Page 4 of Triple Play

I blink. He’s always been vague about his job. What kind of career has in-house barbers? I have a list of running guesses that I sometimes ask him about: stockbroker, competitive baker, world’s buffest librarian. “Are you an Olympic weightlifter?” I tease.

He laughs and shakes his head.

“Heir to a maple syrup fortune?”

Another laugh. “I wish. The only thing I have is the farm.” His fingers stroke the ends of my hair—I usually hate when guys do that, because it’s sometimes a prelude to trying to shove my face in their crotch. But there are customer rules and there are John rules, and he doesn’t try anything else.

He withdraws his hand, then digs into his pocket, pulling out his phone. “I brought you pictures.”

Photos and flowers. Almost too good to be true. “Show me.” I settle myself even closer.

He scrolls through his photo reel: pictures of his family’s dairy farm in Vermont. It’s June, the farm green and lush, the cows munching on the rolling hills. “My sister got a new dog.” He pulls up a picture of a shepherd dog asleep in a pasture, its belly up to the morning sunshine. “We’re still working on his herding skills.”

We. What he says each time about the farm. We visited the sugar shack in spring when the sap finally started running. We took a course on cow acupressure as part of our organic farm certification.

“Here, I had to show you this one—” He pulls up another picture, the puff of steam from a cow’s nose in the early morning cold.

“Did you save this just for me?” I tease.

He blinks—he has eyelashes as thick as the rest of him, surrounding forest-green eyes. “Yes.” As if it’s obvious. He toggles something on his phone until the name of the album appears. Farm pics for Melody.

Something in my chest constricts. This isn’t real, even if the glow that’s settled somewhere below my sternum disagrees. “You must really love that farm.”

“I do,” he says, simply.

Why’d you leave it if you love it so much?

But I know the answer, at least broadly: you can love a place and still leave it.

It occurs to me that this is the last time he’ll come around with pictures. Something about that makes me sad—that I’m losing more than a loyal customer. “Thank you for showing me these.”

“Thank you for wanting to see ’em,” he says. “My ex wasn’t that interested.”

“She not a farm girl?” I ask, though it’s not like I’m one either—I grew up in Boston and the farthest I’ve made it to the country is here in Worcester.

John shifts on the bench. “They, uh, weren’t a big a fan of being out in the middle of nowhere.”

So not a girlfriend. John’s looking at me as if he’s expecting me to react—to say something or ignore that he said they and not she, which is itself a reaction. “Half the girls here are dating the other half the girls,” I say and get the boom of his laughter.

“You’re not dating anyone, right?” he asks.

I’m not. Even if that doesn’t feel like a hundred percent the truth. So I don’t answer, just swing my legs onto either side of his lap. He laughs and grips my waist. Technically, it’s against the no touching rule, but technically I’m the one who enforces the no touching rule. His palms are work-callused, his hands big enough to span most of my back. Facing him, the world is just the two of us.

“You want to pick out music?” I ask.

“Would I have to move?”

“Yes.”

He pulls me to him. “Then absolutely not.”

So I laugh and grind to whatever’s been piped in, music with heavy bass and ignorable lyrics. Less ignorable is the sweep of his hands up my sides.

Most nights, it’s easy to remember that this is a job. That nothing that gets said or done here is real. Except for the tree-trunk strength of his thighs under mine, the gap between his shirt buttons revealing glimpses of his chest. Except for the way he’s breathing in my ear, the occasional brush of his stubble against my shoulder, my neck. Sometimes glancing contact happens—lips meet skin and I remind customers they’re paying for a dance and nothing other than a dance.

Now his mouth narrowly misses my ear. Kiss me. I shove that thought away. He isn’t mine. I don’t know if he has a partner or a wife or five other dancers he sees on the nights he’s not here. But, for the briefest second, I can pretend.

What I can’t pretend is that he isn’t hard in his pants, a bulge that digs into my ass. “That all for me?” I whisper.

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