One Last Night

My name is Nana, I'm forty-two years old, and until last night the most reckless thing I'd done in nineteen years of marriage was switch to decaf for a week. That's not a joke. That's an actual audit of my life, and the audit came back boring.

Here's how it happened. We were moving out of the apartment the next morning. Katelyn, my husband, had already driven off to his brother's place to crash, because he wanted an early start at the new house and I wanted to "supervise the last of the packing," which is what I said out loud. What I actually wanted was one more night in the apartment where I'd been sensible since I was twenty-three. Married at twenty-three! Nineteen years of being the reasonable one, the one who pays the bills on time and orders the sensible salad. Somebody should have stopped me.

The movers were supposed to finish by eight. Two guys, a truck, a stack of boxes taller than me. The older one left around nine, and the younger one, Anton, stayed to do the heavy stuff. He was thirty-eight, which I found out later, and he had forearms like somebody who had never once ordered a sensible salad.

And that shirt. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I need to talk about the shirt.

It was one of those tight gray work shirts, sleeves shoved up past the elbow, and every time he lifted something the fabric pulled across his shoulders like it was filing a complaint. Which it should have been, honestly, because there was a lot of shoulder in there. I sat on the arm of the couch with a glass of wine I wasn't really drinking, and I watched the man pick up a box of books that I myself had labeled BOOKS (HEAVY, SORRY), and I watched his whole back tense up under that shirt, and I thought, well. There it is.

There what is, you ask? I didn't know either! That was the fun part. I'm a lawyer, I deal in documents and known outcomes, and here was a completely unknown outcome sitting in my living room sweating through a gray shirt.

"You want that one on the truck too?" he asked, nodding at the last box by the window. The one marked MISC that I'd been avoiding for two days because opening it meant admitting we were really leaving.

"That one can wait," I said. "That one is the final boss."

He grinned at me. He had a grin that arrived fast and stayed a while. "Final boss gets moved last, that's just the rules."

"Those ARE the rules," I agreed. "You want a beer? You've earned a beer. You've earned two beers and my undying gratitude, but I only have beer."

"Well, now I have to say yes," he said. "Undying gratitude sounds great."

I got two beers from the fridge, which was empty except for beer, condiments, and one sad lime, and when I came back he had done the thing. The thing being: he picked up the floor fan, the big dusty box fan we'd had since forever, and he carried it out to the hallway, and on the way back he was wiping sweat off his forehead with the bottom hem of his shirt, which meant the shirt rode up, and there was a whole stripe of stomach right there at eye level like it was on a display shelf.

I handed him the beer maybe a little too quickly. "So, Anton. That's short for something, right? Nobody's just named Anton."

"Just Anton," he said. "My mom was into one-syllable efficiency. Anton. It's two syllables, so she already failed."

"Two syllables of pure efficiency," I said, and he laughed, a real laugh, head back, and I remember thinking, oh no, I like that sound, I like that a lot.

We sat on the couch arm and the floor, respectively, because all the chairs were in the truck, and the apartment was that weird hollow echo it gets when your stuff is mostly gone. Rain had come through earlier and the concrete outside the window was still dark and shiny, catching the neon from the diner across the street. The truck sat under the streetlight ticking to itself. It was honestly a nice scene. If I were the kind of person who wrote things down I would have written it down.

"So you're moving to a house," he said. "Good neighborhood?"

"Very good neighborhood. Very sensible neighborhood." I said sensible the way you'd say overpriced, and he caught it, because he raised his eyebrows in a way that said he caught it.

"You don't sound thrilled."

"I'm thrilled!" I said, too fast and too loud, which is my tell, Katelyn could tell you, my tell is volume. "It's a great house. Katelyn's wanted it for years. Big yard, good light, a garage he can put a car in and then never drive the car."

"He sounds practical."

"He sounds like someone who has a spreadsheet for his socks." Which was mean, and I liked him too much already to be mean, so I added, "He's a good man. He really is. I just, hmm. I've been sensible for a long time. Since I was twenty-three. That's a lot of sensible."

"Nineteen years," he said, doing the math out loud, which I appreciated, because a man who checks his math is a man after my own heart.

"Nineteen years," I confirmed. "You?"

"Never married. Dated around in my twenties, nothing stuck. Moved out here for the work two years ago and mostly I move furniture and learn the names of dogs in my building." He took a pull of his beer. "The dogs are great. The dating life is not a success story."

"Well, dogs are a high bar."

"They set the bar too high, honestly. Ruined me for people."

The fan came up again because the apartment was stuffy with all the windows painted shut, and he got up to angle it toward the couch, and when he knelt down to adjust it I was treated to the shoulder blade show, which, wow, nobody warns you about shoulder blades after you've been married nineteen years. Katelyn has a nice back, Katelyn has always had a nice back, but Katelyn watches spreadsheet television and is asleep by nine thirty, and has been for years. It's been a long time since I looked at a stranger's shoulders and had thoughts.

And then I did the thing. I admit that I did it on purpose, because I had already decided, sometime between the books box and the shoulder blades, that tonight was going to be different. I reached over to steady the fan, which did not need steadying, and I put my hand on top of his hand on the fan, and I left it there a beat longer than an accident.

He looked at my hand. Then he looked at me. Then he did not move his hand.

"Is the fan okay?" he asked, and his voice had gone from easy to careful, the way a man's voice does when he has noticed something and wants to be sure before he steps on it.

"The fan is fine," I said. "I'm testing a theory."

"What's the theory?"

"The theory is that if I put my hand on a very handsome stranger's hand, he won't take it away." My heart was loud. I want you to know I heard it, loud as the truck outside. "And so far the theory is holding up beautifully."

"Well," he said, and turned his hand over so my palm fit into his, which, oh my goodness, an actual grip, warm and a little rough, "for research purposes, the theory's confirmed."

"That was fast. Peer review usually takes longer."

"I'm an efficient reviewer." He wasn't letting go and I wasn't asking him to. The fan blew dusty warm air across both of us and the neon outside flickered against the bare wall. "Can I ask what this is? Because I like it, whatever it is, but I like knowing things too."

That stopped me for a second, in a good way. A man who asks. Nineteen years and I'd forgotten men who ask existed.

"It's my last night in this apartment," I said. "Tomorrow I become a sensible woman with a garage. And tonight I wanted, I don't know. One reckless thing. Just one. No strings, no drama, no forwarding address required."

He was quiet a moment, thumb moving once across my knuckles, and then he said, "I can do one night. I'd want it to be a good one, though. I don't do sloppy."

"Anton," I said, "if you do this half as well as you lift boxes, I'll be ruined for sensible men forever."

He laughed, but then he stopped laughing, which I respected, because a laugh that can stop itself is a laugh with a conscience. "Okay, hold on. I have to ask, and I'm going to feel like a jerk asking it, but I'm asking anyway." He squeezed my hand once, gently. "Your husband. Is he okay with this?"

And there it was, the question I'd been waiting for him to ask, and I want you to know how much I liked him for asking it. Nineteen years of sensible, and the reckless thing I pick is a man who checks.

"He's at his brother's place," I said. "He's sleeping there tonight so the movers can get an early start. He shook my hand at the door. He said, 'Good luck with the last of it.' That was the goodbye, complete, no further correspondence."

"So it's not exactly a green light," Anton said.

"It's my night," I said. "That's what it is. I'm not sneaking. I'm not lying. Tomorrow I sign papers and water somebody's lawn and become the woman Katelyn married, the sensible version, the one with the garage. But tonight the apartment is empty except for the stuff nobody wants, and there's a man in a gray shirt who carries pianos for a living, and I asked myself, when, Nana? If not now, when? I'm forty-two. I'm a lawyer. I have never once done anything just because it felt good."

"That's a horrible statistic," he said.

"It's a terrible record," I agreed. "Zero scandals in nineteen years. Do you know how embarrassing that is at dinner parties?"

He laughed again, and this time the laugh didn't have to stop itself, it just ran. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Your night. One night. Both of us clear on that?"

"Crystal. No calls, no lunches, no running into each other at the farmer's market with meaningful looks. You help me carry a couch into the new house someday, we say hello like normal people and that's it."

"You have thought about this a lot," he said, and he sounded almost admiring.

"I'm a lawyer. I draft the deal before I take it."

"Fine terms. I accept." And then, because apparently the universe wanted to make sure I knew exactly what I was getting, he added, "Though I should mention I'm very good at this and you might be tempted to renegotiate."

"Anton, I have negotiated against men with billion-dollar portfolios. I have never once lost my footing. You're going to lose."

"I like my odds," he said, and stood up, and pulled me up off the arm of the couch with one hand, which, the casualness of it, like I weighed nothing, like I was one of his boxes, one of the ones marked FRAGILE that he carried like it owed him money.

The kissing did not happen in a smooth movie way. I want that on the historical record. We were standing between the couch and the box marked MISC, and I went up on my toes, and he bent down, and we missed by about an inch on the first try because the fan was blowing my hair into both our faces, and we both laughed into the second try, which fixed it.

And then, oh.

Nineteen years. Nineteen years of kissing a man who kisses the way he files his taxes, which is competently and on a schedule, and here was this stranger tasting like cheap beer and holding the back of my head like the point of the whole evening was my mouth. My hands went under the gray shirt without asking my permission, which I suppose was rude of them, and found the muscles there, and yes, the forearms were not an accident, the whole man was built like the forearms suggested.

"Hi," he said against my mouth.

"Hi," I said back. "Shut up and continue."

He continued.

At some point we relocated, sort of, in the way that two people relocate when they're not willing to stop kissing long enough to actually walk anywhere. We ended up against the stack of boxes by the window, and my hip hit the MISC box, and something in it clinked, and we both froze like criminals.

"What was that?" he whispered.

"I don't know. Something Katelyn packed. If it broke, it was in the MISC box, which means it was legally not important."

"That holds up in court?"

"I'm a lawyer. It holds up."

He grinned and went back to kissing me, and I will tell you the truth, which is that I had my back against cardboard and my hands full of mover and I was making sounds I had not made since before I passed the bar exam, and every single one of them was sincere.

Then he pulled back just far enough to look at me, and his forehead was against mine, and he said, "Nana. Before we go further. I want to say this while I can still talk in full sentences."

"That's very sweet, but please don't develop a conscience now."

"It's not a conscience, it's logistics." Which, honestly, was the most attractive sentence anyone had said to me in a