Junkyard Lightbox Salvation

Sue was twenty-four the week the fog shut down the airport in the north of England, and she had been divorced for a little over a year by then, married at twenty-two and done by twenty-three, which was the kind of math she still did sometimes in the middle of the night when she couldn't sleep and the numbers felt like a wound she kept picking at. The marriage had been short and quiet and mostly numb, and the divorce had been the same, a lot of forms and a lot of her mother saying things like well at least you found out early, love, and Sue had nodded along because there wasn't anything else to do, and then she had gone home to her small rented flat above a shop that smelled of frying onions and had sat on the floor for a long while because the couch felt like too much furniture for one person.

She hadn't dated before Darren, people didn't understand that. No boyfriends in her twenties so far except Darren, no fumbling in cars, no apps, nothing, so at twenty-four she was starting from zero and it made her feel like everyone else had gotten a manual she'd never been handed. So she did what everyone did, she downloaded one of the apps at three in the morning with her thumb hovering over the button like the phone might bite her, and she swiped through maybe forty faces with her heart going too fast, and she almost closed the whole thing out of embarrassment, and then a profile came up that just said Burt, twenty-seven, deckhand on the ferries, and the photo was of a man standing in front of a wall of scrap metal holding a mug, grinning like he'd been caught mid-laugh, and she swiped right on him before she could talk herself out of it.

She never expected a reply. She'd already matched with nobody and she figured that was the way of it, but the next morning her phone buzzed on the kitchen counter while she was eating toast standing up, the way she always ate, and it was him.

*Hi Sue. You're the first match I've had in a month so I'm choosing to believe the app isn't broken.*

She laughed out loud alone in her kitchen, which she hadn't done in a while, and she typed back something about how the app was definitely broken and he shouldn't get his hopes up, and he sent back a row of laughing faces and asked what she did and she told him waitress, and he told her deckhand, ferries out of the coast, and they talked that way for a week, little texts back and forth, nothing serious, him asking about her shift and her asking what the water was like, and it was easy in a way she hadn't expected anything to be easy again.

Then the fog came in.

She was flying back from her sister's place, a cheap flight with a connection up north, and the announcement came while she was sitting at the gate chewing a roll from the machine, saying that the airport was closed, visibility nothing, all flights grounded, could be twelve hours, could be days, please keep your phones on and watch the board in case it lifts. She called her landlord from a plastic chair and asked about her cat and her plants and he said bring in a plant sitter or lose the ferns, and she hung up and looked at the departures board and thought, well, that's that for a bit.

It was Burt she texted, which surprised her more than the fog did.

*This is going to sound weird. I'm stuck at the airport up north. Fog. Could be days. Any chance you'd water my plants if I gave you the key somehow.*

She stared at the message for a full minute before sending it, because it was a lot to ask a man she'd never met, but he replied in under a minute.

*Yeah, course. Send the key in a taxi or I'll come get it, I've got the evening off anyway. Which plant is the drama queen?*

*The fern. Everything else can fend for itself.*

*Understood. The fern gets full service.*

She laughed at that too, sitting there in the terminal with her roll and her dead flight, and something in her chest unclenched a little, and she didn't examine that too closely.

* * *

Two days later, still grounded, she got a photo from him at nine at night. It was a picture of her fern, alive and watered, sitting on her windowsill, but behind the fern, through the window and out into the dark, you could see a strange glow, a rectangle of warm light sitting low against a hill of scrap metal, like a lit aquarium dumped in a wasteland.

*What is that,* she typed.

*Lightbox. It's in the junkyard behind my room. Salvaged it from a theatre that got knocked down. Fixed the wiring myself. It's kind of my whole personality now.*

*That's the ugliest beautiful thing I've ever seen. I want to see it in person.*

*When the fog lifts then. Or before, if you like. It doesn't move.*

She read that message a few times, sitting on her bed in her flat that he had been inside of, and she thought about how the last man who'd been inside her flat had packed a suitcase and left, and how this one had watered her fern and photographed it, and how those two facts sat in her chest in very different places.

*Before,* she typed. *If you're offering.*

*I'm offering. Thursday? I'll bring a flask.*

* * *

The junkyard was bigger than she'd imagined, a sprawl of stacked cars and gutted appliances behind a row of rented rooms near the coast, and Burt was waiting at the gate in a coat that had seen better decades, twenty-seven years old and taller than his photo suggested, with a handshake that was careful, like he'd learned somewhere to be gentle with things.

"You came," he said, sounding genuinely pleased about it, which did something to her she wasn't ready for.

"Well, you've got my fern hostage."

"Fair. Come on, it's through the middle bit, mind the glass."

They picked their way between the heaps, and the light came up around a corner of shipping containers, and Sue stopped walking. It was exactly like the photo and nothing like it at the same time, a big old theatre lightbox with the bulbs mostly working, glowing warm yellow through cracked painted glass, propped upright against a wall of crushed cars, the light spilling over the scrap like it had been put there on purpose, like the whole yard had been arranged around it just for tonight.

"Burt," she said. "This is sort of incredible."

"It's daft is what it is," he said, but he was grinning, and he set down the flask and unrolled a mattress from behind the container, a proper one, with a folded blanket on top, and she looked at it and then at him and her mouth went dry in a way that wasn't fear.

"You planned the mattress."

"I hoped," he said, and rubbed his hands on his coat, and then he didn't touch her, he just stood there in the light with his hands where she could see them. "Sue, I fancy you, obviously. But you've said you've not done much of anything since your divorce, so I'm not gonna rush you at anything. If I touch your hip, is that alright, or would you rather I kept my hands in me pockets?"

It was such a plain question, so unperformancey, that she felt her eyes sting a little and had to laugh at herself.

"Yes," she said. "You can touch my hip. That's alright."

He stepped in slow and laid one hand on her hip through her coat, light as anything, and she didn't flinch, which surprised her, because she'd flinched at everything for a year. He waited a beat, then slid his arm around her waist, and she leaned into him, and the lightbox hummed faintly behind them like a fridge.

"Your skin's like heated glass," he said later, when her coat was off and his knuckles were trailing along her collarbone, slow, tracing the bone like he was reading it. "Warm on top and then something else underneath. It's doing my head in a bit, honest."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me and it's about thermal properties."

"Romance is dead, engineering lives on."

She laughed, and then she stopped laughing because his knuckles had reached the hollow of her throat and her whole body had gone quiet and attentive, the way it never had in her marriage, and Burt looked at her face in the yellow light and asked, soft, "Still alright?"

"Yeah," she said, and meant it, and lay back on the mattress.

Burt knelt over her on the mattress, one knee on either side of her hips, and he didn't reach for anything right away. He leaned down and pressed his mouth to her sternum, flat and warm through the fabric of her jumper, and held it there for a second like he was leaving a stamp.

"Sternum," he said against her, quiet, like he was labeling it. "Okay."

Then he moved down an inch and kissed her again, over the bottom of the ribcage, and another inch, and another, working his way across her ribs one kiss at a time, murmuring to himself the whole while. She couldn't make out all of it. Bits of it came through, little engineering mutterings, fourth rib, intercostal, you beautiful slab of structural integrity, and she started laughing, a real laugh that shook her shoulders and made him lift his head.

"What."

"You're narrating."

"I'm documenting. It's different. If I don't say it out loud I'll forget where I've been and I'll miss a spot."

"You'll miss a spot anyway, you're going in a straight line."

"Then I'll do a second pass." He bent back down and kissed the side of her ribs, where the bone curved away from him, and this time the murmur was softer, less joke, more just words meant for her skin, and she felt each one buzz through her like the lightbox was buzzing behind them. Nobody had ever kissed her like this. Her husband had kissed her the way you check a letter for a stamp, quick, aimed somewhere else, and here was this man in a junkyard spending what felt like minutes on one rib.

She reached down and found the hem of her jumper, and he helped her pull it up and off without making it a whole event, and then he went back to it on bare skin, and the difference made her gasp. His mouth was dry and warm and unhurried. Her whole ribcage felt lit up, mapped, worth looking at.