The Empty Hallway Confession

My name is Dave Acosta, I'm sixty-two years old, and I was standing at the ballroom exit watching my cousin's wedding die a slow, expensive death.

The band had finished their set an hour ago. A DJ was playing filler songs to a room of maybe twenty people, and half of those were staff. Every few minutes another couple would shuffle out through the doors near the coat check, laughing too loud, heading for taxis. I had my hands in my pockets and I was doing that thing where you watch people leave and think about your own house.

My house was very quiet these days. My youngest, Mia, moved out in September for a job in Denver. My oldest had been gone for years. So now it was me, a two-story empty nest, and a refrigerator full of condiments nobody else would eat. I'll tell you what nobody warns you about retirement and empty nests at the same time. The silence has a weight to it. You can feel it on your chest.

"You're doing the brooding thing," said a voice behind me. "I can see it from across the room."

I turned and there was Eden Palmer, fifty-nine years old, holding a glass of white wine by the stem like she was posing for a portrait. We'd known each other since high school. She'd been married to a guy named Roger for twenty-nine years, divorced now about two years, and she looked fantastic in a navy dress that I was definitely not going to admit I'd noticed at the ceremony.

"Brooding is my only hobby now," I said. "It's cheap and I can do it sitting down."

"It's a good wedding," she said, coming to stand beside me. "Too good. That's the problem. You go to one of these and you remember you used to be the kind of person who danced."

"You could still dance."

"I could. But there's nobody left in there I want to dance with." She took a sip and made a face at the wine. "Except Roger showed up with his new one. Did you see that?"

"I saw."

"Her name is Brandi. With an i. She's forty and she kept touching his arm like she was checking it for ticks." Eden's voice was light but there was something underneath it, some wire pulled tight. "Twenty-nine years, Dave. Twenty-nine years and he brings Brandi-with-an-i to a family wedding."

"That's rough."

"It's fine. It's actually fine. I'm tipsy and I'm fine." She looked up at me and there was a glint in her eye I hadn't seen since roughly 1981. Then she reached out, took my tie in her fist, and pulled.

I let her pull. What else would you do. She tugged me down until we were close enough that I could smell the wine and her perfume and see that her lipstick had mostly worn off from the champagne she'd been drinking at dinner.

"You always were the polite one," she said, still holding the tie. "Dave Acosta. Let go of your own tie when a woman grabs it, you're allowed."

"I'm considering my options."

"Consider faster." But she let go and laughed, and stepped back like she'd only been joking. Except neither of us quite believed it had been a joke.

There was a hallway off to the side, past the coat check, where the hotel had put a couple of benches and a locked side door out to the pool deck. We drifted there the way people drift at weddings, without deciding to. We sat down on the bench, not touching, a polite gap between us that neither of us had asked for.

"Do you ever feel like everybody's life got finalized without telling you?" she said after a while. "Like the paperwork went through and nobody mailed you a copy."

"Every day since September," I said. "Both my kids are out. The house is so quiet I can hear the ice maker. That's it, Eden. That's the soundtrack now."

"The ice maker."

"Sometimes the dishwasher. It's a rich and varied life."

She laughed, and then her hand came up and went into the back of my hair. Just her fingers at first, resting there, and I went still. She was watching my face while she did it, which was the interesting part. She wasn't looking away or laughing it off. She was watching.

Then she pulled. Not hard, just a quick little yank, a fist tightening in the hair at my nape, and I gasped. I actually gasped, out loud, like a much younger man, and I felt my whole face go hot.

Eden's eyebrows went up and that smirk arrived, slow, like she'd found a twenty on the sidewalk.

"Well," she said. "Well, well."

"Don't get excited."

"Too late. I'm extremely excited." She didn't take her hand out of my hair, which meant something, I think. "Do you know I have wanted to do that to a man for years? Years, Dave. Actual years. Roger hated being touched, being grabbed, being handled in any way. Twenty-nine years and I never once got to just pull somebody's hair and see what happened."

"What did happen?" I asked, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

"That. What just happened. That little sound you made." She tugged again, gentle, testing, and I felt it in my spine this time, all the way down. "God. You're not going to pretend you didn't like that, are you? Because your ears went red and I have to tell you, it's very satisfying."

"I didn't hate it," I admitted.

"Here's my confession, since we're in the confession hallway," she said, and she turned on the bench to face me, her fingers still idly at the back of my head like she owned the real estate. "I have wanted, for a long time, to pull a man's hair hard. Not this polite little wedding thing. Hard. See what he does. And I have wanted to be with a man who wanted me to. Who didn't just tolerate it. Who liked it."

The DJ in the other room played something with a heavy beat and neither of us moved toward it.

"I've never let anyone do that," I said. "Not once, in my whole life. Karen never, nobody. It never even came up." I rubbed my palms on my knees. "But I think I want to try."

"You think."

"I want to try," I said, and she smiled like I'd passed something.

"Here?" she asked, quiet now, her hand tightening slowly in my hair, taking a real grip this time, waiting.

"Here," I said.

She pulled, hard, and my head went back and my eyes closed and that sound came out of me again, and this time she made one too.

She stood up, then, and pointed at the carpet in front of her, right there between the bench and the locked side door. "Down. Kneel."

"Eden."

"You said here. Here is here." She kept her hand in my hair while she said it, so it wasn't really a suggestion.

I looked down the hallway. Empty. The coat check girl had gone back into the ballroom twenty minutes ago. The only light back here came from one of those wall sconces that hotels think are moody and are actually just dim. I slid off the bench and put my knees on that industrial carpet, the kind that's rough and smells like conferences. Sixty-two years old, kneeling in a suit in a hallway. My knees made a noise and we both pretended not to hear it.

"Good," she said, and the word affected me in a way I'm still not ready to write down honestly.

She took a real fistful then, up near the crown, the gray part, and pulled my head back until my chin was up and my throat was out there like an offering. "Stay still," she said, quiet, close. "And breathe. That's all you have to do right now. Just breathe and stay still."

"I can do that," I said, and my voice sounded like gravel.

"Can you? Because you look a little rattled, Dave." She was smiling down at me. From down there on my knees she looked about ten feet tall, which I didn't think was how geometry worked, but there it was.

"It's been a while since anyone told me what to do."

"Welcome back to civilization then." And she dragged her nails across my scalp. Slow, from my temple back to that fistful she had, the nails catching just enough that I felt every one of them separately. I shivered. Actually shivered, in a warm hotel hallway in a rented suit.

"Oh, that's lovely," she said. "Do that again."

"You're the one doing it."

"I know. I want to watch you do it again."

So she did, and I did, and somewhere in the middle of all that I realized I was hard. Fully, embarrassingly, sixty-two-year-old hard, in a hallway, in dress pants, from a woman scratching my head. I hadn't felt that kind of sudden stupid arousal since I