The Sticky End of Whipped Cream

I was sorting parcel labels at the distribution center on a Tuesday when Katya dropped the whole thing on me like a sack of wet newspapers. She does that. Katya never eases into anything. She's thirty-eight, built with the solid rectangularity of a filing cabinet, and she used to bounce at a bar on Route 40 before she took the postal exam.

"So the peach guy asked about you," she said, flipping a stack of catalogs with one thumb.

"What peach guy?"

"The guy at the fair. Pete. Sells those Red Havens out by the fence line. Big fella, bald, forearms like hams. I dated him for a couple months last summer. It ended fine! No drama. He's just not a boyfriend guy."

"Okay. So why is he asking about me?"

Katya leaned on the case and grinned at me. I've known her six years and that grin has never once meant anything calm.

"Because he said, and I quote, that he's looking for a woman who wants a different kind of education. And I told him about you. About how you've been doing the nice dinner date thing for two years and you always come back looking like you ate a bowl of oatmeal with no sugar in it."

I threw a rubber band at her. "That is a lie! My dates are fine!"

"They're fine the way a warm bath is fine. Krista, honey. You're forty-two. You got divorced two years ago. How many of those dates ended with you actually wanting to see the guy again?"

I didn't answer, which was an answer. The truth is I'd been on maybe nine dates since the divorce and every single one of them ended with a polite hug in a restaurant parking lot and me driving home thinking, well, that was another evening I could have spent watching TV.

"I don't even know what I'd want," I said. "That's the problem. I was married to the same decent man for fifteen years, and he thought sex was something you did on your anniversary."

"See, Pete is the opposite of that."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Ask him yourself. He's at the Split Rail fair every day through Sunday. Stall on the east edge, next to the candle soap lady. Tell him Katya sent you. And Krista? Go hungry for answers, you know what I mean. He likes a woman who says what she wants."

I said I'd think about it. I did not think about anything else for three days.

The fair is a whole thing in our county. Late August, dust everywhere, canvas tents bleached the color of old teeth, a Ferris wheel that groans like my knees do. You can smell the fried dough from the parking lot. It was Saturday afternoon when I went, alone, wearing a sundress I hadn't worn since 2019, which felt like a statement even though nobody was grading me.

Pete's stall sat right at the east edge like Katya said. Hand-painted sign, "Pete's Peaches, Eat One, Buy One." Crates of peaches stacked in the sun. He was forty-nine and big, bald head, gray stubble, apron over a t-shirt, and he was talking to a family about canning when I walked past.

I walked past. I want that understood. I bought a lemonade. I looked at a quilt display. I rode nothing.

Then I walked past his stall a second time, and he glanced up and I pretended to be interested in a folding chair at the neighbor's tent. Then a third time, and by then I was holding a fried dough the size of a hubcap like it was a reason to be walking anywhere.

"Hey," he called out. "You're the mail lady. Katya said you had a question for me."

I stopped dead. A kid behind me nearly went into my back. "I, um. I don't have a question. I like peaches."

He laughed. Not mean. Just laughed. "You've walked past three times. Buy a peach or tell me the question. Either one works."

Well. My face was hot and I'm sure it showed. I walked over, put the fried dough on his crate table like evidence, and picked up a peach. It was warm from the sun.

"These are Red Havens," he said. "Best eating peach there is. You want one that gives a little at the shoulder. Not mush, mind. Give."

I pressed it with my thumb. It gave. "Okay. That's a good peach."

"That's a good peach," he agreed. "Two bucks. Or free if you answer the question you came here to ask."

"I came here to eat a peach in public the way anyone would."

"Sure you did." He leaned his elbows on the crate. "Katya told me a little about you. Said you've been doing the dinner-and-a-hug circuit. Said you're bored out of your skull."

"That's rude."

"It's what she said. I don't know if it's true. That's why I'm asking." He pointed at me with a peach. "So here's me asking, plain. What are you looking for?"

And I stood there in the dust with a warm peach in my hand and frying dough smell in my nose and about four honest answers fighting each other in my throat.

"Katya said you were direct," I finally managed.

"She did? Good. I am. I spent eight years running a food truck in Hannigan. You don't survive a lunch rush being vague. Then my wife got sick and died, God rest her, and I moved out here four years ago because quiet felt right. So now I sell peaches and I'm direct. What do you want, Krista?"

"You know my name?"

"Katya's mouth is a fire hose."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. He smiled and I noticed his hands, big and scarred, chef hands. The peach was so warm in my palm it almost felt alive.

"Okay. Here's the thing," I said. "I've been nice my whole life. Nice wife, nice divorce, nice dates. And in bed I have never, not once in forty-two years, said the actual words. The dirty ones. Out loud. I don't even know if I can."

He didn't laugh at that one. He wiped his hands on his apron and nodded slowly.

"Now that's a real answer," he said. "You want to learn to say them and mean them."

"Yes. I mean, I think? God, this is humiliating. I'm standing at a peach stall confessing this."

"Nothing humiliating about it. Half the county's out here lying about how much they love pie contests. You're the only one being honest today." He stepped around the crate table. "Can I tell you how I do this? No pressure, you can walk away and I'll never bring it up."

"Okay."

"I don't do romance. I'm not your boyfriend material, Katya can confirm. What I am is a guy who talks. I tell you what I'm going to do before I do it, every time, and you tell me what you want, in whatever words you've got, and we build up from there. That is the entire education. Words first."

My stomach did something complicated. "And that works? Women actually..."

"Women love it. Women who've spent thirty years being nice, especially. Because nobody's making them guess. You want to try the words? Start small. Right now, out loud, at a farmers market. Say one."

"One what?"

"One dirty word. Any one. Pick your favorite."

I looked at the peaches. I looked at the Ferris wheel groaning in the distance. I took a breath and I swear my heart was in my ears.

"Cock," I said.

It came out quiet but it came out real, and Pete grinned wide enough to show a gold tooth I hadn't noticed before.

"There she is," he said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

"Get me another peach," I said, "and maybe I'll say it again."

He handed me a peach and I bit into it right there over the crate. Juice ran down my wrist. I did not care.

"Okay," he said, wiping his hands. "Homework. You come back tomorrow and you bring me one sentence. Any sentence. But it has to be a dirty one, and you have to say it out loud to my face."

"That's the homework? I was expecting, like, vocabulary lists."

"That is the vocabulary list. One sentence, building to a full vocabulary by Sunday."

I laughed and walked off with juice on my wrist and my heart pounding like I'd shoplifted something. It was the best I'd felt in two years. Maybe ten.

* * *

I came back Sunday. I'd written the sentence on a grocery receipt in my mailbox cart on Thursday, crossing out three drafts like it was a love letter. Katya caught me practicing in the parking lot at the distribution center and nearly fell off the mail cart laughing.

"Say it louder. You mumble like you're asking forgiveness."

"Shut up, Katya. I was married to a whisperer for fifteen years, this is a whole new muscle."

So Sunday I walked to the east edge of the fair with my sundress sticking to me in the humid air. Pete's stall was the same, crates of Red Havens stacked to my chin, the sign with the gold-painted letters. Pete was handling a watermelon for a lady with a stroller. He saw me over her head and grinned that gold-tooth grin.

"There's my student," he called. "You brought your homework?"

The stroller lady gave me a look. I waited until she rolled off, then I leaned over the crate.

"Fuck me with your tongue," I whispered.

It barely made it out. It came out like a secret in church. But it came out, and it was the exact sentence from the receipt, and Pete set down the watermelon slow.

"Okay, first of all, that's a strong start," he said. "Second, come around here where I can hear you, because that right there was a crime scene whisper."

I came around the crate. He leaned down close, so his mouth was a foot from my ear, and dropped his voice low.

"Say it again. Full voice. Not shouting, no one's listening, but full."

"Fuck me with your tongue." Louder this time. My ears were on fire and I loved it.

"Good. God, good. Now here's your next one." He kept his voice low and even, like he was reading off a menu. "When we get somewhere private, and I mean somewhere with a door, I'm going to put you flat on your back and put my mouth on you. And what I want to hear, right when you feel it, is 'don't stop, don't stop, I'm close.' Can you say that one?"

"I'm close, don't stop," I said, and it came out steadier than the first one, which surprised us both, because my knees were jelly.

"See? Two sentences in and you're already fluent." He laughed. "You're going to be my best student. I've had a few."

"Katya said you've had a few."

"Katya says a lot of things, most of them true." He looked at his watch, then at the thinning crowd. The sun was starting to drop behind the candle soap lady's tent. "Tell you what. You want to skip the rest of the fair? I can close up early. I've got my truck and I've got a six-pack at my place, and neither one of those involves an audience."

My stomach dropped somewhere around my shoes. This was it. This was the actual fork in the road.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, please. I mean, God, I've been here doing errands around this stall since yesterday. Yes."

He laughed at that, a real one, and started stacking crates. "Help me load, then. You're not a customer anymore, you're staff."

* * *

Closing up took twenty minutes. He paid the kid next door to watch the last of the peaches and I carried crates to his truck, which turned out to be an old F-150 with a hundred peach stickers on the tailgate and one bumper sticker that said BOSTON