Strike and Linger

Zara Dempsey was twenty-nine years old and had sworn off romance back when she was twenty-three, after a hotel guest named Glen had seemed charming for three whole months and then moved to Calgary without a backward glance. She had decided, fairly rationally she thought, that romance was inefficient. It cost time, cost energy, and returned almost nothing on the investment. Lust, on the other hand, had excellent margins. Lust was a cash business.

So it made a certain amount of sense that she ended up kissing Joshua Schneider at the quarry picnic last October. He was thirty-two, a blaster, broad through the shoulders with steady hands and a way of looking at her that made her feel like a scheduling spreadsheet that had finally been read properly. They were both nursing one warm cooler each, standing near the chain link fence while somebody's cousin played a guitar badly, and she had leaned in first. She had counted that as her own decision, which mattered to her. He had met her halfway, which mattered to her too.

The trouble started after the picnic, when a small group of them decided to hike up to the old fire lookout instead of waiting for the shuttle. The trail was badly marked. The light went early that time of year. Somehow they got six kilometers off course, which in the dark and the mud felt far greater, and by the time Zara and Joshua found themselves separated from the chatty ones and standing at the base of a rusty fire tower, she was furious, damp to the knee, and weirdly energized.

He opened his emergency pack to look for the flashlight and pulled out, of all things, a folding metal cake stand. Collapsible. Chrome. He stared at it with the expression of a man who had forgotten it was in there.

"That's what you carry," she said. "Not a map. A cake stand."

"It was a gift," he said. "It seemed rude to throw it away."

She laughed, and he watched her laugh, and something in the watching changed. He did not grab her. He did not move at all, really, just set the cake stand on a flat rock and turned it so the little feet pointed up, and asked her, plainly, in a low even voice, if she wanted to know what it felt like to be pinned. He said she could say no and they would walk down the hill like two people who had gotten lost and it would be fine.

She thought about it for maybe four seconds. Then she said yes.

The metal was cold through her sleeves. He wrapped her wrists loosely over the upside-down stand, a knot he could have pulled apart with one finger, and asked her twice more if she was good, and she said yes both times, and then he kissed her like the six lost kilometers had been his plan all along. She came apart against the tower railing with her hands useless above her and her boots slipping in the wet leaves, and afterward they found the trail in twenty minutes, because of course they did.

They had been text-only since that night. Six months of it. Commands, mostly from him, and photos, carefully framed, and a safeword they had agreed on in the first week, which was "tangerine" because she had been eating one at the time and could not think of anything else. He never pushed. She never wanted him to. But six months of a phone screen is a long time to want a person, and eventually a person starts to think about logistics.

Which is how they both ended up at Pine Hills Bowling & Brew on a Tuesday, on league night, surrounded by pickup trucks and minivans in a suburban cul-de-sac east of Toronto, with the air thick with shoe disinfectant and cheap nachos. Zara had booked the lane herself. She was the front-desk manager at the hotel in town, she was good at logistics, and she figured if this thing between them was going to move from her phone to the real world, it should happen somewhere loud enough that neither of them could overthink it.

* * *

The beer was lukewarm. The pizza was a rectangle. Joshua sat across from her in the plastic chairs with his forearms on the table, and he was so calm about everything that it made her itchy.

"Rules for tonight," he said, leaning in a little, under the noise of the league crowd so only she could hear. "We bowl. Between frames I ask you for things, one at a time, and you answer yes or no to every one. Pieces of clothing, probably. The score decides nothing. Nobody wins or loses anything here, and a gutter ball is just a gutter ball. And you get to ask me for things too."

Zara blinked at him. There was a beat where she considered the whole shape of it, the public nature of the venue, the fact that her coworkers sometimes came here, the fact that she was the one who had booked the lane in the first place.

"And if I want out," she said.

"Tangerine," he said. "Any time. We finish the game, I drive you home, and it never happened. Your job and mine have nothing to do with this, and nothing changes either way. I mean that."

She believed him. That was the strange part. She had checked his references in her own head for six months and he had never once failed the audit. She picked up her beer.

"Fine," she said. "But I haven't bowled since college."

"I know," he said, and he looked entirely too pleased about it.

She threw a nine spare in the second frame and a seven in the third, and the pinsetter jammed on the second pass, and the guys on the next lane started heckling her in the friendly way that strangers do. She came back to the chairs and Joshua was already pointing at her feet.

"Shoes?" he said. "Yes or no."

"Joshua. I am not walking around here barefoot."

"You booked the lane by the back wall. Nobody's back there but us." He said it kindly, patiently, like a man offering directions. "Tangerine anytime."

She looked down the lane. He was right about the corner. She looked at him and he waited, and there was nothing in his face but a kind of steady attention that she had been starving for since October. So she said yes, and unlaced the rental shoes, one and then the other, and stepped out of them onto the cool carpet, and stood there in her socks while the automatic scorer blinked at her.

He asked about the socks too, right after the shoes, and she said yes. Barefoot on the approach felt strange and intimate, like the floor was touching her somewhere private. She threw a six that frame and a strike the next, and each pin felt like a small victory, and he scored them in a little notebook he had actually brought, which was so ridiculous she almost liked him more for it.

By the fifth frame she was down to her tank top and shorts. The overshirt had gone when he asked and she said yes, and her hoodie after that, and she was very aware of the air conditioning on her bare arms and of the way Joshua watched her without hurry, the way he had watched her at the tower, like she was a problem with a clean solution. Nobody at the other lanes had noticed anything yet. There was still time for this to stay deniable.

There was still time, but there was not much of it.

"Next frame," he said, in that low voice, "you don't need to bowl well. You just need to do one thing for me first."

She sat down across from him, barefoot, knees together, and waited.

"The house ball's on the return," he said. "The yellow one, the one everybody handles. I want you to clean it. With your shirt. Take it off, pick up the ball, and wipe it down slow. Every side. Like it's the most important thing you've ever done."

Her face went hot. The back wall was indeed empty, the league crowd up at the good lanes, the snack bar staff busy with a retirement party of loud accountants two sections over, none of whom would see her unless they walked, and anyone walking would just see a woman in a bra wiping a bowling ball, which was weird but not illegal, and God help her, the fact that it was weird and barely hidden made it worse and better at the same time.

"Someone could come around that corner," she said.

"Yes," he said. "That's part of it. But the corner's wide, you'll hear them before they see you. And if you'd rather not, say so now and we just bowl."

Six months of texts had taught her that he meant it every time he offered the exit. He had never once made her feel cornered, only invited, and the invitation always had a door in it. The entire reason she had said yes to any of this was that. She thought about the yellow ball, greasy with other people's hands, and about his eyes, and about how long it had been since anyone had asked her for something so specific and so stupid and so hot.

"Tank top," she said. "Not the bra. If someone comes, the bra stays."

"Agreed," he said, and he picked up his beer as a man settling in to watch exactly what he had asked for.

She stood, hooked her thumbs in the hem, and pulled the tank top off over her head in one motion before she could think about it too long. The air hit her skin and her nipples tightened under the plain gray