Spice Rack Regret

Dear Jameson, or maybe just Jameson since we skipped a few formalities last night, that's how I'm starting this, on a paper napkin from the catering tent with a pen I stole from the first AD, because you left before I woke up and I have too much pride to text you the way anyone else would.

It's Thursday morning and I'm sitting in my trailer with the window open, and the whole thing smells like your coffee roasting away down there at the base of the tower, which I am choosing to believe is a coincidence and not you roasting something specifically to torment me. The clock tower is right there through the glass, all stone and pigeons, and it's funny how a building can look different after a night like last night. Yesterday it was just a set piece. Today it feels like a witness.

Here's the part I have to get out of the way first, because honesty is apparently something I do now at forty-two. I heard your joke. Wednesday afternoon, by the craft services table, you were talking to that grip with the beard and you said golfers are the most boring people alive, that a film about golf would be four hours of grass growing, and you laughed, and I stood there holding my clipboard like an idiot because I'm the golf consultant on this production and you didn't know that.

So yes, when you invited me out to that shed later, some of what happened was spite. I want to be upfront about that, since I'm apparently writing you a whole letter about it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up to the party, because that's where this actually started.

It was the director's birthday, Wednesday night, the big fiftieth surprise party down in the old stone room under the tower, and somebody had ordered this three-tier cake from a place in Ponsonby that cost more than my weekly rate. The plan was we'd all hide when he came through the door, somebody would cue the music, and it would be this lovely moment that we'd all pretend to remember fondly in interviews.

Instead the table collapsed. Not the cake, the table, one of those folding legs just gave up, and the whole thing went over sideways, three tiers of imported buttercream sliding across the stone floor like something out of a disaster movie, and the director walked in right at that exact second to find forty adults standing in silence around a ruined cake and a catering manager on the verge of tears.

The silence lasted maybe three seconds. Then you, over by the coffee station, said loud enough for everyone to hear, "Well, the good news is we're already on the floor," and the whole room broke.

I ended up against the wall near you because there was nowhere else to stand, and we just kept laughing, the kind of laughing where you catch each other's eye ten minutes later and start again. You told me the cake place had also catered your sister's wedding and the groom's cake had melted in the sun, so clearly they had a signature move. I told you about the time a golf ball I hit at a charity event took out a drone. We were getting along. That was the annoying part.

Then you said, and I'm quoting because I've replayed it enough times to have it memorized, "Do you want to see my spice rack? It's in the roasting shed, it sounds insane when I say it out loud but I promise it's good."

And here's what nobody tells you about a line like that. It shouldn't work. It's a man inviting you to look at coffee beans in a shed. But the way you said it, it wasn't really about the beans, and we both knew it, it was you saying come see the thing I actually care about, and I have spent five years since my last relationship being very careful about men who want to show me things, and I still said yes. Walked across that whole courtyard behind you telling myself it was just curiosity.

The spice rack, by the way, was genuinely great, which made it worse. Three shelves of jars, each one labeled with a strip of tape and a name written in marker, all of them named after film characters. There was a dark roast called The Dude, a really bright Ethiopian you'd named Ripley, something smoky you called Quint, and a small jar marked Ilsa that you said you were still working on and wouldn't let me taste. You talked about them the way I talk about swing mechanics, with your whole face, and I stood there in that shed full of that smell thinking, oh no, oh no, this one is going to be a problem.

So when you asked, quietly, "Can I kiss you," I said yes before my pride could get a word in, and that's the honest version of how we ended up in your little room above the roastery with the sacks of green beans stacked in the corner and the whole place still smelling like warm coffee.

I'll tell you what I told myself afterward, since you've earned the whole embarrassing accounting. I went into that kiss with an agenda. Some petty little voice in me was saying prove him wrong, show the coffee snob that a golfer is not boring, I was practically keeping score, which, yes, I know, it's a golf joke, my subconscious is very clever.

And then you touched me and the scoreboard just fell off the wall.

Because you were slow about it. Nobody is ever slow about it with me, everybody treats the whole thing like a tee shot, big windup, get it over with, but you took your time like you had all night and like I was worth the time, and I kept waiting for the impatience and it never came. You asked me things. You actually asked, "Is this okay," more than once, and each time I said yes out loud, and each time I meant it, and each time it caught me off guard that you checked.

By the time my shirt was on the floor I had stopped performing entirely, which for me is saying something, I perform at everything, I perform at breakfast. You kissed my neck and my collarbone and then each breast, slowly, and I heard myself make a sound I did not authorize. You looked up and asked, "Can I go down on you?" and I said yes with a frankly embarrassing amount of enthusiasm, and you knelt on the bare boards and put your mouth on me, slow and then not slow, your tongue circling my clit while two fingers curled inside