Last Reel

Dottie wiped her hands on a rag that had given up being a rag years ago and looked at the transmission in pieces on the garage floor. Last job of the day. Maybe last job of the season, if she was honest about how slow things had gotten.

The radio on the workbench was doing that thing where it played the same six songs like it had forgotten the rest existed. She let it. Her hands knew the work anyway.

Twenty-two years old and she could rebuild a transmission blindfolded. That was sorta the problem. Everything in her life had gotten that way. Knowable. The garage in the morning, the hat shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays where she steamed felt over wooden forms until the whole back room smelled like wet wool, and then home. Same loop. Same three roads.

And now the drive-in was closing.

Tonight was the final reel. Final season, final weekend, final everything. The marquee out on Route 9 had said GOODBYE AND THANKS FOR 40 YEARS in letters that were missing an R, so it read GOODBYE AND THANKS FO 40 YEARS, which honestly hit harder somehow.

The whole town smelled like burnt popcorn and leaving. Had all week. Like the concession stand had caught a mood and spread it around.

"You closing up?" Marv asked from the office doorway. Her boss. Sixty-eight, half deaf, mostly fine with it.

"Ten more minutes. Bellhousing's being difficult."

"It's a Dodge. They're born difficult." He laughed at his own joke, which was his arrangement with the world. "You going to the drive-in tonight?"

"Think so."

"Take cash for popcorn. Kid at the register shorted me two bucks Tuesday and I've been carrying the grudge ever since."

He went back inside. Dottie looked at the transmission, at the rag, at her hands. Regular hands. Grease in the knuckle creases that never fully washed out anymore, like a tattoo of the job.

She pulled her phone out of her back pocket. Opened the app she'd downloaded two weeks ago during a slow Thursday and never actually used. One match so far. A guy named Anders. Profile picture was him hanging off some rock face like the ground was optional. Twenty-seven, route-setter, in town for the season. The bio said one line.

Let's climb something before it's gone.

She'd swiped right mostly because the line annoyed her. Felt like a fortune cookie written by somebody with a harness addiction. Then he'd messaged. Then she'd answered. Then it was Thursday and he'd said, meet me at the badlands gate at seven, dress like you might stay out past dark, and she'd said okay, which surprised her more than anything else this month.

Now it was Thursday. Six forty-five. The transmission was back together and the Dodge's owner would pick it up tomorrow and never know a girl with grease tattoos had saved him four hundred bucks.

Dottie closed the garage.

* * *

The badlands started at the edge of the drive-in property, the screen sitting at the boundary. Iron oxide concretions, the sign used to say, before somebody shot the sign. Round red rocks the size of cars and bigger, scattered across the flats like marbles dropped by a giant with bad aim. Locals called it the bowling alley. Kids used to climb them until the county decided kids were a liability.

The drive-in screen sat at the edge of it, half collapsed, one corner folded down like a page somebody dog-eared and forgot about. Beyond it, the concretions caught the last light and glowed rust-orange, all of them at once, like the whole field was one slow coal.

Anders was at the gate. Leaning on a fence post like he'd been grown there. Duffel bag at his feet, coiled rope visible through the open zipper, and something else in his hand. Long, black, rubbery, bent at a wrong-looking angle.

"You brought a dead vacuum hose," Dottie said, walking up.

"I brought the persuader." He held it up. The end was melted into a ragged blob. "Came off a Volvo. The part died so it could live a better life."

"That's the worst sales pitch I ever heard."

"You came anyway."

She had. She was still deciding how she felt about that. Boredom snapped into curiosity somewhere around the second fence post, and curiosity was a feeling she hadn't had in a while, so she let it drive.

"How was your shift?" he asked.

"How was yours?"

"Asked you first."

"Fine. Transmission. You?"

"Rigged a line for a drone shot on some car commercial. The director wanted drama. I gave him anchors. He gave me a check. Everybody lost." He picked up the duffel and nodded toward the field. "Come on. There's one I've had my eye on since Tuesday. It's got good features."

"Rocks have features?"

"Big ones do."

They walked out across the flats. The dirt was that red powder that gets into everything and stays. The big concretion he'd picked rose maybe twenty feet, rounded like a beached whale made of rust. Slings and carabiners were already rigged around its upper shoulder. He'd been out here earlier. That did something small to her chest, him having prepared, having planned, having thought about this all week like she sorta had.

"You free-soloed this to set up?" she asked.

"Top-roped. I'm reckless, not stupid." He set the duffel down. "Okay. Ground rules, because I like you upright and talking. This is a rope scene. Not a climb. You're not going anywhere. Your job is to feel things and tell me about them. My job is to pay attention better than you expect."

"Feel what things?"

"Sensory stuff. Texture, temperature, pressure. I brought the persuader for a reason. It gets warmed up and it's got this ragged edge that's somewhere between scratchy and rude." He said it easy, no sales pitch voice, just facts. "And you can stop it all with one word. Any time. Full stop, scene over, no hard feelings, I walk you back to your truck."

"What word?"

"'Fifth reel.'"

Dottie laughed before she could stop it. "That's dumb."

"It's memorable. That is the entire point. Nobody accidentally says 'fifth reel' when they mean 'a little to the left.'"

"Fair." She looked at the rock, the rigs, the sun going down all orange and dramatic like the sky knew it was the last night and was showing off. "And if I say it, that's it?"

"That's it. It holds. I don't renegotiate later, I don't sulk, I don't pull the 'aww but we were having fun' card. The word wins every argument." He pulled a length of rope from the duffel and shook it loose. "Now. Can I tie your hands? One loop, both wrists, anchored to that ledge right there. You'll be standing, facing out. You can slip it if you really try, it's a courtesy knot, not a jail."

"Yeah," she said. Then, because it felt right to say it plainly, "Yes. Do it!"

"Thanks for saying it out loud. I like that."

"You would."

"I would, yeah." He grinned. He had a good grin, crooked, like it hadn't decided which side to live on. He took her hands and turned them palms up, checked them like a mechanic, which was a thing nobody had ever done to her before. "Glove burns?"

"Work. I turn wrenches."

"Good hands, then. Honest hands." He looped the rope once around both wrists, not tight, and ran the tail up to the ledge, tying it off. She tested it. He was right, she could probably slip it with effort and scraped skin. But she didn't want to. That was the interesting part. The not wanting to.

"There," he said, stepping back to look at her, arms crossed, professional. "How's that feel?"

"Weird. Good weird."

"Scale of one to ten?"

"Six. Might climb."

"Tell me if it hits seven." He dug the persuader out of the duffel and held it up. Then he did something she didn't expect. He clicked a lighter and ran the flame along the hose's ragged end until it softened, warming it, smoothing the worst of the melt. "Body temp plus a little. Too hot and it's mean. I'm not going for mean tonight."

"What are you going for?"

"Honest," he said. "You'll see."

He came around behind her. She felt his breath near her ear before she heard him.

"Last check. You sure?"

"Yeah, Anders. I'm sure."

"Okay." And then the warm, ragged tip of the hose touched her spine, just below her shoulder blades, and drew one slow line down, and every nerve she'd forgotten she owned woke up at once like a garage full of lights coming on.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah," he said, sounding pleased as anything. "There she is."

The hose reached the small of her back and lifted away. Her pulse was doing something stupid in her neck. She could hear it. The hose came back up the other side of her spine, tracing slow, and then it swung around her hip and found her collarbone.

Dottie laughed. A nervous, barky thing that came out before she could catch it.

The hose stopped moving.

"That's not a safeword," Anders said, and she could hear the grin in it. "But it's close enough that I want to ask. You good?"

"Yeah." She swallowed. "Yeah, it just ticked, and then it didn't, and my body doesn't know which one to be mad about."

"Classic. Your body's gonna be confused a lot tonight. Confused is fine. Tell me if it ever goes past confused."

"It won't." She tested the rope without meaning to. The courtesy knot held, loose and patient, like it knew she wasn't going anywhere. "Okay. Keep going. I liked the spine thing."

"I know you liked the spine thing. You made a noise."

"I did not."

"You made a whole noise. It was great. I'm framing it."

"Shut up and do it again."

"So bossy." But the hose came back, warm end first, and drew the line up her spine slower this time. She felt every ridge of it. The melt had left a seam down one side, and when that seam crossed a bump in her back she shivered all the way to her teeth.

"There it is," he said softly. "Goosebumps."

"Shut up."

"Noted. Shutting up. Continuing."

He wasn't shutting up, really, but it was the good kind of talking, the kind that kept a channel open between them so she always knew where he was. She'd never had that before. Nia had been sweet and quiet and mostly just grabbed her hand in the dark, and that had been fine, that had been everything at twenty-one. This was different. This was somebody narrating.

The hose traced her collarbone again, left to right, following the bone like it was reading it. Then it dipped into the hollow of her throat and stopped there, resting, warm and hollow and light as a pen.

Dottie held very still.

"Still with me?" His voice was right at her ear.

"Still with me."

"Scale?"

"Six. Still a six." She breathed out. "Maybe a five and a half. It's weirdly calm up here."

"That's the idea." He pulled the hose back. "Alright, new game." He brought the hollow curve of it around and started tapping her ribs. Tap, tap, tap. A rhythm. Her brain took a second to place it and then she almost laughed again.

"Is that a song?"

"Shaggy. 'It Wasn't Me.' I hum it to myself when I'm route-setting. Now it's your ribs."

"You're insane."

"Tell me the rhythm's not good."

The rhythm was, annoyingly, very good. The hollow end of the hose made a little drum sound against her ribs