The Spice Must Flow

I want to start by saying I'm forty-two years old and I have spent most of those years being sensible, which is a polite way of saying boring. Khalid, grad student in anthropology, four nights a week reading about people who lived exciting lives while I microwaved another plate of leftovers. So when my friend Mick called me on a Thursday and asked for a hand with some event at his spice warehouse in Gartside, I said yes before he even finished the sentence, mostly because saying yes to something was the wildest thing I'd done in months.

What I did not expect was to be ambushed at the loading door by a man in a bowtie who looked like he was losing a fight with his own evening.

"Khalid, thank God, take this." Mick shoved a clipboard into my hands, then a name tag that said GREETER, then a pen, all in about four seconds. "You're a volunteer now, don't argue, we're short six people and the chili powder situation is already out of control."

"The what situation?"

"Don't ask. Just smile at people and point them toward the bar." He was already walking backward toward the chaos. "You're a lifesaver, I owe you a pint, maybe two."

So there I was, forty-two years old, holding a clipboard in a warehouse that smelled like a curry house having a religious experience, wearing a name tag that lied about me being a greeter. Towering racks of spices went up past the fire code, I'd have bet money on it, and in the middle of the concrete floor somebody had laid out a sad little square of parquet and called it a dance floor. A banner over the bar said FIND YOUR FLAVOR, which I assumed was somebody's idea of a joke about the inventory.

I had been pointing elderly couples toward the bar for about twenty minutes when a small woman with fierce eyes and a cardigan that meant business walked straight up to me like she'd been looking for me all night.

"There you are," she said. "You're Shelia's date."

"I'm sorry, I'm what?"

"Shelia's date. Andrea Meyers, her mother, pleased to meet you, don't dawdle." She pressed a View-Master into my hands, the old red plastic toy, the kind my cousins had when we were kids. "She's by the cumin. Go break the ice with her, and for heaven's sake look at the pictures first, I put them together myself."

"Mrs. Meyers, I think there's been a mistake, I'm just a volunteer, I'm not anybody's..."

"You're tall and you're here and you're not in prison, which is more than the last one. Off you go." And she pushed me, actually pushed me, toward a tall woman in her thirties standing at the cumin bins with her arms crossed like a bouncer at a very disappointing club.

She was, I noticed before anything else, gorgeous in a way that seemed annoyed about it. Dark hair pulled back, mid thirties, a figure the blouse and pencil skirt were doing their best job on, and a face that said she was ready to be disappointed by whoever was walking toward her.

"Let me guess," she said before I got a word out. "You're my date."

"I'm not, actually, I'm a volunteer, but your mother gave me a View-Master and physically moved me in your direction, and I've never been so confused in my life."

"Oh God." She closed her eyes. "She found somebody. She cornered a stranger at my own workplace and assigned him to me. What did she give you, was it the View-Master?"

"This thing, yes. With pictures in it, apparently hand-selected."

"That's her third one this year. She thinks it's whimsical. She made my last date look at photos of me on the beach at Blackpool." She held out her hand. "Shelia, by the way. I'm thirty-eight, I teach the dance classes here, and I would like to state for the record that I did not agree to any of this."

"Khalid, forty-two, grad student, clipboard bearer. And I'd like to state that I also did not agree to this, which makes us the two people in this warehouse with honest positions."

That got the first crack of a smile out of her, and I remember thinking it was a good face when it moved like that.

"Here's my problem," she said, lowering her voice and stepping a bit closer. "If I storm off, my mother will spend the whole event telling everyone I'm difficult, and then she'll bring up Byron, and then she'll cry, and I'll be the villain. But if I stay and you're not a complete disaster..."

"We could just pretend," I heard myself say, and God help me, I was smiling. "For one evening. We play along, drive her quietly insane by being disagreeable in a charming way, and at the end of the night we shake hands and go home. I've spent forty-two years being careful and I'd like to try something reckless that only costs me a few hours."

Shelia studied me for a second, then stuck out her hand. "Deal. But I'm warning you, she's going to make us dance. There's a lesson starting in ten minutes and she books it every time like it's a surprise."

It was not a surprise. At nine o'clock exactly Andrea clapped her hands by the parquet square and announced that couples should pair up for a bit of salsa to warm the heart, and she pointed at the two of us like a general picking troops.

"I don't dance," I told Shelia as she dragged me onto the floor. "I want that understood right now. I have two left feet and a history of back trouble."

"Everyone says they can't dance and then they can. Just put your hand here and follow me, and stop narrating."

The problem, and I will be honest about when it happened, was about thirty seconds into the lesson. Her hand in mine was warm, and when she corrected my posture she put her palm flat on my chest and left it there a beat too long, and my brain went from bored anthropologist to something considerably less academic. She smelled like cardamom, which I suppose is a workplace hazard here, and when she looked up at me to scold my footwork her mouth was very close to mine and neither of us stepped back.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're standing too close to let me do anything else."

"That's the correct distance for salsa." She said it firmly, but her thumb moved once across the back of my hand, and I don't think she decided to do it.

The whole room was turning in circles around us and I was holding a beautiful stranger and my heart was hammering like I was twenty-three again, which was the last time anybody had made me feel this off balance, and that had gone nowhere and taught me to be careful, and here I was not being careful at all.

Then Mick came sprinting past the dance floor yelling about the chili powder again, somebody bumped into somebody, and Shelia and I went down in a slow, stupid tumble into the shelving beside the floor. There was a groan of wood, a pause like the universe taking a breath, and then an entire shelf of saffron came down on our heads in a golden cloud.

For a second we just sat there in the dust, absolutely coated in the most expensive thing in the building, and I looked at her, yellow from her hair to her chin, and she looked at me, and we both lost it. I mean properly lost it, the helpless kind of laughing where you can't breathe, sitting in a puddle of saffron worth more than