The Archive Sessions

Callum Buckley was twenty-nine years old, and he was wet. Not metaphorically wet, though there was some of that too. It had been raining on Chalmers Street since four o'clock, and his umbrella had done the thing umbrellas do where it flipped inside out and became useless decoration.

The Meridian Archive sat in a converted Victorian house two blocks off campus, all oak and tall windows and a brass plaque the size of a postcard. He shook himself off on the steps like a dog and went in.

Gregg Dumas was at the back table with a pair of white cotton gloves and a stack of letters in front of him. He was thirty-one, two years older than Callum, and he looked up the way people look up when they already know the news is bad.

"Don't track," he said.

"There's a mat."

"There's a mat for visitors. You're tracking like a horse."

Callum toed off his sneakers, which got him down to wet socks, which was worse, and padded over to the table. "I need to vent."

"I'm working."

"They're letters. Dead people wrote them. The dead can wait."

Gregg set down the tweezers he'd been using to separate pages. "Fair. What happened."

"So I went out with this guy. Travis."

"The one from the app with the forearms."

"The one from the app with the forearms, yes. And dinner was fine. He was fine. He held views about coffee roasters, whatever, that's fine, everyone has opinions about coffee roasters. And then we go back to his place and it's, I don't know, fine. It was fine, Gregg."

"You said fine four times."

"I'm saying it was fine and I felt nothing. Nothing. He asked me to stay over and I said I had an early client and I do have an early client, but I also would've said I had an early client if I didn't." Callum dropped into the chair across from him, the good leather one near the window. "This is the third one in two months. Third guy, same result. Something's wrong with me."

"Nothing's wrong with you."

"I turn thirty soon."

"You turn thirty in two months."

"Two months goes fast. And I keep thinking, by thirty I should know what I like. What I actually want. Everyone else seems to have figured it out by now and I'm out here rating forearms on an app like it's a livestock show."

Gregg picked the tweezers back up. He slid a letter, brown and soft-cornered, out of its folder and squared it on the blotter. "Can I say something?"

"You always do."

"You're dating wrong."

Callum laughed. "Thanks. Very supportive archive environment."

"No, listen." Gregg turned the letter over, checked the back, set it down. "You keep going out hoping for a spark. A lightning strike. The guy who just gets you without anybody having to explain anything. That's not how it works for most people. Sex isn't a lightning strike, it's a language. You're standing in a foreign country waiting for someone to guess your order."

"So what, I take a night class?"

"You find someone who speaks it and lets you practice." Gregg looked at him then, steadily, the way he looked at things in general, like they were interesting and also slightly damaged. "I'm offering."

"Offering what."

"To teach you. Sessions. Not a hookup. Not us dating. A structured thing, here, after hours, where you say what you want out loud and I ask questions and we figure out what you actually crave instead of what you think you're supposed to crave."

Callum sat with that. The rain ticked against the tall window. Somewhere a dehumidifier hummed like it always hummed.

"That's the weirdest offer I've ever gotten," he said.

"Probably."

"And you'd want nothing out of it."

"I'd want you to stop whining at my work table about livestock apps." A small dry smile. "Beyond that, no. I've done casual, I don't love it. I like teaching. It's selfish, really. I get something out of it too."

"What would the sessions even be. Like, homework?"

"Talk, mostly. Then we'd see. You set the pace, you can stop any time, and none of it leaves this building." Gregg went back to the letters for a second, then added, "Think about it. Don't answer tonight."

"I'll answer tonight," Callum said, because two months goes fast. "Yes."

***

They settled on Thursdays, after the archive closed at six. Gregg said the building had good soundproofing, which it needed, since apparently the reading room's acoustics carried everything, and Callum chose not to ask how he knew that.

The first Thursday, Callum arrived dry, which he counted as personal growth. He'd brought coffee, two cups, and Gregg had accepted his with a nod like this was a standing appointment they'd had for years instead of three days.

"Sit," Gregg said, and pointed at the leather chair by the cold fireplace. The good one. Callum's favorite, not that that was a secret.

He sat. Gregg took the chair opposite, no gloves tonight, sleeves rolled up over his forearms, which Callum noticed and then decided not to notice.

"Rules first," Gregg said. "One, nothing here is a performance. Two, you can stop or change anything at any time and I won't ask why. Three, you answer honestly, and if honest takes you a while, that's fine, I have all night. This building closes when I close it."

"Okay."

"First question." He leaned back. "Last time someone touched you and you actually liked it. Not polite liked. Genuinely. When."

Callum opened his mouth. Closed it. Did math he didn't like. "Two years ago? Dele. The guy I was seeing before. He used to, um." He rubbed his palm on his knee. "There was this thing he did, after, where he'd just, keep his hand on me. Not going anywhere. Just resting. And I liked that more than I liked most of the stuff before it, which feels like it says something bad about the stuff before it."

"It doesn't. It says the sex was skipping a step."

"Which step?"

"We'll get there." Gregg turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the arm of his chair. "Now the real question. If you could design a night with somebody, no app filters, no forearms, no script you've seen in anything. What would you want done to you? Or for you. Start anywhere."

"This is the part where I say something embarrassing."

"That's the point of the part."

Callum looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had a plaster rose in the middle, gold paint flaking off it, deeply interesting plaster. "I think I want to be told what to do. Sometimes. Not all the time. But I've never said that out loud to anybody and on the apps it feels like admitting I don't have a job."

"Why would it feel like that?"

"Because wanting things is, I don't know. Wanting things is needy. Nobody wants a needy guy." He heard himself and winced. "That sounded insane."

"It sounded like something a lot of people believe and nobody benefits from." Gregg's voice didn't change pitch at all. He had the flattest, kindest delivery Callum had ever heard, like a man reading good news off a card. "Say more about being told what to do. What does it look like?"

"Just. Someone deciding. Taking their time and not asking me to run the whole thing. I run things all day, Gregg. I count people's reps for a living. I correct people's form. Nine hours a day I'm the one in charge of everybody's body, and then somebody gets me undressed and I'm still the one in charge, and I'm so tired of being in charge."

The room did its quiet thing. Dehumidifier. Rain starting back up against the glass.

"That's the first honest thing you've said since you walked in that first night," Gregg said.

"It is?"

"Everything before it was a review. Travis was fine, dinner was fine. That was a want." He set his cup down. "Second question, and it's a harder one. What are you afraid I'll think, when you say the next thing?"

Callum stared at him. "You can't just ask that."

"I just did. Take your time."

He took it. He looked at the plaster rose again, then at his own knees, then at Gregg, who waited with the patience of a man whose average workday involved a letter from 1874 that had waited a hundred and fifty years and could wait another hour.

"That I'll want the wrong amount," Callum said finally. "Whatever I say. That it'll be too much, or too weird, and you'll do that face."

"What face?"

"The polite face. The 'noted, moving on' face."

Gregg considered that. "I'll make the face anyway, it's my only face. But I won't mean it the way you're afraid I mean it." He stood, collected the empty cups, and paused at the door to the back room. "Same time next Thursday. Before then, homework."

"You said homework as a joke."

"I did not. I want a list. Three things you'd want a lover to do, written down, actual paper, and you hand it to me, and you watch me read it, and you don't apologize for any line on it."

Callum groaned. "That's the worst homework ever assigned."

"I've seen the collection in the back room. It isn't." Gregg went to make the rounds, checking the seals on the cases, and Callum sat alone in the leather chair by the dead fireplace, thinking about the word needy, and wondering what exactly he was going to write on the piece of paper, and how many drafts it was going to take him.

Callum wrote four drafts of the list. The first draft he threw away because every line was a joke. The second draft he threw away because every line was somebody else's fantasy, some guy from a forum, wearing his handwriting. The third one was close. The fourth one he wrote on actual paper, because Gregg had said actual paper, with a pen he'd borrowed from the front desk at the gym, and it took him eleven minutes and his hand hurt afterward, which told him something about how much he wrote by hand these days.

Three things. That was the assignment. He'd managed two and a half and hated every line, and brought it anyway.

* * *

Thursday. Rain again, because the sky in this town had one setting from October onward. Callum came in at ten past six with two coffees and the paper folded into eighths in his jacket pocket, and Gregg was at the back table with a crate of books and no gloves on, which Callum had learned meant nothing valuable was out.

"Homework," Callum said, and put the paper on the table like it was ticking.

Gregg dried his hands on his trousers, picked it up, and read it. Callum watched. That was the other part of the assignment, watching, and not apologizing. He lasted about forty seconds before his mouth started assembling an apology, and he packed it back down.

Gregg read it twice. Then he set it flat on the table, smoothed it once with his palm, and looked up.

"Good list."

"It's not a good list. It's a barely coherent list."

"It's specific, it's honest, and item three is a whole conversation on its own, which is fine, because we have four Thursdays." He folded the paper along Callum's own creases and put it in his shirt pocket. "Tonight we start with the second one. But not undressed. Cloth first. That's how you learn where somebody's attention actually goes."

"Tonight? It's not even, I haven't finished my coffee."

"Then drink it. I'm opening the room, not your jeans." Gregg took his coffee and walked into the reading room, and Callum followed, feeling like he was walking into an exam he hadn't studied for, which at twenty-nine he thought he'd be done with.

The leather chair by the fireplace. Gregg dragged a second chair next to it, close enough that their knees nearly touched, and sat.

"Here's how this works. You stay dressed. I'm going to put my hands on you, over your clothes, and my whole job is to find out where you stop paying attention to me and start holding your breath. Your job is to notice that too, and say it out loud."

"That's it?"

"That's it. You spend all day telling other men to breathe. Tonight somebody's counting yours."

Callum laughed, then stopped laughing, because Gregg put his right hand flat on Callum's chest, over the hoodie, and just left it there.

"Big breath," Gregg said.

Callum breathed. Gregg's hand rose and fell with it. It was, objectively, nothing. A hand through a hoodie. He'd had heavier hands on him in mosh pits at twenty-two.

"Again," Gregg said.

Second breath, the hand moved, slowly, up to the