The First Time We Tried

Dean here. Twenty-eight. I've been with one woman before Cate, back in college, and that was two years of very polite sex. Cate is twenty-seven and she's the one who taught me everything interesting I know. So anyway.

First beer. That's where we start.

Cate's mid-story about a shoot gone sideways in a warehouse down by the river. Some client rented the space, double booked it, and a bachelor party showed up with a boombox at hour three. She's doing the voices. She's good at the voices. And I'm nodding along and holding my bottle and not hearing one word of it, because the napkin is in my pocket and has been for six days.

It's a cocktail napkin from this same restaurant, actually. The Kitchen Sink. Same sticky communal table near the bathrooms. Last Saturday I wrote one word on it in spilled-margarita pen: Experiment. Underlined. Then I folded it up as a child hides a test he failed and put it in my jacket and changed the subject when she asked what I was grinning at.

Six days of carrying a napkin. Twenty-eight years old and I'm carrying a napkin like it's a live grenade.

She's still talking. "And then the best man tells me, and I quote, that the lighting was fine, he had a flashlight." She waits for my laugh. I give her about forty percent of one.

She sets her taco down. "Okay. No. You're gone!"

"I'm here."

"You've been gone for ten minutes. You've got the face."

"What face."

"The face you make when you're rehearsing something." She points her fork at me. A fork with exactly nothing on it. "Spit it out or I'm ordering flan and you're watching me eat it."

God, she's good. She's a photographer, so she notices things for a living, and I keep forgetting that applies off the clock too. She's got dark hair cut short at the neck and she's wearing that shirt with the collar and I've been looking at that collar all night and thinking about the napkin and that is the entire problem.

I pull the napkin out. Put it on the table between the salsa and the empty chip basket. Don't unfold it.

She looks at it. Looks at me. Looks at it again.

"Is that trash?"

"It's not trash."

She picks it up. Unfolds it. Reads it. Her eyebrows do a thing.

"Experiment." She says it flat, like reading a menu item. "You wrote me a word."

"One word and an underline."

"You underlined it." She puts it down and takes a drink of her margarita and I can see her doing math behind her eyes. "How long have you been sitting on this?"

"Six days."

"Six days." She flips the napkin over. Blank. She flips it back. "Dean. We've been dating two years. You could've just said the word."

"Could I have."

"No!" She laughs. "Probably not, actually. You'd have said it wrong." She pushes her plate aside and leans in on her elbows, and the restaurant noise kind of falls away, or I stop hearing it, one of the two. "Okay. What kind of experiment. Use words. Real ones."

So I say it. I've rehearsed it in the shower and on the bus and once out loud to my bathroom mirror like a lunatic, and it still comes out crooked.

"I want you to tell me what to do."

She blinks. "In bed."

"In bed. Yeah. All of it. I want to not be in charge for one night and I want you to be."

She sits back. The waiter comes by with a tray of drinks for the next table over and she waits, watching me the whole time, until he's gone. Then she drums her fingers on the table twice.

"Huh."

"Is that a good huh or a bad huh."

"It's a huh huh." She picks up the napkin again and smooths it flat. "I've wondered, honestly. You're such a planner. You plan everything. Vacations. Groceries. You alphabetize the spice shelf."

"I do not alphabetize the spice shelf."

"Cayenne is between basil and black pepper, Dean." Which it is, because she put it there and I moved it back and she moved it back and now we don't discuss it. "So you want to lose the keys for a night. Fine. I'm game." Then she holds up one finger before my chest does the thing it's doing. "But we do it properly. Rules. We're not animals."

She grabs a napkin from the dispenser. Grabs the pen out of her camera bag, because of course she has a pen in her camera bag. She writes at the top: RULES. Underlines it, which is a direct shot at me, and we both know it, and she smirks while she does it.

"Rule one," she says. "No asking permission. That is the entire point. You want to be told. So you don't ask me for anything. Not once. You don't say should I, can I, do you want. If you're in, you're in, and your mouth stays shut unless I ask you a question. Got it?"

The noise of the restaurant comes back for a second. A plate breaks somewhere near the kitchen and half the room cheers. Somebody's kid, some table of eight grown adults celebrating something, is loud. I drink. My heart's doing a stupid thing about it and I make myself say it out loud.

"Got it."

"Rule one, no asking." She writes it. "What about answers? If I ask you something, you answer?"

"Obviously."

"Fine. Rule two, you answer when spoken to. Anything else?"

"One word," I say. "If I need to say yes to something big. I get one word."

"One word of consent." She writes it and reads it back. "That's generous. I'd have taken a nod."

"I need the word."

"Fine, you get the word." She taps the pen on the table. "But here's my addendum, and it's not negotiable. There's a safe word. One word, any time, anything stops. Everything stops, no discussion, no sulking from me, nothing."

"What word."

"And no asking doesn't mean no saying no. 'Not that one' or 'not yet' works any time too, and it never breaks a rule." She thinks about the word for maybe three seconds. "Cactus."

"Cactus?"

"You'll remember it. Nobody moans cactus." She writes it down and I look at her handwriting, that quick architect-adjacent slant she's got, CACTUS in capitals, and it's real now, it's on paper, it's got a word.

"Okay," I say. "Cactus."

"Okay. And that's the boundary under all of it, the actual rule under the rules. Nothing goes past your comfort zone. Not tonight. You say cactus, we stop, and whatever we didn't get to, we get to some other time or never. It doesn't count against you and it doesn't count against me." She looks up. "Deal?"

"Deal."

"Don't say deal so fast. Ask me questions. This is the part where you're supposed to ask questions."

I think about it. The bar side of the restaurant is doing a thing where everybody yells a chant, some birthday, I don't know. The table wobbles when the guy behind me elbows it getting up. There's a wet ring under my bottle that's been there since the first beer.

"What if I want to touch you?" I ask. "Rule one says I don't ask. But you said no asking. So do I just do it and risk it, or..."

"Good question." She looks pleased, actually pleased, like I passed a quiz she didn't announce. "Answer is, you wait for me to put your hands somewhere. First night, you don't move until moved. That's the experiment. You find out what it's like to have zero initiative."

"Zero."

"Zero. You're a very handsome piece of furniture that I give instructions to." She takes a chip and eats it, unhurried. "And for the record, that part I'm looking forward to. You have no idea how long you've been the one adjusting the spice shelf for both of us."

"Cayenne goes with the peppers. That's not control, that's taxonomy."

"Sure it is, baby."

She writes a third line. I lean over to read it. WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK AFTER. NOT DURING.

"That one's for both of us," she says. "Afterward we talk about it. Everything we liked, everything that was weird, all of it. Afterward is for talking. During is for cactus."

"When is this happening?"

She checks the time on her phone, then looks at me over it, and I can't read her expression and that never happens. Usually I can read her like a call sheet.

"Well," she says, and signals the waiter with two fingers. "It's Friday. Neither of us works tomorrow. We've got a fridge with nothing in it but limes and that chicken you bought with ambitions." The waiter shows up and she orders me another beer and herself a sparkling water, because she's driving, without looking at him, still watching me. "So. Tonight. If you're in."

The napkin with the underlined word is sitting there between us, damp at one corner from the salsa dish. Six days I carried that thing. I pick it up and put it back in my pocket, because she's got the rules napkin now and I don't need two.

"I'm in," I say.

"Then finish your beer." She's already smiling. "And sit still."

The beers come. She takes a sip of hers and goes back to the warehouse story, the part where the bachelor party's boombox was playing the same four songs all afternoon. I'm laughing. I'm actually relaxing. This is the part I'm good at, the talking part, the being-a-person part.

And then I see Melvin Goode walk past our table.

Melvin. Goode. Third year of architecture school, studio across from mine, the guy who did his thesis on modular housing and said "programmatic" in every sentence he spoke. He's got a lanyard on. He's got a date with him. And he's walking past the communal table near the bathrooms, which is our table, because of course it is.

He sees me. His face does the thing. "Dean? Dean Marshall?"

My mouth opens.

Cate's hand comes down flat on the napkin on the table. She doesn't look at Melvin. She looks at me.

"Yeah, man, it's me," Melvin says, coming closer. "God, how long's it been? You still at Hendricks and Roe? We should get a coffee, catch up, I've been meaning to email you since the awards thing, did you ever..."

I can feel every rule on that napkin. Zero initiative. Mouth stays shut unless asked. And I know what this is. She's not rescuing me. She's watching me. This is a test and she wrote it on a napkin ten minutes ago and I agreed to it with beer on my breath.

"Dean?" Melvin says. He's standing there with his lanyard swinging.

I keep my mouth shut. It costs me something physical, like holding a plank. My jaw actually hurts.

Melvin's date says something to him. He laughs, looks back at me, waves. "Okay, well. Email me. Seriously." And he's gone, back into the noise, and I exhale like I've been underwater.

Cate picks up her drink. "Interesting."

"That was Melvin Goode," I say.

"I know. You talked about him for a year. The modular housing thing."

"He thinks I hate him."

"Do you?"

"No. He's just. He's a lot. He made my whole thesis defense feel like a haircut."

She nods slowly. "And you would have talked to him for five minutes. Nodded at his date. Said we should get coffee and meant maybe forty percent of it. And he would have stood there blocking the walkway while your beer got warm."

"...Yes!"

"So instead you got to stand there and say nothing, and I got to watch you do it." She taps the napkin. "That's the experiment, baby. That is the entire first drill. You had an open door and a social obligation and you kept your mouth shut because I hadn't asked you anything yet. How did it feel?"

"Awful."

"Awful like bad, or awful like interesting?"

I take a drink. "Both. My jaw hurts."

She laughs. Actually laughs, head back, and a guy two seats down looks over at us. "Your jaw hurts. Okay. Noted for after." She writes something small on the napkin. I try to read it upside down and she puts her hand over it.

"No reading."

"You said ask after. Not during."

"I did say that." She looks very pleased with herself.

The waiter comes back around, doing his fast walk past the table with a tray of tacos balanced on one arm. "Everything good here, folks? Need anything else?"

I start to open my mouth, because that's what a person does, a waiter asks a question, you answer.

Cate gets there first. "He'll have the shrimp