"Yes."
"Is it just a bathhouse?"
He smiled. "Cal. Look at me."
I looked at him.
"It is not," he said, "just a bathhouse."
"I knew it."
"It is a place where, for one weekend, you can stop being Calvin Reeve. Stop being a senior partner. Stop being on call. Stop being the man who answers emails in the bathroom. Stop being the man who has not been touched by another human being since your last breakup. You go there. You take a long bath. You get some good fucking dick from someone who simply wants to, and they'll be there too, I promise you, in considerablequantity. You could get a room there, sleep in a bed that’s not in your shoebox of an apartment. Hell, you could just fuck for two days straight if you need to. And on Sunday afternoon, you come back out, and you decide what kind of life you want to be living."
He paused.
"That's the prescription. Take the card. Don't take the card. Use it next month. Use it tonight. I don't care. But it's on loan, by the way, it’s mine and I want it back. So if you don't use it within thirty days I'm going to come over to your apartment and personally retrieve it and possibly slap you."
I held the card between my fingers and turned it slowly. The light moved across it.
“Does your wife know you go to this place?”
The question clearly caught him off guard. “She knows I’m bisexual and has given me an opportunity to explore that side of myself. However, she doesn’t know howoftenI explore it.”
“Huh.” I paused, turning the card over again. "Is there a catch to all this?"
"There's one thing."
"Of course there is."
"It's— " Hollis stopped, picked up his Manhattan, took a thoughtful sip, set it back down. "Look. You know how the world is?"
"I'm aware of how the world is."
"And you know there are creatures around. Out in the open now. Going to the same coffee shops as the rest of us."
"Hollis. I work with two of them. Devon's boyfriend is a centaur."
"Right. Right. So, what I want you to understand is that the bathhouse is a place where that's morepresentthan other places. Some of the company there is human. Some isn't. And they don’t hide themselves at all. That's part of how the bathhouse operates. And one of the perks if I’m being honest."
I sat with that for a second.
"You're saying there are monsters there," I said.
"I'm saying," he said, "that there arepeoplethere. Some of them are extremely interesting people with extremly interesting parts. Some of whom have horns. And hooves. And very wonderfully shaped cocks. And that for a like you that hasn’t gotten laid in probably two years, being fucked silly by something different than you expect might be exactly the kind of thing that gets you back on your feet. Metaphorically."
"Metaphorically."
"And also literally, possibly, depending on what kind of weekend you have."
I laughed again. Twice in one night. That was probably a record for the year. Then I looked at the card. I looked at Hollis. And I looked back at the card.
I put it in my wallet.
"There he is," Hollis said quietly. "There's my friend."
We had another drink. We talked, for the first time in months, about something other than work. Apparently his daughter was obsessed with horses now, his wife had found a new pottery hobby, and there was a documentary about coral reefs he'd seen that he thought I would like. I sat across from him and felt, very faintly, like the back half of my brain was starting to come back online. Just a flicker. Just enough to notice.
When we hugged on the sidewalk outside the bar, he held on a second longer than necessary, and whispered into my ear, "Thirty days, Cal. I mean it."
