Late Call

I give people lifts they don't ask for. That sounds like a humblebrag, and maybe it is, but it's mostly a description of a habit I've never managed to break. If someone mentions offhand that their car is in the shop, I'm already clearing my Saturday. If a hiker at the station looks like she's got four more miles in her than her shoes do, I'm pulling the truck around before she can say no thanks. My mother called it being soft. My last boyfriend called it a control thing, which was rich coming from him, and also possibly true. Either way, at twenty-eight I have driven a lot of strangers a lot of miles for free, and it has almost never been a mistake.

Almost.

Arnie was not a stranger, exactly, which is what made it a mistake. He was somebody I hadn't thought about in seven years and then thought about constantly for three weeks, all because he posted in some town group page that his phone was locked inside a soundstage lot outside of town and did anyone with a truck and no plans feel like driving him out. I had a truck and no plans. I also had, buried somewhere under seven years of dust, the memory of a guy in a film studies elective who sat next to me for two semesters and drew sets in the margins of his notebook, and the memory of a party at the end of our second year where we shared one kiss that neither of us had the nerve to follow up on, and then life did what life does. He was twenty-nine now, and I was twenty-eight, and the math of that had never quite added up in my head.

The lot sat on the edge of town where the asphalt gives up and the desert takes over. A dead soundstage, a chain link fence, a gate with an electronic lock and a keypad that had been blinking red since sometime around the invention of the electronic lock. Arnie was waiting by the gate in a canvas jacket, hands in his pockets, and when he saw me he did this thing with his whole face, like he was surprised and not surprised at the same time.

"Victoria," he said. "You look exactly the same."

"You look like somebody who loses his phone in buildings for a living."

"I don't lose it. I abandon it thoughtfully." He grinned, and there it was, the laugh from the lecture hall, the one I'd been carrying around like a loose coin in a pocket. "Seriously, thank you. I know this is out of your way."

It was about forty minutes out of my way. I said it was nothing.

The lot itself was stranger than I expected. Somebody had left the side door of the soundstage unlocked, and inside it was a graveyard of rolling racks hung with dusty costumes, a forest of them, coats and dresses and one entire rack of military jackets with the buttons gone green. A single work light buzzed overhead and threw everything into amber. The whole place smelled like dust and old velvet. Arnie led the way past a half-built wall that was supposed to be a diner, by the look of it, to a prop couch sagging in the middle of the concrete, and there, in the gap between the cushions like the world's least glamorous couch coin, was his phone. He held it up like a fisherman with a trout.

Then we walked back to the gate and the gate said no.

He pressed the button. Nothing. He pressed it again, harder, as if the gate cared about emphasis. Then he found the panel's little display, and the display had a message on it that might as well have been carved in stone. Gate locks at six. Opens at six a.m. There was a guard scheduled for morning, a name and an extension, and no signal out here worth anything, his phone included.

"So," he said, and sat down on the concrete with his back against the fence. "We're camping."

"We're camping," I agreed. I always carry water in the truck, a habit from work, so I brought two bottles over and sat down next to him on the cold floor of the lot, our shoulders not quite touching. The work light buzzed. Somewhere out in the dark a coyote made its opinion known. It was, I remember thinking, a very strange place to be locked into, and also not an unpleasant one, which should have been my first clue.

We talked for a while about nothing, his films, my park, the years after we both turned twenty-two and didn't call each other. He was easy to sit with. That was always the thing about him, back then. He paid attention without aiming it at you, and he waited out my silences like they were part of the conversation.

Then, after a long pull of water, he said, "Can I tell you something weird, since we're trapped here anyway?"

"I like weird. Weird is my whole job."

He turned the bottle around in his hands a couple of times. "I like being told what to do. In bed, I mean. I've known it for a long time. And every person I've ever brought it up with either laughed or went too far in the other direction and treated me like I was made of glass. Nobody's ever done it kindly. Nobody's ever done it like it was something we were doing together."

The work light buzzed. I looked at the racks of dead costumes and thought, of all things, about that kiss at that party, how careful he had been with it, how he'd waited for me to lean in first.

"You mean that?" I asked. "Not fishing. Not talking. Actually mean it."

He nodded, once, no joke in his face at all.

"Then I'd need rules," I said. "I'm a ranger, Arnie, rules are my entire personality. A safeword. A real one, something you'd never say by accident. And you use it and everything stops, no discussion, no hurt feelings, ever. That's not