Loan Officer's Solace

The credit union closes at five, but I never leave at five. Marlene, twenty-nine years old, five years in Pine Valley, and I stay late on purpose. The condo I rent is quiet in a way that presses on my ears, and the office is quiet in a way that feels almost like company. I can hear the furnace tick. I can hear the ice machine in the break room. It's late spring, the tourists are gone, the lifts are shut down, and the whole town has this soft, emptied-out feeling, like a theater after the matinee.

So I was at my desk that Thursday, past six, pretending to review a mortgage file I'd already reviewed twice. Coffee gone cold. Desk lamp the only light on in my half of the building. And the thought that keeps circling me these days came around again, the one about how a person can live somewhere five years and still not have anyone to call on a Thursday night. I had friends, sort of. Coworkers. But no one whose key was in my pocket. No one who'd notice if I just kept sitting here until nine.

Then I heard something from the break room.

At first I thought it was the ice machine again. But it wasn't. It was slower, and it had a rhythm to it, and there was a breath mixed in with it, a small caught breath, the kind a person lets out when they're trying very hard to be quiet. I sat there with my hand flat on the cold file folder and listened, and my face got warm before my brain even caught up to what my ears were telling me.

I should have gone back to the file. I got up instead and walked down the hall on socked feet, quiet on the old carpet, and the break room door was half open, and the light in there was just the vending machine glow, blue and flickering.

Claire was on the couch.

Claire, our underwriter, thirty-two, seven years in town, the woman who fixes my mistakes before they reach a member's file. She was sitting in the corner of the couch with her legs stretched out, and in her lap was a small pink vibrator, and she wasn't even trying to hide it. Her face was flushed all the way down her neck. Her eyes came up and met mine and neither of us moved for what felt almost a minute.

"Hey," she said, like I'd caught her in the kitchen making coffee.

"Hey," I said. "I heard... I heard something."

"Yeah." She looked down at the toy and then back at me. She didn't turn it off. She didn't cover it. She just sat there with it in her lap, calm as anything, though her cheeks stayed red. "Sorry. I thought the building was empty. I wait until after six usually. You're never here this late this quiet, you're usually typing."

"I finished the typing."

"So I heard."

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame. My heart was doing something embarrassing and I kept my face as still as I could, because what do you even say. But the honest thing, the thing that was true, was that my first feeling wasn't shock. It was relief. Like finding out somebody else in town also eats dinner standing at the counter.

"You want to stay?" she asked. Just like that. Plain, no drama in her voice. "You don't have to. You can go back to your desk and forget this, that's fine too. But I'm not stopping, I've had a week, and I've got twenty minutes of quiet left before I go home to my cat."

I hesitated. I looked at the door, and down the hall, and back at her. "You're serious?"

"I'm serious. No strings. We don't even have to talk about it Monday if you don't want. I've done this before, staying things casual. It works for me." She shifted the toy in her lap a little. "Honestly, Marlene, it's just nice not doing it alone in the dark."

And that was the part that got me, not the toy, not the flushed neck. It was alone in the dark. I thought about my condo and the furnace ticking and the file folder I'd read twice, and I said, "Okay. Yeah. Okay."

"Okay." She smiled, small and crooked. "Sit wherever. Other end of the couch. You don't have to do anything you don't feel like, that's the whole deal."

"Whole deal," I said, and walked over and sat down on the far end, knees angled toward the armrest, my purse still on my shoulder like an idiot. I took it off and set it on the floor.

The room was dim, just the vending machine light, blue on the coffee pot, blue on the old paper posters somebody had taped up years ago. Claire clicked the little toy on. I heard the low hum before I saw her press it, and she pressed it right through her jeans, flat against the seam of them, and her breath came out slow.

"God, that's better already," she murmured, mostly to herself.

I don't know how long we sat like that before I reached for my purse. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Her breathing was audible in the quiet, in and out, a little rougher each time, and the hum of her toy was steady, and the room smelled like old coffee and, faintly, like her perfume warmed up. I unzipped the purse and felt around and my fingers found it, the smooth silicone bullet I'd bought two years ago and never used with another living soul. I'd carried it to work in that purse a few times before, just in case, which is a sad sentence when I write it out.

"Should I pretend not to notice?" she asked, and there was a smile in her voice.

"No. I mean!" I laughed, short. "I guess I'm doing this too."

"Good." She didn't look over, actually. She kept her eyes half closed, working the toy through her jeans, slow circles. "Do whatever feels right. Skirt's a better idea than jeans, by the way. Learned that the hard way."