Trapped in the dark

The rain came down like the sky had been saving up for it all summer, and honestly, we deserved it. The composting site celebration had been going so well, too! The new community bins out past the edge of Mokau, everyone milling around the barn with their little paper cups of wine, Lorraine giving tours of the cricket farm's contribution table like she'd been doing it her whole life.

Then the squall rolled in off the coast and the whole party just folded up like a deck chair. Thirty minutes, tops, and everyone had scattered to their cars. Everyone except us two, apparently.

So there I was, twenty-seven years old and sprinting through a downpour with nothing but a wet jacket and bad judgment, when I spotted the old chandler's building at the side of the property. Condemned for years, the tallow place, all rusted dip-tanks and grimy windows, but the door still opened if you leaned on it the right way. I ducked inside and shook the water out of my hair, and that's when I heard footsteps squelching up behind me.

Lorraine came through the door with the rain plastering her dark hair straight to her face, laughing before she'd even gotten both feet in. She was twenty-six, four years out from the last time we'd actually spoken, and I swear she looked exactly the same as she had in that horticulture module we'd shared at community college.

"Didn't expect to see you here!" I said, which is maybe the dumbest possible greeting in the history of greetings, but she laughed anyway.

"Dennis! Oh my god, of all the people to get trapped in a haunted candle factory with!" She wrung out a fistful of her hair and flicked it. "Can you believe that party? One crack of thunder and it's like the fire alarm went off."

"I know. I was mid-conversation with that guy from the council about worm castings and he just... left. Mid-sentence."

"Typical. All that civic pride until it rains." She looked around the long, low room, the row of dip-tanks with their rusted iron rims, the grease film on the walls catching what little light came through the high windows. "This is kind of amazing, actually. Kind of creepy, but amazing."

I did the gentlemanly thing for once in my life and spread my wet jacket over the least stained section of an old bench along the wall, patting it like I was presenting a throne. "My lady's seat. Well, sorta. It's got a stain on it I don't want to examine too closely."

"Oh well, glamour at last." She sat down, still catching her breath from the run. "So how've you been? Four years and all I know about you is whatever the Facebook algorithm tells me."

"Not much to tell. I cook at the pub now. The Mokau Arms. I make a mean lamb shank and I burn approximately one in every nine batches of chips."

"That's a solid average. I'll take those odds." She was grinning, wiping rain off her cheeks with the heel of her hand. "I changed cricket substrate. That's my whole job title. Cricket oviposition substrate exchanger. Say it five times fast."

"It's honestly the most impressive thing I've ever heard."

"It's egg trays, Dennis. I move egg trays. But it sounds incredible on a business card, so I keep it."

We both cracked up at that, sitting there dripping in a condemned building while the rain hammered the roof like it was trying to get in. There was something really nice about it, actually. The absurdity of it. The party we'd both helped set up tables for, gone in half an hour, and here we were, the last two idiots standing.

Then she leaned over to look into the wooden crate she was using as an armrest and made a little excited noise. "Oh. Oh, look at this."

"What is it?"

"An interoffice envelope. A real one, the big brown kind, with the red string ties and everything." She held it up like it was a museum piece. "Who was sending interoffice mail in a tallow chandler's? What interoffice? There's like one office."

"Maybe the chandlers had a very bureaucratic operation. Form 12-B: Request For Additional Tallow."

"You joke but I bet that's real." She turned the envelope over in her hands, and that's when she noticed the shelf behind the crate. "Wait. Wait wait wait. Dennis. Are those candles?"

There was a whole row of them, dusty as anything but intact, fat old tallow-style candles sitting in a tin. She grabbed one and held it up like she'd won a prize at a raffle.

"Those are probably a hundred years old," I said.

"Perfect. Aged to perfection. Like wine." She was already digging in her bag, and sure enough, the woman had matches in her purse. Of course she did. "Don't look at me like that. Everyone should carry matches. You never know when you'll get trapped in a condemned building."

I did look at her like that, though, and she just smirked and struck one, and the flame caught on the first try. Then came the part that honestly kind of impressed me. She didn't just stick the candle on the bench. She threaded the candle upright through the middle of the envelope, wedged between the string ties so it stood straight, and then she propped the whole thing up on a broken dip-tank lid so the brown paper curved around the flame like a little screen.

"There," she said, sitting back to admire her work. "Makeshift lamp. One hundred percent historical accuracy. The chandler would be proud."

The envelope threw this warm, singular pool of light across the middle of the room, and the rest of the chandler's just fell away into shadow. The dust in the air lit up gold. The grease film on the walls got this soft sheen. It was, and I don't use this word lightly, cozy. In a condemned building. With a borrowed candle.

"Okay, wow," I admitted. "That actually looks really nice."

"Right? I have skills nobody appreciates." She tucked her legs up on the bench, careful of the stain, and looked out at the rain through the gap where the door didn't quite close. "So how long do you think this squall is gonna last?"

"No idea. Could be twenty minutes. Could be till dark."

"Hm." She glanced at me, and that glance held some little spark of mischief that I didn't fully understand yet. "Well. We should figure out something to do, shouldn't we? Can't just sit here in the dark like two Victorian ghosts."

"I've got my phone but no signal out here."

"God, no. No phones." She waved it off like the idea personally offended her. "Let's do something old fashioned. Cards? Truth or dare? We're adults, twenty-six and twenty-seven, we should be past truth or dare, but honestly, what else is there to do in a candlelit chandler's during a storm?"

"Is that an actual offer or are you setting me up?"

"Oh, absolutely setting you up. But it'll be fun anyway." She laughed, settling in against the wall, and the light from her little envelope lamp flickered across her face. "Truth or dare, Dennis. And I warn you, I've spent four years working with crickets. I have no shame left."

The rain kept hammering the roof, the candle hissed softly in its paper sleeve, and I thought, well. There are definitely worse ways to spend a squall.

"Truth," I said, because it felt like the safer door.

"Okay, truth." She pulled her knees up and looked at me over them, all innocent-looking, which should have been my first clue. "What were you thinking about just now, when you were staring at the dip-tanks for the last ten minutes?"

I blinked at her. "I wasn't staring at the dip-tanks."

"Dennis." She said my name like she was grading a quiz. "You have looked at those rusted tanks maybe twice, and at me for everything in between. I've been counting. You think a girl spends four years moving egg trays and doesn't develop observation skills?"

Oh. Oh no. I felt my face go hot, which the candlelight absolutely did not hide, because she grinned like she'd caught a fish. "Well," I said, scrambling, "just so you know, I could say the same about you."

"Could you?"

"I'm saying it. You've been watching me watch