The Module in the Field

I got to the field a little after four, which was late by Nathalie's standards. She was already up on the catwalk of the module with a roll of survey tape in her hand, checking the tarp seals the way she always did, slow and methodical, like the cotton was money in a bank and the tarps were the vault door. The sun was going orange behind the ridge and the whole field smelled like dry stalks and dust. I'm Randy, twenty-eight years old, and I work lead sheets at the mill, which means I spend my days flat on my back under gutters. Nathalie is twenty-seven and she runs the seasonal storage here, has for about four years now since she left the fire station archive job.

We met four years back at Dev's book launch, the one at that rented hall above the bakery in town. She'd been leaning on the snack table telling somebody the fire station kept records older than the town charter, and I'd stood there holding a paper cup of warm soda like an idiot, too nervous to say anything. Nothing ever happened between us in four years. Nothing at all. I just kept showing up whenever she asked, which was often enough to keep a man hoping and never enough to settle anything.

"Grab the north corner," she called down. "It's riding high."

I grabbed it. The tarp was stiff with cold and heavy with dew at the fold, and I hauled it down over the bale edge while she worked the grommet latch from her side. We did this maybe six times a season, and I could do it with my eyes shut by now.

"The engine over there," she said, nodding past my shoulder. "You know its story?"

I looked. The old horse-drawn fire engine sits rusted at the field's edge, half in the weeds, the kind of thing you stop seeing after a while. Except its brass hydrant nozzle, which somebody had bolted to the base of the module, still gleamed like it got polished weekly. It caught the last of the light and threw it back yellow.

"Figure it came with the property," I said.

"It came from the old station house down the valley. Retired in the fifties when they got the first motor pumper. My archive had the purchase ledger for it, whole page, ink gone brown. They bought it secondhand from a outfit in Punjab." She dropped down off the catwalk ladder and landed beside me, dusting her palms on her jeans. "When the archive got boxed up during the transition I asked to keep the nozzle. They said take the whole engine or nothing, so I took the whole engine."

"You hauled a fire engine here."

"I hauled a fire engine here. Took a flatbed and two guys and a lot of swearing." She grinned at me. She had sawdust on her sleeve and a smear of tarp grease across one cheekbone and I felt that familiar stupid squeeze behind my ribs, the one I'd been carrying around for four years like a coin in a pocket I kept forgetting to empty. "Now it anchors the module tarps in high wind. Best use a retired engine ever got."

We worked the south seals in silence for a while. The module is a big white block wrapped in tarps, taller than the truck we'd come in, and when the wind moved across the field the whole cover breathed, in and out, like something sleeping. I liked this work. I liked it too much, honestly, because it was an hour of standing next to her with a legitimate reason to be there.

That's when the bus came.

The road runs along the far side of the field, down in a shallow cut, and a city bus came around the bend too hot and stood on its brakes. That long tearing screech, then the hard chunk of the stop. We both froze. My whole body went rigid and I heard her breath catch beside me, and for maybe three seconds neither of us moved, hands flat on the tarp, hearts somewhere up around our ears.

Then the bus pulled off, normal as anything, and we looked at each other and cracked up. Not little laughs either. The shaky kind you get after a scare, where you keep hiccupping it back down and it keeps coming up. She had to sit down on the wheel chock.

"God," she said, wiping her eyes. "Four years I've worked this field and that still gets me every time."

"I nearly went through the tarp."

"You did not." She stood up, still smiling, and then her hand came up and touched my arm. Just rested there, light, on the forearm where my sleeve was pushed back. She'd touched me before, plenty, the ordinary shoulder-punch kind of touching friends do. This was not that. This stayed.

"Randy," she said. "Can I say something plain?"

"Sure."

"I've known for a long time that you like me. Since maybe the second year. You never pushed, you never made it weird, you just kept showing up and being decent, and I want you to know I noticed. All of it."

The field got very quiet. Some bird started up in the trees by the road and quit again.

"Okay," I said, because my mouth couldn't manage anything longer.

"And I never did anything about it because I wasn't sure what I wanted. I think I know now. Or I know what I want to try, anyway." Her thumb moved once across my arm and stopped. "I've been reading up on power exchange. Giving someone the run of a night, having them take it, in a controlled way, with someone I trust completely. I don't trust a lot of people completely. Short list. You're on it."

I stood there with tarp grease on my hands and my pulse doing something embarrassing and said, "You want that with me."

"With you. Tonight, if you're willing. Here, where nobody comes after dark. One night, clear rules, and tomorrow we're still us. That part matters to me more than anything else in it."

To be honest about what went through my head, which was mostly a blank white noise with one word repeating under it, yes, yes, yes. Four years of hoping and she's asking me, standing next to a cotton module with a fire engine at its foot.

"I'm willing," I said. "You know I am."

"Then hear the rules first, all of them, before anything." She held up fingers as she counted. "Safeword is cottonwood. You say it, everything stops, no questions, no hard feelings, and it stays stopped for the night. Two, no restraints. Nothing locked, nothing buckled shut.