On the Shelves

My name is Roberto. I'm twenty-two years old, and I drive a forklift at a warehouse for a living. Nights mostly. My wife Sienna is twenty-three and she works at the Municipal Archive Annex, which is a fancy way of saying she takes care of old boxes nobody else wants.

We've been married two years now. She proposed to me, actually. I was twenty, she was twenty-one, we'd met in a community college class and I couldn't believe my luck then and honestly I still can't.

But here's the problem. We're married and I feel lonely.

That sounds stupid when I write it out. Lonely. With a wife who loves me. But nights are long when you're on a forklift and everybody else in the building is asleep. I get home at 5 in the morning, she's leaving for work, and our overlapping hours are mostly spent eating and watching half a show before one of us passes out.

So when she said what she said, I thought about it for three days.

* * *

"Come visit me at work," she said. We were on the couch, her feet in my lap. "My late shift Thursday. It's dead quiet, nothing ever happens, and you'd get to see where I spend my life."

"Your work? Boxes of paper?" I said.

"Yes, boxes of paper. My kingdom!" She wiggled her toes. "You could bring food. We could eat in the reading room. Nobody would bother us."

I rubbed her ankle. "Like a date?"

"Exactly like a date. A date among the shelves." She smiled at me over the top of her book. "You don't have to. If the drive is too much after your shift."

"No," I said, too fast probably. "No, I want to."

And I did. God, I did. Any extra hour with her felt like finding money on the ground.

* * *

Thursday came slow. I slept until noon, laid around, then paced the apartment like an idiot. At 6 I made a thermos of soup because it seemed like the kind of thing a husband on a date brings, plus sandwiches, plus the cookies she likes with the weird spice in them. I changed my shirt twice. Twice! For a woman who has seen me in every state a man can be in.

The annex is a two story concrete building near the edge of downtown. No windows on the first floor. Just a glass door with her name on a paper sign taped inside: ARCHIVE STAFF ONLY, plus her handwriting, "yes really only!"

I buzzed. A moment later the door clicked and there she was, under fluorescent lights, hair up in a clip, wearing a cardigan with her ID badge.

"Hey you," she said. "You found it."

"I googled it. Like a professional."

"Wow. A man who can use the internet." She took the bag of food from me and kissed my cheek. "Come on. You have to sign in. There's a clipboard. It's very official."

I signed the clipboard. My handwriting looked terrible next to hers. She led me through a door into the main room and I just stopped.

Shelves. Rows and rows of metal shelves, floor to ceiling, going back farther than I could see. Every one crammed with gray boxes. The fluorescent lights buzzed. The air was cold, climate controlled, and completely silent. No music, no hum of machines. Just a faint hiss from the vents and my own footsteps.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's just bigger than I pictured. Where's everybody?"

"Gone home. It's just me. The only camera covers the front door, and the one back here has been dead since March." She grabbed my hand. "Come on, I'll give you the tour. It'll take four minutes because it's all the same room."

We walked the rows. She pointed out boxes from the 1930s, boxes of tax records, a whole shelf of somebody's ancestral diaries.

"This one guy wrote every day for sixty years," she said, tapping a box. "Sixty years. And nobody has read most of it since he died."

"That's kind of sad."

"That's kind of my whole job." She turned a corner and stopped. "Okay. This is my favorite corner. Best lamp in the building."

The corner had a table, a worn carpet patch, and a table lamp with a crooked shade. Two chairs. She set the food bag down and looked at me with her whole face.

"You can stay here and watch me work, if you want. I have a cart of folders to sort. It's boring but I swear it's good boring. Or you can read. There's a whole shelf of city histories back there that put people to sleep on contact."

"I'll watch you work," I said. "That sounds nice."

"Boring, I warned you."

"I've spent the last eight hours driving a forklift in circles. Boring sounds like a spa."

She laughed and went to get her cart.

* * *

I sat in the corner chair with the soup and watched my wife work.

I want to describe this right, because something happened while I sat there, and I didn't expect it.

She sat at the table with a stack of folders, sorting them into piles. That's it. That's all she was doing. But the light from the lamp was warm and the rest of the building was dark, and it was just her hands. She has good hands. Slim fingers, a little ink stain on the side of her palm from the pen she chews. She'd pull a folder out, flip it open, scan it, write something on a slip, put it in a pile. Flip, scan, write. Over and over.

And I sat there staring like I'd never seen a person before.

Her neck. When she leaned over the stack her neck stretched and I could see the little muscles move. I know those muscles. I've kissed that neck a thousand times. But tonight, sitting in the quiet with a hundred years of dead people's paperwork around us, it hit me different. My chest got tight in a good way. A warm way.

Flip, scan, write. She pushed a loose strand of hair off her face with the back of her wrist so she wouldn't get ink on it. God.

I thought about how long it had been since I just looked at her. Not the running around we do, not the quick kisses on her way out the door, but really looked. I couldn't remember. That's the part that made my stomach drop a little. Weeks? Months? We live in the same bed and I couldn't remember the last time I just sat and watched her exist.

She reached for the next folder and caught me. Mid reach, she looked up, and I was staring directly at her, mouth probably half open, and there was nowhere to hide.

"What?" she said. Her mouth curled. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like I'm the exhibit." She turned in her chair to face me. "Roberto. What?"

And I don't know why, maybe it was the quiet, maybe it was the lamp, maybe it was the sandwiches sitting heavy in my stomach, but I told her the truth. All of it, in a rush.

"I'm lonely," I said. "I've been lonely. Not because of you. Just. I work nights and I sleep through the days and it feels like I live next to my own life instead of in it. And then you said come visit me, and I've been excited about it all week like someone before a field trip. And then I got here and you were sorting folders, and I just..."

I stopped. My ears were hot.

She didn't laugh. She set down the folder and gave me all of her attention, which I could feel like heat on my skin.

"And you just what?" she said, soft.

"I wanted you. Just you. Not sex, I mean yes, obviously, you're my wife, but that's not it. I wanted to be in a room with you. I wanted to watch your hands. I missed you and you were right there the whole time and I didn't know how to say it."

The lamp buzzed. Somewhere deep in the shelves a vent clicked on.

Sienna stood up. She crossed the little carpet patch, took my face in both hands, and looked at me from a foot away. Her thumbs moved on my jaw.

"You could have said this two months ago," she whispered. "Or two years ago. Anytime."

"I know. I didn't know how."

"Okay. Well. I'm saying it now. I miss you too. I eat lunch at that table alone every Thursday and I look at that empty chair and think, that's where Roberto would sit if he knew this place existed." Her voice cracked a tiny bit and she laughed at herself. "Look at us. Married two years and we had to rent a building full of dead people's mail to have a conversation."

I put my hands on her waist. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be here." She bent down and touched her forehead to mine. "You're here now. I've got forty more folders, and then I'm all yours. Deal?"

"Deal," I said.

She kissed me then, quick and soft, and went back to her chair. And I sat there in the best corner of the building, under the crooked lamp, watching her hands, and I wasn't lonely anymore.

She finished her forty folders faster than I've ever seen her work. I timed it in my head. Well, I didn't actually time it, but it felt fast. She put the last pile in its box, slapped the lid on, and turned around in her chair.

"Okay," she said. "All yours."

"All mine," I said. And then I just sat there like an idiot.

"You had a whole week to be excited," she said. "You better have a plan."

I did have a plan. Sort of. It was more of a feeling than a plan. I stood up and crossed to her and she looked up at me from the chair, and the lamp made a little golden triangle on her collarbone.

"What I said earlier," I started. "About wanting you. I meant it in a specific way."

"Specific how?"

"I want to worship you." My ears went hot again. "Every part of you. Slowly. Like, no rush, no finish line. I just want to take you apart piece by piece and tell you what each piece does to me."

She blinked. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me and you said it standing next to a box of 1960s tax records."

"Is that a yes?"

"Roberto. That's a yes. Obviously that's a yes." She laughed. "God. Okay. But I'm nervous now. You set the bar stupid high."

"Good. Be nervous."

"Shut up." She stood, and her hands went to the bottom of her blouse, and then she hesitated. "Wait. Do you want to do it, or?"

"Can I?"

"Yeah."

I unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time. It took forever and I loved every second of it. She had a white bra under it, plain and practical, the kind she wears to work, and somehow that made it better. This wasn't a performance. This was my wife's actual Tuesday-through-Saturday underwear. I pushed the blouse off her shoulders and let it drop on the back of her chair.

"There," she said, cheeks pink. "Now you're just looking at me again."

"That's the whole point." I said, "That's literally the whole point," and she snorted, and then I knelt down on the carpet patch in front of her.

I started with her shoulders. Just kisses, slow ones, one side then the other. Her skin was warm from the cardigan and the lamp. She made a small sound when my mouth hit the spot near her neck, so I stayed there and did it again.

"Mm. Okay. I see what kind of night this is," she said.

"Good night?"

"Shut up and keep going."

I worked down her collarbone, one little ridge of bone at a time. Then lower, to the top of her chest, and I stopped at the bra line because I wasn't there yet. That wasn't the piece I was on. I moved around to her side and kissed her ribs, one at a time, counting them with my mouth like an idiot, and she squirmed and laughed.

"That tickles."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's just a lot." Her hand landed on the top of my head. "It's a lot in a good way. Nobody's ever just. Kissed my ribs before."

"Somebody should have."

"Somebody is," she said, softer, and her fingers went into my hair.

I turned her gently by the waist, and she let me, and I kissed up her spine from the waistband of her skirt to the back of her neck. Slow. Each one a little breath of praise into her skin. I told her she had the strongest shoulders. I told her about the muscles in her neck, the ones I'd watched move all night, and how I'd wanted to put my mouth on them since seven o'clock. I told her she smelled like the annex, paper and warm dust, and that I was going to think of this building every time I loaded a pallet for the rest of my life.

"You're so weird," she said. Her voice had gone low and rough.

"I know."

"I like it."

I worked my way back down. Around to the front again. Down her stomach, over the soft little curve below her belly button, the part she always covers up first when she changes clothes, the part she apologizes for like it needs an apology. I pressed my lips to it and stayed there a while.

"Roberto." Her breath picked up. "You don't have to..."

"I want to. This is my favorite part. This exact part. I've thought about this part while driving a forklift, which is probably a workplace safety issue."

She laughed, and then the laugh turned into a shiver, because I did it again, slower. Her hand found the back of my neck and pulled, not steering, just holding on.

"Take your shirt off," she said. "It's not fair. I'm half naked under a lamp and you're in a flannel."

"Fair."

I stood and pulled it over my head, and her hands went straight to my chest, flat palms, like she was checking that I was real. Then she reached back and unhooked her bra without ceremony, the way you take off a work badge, and dropped it on her folder pile.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

She took my hand and pulled it to her hip. "Okay. But I get to touch you too. That's a rule now."

"Deal."

We got her skirt off and her tights, and I laid her down on the carpet patch, which was softer than it looked, worn flat by decades of researchers. The lamp lit her up from one side. I knelt over her and she reached for me and I caught her wrists and kissed them instead, one then the other, and she groaned.

"You're killing me."

"I told you. Slowly."

"Roberto, I swear..."

I let go of her wrists and kissed down her body again, thighs this time, the inside of them, long slow passes that got higher without ever arriving. She was making sounds now, small ones, and her hips kept lifting off the carpet like they had their own ideas.

"Please," she said.

"Please what?"

"Please touch me for real or I'm going to lose my mind in this archive."

"Since you asked so nice."

I put my mouth on her and she gasped loud enough that I honestly worried about the silence of the building. Two floors of dead air and then my wife, moaning over a carpet patch. I took my time. I knew her, that was the thing, I knew every turn of her, I'd just forgotten I knew it. My fingers joined in, my other hand flat on her stomach, holding her down gentle, and in maybe five minutes she was coming apart under the crooked lamp with both fists in my hair, saying my name like it had more syllables than it does.

"Wow," she said after, staring at the ceiling. "Okay. Wow."

"Good?"

"I can't feel my legs. Is that the answer you wanted?"

"Kind of, yeah."

She sat up and pushed me flat on my back, and then it was her turn, and she was not slow about it, which was fine, I wasn't going to complain, my whole plan collapsed in about ninety seconds. Her mouth, her hands, the ink stain brushing my hip. I warned her and she stayed down and I said her name into the dark between the shelves.

Afterward we lay on the carpet patch under her cardigan, which she'd thrown over both of us like a blanket. The lamp was still on. Somewhere a vent clicked off.

"So," she said into my shoulder. "Feel less alone?"

I thought about it honestly, which felt right, since honesty had gotten us this far. "Yes," I said. "Maybe. If we keep this."

"Keep what? The carpet sex?"

"The coming here. Thursdays. You eat lunch alone at that table every week. So don't." I rolled my head to look at her. "I'll sign that stupid clipboard every Thursday and bring soup and sit in the chair and watch your hands, and then we'll lock the doors and you can lose your mind on the carpet. Deal?"

She was quiet a second. "That's a really good deal."

"I know. I'm a good negotiator."

"You're forklift certified, Roberto."

"Forklift certified and married to you. I'm basically winning at life."

She laughed and smacked my chest, and then she got quiet again, and her finger traced a slow circle on my sternum.

"Two years," she said. "And it took a building with no windows."

"We're slow learners."

"Speak for yourself. I proposed. I'm the fast one."

"That's true. You did propose. Right in the middle of community college, in the parking lot, by your beat-up Corolla."

"It was a good car."

"It was a terrible car. Best parking lot in the state, though."

She laughed and pulled the cardigan up higher, and we lay there while the lamp buzzed, and my phone said 9:41, and she had to lock up by ten. Neither of us moved. Her hand found mine on the carpet and our fingers did that thing where they lace together without either person deciding to do it.

"One more folder," she said eventually. "I have one more folder and then we have to go."

"One folder."

"Will you hand it to me? I don't want to get up."

"Absolutely not. You're on break. I'm very strict about breaks."

"I'm on the clock, Roberto."

"Then I'm stealing you. Write me up."

She reached over anyway, grabbed the folder off the table without sitting up, and flipped it open on my chest. "Fine. Help me. Flip, scan, write."

So I held the lamp and she read, and I watched her hands in the yellow light, and the building sat dark and quiet around us, two floors of shelves and dead people's paperwork, and my wife's elbow on my ribs, and I wasn't lonely at all.