The First Blow

Okay, so here's how my Tuesday went. I'm Meredith, I'm fifty-five years old, and I've been a cop in Buffalo for twenty-nine years. And until recently, I had never so much as seen a man without his shirt in person. Not once. Fifty-five years!

I know. You can put your eyebrows down now.

It's not that nobody ever asked. It's that I never said yes, and after a while I stopped getting asked, and then it just became this thing about me, like being left-handed. My one brief kiss happened when I was twenty-two, outside a bar on Main Street, a guy named Sherman whose last name I honestly cannot remember. It lasted maybe four seconds. It was fine. Wet, mostly.

Then three months ago I started messaging a man named Mario on one of those sites for people who like long conversations. He's fifty-two, he does lighting design for theater productions, and he writes messages like little letters. Real punctuation. Jokes that land. We talked every single night.

Last week he said, "Come see my show. Small production, it's a rehearsal, come see what I do." So I did. That's how I ended up in a converted warehouse in the theater district, in a folding chair, watching a dress rehearsal of a play about two brothers and a lake.

And that's how I ended up standing in total darkness when the whole building went dead.

The sound the lights made when they died was awful. Not a pop, more like a long electronic sigh, and then nothing. The actors froze on the stage. Somebody in the back said a bad word.

Then Mario was beside me, his hand finding my elbow in the black.

"The lights are dead. I'm sorry, this is not how I wanted you to see my work," he said, and I could hear how much it stung him. Twenty years of that man's career and one bad wire had erased it in a second.

"It's okay!" I said. "Honestly, I was mostly watching the lights anyway. No offense to the brothers and the lake."

He laughed, which I was glad about. "The director will want to strangle me. Or the electrician. Probably the electrician. Can you do me a favor? The glassblowing studio next door shares our power feed. The owner lets me use her breaker box when she's closed. Would you help me look?"

"Police officer," I said. "Looking for things is my whole job."

So we picked our way past the stage, past a nervous stage manager with a flashlight, and out a side door into the studio next door. Even dark, I could tell it was a beautiful space. Racks of colored glass rods caught what little light came through the high windows. Two big ovens sat like sleeping animals. Workbenches everywhere, scattered with tools that looked sharp and serious.

Mario found the breaker box on the far wall and flipped it open. He didn't swear at it, which impressed me. He just went down the row of switches with his phone flashlight, steady and methodical, saying "not this one, not this one, hm" under his breath.

"You're calm," I said.

"I'm panicking internally. It's just very slow panicking." He flipped one more switch. Nothing. "This is the studio's box, but the fault is on our side of the wall. I'd have to get into the junction room and I don't have the key on me. Of course I don't have the key on me."

"Story of every crime scene I've ever worked. The thing you need is always somewhere else."

"Twenty years of theater has taught me the same lesson!" He closed the box and leaned against the wall, and for a second the phone light caught his face, and I thought, well. Here we are. Three months of messages and now we're alone in a dark room together and neither of us is pretending that's nothing.

We stood there a minute, just looking at the shapes of the ovens.

"Do you know anything about glass?" he asked.

"Only that it's hot and I'd break it."

"Then you know as much as most audiences." His phone swept across a shelf near the workbench. "Oh! Look at that. Is that a tape recorder?"

It was. An old silver one, the kind with the buttons that clunk. It had a film of dust on it and a curled label that said PRACTICE, which is a label that breaks my heart a little, honestly.

"Should we?" Mario asked.

"It's not evidence. It's fine by me."

He pressed play, and the little speaker crackled, and then a voice came out. An older man, soft, almost a murmur, patient the way you only hear teachers be when they've decided to be patient forever.

"Okay. Now gather. Don't rush the gather, the glass doesn't care if you're in a hurry. Good. Feel the weight? That weight is the whole job. Everything after this is just keeping that weight happy."

There was a younger voice too, breathless. "It's sagging."

"Then turn it. Turn it constantly. You're not holding it up, you're keeping it moving. Beautiful. See? Nobody told you it would feel like dancing."

Mario and I stood absolutely still and listened to a dead man, or at least a long-gone man, teach a beginner how to hold molten glass. The murmur went on and on. Turn it. Feel the heat through the pipe. Don't rush.

"That voice," Mario whispered. "That's the owner's husband, I think. He taught classes here before he passed. She's never taken the recorder off the shelf."

"It's the sweetest thing I've ever heard," I said, and my voice did something embarrassing on the last word, so I coughed like that helped. It did not help.

The tape hissed. The murmur said, "That's enough for today. Same time Thursday?" and the beginner said yes, definitely, twice, and the recording clicked off.

Silence, then. The good kind, or the dangerous kind, I couldn't tell which.

"Meredith," Mario said.

"Mm?"

"Can I tell you something? You can stop me. I want you to know you can stop me."

"You can tell me things. That's mostly what we've been doing for three months, from what I remember."

He laughed, but his phone light shook a little, and that undid me. This man who runs lights for a hundred performances a year, nervous in the dark next to me.

"I've been thinking about you all day. Every rehearsal. Every cue. And not the way I probably should admit. I mean yes, that way too, but mostly I just wanted to be in a room with you and hear your actual voice instead of reading it."

"My voice is nothing special."

"Your voice is the best part of my day. Has been since September." He shifted the phone to his other hand. "Can I ask you something even more forward?"

"Ask."

"Have you ever been kissed? Properly? You told me about Sherman, outside the bar, but you never said if there was more."

"Four seconds, wet, done. That's the entire archive. I'm fifty-five, Mario, and that's it. I've written it to you in a message before and now I've said it out loud in a dark glassblowing studio, which is somehow easier, isn't that strange?"

"It's not strange. Thank you for telling me." He stepped a little closer. The light was between us now, pointing at the floor, and I could see our shoes and nothing else. "Can I kiss you? I'm asking. Out loud, plainly, so there's no confusion, because I've wanted to since your third message, when you made that joke about the speed camera."

I took a breath. Fifty-five years, and here it was, being offered politely, like passing the salt.

"Yes," I said. "Please."

He found me in the dark with more care than any man has ever shown anything. One hand at my jaw, and then his mouth on mine, and it was nothing like Sherman. It was slow and warm and it went on long enough that I stopped counting. He pulled back an inch.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Again," I said, and he did, and this time I did the thing where your hand comes up and holds the back of someone's neck, which apparently my body knew how to do without any training whatsoever. Twenty-nine years of police work and my hands knew this.

When we stopped, I was breathing like I'd run stairs.

"So," he said, and I could hear the grin in it. "Thursday?"

"Don't you dare make a joke right now."

"Too late. But also, Meredith, I mean it seriously. If you want to stop here, we stop here, and I'll walk you to your car and message you tonight like always."

I looked at the shape of him in the dark, at the two ovens still warm somewhere in the room, at that little recorder on the shelf with its heartbreaking label.

"I don't want to stop," I said.

* * *

The recorder hissed its way back to the beginning of the tape, that same gentle voice starting up again somewhere in the dark, and it felt like company, honestly. Two old fools in a glass studio chaperoned by a dead teacher. "Feel the weight," the tape said again. "That weight is the whole job."

Mario turned his phone light back toward the floor. "We should probably find that breaker box," he said, and neither of us moved an inch.

"Probably," I agreed.

We stood there like two people at a bus stop who missed the bus on purpose. My hand was still on the back of his neck. His hand was still on my jaw. Somewhere across the warehouse, the cast of the play was presumably sitting in the dark complaining to each other, and I want it noted that I did not care even slightly. Twenty-nine years as a cop in Buffalo and I have never once abandoned a scene. That night I was fully prepared to abandon a scene.

"Meredith," he said. "The thing I said earlier. About wanting to be in a room with you. There's more to it than that."

"I figured there might be."

"And I don't know how you want to handle it, because you've told me things, big things, but you've never told me this, and I don't want to guess wrong and make you feel cornered in a dark building with the power out." He took a breath. "How much have you done? With anyone. Ever."

Well. There it was. The question I'd been rehearsing the answer to for three months of nightly messages, and now that it arrived, standing in someone else's studio at nine at night, I found I couldn't do the polished version. I said the true version.

"I've never done this with anyone," I said. "I mean, sex. I'm a virgin. There. Said it in a room with ovens in it, which is a sentence I never predicted."

The silence went on about two seconds too long and my stomach dropped the way it does when you stop a car at a light and see something in the mirror. Fifty-five years old, and here I was, confessing to a man whose only crime was running lights beautifully, that I was the oldest living beginner in Western New York.

"Say something," I said. "Please. Anything. Even a bad joke. I'd honestly take a bad joke right now."

"No jokes," he said. "Come here." And he pulled me into a hug, which was not what I expected, and turned out to be exactly what I needed. He smelled like sawdust and coffee. His chin rested on top of my head because he's got three inches on me. "Meredith, that doesn't change anything I've been thinking. It changes almost nothing. It changes one thing."

"Which is?"

"Which is that I'm going to be very careful with you, and very honest, and we're going to go as slow as you want, and I'm going to ask before everything. Can you live with that?"

"I'm a cop. I love procedure. You're describing procedure."

He laughed into my hair. "You're unbelievable, you know that? You just told me you've gone fifty-five years without anyone touching you and you made a joke about it in under a minute."

"That's the job. You make the joke first so nobody else gets to."

"Well, stop. Not the jokes. The deflecting." He held me out at arm's length, and in the phone light I could see his face properly for the first time since the kiss, and he was not looking at me with pity, which is what I'd been braced for. He was looking at me the way he looks at a lighting plot, I think, like something with real structure to it that deserves attention. "Can I ask you one more thing?"

"You're on a roll. Keep going."

"Do you want to explore? With me. Tonight, or never, or some third option I haven't thought of. I'm not saying take your clothes off. I'm saying, we've talked every night for three months, we clearly like each other, and I've been dying to put my hands on you for a while now. If your answer is no, that's a complete answer and I'll drive you home and we'll still talk tomorrow. But if it's yes, even a small nervous yes, then I'd like to find out what you like. No pressure. Truly none. If you say no I will not sulk, I will not bring it up, I will not make it weird. That's a promise."

I want to tell you, whoever you are reading this, exactly what went through my head, because it wasn't the movie version. It wasn't fire and certainty. It was arithmetic. It was me standing in the dark doing decades of math: the years I'd spent telling myself it would