Lighthouse After Hours

I landed in Keflavik on a Tuesday in November, fifty-five years old and wearing the same insulated jacket I wear for feeding cattle back in Nebraska. The rental car guy asked if I was up for the northern lights and I said I was up for anything, which was mostly true. Mostly.

Her name was Clare. She was forty-eight, she ran ghost walks in Reykjavik, and we had been talking online for about four months before either of us worked up the nerve to say the obvious thing. She told me flat out she had not been serious with anyone since she moved to Iceland at twenty-five, and I told her I had never been serious with anyone at all, just a few short flings with women I met online after I turned thirty. She said that made us practically married. I laughed at my desk in the farm office until my brother Ashton asked what was so funny and I said nothing, taxes.

So I booked a week at a guesthouse near a lake about forty minutes out of the city, and I told her the name of the place, and she said there was a sauna by the lake that she had keys to because she knew the owner from her ghost walk crowd. She said come Thursday at seven, wear something you can shed, and bring nothing you would mind losing in the snow. I did not fully understand that last part until later.

* * *

The lake was frozen hard enough that evening that a couple of locals were out drilling holes for fishing, and the steam off the sauna rose against the snow like the whole little building was breathing. I parked next to a red hatchback with a cracked taillight and sat in my rental for a minute, hands on the wheel, doing the thing I do where I rehearse being a person.

Then I heard her laugh.

She was standing by the sauna door in a huge gray coat and a knitted hat with a pom-pom on it, laughing at something on her phone, and the sound carried across that cold air like it had a duty to. When she saw me she put the phone away and just looked, and I looked back, and the rehearsing in my head went quiet.

"You're taller than your photos," she called out. "That's a good start. Come here before the cold takes you."

I walked over and she opened her arms without ceremony and hugged me, right there in the parking scrape, her coat cold against my jacket and her chin tucked up to look at me. She smelled like woodsmoke and something green. I had been worried the whole flight that we would shake hands like business partners. Instead she squeezed me once, hard, and said, "Well. Hi, Desmond."

"Hi, Clare," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

She held my sleeve and pulled me toward the door. "Rules of the sauna. No phones, no clocks, no talking about work unless it's funny. You farm, right? Farming is never funny, so we're safe."

"It has its moments. A bull got into the kitchen tent at my cousin's wedding once."

"That's funny," she said, and laughed again, and I remember thinking I would fly nine hours for that laugh and call it a bargain.

* * *

Inside, the sauna was small, cedar benches, a bucket and ladle, one small window facing the lake. She hung both our coats on pegs like she owned the place, which in some borrowed way she did, and pointed at a bench.

"Sit. I'll do the first round."

She ladled water on the stones and the steam came up and the heat hit me like a hand on the chest. I sweat out three days of airplanes in about four minutes. She sat beside me, closer than a stranger would, and we talked. She told me about the ghost walks, how she plays a haunted innkeeper every Friday night and comes home hoarse and pleased with herself. I told her about the herd, the drought year, the way a winter sky in Nebraska sits on you. She listened with her whole body turned toward me, elbows on her knees, and when I trailed off she asked another question instead of filling the space with her own noise. I liked her for that more than I knew how to say.

"Take your shirt off," she said, somewhere around the second ladle of water. "It's a sauna. Nobody's modest here but the ghosts."

I pulled my shirt over my head and she looked at me, plainly, the way a woman looks at a man when she has already decided and is now just confirming. Fifty-five shows on me. Her eyes did not flinch.

"Good," she said. "I hate guessing."

Then she stood, undid her sweater and pulled it off, and stood there in her bra in the steam, forty-eight years old and comfortable in her skin in a way that made my chest hurt. There was a pale scar on her side and she caught me looking and said, "Appendix, age thirty-one, best party of my life," and I laughed and the tension went out of me like water off a plate.

We sat back down and the heat worked on us both and somewhere in there our knees were touching and neither of us moved them away. She told me about the tourist, the affair that brought her here at twenty-five, how it burned fast and left her in a foreign country with a job at a hostel and no reason to go back. "I stayed for the dark," she said. "Then I stayed for the light. Then I stopped needing a reason."

"And now?" I asked.

"Now a man from Nebraska is in my sauna," she said, "and I'm deciding what to do about it."

I wiped sweat off my forehead. "Any ideas?"

"One or two." She looked at the little window, the lake, the dark coming down. "Desmond. I like you. I liked you through a screen for four months and I like you more in person, and I would like to kiss you now if you're agreeable."

I said, "I've been agreeable since Keflavik."

She laughed that laugh one more time and then she leaned in and kissed me.

Her mouth was warm past warm, her hand flat on my bare chest, and the steam slid down both of us while I put my hand at the back of her neck and held on. It was not a careful kiss. She kissed like she talked, direct, a little greedy, and I met her where she was and we stayed there a while, breath going shallow, the heat and her mouth and her thumb moving over my nipple making me forget every rehearsed line I had ever written on a phone at two in the morning.

When we broke apart she was smiling. "There it is," she said softly.

"There what is?"

"You," she said. "I was worried the screen version was a fiction. Men are often fictions." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "You're not."

Her hands wandered then, slow, over my shoulders, down my sides, and mine found the clasp of her bra and paused there, a question.

"Go ahead," she said. "I invited you, remember."

I unhooked it and she shrugged the straps off her shoulders and the steam beaded on her skin and I told her she was beautiful, which was true and inadequate, and she said, "I know, but keep saying it," and I did. I ran my hands over her back and her hips and she made a low sound against my ear when I touched her breasts, and her fingers found the waistband of my sweatpants and stayed there, resting, waiting.

"Clare," I said.

"Mm."

"Tell me what you want. I'm slow to guess and fast to do."

She pulled back enough to look at me, her face flushed from heat and something else, and she said, "I want you to take those off and I want to put my hands on you, and then we'll see where the night goes. I have a lighthouse, a key, and no hurry at all."

So I stood up and took them off, and the steam rolled over me, and she reached for me with both hands, and outside the little window the locals drilled their holes in the ice and never once looked our way.

Then, because I am who I am, I ruined the moment a little by laughing. She pulled back and looked at me. "What?"

"My coat," I said. "By the door. I have to tell you now or it'll be worse later." I told her about the bag of seed potatoes in my coat pocket, the little sack of them, how I had packed it in Lincoln because it was a joke I could not stop myself from making. Four months of messages and I had flown across an ocean with potatoes. She stared at me. Then she started laughing, that big unguarded laugh of hers, and she did not stop for a good while, and I sat there in the steam with nothing on and a sack of seed potatoes ten feet away and thought, well, this is the strangest best night of my life.

"You brought me potatoes," she said, wiping her eyes. "Seed potatoes. Russets. Ashton's variety."

"Your brother sent you to another country with his potatoes."

"He weighed them, Clare. He stood at the truck and weighed the bag."

She laughed again, softer, and kissed me, and the potatoes were settled.

We cooled off the way you are supposed to, or a version of it. She said the cold was the whole point, that her sauna people swore by it, and I said in Nebraska we just stood in the yard until we stopped sweating, and she said that sounded barbaric and then she stood up and held out her hand. Outside the air was a fist. The cold hit my wet skin and knocked the breath clean out of me, fifty-five years old in the dark of Iceland in November, and I let out a whoop, an honest-to-God whoop. The snow was deep and dry by the path and she looked at me with a light in her face and said, "Race you," and I am sorry to report a farmer from Nebraska lost a footrace to a ghost walk host in a yard of snow, though in my defense she cheated, she shoved me first.

I went down backward into a drift and she came down on top of me and we rolled, laughing so hard the sound kept breaking, steam coming off both of us into the black air. The lake was a white sheet beyond us. Somewhere out on it a man was drilling a hole with a hand auger, the rasp of it carrying across the cold, and I lay there with Clare's bare shoulder against my chest and her hatless hair freezing in wet ropes and thought about how my brother would not believe one word of this. She pressed a snowball to the back of my neck and I yelled and she fled and I caught her at the sauna door and we stood there shivering and clinging, and her teeth were chattering when she said, "Inside, inside, come on," and we tumbled through into the heat again.

The warmth came back into us in layers. I sat on the lower bench and she climbed up beside me and then across, straddling my thighs, which I had not been prepared for in any real way. Her skin was flushed pink from the cold and the sweat came up on her again almost at once and she pushed her hair back off her face and looked down at me. "So," she said. "Where were we."

"You were fleeing a snowball felony."

"Before that." Her fingers walked up my chest. "I was deciding what to do with you."

"Decided?"

"Mostly." She leaned in and kissed me, slower now than the first time, and I could taste the salt of her when my mouth moved down to her jaw, to her throat, the salt of the sauna sweat and under it something warm and clean that was only her. She made a sound low in her chest when I worked at her neck with my mouth and her hips moved against me and I stopped pretending I was thinking about anything at all.

"Clare," I said against her ear. "You told me to say what I want. So." I told her. Bluntly, because she had already taught me she liked blunt, that I wanted to put my mouth on her, that I had thought about it through four months of messages and a nine-hour flight and I would like her to say yes out loud. She pulled back enough to look at me and her eyes had gone heavy and bright. "You're asking."

"Ashton raised me right. Eventually."

"Yes," she said, and then, "yes, Desmond, get up here," and she swung off me and stretched back along the bench and I lifted her hips and drew her shorts down her legs while she watched me do it, no shyness anywhere in her, just want and a kind of curiosity, like she wanted to see exactly how I would go about it.

Before I did anything she caught my shoulder. "One thing," she said. "I'm tested. Blood work in October, clean, and I have not been with anyone since spring. You should know who you're kneeling in front of."

"Tested in March," I said. "Nothing since. Nothing in a while, honestly."

"A while," she repeated, and grinned. "Good. Then get to it, farmer."

I got to it. I started at the inside of her knee because I wanted to take my time and because the salt of her skin was on