The Distiller's Rules

The tent came down at half past two on a Saturday, and I want to start there because it explains everything that happened after.

I'm Sonja. I'm fifty-four, I work the front desk at the municipal gym, and I've been with Terry for three years now. We met at a tasting class at a distillery when I was fifty-one and he was forty-nine. He was the teacher's assistant and I was the one who asked too many questions, and somehow that turned into dinner and then into three years.

The Winter Blessing Festival is held every year at the snowplow depot on the outskirts of town. It's a strange venue. There's a big tent set up beside the parked plows, and vendors rent tables under it. Terry has a booth there every February for his small-batch spirits company. I usually come along to help pour and to keep the cash box honest.

That Saturday started fine. Cold, but fine. Terry had his amber bottles lined up in three neat rows and his hand-lettered sign propped against the folding table, and I had a thermos of coffee, which is the only thing I pour at a distillers' market before four.

"Try the birch one," a woman told her husband at our table. "Terry's birch is better than the one from the coast."

"It is not," Terry said, but he was pleased. I could tell because he straightened the bottles that didn't need straightening.

Then the wind came. Not a gust, a sustained shove, the kind that makes you lean sideways without deciding to. The tent poles creaked and the whole roof of the thing bulged up like a breathing chest.

"Somebody hold that corner!" shouted the man who sells knitted hats.

Nobody held that corner. The far pole popped loose and the tent folded like wet paper, right down the middle, and about forty festival-goers scattered into the sleet. I heard a table of pottery go over. I heard somebody's kid laugh, which was either brave or unhinged.

"Terry, the bottles!" I grabbed his sleeve. The table was at the open end and the rain was coming in sideways.

We ran. Terry swept the bottles into the plastic crates he'd brought them in, and I folded the sign under my arm and grabbed the cash box. A woman in a yellow parka helped us shove the crates onto a hand truck while Terry said thank you about nine times. Then we wheeled everything across the gravel, past the rows of parked plows with their huge blades, and into the maintenance bay, which was dry, empty, and smelled faintly of diesel.

The rain hammered the bay doors. Somewhere outside a man was yelling about insurance. Inside it was just us and the plows and the crates.

Terry sat down on an overturned bucket and looked at the bottles, counting.

"None broke," he said. "Not one."

"Your sign survived too." I held it up. The ink had smudged a little at the corner but the letters were fine.

"Small mercies." He took the sign from me and leaned it against a crate. Then he put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, folded into a square and softened at the creases, like it had been in there a while. "Okay. Before the market reopens, I have a proposal."

"This isn't about the birch whisky."

"It is not about the birch whisky." He shook the paper open. "I wrote this on Tuesday. I've been waiting for the right moment and I figured, well, a collapsed tent is as good as any."

I sat down on the bucket next to his. There was a second bucket, so it wasn't even romantic, just two buckets in a maintenance bay.

"Read it out," I said.

He held the paper up and cleared his throat like he was presenting minutes at a meeting. "The rules of the afternoon. First, each of us does one thing for the other without being asked. Second, each of us admits one thing we've been pretending not to want. Third, no leaving the festival early, no matter how wet or cold. Fourth, one honest compliment, out loud, in public. Fifth, no backing out of any rule once stated, no takebacks, no pretending you forgot."

I read the paper over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't improvising. He wasn't. It was dated Tuesday in his blocky handwriting, and under the rules it said, in smaller letters, each rule kept earns a kiss. Each rule broken earns something better.

"What's better?" I asked.

"That's the game," he said. "You don't get to know in advance. That's rule six, the unwritten one."

"There's no rule six on the paper."

"The unwritten ones are the important ones." He folded the paper up again, and his ears were going red, which happens when he's nervous even though he'd deny it. "Three years, Sonja. We're good at each other. We're comfortable. I want to be less comfortable. In a good way."

And there it was. The thing I'd been feeling myself for months without naming it, that our evenings had gotten as predictable as my gym schedule, that I could set a clock by his goodnight kiss. I wasn't bored of him. I was bored of us, if that makes any sense, and it had been sitting on my chest like a cat that won't move.

"I have a condition," I said.

"Of course you do."

"The cash box stays locked and nobody drinks on duty. Those are my actual rules. Everything else, fine."

"Deal." He stuck out his hand like we were closing a business arrangement, and I shook it, and his palm was warm and mine was freezing from the walk over.

Outside, the yelling had changed tone. The festival organizers were apparently declaring the tent officially closed until the weather cleared, and the vendors were being pointed toward the depot buildings. Terry's neighbor with the jams came wheeling her crates past the bay door and waved at us.

"Saved anything good?" she called.

"Everything," Terry called back. "We're geniuses."

"You're hiding," she said, and kept rolling.

She wasn't wrong. And I found I didn't mind.

Terry stood and stretched, and his back crackled audibly, and we both laughed because we're in our fifties and our bodies announce themselves now whether we want them to or not. He checked his phone. Market reopens at four if the sky cooperates, which in February here means it won't.

"Ninety minutes," he said.

"Ninety minutes." I looked at the rope swing hanging from the beam near the far wall of the bay. Somebody had put it up years ago for the staff, I'd heard, though I'd never seen anyone use it. The seat was worn smooth. It hung dead still in the damp air while everything outside moved.

Terry saw me looking at it.

"You wouldn't," he said.

"I might. I haven't decided which rules I'm keeping yet." I took the paper out of his hand, since he'd left it sitting unfolded on his knee, and read it again slowly while he watched. "The second one, admit something you've been pretending not to want."

"That's for both of us. One each."

"Then I'll go first." The rain filled the silence while I thought about it. There were several answers and only one of them was about the swing. "I've been pretending I don't miss being surprised by you. That's mine. There. I said it."

He didn't say anything right away. He just looked at me the way he used to look at me across the tasting table, back when everything about him was a question I hadn't answered yet.

"Okay," he said finally, and his voice had dropped a little. "Then I owe you something better than a kiss."

"Per your own rules."

"Per my own rules." He took the paper back and folded it away, and then he looked over at the rope swing, and then at me, and raised both eyebrows like a man making an offer he wasn't sure would be accepted.

Outside the bay doors, the rain kept coming down, and the plows sat in their rows like patient animals, and for the first time in a long while I felt like the afternoon could go anywhere at all.

We negotiated the afternoon rules on top of the Tuesday ones, which Terry said was legal because the paper said rules, plural, and didn't cap them. We sat on two overturned milk crates near the bay door, and he borrowed a pencil stub from his booth kit to write.

"Okay. New list. Rule one, no touching below the elbow."

"Whose elbow?"

"Either elbow. Both parties. Below the elbow is off limits until further notice."

"That seems designed to frustrate me specifically."

"It is," I said. "Rule two, no eye contact longer than three seconds."

"Three seconds is nothing."

"Three seconds is an eternity with you and you know it." I'd learned early on that Terry holds a stare the way some men hold a grudge. Rule three, no speaking of the festival, the tent, the weather, or the crates. Rule four, no laughing at each other. Rule five, nobody leaves the maintenance bay until the market reopens or the sky does something decisive.

"And rule six," Terry said, "remains unwritten."

"Rule six always remains unwritten. That's its whole personality."

He wrote the five rules out in his blocky letters, and underneath he wrote, kept earns a kiss, broken earns something better, and then he looked at me over the top of the paper, which I want to note was already two seconds of eye contact, maybe two and a half, the cheat.

"Rules active," he said, "as of now."

The rules lasted eleven seconds.

What broke them was nothing, really. He reached past me to pull the pencil stub back from where I'd set it on the crate, and his sleeve rode up, and his wrist was right there at the level of my hand, pale on the inside with that little ridged scar from a glassware accident in year one. And my fingers moved before I did. Just a brush, knuckles along the inside of his wrist, the skin warm and a little rough.

He went still the way a dog goes still when it hears something.

"That," he said, "was below the elbow."

"That was the wrist. The wrist is borderline."

"The wrist is the definition of below the elbow. You wrote the rule."

"I know. I broke it on purpose. It's called strategy." I stood up off the crate, mostly so I could look down at him, which felt like an advantage. "So. Something better. Per your own paper."

"That's not how the game works. You don't choose when the something better lands."

"Then when?"

He didn't answer that. He put the pencil down very slowly, which was somehow more menacing than anything fast, and I sat back down because my legs decided sitting was prudent.

"Rule two," he said. "No eye contact longer than three seconds!"

"Yes."

"I'm about to break it."

He turned on the crate to face me and took my chin in one hand, which was allowed, above the elbow, technically, and he looked at me. Not the way he looks at me over the coffee, checking. The other way. The tasting-class way, back when he was the teacher's assistant and I was fifty-one, and he looked at me like there was a question on the table and all the time in the world to answer it. Five seconds. Eight. My face went hot and I knew it went hot because he smiled, slightly, the corner of his mouth, which should count as laughing at me under rule four but apparently only counts when sound is