Leather and Glass

Aiden drags the hose across the bay floor one more time, boots squeaking on the wet polished concrete. Twenty-eight years old and he still gets a small kick out of this part, the spray arcing off the nozzle, the whole hall smelling like damp stone and, faintly, the rye mash bubbling away in the attached distillery room. The listing photos are done, the buyers did their second walkthrough on Tuesday, and tomorrow the paperwork starts moving. Friday. Everything happens Friday, apparently, when he signs and drives out of here for good.

He kills the nozzle and coils the hose, and that is when he hears the motorcycle.

It growls up the gravel drive, a low rumble that rattles the window glass in the old frames, and cuts off. Aiden squares his shoulders. This would be Tanya, the real estate agent, thirty-one, who has handled the whole sale over the phone and email and has never once seen the property in person until now. He wipes his hands on his jeans and pushes open the big bay door.

The bike is a matte black touring thing with a scratch on one saddlebag, and the woman swinging off it is wearing, of course, leather. Full leather jacket, padded riding pants, gloves tucked under one arm. She pulls off her helmet and shakes out short dark hair, and she looks at the fire hall the way most people look at a cathedral.

"Okay," she says, standing there with the helmet under her arm. "Okay, the photos did not do this place justice."

"People say that," Aiden says. "You want coffee? The machine in there is terrible but it works."

"Terrible coffee, yes, absolutely!" She wheels the bike up onto its stand and follows him in, her boots clicking on the concrete. She stops in the middle of the main hall and just turns around slowly, taking in the exposed beam ceiling, the reclaimed wood wall, the big brass pole that does not go anywhere anymore because the upstairs was converted to a bedroom. "You live in this. You actually live in this."

"I have for three years. It was cheap because nobody wanted to deal with the inspection on the old systems, but I fixed those myself, mostly." He hands her a mug of coffee that is, as promised, terrible. She drinks it anyway.

She wanders while he finishes mopping the last corner, and he can hear her narrating to herself under her breath, the firehouse kitchen, the plywood shelving, the little distillery room off the back where the copper still sits next to the mash tun like a pair of moonshine-loving robots. She stands in the doorway of that room for a long while.

"You built this yourself?"

"Bought the still used, built everything else. It's licensed and everything, don't worry, the buyers get all the paperwork." He leans on the doorframe. "It started as a hobby and got out of hand."

"Grad student, volunteer firefighter, amateur distiller." She ticks the list off on her gloved fingers. "The profile said environmental science. You don't sleep much, do you."

"Sleep is for people without a thesis deadline," he says, and she laughs, a real laugh, head tipped back.

She drifts back out into the main hall, and that is when he catches her looking down at his feet. He glances down too. The boots. Old leather firefighter boots, scuffed at the toes, soft as a chamois from years of shifts and hose drags and one unfortunate chimney call. He has been meaning to replace them for a season and never has.

"Those are the real thing," she says.

"Bunker boots. They came with the building, sort of. The previous chief left a pair in the gear locker and they fit, so." He shrugs. "They're broken in better than anything I've ever bought new."

"You can't buy that kind of break-in." She crouches and touches the toe of one boot with two fingers, a light, appraising press, like she is testing grain. "My ex was a leatherworker. Two years with a man who smelled like the tannery. I learned what good leather is from him and I have never forgiven him for it, because now everything at the mall looks like plastic to me."

Aiden says nothing for a second. He is thinking that she is still crouched there with her fingers on his boot and that his pulse has picked up in a way that is frankly inconvenient for a man with a sale closing on Friday.

She stands up, brushes off her knees, and keeps walking like nothing happened. That is when the wine fridge hums.

It is built into the reclaimed wood wall, a squat glass-fronted unit with a soft blue interior light, and it has been running quietly in the corner of the hall this whole time. Tanya stops in front of it and frowns, then leans close.

"Is that... there's no wine in there. That's not wine."

"Good eye." Aiden comes over and opens it. Inside, rows of small glass bottles sit in the blue light, each one dated with a strip of masking tape and a marker. "Experimental spirits. The still room runs warm, and some of these blends want a cool, steady temperature while they mellow out. A wine fridge is basically a little climate chamber. I bought it at an estate sale for forty dollars and it has been the best forty dollars I ever spent."

Tanya looks at the bottles, then at him, then back at the bottles, and shakes her head slowly.

"You age whiskey in a wine fridge."

"Rye, mostly. And one plum thing that may be a mistake." He shrugs. "The hall had the wiring already, the fridge was cheap, and it keeps the temperature within a degree. It's not romantic, it's engineering."

"It's extremely romantic," she says. "You are going to be someone's problem someday, you know that. Some poor buyer is going to find out the wine fridge is full of homemade rye and have feelings about it."

"The buyers already know. They're keeping the fridge. It was in the contract." He closes the little glass door. "Everything in this deal is settled, by the way. Money's squared, the inspection passed, nobody owes anybody anything. As of tomorrow this is all theirs."

"I know. I did the contract." She smiles at him over the top of her coffee mug. "I like a seller who points out when everything is settled. You'd be surprised how often that comes up."

They end up back in the distillery room, because it is the only room with anywhere decent to sit that is not a kitchen chair. Tanya hops up onto the counter next to the mash tun, which is a thing no health inspector would approve of, and sits there with her boots swinging a little, the leather of her pants creaking softly every time she shifts. The room smells like grain and copper and, underneath it, the sweet rotten-apple edge of fermentation.

"So," she says. "Since everything's settled. Can I ask a non-real-estate question?"

"Sure."

"The boots. And the jacket on the hook by the door, the one with the reinforced shoulders. And the belt you're wearing, which is stitching I recognize as hand-done." She looks at him with an expression that is trying very hard to be casual and is not quite getting there. "Is that a thing for you, or is it a coincidence?"

Aiden considers lying, mostly out of habit, and then decides there is not much point. "I honestly don't know. I like the boots because they're good boots. I like the belt because a guy at a craft fair made it and it will outlive me. I've never... explored it. With anyone. My one serious thing was with a fellow grad student when I was twenty-three and she was a flannel person, so, no, it never came up."

"Huh." Tanya swings her feet a little. The counter creaks. "Because I can tell you, from the other side of it, that watching a man hose down a fire hall in worn leather boots does something to a person. Especially a person who spent two years learning what vegetable-tanned hide smells like right after it's oiled."

"That's very specific."

"I told you. My ex was a leatherworker." She slides off the counter and stands closer than she was standing before, close enough that he can smell the road on her jacket, warm leather and a little gravel dust. "So here's my question, Aiden. Now that your sale is done and you're leaving town on Friday anyway. Do you want to find out what kind of thing it is?"

Aiden looks at her, and at the still gleaming dully behind her, and at the blue glow of the wine fridge through the doorway, and thinks that three years in this building have mostly been about fixing things before they leak.

"Yes," he says. "Yeah. I'd like that."

"Okay." She sets her empty mug down on the counter with a small clink. "Okay. Good. Then tell me about that plum thing that may be a mistake, because I feel like we're going to need a glass of something before I take this jacket off."

The plum thing turns out to be, in Aiden's opinion, drinkable, and in Tanya's opinion, interesting, which she says in a way that makes him suspect it is worse than drinkable. They sit on the counter stools in the distillery room with their boots hooked on the rungs and talk through the rules of the thing they have just agreed to do, which Aiden finds is easier to do while holding a small glass of something with a proof number on the masking tape.

Tanya lays the rules out the way she probably lays out offer terms, plainly, one at a time, waiting for him to nod before she moves to the next one. No intercourse tonight. Nothing past what they decide on out loud. Leather only, at first, meaning the sensations come from the leather and not from skin, which she explains is a discipline thing and not a torture thing, though she smiles when she says it so he cannot be sure. And either of them can stop everything with a hand signal, two sharp taps on whatever surface is nearest, table, bench, the other person's arm. Two taps and it is over, no questions, no negotiating, no hard feelings.

"That seems like a lot of machinery for what we're doing," Aiden says.

"It's not machinery, it's plumbing," she says. "You of all people should appreciate plumbing. The whole point is that once the pipes are set you don't have to think about them again."

He cannot argue with that. Three years in this building have taught him that good plumbing is the difference between a life and a constant low-grade emergency.

She goes out to the bike for her saddlebag while he rinses the glasses. Through the window over the utility sink he can watch her walk across the gravel lot to the matte black touring bike, unhook the bag with the scratch on its lid, and rummage in it. She comes back carrying a folded jacket that is not the one she wore in, plus a pair of gloves draped over her arm like something out of an old movie.

"Spares," she says, holding them up. "I ride in all weather. The jacket is a lighter one, deer skin, broken in soft. The gloves are goat, they're the softest thing I own. I keep them in a bag with a liner so they don't pick up grit."