Chapter 2: The Afternoon Shift Shuffle
The door to Room 112 clicked shut behind Marcus, a sound as final as a tomb sealing. Iris’s fingers were still hooked in his belt loops, her breath a shallow pant against his throat. In the dim light, her eyes were pits of want. He placed his hands on her bony shoulders, not pushing, just creating an inch of space.“Iris,” he whispered, his voice raw. “I can’t.Not here. Someone will—”
“The hall is empty until three,” she hissed, her grip tightening.“I timed it.”
Of course she had.They all did. This place ran on their whispered schedules, not the one posted on Gertie’s clipboard. Marcus felt a hysterical laugh bubble in his chest.He swallowed it down. He used the gentle-but-firm patient-handling technique from his training manual, rotating his body to guide hers back toward the center of the room. “Let’s get you to your chair. You shouldn’t be standing without your walker.”
She resisted, a surprising anchor of flesh and will. But the mention of the walker did it—introduced a sliver of reality, of infirmity.Her shoulders slumped. The desperate hunger in her face flickered, replaced by a weary annoyance. He guided her to the plush armchair by the window, its crocheted afghan a riot of faded colors. She sank into it, suddenly looking every one of her eighty-seven years.
“You’re a tease, Marcus Webb,” she muttered, turning her face toward the closed curtains. “A cruel little tease.”
“I’m just doing my job,” he said, the words tasting like ash. He fumbled for the remote on the side table and clicked on the small television.A game show audience erupted in synthetic cheers. “There.I’ll check on you later.”
He fled.
The hallway was indeed empty, a long expanse of waxed linoleum stretching under the hum of fluorescent lights. His own breathing sounded too loud. He could still feel the cool, insistent pressure of her lips, the taste of her on his tongue.He needed soap.Water. A minute to just be a person, not a… a resource.
The staff bathroom was a small, clinical space at the junction of Wing A and B. It was his sanctuary, the one place with a lock. He pushed inside, the door sighing shut behind him.He engaged the deadbolt with a solid, satisfying thunk. For a moment, he just leaned his forehead against the cool metal of the door, eyes closed. The quiet was a physical relief.
He moved to the sink, glancing at his reflection in the stainless steel mirror bolted to the wall. His hair was mussed, his face pale, a smudge of Iris’s coral lipstick at the corner of his mouth.He looked haunted. He turned on the tap, the water rushing loud in the small room, and cupped his hands under the stream. He splashed his face once, twice, the chill shocking him back into his body. He grabbed a brown paper towel, rough and utilitarian, and scrubbed at his mouth until the skin felt raw and clean.That’s when he heard it.A faint, rhythmic scraping outside the door. Followed by a giggle, muffled but unmistakable.His blood went cold.
The knob rattled softly.Then a knock, light and playful.Tap-tap-tap-tap.
“Marcus, honey?You in there?” It was Doreen’s voice, sweet as pie.
“We know you are, sugarplum.” That was Florence, her tone smoky and knowing.
“Open up, dear.We’ve brought you a little present.” Beatrice. Always the one to get to the point.He stood frozen, the damp paper towel crumpled in his fist. They’d followed him.Of course they had. They had a network, a telegraph of winks and whispers that routed around his every attempt at solitude.The lock was his only defense. He remained silent, hoping they’d think the room empty, that the running water was just a leaky pipe.
The scraping came again.He looked down. A piece of paper, thin and white, was being slid across the tiles from under the door.It stopped just by his foot. He didn’t want to look.He looked.It was a Polaroid, faded and creased. A much younger Doreen, topless on a rumpled bed, grinning at the camera with a devilish gleam in eyes that were still the same bright, demanding blue. On the back, in shaky cursive: A preview.The lock clicked.Not from his side.From the outside. A master key, just like the one on his own wrist, slotted home and turned.
He had a half-second of pure, disbelieving panic before the door swung inward.
They filled the doorway, a trio of them propped on walkers, their faces alight with victorious glee. Doreen dangled the master key—Gertie’s spare, he realized with a sinking heart—from a gnarled finger.“Found it,” she chirped.
They shuffled in, a slow, inexorable invasion. Florence closed the door behind them and flipped the little hook-and-eye latch, a flimsy secondary lock that now felt like a prison bar. The bathroom, which had seemed a refuge moments before, shrank around him. The air, once cool, grew warm and close, carrying the dense, floral scent of their talcum powder and beneath it, a riper, muskier note.
“Now,” Beatrice said, leaning her walker against the wall with a clatter.“We saw you got… distracted earlier. We felt left out.”
Marcus backed up until the edge of the cold porcelain sink dug into his lower back.“Ladies, please. This isn’t… we can’t…”
“Hush, now,” Doreen cooed, advancing.Her movements were not slow or frail.They were deliberate, predatory. Her hands went to the hem of her lavender housedress. In one fluid motion, she hiked it up around her waist, revealing pale, veined thighs and a thatch of thin, grey hair. The smell intensified, a sweet, heavy odor of stale urine and a pungent, tangy arousal that was shockingly familiar. It was the smell of a woman, just amplified, concentrated by age and a desperate, dammed-up hunger.
Florence and Beatrice followed suit, fabrics rustling as they bunched dresses around their waists, a grotesque unveiling. Their bodies were landscapes of time—sagging bellies, drooping breasts barely contained by functional bras, skin mapped with thin purple lines.“See something you like?” Florence whispered, her voice thick.
Marcus’s mind short-circuited. Pity, revulsion, a bizarre and unwanted flicker of desire, and sheer, overwhelming panic collided in his gut.He was cornered. There was no gentle guidance to an armchair here.Beatrice reached him first. Her hands, strong from decades of knitting and gardening, found his belt.He didn’t fight her. A part of him had detached, floating near the ceiling, watching this tall, lanky young man be undressed by three octogenarians in a staff bathroom.His chinos pooled at his ankles. Doreen knelt with a soft grunt, her knees popping audibly on the tile. She took him into her mouth without ceremony.It was not skilled or even particularly pleasurable; it was wet and urgent and deeply functional.
Florence pressed against his side, her dry lips on his neck, her tongue, rough as a cat’s, darting into his ear.The sensation made him flinch. “Such a good boy,” she breathed, her dentures clicking. “Letting us have our turn.”
Beatrice guided his hand to the damp, hot juncture of her own body. Her flesh was soft, yielding.“Feel that?” she gasped.“That’s for you. All for you.”
Doreen pulled back with a gasp, a string of saliva connecting her lip to him. “My turn up top,” she declared. She gripped the sink on either side of his hips and, with a startling agility, hoisted herself up.Her weight was sudden and considerable. He had to grab her hips to keep them both from toppling. She sank down onto him with a low, guttural cry of triumph.
The world narrowed to the feel of her, hot and impossibly tight, the sight of her head thrown back in ecstasy, the sound of Florence whispering filth in his ear, and Beatrice’s fingers working between her own legs as she watched, her breath coming in sharp, excited hitches. The room filled with their sounds: wet slaps of flesh, low moans that echoed off the tile, the soft, gassy escapes of air from their bodies as they moved.The air grew thick, humid, stinking of sex and old skin and cheap perfume.
It was a mechanical transaction. Doreen rode him with a fierce, grinding rhythm until her cries peaked and she shuddered, clutching at his shoulders. Beatrice was there instantly, guiding the limp Doreen off and taking her place, already so slick his entry was a single, shocking plunge. She moved faster, a frantic, chasing rhythm, her face a rigid mask of concentration until it dissolved into a soft, keening wail.Marcus felt it building again, that traitorous response. His body, divorced from his mind, was answering their crude call. Florence was there, turning his face to hers, kissing him deeply, her tongue plunging past his lips as Beatrice clenched around him. The taste of Florence—of mint, of stale coffee, of something deeply and intimately elderly—was the trigger.
He came inside Beatrice with a helpless, stifled groan, his hips jerking forward of their own accord.She milked him dry, sighing with profound satisfaction. When he finally slipped out of her, she wobbled on her feet, steadying herself on Beatrice’s walker.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing, the drip of the faucet. Then, with slow, deliberate movements, they smoothed their dresses back down. They became old women again, slightly flushed, adjusting their hair. Beatrice used a wad of toilet paper to dab between her legs, then flushed it away.Doreen leaned in, patted his sweaty cheek. “You’re a dear,” she said, her voice perfectly normal, as if commenting on the weather.
Florence handed him his pants.“Best get cleaned up, love. Gertie does rounds at three-thirty.”
And just like that, they unlocked the door, collected their walkers, and shuffled out into the hallway, leaving him alone amidst the lingering, ripe smell of their need.
He slid down the cabinet onto the cold floor, his limbs useless. The Polaroid of young Doreen stared up at him from the tiles.He picked it up, the image slick under his thumb. The gleam in her eyes was exactly the same. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.So he did neither. He just sat there, listening to the retreating click-clack of walker wheels fading down the hall, knowing it was only a matter of time before they circled back.