The Edge of the Game

I'm Samira, thirty-five years old, divorced for one year as of last month, and I was sitting in a booth at The Hollow Anchor waiting for a man I'd matched with on a dating app two days earlier. His name was Stephen. He said he was thirty-seven, worked in logistics, and had been coming to this bar for six years. That last part was the reason I'd picked it, or let him pick it, more honestly. Because The Hollow Anchor was also the bar my ex-husband used to bring his mistress, back when she was a mistress and I was still a wife. And because I knew, from a mutual friend who apparently forgot I existed, that Markus liked to stop in on Thursdays when he was closing a deal nearby.

Which tonight he was.

I'll admit the plan was ugly. I wasn't there to date. I was there to use a stranger as a prop and wait for my ex to walk in with his new girlfriend, who is twenty-four, and then find some way to make the whole room see him the way I saw him. I'd rehearsed lines in the car. Some of them were good. Most of them were petty. All of them were aimed at a man who had married me at twenty-eight and left me at thirty-four, and who had somehow come out of that looking like the catch and me looking like the cautionary tale.

So yes, my motives were garbage going in. The universe decided I deserved what happened anyway.

Stephen had the kind of face that doesn't give anything away for free. Calm eyes. A little unsettling, if I'm honest, like he was always three seconds ahead of the conversation. I sat down across from him and did my job, which was smiling and asking about his work in logistics and pretending my eyes weren't on the door.

"You're staring," he said.

I blinked and turned back. "Sorry. Habit."

"No it isn't." He took a sip. "You've checked that door eleven times since you sat down. I counted. Waiting for someone?"

"Waiting for you to turn out to be a weirdo. Statistically it's fair."

He laughed at that, a real one, short and low. "Fair. Well, I've been coming here six years and Candi will vouch for me. Mostly."

"Mostly," I repeated.

"Nobody needs a hundred percent." He leaned back against the leather. "So. Samira. Event planner. Divorced. What's your angle tonight?"

The question threw me. Most guys wanted to talk about themselves or do the thing where they pretend they don't care about your ex and then ask three questions about him. Stephen just put it on the table like a menu.

"Angle? It's a first date. You drink, I drink, we see if we hate each other."

"Uh huh." His eyes went to the door, then back to me, and something in his expression shifted, like a dealer who'd seen a card he was expecting. "Interesting."

Candi came over then. She was the bartender, had worked there four years, and she looked at Stephen with a face that said she'd been asked to vouch for him before and still had questions. She set down two drinks we had not ordered. Mine was something amber with a dark cherry sitting in it. His was pale and cloudy.

"House picks," she said. "Smoked old fashioned for you, his usual for him. Stephen's orders. He's got good taste, usually." She looked at me a beat longer than she needed to, then left.

I picked at the cherry. "I didn't order this."

"I know," Stephen said. "I ordered for you."

"That's bold for a first date."

"It gets bolder." He turned his glass slowly on the coaster. "I'll be straight with you, because you strike me as a woman who'd rather be dared than charmed. Drink yours, all of it, and I'll tell you a secret about this bar."

I laughed. "That's your opener? Mystery cocktails?"

"That's my opener."

I should have said no. Any sane person says no. But the last year taught me this: I'd spent six years being agreeable and it got me a settlement and a moving truck. I was done being careful with men. So I lifted the glass, said something clever like "if this is mayo I'm pressing charges," and drank.

It was good. Smoky and bitter and sweet at the end, with something behind it I couldn't name. I put it down and waited.

"Secret," he said. "You already know half of it. This bar is where your husband used to sit with her. Booth four. You're in booth two, which is closer to the door, and I chose it on purpose so you'd have the better view."

My stomach dropped through the floor and into the basement. "How do you know that?"

"Six years in a bar, you learn everybody's story. Including the story about the pretty event planner who used to come in on Fridays and wait for a man who never stayed long." He slid his glass toward me. "Now the interesting question. Do you finish the drink, or do you get up and leave?"

I finished the drink. We both knew I would. And that's when the door opened.

Markus came in like he always did, like the room owed him rent. Tall, expensive coat, that haircut that costs more than my car payment. And hanging on his arm, this tiny blonde thing in leggings and a puffer vest, because apparently personal trainers wear gym clothes to client dinners now and call it a personality. I knew her name from the mutual friend. I refused to use it even inside my own head.

My knuckles went white around my empty glass. I could hear my own jaw working. Six years of marriage, one year of silence, and there he was, pulling out her chair at booth four like a gentleman. The gentleman. The word alone made me want to laugh or break something.

"Easy," Stephen said, quiet, close. He'd leaned across the table without me noticing. "You're rattling the ice."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. But that's fine." He glanced at the door, then at Markus, doing some math I couldn't see. "New dare."

"I didn't agree to dares."

"You agreed to one already. Look how it turned out." His voice dropped lower, almost under the jukebox. "He's going to the restroom eventually. When you pass him, touch him. Just a hand on the shoulder, nothing anyone could call out. Make him remember your skin."

"That's insane."

"That's a dare," he said. "Same as the drink. You can leave instead. Door's right there."

I looked at booth four. Markus was laughing at something she said, doing the laugh he does with his head tipped back, and something old and hot moved through my chest and out through my hands. A year of composing texts I never sent. A year of my sister saying don't, it's not worth it.

"When's he going?" I asked.

"Soon. They've been here ten minutes. He's a creature of habit, two drinks and he's up."

I sat there with my heart doing something embarrassing and my mind running the geometry of it. Booth two to the hallway was maybe fifteen feet. I'd pass within arm's reach of booth four. A brush of fingers across a shoulder blade. He'd know instantly. He always knew my hands, he used to kiss the inside of my wrist like it was a signature, and the memory of that made me angrier, that he'd get to know it was me and still sit there with her.

"I need to go to the restroom anyway," I said.

"Sure you do."

I slid out of the booth. My legs worked better than I expected. The jukebox dropped the needle onto the next record with a soft thump, and the room was dim enough that I could cross half of it before anyone registered me as more than a woman walking.

I passed booth four.

I didn't slap him. I didn't say a word. I just let my hand drift out and drag across his shoulder, slow, fingertips heavy, the way you'd touch a coat to check if it was still yours. Skin to fabric the whole way. I felt him go rigid under my palm before my hand even cleared him.

He flinched, and his drink sloshed against the table. His head snapped around and there it was, the whole year, on his face. Recognition, then panic, then that quick animal calculation of does she know I'm here, who saw, how bad.

His girlfriend noticed all of it. She was looking at him with her eyebrows up, then at me, then back at him, saying something with a question mark in it that I didn't stop to hear. I kept walking. Fifteen feet to the hallway. The fluorescent light over the restroom door was flickering, and I stepped under it into the cold and pressed my palm flat against the wall and breathed.

I'd done it. First move of the plan, executed clean, and he'd reacted exactly how I wanted. His girlfriend had seen him jump like a startled horse. Whatever he told her in the next thirty seconds, she'd smell the lie on it.

So why did my hands shake like that? Why did it feel less like a win and more like a door opening that I couldn't see the other side of?

Because when I turned around in that hallway, Stephen was standing at the mouth of it, leaning against the wall, arms folded, watching me with that same patient face.

"Told you," he said. "Better view from booth two."

I stood there with my back against the wall and my pulse in my ears, and I tried to figure out why he didn't look pleased with me. He should have been pleased. I'd done the dare. I'd done it well. Instead he watched me the way a man watches a pot he's waiting to boil over, and I realized the hallway was narrower than I'd remembered it, or he'd made it that way just by standing there. He was between me and the bar. Not leaning anymore. Just filling the space.

"You're in the way," I said.

"Am I?" He didn't move. "I dare you to let me kiss you. Right here. Lights flickering, door open, anyone in that room could turn and see you."

"That's not a dare, that's just a question."

"It's a dare. Saying yes is the dare."

And that was the stupid logic of it, and I went along with it anyway, which should have been the second warning. The first warning was how calmly he'd walked into the hallway while my whole plan was still warm in my hands. I should have walked around him. There was technically room. I didn't take it, and I said, "Fine. Yes. Kiss me."

He didn't lunge. That's what I keep coming back to, later, when I try to reconstruct the whole night. He just crossed the space between us the way water crosses a counter, slow and flat and complete, and then his cold mouth was on mine. Not movie-cold, not just-out-of-the-car cold. Cold like a coin from a fountain. His tongue tasted of metal, pennies and iron, the taste of putting your mouth on a doorknob in January. I made myself stay in it because I'd said yes and because Markus was fifteen feet away and I was still, in some broken arithmetic, doing this at him.

Somewhere in the middle of it the jukebox stuttered. The vinyl caught, or the needle skipped, and the song hiccuped, and I felt that hiccup in my chest like the room had flinched too.

Stephen pulled back first. No flushed face. No awkward laugh. He looked at me the way you look at a receipt to check the total.

"You taste like a plan," he said.

"You taste like a pipe."

He smiled at that, and it was the first smile of his that reached anywhere. "Good," he said. "Come sit down."

He stepped aside and let me out of the hallway, and I walked back