The Ten-Touch Rule

Sylvie Malone was thirty-four years old and had been drinking alone at The Shady Elm for exactly forty minutes when Calvin Dunbar slid into her booth without asking.

"Mind if I sit?" he said, already sitting.

"You just did it, so I guess that question's answered," she said.

The Shady Elm was Nadia's bar, worn down in the way Sylvie liked. Sticky floors, cracked vinyl booths, a neon sign outside that flickered like it had a stutter. A dartboard hung crooked near the men's room and nobody ever fixed it. Sylvie had been coming here since before her breakup with Leo, back when she still came here with Leo, and now she came here alone, which was the whole problem.

Calvin was a friend of Leo's, which should have made him off limits, but Leo had moved out six weeks ago and taken the good mixer and most of Sylvie's dignity with him. Calvin was thirty-six, worked at a print shop, and had gone through his own messy split about a year back. Everybody at the bar knew both stories. That was the kind of bar it was.

"Nadia told me you were in here sulking," Calvin said, waving at the bar.

"I wasn't sulking. I was drinking thoughtfully."

"You were staring into your glass like it owed you money."

"Fine. Sulking. Can you blame me?" She pushed her glass an inch to the side, a gesture that meant nothing. "Six weeks. I keep being told six weeks is nothing, and it doesn't feel like nothing."

Calvin nodded at Nadia as she came over with a fresh beer for him. She set it down without being asked, because Nadia had owned the place eight years and remembered everyone's order better than they did.

"Two sad people in my booth," Nadia said. "That's a fire hazard."

"One sad person," Sylvie said. "He invited himself."

"I did," Calvin agreed. "And here's my pitch. We're both stuck in our own heads. My head is a terrible neighborhood, I don't recommend it. So let's do something stupid to get out."

"Define stupid."

"I don't know yet. That's the fun part."

Sylvie looked at him for a moment. He was decent looking in a way she'd never noticed when he was just Leo's friend, mostly because she'd never been looking. Big hands, a little gray coming in early at the temples. He fidgeted with his beer mat, which she found weirdly comforting. Nervous people were honest people, her mother used to say.

"Okay," Sylvie said, and then, because the two beers she'd had had already done their work, she kept going. "Actually, I have a thing. I read about it somewhere. It's called the ten-touch rule."

"Sounds like a law firm."

"It's an intimacy experiment. One date, ten touches, each one a little closer than the last. And that's it. No expectations past the next touch. Touch one might be a hand on the wrist and touch ten might be, well, whatever it turns out to be, or nothing at all. The point is you never have to think further ahead than the next one."

Calvin put his beer down. "Huh."

"Or it's a stupid idea. I did say I read it somewhere."

"No, I like it. It's dumb and I like it. When do we start?"

"Whoa. Tonight? I thought you meant something stupid like karaoke."

"Karaoke is worse than whatever your rule is. Tonight. Right now. This booth counts as the date."

"I haven't even eaten. A date should have food in it somewhere."

"So we'll get food. Diner down the block. Then we figure out the rest as we go." He counted on his fingers. "We've got, what, hours till last call somewhere in this town. Plenty of runway."

"That's ambitious runway."

"I'm an ambitious man."

"You print business cards."

"Color business cards," he said, with real pride, and Sylvie laughed for the first time in maybe two weeks, a real one, that surprised her on the way out.

Before either of them could move, Nadia reappeared, because of course she'd been listening from the bar, which was three feet away and had no wall on it.

"Did I just hear the words 'intimacy experiment'?" Nadia said, loud enough that the two guys at the dartboard turned around.

"You did not hear that," Sylvie said.

"She said ten touches," Calvin said, helpful as ever. "On a date. Right now!"

"Oh, this is the best thing that's happened in this bar all year," Nadia said. She planted a hand on her hip. "Sylvie, honey, you've been moping on that booth for six weeks. I say you chicken out by touch five."

"There's a prediction now?" Sylvie said.

"There's a prediction, and I'm very confident in it. Nobody owes anybody anything, it's just bragging rights. Larry!"

Larry Doubtfire was forty-five, a retired mailman who had held his route for two decades and apparently missed every single house on it, because he still talked about the people like family. He had never actually been married, though he told stories about his twenties and thirties that made it sound like a rotating door, and he considered himself the bar's unofficial authority on romance, which was a terrifying thought.

He came over at speed. "I heard my name."

"You're the official scorekeeper," Nadia said. "Ten touches, Sylvie and Calvin, tonight. You count."

"Official scorekeeper," Larry repeated, savoring it. "I want a clipboard."

"You can't have a clipboard."

"Then I'll use my memory, which is excellent, ask anyone. Touch one, let's go." He pulled a chair over from the next table and sat down like a man at a tennis match.

"This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," Sylvie said.

"You proposed it," Calvin said.

"I proposed it to you, quietly, like a normal person."

"Nothing about this bar is quiet," Nadia said. "Touch five, and you're running for the door. Do we have a deal on who's right?"

Sylvie thought about it for exactly two seconds, mostly out of spite. "Deal."

"Deal," Nadia said, shaking her hand. "Now get out of my bar and go touch each other, if you both want to. You can come back and tell me I was wrong."

* * *

The diner two blocks down was the kind of place with laminated menus and a pie case and a waitress who'd been there since before either of them was born. They took a booth by the window. The vinyl there was even worse than Nadia's, split down the middle with foam coming out like stuffing from a teddy bear.

"Okay, so logistics," Calvin said, unfolding his menu. "Who counts as a touch? Like, if you pass me the ketchup, does that count?"

"Accidental contact doesn't count. It has to be on purpose. That's the whole, that's the point of it, it's a decision every time."

"So it's ten decisions."

"Ten decisions. And nobody has to take any of them."

"Fine. Wrist first, then? The classic opener." He laid his arm on the table between them, palm up, wrist offered like a donation.

Sylvie reached out. Her hand was about four inches from his wrist when her elbow caught the ketchup bottle, which had apparently not been closed all the way, and a generous red puddle spread across the table directly under his arm.

"Oh no," she said.

"Oh no," Calvin agreed, lifting his arm to safety.

Sylvie stared at the puddle. Then, because she could not leave it alone, she dabbed a fingertip in it and drew a little smiley face on the formica. "So that's the mood in here tonight. That's what we're working with."

"I've had worse first dates," Calvin said. "There was one where the girl's actual boyfriend showed up at the restaurant. Touch one is cursed, is what I'm learning. Touch one wants us to fail."

"Touch one," Sylvie said, and, very deliberately, put her hand on his wrist. Her finger left a small ketchup print. "There. Scorekeeper business."

From the doorway, where he had followed them at a distance of twenty feet like the world's most