Latex on the Winch

I parked my rig on the gravel shoulder just off the access road at Dragør, engine ticking down, and looked out at the flattest, most honest piece of coast I'd ever worked with. The glider field sat there like a big grey ruler laid against the Øresund, grass strip, tarmac strip, one little operations shed, a drum housing for the winch cable, and a portable toilet standing off by itself like it was ashamed of something. Salt and aviation fuel in the air. Grey evening sky doing that Scandinavian thing where the light just refuses to leave.

I'm Cedric Chang, thirty-six, long-haul driver, and I was on a layover with about fourteen hours to kill. The woman I'd come to see was Denise Keller, thirty-four, who does coastal sea level benchmark surveying, which is a fancy way of saying she measures exactly how fast the water is coming for Denmark. I'd met her once at a friend's party, we'd been messaging on and off for a while now, and when she said come by the field after my drop at the port, I said yes before she finished the sentence.

She was pacing near the winch shed when I walked up, boots crunching, and she had a yellow Post-it stuck to her jacket lapel like a name tag. It read, in furious ballpoint, Clogged again!

"Denise," I called out.

She spun around and the Post-it flipped up with her. "Cedric! Oh thank god, somebody normal. Look at me, I've been walking in circles for forty minutes. I've got a benchmark on the north end and a handoff that won't happen and a toilet situation from hell."

"You've got a note on your jacket."

"I know I've got a note on my jacket. That's how my day is going." She peeled it off, looked at it like it might say something else, and stuck it in her pocket anyway.

Before I could ask what the note was about, the portable toilet door banged open and a woman came out of it looking like she'd personally lost a war. Late twenties, hi-vis vest, clipboard held like a weapon.

"You must be Cedric," she said. "Victoria Scalia. Field operator. Do not go in there. I mean it, do not."

"I wasn't planning on it."

"Good, because I went in there and I regret every choice that brought me to this field three years ago. The tank float is jammed, there's no plumber until morning, and Conrad won't sign the shift handoff without the facility being signed off. Conrad Wertz, evening mechanic, twelve years here, lovely man, rules like a bureaucrat. So everything is frozen. Nobody goes home. Denise can't run her last benchmark because the light's wrong by the time this gets sorted, and you, truck man, are just parked there with nowhere to be until morning."

"That's grim," I said.

"That's Tuesday," Victoria said, and stomped off toward the shed to presumably argue with Conrad some more.

Denise watched her go, then turned to me with an expression I hadn't seen at that party. Smaller. Slyer. She stepped in close and lowered her voice like we were kids planning something behind a gym.

"So. Here's the situation. We're stuck here for hours, minimum. Nobody's coming out to this end of the field, it's just us, the winch, and a lot of flat horizon." She paused, watching my face. "I brought my bag."

"Your bag."

"My latex bag, Cedric. The good one. Catsuit, gloves, hood, the whole thing. I packed it on purpose because I figured if this visit went the way I hoped, I'd want to show you. I've been wanting to show somebody for eight months who actually gets it, and you kept saying the right things in the messages, so." She shrugged, and it was somehow the most vulnerable shrug I've ever seen from a woman who measures the ocean for a living. "I'm telling you plainly. I want to put it on for you. Are you game?"

I will be honest with myself forever about the speed of my answer. "I'm game. Very game. Suspiciously game."

That made her laugh, the nervous kind that turns into the real kind halfway through. She grabbed my hand, checked over her shoulder once, and pulled me toward the winch housing shed, the corrugated metal building where the big drum lives. Inside it smelled of grease and steel and old rain, one bare bulb on a pull cord, the cable drum taking up half the room as a sleeping animal would. She shut the door, which only latches from the inside with a hook and eye, and shot me a look.

"Nobody comes in here after a launch day. Conrad's in the ops shed arguing. We've got time."

She set a black suitcase down on the workbench and popped the latches. I'm not a latex guy by history, I want that understood, I came into this with no history at all. But I'd seen her collection mentioned in her messages, the way she talked about the sound of it and the way it holds you, and I'd thought, sure, that's a fun quirk. Then she opened that case and it stopped being a quirk.

She laid things out on the bench like a surgeon. A catsuit, black, gleaming with that soft wet shine latex gets. Short gloves. A hood with just the face open. She touched each piece as she named it.

"The catsuit is zero point eight millimeter, so it's got weight to it. Thin latex just clings, this one holds you. And the sound, listen." She snapped a glove flat against her palm and the crack of it went through the shed like a whip. "That's the part. It's the sound and the squeeze together. It feels like being worn by the suit instead of wearing it. I know how that sounds."

"It sounds great," I said, and I meant it. I ran a fingertip along the catsuit's shoulder and the stuff had a life to it, warm-cool, slightly tacky, like nothing else I'd ever touched.

"You need talc or it fights you," she said, digging a small bottle out of the case. "And you need a second pair of hands, which is where you come in. I can't get the back zip myself and honestly I don't want to."

"Tell me how you want it done."

"Start with the legs, work the talc in, then I step in and you roll it up me like a stocking, slow, because slow is the whole point. Then gloves. Then, if you're still standing, the hood last."

So I did it. I shook talc into my palms and worked it up her calves first, over her jeans and socks, and she braced a hand on the workbench and put one foot and then the other into the suit. I gathered the