The Card Catalog Job

Laura Holcomb was twenty-four and she worked nights. Tidal gates, mostly. Somebody had to keep the sludge out of the channels that fed the terraces, and apparently that somebody was her. She didn't mind the work. She minded the waiting.

Because the Yuanyang Terraces after dark were like that. Everything waited. Water waited. Frogs waited. And Laura waited too, elbow-deep in a gate housing, thinking about Lynne Booker.

They'd met two years ago in a night class at the community college. Bookkeeping, of all things. Laura had needed it for invoicing her repair jobs. Lynne was there because the tourism bureau made her take it. They'd compared notes on awful spreadsheets and never really stopped talking after that.

Lynne worked nights too, in a way. She ran the scheduling desk for the Tourism Bureau, which meant she spent her evenings pushing meetings around like little tiles, apologizing to tour groups, and drinking vending machine coffee. Both of them, out here in the wet dark, waiting for something more interesting than canal sludge and scheduling meetings.

Tonight, Laura decided, they'd find it.

She'd thought about it for a week. She'd bought the dress for a costume party that got cancelled, and it had sat in her closet looking expensive and slightly wicked ever since. Leather. A bodice and a skirt. Not her usual grease-stained coveralls at all.

So she'd texted Lynne. *Meet me at the brush factory after my shift. I have an idea. Wear something you like.*

Lynne had texted back a thumbs up and then, three minutes later, *wait what kind of idea,* and then, before Laura could answer, *ok fine I'm intrigued don't tell me.*

Laura finished her shift, changed in the break room, and walked the dripping path to the factory. The corrugated roof was streaming with terrace runoff, little waterfalls off every edge. The air was thick, the kind of thick that made everything smell green.

Inside, the main floor was mostly mothballed. The factory still ran a night shift, Dwayne Spock running it, but half the machines sat quiet under tarps. Laura walked the rows anyway, out of habit. Bristles sprouted in wire racks, and in this humidity some of them had gone green. Actual mold, soft and fuzzy, on rows of little white brushes. It was gross. It was weirdly pretty. It was home.

"Evening, Laura," Dwayne called from the office doorway. He was thirty-six, five years on the night shift, and he knew her from all her evening visits to the vending machine.

"Hey, Dwayne. Inventory going okay?"

"Inventory is a war crime," he said cheerfully. "I'm finishing early and going home. You need anything?"

"Nope. Just meeting a friend in the back."

"Back alley door's yours." He shrugged into his jacket. "Don't let the mold get you."

"No promises!"

She let herself down the side corridor to the back alley door and unbolted it. Outside, the narrow path ran along the warehouse wall toward the used glass mold warehouse, where stacks of obsolete ceramic molds sat under a single bulb. She'd picked the spot for a reason. Nobody came back here after Dwayne left. Just them, the drips, and the mold.

Then she went back inside and waited, pacing, her boots loud on the concrete.

At ten past, headlights swept the alley. Laura heard the car door, then footsteps, then a knock on the very door she'd left unlocked, which was very Lynne.

"It's open!" Laura called.

Lynne came in carrying a cardboard box, and Laura blinked.

"Okay, first of all, hi," Lynne said, breathless, twenty-three years old and grinning under a streetlamp-yellow jacket. "Second of all, explain the dress. Third of all, look what I brought."

"You can't just stack three first-of-alls," Laura said, but she was grinning too.

"I absolutely can. Watch. First of all." She held up the box. "This is a card catalog."

"I can see that."

"It's Lucas's. From the library. He's restoring it, but it needs to sit somewhere dry for a week and the library basement is NOT dry, so I volunteered my car trunk, and then I thought, why waste a perfectly good antique." She set the box on the nearest workbench and lifted out a small wooden card catalog, four drawers, brass pulls, dog-eared in the sense that one drawer hung slightly crooked. "Lucas said if I dented it he'd never forgive me, so, careful hands only."

"Why did you bring a card catalog to my... whatever this is?"

"Because you said you had an idea and wouldn't tell me. So I brought a backup plan." Lynne peeled off her jacket. Under it she wore a dark green blouse, buttoned neat, sleeves rolled. Something she liked. She'd taken the instruction seriously, Laura noticed, and that made her stomach do a small warm flip.

"Okay," Laura said. "The idea."

She stepped under the one working bulb in the back room. She'd changed out of her coveralls in the break room and kept her rain jacket on over the dress for the walk, and now she let Lynne get the full look. Leather bodice, laced up the front. Leather skirt that hit above the knee. The whole thing creaked when she moved, a soft leathery complaint, and she moved a little more than she strictly needed to.

Lynne's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Wow," she managed. "Okay. That's. Wow!"

"You said wear something I like." Laura spread her arms, let the skirt swish. "I like this."

"You walked over here in that, in the rain?"

"Under a jacket. It was worth it."

"What IS the idea?" Lynne was hugging herself, half laughing, and her eyes kept doing this thing where they dropped to Laura's boots and climbed back up slowly, like they were reading a form.

Laura took a breath. She'd rehearsed this on the walk over and it still wanted to stick in her throat.

"I want you to decide," she said. "Tonight. Everything. What we do, how we do it, when we stop. I've been waiting a long time for something more interesting, and I keep hoping it's you, but I don't want to drive. I want to be your..." She gestured vaguely at the leather. "...well. This."

Lynne was quiet for a second. The roof dripped. Somewhere a pump clicked on and off.

"You're serious," Lynne said.

"Very serious. And if you'd rather just watch a movie at my place like always, that's fine too. Genuinely fine."

"No, I mean." Lynne laughed, shaky. "I've been hoping you'd say something like this for about a year, so, yes. Give me a second to be cool about it."

"Take two seconds."

Lynne put a hand flat on the card catalog, like she needed to touch something solid. Then she looked up, and something in her face had settled. Steadied.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what we're doing. That catalog has four drawers. I say we make it a game. Every drawer gets a card in it, and you do what the card says. I write the cards."

"Cards written by you," Laura said. "Read by me. In this dress."

"Exactly. And you can refuse any card. Any time, any reason, no arguing from me. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Then come here and let me look at you properly." Lynne beckoned with one finger. "And touch. If you want. Do you want?"

"Oh, yes," Laura said, and crossed the room, leather creaking all the way.

Lynne reached out and ran her fingers along Laura's arm, following the seam of the bodice from shoulder to elbow. The leather was warm from Laura's skin. Lynne's breath hitched halfway down.

"Okay, so," Lynne said. Her fingers stopped at Laura's wrist. "Question. Are we still just friends tonight? Like, technically. For the record."

"That depends on the cards," Laura said.

"I'm serious."

"So am I." Laura caught her hand. "What do you want us to be?"

"For about a year? Not just friends." Lynne laughed, quiet, and the sound bounced off the mold-crusted wall. "You?"

"Two years, if we're counting honestly."

"Oh." Lynne blinked. "Two?"

"You signed up for that bookkeeping class because the bureau made you, and then you sat next to me, and you shared your pen, and I was done. That was it for me."

"I can't believe you sat on that for two years."

"You sat on it for one."

"Mine was one, yes." Lynne pressed her lips together, clearly doing math on who was more of a coward. She lost. "Fine. You win. Not just friends. Agreed. Officially."

"Good."

Lynne's hand drifted back up Laura's arm. Slow. She was watching her own fingers like they belonged to somebody braver. Then they reached Laura's collarbone and stopped, and Lynne looked up with a question already in her face.

"What's this?" she asked, because there was leather at Laura's throat. A collar, narrow, with a small brass buckle. It had come with the dress and Laura had almost left it home.

"Part of the outfit," Laura said. "But also kind of the point."

She took Lynne's hand and guided it up, set it flat against the collar. Her own fingers stayed on top of Lynne's. Under the single bulb the brass buckle threw a little coin of light.

"You can choose how this goes," Laura whispered. "That's what this means. I'm handing you the wheel. Whole wheel."

Lynne swallowed. Laura felt it through her fingers.

"You're sure?" Lynne said. "Because I've never. I mean, I've thought about it plenty, at the scheduling desk, during meetings that should've been