The Midnight Pharmacy Run

The sign above the porch still said KÖT instead of KÖTT, missing one T, because nobody had ever fixed the missing T, and Jada had been staring at it for two days now. Her brother Ove had bought the thing secondhand from a butcher who went out of business, and he swore he would solder a new letter on "next spring." That was three years ago. So the cabin announced itself to the whole forest with a word that was almost meat and not quite, which Jada found funny in a way she couldn't explain to anyone.

She was fifty-two, and she was alone at her brother's hunting cabin for one week, and she was thinking about Khalid again. Ten years since he'd said it, and she could still hear it. They had been in his apartment in Malmö, she was forty-two, wine on the table, and she'd made the mistake of telling him her secret. That she'd always wanted to be watched. That the idea of a stranger seeing her, really seeing her, did something to her that ordinary sex never touched.

And Khalid had laughed. Not a mean laugh, which would have been easier to hate. A bored laugh.

"You?" he said. "Jada, you cross the street at the crosswalk even when there's no cars. You're too scared to even flash a stranger. Stop dreaming."

She'd stayed with him another eight months after that, which was its own embarrassment. But the sentence stuck. Too scared to even flash a stranger. Ten years of carrying that around like a stone in her coat pocket.

So do you know what she did on the third night, standing under the broken sign with a beer in her hand? She decided to prove a dead relationship wrong. It wasn't mature. She knew that. Khalid wasn't in her life anymore, wouldn't ever know, and had probably forgotten the conversation entirely. But the stone was still in her pocket and she was tired of it.

And there was, as it happened, a young man camped in the pine stand about two hundred meters down the track. Kenji. Thirty-one, a wildland firefighter over from the states on some exchange program, invited to the area by a coworker who'd bailed on the trip at the last minute. He'd wandered past the cabin that morning looking for water, and Jada had filled his bottles and liked his smile and thought, well. Hello.

He was handsome in a quiet way. Black hair going gray early at the temples, forearms that said he carried heavy things for a living, a way of listening that made you want to keep talking. He'd mentioned he was low on food and that the village shop was a hike. And then Jada had remembered: the pharmacy. Her sleeping pills. The ones she absolutely did not need, because she slept fine, but the refill window closed at one and the pharmacy was the only thing in that village that stayed open late.

An errand. A legitimate errand. With a legitimate window of one o'clock.

"That place closes at one," she'd told him that afternoon, casual as anything. "You need supplies, you should come along. I have to pick something up anyway."

"Yeah? That'd be great," Kenji said, and wiped his forehead with his wrist because the day had turned warm. "I've been eating crackers for two days."

"Crackers! What kind of firefighter lets himself run out of food?"

"The kind whose friend was supposed to do the shopping," he said, and grinned, and Jada felt something in her chest that she hadn't felt in years. Not love. Nothing like love. More like standing on a diving board.

* * *

At eleven twenty that night she stood in front of the cabin mirror and took her clothes off entirely, which was of course the whole point of the evening, and dressed again in a way that could pass as normal at a distance and not at all up close. Jeans. Boots, because the path was rooty and she was fifty-two and her ankles were particular. And a canvas jacket, zipped halfway, with absolutely nothing underneath it. Her breasts sat there behind the canvas like a secret with a terrible poker face.

She looked at herself in the mirror and said out loud, to the empty cabin, "You are out of your mind."

Then she grabbed her purse, checked that the sleeping pill prescription slip was in it, and went out to meet Kenji at the track.

They walked to the village together, a forty minute hike, and it was pleasant in a way that made her nervous. He talked about fires he'd fought, the smell of smoke that never quite washes out of gear, the strange peace of a burn line at dawn. She talked about software, about her week off, about Ove's sign and the missing T, and Kenji laughed at that harder than it deserved, which she liked very much.

"Do you always hike at midnight?" he asked as the village lights came up.

"Only for pills," she said. "And you?"

"Only for food." He held up the empty plastic bag as evidence.

A few steps short of the door, under the green cross, she stopped. "Kenji. I'm going to ask you something strange, and no is a complete answer."

"Okay," he said.

"In there, down the snack aisle, where the counter can't see us, I'd like to let my jacket fall open for four seconds. There's nothing under it. It would be only for you, and only if you want to see. If you say no, we buy our things and walk home and I never mention it again. And if you say yes, you can still say stop, even halfway through."

He stared at her. Then he laughed, once, not unkindly, the laugh of a man checking he has heard right. "Yes," he said. "I want to see. And thank you for asking."

The pharmacy was a narrow white building with a green cross glowing in the window and one bored woman behind the counter reading a magazine. Kenji went down the snack aisle like a man in a museum. Jada paid for her prescription and, with a perfectly straight face, a small box she slid into her jacket pocket. She tucked the slip in her purse and then stood near the door doing the calculation she'd been doing all day. Now or never. Now or carry the stone another ten years.

She swung her purse off her shoulder, as if to put her wallet away, and let it slip, the way they had agreed without saying so. It hit the floor and everything in it scattered. Lipstick, coins, the pill box, a hair tie, all of it rolling under the snack shelf where Kenji was crouched.

"Oh no," she said, and crouched too, and let her jacket fall open, just as promised.

That was it. That constituted the entire move. The canvas swung aside and there she was from collar to belt, fifty-two years old and bare to the fluorescent lights, her breasts out, her nipples stiff from the walk's chill, her stomach and the curl of dark hair between her legs all visible to the one man kneeling in front of her, with the snack shelf hiding her from the counter. She gathered coins. She did not look up. She gave him four full seconds.

Then she closed the jacket, stood, and looked at Kenji's face.

He was on his knees by the shelf, a fallen chocolate bar in his hand, and his mouth was open. His eyes came up from her body to her face as a man surfaces from water, and he went red to the ears.

"I," he said.

"Oops," Jada said. "Clumsy me."

"Uh huh," he said. He put the chocolate in his bag without looking at it. He paid for it. The pharmacy woman did not look up from her magazine once, which Jada would think about later and laugh about.

Outside, the night was cool and smelled of pine, and they stood on the gravel looking at each other.

"So," Jada said. Her heart was loud but her voice was steady, which surprised her. "You saw that."

"I saw that," Kenji said. "Yes. Definitely saw that!"

"Was it all right? Tell me the truth, because if it wasn't, I'll die of embarrassment out here in the woods and no one will find me till spring."

"It was," and he laughed, short and disbelieving. "It was the best thing I've ever seen in a pharmacy, and I've seen some stuff. Are you okay? I mean. Why?"

"Long story," she said. "Short version: I've wanted to do that for