Late Shift Love

The hallways are quiet at seven. I like that. Eight hours of kids screaming and sneezing and dropping things, and then it all drains away like water out of a tub.

I've been cleaning this school for eleven years. Started when I was forty, back when I thought I'd be doing something else by now. Turns out mopping is honest work and I don't hate it. Most nights.

Tonight I'm not cleaning, though. Tonight I've got plans.

* * *

Her name is Dee. She's twenty-three, and before you say anything, yes, I did the math on that a long time ago. Twenty-eight years between us. I asked her once if it bothered her and she laughed at me for a full minute.

"Ezra. You fold my cleaning rags into little squares. What kind of monster would I be to dump you over a birthday?"

That's Dee for you. She does the night shift with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays, has for about a year now. We've been together proper for eight months of it. Eight months this Friday. Which is why tonight matters.

I had a thing once, back when I was forty-three. A woman from the district office. It lasted maybe three months and it ended the way those things end, meaning it just sort of stopped. Nothing serious. Nothing like this. This is serious. This is the kind of serious where I spent forty dollars on takeout from the good Italian place across town and hauled it into a gymnasium in a cooler bag.

The gym is where I've set it all up. String lights clipped along the bleachers. I borrowed the ladder from the maintenance closet and everything. A blanket that Dee herself brought in last fall for the kids' reading circle, the one with the little stars on it. Two boxes of food. A candle, because I'm a cliché and I've made my peace with it.

The lights only come on at the push of a button, and I push it and step back and look at it.

It looks good. It looks really good, actually. Warm and small in a big dark room. The basketball hoops loom over it like giants but I don't care. The lights make everything gold.

I check my phone. Six fifty-two. She's due at seven. I pace. I smooth the blanket. I move the candle two inches left, then two inches back.

I'm fifty-one years old and I'm nervous about a picnic. Dee would laugh herself sick if she could see me.

Then I hear the front doors, way down the hall. The clunk of the deadbolt. Her voice calling out before I even see her.

"Hello? Ezra? Why are all the lights off, you're gonna give me a heart attack..."

"In the gym!" I call back.

I hear her footsteps come down the long hallway. Quick little clicks on the tile. She's got her jacket half off already, the way she always does the second her shift starts, and then she stops dead in the gym doorway.

"Oh," she says. Then again, quieter. "Oh!"

Her hair's still damp from a shower at home, curling at the ends. She's twenty-three and a grown woman, standing there with her mouth open, and I remind myself, again, that this is fine and I should stop doing that math in my head.

"You did all this?" she says. "When? Your shift ended two hours ago!"

"I came back. Kept my key."

"You came back." She's smiling now, that crooked smile that does something bad to my chest. "For how long? How long have you been setting this up?"

"Since five. I cleared your shift with Mr. Havel, so nobody's looking for us. Don't worry about it."

"Ezra." She drops her jacket on a bleacher and comes over and puts both her hands flat on my chest. She has to reach up a little to do it and I love that she has to reach up. "This is so sweet I might cry. Is it because of Friday? You did this for Friday?"

"Can't a man just feed his girlfriend on a random Thursday?"

"It's not random. You're terrible at surprises. You've been weird all week." She kisses my jaw, quick, then pulls back and looks around at the lights. "The string lights. Where'd you even..."

"Party supply place off Route 9. Twelve bucks."

"Twelve bucks." She shakes her head at me. "You're ridiculous. Sit down. Come on, sit down, I want to see everything you got."

She tugs my hand and we sit on the blanket. I open the cooler bag and start unpacking. Chicken parm. Garlic knots. A little tub of tiramisu I paid too much for. Two cans of ginger ale because neither of us drinks and never have.

"Garlic knots," she says, like I've handed her a puppy.

"The good kind. Extra garlic."

"You're gonna regret that."

"I regret nothing."

She's laughing, unpacking napkins, and that's when I hear it.

A beep. Distant. From the hall.

I stop. Dee keeps talking but I'm not listening anymore because there's a second beep and then the panel by the front office starts that slow rising tone that every person who's ever worked in a school knows in their bones.

"Oh no," I say.

"What? What's wrong?"

"The alarm. Dee, I disarmed the building panel but I never did the gym annex. It's got its own code and I..."

The tone becomes the siren. Full volume. It's an outdoor siren and a strobe and it is directly above us and it is loud. Loud like a fire drill times a hundred.

Dee screams. I mean actually screams, hands over her ears, and then we're both scrambling up off the blanket and she's yelling over the noise.

"WHAT DO WE DO? EZRA!"

"THE CODE! I KNOW THE CODE!"

"HOW LONG DO WE HAVE?"

"MINUTES! MAYBE!"

I run. She runs after me. Down the hallway, past her abandoned jacket, past the trophy case, to the little gray box on the wall by the office door. My hands are sweating. I punch in the code and my finger slips on the four.

"Ezra." Dee shouts from behind me.

"I KNOW!"

Second try. Five, eight, two, four. Enter.

The siren winds down. Slow, like a kettle coming off a boil. Then silence. The strobe keeps blinking a few seconds and quits.

We stand there in the dark hallway, both breathing hard.

"Okay," Dee says finally. "Okay. Wow. My ears are ringing."

"Mine too."

"Does that thing call the fire department? Are we gonna have a fire truck pull up?"

"I don't think so. It's just a noisemaker. Old system. Mr. Havel told me it's been broken since before he got here and he got here before me."

"So nobody's coming."

"Nobody's coming."

She leans against the wall and puts a hand over her heart. Then she starts to laugh. It builds until she's bent over, wheezing, and I can't help it, I start laughing too, standing in a dark school hallway at seven fifteen on a Thursday, feeling like an idiot and loving every second of it.

"We almost died," she gasps. "Of embarrassment. Cops showing up to find us eating chicken parm in the gym."

"They'd have written us up for sure. Disturbing the peace. With garlic."

"Stop." She wipes her eyes. Then she takes my hand. Hers is still shaking a little. "Take me back to the picnic, janitor. Before you set off anything else."

"Yes ma'am."

"And Ezra? Next time you plan something like this?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe tell me the code first."

Back in the gym the lights are still glowing and the food's still warm and the candle hasn't even guttered. Dee sits down cross-legged and pats the blanket beside her like a queen summoning a courtier.

We eat. The garlic knots are gone in four minutes flat except the last one, which we both pretend to be saving, exactly like she predicted. She feeds me a bite of chicken parm off her own fork, which I was not expecting, and it tastes better that way and I tell her so.

"Flirt," she says.

"Fifty-one years old and I still got it."

"Shut up and eat your dinner."

We work through half the tiramisu with two plastic forks, trading the tub back and forth like it's a negotiation.

"Okay," Dee says, scraping the side of the tub. "Confession time. This is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. Top of the list. Nothing else is close."

"That's kinda sad."

"It's not sad, it's true. You want my sad ex stories over tiramisu or should we save it?"

"We got all night. Alarm's already gone off, can't get worse."

So she tells me about the guy she dated in college. A whole year, ended when she was twenty-two. Amicable, she says, which I can tell is her being generous.

"He just sort of faded out. Like a phone call with bad signal. And I kept thinking, if I just hold on, the call will come back." She shrugs. "It didn't. But he was a decent guy. No villains in that story. Just two people who weren't it."

"Two people who weren't it," I repeat. "That's a good line."

"Steal it."

"Already did."

I give her my story too. The woman from the district office, when I was forty-three. Three months, casual, over before it really started. She listens with her chin on her hand.

"Then nothing? Eight years of nothing?"

"Eight years of floors and toilets and basketball games. Then a new kid on the night shift who stole my push broom and never gave it back."

"I needed a push broom."

"You needed ME. The broom was just the bait."

She laughs and leans over and bumps her shoulder into mine, and we sit there like that a while, lights glowing over the bleachers, the gym quiet in that way gyms never are during the day.

"What do you love about me?" she asks suddenly. "I mean it. Don't dodge."

"Easy. You sing in the stairwell when you think nobody's listening. You alphabetize the supply closet even though nobody asked. You brought that blanket." I nod at the stars under us. "For kids you'll never even meet again. And you laugh at my jokes, and half of them are terrible."

"Seventy percent are terrible."

"See? Honest too. Your turn."

"Your turn what?"

"What do you love about me. Fair's fair."

She's quiet a second. Then she takes my right hand and turns it over.

"I love this. I love that these hands have done eleven years of honest work and they don't hide it." Her thumb stops on a dark spot on my knuckle. "Ezra, you're bruised. Right here. What happened?"

"Handle on the boiler room door came loose yesterday. Smacked me. Didn't even hurt much."

"It hurt enough to bruise."

"It's nothing, Dee."

"It's not nothing." And she lifts my hand and kisses the bruise. Soft. Right on the knuckle. Then she looks up at me and doesn't let go. "Can I kiss you? Properly, I mean. Not the drive-by kind."

"Yeah," I say. "I'd like that a lot."

She comes up on her knees and puts her hand on the side of my face and kisses me slow. Careful. Her mouth is warm and she tastes like ginger ale and tiramisu and I make some small sound into it that I hope she didn't hear. She heard it. She smiles against my lips.

"That's a new sound," she murmurs.

"Shut up."

"Make me."

So I do. I kiss her deeper and she makes a sound too and now we're even. Her fingers slide into my hair. My hand rests on her back, over her shirt, just holding. It goes on long enough that the candle flickers and neither of us cares.

When we finally break apart she's breathing fast and so am I and she's got that look, the one she gets when she's about to say something bold.

"Ezra. The lights, the dinner, the almost dying together. I don't want tonight to end at tiramisu."

"Dee..."

"Tell me if I'm reading this wrong. Because I really don't think I am."

"You're not reading it wrong." My voice comes out lower than I planned. "I just want to be sure. You're sure?"

"I'm twenty-three and a grown woman, and I've been sure for months now. Are you sure?"

"Been sure since the broom."

She laughs, and then her hands go to the hem of her shirt and stop. "Okay. Slow. We go slow."

* * *

We undress each other on the gym mats by the blanket, one piece at a time, and I mean slow. She peels my shirt up over my head and runs her palms down my chest like she's reading it.

"You're built better than a janitor should be," she says.

"Fifty-one years of ladders and mop buckets. It's a gym membership that pays me."