The Engine Room Lease

Bree Parsons got to the dock fifteen minutes early, which was unusual for her, but the bus had been empty and the evening was one of those gray Scottish ones where sitting at home felt like a slow way to lose your mind. She was twenty-eight, six months out of a five-year relationship, and her idea of a wild Friday lately had been reorganizing her spice drawer. So when her coworker Barbara had sworn up and down that her cousin's friend Moe was "normal, actually funny, and single in a non-tragic way," Bree had said yes to a blind date at the Anchor & Gull.

Except the text she'd gotten an hour ago said not the pub. The ferry.

She climbed the gangway of the MV Carrick, the old decommissioned boat where she'd worked as a line cook for the past two years, and stood at the top blinking. The hatch to the engine room was open, and a work lamp glowed down below like something out of a mining documentary.

"Hello?" she called down the stairs.

"Down here! Careful on the third step, it's slick."

She picked her way down the ladder and found a man she recognized from the photo Barbara had shown her, standing in a pool of lamplight with a big flashlight in one hand and a folded stack of papers in the other. He was thirty-two maybe, broad shoulders, work jacket, hair that looked like he'd been running his hands through it all day. He smiled when he saw her and looked, if anything, more nervous than she felt.

"You must be Bree. I'm Moe." He held out his hand, then seemed to remember the flashlight and juggled both. "Sorry. I'm normally better at greetings. Barbara's cousin says hi, by the way. Small world, harbors."

"Hi." She took his hand after he'd sorted himself out. "Okay, I have questions. The text said meet at the ferry. I assumed that was a typo and you'd be at the pub looking sad and punctual."

"I am punctual," he said, "but not sad, and not at the pub. I know this is weird. I promise it's weird for a reason." He held up the folded papers. "Can I show you something before you decide I'm a lunatic and go drink alone, which, honestly, would still be a decent evening."

Bree looked around the engine room. She knew this space like the back of her hand, or at least the parts of it she walked through every shift. The big diesel heart of the boat, stripped down and quiet now, everything painted over and humming with that low residual electricity old machinery gives off even when it's dead. Work lamps somebody had set up. Oil and salt in the air, the way it always was.

"You've been busy down here," she said. "Those lamps aren't ours."

"Those are mine. From my garage." He unfolded the papers with the care of a man presenting evidence in court. "So. I'm a fire inspector for the port authority. I inspect boats. Including this one, three weeks ago, which is how we technically met, though you were carrying a tray of rolls at the time and I don't think you noticed me noticing the extinguisher placements."

"I do vaguely remember a clipboard man."

"That was me. Clipboard man has a name." He cleared his throat. "Anyway. While I was going through the records, I found the lease. The company leases this boat, right? And there's a clause. A very strange clause."

"A clause," Bree repeated. "You called me off a date at a pub for a lease clause."

"This clause, yes. Give me a second, I'm building up to it." He laughed at himself. "Okay. Here." He turned the papers toward her and pointed with the flashlight, which was a terrible way to read anything, so she took the pages from him.

She found it halfway down the second page, in language that had clearly been drafted sometime around the invention of steam power. Her eyebrows went up.

"'The lower machinery spaces may be reserved for communal use by authorized parties for private gatherings,'" she read aloud. "'Subject to safety compliance and reasonable notice.'"

"Communal use," Moe said. "Private gatherings."

"It's some old Victorian thing, isn't it. Some shipping family used to throw parties down here."

"That's what I figured too, at first. But it's never been struck through or amended. It's still active. I checked with the harbor office, twice, because the first time I asked the woman thought I was pulling her leg." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "So this space, legally, can be booked. For gatherings."

"Okay, and here's where you lose me, because you're a fire inspector and I'm a line cook, and neither of us has ever once in our lives thought, you know what would be fun, a party in an engine room."

"Right. Yes!" He took a breath, and she could actually see him deciding to say the thing. "I found this clause three weeks ago and I have thought about it every single day since. And when Barbara's cousin set up this date, and I realized who you worked for, I did something kind of insane, which is ask you here instead of somewhere normal."

Bree leaned against the old rail around the engine housing. Below them the bilge was dark and still, and one of the work lamps buzzed faintly. "Moe. What kind of gathering were you picturing?"

He looked at the floor, then at her, and to his credit he didn't dance around it. "Not a party. More of a... private thing. With a small number of people. Where I could tell you about a fantasy I've never said out loud to anyone, in a space where it's technically allowed."

Bree felt something she hadn't felt in months, which was actual curiosity with an edge on it. "That's either the most interesting or the most alarming thing anyone's ever said to me on a first date."

"Both answers are fair."

"Is it a dangerous fantasy? Because I feel like I should note that I'm standing in a boat with a fire inspector and that would be a funny obituary."

"No! No, nothing dangerous. Nobody gets hurt, nothing illegal. It's just, um. It involves more than two people." His ears had gone visibly red under the lamp. "And I've never told anyone. And my housemate knows half of it and has been merciless about it for two years."

"Your housemate."

"Rhys. He's great, you'd like him. He co-owns a salvage boat. That's not relevant, I just mentioned him because I apparently mention him when I'm nervous."

Bree laughed, and it came out bigger than she expected, echoing a little off the metal. "Okay. Okay. So let me get this straight, because I want the whole picture before I decide anything. You found a hundred-year-old lease loophole on my boat. You moved a first date here. And your pitch is that we sit in the engine room and you confess a fantasy involving your housemate, and then what?"

"And then," Moe said, "honestly, nothing. Or something. Or we go to the pub like normal people and I die of embarrassment and you tell Barbara everything, which she will enjoy immensely."

"That last one is guaranteed regardless."

"I assumed so."

Bree looked around the engine room again, at the dead engines and the lamps and the folded lease in her hand, and thought about her spice drawer, and the bus, and the six months of nothing-new. She was twenty-eight and healthy and bored right down to the marrow, and a strange clipboard man had just handed her the strangest evening of her adult life on a plate.

"Fair warning," she said, sitting down on an equipment crate and patting the one next to her. "I'm going to listen to every word, and I reserve the right to laugh."

"Everyone who's heard it eventually laughed," Moe said, sitting down beside her. "That's actually encouraging. Sit, please. So. It started about four years ago..."

He told it in pieces, the way people tell things they've rehearsed alone for years. It started, he said, at a maritime safety refresher course, of all places, five years back, when he'd watched two instructors demonstrate a rescue drill and found his mind wandering somewhere it had no business going.

"Wait," Bree said. "A safety course gave you the fantasy?"

"The course gave me Rhys. The fantasy came later. He sat next to me because all the other seats were taken, and we got kicked out of the practical session for laughing, and we've lived together ever since. But the fantasy, that took about another year to show up."

"Show up how? Like it arrived in the mail?"

Moe rubbed his palms on his knees. "I was seeing someone, casually, nothing serious. And one night Rhys came home while we were on the couch, and I caught myself thinking about what it would be like if he stayed in the room. Not joined in, at first. Just stayed. Watched."

"And that did it for you."

"That did it for me. Thoroughly. And I shut it down, obviously, because that's what you do. But it didn't go away. It just got more specific."

"More specific how?"

"More specific in every direction you can think of." He was staring at the lamp now, not at her. "Rhys has known about it for two years. I told him drunk, on his birthday, and he said, well, that's the least surprising thing anyone's ever told me, and then he made me a toast."

"What did he toast to?"

"He toasted to whoever finally got to hear it next. Which is, apparently, you."

Bree sat with that for a second. The engines below them ticked as they cooled, little metal sounds in the dark, and she realized she'd leaned forward without meaning to.

"So here's my question," she said. "When you say you've been thinking about it every day since you found the clause, and you looked me up, and you moved the date here. Am I in the fantasy? Or am I just the audience for the confession?"

Moe turned and looked at her properly, and she gave him credit for it, because most men would have fudged that one.

"You're in it," he said. "Not since the clause. Since Barbara's cousin mentioned you, honestly, before I ever knew about the lease. She said her cousin worked with a line cook who was funny and had just gotten out of a long thing and was bored, and I thought, right, that's the kind of person who might not run. And then the clause came after, and it felt like the universe was being heavy-handed."

"The universe being heavy-handed. That's a fire inspector way of putting it."

"I inspect things. I notice when arrangements look deliberate."

Bree laughed again, shorter this time, because her pulse was doing something. She hadn't felt this particular feeling in a long while, the one that was half terror and half appetite, the one that said the evening had left the map.

"Okay," she said. "So say it. The whole thing. I'm sitting here, I've signed nothing, I've promised nothing, and I want to hear what you actually picture."

He took a breath that went on a while.

"What I picture," he said, "is three people. You, me, and Rhys. And what I want, the thing at the center of it, the thing I've never told anyone, is that I want to watch first. I want to watch you with Rhys."

Bree kept her face still, mostly. "With Rhys. Not with you."

"With me too. Eventually, I hope, if that ever happened at all. But first, yes. I want to be in the room while he makes you come apart, and I want to watch, and I want it to be you because you'd know he was watching me watch you, and I think that would ruin me in the best possible way." His ears had gone past red into something approaching purple. "There. It's out. Four years of carrying it around, and I just said it to a woman I met forty minutes ago in an engine room."

"You did."

"I should probably point out that I'm not asking. I want to be very plain about that. I'm describing a thing. You could stand up right now and say that's bonkers, Moe, and we'd go to the pub and I'd buy you dinner and never mention it again. That's a real offer. That's actually the offer."

Bree looked at him for a moment without saying anything, and let herself feel the whole shape of it. Six months of microwave curries and reruns. Six months of Barbara saying you need to get back out there and Bree saying the food is fine, the television is fine. And here was a man who had found a Victorian lease clause and hauled lamps from his garage because he wanted to tell her, in a legally designated gathering space