Snowed In, Typed Out

Let me tell you how I ended up snowed into a whiskey distillery with a man I'd spoken to maybe six times, because honestly it still sounds made up when I say it out loud.

I'm Mira, I'm forty-two, and I teach yoga in a village in Scotland that has one road in and one road out. The distillery does these tasting evenings once a month, and the owner pays me to run a little stretch session beforehand, because apparently American tourists love the idea of yoga followed by single malt. Who am I to argue? It pays for my petrol.

Asher works there. He's thirty-four, he runs the tasting room, and he also acts in the haunted trail over in the next glen every October, which I only mention because it explains a lot about him later. He's got that easy way about him, the sort of man who has never once hurried for anything. I'd spoken to him maybe six times before that night. Nice chap. Good arms. That was the extent of my file on him.

So it's a Thursday in February, we finish the event, the last coach of tourists pulls away at nine, and by ten the county road is a white rumor. The owner had already gone home to his wife in Inverness, which left me and Asher and a space heater the size of a toaster and about four hundred boxes of unsold merchandise.

"You know we're stuck, right?" Asher said, looking at the window like it had personally insulted him.

"I gathered," I said. "Is there a phone signal?"

"Not since six." He shrugged. "There's coffee, there's whiskey, and there's a couch that folds out. I've slept worse."

Reader, I want it noted that I panicked quietly and with dignity. Mostly. I did text my sister from the one bar of signal I found standing on a bar stool by the window, holding my phone at the ceiling like that helps, and she laughed at me, which is what sisters are for.

So we made the best of it. He built a fire situation that was mostly optimism, we split a frozen pizza from the staff freezer, and by midnight we were both bored out of our skulls. That's when I started going through the boxes. I can't help it. Stacked boxes are a puzzle to me.

Box nine, tucked behind promotional coasters, hundreds of coasters with a stag on them, was a folded stack of paper. Typed. Actual typewriter font, like someone had gone to real trouble. I should have put it back. I did not put it back.

"To C," it began. "You asked me once what I think about when I look at you. Here it is, all of it, typed out because I can't say these things with my mouth. I can want you out loud on paper."

Oh my word. I read three lines and my face went hot, and then, because I am apparently a terrible person, I cleared my throat and read it aloud.

"'I think about the back of your neck. I think about what you'd sound like if I took my time. I think about teaching you to slow down until wanting is the whole meal, not just the first bite.'"

Asher's head came up from the other side of the room like a deer catching a sound. "Is that mine?"

"Is this yours?" I held it up, grinning like an idiot. "Asher. This is gorgeous. You typed this? On a typewriter?"

He crossed the room and held out his hand for it, and I'll admit I made him do a little lap before surrendering it. "I typed it for someone, ages ago," he said, folding it carefully. "Long over, no hard feelings either side. It was a thing we did. Letters. It worked well."

"It worked well," I repeated. "What does that mean, worked well? Worked well how?" I was fishing and we both knew it. "Because I've got to tell you, that line about the back of the neck, that's not nothing. That's craft."

He laughed and went back to his chair, but I could see he was pleased. And here is where I confess my actual sin, the thing that started everything. In that stack of coasters there'd been a pad of paper, distillery letterhead, the kind they give tourists. And somewhere between the pizza and two in the morning I sat down and wrote him a note.

Now, a little context. I have dated, casually, in my thirties, nothing that stuck. I am single and mostly fine with it. But I have this flaw, which my sister calls my thesis defense personality, which means when someone claims expertise I need to test the claim. And Asher had said, at some point in the evening, one of those throwaway lines of his, that desire was teachable. That anyone could learn to want anything, given the right framing. I'd rolled my eyes at the time.

So I wrote on the little pad, in my cramped handwriting, because I did not own a typewriter and my phone was dead anyway: *You claim you can teach anyone to want anything. Big talk from a man whose love letters are hidden in a coaster box. Convince me. Teach me something worth learning. Under your bottle, if you dare. M.*

I slid it under the half-empty bottle of the cask strength stuff on the bar and went to "bed," meaning the fold-out couch where I lay staring at the ceiling feeling like someone who had just bet her house on a hand of cards.

* * *

He didn't wake me. I woke on my own at half eight to gray light and snow still coming down, and found his reply propped against the bottle. Typed again. He had a portable typewriter in the back office, apparently, because of course he did, haunted house man, typewriter man.

*Dear M,* it began. *You accepted the challenge before I made one, which tells me something. So here are the terms, and they are not negotiable.*

*One. The course is in writing. Every lesson you complete, you type back to me. There is a typewriter in the office and you will learn to use it, which is lesson zero.*

*Two. No touching. Not yours, not mine, until the course is finished. If at any point that rule stops being fun, you write the word STOP on a note and it ends, no questions, no hard feelings, and we go back to being coworkers snowed in with a pizza situation.*

*Three. This is nothing to do with your sessions here or my wages, nobody's job is on the table, and nothing hangs on how you do. You do only what you want. Every lesson, you choose. I don't want obedience, I want honesty. There's a difference and the course depends on it.*

*Lesson one: tell me what your hands would do first, if the rule were lifted. Not what you wish you felt. What you would actually do. Details. Type it.*

I read it three times. Then I put it down. Then I picked it up again. No touching until the course is finished? What kind of madness was that? And also, why did the words "no touching until the course is finished" make my stomach do a little drop like the top of a rollercoaster?

Here's the part where I tell you the truth about myself. I sat at that typewriter for an hour before I got a single line down, and most of that hour was spent typing and crumpling and retyping the same opening sentence. The