The Apron Dare

Shelley had been standing on the refueling apron at Abarkuh for three hours and the fuel truck still hadn't come. Thirty-four years old, birthday the day after tomorrow, and she was spending the evening arguing with a dispatcher in a language she barely spoke, over fuel logs that didn't add up anyway.

"I said put it in writing!" she shouted into her phone, for the fourth time. "If the numbers don't match the delivery ticket, I can't sign off on it! That's the whole job!"

The dispatcher hung up on her. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

The apron stretched out huge and gray under a pale sky going purple at the edges. Floodlights hummed overhead and threw her shadow twenty feet long across the concrete. Fuel trucks sat parked along the far side like sleeping animals, and beyond them was the low flat building that belonged to the medical waste facility. She'd seen men in gloves going in and out of it all afternoon.

And one of them was watching her.

He'd been at the edge of the tarmac for a while now, just standing there where the concrete met the gravel. Tall, dark hair, work coveralls with the sleeves pushed up. Every time she looked over, he didn't even pretend to look away.

Shelley was too tired and too annoyed to care about being polite.

"What?" she called across the apron. "You need something?"

The man started walking toward her. Well. Okay then.

"You're the auditor," he said when he got close. He had an accent she couldn't place and a voice like gravel in a bucket. "The fuel one."

"I'm the fuel one, yes. And you are?"

"Juan. I work the waste facility." He held up a small yellowed cube of paper, the kind that used to sit next to old office phones. Pages fanned out of it, gone brown at the edges. "We got a whole pallet of these come through today. Somebody dumped office supplies in with the biohazard. Can you believe that?"

"Is there a reason you're telling me this?"

"No reason." He turned the cube over in his hands. "You've been out here three hours yelling at your phone. I could hear you from the loading dock."

Shelley felt her face go hot. "That's none of your business."

"Sure it isn't." He said it easy, no fight in it at all, and somehow that made it worse.

"Look, this apron is restricted. You shouldn't even be standing on it."

"The waste building shares the perimeter. I'm allowed up to the line." He pointed back toward a faded yellow stripe she hadn't even noticed. "That's the line. I'm on my side of it."

"Then why are you talking to me?"

"Because you look like someone who could use somebody to talk to who isn't hanging up on her."

She stared at him. He was maybe thirty-six, lines around his eyes, forearms bare and stained with something brown she chose not to think about too hard given his job. He wasn't handsome exactly. He was something better than handsome, which was interested.

"My fuel delivery is three hours late," she heard herself say. "And my paperwork is a mess. And I've been in this country nine days and I have talked to exactly nobody except dispatchers."

"Happy early birthday, then."

She went cold. "How did you know my birthday is coming up?"

"It's on your visitor badge. Big red print. BIRTHDAY VERIFICATION REQUIRED." He shrugged. "They print it so security actually checks it. Mine said forty-something and they checked it twice."

"I'm thirty-four," she said, fast. "Thirty-five the day after tomorrow. Which I'm aware is not old, before you say anything."

"I wasn't going to say anything." He looked at the sky, then back at her. "The truck's not coming tonight. Driver got turned around at Yazd. It'll be morning."

"You're kidding me."

"I don't kid much. It's a boring habit."

So that was that, the whole evening shot to hell, and Shelley stood there on the tarmac with her clipboard and her badge and her bad mood, and Juan stood there holding his stupid yellowed memo cube, and neither of them moved for a second.

"Do you want to see the swatches?"

"The what?"

"Dye sample swatches. The bankrupt carpet cleaner. That's part of the pallet. Little cards of carpet colors, hundreds of them. We can't incinerate them with the medical waste so I've got to sort them by hand." He said it like this was a normal thing a person did. "It's the most interesting thing that's happened at that facility in two years."

"Two years?"

"I do stickers," he said. "Barcode stickers off blood sample tubes. Peel, bin, peel, bin. You get so you'll talk to anybody about anything."

Shelley laughed. It surprised her, coming out of her own mouth. "God. Okay. Peel, bin. That's grim."

"It has its moments." He held up the memo cube again. "Want this? It's got old notes in it. Somebody's handwriting from twenty years ago. Grocery lists, phone numbers. It's the closest thing to a conversation I've had at work."

"I'll pass on the mystery paper, thanks."

"Suit yourself."

He started to walk away, and something in her chest panicked about it, which was ridiculous, she'd known the man ten minutes.

"Hey. Juan."

He turned.

"What do you do after your shift?"

"Sleep. Eat. Come back. Peel, bin." He smiled a little. "Why?"

"No reason," she said, and hated how much it sounded like him from ten minutes ago.

* * *

The truck didn't come that night, and it didn't come the next morning either, and by the time Shelley got back to the apron the following evening she'd stopped pretending to herself that the fuel was the reason.

It was her birthday eve now. Officially the last hours of thirty-four. She'd spent it alone in the airport guest room with a packet of biscuits and her phone, and then she'd put her boots back on and walked out to the apron because there was nothing else to do and nobody else to see.

Juan was there. Of course he was there, at the yellow line, like the line was his front porch.

"Happy early birthday," he said.

"You already said that."

"It's a better joke the second time, closer to the day." He had the memo cube again. "Still don't want it?"

"Still don't want it." Shelley walked the length of the line, slow, and he turned to keep her in view, which she noticed, and which did something warm and stupid to her. "Juan. Can I ask you something weird?"

"Please. It'd be the first interesting thing this week."

"Are you attracted to me?"

He didn't flinch and he didn't laugh. "Yes. Since the first night. You yell like somebody who's been holding everything in for a long time and it's a good look on you."

"Well." She hadn't expected him to just say it. "Okay. Good. Because here's my weird question."

"Go ahead."

"I'm turning thirty-five tomorrow and I've spent four years being careful about everything. Job, money, men, all of it. Careful, careful, careful." She heard her own voice picking up speed. "And I'm on a refueling apron in the middle of nowhere with a man who peels stickers, and nobody knows either of us, and tomorrow I'm going to go back to being careful forever. So. Tonight I want to do something reckless. And I want you to watch."

"Watch you do what?" His voice had dropped a little.

"Watch me touch myself. Right here. And the rule is you don't touch yourself. Not once. You just watch."

The floodlights hummed. Somewhere a truck engine turned over and died again.

"You're sure?" he said. "Say it plain, because once you start I'm not stopping to ask twice."

"I'm sure. I'm asking you to watch, Juan. That's the dare."

"Then I accept the dare." He set the memo cube down on the gravel like a witness taking a seat. "And when you're done, I get to dare you something back. Deal?"

"Deal," said Shelley, and started unbuttoning her shirt.

Her fingers were steady, which surprised her. Six buttons, one at a time, and the night air came in cool against her stomach.

"Still sure?" Juan called from where he stood. Ten paces, maybe eleven. Far enough to be polite. Close enough to see everything.

"Still sure." She shrugged the shirt off her shoulders and let it drop on the clipboard. "That's my costume gone, so don't go falling over."

"I haven't fallen over in two years at that facility. Good record."

"Keep it intact."

She was shivering a little now, and it wasn't all cold. The floodlights buzzed overhead and turned everything the shade of weak tea, and somewhere out on the taxiway a light blinked red, patient as a heartbeat. She reached behind her back and unhooked her bra, and her breasts came free in the flat yellow light, her nipples tightening in the air right away.

"Oh, it's cold," she laughed. "Nobody warns you about that part."

"Take your time," he said. His breath was visible, a little cloud each time he breathed out. "I've got all night. I peel and bin, remember? I know how to wait."

"That's a horrible comparison and I refuse to think about it."

She pushed her trousers down over her hips and stepped out of them, and then her knickers, and there she was, thirty-four years old, barefoot on a concrete apron in Iran, with a man watching from ten paces and her clothes in a heap by her clipboard. Any minute a security jeep could roll around the fuel farm. That thought should have stopped her. It did the opposite, and she knew exactly what that said about her and decided not to analyze it.

"Last chance to say stop," she said.

"I'm not saying stop."

"Good answer."

She sat down right there on the cold concrete, knees up at first, then slower, letting them fall open, and she felt the air on her pussy and heard Juan's breath catch across the ten paces of gravel and tarmac. That sound did more for her than anything in four years of careful, sensible, well-lit encounters.

"Can you see?" she asked.

"Yes." His voice had gone rough. "God, yes."

"Then watch."

She let her fingers walk down her own stomach, slow, teasing herself as much as him, and then she slid them through the wet already waiting between her legs. Oh, she was soaked. Weeks of nothing, four years of careful, and one reckless evening on a refueling apron, and her body had apparently been holding a decades-long grudge.

"Mmnh." The sound came out of her before she could dress it up. "Okay. Okay, that's..."

"Good?" he asked.

"So good."

She found her clit with two fingers and pressed, and her hips came up off the concrete like they had somewhere better to be. The cold of the ground seeped into her backside and the heat built in her belly, and the two of them together made her dizzy in the best way. She rubbed slow circles first, then faster, and she could hear Juan breathing hard now, ten paces away, hands somewhere out of sight and staying there because he'd agreed.

"You're not touching yourself," she managed. "Right? Rule's a rule."

"Not touching," he said. "I want you to know it's costing me, though. It's costing me a lot."

"Good." She laughed, breathless. "It should cost you."

Her fingers slid lower, and she pushed two of them inside herself, and the sound they made was loud and obscene under all that humming fluorescent sky. She fucked herself with them, slow and then less slow, her heel digging into the tarmac, her free hand coming up to pinch her own nipple until it ached.

"Juan." His name came out without her permission. "Juan, I'm..."

"I'm here. I'm watching. Don't stop."

She didn't stop. She ground the heel of her hand against her clit and rode her own fingers and felt it come up through her like a fuel gauge swinging past full, and then she was coming, hard, crying out at the sky over a supersonic jet apron with her clothes in a heap and a sticker-peeler ten paces away saying something low in a language she couldn't place. Her whole body shook. The concrete bit into her tailbone and she didn't care.

It took her a while to come back down. Her chest heaved. The floodlights hummed. She blinked up at them.

"Well," she said finally, wobbling as she stood. "That's the best birthday eve I've had in years, and I once had a whole cake to myself."

"You're incredible," Juan said. His voice shook a little too. "You are. I hope you know that."

"I know it now." She stepped into her knickers