Leather & Rust

So here's how my day was supposed to go. Lunch at noon in Lucerne with my lawyer and Ronald's lawyer, sit through two hours of mediation, sign something, drive home. Clean. Quiet. Done.

Instead it's dusk and I'm trapped in a toll hut at the top of a mountain pass with three feet of snow on the road behind me and three more feet on the road ahead. The hut is concrete. One window. White sky through it, nothing else. A bench, a table with three legs, a coffee machine that smells like burnt dust, a crate of emergency blankets, and one phone that doesn't dial out. I tried it six times.

My name is Melina Pace. I'm fifty-two years old, and for the last nineteen of those years I've been a harbor pilot, which is a job people think is all romance and ships and it is, for about four minutes per ship, and the rest is waiting around in the cold.

The man across the hut is Adam Stevens. He's forty-three, harbor pilot, and ten years ago, when I was forty-two and he was thirty-three, we went through the same advanced simulator certification course and I beat him in the docking simulator. Final exercise. Full current, zero visibility, tanker the size of a cathedral. I docked it clean. He put a dent in a bollard that cost him points and, apparently, ten years of his good mood.

We haven't spoken since. Except for the parking lot. And the kiss.

Which brings me to the irony of my day, because the reason Adam Stevens is in this hut is that his mediation got postponed by the same storm. His mediation. With his ex-wife. Over the boatyard. And mine got postponed too, so the universe put two people in the middle of their own divorces into one concrete box and walked away whistling.

He's been quiet for an hour. I've been quiet for an hour. Then he picks up his paper cup, drains the cold coffee, and sets it down so hard the table wobbles on its bad leg. Coffee slops over the rim and spreads toward my sleeve.

"Damn it," I say.

He digs in his duffel, comes out with a seed catalog, and slaps it flat over the spill. Just slaps it down, like he's killing something. Tomato varieties, I can see, upside down.

"That's your coaster?" I say.

"It absorbs." He shrugs. "My wife's selling the greenhouse, you know. I built it. Every bolt. And she's selling it with the house, so it's hers now, so it's gone."

"Your divorce was your choice," I say, and I don't even try to soften it. "You signed the papers because you wanted out. At least you picked it. Mine is being done to me with a lawyer's pen and a spreadsheet."

"Oh, here we go." He leans back on the bench. "Poor Melina. Twenty-six years of marriage and she's the victim."

"Twenty-six years, yes." I hold up my hand, count nothing, put it down. "Look, I didn't ask for this. Ronald decided at fifty-six that his life was missing something, and the something turned out to be a woman named Deirdre who teaches spin classes. You chose yours. That's all I said."

"All right. Fine." He says it fast, twice, like closing a door. "Fine."

The heater picks that moment to die. It makes a sound like a cough and then nothing, and the hum I'd stopped hearing is gone, and the cold comes in like it had been waiting at the door the whole time.

I hug my arms and pretend I didn't notice. He notices anyway.

He gets up, digs through the duffel again, and pulls out a leather jacket. Old one, dark brown, worn at the elbows. He shrugs into it and the creak of the hide fills the whole hut, loud as a voice in the silence. Then he stands there looking at the white window like the view might improve.

I last four minutes. Maybe five. My teeth start doing it on their own.

"Okay," I say. "I'm freezing. Officially. I'm saying it out loud so you can enjoy it."

He doesn't say anything. He just takes the jacket off, crosses the hut, and shoves it onto my shoulders, and he doesn't meet my eyes while he does it. He goes back to the bench and sits and stares at the window again as if he has done nothing at all.

But the leather holds his heat. All of it. And there's a smell in the collar, faint, brine and cold water and underneath that the animal smell of the hide itself. He smells like a harbor. Of course he does. I pull the collar up without deciding to and I hate myself a little and I do it anyway.

"Thank you," I say.

"Sure."

"Adam."

"What."

"The parking lot," I say. "That's where my head went, if you're wondering. Since we're stuck here all night."

His jaw works. "Don't."

"You started it. You grabbed my shoulder and I spun around and I had my keys in my fist, remember? Ready to go for your eyes."

"Because you'd out-scored me by four tenths of a point and you smiled about it. In front of everyone."

"You dented a bollard, Adam. The instructor drew a picture of it on the board."

"I know what the instructor did." He turns around then, finally, and his eyes are the same, dark and angry and a little bit amused, which was always the dangerous part. "And then you smiled and I saw red, and I said what I said, and you shoved me."

"You shoved me first."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did." I'm warming up now, and not just from the jacket. "And then it was grabbing and coat-pulling and I don't even know what, and then you..."

"Then I kissed you." He says it flat. "Yeah."

"You kissed me hard enough to bruise my lip. I had a mark for three days. Ronald asked if I'd bitten into an apple."

"And you hit me in the chest with your fist, so we're even."

"I did not hit you, I pushed you, and then you..." I stop. Because here's the part I've told nobody, ever, not Ronald, not my lawyer, not the woman I play cards with. "And then I kissed you back. For three or four seconds. And then I drove home furious the entire way."

He's quiet a while. The window goes from white to gray as the light drops.

"Four seconds," he says.

"Three."

"You counted."

"I count everything. It's my whole personality, apparently. Ask Ronald's lawyer."

He laughs then, short and low, and it changes his whole face. He's older now, gray coming in at the temples, and