The Morning After the Cache

I wake up on a cot in the county emergency medical supply cache and the first thing I see is crates. Rows of them. Sterile white plastic, stacked to the ceiling. Second thing I see is my dress, crumpled on the floor like it lost a fight, and me in the old work shirt of his I pulled on in the night.

Third thing is my husband, still asleep, wearing my pink lace blouse.

Hi. Shirley here. Twenty-two, electrician, married three months. This is a story about the weirdest morning of my life, and I'm going to tell it in order even though my brain is still filing it in random chunks.

So. Burketown, Queensland. Don't ask why we're here, it's a long story involving a contract job and a ferry that doesn't run on Sundays. There's a cyclone shelter out past the salt flats, and tucked inside it, a supply cache. Medical crates, water drums, a backup generator. And a little room off the side where the amateur radio club keeps their gear. Their antenna hangs out back on a fishing pole. The draft through the shelter hums all night, low, like the building is humming to itself.

That hum is what I wake up to.

Will is asleep on the second cot, face turned toward me. The blouse is mine. Pink lace, bought it in Cairns last year. It fits him weird, too tight across the chest, and one of the buttons is straining. His legs are bare. His underwear is not.

I lie there for a minute, just looking. My head hurts. Not from drinking, we only had two beers. From thinking too hard, I reckon.

Because consider this. I caught him. Hour before we fell asleep, I caught him going through my bag, and my skirt was half up his legs, and he froze like a possum in headlights. And we'd already... well. I'll get to that.

Let me back up. Last night, the radio hang.

The amateur club here is four old blokes and a lot of enthusiasm. They run a night station every few months, contacts with other shelters, weather checks, that kind of thing. They'd invited anyone to come down, and Will, who will talk to anyone about anything, signed us up. Sheets everywhere, someone had hung them from the ceiling to deaden the echo. Flashlight on a tripod because the mains were off. It looked like a very boring séance.

I was enjoying it. Genuinely. There's something about radio people, they're so pleased with themselves when the signal comes in. I sat on a crate and watched Will lean over the set, and I thought, that's my idiot. Married him at twenty-one after a year of dating, and I'd do it again.

Then it got late. The old blokes packed up. Will said he wanted to tinker with the set a bit longer, and I said I'd nap on the cot, and that's how we ended up staying the night in a cyclone shelter, which was not the plan but also not not the plan.

Here's where I have to be plain with you, because this is that kind of site.

We'd been fooling around before the old blokes even left. Will had his hands under my dress behind a stack of water drums, and I'd told him yes, more than once, and he'd asked each time, which is a habit of his I like a lot. So when everyone cleared out and he locked the cache door and looked at me with that face, I said, "Well, finally."

We were married. Condoms were a thing we'd left behind months ago, after a very unromantic clinic visit and a lot of paperwork. So it was just us, on a cot that was not built for it, in a room that smelled like dust and radio heat. He asked before everything. Asked when he pushed my dress up, asked when I pushed him down, asked, breathless, "Can I?" right at the end, and I said, "Yes, obviously, please!"

It was good. It was really good. I said some things I won't repeat and he laughed into my neck and afterwards we were both grinning like lunatics in the dark.

Then I fell asleep for maybe an hour. And when I woke up, my bag was open.

The flashlight was still on the tripod, angled away, so the light was soft. Will was standing by my bag with my grey skirt pulled up over his own shorts, and he was looking down at himself, and his expression was not what you'd think. Not caught-out. Hungry, almost. Like he was seeing something.

I should have said something right then. I didn't. I just watched, which I know sounds strange, but I couldn't help it. He smoothed the skirt over his hips. He did a little turn. He looked, honestly, good, and that confused me more than anything else.

Then he saw me.

"Oh my god," he said. "Shirley."

"Hi," I said.

"I wasn't." He stopped. His ears went red. "Okay. I was. I'm sorry."

"Are you?" I asked, and I meant it as a real question.

He stood there in my skirt, in a flashlight-lit medical cache in far north Queensland, and said, "No. Not really!"

And then we talked. And then we fell asleep. And now it's morning and he's wearing my blouse and I'm on a cot deciding what kind of wife I want to be about all this.

He stirs. His eyes open, find mine, and go wide.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey!" He sits up slowly, arms crossed over the lace, which is silly because I've seen it all already. "Shirley. About last night. I'm sorry."

"For which part?" I sit up too. "The part where you wore my skirt, or the part where you did it while I was in the room?"

"Both. Either." He rubs his face. "I've been wanting to tell you for ages. Ages. And every time I got close, I chickened out, so apparently my brain decided to just do it while you were asleep, which is the worst possible way."

"It's a bad way," I agree.

He laughs, short and surprised. Then he goes serious. "I like it. Wearing your clothes. I like it a lot. It's not a bit, it's not a kink I can explain, it's just..." He gestures at himself, at the blouse.