Unmarked Postscript

Seat 27 came to me on a square of cream card, though, at noon on the Friday in question, it existed only as a blank square beside my name and a small domestic betrayal in sans-serif type.

Years later, I kept the five numbered cards in the back of my desk drawer, beneath invoices and a charger with no surviving device. Each held one rule from the weekend Roshni Bhatt had called an adult-only bachelorette expedition and I had called a networking emergency, because I had a professional instinct for improving bad language before it became dangerous. Card One said NO DECLARATIONS. At thirty-three, I had earned a living disarming other people’s catastrophes: deleting adjectives from apology statements, directing actors away from nightclub entrances, explaining to executives why a two-word correction could be cheaper than a lawsuit. I had not, apparently, learned how to handle Nola Pryce.

Nola, fifty-seven, lived across our fourth-floor landing and treated my solitude as a municipal pothole requiring a petition. Her seating chart was taped beside the elevator, under a flyer for an adult beginner pottery class and above an overdue notice for someone’s missing casserole dish. Roshni, thirty-four and formerly my colleague at the creative office, had organized the charter-bus loop to retrieve bachelorettes from every corner of Nashville before carrying us toward boots, records, cocktails, and whatever else could be made more festive by a clipboard. Nola had printed the itinerary on rose-colored paper, then added names in blue ink, then placed a vacant plus-one alongside MUNEER SANTOS as if loneliness were an administrative omission.

“Artful,” I said.

Nola opened her door wearing an apron striped with lemons. “I left room for possibility.”

“You left room for a person who does not exist.”

“Details,” she said. “My child is thirty-one. I know how hard it is to coordinate adults. You simply need to bring somebody charming who owns a jacket.”

I was still considering whether setting the chart on fire would count as an overreaction when the stairwell door released Holland Puckett into the hall. They were thirty-five, dressed in charcoal trousers and a white T-shirt, their dark curls making a minor but sustained argument against gravity. They carried a clipboard. Holland with a clipboard was like a peacock holding a subpoena: improbable, radiant, and almost certainly bad news.

“Please tell me you have a date,” Nola said at once.

Holland looked from the paper to me. “Do you require one?”

“I require a trapdoor,” I said.

They handed me the clipboard. At the top, in Holland’s slanted handwriting, was QUEER ROM-COM PREMIERE: RISKS AND REMEDIES. Beneath it: old rumor cycle, intrusive questions about their dating life, photographer ambushes, one tasteful public partner narrative if mutually beneficial.

“You made a contingency plan for having a boyfriend—” Nola began.

“Partner,” Holland and I said together.

Nola beamed as though she had invented grammar.

Holland had a new film premiering in six weeks, the sort of queer romantic comedy that promised rain-soaked streets, excellent coats, and a final airport dash timed by committee. A glossy profile had recently described them as “famously elusive,” which was publicist language for someone who had declined to produce a consumable private life. I managed reputations; Holland supplied more manageable facts. A devoted partner on a friendly bachelorette weekend would generate the agreeable pictures their studio wanted without converting their entire existence into a press kit.

“For one weekend,” I said.

“Friday through Sunday,” Holland said. “No declarations.”

“Not even fake ones.”

“Especially fake ones.” Their face softened in a way I pretended not to record. “No kissing unless both of us ask first.”

“No sleeping together.”

“Either person can stop the performance, for any reason.” They lifted a pen. “No appeal, no cross-examination, no devastating monologue in a parking garage.”

Nola stepped back into her apartment. “I am choosing to hear only the first half of that.”

The arrangement was sensible. It had endpoints, clauses, optical benefits. It also had Holland standing close enough that I could recognize their laundry detergent, something crisp and ordinary that made the idea of a weekend together feel less like strategy and more like standing too near an open flame.

“Seat twenty-seven?” I asked.

“On the bus?”

“Your place card. Nola has paired the blank with me.”

Holland took the pen from my hand, crossed out PLUS-ONE, and wrote HOLLAND PUCKETT in careful capitals before I could perform the usual useful trick of making myself unavailable. Then they peeled the cream card from the chart and slipped it into their pocket.

“Booked,” they said.

Card One, I later learned, did not prevent declarations. It merely gave them a sharper edge.

À suivre.

Card Two said ASK CLEARLY, a rule that sounded as though it belonged on a workplace poster beside instructions for lifting boxes and reporting suspicious stains. Holland made it feel less bureaucratic by looking pleased whenever I enforced it.

The charter bus collected Roshni’s chosen adults in loops across Nashville: eleven overnight bags, three garment bags, one portable speaker, and Roshni herself moving through the aisle with a rose-gold clipboard. Seat 27 waited near the rear, beside a window already decorated with rain.

“Do you want to rehearse?” Holland asked after our second pickup.

“That is technically a question,” I said.

They considered this. “May I put my hand at your waist, over your shirt, until the next red light?”

“Yes,” I said. “If the driver finds a pothole, I reserve the right to blame your choreography.”

“Fair.”

Their palm settled at my side with no theatrical flourish. It should have been ordinary, no more consequential than a seat belt. Instead, the heat of another person traveled through my shirt and rearranged several reliable thoughts. Holland’s hand lifted the instant the light changed.

“No breach,” they said.

“I was not auditing you.”

“You audit weather forecasts.”

“Only when they threaten an outdoor premiere.”

Holland laughed, and I had to look out at the wet storefronts sliding past because our usual banter had become less useful. It had always been a dependable ladder. Body heat, I discovered, could remove several rungs.

At the next stop, Roshni appeared between the seats with her phone held high. “Road-trip pictures. Everyone look as if you have made excellent decisions.”

Holland turned toward me. “May I kiss your forehead for the photo?”

“Your marketing language is alarming.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes. One kiss. No improvised poetry.”

Their mouth touched the center of my forehead for a brief, careful second. Nothing in it was dramatic. That was perhaps the trouble. It had the neat certainty of a signature on a document I had not read closely enough.

Roshni made a delighted noise. “Oh, disgusting. Keep doing exactly that.”

Our first activity was a record-pressing demonstration in a converted warehouse, where an instructor explained vinyl pellets, heated molds, and the enduring importance of not placing one’s hand near machinery. Roshni arranged us into teams as if romance were an additional safety protocol.

When it was our turn at the press, Holland stood at my shoulder.

“May I hold your waist while you lower the lever?” they asked. “Over your shirt.”

“Yes,” I said. “If I ruin the record, I will blame you publicly.”

“Then we will call it experimental.”

Their hand arrived precisely where promised. I lowered the lever. A black record emerged several minutes later, warm from the press and faintly smelling of machinery. I was not paying much attention to it. I was waiting for Holland to ask something else.

Roshni demanded another round of photographs before anyone could escape. Holland and I sat on a low velvet bench beneath a mural of enormous daisies.

“May I rest my hand on your thigh?” they asked. “Above your knee, over your trousers, until Roshni finishes?”

“How many photographs?”

“Three, unless she develops a new artistic conviction.”

“Three,” I said. “Yes.”

Their palm settled exactly where they had specified. It was camera-friendly, modest, entirely defensible. My body responded to this administrative fact with the composure of a dropped tray.

“Lovely,” Roshni said, taking far more than three photographs. “You two are boringly convincing.”

“That was not in the agreement,” I told her.

Holland’s hand left my thigh as soon as the phone lowered. The absence of it seemed unnecessarily loud.

Back on the bus, rain threaded down the window in silver lanes. Holland sat close enough that our shoulders nearly met, waiting rather than assuming. I found I was not merely anticipating the next touch.

I was anticipating the question before it.

Continuará.

Card Three said DO NOT INVENT A PAST. I had added it myself, because fabricated anecdotes were like loose sequins: pretty at first, then somehow inside every shoe you owned.

Saturday’s print-studio scavenger hunt took place among drying posters, lead-type drawers, and presses old enough to disapprove of modern posture. Our first clue required identifying a typeface from a postage-stamp sample.

“Caslon,” I said.

Holland looked at the card. “They have been intolerable about Caslon since we met.”