The Barn Reunion Game

I turned twenty-nine in March, which meant I was old enough to know better than to agree to fake-date someone I barely knew, and young enough to do it anyway. Two years of knowing Bess, and all of it small talk. Gliding club hangar parties, a few messages about weather, nothing more. Then my relationship of four years ended in February, and by spring I was working bar nights in a college town and feeling like furniture. So when Bess asked if I'd be her date for her class reunion, I said yes before I'd thought about it at all.

The reunion was in a restored barn outside of town, all dark beams and fairy lights strung across the rafters. Someone had laid a dance floor over the old hayloft, which seemed structurally optimistic but looked great. Beyond the yard, the gliding club hangar sat with its big doors shut, quiet for the night, and even from the gravel parking area I could smell grass and that faint fuel smell that hangs around airfields.

I was twenty-nine that spring, and Bess was thirty-one, and Leon, the host, was thirty-four and had apparently spent six years on one project: a model railway set up on trestle tables along the near wall of the barn. It was huge. Little hills, a tunnel, a station with tiny lights. Half the guests kept drifting over to watch a blue freight train go around.

I spotted Bess before I spotted anyone else. She was standing near the railway with a drink in her hand, laughing at something Leon said, head tipped back, and something in my chest did a thing I hadn't felt in a long time. Not comfort. Not friendship. A jolt, low and unexpected, the kind I thought I'd used up.

She saw me over Leon's shoulder and waved me in.

"Mona! You came." She kissed my cheek before I could say anything, and then, close to my ear, quick and quiet: "Okay, rules. We're strangers tonight. Just met. No history, no strings, first time everything. Deal?"

I pulled back and looked at her. She was grinning.

"That's the strangest date request I've ever had," I said.

"Good. Because we've never met." She stuck out her hand. "Bess. I blow glass. You?"

I took the hand. Her grip was warm and sure. "Mona. I play records in a bar and feel sorry for myself."

"Perfect. I love a project." She handed me a drink from the table like she'd been holding it for me, which she probably had. "Leon, this is Mona. Mona, Leon. He built all this."

"It took six years," Leon said. "Do not touch the tunnel."

I promised not to touch the tunnel, and Bess steered me away toward the dance floor, which was already full of people in their thirties dancing like people in their thirties, meaning carefully at first. Marshall, the hangar manager, was there with a beer and a nod. He'd flown with Bess a few times over the years. He seemed fine, unbothered, mostly interested in whether the buffet was open yet.

The music was a bit fast and a bit dated and I didn't care. Bess danced close, not touching, which was somehow worse than touching. She was funny the whole time, quiet observations about the guests, and I kept forgetting we were supposed to be strangers and almost said something about the hangar party two summers ago, and she'd just shake her head slightly and I'd course-correct.

"Strangers," she reminded me once, near my ear, under the noise.

"Right. Sorry. Tell me about glass."

"Hot sand, a tube, and a lot of cursing," she said. "It's basically plumbing with art anxiety."

Then the DJ, some kid Leon had hired, shifted to something slow, and the floor sorted itself into couples. Bess looked at me with one eyebrow up, asking without asking, and I stepped in. My hand went to her waist first. Halfway through the song it slid lower, to the small of her back, and she didn't move away. She smelled faintly of woodsmoke, probably from the studio kilns, and warm, and I was aware of every inch where we touched.

"This is a weird date," I said.

"It's not a date. We just met," she said, deadpan, and I laughed into her shoulder.

We danced three slow ones. At some point her hand found mine and our fingers sorted themselves together without a discussion, which felt like something out of a film, and I let it happen because it had been a long dry year and I was greedy for anything.

Around eleven the barn got stuffy and loud and we drifted out for air. The night had cooled and the yard was empty. The hangar sat dark across the grass, doors closed, and the fairy light glow spilled out of the barn door behind us like something from a postcard.

Bess nodded at the barn over her shoulder. "The railway's good, isn't it. Six years of his life."

"It's very good."

"You know what I like about it? The patience. It's like when kids spend a whole afternoon on one thing, laying track, getting it perfect. My brother did puzzles like that. I never had it. I melt things and shape them fast before they cool." She looked out at the dark hangar. "Leon found what he was patient about. Took me till thirty-one to find mine."

"Mine's probably finding a good parking spot," I said.

She laughed, that full laugh from earlier, and turned to face me, and the joke died somewhere in my throat. The lights behind her made a rim around her hair. We were close, closer than the dancing had put us, or the same distance and it just felt closer out here with no music to hide behind.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're noticing."

She didn't step back. "Still a stranger," she said, softer now. "But a stranger who'd very much like it if you kissed her. If you want. No strings, remember."

"I want," I said.

I kissed her. She tasted like the drink she'd been holding for me all night, and her hand came up to the side of my neck, and we stood there by the silent hangar under a sky full of actual stars, no town glow this far out, kissing slow like we had all the time in the world. Which, technically, until the buffet ran out, we did.

When we broke apart she was smiling. "Okay," she said. "Strangers is working for me."

"Me too." My heart was doing something unprofessional. "So, stranger. What happens next in your story?"

"Well," she said, and glanced at the dark shape of the hangar, then back at me, "that depends how bold this stranger gets."

I had a car, and a night off, and a whole year of nothing to make up for. I was thinking about it already.

I drove us around the back of the hangar, gravel popping under the tyres, and killed the lights. Nobody would come looking. Marshall was back in the barn arguing with the buffet table, and everyone else was busy watching Leon show off his six years of railway like a new father.

Bess pulled off her coat in the passenger seat and threw it over the headrest. "God, it was loud in there. My ears are still ringing."

"Mine too." I killed the engine but left the key in, because the radio had a good station on low, some late-night jazz thing that probably nobody under fifty listened to on purpose.

She turned in her seat to face me. In the dark her face was mostly outline, the moon doing the work. "So. Here we are. Two strangers in a car."

"Classic strangers behaviour, this."

She laughed, and then it went quiet in a way that wasn't awkward, just full. She reached over and took my hand and put it on her knee, deliberately, like she was setting a chess piece down. "I like you, Mona. For a stranger you're doing very well."