Snow Depot Strangers

I want to tell you about the night I stopped being careful at fifty-five years old, and it starts with snow, because of course it does.

It was eleven at night in February, out at the plow depot on the edge of town, and I was standing in the warm office with a cup of terrible coffee when I saw her cross the lot. Skylar. Fifty-two years old, speech pathologist, filling in as our night dispatcher for the winter. She walked through the falling snow with her sensible parka unzipped all the way down, like the cold was something that happened to other people.

Six months of coffee breaks, that woman and me. Six months of her laughing at my bad jokes and me finding excuses to walk past the radio room. And not one single time had either of us crossed the line. I'd never even held her hand, not counting one slow dance at the holiday party.

She pushed through the door into the office, cheeks pink, snow melting in her hair, and I swear the room got warmer.

"Evening, Sergei," she said, hanging her coat on the hook. "Cold enough for you?"

"Colder than it's got any right to be," I said. "You walked across that lot with your coat open! You're trying to catch pneumonia."

"I'm trying to feel alive," she said, and she looked at me, and something in her face had changed. She put her hand flat on the fax machine, the old one that flickers, and she said, "Here's my idea. For tonight, we're not coworkers. You're a stranger who just walked in out of the storm."

I stood there with my coffee going cold in my hand. "A stranger?"

"A stranger," she said. "You don't know my name. I don't know yours. We met five minutes ago and we both liked what we saw. Can you do that? Can you play?"

Well. What do you think I said? I set the cup down on the desk so fast it sloshed.

"Yeah," I said, my voice coming out lower than I meant it to. "Yeah, I can play. Hi. I'm Sergei."

"Nice to meet you, Sergei," she said, and she smiled like she'd never smiled at a coffee break in her life. "I'm passing through town. My car died. Terrible night for it."

"Terrible night to be out here alone," I agreed, and I started to walk around her, slow, the way a man circles a truck he's thinking about buying. She let me. She stood by the fax machine and turned a little as I moved, chin up, watching me with those eyes. I'd looked at her plenty over six months but never like this, never with permission.

"Good coat," I said, circling. "Good boots. You dress warm for somebody who drives around with her coat open."

"I like the cold," she said. "It wakes you up."

I came around behind her and stopped. This was it, the line, the one we'd never crossed. "Can I?" I asked, my fingers on the hem of her sweater.

"Please," she said.

I lifted it slow, up over her hips, her ribs, and there it was, the pale line of her ribs in the flickering light, and her skin was warm from the walk.

"Beautiful," I murmured, and I meant it down to my boots. "Beautiful bones."

She shivered, and it wasn't from the cold. "You're staring, stranger."

"Can you blame me?" I said. "A woman like you walks into a place like this at midnight?"

She turned around under my hands, and her face was close to mine, closer than it had ever been, and she said, "I think you should sit down on that plow out in the bay."

"The plow?"

"The running board. Number two, the one idling in the bay. Go sit down and let me look at you for a change." She was already pulling her sweater back down, laughing a little. "Go on. A stranger doesn't argue with a woman like me."

So I went. I walked out into the big bay where three plows sat idling, diesel thunder and blue exhaust fog and snow blowing in under the door, and I sat on the running board of number two like she told me. It was cold through my jeans. The radio static came tinny from the office speaker. My heart was going hard, I'll tell you that much.

She came out of the office and crossed the concrete toward me, and I got to be the one watching her walk this time, hips swinging under that skirt she'd worn under her winter gear all along, who knew. She stopped in front of me between my knees, close enough that I could feel the heat off her through the diesel cold.

"Six months," she said, and broke the game for just a second, her hand touching my jaw. "Six months of watching you make coffee wrong. You ready, Sergei?"

"Been ready since the holiday party in December," I said honestly. "You remember that slow dance?"

"I remember you stepped on my foot twice and apologized both times." She grinned. "But tonight I don't know you. Tonight you're just a man on a running board."

Then she went down on her knees on that cold concrete, right there in the bay, and her hands went to my belt, and I stopped breathing.

"A stranger would ask first," she said, looking up at me with her fingers on my zipper. "May I?"

"God, yes," I said. "Please!"

She unzipped me slow and worked me out of my boxers into the cold air, and I was so hard it almost hurt, and she wrapped her hand around me and looked at it like she was deciding something. Then she took me in her mouth, warm and wet and sudden, and my head went back and a sound came out of me that I hope the diesel covered, because it did not sound dignified.

She was good. She was patient and she was greedy at the same time, taking me deeper, her hand working what her mouth couldn't, and I sat there on that running board with