The Dare Jar

I found the jar on a Tuesday in October, which figures, because Tuesdays were always the day my life decided to fall apart.

I was packing up Martin's things. We'd been divorced six months by then, finalized back in April, and I still had three boxes of his crap sitting in my garage like ghosts that wouldn't move out. I'm forty-four years old, an English professor, and I had spent eighteen years married to a man who left me for a woman who was twenty-nine and wore those little athleisure outfits to brunch. So yeah, packing his boxes was not my favorite activity.

The jar was at the bottom of a box marked "garage misc." It was an old mason jar with a strip of masking tape on the lid, and on the tape, in my own handwriting, it said DARES.

I sat down on the garage floor and opened it. Inside were maybe thirty folded slips of paper. Date night dares. We made them our first year of marriage, back when we were still fun, and the rule was one of us would pull a dare and the other would try it, or say why not. Dancing in the rain. Karaoke. Kiss him at the top of the Ferris wheel. All the things I used to be.

He never pulled a single one. I checked the slips. All thirty of them, still folded, still crisp. Eighteen years and he never once reached into the jar.

I brought it inside and set it on the kitchen counter, and then I did what any sensible woman does with a crisis. I texted my graduate assistant.

Shane Vickers is thirty-one, he's been working for me for about fourteen months, and he is honestly the only person in the department who still treats me as a person rather than a cautionary tale. He showed up twenty minutes later with two coffees and a paper bag of cinnamon rolls from the place on Hawthorne, because he's the kind of person who shows up with cinnamon rolls.

"Okay, so," he said, shrugging out of his rain jacket, "the email you sent just said 'come over, bring coffee, I have made a discovery.' That's ominous, Dr. Jacobsen."

"Kath. I've told you."

"Kath." He set the cups down. "What's the discovery? Please tell me you found grading I can do."

I slid the jar across the counter. He picked it up, read the tape, and peeled off the lid.

"Date night dares?"

"Martin and I wrote those when we were twenty-six. He never did one. Not one, Shane. Eighteen years." I poured my coffee and drank half of it too fast. "And you know what the worst part is? It's not even that he didn't do them. It's that I stopped asking. I put the jar in a box and told myself I was being mature about it."

Shane turned the jar in his hands and looked through the slips without unfolding any. "So what are you going to do with it?"

"I'm going to do them."

He laughed. Not mean, just surprised. "All of them?"

"The ones that don't need him. Some of these are stupid, like 'try that Ethiopian place,' fine, I can do that alone. But some of them I need a co-conspirator for." I looked at him over my cup. "You busy this week?"

"It's fall break," he said. "I have exactly zero things to do and a dissertation chapter I'm avoiding. What kind of dares are we talking?"

I pulled one out and unfolded it. Wear something red and daring to dinner and don't apologize for it. I put it back in the jar like a tarot card I wasn't ready for.

"That's a dare?" he said. "That's nothing. My grandmother wears red."

"You haven't seen the other ones." I fanned out a few slips. Slow dance in the living room. Kiss someone under a streetlight. Go skinny dipping after dark. Some of these were written by a woman who was twenty-six and married and had no idea what was coming, and honestly, reading them felt like getting letters from a stranger who used to be braver than me.

"Okay," Shane said, and he was doing that thing where he tried to look calm and his ears went pink instead. "Okay. So you want me to be the co-conspirator. The dare referee."

"The participant, when necessary."

He picked up his coffee and thought about it for a second. "Fine. But I get to draw too. If I'm doing your dares, you're doing mine."

"That's not how the jar works."

"That's how the jar works now. New rules, new era. Anyone can veto any slip, no reasons given, no penalty. You're always telling us to revise the canon."

God help me, I liked him. I'd liked him for a while, in the way you like a person you're not supposed to like, and I had been very disciplined about it for fourteen months. But it was fall break, it was raining, and there was a jar on my counter full of proof that I'd spent my whole marriage waiting for a man who couldn't be bothered.

"Deal," I said. "You draw first."

He reached in, unfolded a slip, and read it. "Wear something red and bold to a department event and don't apologize for it." He looked up. "You have a department meeting Thursday."

"I'm not wearing red to the faculty meeting. Whitmore will have an aneurysm."

"Those are the rules, Kath." He said my name like he was trying it on. "First dare. Thursday. And no cardigans over it, no 'well, it was the only clean thing,' none of that. Bold."

"Define bold."

"You'll know it when you put it on. If you apologize for it, it doesn't count."

So Thursday I wore the red dress.

I bought it that Wednesday at a shop on Division, and when I say red I mean red, the color of a fire truck having opinions. It came to just above the knee and it fit close through the waist and it had a neckline that a person with my history of turtlenecks would call a statement. I stood in my bedroom looking at myself for a full ten minutes. I looked like a woman, is what I mean. I hadn't looked like that in a while.

The meeting was at nine. I walked in and the room did that thing rooms do, the little pause, and Whitmore looked at me over his glasses and said, "Well, Kath, we're celebrating something?"

"Yes," I said, and sat down, and did not apologize.

Shane was at the far end of the table with his legal pad. He didn't say anything at all, but he wrote something on his pad and underlined it, and later I saw it said DARE ONE: PASSED, with a little check mark, like a lunatic. I had to look out the window so nobody would catch me grinning.

The next night, Friday, he came over again, because by then it had turned into a thing. Rain on the roof, cinnamon rolls, the jar on the counter between us like it was a third guest.

"Draw," he said.

I pulled a slip. Slow dance with someone in your living room. My stomach did a small flip, which I ignored, because ignoring things is my whole methodology.

I read it out loud and Shane went very still with his coffee halfway to his mouth.

"There's a rule on the back," I said, and turned it over. In my own twenty-six-year-old handwriting: no clothes touching at first. Just close. I had apparently been a romantic once. It was news to me.

"That's, huh," Shane said. "Okay."

"You don't have to. We can call it void. The dares are old, maybe they expire."

"Do you want to void it?"

I thought about it honestly, which was a mistake, because the honest answer was embarrassing. "No!"

"Okay, then." He set his cup down and stood up and suddenly the room felt smaller in a way I hadn't planned for. "There's no music!"

"There's a record player in the hall closet. Martin never took it. He couldn't lift it."

I put on an old Ella Fitzgerald record because it was the first one my hand found, and the needle crackled, and she started singing something slow about someone to watch over her. Shane stood in the middle of my living room with his hands in his pockets as a man waiting for a bus.

"You have to actually dance," I said. "I'm not doing this alone."

"Right. Sorry." He took his hands out. "How do we, uh. Logistics."

"Arms go here. My hand goes there. It's not rocket science, you went to college."

He laughed, and that broke the worst of it, and then we were standing in my living room with about two inches of air between us, because of the rule, no clothes touching, and Ella sang, and it rained.

"You're a good dancer," he said after a while.

"I used to be. Eighteen years of a man who danced like a filing cabinet falling downstairs."

He laughed again, and this time I did too, and the laughing brought us closer without meaning to, close enough that I could feel the warmth off him without touching. Two inches. The rule said two inches, and I was a stickler for the rules, I was a professor, it was my whole career.

"Kath," he said, quietly, during the quiet part of the song.

"Yeah."

"Can I ask you something that isn't a dare?"

My heart was loud, but I kept my voice level. "Ask."

He looked at me, and I looked back, and he said, "Can I kiss you? Because I've wanted to for a while now, and I'd rather ask than do something dumb."

The record turned. The rain came down.

"Yes," I said. "I've been waiting fourteen months for you to ask that."

"Fourteen months?"

"I'm very patient. It's one of my flaws."

He smiled, and then he leaned in, slow, giving me all the time in the world to change my mind, and I didn't change my mind. He kissed me soft and careful, like the question was still open, and I answered it by kissing him back.

When we came up for air, Ella was still singing and the jar was sitting on the counter with twenty-eight dares left in it.

"So," Shane said. "Whose turn is it to draw?"

"Mine," I said, and reached for the jar.

I pulled a slip and unfolded it. The rain kept up on the roof, which was nice, because I needed a second.

"Read it out loud," Shane said.

"Exchange one sentence of raw, honest truth about what you find attractive in the other person." I put the slip down on the counter and picked up my wine. "Well. That's a trap."

"It's a truth dare. You're an English professor. Aren't you supposed to love honesty?"

"I love footnotes. Honesty is different." But we'd done a dance and a kiss already, and there was no way I was going to be the one who folded first, so I took a breath. "Fine. Me first, since it's my jar." I looked at him, at my graduate assistant of fourteen months, and said, "What I find attractive about you is that you asked before you kissed me, and you meant it, and no man has asked me for anything in eighteen years, they just took."

Shane didn't say anything for a second. The record had run out and the needle was hissing in the groove, and neither of us moved to fix it.