Locker Room Warm-Up

Karin had been a security guard for nineteen years, which meant she noticed everything. That was the entire job, really. Notice things, write them down, tell somebody. She was forty-four years old and she could spot a kid trying to sneak into the pool from forty feet, could tell when a membership card was borrowed before the person even opened their mouth.

What she had never noticed, in ten years of working the same rec center as Hector, was how the man moved.

She was sitting at the front desk at ten forty on a Thursday night, watching him stack folding chairs with one arm, and she was noticing it now with something like embarrassment. He was forty-two, six foot three, built like a fridge that worked out, and he carried four chairs at a time like they were magazines.

"Show-off," she called.

He looked up and grinned. "This? This is nothing. This is me being lazy."

"Sure it is."

"Karin, I could carry six. I choose four, because four is dignified." He set them on the rack and came over, wiping his hands on his work shirt. "You waiting on me again?"

"I'm waiting on my paycheck, which comes whether I leave at ten or eleven. Might as well be useful."

"Guarding empty chairs."

"Somebody has to. They're defenseless."

He laughed at that, the same laugh he'd been laughing at her jokes for a decade, and went back to the chairs, and she went back to noticing. Which was the problem. She had worked three hundred feet from this man for ten years. They ate lunch together twice a week. He had helped her move a couch in March. And until about ten minutes ago she had filed him under coworker, friend, big guy, done.

Then he'd reached up to fix a ceiling tile in the hallway and his shirt had pulled up and she had looked. Not even on purpose. She was a guard. She looked at everything. It was practically professional.

Except now she couldn't stop looking at everything, and everything was Hector.

So. That was where she was at eleven o'clock, following him into the locker room with a mop, helping him close the place down, and pretending her face wasn't doing anything weird.

"You're quiet tonight," he said, wringing out the mop in the big sink. "Usually by now you've told me three stories about people being idiots."

"I'm conserving material. It's Thursday. My idiot stories peak on Saturday."

"Weekday Karin. Rare."

"Collector's item." She swatted his arm as she passed him with the trash bag, and it was like swatting a fire hydrant. "God. You know what I keep forgetting? That you're not actually just a big soft guy. You're a whole werewolf. You could pick this building up."

"I could not pick this building up."

"Could you lift the front desk?"

"Probably."

"The pool table?"

"Definitely. Done it."

"You have not."

"Staff party, three years ago, Debbie dared me." He leaned the mop against the wall. "There were witnesses. Leon took a video but he promised to delete it."

"He sent it to me. I still have it."

"Of course you do."

She dumped the trash in the bin and came back, and the locker room was empty and echoey and smelled like chlorine and floor cleaner. She leaned against the tile between the showers and looked at him, properly looked, the way she looked at people she was assessing. Only this wasn't assessment. This was something else and she knew it.

"Flex for me," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"Go on. You've been showing off all night with those chairs. Finish the job. Flex."

He laughed, but he also did it, which surprised her. He raised one arm and the sleeve of his work shirt strained and there it was, a bicep like a canned ham, and the air in the room changed. Or the air stayed the same and she changed. Hard to say.

"Happy?" he asked, and his voice had dropped a little.

"Terribly. Very professional of us. Cleaning the locker room."

"Extremely professional. This is in the manual."

She should have stopped there. She knew that was the door and she was standing in it. Ten years of friendship, twice-weekly lunches, a couch moved in March, and she was standing in a doorway deciding whether to walk through it.

"Do you work out?" she asked. "Like, at all? Or is it just the wolf thing?"

"Little of both. Wolf thing does most of the heavy lifting, pun intended. I run at night sometimes. Full shift. Good cardio."

"Run where?"

"Out past the fairgrounds. There's a drainage trail nobody uses. It's nice. Quiet. You can hear everything."

"Huh." She crossed her arms. "I've known you ten years and I've never once seen you shifted."

"You've seen me tired and grumpy on Mondays. Close enough."

"That's not the same and you know it."

"Karin." He said her name the way he always did, easy, warm, and then he didn't say anything else, which he never did. Hector always had a next sentence. The silence sat there between them like a third employee.

"You're doing the thing," she said.

"What thing?"

"The not-talking thing. You've got a face on."

"I don't have a face on."

"You absolutely have a face on. I read faces for a living. Well, for a side job, I read climbing walls for a living, but same skill." She pointed at him. "Say the thing you're not saying."

He set the mop down again, slower this time, like he was buying time with it. "I don't want to make it weird."

"We're already weird. I asked you to flex in a locker room."

"Fair." He looked at her, and it was the look that got her, steady and a little helpless, a big man who had clearly been holding a sentence for a long time. "I like you, Karin. Not the lunch-buddy way. The other way. I've liked you the other way for a long time, and I keep not saying it because if it goes badly I still have to see you on Thursdays, and Thursdays are the best part of my week."

The room got very quiet. Somewhere in the wall a pipe ticked.

"How long is a long time," she said.

"Six years? Seven? Right around when I stopped dating anybody."

"Seven years. Hector."

"I know."

"I've been single five and I thought I was the bad friend here."

"You thought about it too?" He sounded genuinely knocked over, which was its own little reward.

"I thought about it tonight, starting approximately forty minutes ago, when you fixed that ceiling tile and your shirt did a thing. So, no, I don't get the decade medal. I get a participation ribbon."

"That ceiling tile was crooked for two years."

"And you fixed it tonight."

"I did."

"You absolute menace." She was grinning and she could feel it and she let it happen. "Okay. Okay, so, here's my situation, and I'm going to say it plainly because you just did me the courtesy. I'm forty-four years old. I've dated maybe five men in my life and none of them stuck and I've spent the last five years being fine, or telling myself I'm fine, which is the same thing with worse posture. And tonight I looked at you stacking chairs and I noticed your arms, and then I couldn't stop noticing, and I've been standing in this locker room trying to decide whether to say something."

"That's the plainest thing anybody's ever said to me."

"I'm a security guard. Plain is the job."

"So what's the decision?" he asked. "You decide?"

She looked at him. Six foot three, forty-two years old, big soft hands, a man who carried chairs two at a time below his actual capacity because four was dignified.

"I'm deciding right now, actually. It's happening in real time." She stepped away from the wall. "Hector, I would like to kiss you. Are you open to that?"

"Yes," he said, fast, and then, "yeah. Very much yes!"

"Okay." She walked the four steps to him, and even at full stretch she had to tip her head way back, and he came down to meet her, careful, like she was something he didn't want to break, and kissed her.

It was a good kiss. It was a genuinely, stupidly good kiss, patient and warm, and his hand came up to her jaw and she made a small noise into his mouth that she would never, ever admit to making.

They broke apart and she was a little short of breath.

"Well," she said.

"Yeah."

"That was worth seven years of you not saying anything. Imagine if you'd said it sooner."

"Imagine where we'd be."

"Probably right here. I'm slow." She put both hands flat on his chest, which was like pressing on a parked truck, and felt his heart going under her palms. "Okay. I'm going to say one more plain thing and then we can decide together."

"Go."

"I don't want to stop there. But I also don't want to do this in a locker room like we were two people skipping gym, and I don't want to rush you, and I especially don't want to rush me, because I've got nineteen years of noticing things and zero years of doing anything about it. So." She looked up at him. "Talk to me. What do you want?"

"That," Hector said, "is a complicated question."

"I've got time. I'm on the clock until midnight, and technically I'm allowed to be on the clock wrong until midnight."

"Okay." He sat down on the bench, which creaked under him, and put his elbows on his knees. "Here's the thing. The last seven months I've been having these dreams."

"Dreams."

"Wolf dreams. Which is a real category for me, don't laugh."

"I would never laugh at a man's dream taxonomy."

"The dreams aren't the usual kind, where I'm running the drainage trail and it's all smell and wind and whatever. In these ones I'm just me, and I'm somewhere normal, and you're there. And it's not, like, holding hands over coffee. It's the other kind of dream. The kind a grown man doesn't confess to his coworker."

Karin's pulse did something she felt in her throat. Nineteen years of reading faces, and hers had apparently gone completely illegible, because he was watching her like she might bolt.

"And in these dreams," he went on, slower, "you're not a coworker. You're not the lunch lady of my heart. You're, uh."

"Say it."

"You're mine. That's the word the dream uses. And I wake up on a Thursday and it's Thursday, the actual best day of my week, and I eat lunch with you and feel like a dog that got into the trash."

"Two questions." She held up a finger. "One, do you bark in these dreams, because that would be funny."

"Karin."

"It would be a little funny. Two, and this is the important one, what do I do in these dreams? Because I've had some version of them too and I want to compare notes."

He stopped breathing, she was fairly sure of it.

"You've had them," he said.

"Since about March. Since the couch." She sat down next to him on the bench, close enough that their shoulders touched, which felt enormous. "In mine we're not even doing anything scandalous at first. You're just there, in my apartment, fixing something, because in my dreams you're always fixing something, which tells you the state of my subconscious. And then at some point you look at me, and it's that exact look you just did, and the dream stops being about the leaking faucet."

"March," he said. "That's when I started too. Right after we moved the couch."

"So we've been having the same dream for seven months and eating turkey sandwiches through it."

"Twice a week."

"Twice a week." She rubbed her face with both hands. "I've been dreaming about you since March, Hector. In the dreams you don't have a shirt on, which is unfair to the dreams, because now I know the shirt situation and the dreams were right."

He made a low sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the wolf equivalent of a whimper. "So when you said you didn't want to stop at the kiss."

"I meant it. I meant it so hard I had to go stand by the wall for a minute first." She turned toward him on the bench. "Here's my proposal. Not tonight, maybe tonight, I haven't decided, hear me out. We've both been carrying this around for years like idiots. We clearly need to work out some tension together. That's a thing people say in gyms, and we work in a gym, so I figure it applies."

"That is not what that phrase means."

"It is now. I'm inventing it. You and me, working out tension, together, as a team activity."

"Karin." He turned to face her, and his knee knocked against hers, and even that little contact made her breath go shallow. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think about it and not just answer fast the way I answered about the kiss."

"Fine."

"Are you sure? Because this is you and me. This isn't a stranger at a bar who you never have to see again. If we do this and it's bad, or it's weird, or one of us catches feelings worse than we've already caught them, you still have to work here, and so do I, and the break room is twelve feet from your desk. I can be your friend for the rest of my life, Karin. I'm less sure I can survive being your almost."

She looked at him for a moment, and it wasn't hesitation, it was just taking him in, the worry on his big honest face, the fact that after seven years of wanting her his first move was to protect her from a bad outcome.

"That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me in a locker room," she said. "And you're right to ask. So let me answer properly." She took a breath. "Yes. I'm sure. I've been sure since March, honestly, and I've been pretending I wasn't because