Root Canal and Riffs

Hanna pulled the last rubber dam off the patient and stepped back from the chair. Root canal, number thirty molar. Two hours of her life, gone, but the guy would keep his tooth and probably forget her name by Tuesday. That was fine. That was the deal with dentistry. You fix people and they hope they never see you again.

She peeled off her gloves and washed up at the sink, scrubbing past the wrist like always. Her phone buzzed on the counter while her hands were still wet.

Gregory, from Tinder. The one she'd rescheduled twice already. *so sorry but i have to bail saturday. Work thing came up. Rain check?*

Hanna dried her hands on a paper towel and read it twice.

"Rain check," she said, quiet, to nobody. The assistant, Destiny, looked up from her tray setup with one eyebrow raised.

"Gregory?"

"Gregory."

"Third time?"

"Third time." Hanna crumpled the towel and shot it into the trash. "Gonna burn his number into a mouthguard and mail it to him."

Destiny laughed. Hanna didn't, really. She was twenty-nine, and she was tired of cancelling Saturday plans and pretending that was fine. She wanted a man who showed up. Not a husband. Not a text thread about feelings. Just someone who showed up.

She'd dated two musicians in her mid-twenties, back to back, and neither one made it past the two-month mark. One cried when she made him throw out a couch he'd found on a curb. The other wrote a song about her and it wasn't even good. So she'd filed musicians under "do not" and mostly stuck to it.

Which is why the barbecue thing was so stupid.

***

Her friend Brenda threw a cookout every June in her backyard, and every June Hanna went, ate too much potato salad, and left by nine. This year there was a drum kit in the yard. Actual drum kit, on plywood, under the maple tree.

Somebody's brother's band, apparently. A guy with a guitar plugged into a practice amp, another guy on a bass with no amp at all, and behind the drums, a lean man in a gray t-shirt who hit like he meant it.

Hanna stood near the fence with a beer and watched. Not the band. Him. He played with his mouth open and his shoulders doing half the work, and it had a certain quality, the economy of it, no wasted motion.

He caught her looking. He nodded at her. Just a nod, drumstick still up.

She nodded back and drank her beer and told herself to stop.

Later, the band wrapped up and the crowd shuffled around the cooler. Hanna was digging for a cold one when a voice came over her shoulder.

"Okay, don't freak out, but I know you."

She turned. Drummer guy. Closer up he had a jaw like a comic book character and sweat still drying at his temples.

"You don't know me," Hanna said.

"I kind of do. You took my wisdom tooth out three years ago." He held up a hand and counted. "Lower left. Two of them. You cracked a joke about my insurance."

Hanna squinted. Somewhere in the back of her head, a file opened. College town clinic, one day a week she used to cover. A guy who flinched at the needle and then apologized for flinching.

"Manuel," he said. "We had a music appreciation class together too, way back. You sat near the front. I sat near the door so I could leave early."

"That tracks," she said. "You look different with a drum kit."

"You look different without a mask on." He grabbed a beer out of the cooler, opened it on the edge of the table, handed it to her. "So are you still a dentist or was that a phase?"

"Still a dentist. Twenty-nine years old and I spend my days looking at molars."

"I'm twenty-eight and I spend mine in a garage that smells like mildew, so."

They talked for twenty minutes. He was easy to talk to, no performance to him, and he didn't ask her out, which she noticed and appreciated. When she left, he just said, "See you around, dentist," and went back to packing up the kit.

***

The text came six days later, a Thursday. His number had somehow ended up in her phone, probably from Brenda's group chat.

*Band has a show Friday. Come.*

She stared at it over lunch and typed three different replies and deleted all of them. Then she typed *fine.* Then deleted that too. Then typed *what time* and hit send before she could think about it.

Friday she told herself the whole way across town that she was going for the cheap beer. Three dollars a can, that was the pitch she gave herself. The venue was a former laundromat with a ceiling that had been leaking since sometime in the previous decade, and the beer was in fact three dollars, so technically she was telling the truth.

The band went on at ten. She leaned against the stage, close enough that she could see the drum heads, and stayed there all night. The music was fine. Loud, sort of sloppy in a charming way. She wasn't really listening.

She was watching him sweat through a song. Watching the tendons in his forearms, the way his whole body leaned into the crash. A drop of sweat flew off his hairline and hit the stage and she thought, well, that's that, I'm in trouble.

After the set she bought another can she didn't want and stood by the merch table while he packed up. He came out wiping his hands on a towel and spotted her right away, like he'd known she'd still be there.

"You stayed the whole show," he said.

"Beer was cheap."

"Sure it was." He smiled. He had a towel around his neck and his shirt stuck to him. "Walk you to your car?"

"It's a parking lot two blocks away and I know the way."

"So that's a yes with extra steps!"

That was a yes with extra steps.

They walked out into the sticky night air. Streetlights, a dumpster, somebody's cousin puking near the curb. Normal stuff. Her car was halfway down the lot, and their shoulders bumped twice on the way, and the second time neither of them moved away.

At the driver's door she turned around to say something, and he was right there, and the something died in her throat.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked. Plain as that. No lean, no ambush. Just asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Obviously, yeah."

It was sloppy and urgent and her keys dug into her palm and she didn't care. He tasted like cheap beer and his hand landed flat on the car door next to her hip, holding himself up, not pushing anything. She got a fist in his shirt and pulled him closer and he made a low sound into her mouth that she felt in her sternum.

When they broke apart she was breathing hard and her back was against the window.

"Okay," he said, a little winded.

"Okay," she agreed.

"So here's a thing. Do you want to get coffee sometimes? Like, sit down, talk, the whole boring thing."

Hanna looked at him. Sweat-damp, grinning, half-lit by the streetlight. Nice guy. Clearly a nice guy, which was the dangerous part.

"No," she said. "No coffee!"

His grin flickered. "No?"

"No coffee. No dinner. No, like, walking through a farmer's market holding hands." She took a breath. "But you can come home with me right now, if you want that. Tonight. And maybe other nights. That's