Late Shift Love Match

My name is Dianne, I'm thirty-four years old, and I've been married to Sonny for five years. We work at the same tech campus, different floors, which sounds like a nightmare but actually works out fine. Most nights we carpool home and argue about podcasts.

That Thursday we both got stuck finishing a release prep that ran way past dinner. By the time I shut my laptop it was almost midnight, and the whole building had that empty hum it gets when the cleaning crew has come and gone. I was starving and cranky and I figured Sonny would be waiting in the car.

He wasn't in the car.

I texted him. No answer. So I rode the elevator up to the third floor, because that's where the good break lounge is, the one with the old sofas and the ping-pong table somebody talked facilities into buying four years ago. The fluorescent lights were on and the vending machine was humming like always, and there was my husband, standing alone at the table, flipping a paddle in his hand.

He'd taken his shoes off. He was just standing there in his socks, catching the ball against the paddle, flip, flip, flip.

"Are you serious right now?" I said.

He looked over his shoulder. "You took forever."

"I texted you."

"Phone's in my jacket." He nodded at the sofa, where his jacket was folded up neat the way he always folds things, which is one of the forty things I love about him and one of the three things that annoy me. "I was going to come down in a minute. I saw the table and got distracted."

"You've been playing ping-pong by yourself at midnight."

"Practicing," he said. "There's a difference."

I dropped my bag on one of the worn sofas and walked over. The table had a dead spot near the net where the green coating had worn through to something gray, and both paddles were the house ones, the ones with the cracked handles and the rubber peeling at the edge. Sonny held out the least broken one.

"You want to play me?" he said. "Right now? At midnight? When I haven't eaten since the pretzels at three?"

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes!"

See, this is how it is with us. We've been married five years, together seven, and somewhere in there we stopped doing stuff like this. Not on purpose. It just happens, the way laundry happens. We work, we drive home, we eat something one of us made, we watch half a show, we go to bed. Sonny's forty-six and I'm thirty-four and we are, both of us, tired in a way that doesn't go away with a weekend.

But he was standing there in his socks flipping a paddle, and something in my chest went off as if a light switch had been flipped.

"First to twenty-one," he said, walking to his end of the table. "Win by two. Regular serves, none of that Olympic spin stuff."

"You're scared of my spin stuff."

"I've seen your spin stuff. It goes into the net forty percent of the time."

"Forty percent goes in," I said. "Think about it."

He served first, a lazy one, and I smacked it back so hard it hit the edge of the table and shot off toward the vending machine. He chased it down in his socks, sliding a little on the tile, and came back shaking his head.

"Okay," he said. "I see we're doing this for real."

We went back and forth for a while. He took an early lead because he always does, he's got this calm serve that just clears the net by a millimeter and makes you want to hit it too hard. I lost four points in a row chasing it. Then I figured it out, stopped trying to kill the ball, and won five straight.

"That's the dead spot," he said, pointing at the gray patch. "Your serve bounced off the dead spot."

"That's called table position, babe. Very strategic."

"That's called the table is broken and facilities never fixed it."

The score crawled along. Nine all. Twelve all. At some point I realized I was sweating and my face hurt from grinning, which is not a face I'd made at work in months. Sonny had his shirt stuck to his back and his glasses sliding down his nose and he kept pushing them up with the back of his hand between points.

Fifteen all, he called a water break. The vending machine had nothing good, just these trail mix things that taste like cardboard, so we each paid the absurd dollar seventy-five and ate them anyway, leaning against the table.

"You know what I was thinking," he said, chewing, "when you walked in?"

"What?"

"That I haven't seen you all week, really seen you. You've been in your work cave. I've been in mine. And I thought, I'd like to just stand here and look at her."

I snorted, because I do that instead of saying something soft, and he knows it, and he waited me out the way he always does.

"Well," I said. "I'm here. Sweating. Eating cardboard."

"Best you've looked in a week," he said, and I shoved his arm, and he grinned, and we played on.

Seventeen all. Eighteen all. This was the part where I got the idea.

I need to explain the idea properly, so let me back up. A couple months ago, on one of our drives home, Sonny said something offhand about how we never bet on anything anymore. Nothing to bet on, I'd said, we agree on everything, which is both true and a little depressing. And he'd said, no, it's because we stopped making things interesting. He used to make these little wagers with me back when we were dating. Who guesses the bill closer. Who spots the coffee shop first. The winner picked a prize.

So there we were, tied at eighteen, and I said, "Let's make this worth something."

"Like money?"

"Like whatever the winner wants. Within reason."

He lowered his paddle. "Within reason."

"Winner's choice. The loser has to do it, and either of us can veto anything that isn't fun. No whining." I shrugged, trying to look casual. "Could be anything. Loser does all the dishes for a month. Loser plans a whole weekend. Loser has to sit through my aunt's slideshow."

"That last one's a war crime," he said.

"Then don't lose."

He studied me a second. He's got this way of looking at you like he's doing math, and I've never been sure what the equation is. "Dianne," he said slowly, "what kind of prize are you thinking about?"

"Any kind. That's the point of winner's choice."

"You've got a look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have a look. You've had it since you walked in. This whole challenge has a smell on it."

I served before he could poke at it more. Nineteen eighteen, me. He came back to nineteen all. Then twenty all, deuce, win by two, and the room got quiet except for the vending machine hum and the little click of the ball.

He served. I returned. He returned better. I dove for it, half fell over the table, and got a lucky tip that caught the net and dribbled over on his side. Twenty-one, me. He stood there with the ball in his hand.

"Lucky," he said.

"Scoreboard doesn't say lucky. Scoreboard says twenty-one."

He walked around the table, still holding his paddle, and stopped in front of me. Up close he smelled like the trail mix and the hand sanitizer from his desk, which is somehow exactly what five years of marriage smells like.

"Okay," he said. "I lost. What's the prize?"

And here is where I should tell you I hadn't fully planned this. I had a shape of a plan, a thing I'd been turning over since about the fifteenth point, but saying it out loud at midnight in a break room in my work socks felt different than thinking it.

"Remember that drive home," I said, "when you said we stopped making things interesting?"

"I remember."

"You said the prize should be something the other person wouldn't expect." I turned the paddle over in my hands, buying a second. "So. When we get home, you're going to put your phone in the drawer. And then I get you for one whole night, undivided, no screens, no work, no podcasts. That's the prize. It's all the bet gets, and I mean that. There's something else I want to ask you at home, and that part has nothing to do with who won."

Sonny went very still, and then the corner of his mouth went up, this slow thing, like a drawbridge.

"That's within reason?" he said.

"Barely," I said. "That's why I won."

He set the paddle down on the table, careful, right in the dead spot. "Then I guess we should get home," he said, "before I lose the nerve to hear the question."

I grabbed my bag off the sofa. My heart was doing something I'm not going to describe, because he'd notice and get smug about it. But on the way to the elevator he took my hand, the way he did when we were twenty-something and thirty-something and new, and I thought, well. Maybe this is how it stops happening. The laundry and the tired and the half a show. Maybe it doesn't stop at all. Maybe you just have to beat somebody at ping-pong first.

* * *

The drive home was ten minutes and we spent it mostly quiet. That was unusual for us. Normally I do the talking and he does the pointing out of exits, and I argue about podcasts with him even when he hasn't said anything. Thursday nights we listen to that history show I hate, and I spend forty minutes telling him why I hate it. Tonight the radio was off. His hand stayed on my knee the whole way, thumb doing nothing in particular, and I kept my eyes on the road like the road needed me.

"You're quiet," he said as we turned onto our street.

"I'm thinking."

"About the prize."

"About the prize."

Garage door. Kitchen light. Same house as every Thursday, but the air in it felt different, the way a room feels after you've rearranged one thing and your eye keeps catching on it. Sonny hung his jacket on the hook by the door, neat and annoying, and then he stood there with his hands in his pockets as a man waiting for instructions would.

Which, fair. He was.

"Okay," I said. I put my bag down on the kitchen chair. "Phone. Drawer."

He pulled it out of his jacket, looked at it a second like it owed him money, and put it in the little junk drawer under the microwave. Closed it. He even slid it shut gently so it wouldn't bang. He folds things and he closes drawers gently and I have spent seven years pretending this bothers me.

"There," he said. "Surrendered."

"Take your shoes off too. We're doing this properly."

He toed his shoes off and lined them up by the mat, and I almost laughed, because of course he did. Then he just stood there again. Forty-six years old, senior engineer, the calmest person I have ever met, and he was standing in his own kitchen waiting for me to say something, and I felt like the floor tilted a little. In a good way. In the way the floor tilts on a boat you chose to get on.

"Come here," I said.

He came. Two steps and he was in front of me, close, and I put my hands flat on his chest. He was warm through the shirt. His breath had the trail mix on it still, salt and raisin, very romantic.

"First question," I said. "The bet is over, it was only the phone and the night, and this part is separate. I'd like to take you to bed and try something new with you, slow, lights on. You can say no and nothing changes. I don't want you doing it because you lost a game. Do you want to?"

"Dianne. I've been half hoping you'd ask me something like this for about two years."

"Two years."

"Two years, give or take. I just never knew how to bring it up without it sounding like a performance review."

I laughed, and the laugh broke whatever was stuck in my chest, and after that it got easier. I took his hand and led him up the stairs, and on the landing he stopped me.

"Wait. One thing." He turned me by the shoulder, gentle, and looked at me the way he does the math look, the one I can never solve. "You're not unhappy, right? This isn't a fix for something. This is just for fun."

"Just for fun," I said. "Cross my heart. I'm tired and bored and I love you and I want to do something new with you specifically. That's the whole recipe."

"Okay." He nodded, like signing off on a design doc. "Then yes!"

"Yes what?"

"Yes to you, tonight. And I get to say no to any piece of it, and so do you. Deal?"

"Deal."

We went into the bedroom and I did the thing I'd been thinking about since roughly the seventeenth point, which was to push him back onto the bed and climb on over him, knees on either side of his hips. The mattress is old and dips in the middle so we always roll toward the center, which is the one cheap thing about this house I've never once minded. He put his hands on my thighs and looked up at me.

"Can I take your shirt off?" he asked.

"Yes. You don't have to ask about every button."

"I like asking."

And that right there is why I married this man, honestly. Seven years together, five married, and he still asks like the answer could be no.

"Yes," I said. "Ask all night if you want."

He sat up partway and pulled my shirt over my head, slow, and then unhooked my bra, which he can do one-handed, a skill I have never once been jealous of until right then. His hands settled warm on my waist and his thumbs moved up