The Second Shift

Destiny parked her old Honda behind the salvage yard at six in the evening and sat there for a minute with her hands on the wheel. The gravel lot was empty except for Zach's truck, which meant he was still inside finishing up paperwork before his overnight shift at the shop next door. She was twenty-four years old, married for two years, and about to do something she had been thinking about since she was twenty-one.

She got out and walked to the office door, the little metal shed that had been added onto the side of the main building sometime before either of them worked there. Year calendars hung on the walls inside, a whole row of them, going back to 2021 because nobody had ever taken them down. There was a dented desk and a space heater that rattled and a coffee mug with a cartoon crane on it. Zach ran the place and Destiny ran the office, which mostly meant she answered phones and told scrap dealers the copper prices were not going up.

She unlocked the door and stepped inside. The heater was already ticking away because Zach had left it on for her. That was the kind of thing he did. She loved him for it and it made what she was about to do easier and harder at the same time.

Her phone was in her back pocket. She pulled it out and scrolled to the contact she had never deleted, even though she probably should have three years ago. Toby. Harbor pilot. The guy she had met at a party down by the docks when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, back when she was still figuring out who she was. They had talked for four hours on a folding chair by the water and she had wanted to kiss him so bad her chest hurt, and she had not done it, and then a year later she married Zach.

She typed the text before she could talk herself out of it.

I'm house-sitting this weekend. Come if you still want to.

She stared at it. Her thumb hovered over send for a good ten seconds. Then she sent it and put the phone face down on the dented desk like it had burned her.

The back door banged open and Zach came in, pulling off his work gloves. He was twenty-five, big through the shoulders from hauling engine blocks, and he looked at her face and then at the phone on the desk and grinned.

"You sent it," he said.

"I sent it," she said. "God. Okay. I sent it!"

"Good." He came around the desk and kissed her, slow, the way he did when he was not in a hurry, even though he was always in a hurry. His hands were cold from the shop and she leaned into them when he cupped her face. When he pulled back he kept his forehead against hers.

"Listen," he said, quiet, even though there was nobody within a hundred yards to hear. "If he shows up, don't hold back for me. I mean it. I want you to actually do this, not sit there feeling guilty the whole time."

"How am I not supposed to feel guilty?" She laughed, but it came out shaky. "You're my husband. You're literally standing here."

"And tonight I'm literally going to be at the shop until two in the morning, and you're going to be at Henrietta's house with a bottle of wine and a guest room and no curfew." He kissed her again, quick this time. "I've known about Toby for two years, babe. You talk in your sleep. Well, not talk, but you sigh in a certain way."

"Oh my god!"

"It's a very specific sigh." He was smiling. "I'm not mad. I'm the opposite of mad. I just want you to have the thing you skipped. That's all."

She looked at the calendars on the wall, the old ones with boats and cranes and a photo of somebody's dog in October. "What if he doesn't come?"

"Then you drink wine and watch the bad TV at Henrietta's house and we never speak of it." Zach grabbed his jacket off the hook. "And what if he does come?"

"Then I guess we'll see."

"That's the spirit." He shrugged into the jacket and headed for the door, then turned back. "Text me when he gets there. Just so I know you're safe. That's the only rule. Safety."

"You're weird," she said.

"Yep." He blew her a kiss from the doorway. "Love you. Go get your weekend."

The door clanged shut behind him and Destiny stood alone in the little office with the rattling heater and her heart going hard. She picked up her phone. No reply yet. It had been maybe four minutes. Toby was probably out on the water, or sleeping off an early tide run, or married by now, or had a girlfriend, or had forgotten her entirely. She made herself a cup of coffee from the stale bag in the cabinet and sat on the edge of the desk and tried to think about anything else.

The phone buzzed at six twenty-three.

She grabbed it so fast she almost dropped it.

Still want to. Badly. Where and when?

Her breath went out of her all at once. She had to put the coffee down because her hand was not steady enough to hold it and drink at the same time.

Henrietta's place, on Harbor Road, the blue one with the broken mailbox. Tonight through Sunday. I'll be there after eight.

The reply came fast. I'll be there at 8:30. I haven't stopped thinking about you since that party, just so you know.

Destiny read it four times. Then she typed back, before her nerve could fail her, Neither have I. See you tonight.

She set the phone down and covered her face with both hands and laughed into her palms, a weird strangled laugh, the kind you do when you have been holding something for three years and suddenly your hands are empty.

She drove to Henrietta's place, the little blue house with the sagging broken mailbox that Henrietta had promised to fix for a year. Henrietta was flying out to visit her sister in Phoenix and had left a key under the fake rock and a note that said "Wine is in the fridge, don't burn anything, the TV remote is haunted." Destiny let herself in and stood in the quiet living room feeling like a burglar in a house she had permission to be in.

She texted Zach from the kitchen.

He said yes. He's coming at 8:30.

Zach replied in under a minute. Knew he would. Have fun. That's the safety text, so nothing else until tomorrow, I don't want to know the schedule. Love you.

She smiled at that. He really was the best. She put his contact away and looked around the kitchen and realized she had three hours to kill and no idea how to kill them.

She took a shower first, a long one, using Henrietta's fancy shampoo that smelled like somebody had put a whole orchard in a bottle. She shaved everything and dried her hair and put on the nice underwear she had bought two weeks ago and hidden in her gym bag like contraband, and laughed at herself, because that was exactly what she was doing.

She ordered a pizza at seven because she figured she would be too nervous to eat later, and she was right. She ate two slices standing at the counter and threw the rest in the fridge and by eight she was sitting on the couch with the TV on and the sound off, watching the driveway through the window.

At 8:26 headlights swept across the curtains.

Her whole body went still. A car door closed. Boots on the gravel walkway. Then a knock, two knocks, polite as anything, like he was delivering a package.

Destiny stood up, checked herself in the hallway mirror one last time, and went to the door.

She opened it and there he was. Toby, twenty-five years old, taller than she remembered, a little broader in the shoulders than the guy on the folding chair three years ago, harbor wind still somehow in his hair even though he must have driven here. He had flowers in one hand, a small bunch of grocery store daisies, and he looked as nervous as she felt.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said.

They stood there a second, the porch light buzzing above them, three years of not kissing each other sitting on the doorstep between them.

"You look really good," he said. "You always did, but. Wow!"

"You brought flowers."

"They were the only thing open on the way here. The guy at the gas station said they were fresh." He held them out. "They're probably not fresh."

She took them and laughed and that broke whatever frozen thing had been holding them both, and he stepped forward onto the mat, and she stepped back to let him in, and the door closed behind them.

She put the daisies in a glass of water and stood them on the counter and then neither of them knew what to do with their hands. Toby looked around the living room like it could tell him something useful.

"This is a weird house," he said. "The TV remote is haunted?"

"Henrietta wrote that. I have not tested it yet."

He laughed and sat down on the couch and then stood right back up, like sitting was too much of a commitment. Destiny sat in the armchair across from him and crossed her legs and uncrossed them. The space between the couch and the chair was about four feet and it felt like an ocean.

"So," he said. "Three years."

"You answered in four minutes," she said.

"I was in the shower. I answered wet."

She laughed and he smiled and the ocean got a little smaller. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Up close he smelled like soap and cold air, and she thought, three years, I waited three years and he answers texts wet.

"I want to tell you something before anything else happens," he said. "That party, down by the docks. We talked for four hours. I counted. And then you left with your friends and I did not ask for your number because I chickened out."

"You chickened out?"

"Completely. Sat on a folding chair and watched you walk away and told myself I would see you around the harbor someday. Then a guy at the marina told me you got married. I was at your wedding, you know. Well, not at it. I drove past the church."

Destiny stared at him. "You drove past my wedding?"

"Slowed down. Kept going. It felt very dramatic at the time."

She was laughing now, the bad kind of laughing, the kind that comes out when something has been sitting on your chest too long. "Toby. Toby. I have to show you something. Wait here."

She went out to the old Honda parked in the driveway and popped the trunk and dug under the blanket she kept back there for emergencies. When she came back inside she was holding a bowling ball, scuffed and green, and she set it on the coffee table between them with both hands.

Toby leaned forward. There was a name engraved on it. His name.

"Is that," he said.

"You bowled a strike at the alley down the road that night. The night of the party. You left before anyone could give it back to you, so I took it home. And then I never gave it back. It has lived in my trunk for three years. I moved it between two cars."

He picked it up like it was made of glass. "You kept my bowling ball in your trunk for three years."

"Two cars. It survived a tire change. The guy at the shop asked me about it and I said it was a friend's and he gave me a look."

"That is the most chicken move I have ever heard of."

"You drove past my wedding."

"Okay. Fair. We are both cowards." He set the ball down carefully. "Three years of trunk bowling ball versus one slow drive past a church. We deserve each other."

The word each other sat in the room. Destiny looked at it, meaning him, and he looked back at her, and the ocean was gone now. It was maybe two feet of carpet.

"Toby," she said. "My husband knows I invited you. He has known about you for two years. He told me to go for it. I want to be very sure you know what you walked into."

"I know what I walked into." His voice had gone quiet. "Do you want this? Because if you have changed your mind, I will drive home and that is fine."

"I have not changed my mind. I have not changed my mind in three years."

"Then say it out loud. I want to hear it."

"This time I am not chickening out," she said. "Kiss me."

He came around the coffee table and she stood up to meet him and the first kiss was a mess. Their noses bumped. He was a half inch too far to the left. She made a sound into his mouth that she would be embarrassed about later, and his hand found the back of her head and tilted her the right way and then the second kiss was not a mess at all. It was slow and deep and her knees did something unreliable.

When they broke apart they were both breathing hard. "Okay," he said. "Okay, wow."

"Yeah."

"Can I keep doing that?"

"Please."

He kissed her again and walked her backward until her legs hit the arm of the couch, and then he seemed to remember himself and stopped and looked at her. "Wait. I do not want to assume. Tell me how far tonight. Say it, I mean it."