What She Said

Nobody tells you the worst part of getting out is the quiet.

I'm Nia, twenty-two, and I'd been a soldier for one year before they discharged me with a knee that complains when it rains and a folder of paperwork I still hadn't read. I enlisted at twenty-one because I had no plan and the Army is basically a plan with meals attached. Then it was done, and suddenly I was a civilian sitting on the porch of a hunting lodge in Montana with a beer going warm in my hand.

The lodge sat at the edge of the national forest, a low log building with a deep porch and a wood stove going inside. There were guest cabins strung out along a gravel path, and I'd rented one for three nights because it showed up cheap in the off-season and I liked the photos. Off-season meant I was the only guest. The place smelled like pine smoke and old coffee.

I cracked my second beer and sat there in one of the wooden chairs with my boots up on the rail. And I realized I hadn't been told what to do in over a week. Nobody had yelled at me. Nobody had scheduled me. I could sit here until the sun went down or until I died of boredom and no one would care either way.

It was messing with my head.

At the base, someone always had the answer. Wake at this time. Run this far. Stand there. It sounds like a complaint and it isn't. I was good at it. I liked knowing exactly what was expected. Out here the whole day was a blank page and I kept staring at it like it might bite me.

A screen door banged behind me and a guy came out with an armful of split firewood. He was twenty-eight or so, big through the shoulders, flannel, the kind of beard you grow when shaving feels optional. He'd introduced himself at check-in as Cal. Camp host, hunting guide, apparently the entire staff.

"You're going to freeze that beer," he said, stacking wood by the door. "Sun's almost gone."

"It's fine."

"It's not, but you're an adult." He straightened up and looked at the tree line. "Quiet first day?"

"Very."

"Some people come here for that." He brushed splinters off his jeans. "Others find out around day two that quiet is louder than they thought."

"That's a very fortune-cookie thing to say."

He grinned. "I've got a whole book of them. Comes with the lodge."

He went back inside and I sat there another ten minutes, turning my beer in my hands, thinking things I hadn't planned to think. One year on base, and in all that time I never dated anybody. Never hooked up with anybody. Partly the rules, mostly me. I kept waiting for someone to just tell me what to do, and nobody ever did, and I never worked out how to ask.

Which is a weird thing to realize on a porch in Montana at dusk.

He came back out to grab the last of the wood and I opened my mouth and something fell out of it.

"Can I ask you for lessons?"

Cal stopped with an armload of birch and looked at me. "Lessons."

"Yes."

"Lessons in what?"

"Hunting," I said, too fast. "Or. Not hunting. Other things."

He set the wood down slow, like I might spook. "Okay. I'll bite. Other things like what?"

I took a drink. Bad idea, the beer was warm and flat. "Being told what to do."

There was a pause long enough that I heard a bird somewhere back in the trees.

"Ma'am," he said, "you're going to have to help me out here, because that could mean about nine different things and half of them end with me explaining myself to a sheriff."

"I know it sounds weird." My ears were hot, which was annoying, because it was actually cold out. "I just got out of the Army. One year. And the whole time, somebody's telling me where to stand and what to wear and when to eat, and I hated it and I was also good at it, and now there's nobody, and I don't know what to do with that. And I think it's the same problem in other parts of my life."

"Other parts," he repeated.

"Yes!"

"Name one."

"You know which one."

"I really don't." He pulled a chair around and sat, forearms on his knees, giving me his whole attention, which was somehow worse. "Say it plain. I'm a guide. I work with people who can't read a map. Plain works."

I looked at my boots. "In bed. I've never. I mean, never at all, that's part of it, and I don't want the first time to be two people guessing at each other in the dark like a couple of raccoons in a garbage can."

That got a laugh out of him before he could stop it. "Sorry. Go on."

"And what I want, what I think I want, is for somebody to just tell me what to do. Take the wheel. Because I've spent a year being told where to stand and it turns out I liked it, in a way I never said out loud, and I'd like to try it in a place where it's allowed." I finally looked up. "That's it. That's what I'm asking. And if this is a bad idea because it's your workplace, say so and I'll drop it."

Cal rubbed his jaw. He didn't laugh again. He didn't make a face either.

"You're twenty-two?" he said.

"Twenty-two since March."

"And you've never?"

"Never. Basic training doesn't cover it. I checked."

"Okay." He sat back. "First thing. I'm going to ask some questions and you're going to hate some of them, and that's fine."

"Fine."

"Are you drinking?"

"I had two beers. I'm not drunk. I've passed worse evaluations hungover."

"Good, because if you were I'd say we talk tomorrow." He pointed at my bottle. "That's the last one tonight, though. This conversation works better sober and so does everything after it, if there's an after it."

"Understood."

"Second thing. I'm not taking money for that. Ever. If we do anything, it's because two adults wanted to, not because there's a fee. So get that out of your head right now."

"I'd feel like I owed you."

"You'd owe me nothing. If you want to feel square about it, book a fourth night at the lodge rate. That's a transaction. The other thing isn't."

I sat with that. "Okay. Fair."

"Third thing." He leaned forward again. "Tell me what told-what-to-do means to you. Not the movie version. You. When I say take the wheel, what happens in your head?"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I'd been rehearsing the pitch for two days and I'd only rehearsed the pitch.

"Like," I said. "You decide. I don't have to guess. I don't have to lie there doing math about whether you're enjoying it or whether I'm doing it wrong. You just tell me, and I do it, and it's right, because you said so. And if it's not right I can say so and you stop. That part I'm very sure about. I want the stop part to be real."

"That's the most important part and you already have it right," he said. "The stop is always real. Before anything else. Anything I ever ask, you can say no, and no sticks."

"Yes. That."

"And you'd want me to be, what, firm about it? Bossy?"

"Please don't make me define bossy on a lodge porch."

He laughed, low. "Fair enough. We can workshop the vocabulary later."

"So is that a yes? Or a no? Or a you're-crazy?"

"It's a slow yes," Cal said. "Yes with conditions. Mostly the condition is we talk more first, tomorrow, in daylight, and you tell me your limits even if you only know two of them. And the other condition is you eat dinner, because I made too much chili and it's going to waste."

"Chili first," I said. "Then limits."

"That's the order I'd pick." He stood and picked up the wood he'd put down during the conversation. "And Nia? For whatever it's worth, asking straight out like that took more nerve than most people ever show me. Most folks take the quiet route and ruin a good thing."

"You should've seen me practice it on the drive up. I did it to the radio."

"How'd the radio take it?"

"Terribly. Kept playing commercials."

He shouldered the wood and held the door for me. "Come eat. We'll figure out the rest."

We ate chili at the long table in the lodge, just the two of us and a kerosene lamp, and he made me say the terms back to him like he was reading me my rights.

"One session," I said. "If I want one. Maybe not even that. Cash isn't part of it, the fourth night is already booked and paid. No strings after. If I get weird about it, that's my problem, not yours."

"Good. And my add-on. You say the actual words before anything happens. Not hints, not standing in my kitchen looking at the floor. You tell me what you want, out loud, in a full sentence, and until you do, nothing starts."

"That's a lot of power over one sentence."

"It's the right amount of power," he said. "Sleep on it."

I slept fine, which surprised me. Maybe it was the altitude. Maybe it was having a plan for the first time since my discharge paperwork showed up in a folder I still