The Oil Press Proposal

The absurd part wasn't that I was trapped overnight in a disused oil palm press at the edge of Kanas Lake. The absurd part was who I was trapped with. Keith Rogers, my boss of three years, thirty years old, single, the man who signs my timesheets, was currently sitting on an old wooden crate reading the label off a bottle of machine oil like it might contain instructions for escape.

I'm Nell Hartley. I'm twenty-eight. I got married at twenty-three to a man named Dominic who turned out to be better at leaving than at staying, and the divorce went through last year when I was twenty-seven. Since then my love life has been a desert with occasional cactus. So maybe that explains some of what follows. Maybe it doesn't. I've stopped trying to explain it to myself.

Here's how we got here. There's a catacomb tour about two kilometers from the lake, some old dug-out passages the guidebook called "atmospheric" and I would call "damp." Keith and I were in Xinjiang for a work trip, a supplier audit that finished a day early, and we'd rented a car and gone sightseeing because neither of us wanted to sit in a hotel lobby reading email. Halfway through the tour there was a rumble behind us, and the guide went pale, and a tunnel that had held itself together for maybe two hundred years decided not to anymore. The guide and the other four tourists went back the way they'd come. Keith and I had wandered ahead into a side passage, and when we doubled back, our way was a wall of rubble and our only forward option was a rusted door that opened into this press building.

So. Stranded. The guide had radioed someone, supposedly. Keith's phone had one bar for about four minutes and then nothing. Somebody would come in the morning, probably. It was late afternoon when the tunnel came down, and by evening the light through the cracked windows had gone a weak, watery brown, and the temperature was dropping the way it does out here, fast, like the sun takes it personally.

"I found this in the bottom of my bag," Keith said, holding up a folded square of fabric. "I think it's a fat-quarter. For quilting."

"Why do you have a quilting quarter in your bag?"

"I bought it at a market in Urumqi. It was pretty. I don't quilt. I just liked it."

It was floral chintz, roses on a cream ground, about the size of a large pillowcase. I took it from him and held it up.

"Well," I said. "There's our blanket for the night. Very romantic. Roses."

"It's a fat-quarter, Nell. It will cover one knee."

"One knee each if we share."

He smiled at that, and I looked away, because looking at Keith smiling was a thing I'd been carefully not doing for about a year.

I need to back up here and say something about the paper in my pocket, because it had been in my pocket since the morning, and I'd written it at the hotel at about one in the morning, and I'd put it there on the off chance of an opportunity that no rational person would have predicted. The fact that a tunnel collapsed and handed me the exact opportunity was, I decided, either fate or a very weird coincidence, and either way I was going to feel stupid if I didn't use it.

I pulled the folded paper out of my jacket.

"What's that?" Keith asked.

"It's a proposal. Sort of. It's called the experiment."

He took it. He unfolded it. I watched his face while he read, which was a mistake, because his face went through about four different expressions and one of them made my stomach flip.

The paper said this. One: this is a one-time experiment, tonight only, between two consenting adults who are stuck in a building. Two: the act in question is anal sex, me receiving, because I have wanted to try it for two years and Dominic considered it a personal insult. Three: slow, plenty of lube, and a condom, no exceptions. I have a small bottle of the proper kind, water-based, in my pack because I planned this, don't make it weird. Four: anyone can say stop at any point, any word works, and stopping is final, no negotiating. Five: no talking about feelings afterward. Ever. We go back to being boss and employee and this never comes up again.

"Your handwriting is very neat for someone proposing this," Keith said.

"Thank you. I was calm when I wrote it. Mostly calm."

"You planned this."

"I wrote it last night. I didn't plan the tunnel. I want that understood. The tunnel is not my fault."

"You had lube in your pack."

"I said don't make it weird."

He read the paper again, top to bottom. The light was nearly gone now and he tilted it toward the window to catch the last of it. Outside, the wind was doing something dramatic against the tin roof. Inside, an old oil press sat in the dark, all rusted gears and a great screw mechanism thick with sixty years of dust, and somewhere water dripped with a regular patience, as if the building had all night, which it did.

"Rule five," Keith said finally. "No talking about feelings!"

"That's the important one."

"Why is it important?"

"Because I've been divorced for a year and you're my boss and I'm not in any state to be talking about feelings. Rule five keeps this clean. It's a firewall."

"It's a very HR firewall."

"It's also separate from work. Nothing about tonight touches my job, your job, or my timesheet, and either of us can say no and Monday is exactly the same. Rule zero."

"Rule zero. Agreed."

"I'm an HR specialist. I firewall things professionally."

He folded the paper along its original creases, carefully, and handed it back to me. Then he was quiet for a while, and I used the quiet to panic quietly, which is my specialty.

"Yes," he said. "All of it. The rules too. I'll even sign it if you want."

"I don't need a signature. I need you to mean it."

"I mean it."

"Okay then."

"Okay."

And then neither of us moved for a good thirty seconds, which was possibly the least efficient yes I've ever been part of.

We handled the practical things first, because we're both the kind of people who handle practical things first, and I think that's part of why I trusted him with this. He shook out the chintz and spread it on the widest flat stretch of floor, between the press housing and the wall, where the boards were least rotten, and it covered roughly the area of a bath mat, which confirmed my one-knee theory. He unrolled a thin blanket from his pack, an emergency foil thing, and we put that under the chintz because the floor was cold enough to be a rule violation of its own.