Slow Burn Rules

The DJ thing fell apart in March. I had a Wednesday residency at a bar downtown, decent money, and then the owner sold the place and the new owner's nephew, who is twenty-four and owns two turntables, took my slot. So I said fine, and I picked up hostess shifts at Solera to cover rent until I found another room with speakers in it. I was thirty-two at the time and I told everybody this was temporary. That was three months ago.

Solera is a high-end Spanish tapas place, which means rich people eating small amounts of expensive food and a staff running around like the kitchen is on fire. Fridays were the worst. This particular Friday, the first Friday of June, was the worst Friday I had ever worked there, and I have worked a lot of Fridays there.

By ten I had stopped counting tables. Milo, who bounces and does security and mostly stands by the door being enormous and quiet, had already thrown out one guy for snapping his fingers at Cathy. Cathy waited tables and never once lost her smile, which I honestly don't understand. Saul ran the sauté station and looked as though he had been standing in one spot for eleven hours, which he had.

I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is the last table left at 11:40. A party of six, three bottles of Rioja, a two-hundred-dollar tip they made us split seven ways because the barbacks wanted in. Then the door shut and the room went quiet in that way a restaurant goes quiet, all of a sudden, like somebody turned off a machine.

We ended up in the back office. It's a closet with a desk, really. Dim light, a chair with a broken arm, boxes of receipts, a coffee maker that smelled like burned coffee from 2019, and a sagging little couch shoved against the wall under a stack of boxes. Cathy sat on the desk. Milo leaned on the door frame because no chair in the building could hold him. Saul dropped into the broken chair anyway.

"Okay," Saul said. "I have an idea for a dumb game."

"You always have ideas for dumb games," Cathy said.

"This one is genuinely dumb. I'm proud of it."

"Let's hear it," I said, because I was too tired to argue and because Saul's dumb games are usually at least funny.

"Everybody writes down one rule," he said. "One rule for surviving a shift like this. Like, a law of the universe. Then we read them out loud and vote on which one is truest."

"That's not a game," Cathy said. "That's a meeting."

"It's a meeting with wine."

"Okay, fine," Cathy said, and she got the half bottle of tempranillo off the shelf and four coffee mugs, because we are professionals.

I'll be honest about why I played along. I was in a mood. Three months of hostessing because some nephew with two turntables took my Wednesday, and I was tired, and my feet hurt, and I wanted to prove I could handle anything, which is a stupid thing to want but there it was. So yeah. I played along. Spite works fine as a party drug.

We wrote on ticket slips. Saul went first.

"Rule one," he read. "Never tell the kitchen the ticket is in. Say it's coming. Because if you say in, they stop, and if they stop, you die."

"That's real," Milo said. Milo is twenty-nine and talks maybe ten words an hour, so when he agrees with you, you feel like you won something.

Cathy went next. "Rule two. Smile at table twelve even if table twelve deserves prison."

We all agreed table twelve deserved prison. The guy with the snapping fingers had been at table twelve.

Milo read his. He had to clear his throat first. "Rule three. Stay near the door. Problems come through the door."

"Cryptic," Saul said. "Very wise. Stay near the door."

"Okay, me," I said, and I unfolded my ticket slip. "Rule four. Don't touch anyone. No matter how much you want to shake them, hug them, or slap them. Hands off until close."

"Ooh," Cathy said. "That one's good."

"It's my best work," I said. "I wrote it after the guy at table nine grabbed my arm to ask about the octopus."

Then Saul said, "Wait. The rules should bind us. That's the real game. Whatever rule you write, you follow it until we clock out."

"That's a different game," Cathy said.

"It's a better game," Saul said. "Deal?"

"Deal," Cathy said, and Milo nodded, and I said deal, because I was not going to be the one who backed out of a game I invented the best rule for.

Cathy read hers again, louder, like she was delighted by it. "No touching anyone's neck!"

"Where did that come from?" Saul asked.

"Necks are weird. Necks are intimate. Don't touch anyone's neck."

"That's not what you wrote," Saul said, leaning over to look. "You wrote smile at table twelve."

"I'm amending. The rule is now no touching anyone's neck."

"You can't amend," I said.

"I just did."

And here is the part I still don't fully remember deciding. I stood up, walked over to Saul, and with one finger I brushed the collar of his chef's coat, right along the side of his neck, barely, the lightest thing. And then I stepped back.

Cathy screamed. Not a real scream, a restaurant scream, the kind you use for dropped plates. "Rule broken! Ten seconds! It took you ten seconds."

"It's not my rule," I said. "I don't have to follow it."

"That's not, that's not how, okay, that's honestly exactly how it works," Saul said, and his voice cracked a little, and his ears had gone red. Thirty-four years old and his ears still go red. I've known him five years, since a mutual friend dragged him to a house party, and I have never once seen him blush, and there he was with red ears.

"Why did I say that rule out loud," Cathy said into her wine mug.

"Because you wanted to see who'd break it," Milo said. Everyone looked at him, because that was a whole sentence, maybe two sentences' worth. "You made it too specific. Nobody makes a rule about necks unless they're watching for it."

"Traitor," Cathy said.

"Stay near the door," Milo said, which I think was his way of changing the subject.

I sat back down and my heart was doing something I wasn't going to examine. Saul's collar had been warm. That was the detail that stuck. Eleven hours in a hot kitchen and the side of his neck was warm through one finger, for maybe half a second, and I was thinking about it way more than a person should think about half a second.

"New enforcement question," Saul said, rolling his ticket slip into a little tube and unrolling it, which is what he does when he's nervous. "What's the penalty for breaking a rule?"

"Penalty for Cathy's rule," Cathy said, "is whatever I say it is."

"Ominous," I said.

"Very ominous," Saul agreed.

"Shut up," Cathy said, and she pointed the wine mug at both of us. "Lexi broke my rule. So I decide the penalty."

"I'm listening," I said, because I wanted to prove I could handle anything, and because I'm an idiot.

Cathy took a slow sip of wine and looked at me over the rim, and I could tell she had just thought of something.

"New rule," she said. "Milo's rule. It's his turn anyway. Milo, write a rule."

Milo looked at the ceiling like it owed him money, then took the pen. He wrote for a while, which was funny, because I don't think he'd ever written that much in one sitting in his life. He passed the slip to the middle of the desk.

No eye contact with anyone for more than five seconds.

"Paranoid," Saul said. "It's good though. It's very security. You clock everyone, you hold nobody."

"That's the job," Milo said. "You look just long enough."

"It binds us all?" I asked.

"It binds us all," Milo said.

So we played. And here's what I learned about myself: I am terrible at not looking at people. Five seconds is nothing. Five seconds is one breath. Saul counted us out loud, and every time I got to four I'd flick my eyes to the coffee maker or the boxes of receipts, and Cathy called me a coward, and I called her a rules lawyer, and it was very stupid and very fun, and the office smelled like burned coffee and old paper and four people who'd been on their feet for eleven hours.

Then Milo looked at me.

He didn't mean to. I could tell he didn't mean to, because he was mid-sentence about the door, saying something like "the side entrance sticks, so if," and then I just didn't look away, and he didn't either, and Saul was counting, "three, four," and Milo's face started going pink at the cheeks, this slow