Line Work

I woke up alone in my own bed at seven in the morning, staring at the ceiling like it had answers, and the first thing I thought was: that was my first time with someone new since I was twenty.

Eleven years. Eleven years with one woman, start to finish, and now there was paint on my forearm that wasn't mine and I couldn't stop smiling about it.

I mean, I knew the math before last night. I married Peg when I was twenty, we were done by thirty-one, and I'd spent the last two years being the sad single guy who fixed other people's wiring and went home to microwave dinners. So yeah, I knew the math. Knowing the math and lying in bed at seven a.m. with your ears still kind of ringing are two different things, though.

Did I do okay? That was the question I kept circling. Was I any good? She laughed a lot, which felt like a good sign, but Thelma laughed at everything, so what did that prove? She also grabbed my hair pretty hard at one point, which I'm choosing to file under encouraging.

Let me back up, because I'm getting ahead of myself and my coffee hasn't kicked in.

Friday night. She'd texted me Thursday, this teacher I'd matched with on the app, and we'd been trading flirty nonsense for a week. Her name was Thelma, she was thirty-four, and she taught art at the high school over on Kessler. She told me her classroom had a light that flickered like a horror movie and asked, all casual, if I maybe wanted to take a look at it after hours sometime. After hours. On a Friday. Sure, Thelma, it's the fixture I'm coming to see.

So there I was, six forty-five on a Friday night, standing in an empty suburban high school with a toolbag and a heart rate that was not professional. The hallways smelled like floor wax and the fluorescents buzzed the whole length of the wing, and every door had one of those laminated name things on it. Hers was near the end. THELMA MARSH, ROOM 114, and under it a paper sign some kid had made that said ART HAPPENS HERE.

The door was open a few inches and I knocked on the frame like an idiot.

"Come in! You found me!" she called, and when I pushed it open she was standing at her desk in a paint-smudged smock, this big canvas apron covered in blues and greens, holding a mug. She's got dark hair pinned up with what I swear was a paintbrush, and she was taller than her pictures made her look, and she smiled the second she saw me. "Oh good, you're real. I was maybe fifty percent sure I was getting catfished by an electrician."

"Fifty percent? I'll take it," I said, coming in. "Most people are more skeptical of a guy who lists his job as his whole personality."

"Well, in your defense, it was a very good profile. Kilts? No. Sorry, that was somebody else." She laughed at herself and waved a hand. "Hi. Sorry, I'm nervous, which is stupid, because it's my classroom. I own this room."

"You look like you own it," I said, and it was true. There was stuff everywhere, drying racks with kid paintings, a kiln in the corner, tubs of glue sticks, and her desk lamp doing this warm yellow thing against all that harsh overhead light. She smelled like acrylic paint. I liked it a lot more than I expected to.

"Okay, the patient is over there," she said, pointing at the bank of lights above her demo table. Third fixture from the window was doing this sad stutter every few seconds, flash, buzz, flash. "It's been doing that for two weeks. The janitor looked at it and said words I didn't understand and then left."

"Yeah, that tracks," I said, dragging a chair over under it. "Is it just flickering, or does it go fully dark ever?"

"Fully dark for like a second, then it comes back and acts like nothing happened. Honestly, same."

I laughed so hard I nearly missed the chair rung getting up. She looked pleased with herself, which, fair.

I popped the diffuser off and got a look at the tubes, and yeah, one of them was fine and one was basically retired, but the real problem was the ballast. Old magnetic thing, hummed when I put my hand near it, corner of it discolored from running hot. "Okay, so it's two things. One tube's dead and the ballast is dying. That's the part that feeds the tubes. I've got both in the bag, give me like twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes? You carry spare ballasts around on a Friday night?"

"I carry spare everything," I said, already killing the breaker on her wall panel, which she'd labeled in marker, which was honestly adorable. LIGHTS, KILN, MYSTERY. "What's the mystery?"

"No idea! Came with the room. I've been here six years and I refuse to touch it."

I worked with her watching me from her desk chair, chin on her hand, and I could feel it the whole time, that look. My hands were steadier than my brain. She asked if I did this all day and I said mostly, and she asked if it was weird fixing lights in a place like this after hours and I said, "Honestly it's the best call I've had in months," and she went a little pink around the ears and pretended to sip her mug.

"Can I ask you something?" she said while I was up on the chair swapping the ballast. "Do you do this for women a lot? Come fix things?"

"Never, actually. You're the first customer I've flirted with. Is that unprofessional to admit?"

"Extremely. I love it. Keep going."

So I kept going, and somewhere in there she got up and put on music off her phone, this old soul station stuff, quiet, and she talked the whole time about her seniors and the kiln and the kid who paints exclusively in orange, and I kept losing my place in the wiring because she was funnier than anybody I'd talked to in years. She teased me about being handy. She called me "the help" at one point and then immediately apologized and then did it again on purpose, because she was like that.

"There," I finally said, hopping down. "Flip it."

She hit the switch and the whole bank came up clean and steady, no buzz, no stutter. "Oh my god. Look at it. It's beautiful. You're a wizard."

"Just regular electrician," I said. "But thanks."

She set her mug down and looked at me, and the room got quieter somehow even with the music going. "Okay," she said. "So. The light's fixed. That was the excuse. It's been excellent, right? The excuse."

"It's been a great excuse," I said. "Top five excuse of my career."

"Also, for the record, the district gets your invoice and the light is a work order, so none of that has anything to do with what I'm about to ask. Do you want to stay? Like, not for the light."

And I want it noted that I did not play it cool even a little. I said yes so fast it was basically one syllable, invoice or no invoice, and she cracked up, and she reached out and took my hand and her thumb had a smear of green paint on it, and that's about where my brain stopped taking notes and started running on pure nerve.

But that's the next part. God. The next part.

Okay, so. She took my hand. I know I said that's where the notes stopped, but give me a minute, because lying here at seven in the morning with paint still on my forearm, I've been doing forensics. I keep replaying it like game film, except I'm both the player and the guy on the couch yelling at the player.

Here's what I've got reconstructed so far.

She took my hand and she didn't let go, and then she said, "Come here, I want to show you something," and I swear every horror movie I've ever seen flashed through my head, which is not romantic, I know. But she was already pulling me toward the back of the room where the supply cabinets are, these big metal doors with handles that look like they came off a submarine, and I went. Obviously I went.

"What am I looking at?" I asked.

"Nothing. I just wanted to stand somewhere with less fluorescent light. The overheads make everyone look like a crime victim."

"That's so true," I said, and I meant it, because under the desk lamp glow spilling back there she looked warm and a little flushed and she was thirty-four and had put it on her profile like a confession, like I was gonna do the math and leave, and instead I was standing there thinking, wow, okay, this is happening, this is actually happening to me, the guy who spent two years eating microwave dinners alone.

And then she kissed me.

Just like that. She kind of leaned in, and she had one hand still holding mine, and it was soft and quick and a little off center, and I was so surprised I made a noise. Like an actual noise. A "hm." like a startled owl. She pulled back and looked at me with huge eyes and said, "Oh no, was that okay? I should've asked first."

"No. I mean yes, it was okay. It was very okay. I just wasn't, my brain was..."

"Take your time," she said, grinning.

"Can you do it again?" And I want it noted I asked. Because whatever else I fumbled that night, I asked.

"Yeah," she said, "I can do that," and the second one was not off center at all. It was longer, and her free hand came up and did something to the back of my neck, and I exhaled like I'd been holding my breath since Thursday when she first asked me to come by. Which, honestly? Maybe I had.

We kissed against those cabinet doors for a while, and I remember the metal was cool through my shirt, and her mouth tasted like the tea she'd been drinking, and I remember thinking, don't mess this up, Logan, and then thinking, you are literally thirty-three years old and you are coaching yourself like it's a middle school dance, and then I stopped thinking entirely for a bit, which was a huge relief.

When we came up for air she was laughing, because she laughed at everything that night, and she said, "Okay, honest question. How long has it been for you? You seem kind of..."

"Rusty?" I said. "A while. A long while."

"Same, actually," she said, and her voice did this softer thing. "Four years. Since Jamal. And I keep looking at you and thinking you're gonna figure out I'm too old for this and bolt."

"You're thirty-four," I said. "I'm thirty-three. That's not a math problem, that's a Tuesday."

She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on my shoulder. "A Tuesday," she repeated into my collar. "Oh my god. Okay. Okay."

And then her hands found mine, and she did this thing I keep coming back to. She took both my hands and just placed them on her waist, over the smock, deliberate, like she was setting a glass down carefully, and she held them there and looked up at me. And I froze. Not scared frozen, more like a guy holding a live wire with both hands going very still and very polite.

"You can move them," she said. "It's allowed."

"I know. I know. I'm just," and I didn't even have an ending for that sentence. I was rusty on a molecular level. Eleven years with one woman, from when I was twenty till I was thirty-one, then two years of nobody, and my body had apparently forgotten that touching a new person was a thing hands did.

She read all of that off my face somehow, because she went up on her toes a little and said, quiet, right by my ear, "Hey. We don't have to if you're not ready."

And that. That sentence. I've thought about that sentence for two hours this morning. Because nobody had ever said it to me like that, like it was genuinely fine either way, like she meant it, like the whole night wasn't a contract with fine print. Peg never said it. I never said it to her either, now that I think about it. We just sort of assumed and barrelled ahead and called that intimacy, and maybe it was, for a while, but it wasn't this.

"I'm ready," I said. "I'm just nervous. There's a difference."

"I know," she said. "I'm nervous too. I've been nervous since you walked in with your little tool bag."

"It's not little," I said, and she lost it, cackling, hitting my chest with the flat of her hand, and that broke the whole nervous thing wide open. That's the trick, by the way. Laughing. Somebody should write that down somewhere official.

So I moved my hands. Properly, I mean. Her waist first, then around, and she was warm through the smock and I could feel her breathing speed up under my palms, which did something to my whole nervous system, like flipping a breaker. She reached back and pulled the paintbrush out of her hair, and all that dark hair came