one more round

I was twenty eight years old and standing at the Great Lakes Brew Fest with a plastic cup of something hoppy that I didn't really want, and I was bored out of my skull. That was the entire truth of it. I'd been a firefighter for six years, and the job ate everything out of me by October, and every year I came to this thing because my crew came, and every year I ended up at the edge of the pavilion watching other people have a better time than me.

The fest was the usual sprawl. String lights strung between poles over rows of picnic tables, a band doing covers too loud to talk over, thirty vendor tents pushing everything from kettle corn to candles shaped like lake trout. I'd already done the circuit. I'd already heard three guys try the same line about how they "really respected what firefighters do." One of them had called me brave. I'd thanked him like a customer service rep and walked away.

I was scanning the crowd the way I scan a room when I walk into a structure. It's not a choice, it's just what the job does to you. You look for the exits, the trouble spots, the person who's had too much. My old lieutenant used to tell me I had eyes like a hawk with a caffeine problem.

"You're still staring at people like you're about to put out a fire."

I turned around and there was a man I half knew holding two cups of beer, and it took me a solid three seconds to put the face together with the name. Saul Moretti. We'd been in the same graduating class at Central, back when I was eighteen and he was nineteen and already looked like a guy who owned his own opinions. He worked in logistics now, I think. Or shipping. Something with containers. He looked the same as he had back then, broad and calm, like nothing in the world had ever needed to be handled quickly.

"Saul," I said. "Wow. Hey!"

"You remember my name, so that's something," he said, and handed me one of the cups. "You looked thirsty from across the yard."

I took it because it felt rude not to, and because I actually was thirsty. We ended up at a quieter corner near the vendor tents where the music faded down to a thump and the crowd thinned out to people who'd come to drink and not to be seen. He asked what I was drinking. I told him I had no idea. He laughed at that, a quiet laugh like he kept his amusement in a drawer somewhere and only let a little out at a time.

We did the catching up thing. My job, his job, who got married, who got divorced, the teacher we both had who threw chalk at people. He told me he'd moved into a house on the east side. I told him I was still in my apartment and that I owned more work boots than regular shoes, which was true and kind of sad when I heard it out loud.

I noticed this, maybe five minutes in. He wasn't filling silences. Most guys my age can't stand a quiet beat. They fill it with a joke or a fact about themselves or their phone. Saul just let a pause sit there, drinking his beer, watching the crowd, and I found myself talking more to cover the space, which I realized was exactly the effect he wanted. It was like he was a fire and I was the oxygen, and I resented that metaphor immediately because it was too good.

At some point he asked if I was seeing anyone, in that casual throwaway way, and I told him the truth, which was that I'd put myself on a break. Over a year now. I'd ended a relationship that mostly involved me taking care of a grown man's feelings, and after that I'd decided dating was a subscription I was canceling until further notice.

"A year," he said.

"Fourteen months," I said, and immediately regretted knowing the exact number.

He did that quiet laugh again. Just a breath of it. And something in me, some dumb competitive thing left over from being the only woman on my shift for two years, decided I did not like being laughed at by a man holding a beer he'd bought me. I wanted to prove him wrong about something. I didn't even know what yet.

"Fourteen months is a long time," he said, like he was doing math on it.

"It's not that long."

"It's fourteen months," he said. "Of nobody deciding anything for you."

I didn't answer that, mostly because I was busy noticing that he was right, and noticing that I hated that he was right, and noticing that somewhere under the fatigue I'd been carrying since spring there was a small warm coal that had just got a little oxygen.

He reached out then, slow, and took my wrist. Not grabbing. Just his fingers around it, light, as if he were checking a pulse at a scene. His thumb moved over the inside of my wrist, right where the skin is thin, and I could feel my own heartbeat come up to meet him, which was embarrassing, because it was fast, and he could tell.

"You've had a long year of deciding everything yourself," he said, thumb still moving, patient as anything. "Work, shifts, who to let in, who to shut out. I'm asking if you've ever tried letting somebody else decide where the night goes."

I need to be truthful about what happened in my head, because I think about it a lot now. The old me, the competent one, the one who runs toward the sound of the mayday, started lining up the objections. He's a guy from high school. We're at a public event. This is a strange conversation to be having with his thumb on my pulse. And underneath all of that, a much older and much quieter part of me said, finally, somebody is asking first, and I realized I'd been waiting a long time for a man to ask me a question like that instead of just assuming the answer.

"I haven't," I said. My voice came out lower than I meant it to.

"But you've thought about it."

I nodded. I couldn't get a word out that would have been true and also survivable.

"Good." He let go of my wrist, and I felt the absence like a draft. "Then here's the only rule for tonight. You don't talk unless you're saying your safeword, or unless you're asking my permission. You pick the word now."

I picked one. A boring one. I'll keep it to myself, since it's still ours, or was for a while anyway.

"Say it back to me," he said, so I said it, and he nodded like I'd passed an inspection. "That's the word. Anything else, you keep quiet and you do what I tell you. If that's too much, you say so now and we finish our beers like old classmates."

And here's the part I keep coming back to. There