The Sixth Toe

The banquet hall was already loud when Bernice got there, thirty members of the Antique Clock Club all shouting over each other about pendulums and chimes and whether this year's daylight savings switch would truly be the last one anybody ever had to fuss with. She stood in the doorway for a minute with her lanyard still clipped on, feeling like an auditor who'd wandered into a carnival, and her eyes went straight past all of them to the small kitchen door hanging open at the far end of the room.

Through that door she could see him, Zac Archer, thirty years old, the ghee-clarifying technician nobody ever talked to, bent over the giant copper vat with a long wooden spoon and an expression of total concentration. He was stirring something golden and slow, and the steam rising off it caught the light in a way that made her stomach do a small, embarrassing flip. She'd worked in the same building as him for eight months and they'd exchanged maybe eleven words total, all of them about the microwave.

The flyer was still pinned to the corkboard by the door, the one the club had put up three weeks ago, all swirly lettering about celebrating the final daylight savings adjustment of the era, one last hour to lose or gain depending on your philosophy. Bernice had read it four times now and she still didn't fully get what that meant, but she liked the sound of it, one extra hour tucked into the night like a pocket with money in it. She looked through the doorway again and Zac set the spoon down, wiped his hands on his apron, and adjusted a brass valve on the side of the vat with two careful fingers.

She felt a sharp, hungry curiosity, the kind she hadn't felt since her thing with that caterer three years ago, when she was twenty six and stupid in the best way. That had ended fine, no drama, just two busy people drifting apart, but she remembered how it felt to be someone else for a while, someone with no paperwork and no follow up emails. She wanted that again. And there was a plan, a silly plan they'd agreed to over instant coffee that morning, barely knowing each other, both of them a little red in the face about it, and her heart picked up every time she thought about going through with it.

She pushed off the doorframe and crossed the hall, past a man arguing that a carriage clock from 1908 kept better time than any phone, and slipped through the kitchen door.

* * *

The kitchen was warm and it smelled incredible, deep and nutty, the whole room thick with clarified butter. Copper pans hung from hooks, the stone countertops were scrubbed pale, and shelves on three walls held rows of jars all glowing that same honey color. Zac looked up when she came in and straightened like he'd been caught doing something.

"Oh," he said. "You made it."

"I made it," she said, and then, because they'd agreed to be strangers tonight, she stopped herself from saying anything friendly and just looked at him.

He was wearing the apron and a big linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his forearms were flecked with dried butter, and honestly it was kind of working for her. He cleared his throat and dropped into a lower voice than she'd ever heard him use.

"We're closed," he said. "Kitchen's shut to visitors."

"Is it," she said, shutting the door behind her. "That's a shame. I heard the best ghee in three provinces was made here, and I came a long way."

"Long way for butter?"

"For the right butter, sure."

He almost broke, a grin twitching at the corner of his mouth, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to hold her own face still. The rule was no laughing until the clocks turned, and then whatever happened happened, and they'd both shaken on it over the coffee machine like absolute idiots while the night cleaner watched them with pity.

She wandered deeper into the kitchen to buy her face some time, and that was when she saw the shoe tree. It hung on a hook near the back door, a single carved wooden form shaped like a foot, polished dark with age, and it had six toes. Clearly, deliberately, six toes, each one rounded and smooth like a fat little loaf.

"Okay, what is that," she said, pointing.

"Ah." Zac came over and stood beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth off his arm. "It came with the kitchen. Previous owner left it. I asked around and nobody knows anything, except the clock club people keep asking to see it, which is weird, because it's a shoe tree."

"It's a foot with six toes, Zac."

"Strangers, remember," he said. "I'm the gruff artisan to you."

"Fine. What is that, artisan."

"Wood," he said gravely. "Very old wood."

She reached out and touched it before he could stop her, ran her fingers along the row of toes, and the strangest thing happened. Warmth spread up from her fingertips, a slow pleasant heat like she'd dipped her hand in the vat steam, and it crawled up her wrist and into her forearm and sat there, odd and unwelcome. She pulled her hand back and stared at her fingers.

"Did you feel that?" she asked.

"What kind of feel?"

"Warm. Like it was, I don't know, awake or something."

Zac touched it with the back of his knuckle and shook his head. "Feels like wood to me. Warm kitchen, warm wood, so maybe it holds heat."

"Maybe," Bernice said, but she didn't fully believe it, because the warmth was still lingering in her arm, and she shook it out and stepped away from the thing on purpose. She looked at Zac and he was looking back, and what she felt then had nothing to do with wood. It had been there since the doorway, hers alone, and the stranger game suddenly felt thin, like something they could set down if they both wanted to.

"The clocks turn at three," he said quietly. "That was the deal."

"I know what the deal was."

"I'm just saying, in case you changed your mind."

"I haven't changed my mind. You?"

"No. And if either of us does, we say so, and it stops, and we just get coffee. Deal?"

"Deal."

* * *

They didn't wait for three in the end, or maybe they did, maybe the extra hour was already leaking into the room without anyone telling them. The vat's low flame threw a soft orange light across the stone, and the ghee smell had thickened until it felt like something you could lean on, and Bernice found herself standing very close to a man she barely knew with her fingers already on the top button of her blouse.

"Slow," she said. "We're doing this slow."

"Strangers are slow," Zac agreed, and his voice had gone rough and unfamiliar, the gruff artisan fully arrived. "First time in this kitchen, mysterious lady. You'll want to take your time."

"God, you're committed."

"Tell me to stop and I stop!"

"I know. That's why I'm here, you muppet."

She unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time while he watched, and she watched him back, his hands hanging loose at his sides, not reaching, just watching, which was somehow better than touching. The blouse came off her shoulders and dropped onto a stool, and then his shirt went over his head, hair mussed, butter-flecked forearms bare, and she got her first proper look at him and thought, well, eight months of silence had been a waste.

Her trousers next, pushed down over her hips with a shimmy that made him exhale through his nose, and his belt followed, the buckle clinking against the quiet. She stood in her underwear in a ghee kitchen at half past two in the morning and felt like the most interesting person in the world, anonymous and brand new, no lanyard, no files, no follow ups, just a mysterious lady who came a long way for butter.

He crossed the small distance between them and stopped an inch away, and asked, plain and simple, "Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," she said. "Please, yes!"

And then Zac kissed her with a stranger's intensity, nothing polite in it at all, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head and the other settling warm on her waist, his mouth hungry and sure like he'd been thinking about this for longer than a day, like the gruff artisan had been waiting years for a mysterious lady to walk through his door. She made a soft noise against his lips and felt her own pulse flare, and somewhere out in the banquet hall thirty clocks began winding themselves toward the last hour they would ever steal.

The six-toed shoe tree hung on its hook near the door, watching, warm.

Zac walked her backwards until her hips met the edge of the stone counter, and the granite was cool through her underwear, which was a shock and a relief at the same time because everything else in the room was warm, the air, the vat, his mouth still working at her jaw and her throat like he was mapping territory he intended to claim.

"Counter's clean," he said against her neck. "I scrubbed it this afternoon, before I knew anything."

"You scrubbed it before you knew anything?"

"Habit. Everything in here gets scrubbed. Then I found out you were coming and I scrubbed it twice."

"Well. Good for you, artisan. Can I take these off you?"

"Please." He grinned. "Can I touch you, mysterious lady? Anywhere you like."

"Yes. Everywhere I say yes to, anyway, and I'll say." She hopped up onto the stone, and it was high enough that sitting put her almost level with him, and she hooked her fingers into his waistband and tugged, which was as plain an invitation as she knew how to give. "These off."

"Yes ma'am!"

He stepped out of his trousers and boxer shorts without ceremony, and she looked at him, all of him, and the stranger game made that easier somehow, because Bernice Greene from the third floor would have gone pink and made a joke, but the mysterious lady just looked, openly, at his chest and his soft belly and his cock, already half hard, curving up against his thigh.

"Condom," she said, and it wasn't a question but it also wasn't a barrier, it was just the fact of the thing, the sensible boring fact, and he nodded like she'd asked him to pass the salt.

"Wallet. Back pocket. Also scrubbed."

"Nothing in this kitchen is scrubbed, it's all just greasy butter."

"Not the wallet."

He fished it out and handed it over, and she sheathed him with the steady hands of someone who had done this before, three years ago with a caterer whose name she'd half forgotten, and she'd decided on the walk over that