Spring Tension

I got to the Boronia Spring at four in the afternoon, which is the worst possible time to be anywhere in the Queensland outback. The glare off the water was so bright I had to squint just to walk the boardwalk. The whole place smelled like algae and crushed stone, and I loved it, because it was the first thing in three months that hadn't been an audition room or my apartment ceiling.

Quick background. I'm Dakota Moretti, I'm thirty-four, and I'm an out-of-work actor, which sounds more romantic than it is. It mostly means I memorize sides for roles I don't get and then eat cereal for dinner. I moved to Normanton when I was twenty-two, did the community theater thing, dated around for two years, and now I mostly freelance nothing in particular.

Marla Parsons invited me on this trip. We've been friends since we were both in our twenties in that theater group, so going on twelve years now. She's thirty-three, she does compliance training for remote workers, which is a real job that real adults have, and she's always been one of my favorite people to flirt with badly. Nothing ever happened. We just never closed that door. She's in town for a work thing and her whole department is doing some team bonding field trip to look at endangered pupfish, and she texted me, quote, come be the interesting one.

So here I was, the interesting one, melting on a boardwalk.

I spotted her right away. She was standing near the interpretation shelter with a tall guy in a company polo, and she was laughing at whatever he said. Not polite laughing. Real laughing, head back, hand on his sleeve. That stung a little more than I expected it to.

"That's Brent," Marla said when I walked up. "Coworker. Brent, this is Dakota, the friend I told you about."

"The actor," Brent said, and shook my hand with a grip like a handshake should be. He was thirty-something, maybe thirty-eight, tanned, boring in a way that probably killed in HR meetings. "Marla says you're between projects."

"Marla says a lot of things," I said.

"I say true things," Marla said. She looked good. She always looks good, but today she had a linen shirt open over a tank top and her hair was down and the wind was doing things with it that felt personal.

Oscar, the spring caretaker, gathered us by the shelter. He was thirty-six, wiry, had the look of a man who'd explained the same fish to tourists five thousand times and still sort of meant it. He talked about the Boronia desert pupfish, how they only exist in this one pool, how the water comes up through the limestone at a constant temperature, how the whole species lives in a space smaller than my apartment.

"They've been here longer than people," Oscar said. "Whole species, one spring. Think about that."

Brent thought about that out loud for a while. I watched Marla watch the water.

It was going fine, honestly. It was going fine right up until Marla slapped her pockets and went white.

"Okay. Don't panic," she said, to herself, at a volume that made four people look at her. "Has anyone seen my keys? The ring with the blue fob. Blue fob, little lizard charm, my apartment keys, my car keys, my work fob, everything is on that ring."

"Briefcase?" Brent offered.

"It's not in the briefcase, I checked the briefcase while you were talking about fish." She dropped to her knees by her tote bag right there on the boardwalk and started pulling things out. Sunscreen. A paperback. A receipt for something in 2019. "Oh god, oh god, Dakota, if I lost the work fob I have to file a security report and there's a whole process and..."

"Deep breaths," I said, kneeling next to her. "When did you have them last?"

"The bus. I had them on the bus, I held them the whole ride, I remember thinking I should put them somewhere safe and then I..." She stopped. We both looked at her coat, which was sitting on the railing.

"Marla."

"Don't say it."

"Marla, check the..."

"I know." She grabbed the coat, went through both pockets, and pulled out the key ring with the blue fob and the lizard charm. She held it up like a trophy and then pressed it to her forehead. "They were in my pocket. The whole time. In my pocket."

Brent laughed first. Then Oscar. Then me, hard enough that I had to sit back on my heels.

"You're a menace," I told her. "A walking security report. They should study you."

"Shut up. Shut up, all of you." She was laughing too, stuffing things back into the tote with no system at all. "I literally checked the briefcase."

"You held them on the bus," I said. "Somewhere safe."

"I hate you. I hate every one of you."

Something loosened in my chest at that, and it took me a second to name it. It was the first thing in months that had felt unscripted. The panic, the absurdity, her face when she pulled the keys out. I'd been running sides in my head all day, little auditions for a life I wasn't booking, and this was just a thing that happened.

* * *

Oscar took Brent down the far side of the boardwalk to show him where the pupfish spawn, and Brent got genuinely excited about it, which told me something about Brent I didn't need to know. The rest of the work group had drifted toward the shelter and the cooler of drinks. That left me and Marla and the water.

"Hey," she said, quiet now. "Walk with me."

We walked. Past the end of the boardwalk there's a tall rock shelf, sun-baked and pale, and behind it a strip of shade nobody was using. Marla stopped there, out of sight of everyone, and turned around.

"This is going to sound rehearsed," she said. "It's not. I've been thinking about it for a while."

"About keys?"

"About you, dummy." She pushed her hair back. "Twelve years of flirting and never doing anything about it. And I'm turning thirty-four next month and I'm so tired of my whole life being a compliance module. I want to do one honest thing."

My mouth was dry and it wasn't the heat. "Okay. I'm listening."

"I don't want to ruin the friendship. I need to say that first. But I've wanted you for a long time and I'm sick of pretending I haven't."

"Marla." I stepped closer. "Me too. For longer than I'd admit sober, and I'm completely sober right now, so."

She laughed, short and shaky. "So what?"

"So I'm asking. Can I kiss you?"

She nodded, then said it out loud anyway, because that's who she is. "Yes. Please."

I kissed her. Slow at first, her hand finding the back of my neck, the shade cool on both of us. She tasted like the lemonade from the cooler and she kissed exactly the way I'd imagined, which was better than the imagining. When we broke apart she kept her forehead against mine.

"Okay," she breathed. "Okay, wow, we're really doing this!"

"Do you want to keep going?" I asked. "Here, now, or we go slow, or we stop and get dinner and talk. Any of those is fine. I mean it."

She looked at me for a beat, then glanced back toward the boardwalk, where Oscar was explaining something with his hands.

"Here," she said. "Now. Nobody comes back here, and Brent will talk about fish until sundown." Her fingers found the hem of her tank top, then stopped. "But Dakota, listen. If we do this, I want to tell you something I want, and you're allowed to say no to it."

"Tell me."

"Later. Not standing up. But it's real and I've thought about it and I want you to hear it before anything happens." She took a breath. "Can I tell you now?"

"Yeah," I said. "Tell me now."

She said it quiet, right against my ear: that she wanted me to fuck her ass, that she had thought about it for years, that she had brought what we would need, and that I was allowed to say no. My entire body went warm in the shade of that rock shelf.

"Okay," I said, when I could talk again. "Yeah. Yes to that."

"Say you're sure."

"I'm sure."

I said it again, slower, so she'd know I meant it. "I'm sure."

"Okay." She let out a breath like she'd been holding it since the bus. "Okay. God. Twelve years."