a couch, so my judgment was not at full strength. I said yes so fast I almost bit my tongue.

"Give me your number," she said, holding her phone out. "For convention networking purposes."

"Is that what we're calling it."

"That is exactly what we're calling it, and if Angelica ever asks, you were a vendor contact and I was being thorough." She typed her number into my phone under M, which I noted, and she noted that I noted it, and she smirked like she was already planning something.

Six o'clock came and I broke down the cart, and at seven I was on a patio with Marcia and two pints between us. No blazer. Hair down. She looked different in regular clothes and I told her so, clumsily.

"You clean up well for a barista," she said, which was her version of the same compliment, so we were even.

We talked about nothing for a while. The con, the soda guy, the fact that she'd been doing claims for eight years and still couldn't watch somebody carry an open drink near merchandise without tensing up. I talked about the roastery, the breakup, only a little, because I didn't want to be the sad one at the table. She asked real questions and listened to the answers, which I'd forgotten people could do.

Then somewhere around pint two she got quiet, turned her glass a half circle on the table, and said, "Okay. Here's my question, and you can say no and we finish our beers and part as friendly vendor contacts."

"That sounds ominous."

"It's not ominous. It's specific." She looked at me straight on. "I've been curious about anal for a while now. Like, actually curious, not drunk-dare curious. And every guy I've brought it up with either treated it like a checkbox or went at it like they were changing a tire. No lube, no patience, no clue. So I want to try it with someone who actually cares about doing it right, and you seem like somebody who pays attention to details, because you made me a cortado I didn't order and it was perfect."

I put my glass down. My heart was doing something unprofessional but I kept my face mostly together.

"That's," I started, and stopped. "Okay, wow. Straight to it, huh."

"I'm a claims investigator. I don't pad my reports." She took a drink. "No strings, no drama, nothing either of us has to explain to anybody. Angelica can never know because she'd put it in the group chat. Just two adults, thirty-three and thirty-four respectively, being honest about what they want."

"You did the math on our ages."

"I investigate everything, Bert. I told you."

I sat with it for a second. Six months of couch sadness, a weekend of pulling shots for people in capes, and now a sharp, funny woman across a patio table telling me plainly what she wanted. It felt like a trap for about three seconds, until I remembered I had nothing in my life that could be trapped.

"Conditions," I said, and she raised an eyebrow. "One, we go slow, like actually slow. Two, lots of lube, the good stuff, not the gas station kind. Three, if you say stop at any point, it stops, no negotiating after the fact."

Marcia smiled and it changed her whole face. "Those are my conditions too, you realize. You just said them out loud like you were granting them."

"Well. Great minds."

"There's a hotel attached to the convention centre. I have a room. I drove in Thursday." She finished her pint and set it down with a small, decisive click. "So. Tomorrow night, after your shift. I want you to have a whole day to change your mind. Yes or no, cart guy?"

"Yes," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "Definitely yes."

"Good." She stood and gathered her jacket, then paused. "Fair warning, I bought supplies this afternoon, so if there's a drugstore bag in my room tomorrow, that's what it is, and you're not allowed to laugh at how organized it looks."

"No promises. I laugh when I'm nervous."

"Then you're gonna laugh a lot tomorrow."

She paid for the beers over my objection, we walked the two blocks with her hand finding mine somewhere around the halfway point, and I remember thinking, as we crossed into the hotel lobby, that my fresh start had arrived in the form of a woman with a clipboard and a very specific agenda. The elevator in the lobby was old and slow too. She kissed me, quick, while we waited for it, said "Tomorrow, seven, room 412," and stepped in alone. It felt like the entire weekend was going to be about elevators.

* * *

I showed up at her door the next evening at seven, mostly shaved, definitely nervous, holding a paper bag from Lyle's juggling booth like an idiot.

"You brought a bag," Marcia said, looking at it instead of me.

"I did."

"Is that going to be a weird thing or a fun thing?"

"Jury's out," I said, and she stepped aside to let me in.

The drugstore bag was on the desk, organized, exactly as promised, and I laughed the way she'd said I would. Lube, condoms, a pack of wipes, and a little foil packet of something I didn't recognize. She'd lined them up like evidence.

"You alphabetize your sex supplies," I said.

"I categorize them. There's a difference, and it matters in my line of work." She nodded at my bag. "Open it. Let's see yours."

So I pulled out the juggling set. Three vinyl balls, a beginner's guide booklet, forty bucks Canadian, purchased at four in the afternoon while I was waiting for my shift to end and thinking about her.

Marcia looked at it. Then she laughed, a real one, the kind that made her fold forward a little with her hands on her knees.

"You bought juggling balls," she said. "You are going to juggle for me before we have anal sex."

"When you say it like that it sounds insane."

"It was already insane, Bert. Now it's insane with props." She sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed at the floor in front of her. "Show me a trick."

"I never said I could juggle."

"You bought a beginner's guide. It's right there. Cascade for Beginners."

So I stood on the hotel carpet in my good