The Thirty-Ninth

The office at Bell's Automotive smelled like coffee and brake dust, which is not a combination I'd recommend to anybody. I was sitting in my rolling chair with my feet up on the filing cabinet, staring at the wall calendar like it had insulted my mother. Tomorrow's date was circled in red marker. Somebody had circled it months ago, probably me, back when forty still felt like a rumor.

Tomorrow I turn forty.

I'll be honest with you, I sat there for a long time just breathing. The shop was quiet, both bays empty, the hydraulic lifts at ride height like two metal altars nobody was praying at. Willis had one more job on the schedule, a Ford with mushy brakes, and I could hear him out there rattling around, dropping a wrench and swearing at it in that friendly way he swears. That sound usually made me smile. Tonight it just made my stomach hurt.

Thirty-nine years and change. That's how long I've been a person, and for most of them I have not said what I actually wanted. Not about much of anything, really. Not about the mashed potatoes being wrong at restaurants. Not about my cousin Sharon's wedding, where I sat in the back and fumed in a dress I hated. Not about work, not about money, and definitely, definitely not about sex.

That's the big one. That's the one I've been carrying around like a suitcase with a broken handle.

I've been dating men since I was twenty-one. Eighteen years of men, if you do the math, and every single one of them got a version of me that was edited for content. Nice Madeline. Agreeable Madeline. Madeline who laughs at the right times and lies there like a folded towel when things get physical, nodding along, saying oh yes, that's good, when half the time it wasn't and the other half I was too chicken to ask for what would have been.

And here's the part I've never told a living soul. In all those years, all those men, I have never once finished with a partner without finishing the job myself later, in the bathroom, with the water running. Not once. It's been sitting inside me since before I can put a date on it, this quiet humming want, and I have treated it like a bill I could keep deferring.

I don't know why. Fear, I guess. Fear of the sentence coming out of my mouth and the man across the table looking at me different. Fear of being a punchline. Fear of finding out the want was real and then having to do something about it.

Except now I'm about to be forty, and I made a deal with myself at the start of this year. I said, Madeline, you are not carrying this suitcase into another decade. You either put it down or you set it on the table and open it in front of somebody.

The somebody is Willis. He doesn't know what's coming. Poor man.

We've been together a little over a year now, and he is the best of the bunch, which is saying something because the bunch included a guy who collected garden gnomes and cried at car commercials. Willis is forty-one, an auto mechanic, big hands, calm voice, laughs with his whole chest. He has never once made me feel small. Which is probably why I picked him to be the audience for the scariest sentence of my life.

I looked at that calendar again. Red circle. Tomorrow.

"Okay," I said to the empty office. "Okay, okay, okay." Saying it three times didn't make it easier. I said it a fourth time anyway.

Out in the bay, the impact wrench went off one last time, then the rattle of the wheel nuts going back on by hand. I heard him lower the lift with that hydraulic sigh the old one makes, and then his boots on the concrete, coming toward the office.

* * *

Willis came through the door wiping his hands on a red rag, which is a thing he does about forty times a day, and stopped dead when he saw me.

"Well, hey there," he said, and grinned. "I figured you'd gone home hours ago. What are you still doing here, sitting in the dark?"

"I wasn't sitting in the dark," I said. "I was sitting in the ambiance."

"Ambiance. Sure. The ambiance of a seventy-five watt bulb and a stack of invoices." He tossed the rag in the bin and came over and kissed the top of my head. He smells like the shop always, soap over motor oil, and I love it, which I have never told him either. See? Suitcase. "You want to grab dinner? There's that Thai place on Delmore still open till nine."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe in a bit."

He leaned against the desk and looked at me. Willis is good at looking at people without making them squirm. It's one of the ten thousand things I like about him. "You've got a face on," he said.

"What kind of face?"

"The kind where you're doing math in your head and you don't like the answer." He pulled the other chair over with his boot and sat down backwards on it, arms crossed over the backrest, the way he does when a customer's about to get bad news about their transmission and he wants to deliver it gently. "What's going on, Maddy?"

"It's nothing bad."

"That's exactly what people say before it's something bad."

I laughed, kind of against my will. "No, it's... it's not bad. It's just big." I picked up a pen off the desk and put it back down. "Do you ever think about how there are things you've never said to anybody? Like, whole rooms in your head that nobody's ever been inside?"

"Sure," he said slowly. "Everybody's got rooms."

"I've got a room I've never shown anyone. Not my sister, not my college roommate, not any of the men I've dated. Eighteen years of dating, Willis, and nobody's been in this room."

He didn't say anything right away. He has this way of letting a silence sit there without filling it, which used to drive me nuts and now I understand it's him being careful. "Okay," he said. "Is this about us?"

"Sort of. It's about me, mostly. But it affects us. It would affect us a lot, actually, depending on..."

"Depending on what?"

"Depending on how you take it," I said, and my voice did a wobble at the end that I hated.

He reached over and put his big warm hand flat on the desk between us, palm up, not grabbing, just offering. "Madeline. Whatever it is. Whatever you've been carrying around in there." He tapped his own temple. "You can put it down. I'm not going anywhere. You could tell me you've got a second family in Ohio and I'd just ask if the other guy pays child support."

"Oh my god," I said, laughing even though my eyes had gone hot. "That is not what it is."

"Okay, good, because I was about to say, I don't have a second family in Ohio to trade you, so we'd be uneven."

"Willis."

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to tell you. Tonight. Not at a restaurant, not over pad thai, not in the car. Here. Because if I schedule it and dress it up I'll talk myself out of it again, and I've been talking myself out of it since before you and I ever met."

He sat up straight on that backwards chair. I watched the joking drain out of his face, not into alarm, more into attention. Full attention, the way he listens to an engine. "Alright," he said. "I'm here. Take your time."

I took a breath that went all the way down to my shoes.

"First I need you to promise me something," I said.

"Anything."

"No. Not anything. That's the problem with promising anything. Promise me you'll let me get the whole thing out before you react. Even if it surprises you. Even if it's not what you expected. Because I've rehearsed this in the shower about four hundred times and if you interrupt me at sentence two, I will lose my nerve and we will be sitting here when I'm fifty having this same conversation."

He put his hand over his heart, actually put it over his heart, like a scout. "I promise. Whole thing, then I react."

"Okay." My hands were in my lap, wringing each other. "Okay. So. Tomorrow I turn forty."

"I know. I bought a card. It's got a dog on it."

"Willis."

"Sorry. Go."

I looked at him. I looked at that red circle on the calendar over his shoulder. And I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out. Well, one thing came out and it was "Um," which is not the sentence I rehearsed four hundred times.

Willis waited. He's good at waiting. He sat on that backwards chair with his arms folded on the backrest and he let me sit there with my mouth open like a mailbox with the flag stuck up.

I reached over to the parts bin on the shelf by the desk. There's always bolts in it, loose ones, odds and ends that come out of engines and never get matched back to anything. I picked one up. It was a hex bolt, maybe half an inch, cool and a little greasy, and I turned it over in my fingers while I tried to find the first word.

"So you know how I've been," I said, and stopped. I put the bolt down and picked it up again. "Okay, so. Eighteen years, right? I've been dating since I was twenty-one. Eighteen years of men. And in all that time, in every relationship, every single one, there was this one thing I never said out loud. Not to the gnome guy, not to anybody."

"The gnome guy cried at car commercials," Willis said. "Sorry. Go. I promised."

"You did promise." I rolled the bolt across my knuckles, which is something I've seen him do and probably picked up without noticing. "And I kept it in. I kept it in on purpose because it felt like too much, or too weird, or I'd scare the guy off, or honestly because I didn't have the words for it. And every year it got a little heavier. And now it's the night before I turn forty and I'm sitting in a garage holding a bolt, and I can feel it, Willis, I can feel how heavy it's gotten. And I don't want to carry it into another year. I don't want to be forty with a full suitcase."

He nodded, just once, slow. "Okay. So what's in it?"

"I've never told anyone what I actually fantasize about," I said. It came out fast, almost one word. "Not one person, ever, in my whole life. There's what I've told guys I like, the normal stuff, the stuff you say to be safe, and then there's the real thing, and the real thing has never left my mouth. Not even alone in my own apartment. I've thought it, I've wanted it for years, and I have literally never said it out loud until right now."

I stopped and looked at the bolt. Somewhere out on the shop floor the compressor kicked on and hummed, and then cycled off, and it was quiet again.

"What is it?" he asked. His voice was soft. Not soft like walking on eggshells. Soft like he'd lowered it on purpose so I wouldn't have to talk over him.

"It starts with wanting to watch," I said.

"Watch."

"Watch. That's not the whole thing but that's where it starts. I want to watch you. I want to watch and not be the one doing anything and just... see. I've wanted that for so long I can't even remember when it started. Maybe it never started. Maybe it was always just there, like a room I was born with."

"Watch you," he said. "Watch me do what, exactly? I'll be honest, Maddy, I'm running through a list in my head and the list has a lot of entries."

I almost laughed. Almost. It came out as a weird little huff and then my throat closed again. "That's the thing. The full thing. The thing I've never said." I turned the bolt over one more time and set it down on the desk, and I made myself look at him. His face is a good face to look at when you're scared, because it doesn't do anything dramatic. It just waits.

"I want to see you with a man," I said. "I want to watch you with another man."

The words came out and then they just hung there in the air, in that office that smells like coffee and brake dust, and I could practically see them hanging, like they were pinned to the wall calendar next to the red circle.

Willis didn't move. His eyebrows went up a little, that was all, and then they came back down. I watched him take a breath through his nose, the way he does before he tells someone their engine is shot.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Wow. Okay."

"You promised to let me get the whole thing out."

"I did. I'm letting. I'm the letting-est guy in the world right now." He uncrossed his arms and recrossed them. "Keep going."

"Before you say anything, there's a part two," I said, and my heart was loud but my voice held, which felt like a miracle. "Because when I say I want to watch, I don't mean I want to be left out. That's important. That's the part I could never get to in my head because the first part always stopped me. But I've thought about it, Willis, for years, and it's not me being pushed aside. It's me being there. Being in the room. Watching you, and being part of it, and you knowing I'm watching and that I want to be watching. I don't want a show with me sitting in a corner. I want all of it. I want to see you with a man and I want to be right there, wanting it, and I want you to want me there."

The compressor kicked on again outside. I held the bolt so hard the edge of the hex left a line in my thumb.

"I've imagined telling you this about a hundred ways," I went on, because now that the dam had cracked the water didn't want to stop. "In the car. In bed. Once in the shower at my cousin Sharon's wedding, which was terrible, because I hated that dress and I was already in a mood. I imagined you laughing. I imagined you looking at me like I'd grown a second head. I imagined you being polite about it and then slowly disappearing from my life over six months like guys do. So mostly I just didn't say it. Every guy I dated, I got to the point where I almost said it and I swallowed it, and then we'd break up over something stupid and I'd think, well, at least he never knew."

"That's a lot of years of swallowing," Willis said.

"Eighteen."

"Yeah." He looked down at his hands. They're big hands, mechanic hands, and they were still for once.