The Juror's Challenge

Lloyd Peck was fifty-two years old and he had never served on a jury in his life. He'd gotten the summons twice before and both times his airline had shuffled his schedule around and gotten him out of it. Not this time. This time the flights were thin and the union said take the duty, so there he was, Tuesday morning, sitting in the federal courthouse jury assembly room with a bad coffee and a lanyard that said JUROR like it was a job title.

He was a flight attendant. Twenty-six years of it. He could read a room full of strangers faster than most people could read a menu, and what he read in that room was one woman across the aisle who was also reading the room. Forty-four, dark hair cut sharp, blazer, laptop already out like the whole exercise was beneath her. She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.

Well. That was an invitation if he'd ever seen one.

He got up and moved to the empty seat next to her, and she closed the laptop an inch, just enough to say I see you.

"This seat taken?" he asked.

"It's a courthouse, not a nightclub," she said. "Sit down if you want."

"Lloyd," he said, putting out a hand.

"Clair. And before you ask, yes, I'm a lawyer, and no, I won't tell you which side I'd be on." She shook his hand with a grip like a handshake was a contract. "You?"

"Flight attendant. International routes mostly."

"Ooh, fancy. Do you say 'chicken or fish' with a smile?"

"Twenty-six years of practice, yeah."

She laughed at that, an actual laugh, not a polite one, and Lloyd thought, all right, this duty might not be a total loss.

They ran out of small talk about eleven minutes before the clerk called the first pool of forty names, and it turned out both their names were in it. So they filed into courtroom four with thirty-eight strangers and sat through the judge explaining what a juror's duties were, and Clair sat there looking bored the way a cat looks bored right before it pounces.

The judge was the Honorable Marjorie Keswick, and Lloyd had heard about judges like her but never stood in front of one. She did not smile. She did not blink much. She had been on the federal bench for what the bailiff whispered was nineteen years, and she surveyed the pool like a woman counting heads of cattle. Lloyd decided instantly that he would rather take a red-eye in a middle seat next to a crying baby than be questioned by her.

During a recess, Clair leaned over.

"See her? Judge Keswick?"

"I see her. I'm trying to avoid eye contact with her, actually."

"Thirty seconds," Clair said.

"What?"

"Hold eye contact with the judge for thirty seconds. She's back on the bench in two minutes. Do it and I'll buy your lunch."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you buy mine, and you admit you're a coward in front of God and the federal government."

Lloyd looked at the empty bench. Then at Clair. She had that half smile, the one he'd already catalogued as trouble.

"You're on," he said. "But why? What do you get out of it?"

"Data," she said, and popped a piece of gum in her mouth.

The judge came back and the bailiff called the room to order and Lloyd sat up straight like a man about to do something stupid, which he was. He waited until Judge Keswick scanned the gallery, and when her eyes came around to his row he looked right back at her.

One. Two. Three.

She didn't look away. Of course she didn't. She was a federal judge, looking away was her superpower. Four. Five. Lloyd felt the sweat start at his hairline. Six, seven, eight. Somebody behind him coughed and he almost broke. Nine, ten.

The judge tilted her head. Just slightly. Like a bird noticing a worm.

Fifteen. Twenty. His eyes were watering. He did not blink. Twenty-six years of keeping a straight face while a man in seat 14C explains that no, he did not know the emergency exit was for emergencies, and Lloyd had iron in him somewhere.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

Judge Keswick's mouth moved maybe a millimeter. It might have been the ghost of a smile. Then she looked down at her docket and the moment was over, and Lloyd let out a breath so slow nobody in the room could have heard it except Clair, who was grinning like she'd bet on the right horse.

"Data," she whispered.

"Pay up," he whispered back.

***

The pool got pared down during voir dire, and by some miracle or some clerical error, both of them made the final twelve plus two alternates. Twelve strangers and two alternates, sworn in before lunch, told to report back Thursday. So they had the whole afternoon free and one very specific debt to settle.

Clair bought his lunch, as promised. Turkey club at the sandwich place across the street from the courthouse, the one with the sticky floor and the radio playing oldies. She paid without complaint and he noticed she paid exactly, tip calculated to the coin, which told him something about lawyers.

"One more before we part ways," she said, unwrapping her half of the sandwich.

"Another dare?"

"I'm establishing a pattern. It's how I win cases. Repetition." She nodded toward the counter, where the clerk from courtroom four was picking up a to-go order. The older woman with the reading glasses and the sensible cardigan. "Compliment her shoes."

Lloyd looked. The clerk was wearing orthopedic-looking white sneakers.

"Those are sneakers, Clair."

"They're shoes. A deal's a deal. Do you want the record to show you backed out?"

"You can't put anything on my record, I'm not even employed by this courthouse."

"Then prove it."

He groaned, wiped his hands on a napkin, and got up as a man walking to his own execution. He caught the clerk at the door.

"Excuse me, ma'am? I just, um. Those shoes. They're very clean. That's, uh. That's hard to maintain, in a courthouse. With all the, you know. Foot traffic."

The clerk looked at him for a second and then laughed, a real one, and said, "Thirty-one years in that building, hon. You either keep your shoes clean or you go quietly insane." And she pushed out the door, leaving Lloyd standing there feeling like he'd survived a plane landing on water.

He came back to the table. Clair had her hand over her mouth.

"That was the worst compliment ever uttered in the history of federal court," she said.

"It worked! She laughed! That's a win!"

"It was a win by decision, not a knockout." She finished her iced tea. "You're fun, Lloyd. Most people around here just talk about parking."

He felt that land somewhere under his ribs, and he didn't love how pleased it made him. He was fifty-two. He'd been single since a long relationship ended when he was twenty-nine, and there had been stretches of nothing and stretches of something, and he knew the feeling of someone deciding he was fun and he knew it didn't always mean anything. But it had been a while, and the feeling had a kick to it.

***

Thursday they sat through testimony. It was a fraud case, dry as toast, and Lloyd did his duty and paid attention like a grown-up, mostly. At the afternoon break Clair leaned over with her coffee.

"Day two of the pattern," she said. "New dare."

"We're still doing this?"

"We're absolutely still doing this. Dare: kiss my hand."

He looked at her. She had her hand on the table between them, palm down, fingers relaxed, like it was nothing, as if she asked men to kiss her hand in federal buildings every day of the week.

"Here? Now?"

"Right here, right now. Nobody's watching. The bailiff is getting coffee." And then, quieter, watching his face: "You don't have to, obviously. That is the entire purpose of a dare. You can say no and we're square."

There it was, the open door. And Lloyd, competitive to a degree his sister had made fun of him for since they were kids, well, that, plus the fact that her hand was right there and she was easy to look at and he hadn't been this entertained in months.

"Nope," he said. "Saying no is for cowards."

He picked up her hand, turned it over, and pressed his mouth to the back of it. Formal, old-fashioned, the kind of thing men did in black-and-white movies. Her skin was warm and her pulse was quick under his lips, which meant maybe she wasn't as cool as she pretended. He held it maybe two seconds longer than the dare required, and when he let go her ears were pink.

"Huh," she said.

"Huh, what?"

"Nothing. Bailiff's back."

***

They got dismissed at four thirty, case going to Monday, and the whole twelve plus two spilled out onto the courthouse steps into a gray afternoon. Clair was ahead of him on the sidewalk, heading the same direction he was, which was funny, because his apartment was two blocks from the courthouse and so, it turned out, was hers. They figured that out walking, and then they figured out they were in adjacent buildings, the kind with the shared courtyard where the trash cans lived.

"Small world," Clair said.

"Small neighborhood."

"Okay. Last dare of the day, and it's the real one." She stopped at the corner where their paths split, and she looked up at him with that half smile. "Come to my apartment tonight. Eight o'clock. There'll be a challenge there that's worth being brave for."

"What kind of brave?"

"Something you'll have to be brave for. And something I'll have to be brave for, which I'll admit is not how I planned this." She said it lightly but her eyes stayed on his. "It's a real invitation, Lloyd. Say yes or say no, either one's fine, but decide now."

Lloyd thought about his evening, which consisted of leftovers and a documentary about sharks.

"Yes," he said. "Eight o'clock. What should I bring?"

"Your nerve," she said, and walked off toward her building without looking back, which was a power move, and he admired it, and he also watched her go, because he was only human.

At seven fifty-eight that night he stood in the courtyard between the buildings with a bottle of wine he'd grabbed at the corner store, feeling as green as a new hire on the first day of a job he hadn't been trained for. Her window was lit. Third floor. He took the stairs.

She opened the door before he knocked, like she'd been standing there, and she was in jeans and a soft sweater and no blazer at all, and she looked younger without the armor.

"Punctual," she said. "Good sign."

"I brought wine and nerve. The nerve's untested."

"Come in and we'll test it."

Her living room was small and clean and had a big brown couch and a record player in the corner, which surprised him, because he had her down as a streaming person. Two glasses already sat on the coffee table, so she'd planned this, and that did something to his stomach.

"Sit," she said, pointing at the couch. "You pour. I don't trust lawyers who pour their own guests' wine, it feels like billing."

He opened the bottle with the corkscrew on his keychain, twenty-six years of hotels taught a man to be ready, and filled both glasses, and she sat down across from him in the armchair and took off her shoes.

She just took them off, right there, and set them by the chair, and her socked feet were tucked up under her on the cushion like this was the most normal evening in the world.

"Okay," she said. "The dare."

"I'm listening."

"Fifteen minutes. You kiss my feet. No hurrying, no rushing to the end to win. Fifteen real minutes, timed on my phone, and you can't ask how much is left more than twice."

Lloyd put his glass down. "Your feet."

"My feet. And before you say anything, yes, this is the brave one, for both of us, exactly like I warned you. You can say no right now and we drink the wine and watch whatever's on and it costs you nothing."

There it was again, the open door, same as on the courthouse steps. And he had learned one thing about her by now, which was that she left the door open every single time on purpose, and that the dare only counted if the no was real.

"Why fifteen minutes?" he asked. "Why not five?"

"Because five is a stunt. Fifteen is you actually staying in the room with it." She wiggled her socked toes at him. "Also because I want to see if you can do it without making it a joke, and I genuinely don't know if you can, and that's why it's interesting."

"And what's in it for you?"

"Honestly? I want to find out what it feels like to have somebody pay attention to me like that. Forty-four years old, I've never had it. Curiosity is in it for me." She picked up her phone. "Yes or no, Lloyd."

"Yes," he said, and his voice came out lower than he planned. "Yeah. Okay. I'll do it."

"Good." She tapped the phone. "Starting when your knees hit the floor."

So he got down on the carpet in front of her armchair, wine glass abandoned, and he was suddenly very aware of how tall he usually was and how the ceiling was a long way away from down here. She