The Jazz Vet

*This one came from the idea that not every romance is forever, and that's okay. I wanted to write something playful and honest about two people at opposite ends of their adult lives who just wanted to be happy for a weekend. Thanks for reading.*

I paid forty dollars for a three-day pass and I figured I'd earned my money by noon on Friday.

The Gulf Coast Jazz and Crawfish Festival is a dozen stages stuck in the mud somewhere on the Alabama coast. Boiled shrimp smell and salt air and beer tents every forty feet. I'd been coming down here every year since I turned fifty-eight, and every year I tell myself I'm just going for the music.

This year I was going for the not being sensible. Two years since I ended things with Seth. Twenty-six years, gone, and no funeral for it either. I was sixty-three and nobody's wife and I'd been on maybe eight first dates since and that was enough of a stretch to know I didn't want a stretch. I wanted a night.

So there I was, third set of the day, some trumpet player from New Orleans who was honestly better than the headliner, and I was carrying a folding chair and a plastic cup of beer across a field that had turned to soup because of course it had.

My sandal went into a hole. The beer went everywhere. Mostly on the sandal, some on my ankle, a little in the mud where it maybe made one worm very happy.

"You okay, ma'am?"

I looked up. Young guy, festival volunteer t-shirt, lanyard, tall, arms like he did actual work with them. Mid-twenties. Nice face. Sunburn across the nose.

"I'm fine," I said. "The beer isn't. That was a whole cup."

He dug napkins out of his back pocket. Not a little packet, a whole wad, like he'd been prepped for exactly this. "Here. I've handed out about four hundred of these today. People fall in that hole constantly."

"Constantly?"

"At least six an hour. We should just fill it in." He watched me wipe off my ankle, then nodded at the chair under my arm. "You want me to carry that? You're headed to the stage, right?"

"I was headed to the stage."

"Then I got it." He took the chair out of my hand before I could argue, which, fine, I wasn't going to fight a boy with a lanyard over a lawn chair.

We walked up toward the front. Trumpet player was cooking. The crowd was loose and loud. My new friend set the chair down in a decent spot, kicked a bottle cap out of the way, and unfolded it for me like this was a paid service.

"Ryan," he said, hand out.

"Patty."

"Patty. You want a fresh beer? On the house. Well, on the festival. Technically on some shrimp company's marketing budget."

"I'll allow it," I said, and sat down, and he jogged off and came back with two cups, which told me he wasn't going back to work for a bit. He stood next to my chair while the trumpet player finished the set and the crowd hollered and somebody's beach ball sailed over all of us.

"Good?" he asked.

"Good," I said. "You always watch sets with strangers?"

"Only the ones who fall in the hole."

I laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, which I hadn't done on a Friday in a while. He grinned like he'd won something.

We talked through the next act, which was a piano trio, fine but not worth much attention. Ryan was twenty-seven. He told me this without me asking, which I noted. Volunteer because he lost his job in the spring, some logistics outfit, and his mother lived forty minutes inland and he'd moved back in with her for a couple months and needed out of the house on weekends. I told him I was a vet. Small animal. He said his childhood dog bit a mailman and he'd always wondered if the dog knew.

"The dog knew," I said. "Dogs know everything. They just can't testify."

"That's a dark way to run a practice."

"I run a very honest practice. I just don't extend it to festivals." I finished my second cup. The sun was going down orange behind the stages and the mosquitos were starting to think about it.

He asked if I was staying for the whole weekend. I said I had a rental. Beach house, two bedrooms, screened porch, an air conditioner with a bad attitude. He said that sounded nice. He said it kind of quietly, looking out at the crowd instead of at me, and I clocked that too.

Here's where I did the not-sensible thing. I'd like to claim I thought it over. I did not.

"Ryan," I said. "Do you want to come help me finish this bottle of wine back at my rental?"

"Yes," he said. Before I'd even finished the sentence. Then he went red from the collar up and said, "I mean. Yes. If you want. Obviously. Sorry."

"Good answer the first time," I said. "Don't ruin it."

* * *

We walked out past the beer tents and the crawfish stands, me in ruined sandals, him carrying my chair because he refused to stop carrying my chair. He'd called his shift lead, some girl named Dee, and told her he was leaving early, and Dee had apparently said something that made his ears go pink again.

I'd bought the wine at a gas station the night before, which I confessed to, and he said gas station wine was a lifestyle and he respected it. The porch lights were on when we got in. The air conditioner was doing its grinding thing, half working, like everything I rent.

I kicked my sandals off in the kitchen and poured us each a plastic cup of very bad red. Ryan stood in the middle of my living room holding his cup with both hands, taking in the wicker furniture and the stack of paperback mysteries on the end table, and looked like a boy at a school dance.

"You can sit," I said.

"I know. Sorry." He sat. Perched, really. Knees together, cup still two-handed. "Can I say something dumb?"

"You've been holding it in, I can tell."

"I've never been with an older woman." He said it fast, eyes on his wine. "Like, ever. And I think about it kind of a lot. More than kind of. It's basically all I want, honestly. Someone who actually knows what she wants and would tell me. The two women I've been with, it was both of us guessing. Whole time. Two awkward nothing encounters and then nothing since."

"How long since?"

"Almost a year." He looked up at me then, finally, and there was nothing shy in it. Hunger, plain as a sign. "And I don't mean to be weird about it. I just figured you should know what you've got sitting on your couch."

"That's not weird," I said. "That's flattering. And it's honest, which is rarer." I took a sip. The wine was terrible. I didn't care. "I'll tell you one thing for free, since you were so honest. I'm sixty-three. My knees click. I have strong opinions about foreplay and no interest in pretending otherwise."

"Good," he said. Too fast. "I mean. Yes. That sounds. Yes."

I set my cup down on the end table, next to the paperback mysteries, and stood up.

"Then here's your first lesson," I said. "Stand up."

He stood. Fast, knocked his cup against his knee, put it down. Six feet of nervous.

"Undress me," I said. "Slowly. Don't rush. Don't apologize. If I don't like something, you'll know, because I'll say so. That's the deal. That's how this works with a woman who knows what she wants."

"Okay," he said. His voice had dropped. His hands came up and stopped, hovering, like he wanted permission one more time.

"Start with the top," I said. "And breathe, Ryan."

He breathed. Then he reached for the buttons on my shirt, one at a time, slow, the way I'd told him. His fingers shook a little on the second one.

"You're doing fine," I said. "Slower than that, even."

"This slow?"

"Now you're teasing me. Good."

He got the shirt open and pushed it off my shoulders. Stood there looking. I let him look. He was polite about it, which was funny, like the sight of a woman in a bra required a moment of respect.

"You can touch," I said. "That's generally the idea."

He laughed. Nervous, but a real laugh. His hands came up and settled on my waist, warm, and he ran them up my sides like he was reading something in braille.

"Lighter," I said. "Fingertips. Skin likes to be asked, not grabbed."

"Like this?"

"Better. Keep doing exactly that."

So he did. A while. He had good hands, big ones, careful ones. When he got the bra off he went still again and I had to nudge him. "It's not a museum, Ryan."

"Sorry. It's just." He gestured at all of me. "You're very."

"Very what?"

"I don't have a word that won't get me in trouble."

"Try me."

"Gorgeous," he said, and went red again, and I decided I liked making this boy blush more than I'd liked anything in a while.

I toed off my socks, which ruined the mood slightly, and we both laughed about it, and then I got the rest off at my own pace because he was never going to get my jeans past my hips without help. He watched the whole thing like it was a demonstration.

"Your turn," I said.

He got his shirt off over his head, and the volunteer t-shirt went in a ball on the wicker chair, and then he was standing there in socks and nothing else, and I'll say this for twenty-seven, it does not hide anything.

"Come here," I said.

He came. I put my hand around him first, just to hear what he'd do, and he made a noise and put his forehead against my shoulder.

"Patty. I'm gonna. If you keep that up, this ends before it starts."

"That would be a shame." I let go. "Condom's in my purse. Bedroom's down the hall. Go."

"Go where?"

"To the bedroom, get the condom, bring it back. I'm not doing this standing in a rental living room with my knee clicking."

He went. I heard him dig through my purse, say "found it" to nobody, come back. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me lying back on the bed, and something in his face changed. Less nervous. More hungry. Good.

"Ask me," I said. "Out loud. Before anything."

"Can I?" he said. "Can I touch you? I mean, down there."

"You can. Two fingers first. Here." I showed him. I am not shy and I never have been. "Slow circles. Watch my face, not your hand. If my hips come up, you're doing it right."

He watched my face. He listened. First pass was too light, second was too much, third was right, and I told him so, and he grinned like he'd won something. When I got close he panicked and slowed down, thinking he'd done something wrong.

"Don't stop. Whatever you just changed, undo it."

"Undo it, okay, sorry."

"Stop apologizing and start again."

He started again. He got me there, half because his fingers found a rhythm and half because watching a young man concentrate that hard on my pleasure was its own kind of entertainment. I came with my hand over my own mouth out of habit, then took it away, because what was the point of a beach rental with no neighbors close enough to matter.

Then the condom, then him, slow, me directing traffic with both hands on his hips. He held out maybe four minutes, which I expected, and I wasn't keeping score. He groaned into my neck when it hit him and stayed there a long moment after, breathing hard.

"Sorry," he said, into my collarbone.

"Say sorry one more time and I'm charging you by the hour."

He laughed into my skin. "It was. I mean. That was."

"Take your time. Words come back."

"That was the best I've ever had," he said. "By a lot. That's embarrassing to say out loud."

"It's not embarrassing. It's a data point." I patted the mattress. "Come here. You're not done. Lesson two is what happens after."

* * *

He stayed the night. So much for no complications, but it was Friday and the festival had two more days, and the plan was already dead by then anyway. The air conditioner rattled us both awake around two. He fixed it. Turned out the bad attitude was a clogged filter, and he stood there in his underwear holding a filter