Form 11-B, Kissing Optional

Training Camera 3 watched Niles set an event packet on the conference table.

“Both of you have made the Better Binder Challenge a personnel issue.”

“Rude,” Rufus said. “It was always an artistic issue.”

“The Gay Men’s Emergency-Contact Mixer needs booth leads. It is a speed-dating event for adult men, it begins Tuesday, and two volunteers have withdrawn after learning that speed-dating involves speaking to strangers.”

Merritt put down his cold mug. “You are assigning us to it?”

“I am assigning you one shared booth.” Niles rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You will demonstrate an emergency-contact system that people might use on an actual date. Consider it corrective action.”

Rufus held the back of his chair. “I have several questions, all of them insulting.”

“Save them for the mixer.”

The booth became Rufus’s dating relay by noon.

He made scenario cards from orange cardstock and arranged them in a looping course through the lobby: pick a card, discuss whom you would call, identify what information mattered, ring a desk bell, move on. The first card read: YOUR DATE HAS A DEAD PHONE, ONE FORMAL SHOE, AND NO IDEA WHICH FRIEND HAS HIS SPARE KEY.

Merritt read it twice.

“The shoe is immaterial.”

“It establishes stakes.”

“The spare key is useful. The shoe is theater.”

“People enjoy theater.”

“They enjoy not being stranded outside their apartment.”

Rufus watched him take out a red pen. “Do not make it boring.”

Merritt revised the card.

YOUR DATE IS LOCKED OUT, HAS LIMITED PHONE BATTERY, AND NEEDS TO CONTACT A TRUSTED PERSON WITH ACCESS TO HIS RESIDENCE.

Rufus stared at the new version. “You have turned a romantic calamity into a housing memorandum.”

“It now tells participants what an emergency contact can realistically do.”

That was irritatingly accurate. Rufus hated accuracy when it wore a cardigan and arrived after he had done the difficult part.

The next card involved a migraine at drag brunch, a medication list, and an older cousin who knew where the pharmacy card was kept. Merritt removed the phrase “under disco conditions,” then added a line about calling emergency services if symptoms became severe.

“You ruin charm with terrifying efficiency,” Rufus said.

“You provide charm with alarming indifference to procedure.”

“Procedure is merely charm that has given up.”

Merritt’s mouth shifted, almost conceding the point. “That is not how anything works.”

At six-forty, their seating chart failed with equal commitment.

Rufus had replaced Merritt’s table numbers with song titles because Table Seven sounded too much like an audit. Merritt had replaced the song titles with participant codes because “It’s Raining Men” was not a viable locating system. Their files had synchronized badly, printing each code over each title in three colors and one unexplained floral border.

Niles looked at the page for a long time.

Then he handed every arriving man a blank name tent and told them to select any open seat.

“What about us?” Rufus asked.

“You two will run the relay as the paired demonstration.” Niles pointed to the small table beneath Training Camera 3. “Every round.”

Crispin sat at the timing console with one hand around the bell, enjoying himself with merciless satisfaction.

Rufus took the chair facing Merritt. Merritt set the first card between them and folded his hands beside it.

The bell rang.

Rufus read aloud. “When something goes wrong, who do you call?”

Crispin leaned toward the microphone. “Try not to make it a joke, Bell.”

Rufus looked at the card, then at Merritt, who had arranged his face into official calm. That was a trick too, Rufus realized: people saw a cardigan and assumed its occupant had never needed rescuing.

“I call Crispin,” he said. “He has keys to rooms that should be theoretical, and he enjoys my failures more than friendship permits.”

“Accurate,” Crispin said through the microphone.

Merritt’s pen moved across the card. “Why him?”

The obvious answer was that Crispin would arrive with a flashlight, a toolkit, and a critique of Rufus’s shoes. The less convenient answer sat beneath it. Rufus drummed two fingertips on the tabletop.

“He knows the ridiculous parts are usually delivery systems. People read an exit route if there’s a cartoon pigeon in a hard hat.”

“No pigeon,” Merritt said.

“Noted.”

“But the point is sound.” He wrote it down with irritating care. “You use comedy to direct attention.”

Rufus felt briefly stripped of his usual props. “Don’t say it like you’ve solved me.”

“I have not. I have read one card.”

“Very invasive card.”

The bell rang. Men shifted stations. At Table Song Title/Participant Code Seven, a man in a navy shirt told his date that his emergency contact was his ex-boyfriend because nobody else knew the password to the building laundry room. His date said that was perhaps not ideal and asked if he wanted coffee after the event.

Rufus had built a joke relay. It had started producing modest acts of courage. Rude, frankly.

The next card read: WHAT WOULD YOU WANT A STRANGER TO KNOW BEFORE HE TRIES TO HELP?

Merritt read it without editing. Rufus watched his thumb press once at the edge of his mug, which Crispin had somehow supplied fresh and hot.

“My contact should know I have a medication list,” Merritt said. “My doctor. My building code. That I become unpleasant when I have a migraine.”

“You are unpleasant recreationally.”

“Thank you for your clinical observation.”

Rufus waited. Merritt’s attention stayed on the card.

“And that the lists are not an invitation to call me a filing cabinet.”

It landed quietly. Rufus saw the old joke he had made, all cheap shine and no care. He had thought Merritt enjoyed being the one who could correct a form, locate a key, prevent everyone from becoming a cautionary memo. Competence was not consent to be reduced to it.

“I thought the cardigan joke was welcome,” Rufus said.

“It is sometimes funny.”

“Devastating news.”

“I would prefer someone who understood that I make things precise because I do not want anybody stranded.”

The bell did not ring soon enough. Rufus could not put a little dancer on that sentence and escape.

“I understand,” he said. “More than I made it seem.”

Merritt placed the card face down. “I had gathered.”

At seven twenty-two, the Annex lights vanished.

Crispin’s timing console emitted a final offended beep. Then the fire doors unlocked with a mechanical clatter, and Niles’s voice arrived from the lobby through a megaphone.

“Scheduled blackout drill. Remain calm. Do not improvise.”

“That rules Rufus out,” Crispin called.

Niles appeared in the backup lighting, handed Merritt a flashlight, and pointed upstairs. “Roof-terrace stairwell. Confirm the kit is there. Thermos, blanket, camera. Then report back.”

“The camera?” Rufus said.

“Training audit.”

“Of course.”

They took the stairs through blue emergency light. The roof landing held an emergency blanket in foil, a dented thermos, and Training Camera 3 blinking from its bracket, aimed faithfully at a cinderblock wall.

“Excellent documentation,” Rufus said. “The wall has been very professional.”

Merritt tested the door. It clicked shut behind them, temporarily locked for the drill.

“Of course,” he said.

“Want the thermos?”

“Is this tea?”

“Hot water. There are sachets.” Rufus held up two. “An Annex romance novel begins exactly this way.”

Merritt took the black tea. Their hands met at the thermos handle. Neither withdrew at once.

Then Merritt said, “May I take your hand?”

Rufus had spent years converting sincerity into confetti before it could inconvenience him. Here was Merritt, asking as if the answer mattered more than momentum, his fingers open beside the emergency blanket.

“Yes,” Rufus said. “You may.”

Merritt closed his hand around Rufus’s. No flourish. He held on as though holding on had always belonged in the procedure.

“I see the effort,” Merritt said. “Behind the chaos.”

Rufus looked down at their hands, then back at him. “That is inconveniently well said.”

“I can revise it.”

“Don’t.”

Merritt lifted his free hand to Rufus’s cheek and waited.

“May I kiss you?”

Rufus laughed once, because the alternative was standing there exposed. “Yes, Merritt.”

Merritt kissed him. Careful at first, then less so when Rufus stepped close and caught the front of his cardigan. The thermos knocked lightly against the kit. Rufus tasted black tea and stopped trying to turn the moment into a performance.

The stairwell door opened.

Eudora stood on the landing with a flashlight under one arm and the neutral judging checklist under the other. She took in the cardigan, the emergency blanket, Rufus’s hand at Merritt’s shoulder.

She laughed once.

Then she backed out and shut the door, without apology.

“I will have to move municipalities,” Rufus said.

“You cannot. The contest remains active.”

“Then a new identity. Something dignified. Lionel Gazette.”

“You will require Form 4-C.”

“See, this is why I kissed you.”

Merritt considered that. “Field research.”

“For what field?”

“Adult communication under emergency conditions.”

“Very rigorous.”

The lock released with a click.