The Last Dare The Long Way

Louise Beck was forty-four years old and three hours into celebrating the end of her marriage when Timothy Hale leaned across the rooftop bar table and dared her. He was forty-eight, retired from the force two years now, and he had the look of a man who had been waiting all night to say something stupid. She should have known better than to listen. She was two shots deep already and the night felt like it owed her something.

The bar was loud and crowded and smelled like smoke and spilled beer, and Louise had spent the first hour complaining about David, and David's lawyer, and David's lawyer's tie, and Timothy had listened the way old friends listen: he nodded and drank and waited for his opening. When it came he took it.

He told her about the gallery down the street. Second Skin, it was called, a converted loft in the arts district with concrete walls and a mezzanine, and an owner named Jan Martins who never looked quite the same twice. Timothy knew him through a friend of a friend, some gallery owner chain of acquaintance Louise had never bothered to follow. The story was that Jan had been running the place for over a decade and nobody could say how old he was or where he came from. Some people said he was disfigured under the makeup. Some people said worse things. Timothy had met him once and sworn the man's face had been different at the end of the evening than at the beginning, and he had been drunk enough at the time to believe it, and sober enough since to still believe it, which was the part that bothered him.

So the dare was simple. Go down there, alone, and make a move on him. Report back. If she chickened out, she bought the next round, and worse, she had to admit it, and Timothy would carry that around for years like a trophy. He knew her too well. He knew she had spent twenty years as a cop being careful, being procedural, being the person who filled out the forms correctly, and that David had divorced her partly because of it, or so the lawyer had hinted in that smug way lawyers hint, and that she wanted, more than anything tonight, to be a person who did something stupid and reckless and just because.

She looked at the shot in her hand. It was tequila and it was already warm from sitting there while she argued. She tipped it back and swallowed it and set the glass down hard enough that Timothy flinched and then grinned.

He asked her if she was sure, and she told him, in the plainest words she could find, that she was divorced now and nobody was going to stop her from walking into a gallery and flirting with a man who might be a monster. Timothy laughed so hard he had to put his beer down. He told her he would wait right here, or maybe wander over in twenty minutes to watch through the window like a coward, and she told him not to bother, she could handle herself, she had handled worse than a gallery owner with a strange reputation. That was true, more or less. She had handled biker funerals and domestic calls at three in the morning and one memorable hostage situation in a check cashing place. A gallery was going to be easy. She told herself that on the stairs down from the rooftop, and again at the street level, and the story held together right up until she pushed open the gallery door.

The gallery was quiet in the way that money and thick walls make a room quiet. The street noise cut off behind her like a door had closed on it, which in a way it had. The main floor was one big open space, raw concrete, exposed ductwork painted black, and abstract paintings hung with a lot of empty wall between them, the kind of spacing that says the owner is confident the work can carry the room. Louise knew nothing about art. David had been the one who wanted to go to museums, and she had followed him around with her hands in her pockets reading the little cards and feeling like she was failing a test nobody had warned her about. Tonight she decided she did not care. Tonight she was not there for the art.

The lights were dimmed to something halfway between closing time and working hours. Most of the floor was dark but there was a pool of light near the back wall, and in it stood a man arranging a sculpture. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was moving the piece a few inches at a time and stepping back to look, the way a person does when the placement matters to them more than it ever would to a visitor. The sculpture itself was abstract, some twisted bronze form that might have been a figure falling or a figure dancing, and Louise honestly could not have said which, and decided not to guess.

She walked toward him across the concrete floor and her heels clicked in a way that announced her from thirty feet out, so there was no sneaking up on anybody, which was fine, because sneaking had never been her style. He turned when she was still a few steps away and looked at her with an expression she could not read. Polite, maybe. Patient. The face itself was hard to hold onto. It was a good face, she thought, strong jaw, dark eyes, a small scar or a crease at the left temple, but every time she looked away and back she had a faint doubt about whether the crease had been on the other side before. She blamed the tequila.

She had rehearsed a line on the walk over. It had seemed smooth in her head. Something about the sculpture, something wry, something that a woman in her forties celebrating her freedom might say to a mysterious gallery owner. What came out instead, with the timing of a drunk person and the confidence of one, was a comment about the piece looking like it was falling, and then, before she could stop herself, an offer to catch it if it did.

There was a silence of about two seconds, which in her professional opinion was the exact length of a silence needed to assess whether someone was drunk or unwell. He did neither of the things she expected, which were laugh politely or call security. Instead he tilted his head and corrected her, quietly, with what was unmistakably amusement in his voice. The piece was not falling, he said. It was arriving. There was a difference, and it mattered to the placement, and he would be happy to explain the difference if she actually wanted to know or if she wanted to keep pretending to know things, which he suspected was what most people in the room did on any given day.

Louise stood there with her mouth slightly open. In twenty years nobody had talked to her like that, at least not anyone she had not arrested. She felt the strange hot feeling of being caught out, and under that, unexpected and unwelcome and completely in keeping with the night, she felt something like relief. He had seen through the line in two seconds flat. There was nothing left to perform.

She told him the truth, more or less, that she knew nothing about art and had come in on a dare from an old friend and had been planning to flirt badly at him, and that the flirting was apparently already over. She did not mention the monster rumors. That part she kept in her pocket.

He studied her for a moment. Whatever he saw seemed to interest him, because the amusement warmed into something else, curiosity maybe, the look of a man deciding whether to open a door he usually kept locked. He said most people who came in alone at that hour wanted one of two things, to buy something expensive or to photograph the strange owner for the internet, and she clearly wanted neither, and that made her the most interesting person to walk in all week. Then he invited her up to the mezzanine, where the real work happened, if she wanted to see something nobody else had seen. He said it plainly, no salesmanship, and that was what made it feel like a dare all over again, a second dare nested inside the first one, and Louise, who had accepted one dare tonight already and was two for two on bad decisions, heard herself say yes.

The stairs to the mezzanine were steel and grated and loud under her heels. The studio up there was a smaller loft within the loft, warm lit, cluttered in a lived-in way the main floor was not. Tools on a bench, sketches pinned to a board, a work table with the bronze pieces of something half assembled. And at the center, on a low plinth under a single hanging lamp, the newest piece. It was a figure, human sized, kneeling, and the surface of it was not bronze at all. It moved. Not visibly, not while she watched, but the texture of it shifted under the light like oil on water, and when she looked again the shading had rearranged itself, subtle, slow, the way a face rearranges itself in bad lighting. She thought of Timothy's story and stopped thinking it was a story.

Jan came up behind her and she heard, or thought she heard, the soft sound of skin moving against itself, like something settling into a new arrangement. When she turned, the crease at his temple was gone. He watched her notice, and he did not explain, and the dim light in the studio slid across his face like it was crossing something that had not fully decided what it was.

She should have said something. That was the rule, twenty years of it, say something or say nothing but do it on purpose, and here she was standing in a studio with a man whose face had lost a wrinkle while her back was turned, and all she could manage was a slow blink and the thought that she was way too sober for this and way too drunk for it at the same time.

He watched her work through it. She could tell he was letting her, giving her the time the way you give a suspect room to hang themselves or come clean, whichever came first. She appreciated it more than she could say, which was the problem, because she had never once in her life been able to leave a thing unsaid.

"I took a dare to come here tonight," she said. "That is the entire truth. Timothy dared me to seduce the gallery owner. That's it. That's the embarrassing thing I've been carrying around since eight o'clock."

She expected a lot of reactions. Anger, maybe, or disgust, or that thin polite smile people put on when they're recalculating how fast they can get you out of their space. What she got instead was a laugh, low and genuine, the kind that came from somewhere under the ribs, and he leaned against the work table and laughed for a good five