The Conservator's Wait

I'd been at the salvage yard since two in the afternoon and the power had died around five, so by eight I was basically living by lantern light. I'm Melina, I'm twenty-eight, and I clean a salvage yard outside a small New Mexico town for a living. Somebody has to. Most nights it's me.

The office where Ursula keeps her desk is the strangest room I've ever had to dust, and I've dusted a lot of strange rooms. There's a taxidermied heron standing on top of the filing cabinet, staring at the door like it's waiting for somebody specific. There's a stack of old film reels taller than me in the corner, and half of a broken neon sign that used to say something, nobody remembers what, leaning against the wall by the window.

"Hello, bird," I said, wiping dust off its long neck with a rag. "You and me again."

The heron did not answer. It never does. I keep talking to it anyway, because eight hours in that office will do things to a person.

Outside the grimy windows the yard itself was lit up by a full moon, all that rusted machinery and stacked car parts glowing silver. Honestly it looked kinda beautiful, which is not a word I use about the yard much. Usually it's just hot and rusty and full of wasps.

I checked my phone. Eight-oh-six. No bars, no texts, no power company update. My boyfriend Colby was supposed to swing by tonight anyway to pick up a painting, some old canvas Ursula had stored in the back room for him. He's a painting conservator, thirty-one years old, the most careful man I have ever met in my life. We've been together three years, since I was twenty-five and took an evening art course I could barely afford. He sat two rows over and corrected the instructor's dates under his breath, and I thought, well, that's either the most annoying man alive or the most interesting one. Turns out he's both!

Here's my thing, though, the thing I think about when I'm alone with the heron for hours. My whole life has been sensible. Sensible job, sensible apartment, sensible three-year relationship with a man who keeps his paintbrushes sorted by bristle stiffness. And some nights I look at the moon over a pile of dead trucks and I think, is this it? Is this who I am? A woman who talks to taxidermy?

Also, and this matters for what comes later: I'm a trans woman, and four months ago I had the last of my surgeries. My surgeon cleared me last Tuesday. Colby and I have spent those four months being so careful with each other that we have basically been two museum exhibits, and I have not said out loud that I'm ready, because saying it makes it real.

The door rattled at eight-fifteen.

"Hello?" Colby's voice, careful even in the dark. "Is there somebody in here? Ursula said to just come in."

"Back here!" I called. "Mind the film reels!"

He came around the corner with a flashlight held low, like he was afraid of waking something up. He's tall and thin and he walks the way a man crosses a museum floor in sock feet, which is a habit from his job. He found me by the filing cabinet and the lantern light caught his face, all eyebrows and concern.

"There's no power," he said. "The whole street is out. Ursula let me in, she's heading home. She said, and I quote, don't electrocute yourselves, the generator's dead too."

"So she just left you here with me. A stranger in the dark."

"You're not a stranger, you're my girlfriend. Of three years. I have a key to your apartment."

"Details," I said, and waved the rag at him. "Did you say hi to the heron?"

"I acknowledged the heron." He set his bag down on Ursula's desk, which he would never do if the lights were on, because Ursula's desk is Ursula's. "The painting's in the back room, right? I just need to check its condition, get it wrapped, get it home. The humidity today was terrible for it."

"You came to a salvage yard in a blackout to worry about humidity."

"Humidity doesn't take nights off, Melina."

God, I love him. He said it so plainly, like the weather report. That's Colby for you.

He got his flashlight into the back room and started fussing, and I went back to dusting, because if I stop dusting in this office I will simply lie down on the floor and sleep there. The battery lantern that had been in the office for ten years hummed on the desk and threw these huge long shadows across the wall, the heron's shadow especially. It looked nine feet tall. It looked like it was about to eat the film reels.

Then the lantern flickered. Then it flickered again. Then it went out completely, and the only light left was the moon through those filthy windows, gray-blue and thin.

"Colby?"

"I'm here." His voice came from the back room doorway, and I could hear him feeling along the wall. "That's not supposed to happen. Battery lanterns don't flicker, they just die."

"Well this one's dramatic. It's been in this office for ten years, it learned from the locals."

He found his way to me by the desk. I could just make out his shape, the pale rectangle of his shirt. The moonlight turned the yard outside into a photograph of itself, everything still and silver.

"So," I said, perching on the edge of the desk. "Big night for me. First time in my whole life the power went out while I was working. Truly my most rebellious evening ever. I'm basically an outlaw now."

"Is that sarcasm or are you actually sad?"

"Can't it be both?" I laughed, kind of surprised at what came out of my mouth next. "Sometimes I think the wildest thing I've ever done is work the night shift at a junkyard, and I didn't even choose it, the grid chose it for me."

He was quiet a second. Then, "Do you want to be wild?"

"I mean. Doesn't everyone? Don't you?"

"I want to check on a painting and go home and make dinner," he said, so earnest I almost cried laughing. "But that's not the same question."

"It's kind of the same question."

The lantern, dead as it was, gave one last sputter of dim orange light while we stood there, and in that half second the whole office went orange and shadowy, and I saw Colby's face turn toward me, and he stepped forward and his hand came up toward my face, and he said, in this low warm voice I had never once heard him use,

"Ursula? Is that you?"

And I swear my whole body went cold.

"Excuse me?" I said.

The lantern was fully dead again, but I could hear him freeze. I could hear the exact moment his brain caught up with his hand.

"Melina. That's. I thought. The light, the shape of you by the desk, I thought you were Ursula coming back in."

"You thought I was your girlfriend's forty-something boss?" I knew she was forty-two, actually, but the point stood. "You were about to kiss Ursula Granger?"

"No! I mean, yes, but no, I mean..." He made a sound like a man biting into a lemon. "I thought it was her, and for one second, in that light, I wanted..."

He stopped. The silence in that office was so big I could hear the heron's shadow growing.

"Wanted what, Colby?" I asked. "Finish the sentence."

And God help me, my heart was pounding, and not just from the scare.

His hand found my shoulder in the dark. Just rested there, light as a moth. "I wanted to kiss you," he whispered. "I've wanted to since the first time Ursula showed me the back room. The way she talks about paintings, God, I know it's ridiculous, but I've thought about her. And right now, in this light, I couldn't stop myself."

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. His thumb was on my collarbone and my boyfriend's brain was three feet behind his hand and somewhere out there a coyote started up and I swear even the wasps would have been stunned.

Then I laughed.

I laughed so hard I slid off the desk. I laughed the way you laugh when you almost get hit by a truck and then realize the truck was a shopping cart. I laughed until I had to hold the filing cabinet, which meant holding the heron, which made it worse. Colby just stood there in the moonlight while I wheezed.

"Melina. Melina, wait. Who. Who am I touching right now."

"You're touching your girlfriend," I gasped. "You are confessing a crush on Ursula Granger to Ursula Granger's face while holding Ursula Granger's employee. Colby. Love. You almost cheated on me with me."

"Oh no." I could hear him put it together, piece by piece, like he was cataloguing a damaged canvas. "Oh no, no, no. That wasn't. Melina, I didn't know it was you, I would never, I mean I would, obviously I would, you're my girlfriend, but I thought..."

"You thought I was a forty-two year old woman who runs a junkyard, and you went for it. In the dark. With your whisper voice. The whisper voice I have never heard."

"I'm sorry." He took his hand off my shoulder so fast I felt the air move. "I'm so sorry. That was, I don't even have a word. That was a violation of basically every rule I have, and I have a lot of rules, you know I have a lot of rules."

"I do know that. I married the rules."

"We're not married."

"I know, Colby, I was making a joke, stay with me here." I wiped my eyes. My cheeks hurt. The moonlight sat on everything, patient, like it had all night, which it did. "Okay. Okay, hold on. Let me ask the actual question, because I don't care about the almost kiss, we're fine, nobody kissed anybody. I care about the part where you said you've thought about her. Since the first time. That's not one bad second in a blackout, love, that's a whole archive."

He was quiet. I heard him lean against the desk, which he would never do with the lights on, so the dark was already changing him.

"Yes," he said finally. "It's an archive. I'm ashamed of it and it exists."

"Why are you ashamed?"

"Because I love you. Because I have loved you for three years and I have never once wanted anything else and then some woman says 'condition report' in a certain voice and apparently I'm a cliché."

"First of all, 'condition report' in a certain voice is genuinely hot, don't sell yourself short. Second of all." I took a breath. My heart was still going but it had changed reasons. "Colby, do you want to know a secret? Since we're apparently doing confessions by moonlight in a salvage yard?"

"Is it going to make this worse?"

"It's going to make it weirder. Worse is a judgment call."

"Tell me," he said, and God, that voice again, but this time he knew who he was saying it to, and that made all the difference in the world.

"I've thought about it too. Not Ursula specifically. But the wanting. I've thought about the fact that I clean a junkyard and you restore paintings and we both spend all day being careful with other people's things, and then we go home and I make dinner and we watch a show and we're careful with each other too. And sometimes I want to not be careful. Sometimes I want you to look at me the way you just looked at a shape you thought was somebody else. Does that make sense? I want to be wanted like that. Recklessly. Once. By you."

The coyote shut up. Even the yard seemed to lean in.

"Melina." He found my hand in the dark and held it. His palm was damp and I loved him so much for that. "I wasn't looking at her. I mean, I thought I was, but the person I stepped toward, the person whose shoulder I touched, the shape in the light, that was you. It was always going to be you, standing there. Ursula left twenty minutes ago. You're the only person in this building. My stupid brain picked the wrong name and my hands picked right."

I stared at where I imagined his face was. It was too dark to see him properly, just the pale shirt and the glint where his glasses caught the moon.

"Say the thing again," I said. "The whisper thing. The 'I wanted to kiss you.' Say it to me on purpose this time."

"Melina. I wanted to kiss you." His voice dropped right back into that low register like a key finding its lock. "I have wanted things I've never said out loud in three years, and I think tonight the dark made me brave and stupid at the same time."