Late Shift Lessons

My name is Aly, I'm twenty-six years old, and as of last Tuesday I was officially a pharmacy school graduate, which sounds impressive until you learn that my first job out of the program is the overnight shift at a twenty-four hour drugstore on the bad end of Colfax, where the customers at two in the morning are mostly insomniacs, truckers, and people who have run out of options more interesting than allergy pills.

Let me state upfront that I knew the shift would be quiet. I did not know it would be lonely, and I especially did not know that the laundromat next door, the one with the broken flickering sign and the seating area made from a repurposed church pew, would become the most important place in my adult life, but that is exactly what happened, and it started on a Thursday because I was out of clean socks and too cheap to use the machines in my building.

The laundromat at midnight is a strange country. The fluorescent lights buzz like they're annoyed at you, the dryers thump in uneven rhythms like a club of incompetent drummers, and the whole place smells like detergent and floor wax, and I was sitting on that church pew with a paperback I wasn't reading, watching my one load of laundry go around, when a woman came in carrying a duffel bag that was nearly as big as a small dog.

She was maybe twenty-nine, tall, dark hair pulled back in a way that looked accidental but clearly wasn't, and she had the kind of calm way of moving that made the whole room seem slower, like she had negotiated a separate rate with time itself. She dumped her bag into the machine across from mine, fed it quarters, and then turned around and looked directly at me, which was the moment I realized I had been staring at her, which was the moment I looked very hard at my book, which was upside down.

"Interesting reading technique," she said.

"It's avant-garde," I said, before my brain could file the paperwork on the joke. "You wouldn't have heard of it."

She laughed, an actual laugh, not a polite one, and sat down at the other end of the pew with her phone. "Bold of you to assume I read at all. For all you know I'm here to steal socks."

"It's a sock-focused crime wave, statistically underreported."

"See, now you're talking my language." She glanced at my book, which I had quietly righted. "You always do laundry at midnight, or is this a special occasion?"

"New job, night shift, the body clock of a bat. I'm next door most nights, actually, at the drugstore. If you ever need anything at three a.m., I'm your guy. I know where we keep the antacids and also the shame."

"Antacids and shame, that's most of adulthood right there." Her machine finished filling and she watched it churn for a second. "I'm Rosie, by the way. Physical therapist, which means I spend my days telling grown adults to do their exercises and then being lied to."

"Aly. Recent graduate, which means I spent four years learning things and apparently retained the antacid locations."

"A solid education," Rosie said, and then our dryers finished at almost the same time, and we folded our laundry on opposite sides of the same folding table, and she pulled a gray hoodie out of her dryer and held it against her face for a second the way people do with warm laundry, and the smell drifted across the table to me, cotton and heat and her underneath it, and something in me that I had kept quiet since college sat up like a dog hearing its name. She stole my folding technique, the t-shirt-in-three-moves one, and claimed it loudly as her own invention, and I let her, because I didn't yet know that arguing with Rosie was a losing proposition and also because I liked watching her do it.

We didn't exchange numbers. She left first, duffel over her shoulder, and threw a "see you around, drugstore" over her shoulder like she already knew something I didn't.

* * *

The universe, being a decent editor, gave us a second scene. It was the following Sunday morning, which for a man on nights means late afternoon, and I was at the coffee shop on the corner drinking something with too much syrup in it and pretending to study drug interaction charts, and Rosie was in line, and when she saw me her whole face did a small satisfied thing, like a cat finding a sunbeam it had been promised.

"Upside-down book boy," she said, sliding into the chair across from me without asking, which I decided instantly was fine. "You're out in daylight. Should I be worried?"

"Human sacrifice to the circadian gods. I lost a bet with my own sleep schedule."

"How's the night shift treating you?"

"It's quiet. I've organized the cough syrup by color. Twice. My manager thinks I'm a genius and I'm worried one day she'll find out the truth."

Rosie stirred her coffee, watching me over the lid, and there was a pause that I would think about later, a pause where she seemed to be making a decision and enjoying the deciding. "You're funny when you're nervous," she said.

"I'm not nervous."

"You've stirred that drink eleven times since you sat down. I counted. It's a habit I have from work, counting things, watching how people move." She finished her coffee standing up, like she'd only come in to deliver herself to my table. "Anyway. Good luck with the syrup."

And she was gone, and it wasn't until I stood up to leave twenty minutes later that I found the note tucked under my cup, in handwriting that was surprisingly tidy for someone I'd only ever seen move like weather. It said: Wednesday. Nine p.m. The Turnstile Bar, on Girard. Wear something you can sit still in. R.

I read it maybe forty times over the next three days, which is an embarrassing confession but an honest one, and the phrase "wear something you can sit still in" went around my head like a laundry load, thumping unevenly.

* * *

The Turnstile turned out to be a bar with no windows near the door, which I should have taken as information, and a bouncer who checked my ID and then looked at me with an expression I can only describe as sizing up a lamb, and when I got inside I understood why, because the place was full, but not like a normal bar is full. There were no TVs. There was no music you could shout over. People were dressed in ways that ranged from business casual to considerably less, and along one wall was a booth with a sign I read twice, which said "Negotiation Corner, No Means No, Ask First," and I stood there near the coat rack like a piece of furniture that had wandered in from a doctor's waiting room.

Because here is the thing I have not yet mentioned, the thing I have been circling this whole time the way I circled Rosie's table: I am twenty-six years old, I have read an enormous number of books, and I have almost no experience with any of this. Kink night at a bar called the Turnstile was about as far outside my curriculum as it gets, and my first instinct was to walk out the door and go organize cough syrup by color a third time.

My second instinct was to order a ginger ale and stand there radiating the specific aura of a man who has read the syllabus but never attended class, and that is exactly what I did, and I want it understood that nobody bothered me, which said something good about the place, people nodded at me and moved on, and I nursed my ginger ale and watched a woman in an excellent hat explain something to a man who was listening very hard, and I was working up the nerve to leave when I heard, from about four feet behind me, a voice I would have known through six feet of insulation.

"Eleven stirs and you didn't even bring the drink."

I turned around and Rosie was there, wearing black, holding two glasses of water like someone who planned ahead, and the look on her face was the look of a woman who had set a trap and was genuinely pleased at the quality of the animal she'd caught.

"You said the Turnstile," I said. "You did not say it was, uh, this."

"I know I didn't." She handed me one of the waters. "If I'd told you, you'd have googled it, read three forum threads, talked yourself out of it, and then regretted it in your soul for a month. I've seen the pattern. Come sit down, you look like a coat rack."

"You said wear something you can sit still in. That's cryptic."

"It was a hint." She led me across the room, threading through the crowd with the same calm she'd had in the laundromat, and people moved for her, actually moved, and I followed because following her seemed like the kind of thing my body had decided without consulting me. She slid into a quiet booth in the back corner, one lit by a single small lamp like an interrogation that had been downsized, and I sat across from her, and she looked at me with her chin on her hand.

"So," Rosie said. "You came."

"You left a note with a time and a place. What was I supposed to do, respect your privacy?"

"Exactly that, ideally. Instead here you are." She turned her glass a quarter rotation on the table, watching me the way she'd watched me over the coffee lid, counting, measuring. "Let me ask you something, and I want the honest answer, not the funny one. Do you actually know what kind of bar this is, or are you here because you followed me and you'd have followed me somewhere worse?"

I thought about lying, and then I thought about how she'd counted the stirs, and I said, "I know it's a kink night. I read the sign on the wall twice. I don't know much more than that."

"Good," she said, and the way she said it made my ears warm. "That's a better starting point than most. Now, here's how this works, and listen close, because I'm only going to explain it once."

She explained it in the calm voice she probably used on patients who had just torn something important, which was that nothing happened inside the bar except talking, that the bar was for meeting people and having conversations with the words turned all the way up, and that if I wanted to leave at any point I could and she would not follow me or bring it up again. I told her I wanted to stay, and she studied me for a moment the way she'd studied my hands over the coffee cups, and then she nodded like a doctor confirming a diagnosis she'd already written down in the chart.

"Okay. Then some questions, and again, honest answers. Have you ever done anything like this, with anyone, in any form?"

"No. Nothing. I've read about it, which I know is not the same thing."

"It's a better starting point than you'd think, actually, because it means you've had time to figure out what attracts you instead of just falling into somebody's preferences by accident." She turned her glass another quarter rotation. "So here's my question, the real one. Are you curious, or are you just curious about me?"

I thought about that for a second, which was longer than it sounds, because the fluorescent hum of the pharmacy and the counting and the organizing and the whole shape of my life so far had all been arranged around one very specific question, which was what did I actually want, and I had never once answered it out loud. "Both," I said. "Mostly the second one, if I'm being graded."

"You're not being graded. Nobody's grading anything tonight." She put her glass down and looked at me with that measuring look, and then, "May I put my hand on your knee?" she asked, and when I managed a yes she did it casually, like she was reaching for a napkin.

The effect on me was immediate and frankly embarrassing, my whole nervous system going off like I'd grabbed a live wire, and she must have felt the muscle jump in my leg because the corner of her mouth moved. "Breathe," she said. "It's a knee. Now, limits. There are things I don't do and things you don't do, and we're going to say them out loud before anything else happens, ever. Nothing that leaves marks you can't explain at work. Nothing that involves you not being able to breathe. Nothing sexual at all tonight, if you decide you want that line, and if you do I will respect it completely and we'll still be friends who drink water in a corner booth. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"That you're going to ask before anything happens."

"Every time. Every single new thing, I ask first, and you can say no, or you can say wait, or you can say I don't know yet, and all three of those are fine answers." Her hand stayed where it was, warm through the fabric of my jeans, and she watched me absorb it. "So. Is there anything you already know is a no for you?"

I ran through the forum threads in my head, the ones I'd read at four in the morning instead of sleeping before my shift, and I said, "Nothing comes to mind, but I might not know until it's happening. I've never tested any of it."

"That's an honest answer and a normal one. We'll go slow and I'll watch you closer than you'll find comfortable, and you'll tell me if anything feels wrong even if you can't explain