Tilting at the Fair

I still think about that night on Little Gull Island, how the whole thing started with a flask and a dare and nobody planning anything. I was twenty-three that summer, working nights at the reserve clinic, and Sabrina was twenty-five and about to move nine hundred miles inland to some ranger station in a state I'd never been to. Aiden was twenty-four and guiding rafts for the outfitter, same as he had been the two years since we all met at the reserve's seasonal staff orientation.

The keeper's quarters sat right over the channel, stone walls and low ceilings, and Sabrina had hung paper lanterns all around the main room for her going-away party. The smell of salt came through the window she'd propped open, that low tide smell that gets in your clothes and stays there. There were about a dozen of us, mostly coworkers, mostly retired ranger types who called her kiddo even though she outranked them in patience.

And there, on a peg by the fireplace, hung a pair of ice skates. Sabrina's old ones. She left them there on purpose, I think. She'd taught Aiden and me to skate two winters back on the pond behind the reserve, and Aiden spent most of that winter flat on his back on the ice while she laughed at him.

"You know those skates are still up there," Aiden said to her, standing by the fireplace with a beer he hadn't opened. "You left those as a threat."

"It's a monument," Sabrina said. "A monument to the worst student I ever had."

"I fell twice. Twice."

"You fell eleven times. I counted. Jessica counted too, ask her."

"He fell eleven times," I said. I was on the couch with my shoes off, feeling the whole night already in my chest, that warm ache you get when you know a thing is ending and you're trying to just be in it instead of sad about it. "I counted too. She kept a tally on her glove."

The older folks cleared out around ten. One by one they said their goodbyes to Sabrina, hugged her, told her the new station was lucky, and then it was just the three of us and the lanterns and the sound of the channel below. Sabrina dug a flask out of her jacket pocket, the same dented flask she'd carried since before I knew her, and poured three short ones onto the coffee table like we were children sharing contraband.

"Last round on the island," she said. "Drink up."

We drank. The whiskey was cheap and warm and it went straight down. Then Sabrina got that look she gets, the one that always meant somebody was about to be embarrassed, and she stood up and pointed at the floor.

"The floor's wet," she said. "Condensation, or something. It's slick near the fireplace."

"So?"

"So, Aiden. Race. Down the hall and back. Loser does the dishes at the sink while the other two watch."

"There are no dishes," Aiden said. "We used paper plates."

"Then loser sings the ranger anthem. The real one, the embarrassing one you made up."

That was how it went with us. Dares stacked on dares. Aiden got up, and the two of them lined up at the far end of the room, and Sabrina counted down from three like a race official. They took off across the wet stone in their socks and it was immediately obvious that this was a stupid idea, which was the point. Aiden's feet went out from under him about halfway down and he skidded, arms windmilling, and caught himself against me right as I stood up to laugh at him.

He landed against me with both hands on my shoulders to stop his fall. His face was close. Closer than it had ever been. Six inches, maybe less. I could see the lantern light in his eyes and he could see, I guess, that I wasn't stepping back.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry, sorry."

"You're fine," I said.

Behind him, Sabrina was laughing so hard she'd bent over, hands on her knees, breath coming in whoops. "Eleven falls," she wheezed. "Make it twelve. Somebody mark it down."

And I don't know what came over me. I really don't. Maybe it was the whiskey, or the goodbye of it all, or six inches being too small a distance for two people who had two years of friendship and one night left. I leaned in and kissed him.

It was a laughing kiss. We were both still half laughing, and it landed crooked, more cheek than mouth at first, and then his hand came up to my jaw and it wasn't crooked anymore. It was soft and short and it ended and we looked at each other and he said, "Oh," like someone who had dropped a plate.

"Is that okay?" I asked him. "That was me asking, by the way."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's okay."

Sabrina had stopped laughing. She came over slow, sock feet quiet on the stone, and she put her fingers under my chin and turned my face toward hers.

"Me too?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

She kissed me differently than Aiden had. Slower, surer, like she'd already thought this through on some night I didn't know about. Her thumb moved along my jaw. When she pulled back, all three of us stood there in the lantern light, nobody moving away, nobody saying the thing that would break it.

"Well," Aiden said finally. "That's a new one for the tally."

"Shut up," Sabrina said, but she was grinning.

I want to tell you it happened fast after that, but it didn't. It happened the way the rest of the night had gone, one dare at a time, each of us checking in with the others without making a big speech about it. Aiden asked before he touched either of us. Sabrina asked me before she unbuttoned anything. It was careful in a way that didn't feel careful, if that makes any sense. It felt like the three of us had been circling this for two years without knowing it, and now nobody wanted to rush it because we only had the one night and we meant to use all of it.

The lanterns threw soft orange light on the stone. The skates hung by the fireplace where they'd hung all night. Outside, the channel made its slow noise against the rocks, and somewhere out there a buoy bell rang once and went quiet.

Sabrina took my hand and Aiden's hand and walked us backward toward the couch.

"Okay," she said. "New game. Nobody wins, everybody plays."

"That's not a game," Aiden said.

"It's the best game," she said.

He laughed, and I laughed, and then we stopped laughing, because her mouth found mine again and his hands were warm through my shirt, and the whole warm grateful ache I'd been carrying since the first goodbye hug that evening turned into something else entirely. Something with weight and heat and a low tide smell coming through the open window.

The last party on the island was just getting started.

The shirts went first. Not all at once, nothing dramatic like that. Sabrina started on my buttons while Aiden watched, and when she got to the third one she looked over at him and said, "You're just going to stand there?"

"I didn't want to rush anybody," he said.

"Come here." She took his hand off his own hip and put it on my waist. "You've been sneaking looks at her all night. Both of you have been sneaking looks at each other all summer, don't think I haven't noticed." She went back to my buttons. "Okay?"

"Okay," I said.

My shirt came off and the room was warm enough that I didn't even feel silly standing there in my bra between the two of them. Aiden's hands stayed where she'd put them, on my waist, and his thumbs moved a little, as if checking that I was real. I reached over and started on Sabrina's shirt. She had a plain white one, the ranger shirt, and I worked the buttons slow because her skin kept twitching under my knuckles and I liked that.

"Ticklish," she said.

"Noted," I said.

Aiden got his own shirt off without being asked, which was fine by me. He was twenty-four and he'd spent two years hauling rafts around and it showed. Sabrina whistled at him. He turned red all the way down his chest and I laughed, and then she pulled me down onto the sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace because the couch was too small for three people and she'd apparently thought this part through already, whatever night she'd done her thinking on.

The rug was soft and a little scratchy and it smelled faintly like the wood smoke from earlier. I lay back on it and Sabrina settled beside me on one side and Aiden on the other, and she said, "Tell us if you want to stop. Either of you. Any time. That's the rule. And we've only had three short ones each over a few hours, so we're buzzed at most, and there's water in the kitchen