The Deposition Drafter

Shelby was thirty-four years old and she had the malt spiel down to a science. Twelve years in brewing. Head brewer at Copperline for four of them. She could say "kilned" with her eyes closed.

"So the crystal malt gets its color from the kiln," she said, tapping the stainless sample bucket. "Caramelization happens right inside the grain. That's where your toffee notes come from. Any questions so far?"

Twenty-six lawyers and paralegals stood around the fermentation tanks in their lanyards. Some kind of firm outing. Shelby had done a hundred of these. Most people asked about ABV and went back to their phones.

One guy in the back, tall, dark hair going gray at the temples, actually looked at the bucket. He looked like he wanted to take notes. Mid-thirties, maybe thirty-seven. Good shoulders under a wrinkled dress shirt.

Then his phone rang.

He winced. "I'm so sorry. I have to. It's the third time they've called." He held up a finger and stepped away toward the loading door, phone already at his ear. "No, no, tell them we filed the thing. The thing with the attachments..."

Shelby watched the door swing shut behind him.

And there it was. The familiar little spike of annoyance. Six years with Rashid had trained her to notice when a man put a phone over her face like she wasn't standing right there. She'd dumped Rashid ten months ago for exactly this flavor of behavior, and here was some stranger doing the lite version in her own brewery.

"Anyway," she said loudly, to the other twenty-five. "Where was I. Kilns."

She finished the malt section. She did the hop section. The guy still wasn't back. She walked the group over to the fermentation tanks, which was the good part, the part where she got to say "we're basically yeasty gods in here" and get a laugh.

The door swung open. Phone Guy slid back into the group like he'd never left, slightly winded.

"So the yeast," he said. "I have a question."

"Shoot."

"Is the yeast... temperamental? Like, is it as temperamental as a witness?"

Shelby blinked. The other lawyers groaned.

"Oh my god, Christian," said a woman with a clipboard. "We said no work talk!"

"What? It's a brewing question."

But Shelby was already laughing. She tried to stop it and couldn't. "Okay, that's actually a good question. Yes. Yeast is absolutely like a hostile witness. You can't force it. You can only make it comfortable and hope it cooperates."

"Can you impeach it?"

"You can absolutely impeach it. If your fermentation stalls, that's the yeast saying no further questions."

Christian grinned. Up close he had tired eyes and a jaw that needed a shave. "Christian. Sorry about the phone. Deposition tomorrow. I'm opposing counsel on a construction dispute and the other side is run by demons."

"Shelby. Head brewer. The other side of what? Beer?"

"Contracts. Five years of contracts." He rubbed his eyes with a knuckle. "I moved here two years ago and I've spent most of it in that courthouse across the street. That one."

He pointed out the window at the limestone block across Sixth Street. Shelby looked at it, then at him.

"Wow. That's bleak!"

"It's very bleak." He looked at the tanks. "So the yeast. Does it, uh. Is it alive in there right now?"

"Very much. Say hi."

They all pressed up to the glass. Somebody's lanyard clinked against the tank. It was, Shelby had to admit, a pretty good tour.

* * *

A week later, on a slow Thursday at four-thirty, the tasting room nearly empty. Shelby was scrubbing the glycol line fitting when the door chimed and Christian came in still wearing his suit jacket. No lanyard this time. No lawyers. He looked as though he had lost a fight with a parking meter.

He sat at the bar and put his forehead briefly on the wood.

"That bad?" Shelby asked.

"The hearing was a massacre." He lifted his head. "Judge hated my brief. Opposing counsel smirked. Physically smirked. I need beer and I need it in a scientifically arranged order."

"Flights are scientifically arranged. That's the whole point." She pulled four glasses. "What do you like normally?"

"Lager. Honestly. Boring lager."

"Not boring. Respectable. Okay, I'll build you a bridge from lager to weird." She lined up the glasses left to right. Pilsner, pale ale, amber, then the sour she was proud of. "Left to right. Tell me what you think."

He worked through it in order, quiet, actually thinking about it, which she appreciated more than she expected to. Most people gulped the sour and made a face.

"Okay," he said at the pale ale. "This one's different. There's something kind of... lemony? Grassy?"

"Saaz," she said.

"Saws."

"Saaz."

"Sah-azz."

"There's no second z, Christian. It's Czech. Saaz. One syllable, sort of. Like 'sawz.'"

"Sawz."

"Close enough. Third try you'll have it."

He pointed at the pale ale. "So this is the sawz beer."

"This is the sawz beer." She was grinning and she didn't entirely want to be. "It's my favorite hop. Old variety. Grown in that one region in Bohemia for like seven hundred years. It tastes like the past. In a good way."

"The past in a good way," Christian repeated. He turned his glass a little on the bar. "I like that. I could use some past in a good way. All my past lately is exhibits."

"Exhibits?"

"Exhibit A, deposition of the guy who lied about the drainage. Exhibit B, the invoice he said he never saw. I dream in exhibits now."

"So this is what you do after court. Sit in breweries and ask the brewer about dirt?"

"It's better than my office. My office has a window that faces a parking structure." He finished the pilsner and slid the glass toward her. "This was good. The whole flight. Can I buy you one? A drink, I mean. After your shift. If that's not weird. I don't actually know the protocol for this."

Shelby dried her hands on the towel at her hip. Careful, she told herself. Ten months out of six years with Rashid. Careful.

"It's a little weird," she said. "But my shift ends at six and the nachos here are stupid good. So."

"So that's a yes!"

"That's a yes."

* * *

The nachos happened. Then they happened again the next Thursday, because Christian lost another motion and Shelby happened to have the night's tap list memorized and he happened to ask about it. Then it wasn't even Thursdays anymore.

He never put his phone over her face. That was the first thing she noticed, and it mattered more than she could explain. When it buzzed he looked at it, sometimes texted back one thumb, but he kept his eyes up. He asked about the yeast. He asked about her. He learned that she'd started homebrewing at twenty-one in an apartment in her hometown with a pot she'd ruined, that her dad still called brewing "the beer science," that she'd once dumped an entire batch of a stout because the roast barley scorched and she refused to serve beer she didn't like.

"That's stubborn," Christian said.

"That's standards."

"That's stubborn standards." He was eating nachos like someone who'd forgotten lunch, which he had. "I respect it."

"You have standards? In law?"

"I have a rule about depositions. Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. Which my boss says is cowardly, but my boss has never been screamed at by a plasterer."

"A plasterer."

"This case. There's a plasterer. He wept."

She laughed so hard she had to set down her pint. This was the other thing she noticed, the thing that snuck up on her. She laughed a lot around him. Ten months of being carefully, sensibly single, and here was a tired lawyer with a parking structure view making her snort beer through her nose over a weeping plasterer.

He never rushed anything either. Several weeks of nachos and flights and closing-time conversations by the tanks, and the furthest he'd gone was one night when they'd stood a little too close by the brewhouse door and he'd said, quietly, "I really like you, Shelby," and then, "just so you know. No agenda. Just so you know."

"So you know," he'd said.

"So I know," she'd said back.

And then he'd paid his tab and gone home like a gentleman, and she'd stood in the empty tasting room thinking, well, that's either the best man in the world or the slowest.

It was a Friday in late October when it came to a head. The fermentation alarm had gone off at four that afternoon, a stuck stout, and Shelby spent forty minutes with a thermometer and a heat wrap muttering threats at tank three. Christian showed up at five to find her with glycol residue on her forearm and pure murder in her eyes.

"Rough day?" he asked.

"Don't. Talk. To me. About. Days."

"Fair." He sat at the bar. "I won, by the way. The motion. The judge reversed herself on reconsideration."

That stopped her. "Wait. You won? The demon case?"

"One round of it. The case isn't over, but today is." He turned his phone over on the bar, face down, and left it there. "So tonight I have nowhere to be and no exhibits to dream about."

Shelby looked at him. The alarm was quiet. Tank three was breathing again. The tasting room was emptying out, somebody's last stragglers paying up at the far end.

"Christian," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Ask me the thing. The protocol thing. The one you asked about nachos."

He set down his glass. "Shelby. Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," she said. "God, yes, finally."

He came around the bar slow, as if the floor might be slick. Shelby wiped her hands on her towel again and then just dropped it, because her hands were never going to feel clean enough for this and she didn't care.

The kiss was soft at first. Careful. His hand found the side of her face and she made a small noise against his mouth that she would absolutely be thinking about at three in the morning for the next several weeks. When they broke apart he kept his forehead against hers.

"Okay," he said. "Wow."

"That's your legal assessment?"

"Objection sustained. Whatever. I'm out of practice at talking."

"You seemed fine just now."

"I wasn't talking." He kissed her again, shorter, and she curled her fingers into the front of his jacket. Somewhere behind them tank three hummed along, smug about its recovery.

His phone buzzed on the bar. They both looked at it.

"Don't," Shelby said.

"It's face down. I can't even see who it is."

"Then it doesn't exist."

"It doesn't exist," he agreed, and turned it fully off, which she had never once seen him do, and kissed her a third time with both hands gone quiet and his whole attention on her, which was honestly more intoxicating than anything she'd ever put on tap.

* * *

The private tour was his idea. A client's whole legal team, in town for a settlement conference, wanted a team building thing, and Christian had said, with a completely straight face, that he knew a brewery.

"Twenty-six people," Shelby said, staring at the clipboard. "On a Tuesday."

"Eleven lawyers and fifteen paralegals. The paralegals are the fun ones."