Just a Hookup at the Market

Saturday mornings at the Oakridge farmers market always start the same way for me. I show up at six, the sun is barely up, and Burton the honey guy is already hogging half the parking lot with his truck like he owns the place. And every week he waves at me like we're best friends. We're not. He's just the only other person crazy enough to be there that early.

So there I was, dragging crates of dahlias and zinnias and sunflowers out of my hatchback, thinking about exactly nothing, which is my specialty these days.

See, my name is Janna, I'm twenty-three, and I've been divorced for eight months. Married at twenty-one to a guy named Colin who, turns out, mostly wanted a wife so he'd have someone to cook. Two years later I signed papers at the county courthouse and felt... nothing. That's the part that messes with me. Not sad. Not angry. Just nothing, like somebody turned the volume knob all the way down on my life.

My cousin Faith says that's normal. She says grief comes in whatever order it wants. But Faith also does yoga at five in the morning, so I take her advice with a grain of salt.

The flower stall is technically my aunt Brie's business. I just run the Saturday market for her, which suits me fine. Flowers don't ask how you're doing. People at the market do, though, and I've gotten real good at the answer. "Good! Busy! You know how it is!" Big smile, change the subject, hand them a peony.

So I set up my buckets, fanned out the wrapped bouquets, and waited for the rush. It was going to be a hot one already, that thick June heat where the canopy does nothing. I tied my hair up, dumped ice in the cooler with the water bottles, and settled in.

And that's when she walked up.

I'd seen her before, obviously. Everyone has. She does the pottery stall two rows over, the one with all the blue glaze stuff that half the town collects. Casey Smithers. Twenty-six, I think, and she's got that easy way about her where she talks to everybody like she's known them since forever. She'd bought flowers from me maybe four times over the spring. Never anything more than friendly.

That morning she was in denim overalls with one strap undone and clay smudged on her forearm, and she came straight to my table like a woman on a mission.

"Sunflowers," she said. "The big ones. How many you got?"

"Uh, plenty. Twelve stems or the whole bunch?"

"How many is the whole bunch?"

"Twenty-ish? I counted nineteen this morning, one's a little crooked."

She grinned at that. "The crooked one sounds like my kind of flower. Give me all of them."

"All nineteen? That's like thirty bucks, you know."

"I have thirty bucks, Janna." She said my name like she'd been saving it up. Which, okay, fair, I'd never told her my name, but it's on the little sign on the table, AUNT BRIE'S BLOOMS, RUN BY JANNA, in my aunt's terrible handwriting. "Cash, even."

I wrapped the sunflowers while she watched, and I could feel her watching, which was weird, because customers never watch. They look at their phones. She leaned her elbows on my table like she had nowhere else in the world to be.

"So how come you're buying nineteen sunflowers at eight in the morning?" I asked.

"My stall looks sad. Somebody told me if you put sunflowers near pottery, people buy more pottery. Something about how flowers make tables look happy."

"Who told you that?"

"You, actually. Back in April. You said my table looked like a funeral, and I took it personally and I've thought about it ever since."

I laughed before I could stop myself. Had I said that? Probably. I say stuff.

"Well, congrats on your revenge purchase," I said, handing her the bundle. "That'll be twenty-eight fifty. Crooked one's free."

"See, this is why I buy flowers here." She counted out the bills, then paused, and I knew another sentence was coming before it arrived. I could tell by her face. "Hey, so. Random question. You get a break at some point, right? Markets have breaks. It's a known fact."

"I... get a break, yeah. Around ten, when it dies down."

"Great. I've got a thermos of cold brew and a picnic bench under that oak tree that nobody ever uses. Ten o'clock. You can say no, obviously, but I make good cold brew and I don't bite."

And this is what I am right now, the nothing-feeling thing. A year ago, married me would have said no. Married me would have gotten flustered and mumbled something about inventory. Eight months of volume-knob-down me just heard herself say, "Ten o'clock works."

"Okay, cool," she said, and her whole face did this easy open smile, and something in my chest moved for the first time in months. Just a little. Like a floorboard creaking in an empty house. "It's a date. Well. Not a date. Coffee. Between coworkers. Market coworkers."

"Is that what we are?"

"We share a parking lot and a porta-potty, Janna. That's basically a marriage."

She walked off with her sunflowers and I stood there like an idiot with change in my hand.

***

The rush came and went the way it does. Old Mr. Burke bought his usual carnations for his wife's grave, and I told him they looked lovely, and he told me I looked thin, which is his version of small talk. A woman bought forty dollars of peonies for a wedding shower. A kid tried to steal a single daisy and his mom made him put it back and then paid me for it anyway, which I thought was a decent parenting move.

But the whole time, I kept glancing down the row at the pottery stall. Casey was arranging her sunflowers in these fat blue vases, crooked one front and center, and a small crowd had formed. Huh. Flowers near pottery. Maybe I should start charging a consulting fee.

And I kept doing the math in my head, the bad kind of math. She's queer. Everybody knows this, it's Oakridge, there are like nine of us under thirty and we all know each other's business. I'm... whatever I am. I married a man at twenty-one because that's what you did in my family, and before that there was exactly one drunken hookup in my dorm at twenty with a girl named Susan, and I'd filed it away under "one weird night" and never opened the file again. Until lately. Lately the file keeps rattling around.

Ten o'clock came slow. The crowd thinned, the heat got honest, and I untied my apron and told the honey guy I was taking fifteen. He gave me a thumbs up without looking up from his phone.

Casey was already at the bench under the oak, sitting on the tabletop itself with her boots hanging, two cups out. She poured when she saw me coming.

"You came," she said. "I gave it sixty-forty."

"Sixty-forty against me?"

"Against you. I'm charming. But you've got that thing going on where you look like you're bracing for something."

I sat down on the bench proper and took the cup. It was good cold brew. Annoyingly good. "I'm not bracing for anything. I'm just... it's been a year, you know? Long year."

"Divorced, right? Small town, everybody knows, sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Best thing I ever did, technically. Worst year I ever had, also technically. Both things."

She nodded like that made complete sense, because apparently it did. "My ex and I broke up a year ago too. Marnie, she's a teacher, super nice about it, we still wave at each other at the co-op. Sometimes a thing just runs its course and you're left standing there going, okay, now what?"

"Now what," I repeated.

"So that's my question. Not to get deep on a coffee break, but. Now what, Janna?"

I looked at her. She was looking back, not doing the big easy grin anymore, just actually looking, waiting. And that creaky floorboard in my chest did another creak.

"I don't know," I said. "I think I forgot how to want stuff."

"Well." She hopped off the table and stood there with her cup. "For what it's worth, wanting stuff comes back. Usually when you least plan for it." Then she grinned again, because she couldn't help it. "Come see my happy table before your next rush. I need an expert opinion on the crooked one."

"Deal," I said.

And I finished my coffee thinking that ten o'clock had turned out very differently than I planned, and that I didn't mind even a little.

We closed at two. The heat had that late-June thickness to it where even the honey guy packed up early, and I was counting my cash box into the little lock bag when I heard boots on the gravel behind me.

"So," Casey said. "Question. And feel free to throw a vase at me."

"Yours or one of mine? Because I only have buckets."

"Smartass. Okay." She put her hands in her pockets, which I'd never seen her do, she was always all elbows and gestures. "Here's the thing. I like you. Not in a weird way. Okay, in a way. But I'm not looking for anything serious right now, and you just did the divorce thing eight months ago, so I'm guessing you're not either."

"Wow. Straight to it, huh?"

"I'm bad at circling. Marnie used to say I approach feelings like a forklift." She shrugged. "So. No strings, no drama, nobody has to meet anybody's mother. Just... scratching an itch. Two adults. That's the whole offer."

I want to tell you I thought it over. I did not think it over. I thought about it for about four seconds, most of which was spent noticing that she'd said two adults like it was a selling point, which, honestly, it was.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. But I have never done this before, so if I'm bad at it, that's on you for asking."

"Oh, I can live with that," she said, and grinned, and the floorboard in my chest just about cracked in half.

* * *

Her place was a rental three streets over from the market, a little white house with a porch full of half-glazed mugs drying on towels. Everything in the living room was either pottery or a folding chair. "I own forty chairs at the studio and none here," she explained, catching me looking. "Want water? Beer? I have beer and also water."

"Water."

She got it, we drank it, and then we were just standing in her living room like two people who had agreed to something and now had to figure out the actual mechanics of it.

"So how does this. I mean, do we just."

"I usually kiss people," she said. "At some point. If that's on the table."

"It's on the table," I said, and she stepped in slow, giving me all the time in the world to back out, and I didn't back out, and her mouth was soft and she tasted like cold brew and I made a noise that I refuse to describe.

"Okay?" she asked against my lips.

"Very okay."

"Bedroom's down the hall. Fair warning, the bed is a mattress on the floor, I'm a disaster."

"It's a mattress or nothing, Casey, I don't care."

She pulled my shirt up over my head and I helped, and then hers went, and God, she had these shoulders, broad and freckled, and I got to touch them, which felt like some kind of prize I hadn't known I'd entered a contest for. She got a condom and a strap from the nightstand and held them up like a question.

"You want to? Or I can just use my hands, or my mouth, or honestly I'll do whatever, I'm flexible."

"Both? Eventually? Is both greedy?"

"Greedy is encouraged," she said, and pushed me back onto the mattress.

And look, I'd been with Colin for two years and it was fine, it was mostly fine, it was fine in the way that a casserole is fine. This was not casserole. Casey went down on me first, no rush about it, her fingers on my clit in slow circles until my hips were doing things without my permission, and when I came the first time it was embarrassingly fast and she laughed into my thigh, not mean, just delighted.

"Shut up," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"Okay, yeah, I was." She came up and kissed me, and I could taste myself on her mouth, which did something to my brain I wasn't prepared for. "You're loud, by the way. Neighbors are gonna know my name."

"They don't know my name."

"They will. Janna from the flower stall, very vocal, excellent kisser."

I rolled us over and got on top of her, which she clearly approved of, and got my mouth on her tits while she made these little sounds, and then I went down on her, which, okay, I had done exactly once, at twenty, in a dorm room, with Susan, and it had been fumbling and over in a blur. This time I took my time. She was wet and warm and she kept talking, of course she kept talking, "right there, oh, fuck, Janna, yes," with her hand in my hair, and when she came she grabbed the mattress with both hands and swore in a way that would've gotten her thrown out of church.