In Summertime Saga

The kitchen was clean when I got home from school and that was wrong.

Not clean like Debbie had tidied up after dinner. Clean like someone had taken everything off the counters, scrubbed behind the toaster, wiped the backsplash tile by tile, and put it all back in a slightly different order. Coffee maker on the wrong side. Fruit bowl moved. The dish soap was a new bottle, green instead of yellow, sitting in a little ceramic dish that hadn't been there this morning.

Debbie cleaned like this when she couldn't fix the thing she actually wanted to fix. I'd noticed it on Day 4 after the first Russian visit. The whole downstairs had smelled like lemon Pledge and she'd reorganized the pantry alphabetically and she'd been smiling and I didn't buy it.

Today the bathroom was done too. I'd used it after school and the grout between the tiles was whiter than the tiles themselves. The towels were refolded. There was a new bathmat, still stiff. She'd been on her knees scrubbing a bathroom floor because the mortgage was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and scrubbing was free.

I dropped my bag in my room, changed my shirt, and went downstairs. Jenny was out. Tuesday night was a thing with Jane, I think, or a shoot. The house had the quiet it only got when it was just me and Debbie and neither of us was doing anything loud.

I found her on the living room couch.

She was sitting with her feet tucked under her, bathrobe on, eyes closed, one hand on the back of her own neck. Rubbing. Her thumb pressed into the muscle below her skull and her fingers worked the side and her mouth was tight. The TV was on but the volume was low. A home renovation show. Some couple tearing out a kitchen island. Debbie wasn't watching.

"Hey."

She opened her eyes. "Hi, sweetie. I didn't hear you come in." She dropped her hand from her neck like I'd caught her doing something. "There's leftover pasta in the fridge if you're hungry."

"I ate at Tony's." I sat down on the other end of the couch. "You okay?"

"Fine. Just a long day." She stretched her neck to one side and it popped. "I did the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen and the living room baseboards. And the windows in Jenny's room, but don't tell her I went in there. I didn't look at anything."

"You did all that today?"

"It needed doing."

It didn't need doing. The kitchen had been fine. The bathroom had been fine. Jenny's windows hadn't been cleaned since I'd arrived and nobody had cared. Debbie had spent eight hours cleaning a house that was already clean because sitting still meant thinking and thinking meant the number.

She rubbed her neck again. Winced.

In the game, this was later. Much later. The massage came after the lawn mowing and the mall errand and half a dozen steps I was skipping because I already knew where the road went and I didn't need the scenic route. The game MC would bumble into this. Trip over it. Debbie would ask him, or he'd stumble into the right dialogue option. I'd given a hundred massages in my past life, to women whose last names I never learned, and every one of them had started with a woman rubbing her own neck because nobody else was going to do it.

"Sit on the floor," I said.

She looked at me. "What?"

"Turn around and sit on the floor. Back against the couch."

"Arthur, you don't have to-"

"You scrubbed grout for eight hours. Sit down."

She hesitated. Looked at me, looked at the floor, looked at the TV where the couple had decided to keep the island. Then she slid off the couch and sat on the carpet between my knees with her back to me. The bathrobe pooled around her on the floor. Her hair was down and it smelled like shampoo and underneath that, a chemical trace, the cleaning stuff she'd been using all day.

I put my hands on her shoulders.

She was tight. The muscles along the tops of her shoulders were rigid, knotted, holding hours of tension from the same motion. I pressed my thumbs into the meat of her shoulders, on either side of her spine, and found the first knot.

"Oh," she said.

I worked it. Slow pressure, firm enough to sink in instead of sitting on top. I'd learned this from a woman in my building in the old life who was a massage therapist on weekdays and a terrible cook on weekends. She'd traded me lessons for meals and I'd gotten the better end of the deal because I couldn't cook either but I could learn to use my hands. The thumbs do the work. The fingers guide. You don't push into a knot, you push through it, slow enough that the muscle has time to give up instead of fighting back.

Debbie's shoulders dropped two inches.

"Oh god." Lower. Looser. "Oh, that's- how are you doing that?"

"Breathe."

She breathed. In through her nose, out through her mouth. I moved my thumbs outward along her shoulders toward the deltoid, pressing into the ridge where the muscle bunched and held, and she made a sound I hadn't heard from her before. Low. From the back of her throat.

My hands were bigger than they used to be. In my past life I'd had a man's hands on a man's body and the proportions matched. Now I was eighteen and my hands were still catching up to the gym work, but the technique was the same. You find where she's holding and you convince her to let go.

I worked down her spine. My thumbs pressed on either side of the vertebrae, into the muscles that run parallel. She dropped her head forward and her hair fell over her face and her breathing slowed. The tension released in layers. Upper back first. Then the middle, between the shoulder blades, where everything bunches when you're bent over a bathtub with a scrub brush. A low sound came out of her on that one, quiet, from the back of her throat. A sound she probably didn't know she was making, or did know and couldn't stop.

The bathrobe slipped off her left shoulder.

The strap of her bra. White. Plain. The skin of her shoulder was smooth and faintly freckled and the strap cut a line across it and the fabric of the robe hung from the crook of her elbow. She didn't fix it.

I didn't stop.

My thumbs moved lower. The lumbar. Just above the belt of the robe. My fingers wrapped around her sides and the pads of my palms rested on the curve above her hips and I pressed in and worked the muscles there and her back arched forward, just slightly, just enough that the front of the robe went loose and down the collar was the top of her chest. The swell where her bra started. She was leaning back against my shins and the weight of her was warm through my jeans.

She made the sound again. Longer this time. Her breath caught in the middle of it and her fingers curled into the carpet on either side of her thighs.

I'd done this before. The massage that turns into more. The hands that are helping and then aren't. I'd run this a hundred times in my past life and my hands knew the timing and the pressure and exactly where to linger.

Debbie wasn't those women.

She was in a bathrobe on her living room floor because she'd spent eight hours trying to scrub two hundred and fifty thousand dollars off her life and her back hurt and she'd asked nobody for help because she didn't ask for help. She'd made me breakfast every morning since I'd woken up here. Her eggs were good and her coffee was strong and she left the porch light on when I was out late.

And she was making sounds on my hands that she didn't make for anyone else in this house.

I pressed my thumbs into the muscles just above her hipbones and she shuddered. A full-body thing. Her shoulder blades drew together and her head dropped further and her breath came out shaking and it came through my legs where her back pressed against them.

I stopped.

Pulled my hands away. Rested them on my own knees.

"Better?"

She didn't move for a second. Just sat there on the floor between my legs with her head down and her hair over her face and her breathing uneven. Then she turned her head. Just enough to look at me over the shoulder where the robe had slipped.

Her face was flushed. Cheeks and neck and down past the loose collar of the robe. Her eyes were slightly glassy and her lips were parted and she was looking at me like she'd forgotten who I was for a second and was just now remembering.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

Same question Jenny had asked me two weeks ago in her bedroom after I touched her like I knew what I was doing. Second woman asking me the same question in the same house.

"YouTube," I said.

She laughed. Small. Breathy. She pulled the robe back up over her shoulder and held it there with her hand.

"Thank you, sweetie." She stood up. Slow. Her knees popped and she steadied herself on the arm of the couch and she didn't look at me when she said "I should get to bed. Early morning tomorrow."

"Night, Debbie."

"Goodnight, honey."

She walked to the hallway. The bathrobe swayed when she moved and it hung loose on her frame and her bare feet were quiet on the hardwood. She went to the stairs and up and I listened to each step creak until she reached the landing and the upstairs hallway and her bedroom door opened and closed.

The lock clicked. Small sound. A bolt turning.

I sat on the couch. The renovation show was still on. I watched it without seeing it. Turned it off after a while and the house went quiet and the kitchen light hummed in the silence.

I went upstairs.

The hallway was dark. Debbie's door was shut. No light under it. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and went to my room and lay on the bed with the light off.

Her room was on the other side of the wall. My headboard and hers were probably six feet apart with drywall between them.

I was almost asleep when I heard it.

A breath. Then another. Faster than sleeping. Faster than lying still. A rhythm that built and then stuttered and then built again. And then a sound, small and muffled and pressed into a pillow or the heel of her hand, the same sound she'd made when my thumbs hit the muscles between her shoulder blades but breathier. Wetter. A sound made in the dark with a locked door and nobody supposed to hear.

I lay in bed and I listened and I did not move.

She finished quietly. A catch in her breathing that held and then released in a long exhale that came through the wall like a sigh. Then the creak of the bed as she shifted. Then nothing.

I stared at the ceiling. My hands smelled like her shampoo.

I could've knocked on her door earlier. Before she locked it. I could've said the right thing and I knew the right thing because I'd said it to women with higher walls than hers, and the robe would've come off and the sounds she was making for herself in the dark she'd have been making for me.

Not yet.