The Off-Season Bet

The offseason at the Shoreline Motel is slow enough that I talk to the coffee maker. That's not a joke. On a Tuesday in mid-November I had exactly one reservation, a couple coming in from the valley, and I'd spent the morning arguing with the coffee maker about whether it wanted to brew or just sit there and drip sadly.

Yuki, thirty-four, manager, recently dumped. That's the resume. Ray took the job in Denver two months ago and I stayed here with the motel and the salt air and a coffee maker with opinions. Fine. Moving on.

The couple showed up around four. The woman was the one doing the talking, which I figured out fast. Her name was Lyn, twenty-eight, and her boyfriend was Pete, thirty-one, and he carried the bags like someone who had learned that carrying bags was his job in this relationship and he was okay with it. She had a camera with a big lens slung over her shoulder and she was photographing the motel sign before she even checked in.

"This sign is incredible," she said. "Look at it. The pelican is falling apart. One wing is missing."

"That's the charm," I said. "Offseason rate includes the charm."

She laughed like I'd said something funnier than that, and I liked her immediately, which I noted and then put away because guests are guests. I got them signed in, took the card, gave them room six, told them about the heater that rattles and the good taco truck two towns over that parks by the church on Fridays.

"Heaters that rattle," Pete said. "Luxury."

"You're paying offseason rates," I said. "You get offseason rattles."

They went off to their room and I went back to my standoff with the coffee maker, and I figured that was the end of it. Quiet couple, quiet week.

Around seven I was doing the lobby crossword when they came back down. They'd walked the beach, they said, and the beach in November is a whole lot of nothing, so then they'd walked to the one bar that stays open, and now they were back, and Lyn had a bottle of wine from the bar in her hand like a trophy.

"The bar closes at eight," she said. "In November. Can you believe that. So we bought this and we're going to drink it and the guy said we could drink it here if there's a couch."

"There's a couch," I said. There is. It's ugly and it's been there since before I worked here.

So they sat on the ugly couch and I kept doing my crossword, and the honest thing is I was happy for the company. Two months of Ray not being in my bed and I'd gotten into a rhythm of talking to appliances. They offered me a glass around the second round. I said no. They offered again. I said fine, one glass, and I got a plastic cup from behind the desk because we're a classy operation.

Lyn asked about the town, and I told her about the town, which takes four minutes, and then she asked about me, and I told her about me, which takes about ninety seconds, and somewhere in there she caught the tone in my voice when I mentioned living alone above the lobby.

"Boyfriend?" she asked.

"Ex-boyfriend. Two months ago. He's in Denver now."

"Denver," Pete said, and shook his head like Denver was a personal insult.

"Well, his loss," Lyn said, and topped my cup up an inch without asking, which I let happen, and that's where the evening turned.

Because after the second round she got this look. I've worked in bars before this job. I know the look. It's the look of somebody with an idea they find hilarious and they haven't said yet.

"Okay," she said. "I have a game."

"I don't like games," I said.

"You haven't heard it."

So I heard it. And this is the part where I want to be fair to myself and say that the one glass of wine was doing a little of the lifting here, but not much of it. Some of it was pride, and some of it was two months of being careful and sad and reasonable, and Lyn was looking at me like I was a person who used to be fun and could be again.

The game was this. She bet that I couldn't stay silent through a whole night of sex. Not quiet. Silent. Not one sound. Nothing rode on it but bragging rights, and the loser had to admit it out loud. Then she added, before I could say anything, that dinner at the good place up the coast was her treat anyway, and Pete would wash my car anyway, because she'd seen the sand on it in the lot and it offended her, and that none of that had anything to do with the game or with whether I said yes or no. Pete agreed to the car on the spot, which says a lot about Pete. I said I was the manager and they were guests, and that this was separate from the room, the rate and any review they'd ever write. "Obviously," Lyn said. "You could throw us out tomorrow and we'd say thank you."

"That's a weird bet," I said.

"It's a fun bet," Lyn said.

"It's the weirdest bet I've ever heard."

"You don't have to," Pete said. He said it plainly, no pressure in it, just an exit offered. "Seriously. We're just messing around."

And that's probably why I said yes. He wasn't pushing. She was pushing, but he was leaving the door open, and I've been with enough pushy people to know the difference between a couple where both of them want it and a couple where one of them drags the other one around. Lyn was grinning and Pete was calm, and when I asked him straight out, are you actually into this, he said yes, actually into it, and when I asked Lyn the same she said god yes, and that was good enough for me.

"Fine," I said. "The game is just a game, and I'll take the dinner and the car wash either way, separate. It's got sand on it from July."

"It's November," Pete said.

"The sand is from July," I said.

We shook on it. Lyn made me shake on it twice because she said once wasn't official, which is not a real rule, but fine.

Then I closed up the desk, went upstairs, and panicked for about forty minutes. I stood in my little kitchen eating crackers over the sink and thinking, you can still go down there and say you changed your mind, nobody would think anything of it. And that was true. That was fully on the table. But I kept thinking mostly about how long it's been since anybody touched me, and I looked at the clock, and it was eleven, and then it was midnight, and I put on a clean shirt and went downstairs.

Room six. I knocked. Pete opened it and he was in sweatpants and a t-shirt and he had the manner of a guy hosting a card game, very relaxed, very normal, and somehow that helped more than anything.

"Hey," he said. "Want water? There's water. You had one glass hours ago, but I'm asking anyway, are you sober enough to say yes to this and mean it?"

"I am," I said. "Stone sober. I've mostly had crackers."

"There's water," Lyn called from the bed. She was sitting up against the headboard in a t-shirt, legs crossed, like she was about to watch television. "Yuki. Get in here. I've been brainstorming rules."

I got in there. I took the water. I sat on the edge of the bed because there was nowhere else, and Lyn laid out the rules like she was reading a lease.

"Rule one, you can't make a sound. Nothing. Not a moan, not a squeak, not heavy breathing that we can hear. Rule two, you can