Latex and Low Tide

The griddle at The Locker never really cools down in November, it just gets less use. I was scraping it at nine on a Tuesday night with no customers worth mentioning, and Reggie was folding boxes in the back for no reason I could understand.

Miles here, by the way. Twenty-two, line cook, living above a bait shop in a town that empties out after Labor Day. Farron Point in November is a ghost town with one working traffic light. This is the story of how that got less boring.

"Hey," Reggie said, leaning in the kitchen doorway. He's twenty-four, been there longer than me, mostly quiet. "You remember Remi? The friend of Cassie's from college. You met her at that party two years back."

"Sort of. Tall girl, talked fast."

"That's her. She's in town for the week. Renting one of the cottages on the north end."

"In November? Nobody rents those in November."

"She did. Said she needed to get away from her laptop for a while." He wiped his hands on his apron. "She asked if you were still around. Said she wanted company, somebody local who knows the town."

"Company meaning what?"

"Meaning hang out, I think. I told her you'd probably be at the bar until close anyway, because you always are."

He wasn't wrong. My routine this fall had been work, bar, apartment, repeat. The bar was The Locker itself, which is a weird loop but it's what you get in a town with one bar. I finished the griddle, hung the scraper, and told him I'd be out front in ten.

I got a plate of fries going for myself and ate standing at the counter. Around nine forty the door opened and a tall woman came in wearing a big coat and shaking off cold. She spotted me right away.

"Miles, right?" she said, sitting down across from me without asking, which I liked. "Remi. Cassie's friend. We met at that thing at Dustin's apartment, you made everybody drinks."

"I made everybody terrible drinks," I said. "You're twenty-three now, right? You were twenty-one then."

"Twenty-one then. Twenty-three now, yeah. How'd you remember that?"

"You made a joke about finally being legal to buy your own wine coolers. It stuck."

She laughed and ordered a beer from Tina behind the bar. We did twenty minutes of small talk, which honestly was more social contact than I'd had outside of work in about three weeks. She does graphic design now, moved away after college to a city, works remote, got tired of her apartment and booked a cottage out here for a week. I told her about the diner and the griddle and the raccoon that lives under the boardwalk that I've named Clint.

Then she took a long pull of her beer and said, kind of casual, "Okay, weird thing to mention, but I've been sitting here deciding whether to say it."

"Say what?"

"I'm wearing a latex dress under this coat."

I looked at her. She looked back at me, calm, like she'd just told me the time.

"Like, the whole thing," she said. "Under the coat. I put it on before I came out because I wanted to tell somebody tonight. Anybody. And Reggie said you were the least likely person in town to make a thing out of anything."

"Is it a thing?"

"For me it's kind of a thing. I've never told anyone in person. Ever." She shrugged. "This town seemed like a good place to do it. Nobody here knows me, nobody cares, and if I chicken out I can just leave and nobody from my life ever finds out."

"Why latex?"

"I like how it feels. It's that simple, really. I got one a few months ago on a whim and wore it around my apartment with the curtains closed and it was the most interesting thing to happen to me all year. Which is sort of sad, but there it is." She finished the beer and waved at Tina for another. "Anyway. That's my weird thing for the night. You don't have to react."

I thought about it for a second. My weird thing for the past three months was that I'd eaten dinner standing at my counter every single night like an animal.

"Honestly the only thing I'm reacting to is that you drove here and I walked," I said. "You showed up to a dead bar in November wearing a latex dress under a coat just to tell a near stranger. That's the most interesting thing to happen to me all year, so we're even."

She grinned at that and some of the tension went out of her shoulders. We talked until closing time. She asked normal questions and I asked normal questions back, and somewhere in there she said the dress went down to her knees, long sleeves, back zipper, and that she'd bought it online at two in the morning like a person with no self-control, which is the only correct way to buy latex.

"Is it uncomfortable?" I asked. "Seems like it'd be sweaty."

"It's a whole process. Powder, then work your way into it, then you're sealed in and warm and it feels like being gripped by the entire garment at once. Some people hate that. I love it."

"Huh."

"Why, does it sound interesting?"

"Kind of, yeah. I don't know anything about it. It sounds sorta like a wetsuit you didn't buy for a practical reason."

"That's honestly a decent description and I'm stealing it."

Closing time came, which in November is ten o'clock. Tina started stacking chairs. Reggie poked his head out, said goodnight to both of us, and left. Remi put some cash on the table and looked at me.

"So here's my situation," she said. "I've got a week in a cottage and no plan. You've got an apartment, presumably with less dust than my rental. I don't want to go back to an empty cottage and sit in a latex dress alone watching cable, which is what I did last night, and it was pathetic."

"I mean. You could come to my place," I said. The decision was more complicated than that, but it really wasn't. I'd been bored for a season and here was a person doing something for no reason at all, which is my favorite kind of person. "I've got wine that's mostly respectable and a couch. Fair warning, I also have a roommate situation but he's a cat."

"Deal." She stood and pulled her coat tighter. "And for honesty's sake, I'm not expecting anything. I just don't want the night to end at a shut bar."

"Neither do I, honestly."

We walked out into the cold. The boardwalk was shut up for winter, all the shuttered snack shacks chained down, and the tide was way out so the beach was just a wide dark flat with a smell of salt and diesel. Her car was a little silver hatchback parked half on the curb.

"Follow me, or ride with me?" she asked.

"I'll walk, it's four blocks. Or ride with you, whatever. It's cold."

I rode with her. Her car smelled like vanilla and the heater blew straight at her feet. She drove slow through the empty streets, past the dark cottages, past the bait shop where I live above, and pulled into the gravel lot behind the building.

"This is me," I said. "Second floor, the stairs with the loose one. Step high on the third step or it clangs."

She got her coat off the second we were inside my apartment, and I got a look at her. She hadn't been exaggerating. It was a black latex dress, knee length, long sleeves, and it clung to her body, shiny and a little surreal in my kitchen light.

"Okay," I said. "Yeah. That's a dress."

"It's a lot, right? I keep forgetting how it looks to other people because I only ever see it in my mirror."

"It looks good. That's my honest take." I got two glasses down and the bottle of wine that was mostly respectable. "So this is what you wore around your apartment with the curtains closed."

"Among other things. The other things were also with the curtains closed." She took the glass and sat on my couch like she lived there. "God, this is nice. A couch that isn't from a rental listing."

I sat down at the other end. The cat came out and stared at her from the hallway for a solid minute, then decided she was acceptable and left.

"So ask me stuff," she said. "I know you're curious. You've been doing the face."

"What face?"

"The face where someone tells you they own a latex dress and you're doing math in your head."

I laughed, because I had been. "Fine. First question. Why tonight? Why tell me?"

"Because I've had this thing for months and told no one, and it started to feel less like a thing I like and more like a thing I hide. That's a bad trade. So I picked a town where I don't know anybody and told the first person who seemed like they