Chapter 2: The First Night Alone
The house settled into its night noises the way an old dog settles onto a rug, slowly, then all at once. Michael had been asleep before his head fully found the pillow, and within a minute the snore had started, that wet, grinding rasp that Mia had learned to build her whole nights around. It filled the bedroom now, filled the dark, and she lay on her back beside it with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling where the moonlight from the window laid a long pale bar across the plaster.
Her body would not let her rest. That was the thing. Every time she closed her eyes the ache came back to the surface, dull and deep and specific, radiating up from between her legs, where she was still raw from the drive. Her thighs would not sit still. When she shifted them against the sheets, the friction sent a bright thread of feeling up into her belly, and she had to bite down on nothing, on her own breath, to keep from making a sound beside her sleeping husband.
Get settled, RJ had said. Wait for me.
The words kept playing behind her eyelids in that low voice, that voice that had no business coming out of an eighteen-year-old girl, calm as a person who already owned the thing she was asking for. Mia had not answered. She had stood in the dorm corridor with her mouth open like a fool while her daughter walked back into the room and the door clicked shut, and then Michael had come back from parking the van and asked her what was wrong with her face, and she had said nothing, sun, it's nothing, it's the glare.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand. The screen lit her face a cold blue, and Michael's snoring hitched and then went on.
The message had been sitting there for hours. She had not opened it in the van, not with Michael driving, not with the last of her nerve frayed down to a thread. Now she touched the little preview and the photo bloomed across the screen.
It was a mirror shot. RJ's dorm room, the bare walls behind her, boxes still stacked against the desk, and RJ standing square in front of the long mirror with her phone held at chest height and her flannel shirt hanging open, nothing under it, the hard flat planes of her stomach and the small dark buds of her nipples half caught in the shadow of the open shirt. And beneath that, buckled low across her hips, black and gleaming in the bathroom light, the strap-on.
Mia's thumb hovered. She could not stop looking at it. The thing had been inside her twice that day, had stretched her open on the passenger seat of her own family's van while her husband hummed along to classic rock three feet away, and here it was again, polished and idle and waiting at the hips of the girl who owned it. Thinking about you, the caption read.
The ache between Mia's legs pulsed in answer, hard and hot, and she pressed her thighs together under the sheet and made a small sound and hated herself for it.
Michael rolled onto his side. The snoring changed pitch. Mia froze with the phone against her chest and lay perfectly still, counting her husband's breaths, and when they evened back out into the long regular rasp she let the breath she was holding go and looked at the photo again.
She was a forty-four-year-old woman. She had a silver ring on her finger and a marriage and a house and a daughter, and the daughter had put her on her back in a moving van and pulled an orgasm out of her with her hand without even breathing hard, and then she had knelt in a truck stop bathroom and done worse, done things to Mia's body that Mia had stopped asking anyone for a decade ago, and the whole time RJ had watched her with those steady dark eyes of hers, patient, as if Mia were a problem she had already solved and was simply waiting on the world to catch up.
Mia slid her hand down her own stomach under the sheet. She told herself she was only checking, only feeling out the soreness, and that was a lie she let herself have for about three seconds before her fingers slid lower and found herself slick and swollen and hot to the touch.
She pressed the heel of her hand down flat against her cunt and her hips lifted off the mattress an inch and her whole body clenched around the pressure, and she had to turn her face into the pillow to smother the noise that came out of her throat. The fabric smelled of her own hair and her own dried sweat from the drive. She dragged her hand in one slow circle, two, and the soreness and the pleasure ran into each other until she could not tell which was which, and she thought of RJ's thumb on her and RJ's breath on her neck in the van and RJ's mouth down between her legs on the cold tile of that bathroom, and it built fast, embarrassingly fast, the way it had all day, her body trained to RJ's rhythm in the space of a single afternoon, and she fucked herself with two fingers in her own bed beside her sleeping husband with the photo still glowing by her ear, the strap-on buckled at RJ's hips, and came with her teeth buried in the pillow and her ring hand fisted in the sheets, silent, silent, riding it down until her thighs stopped shaking.
When it was over she lay there panting into the pillow and felt the shame arrive, late and pale, the way it always did, and it did nothing, less than nothing, because the ache was already coming back, already building up behind the quiet again like water behind a weir.
She turned her head and looked at the photo one more time. Then she saved it. All that and she saved it, thumb moving on its own, before she could think about it, and there it was, in her camera roll, between a picture of the dog and a screenshot of a grocery list.
She set the phone face down on the nightstand and lay in the dark and listened to Michael snore. The moonlight had moved across the ceiling. The whole house was quiet. She could hear the refrigerator click on downstairs, and the slow tick of the clock in the hallway, and under all of it, running like a low current through the room, the simple fact of it, the plain arithmetic: her daughter was coming back for her, and Mia was going to wait, and what that made her was a question she was not going to answer tonight.
Rain began somewhere after midnight. It came in soft and steady off the coast, tapping at the window glass, and the drumming of it covered the small sounds she made the second time she reached for the phone.
The rain stopped before dawn and left the morning gray and clean and smelling of wet asphalt. Mia got up with Michael, made the coffee, stood at the kitchen window with her hands wrapped around the mug, and told herself, in a voice that sounded a great deal like her own, that yesterday had been a long drive and a strange day and that people did strange things when they were tired. She wore the cream blouse and the dark skirt and sat beside her husband in the third pew from the back of the church the way she had every Sunday for nineteen years, and she kept her eyes on the altar and her ring on her finger and her knees pressed together and she did not think about the photo in her phone. She was almost good at it.
Then the service ended and the aisle filled with the usual slow shuffling surge toward the doors and the coffee urn in the fellowship hall, and through the crowd, bright as a struck match, came the blonde.
Ponytail high, sunglasses pushed up onto her head, a white cardigan over a dress that cost more than Mia's whole skirt and blouse together. She was twenty-five and she moved like a woman who had never once wondered whether a room wanted her in it. She saw Mia across the narthex and her whole face opened up, and she came through the crowd fast, cutting between the deacons, almost running.
"Mrs. Kessler. Hi. Hi."
"Hello, honey." Mia had met her twice. Once at the house, once outside the diner. "How are you?"
"Good. So good." The girl took Mia's hand in both of hers and squeezed, and her skin was cool and her grip was far too familiar, and she was grinning so wide her eyes had gone into happy little slits. "I just had to come find you. I couldn't wait till tonight."
"Till tonight?"
"She called me." The blonde let go of Mia's hand and clasped her own together in front of her chest like a girl at a birthday party. "Last night. Late. Like, one in the morning late. She never does that, she's so locked down about her sleep, and she called me and just, like, talked to me for an hour."
Mia felt the floor of the church tilt very slightly under her heels. "She did."
"An hour, Mrs. Kessler." The smile got wider. "I mean, we barely talked about anything? That's the thing. She just wanted to talk. She kept saying my name and asking me what I was doing and whether I was in bed yet, and her voice was all low and slow, and I could hear her breathing. And then she, you know, and then I did too, and it was so. Fucking. Sweet." She laughed, delighted with herself, and did not appear to notice that she had sworn in the narthex of a church. "She's never like that. She's usually so quiet about what she wants. I think being home did something to her."
Mia's mouth was dry. The organ was still playing something soft and endless behind them, and someone was laughing down the hall, and the coffee smelled burnt the way it always did.
"I'm so glad she has you," Mia said, and heard her own voice come out smooth and pleasant and completely wrong, and the blonde beamed at that, took it as a blessing, squeezed her arm one more time, said they'd see each other soon, and was gone out into the parking lot in a swirl of cardigan and ponytail. Mia stood in the middle of the crowd with her hands folded and her blood roaring in her ears.
Jealousy went through her like a splinter of glass, sharp, ugly, and utterly beneath her. She was a mother. She was forty-four years old. She had no claim on her daughter's nights, no standing, no business feeling this hot twist of fury at the thought of RJ lying in that dorm bed in the dark with her voice gone low for someone else, someone twenty years closer to her in age, someone who was allowed. Mia hated her. God help her, she hated that pretty smiling girl and she hated RJ for calling her, and she did not hate either of them anywhere near as much as she hated how wet she had gotten standing there in the aisle hearing about it.
Michael found her by the door. "You ready? You look flushed."
"Warm in here."
They drove home. She made lunch. She washed the dishes. She sat through the afternoon like a woman serving a sentence, and at four o'clock, with Michael out in the garage, she picked up her phone and called her daughter.
It rang twice before she remembered that she was not supposed to be the one who called. That she was the mother, and the whole architecture of that word meant that whatever this was, it did not get to be a thing she reached for first. Her thumb was moving for the red button before she had finished thinking it.
"Mom?"
The voice came through small and close and sleep-thick, and Mia's hand stopped.
"Hi, baby." She sounded winded. "Did I wake you?"
"Kind of. That's okay." A rustle of sheets. A low yawn. "What's going on?"
"Nothing." Mia closed her eyes. "Nothing, I just. I wanted to hear your voice. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have. You should sleep, you must be exhausted from yesterday."
She pulled the phone from her ear to hang it up, and the movement brought it back, she told herself it was the movement, in one motion, and she heard RJ say her name, not Mom this time, and she put it back to her ear.
"Mom. Stay on the line."
We're mother and daughter, Mia thought. That's what this is. That's all this is. She thought it very hard and very clearly, and the thinking of it sent a slow pulse down low in her belly, and she looked at the open bedroom door, the empty hallway, Michael's tools clinking out in the garage, and then she got up and pushed the door shut and lay down on her side of the bed with the phone cradled against her ear and reached for the pillow beside her with her free hand.
"Talk to me," she said.
RJ talked. That was all it took. Not about the blonde at first, not about anything, just in that unhurried voice, telling Mia about the boxes she had unpacked, the girl in the next room, the dining hall food, the way the radiator knocked. And Mia pulled the pillow between her thighs and pressed it up into herself through her skirt, and every time RJ said a word in that voice she rolled her hips into the seam and a lovely, filthy heat spread up through her, soaking through the cotton, and she could not have stopped if God himself had stood at the foot of the bed.
RJ got around to the call last. She explained it lightly, without heat, the way you would explain anything to your mother. That the captain's girlfriend had been worried about her driving all day, that she had wanted to hear a voice she knew, that it had been late and she had been keyed up and it had been nice to have someone to talk to, that she had been thinking about home, and Mia, and the whole long day.
"You were thinking about home," Mia said, and the pillow was wet under her now, and her breath was coming short.
"I was thinking about you," RJ said, and she said it bland, ordinary, a thing you'd tell your mother about a nice phone call, and she did not change her tone even a little, and Mia understood all at once that her daughter knew exactly what was happening on the other end of the line. Knew, and was letting her have it, keeping her voice level and warm and casual, telling her about the drive home, reminding her to eat something, asking if her father had fixed the gutter yet, all while Mia ground herself down against the pillow in slow, rolling, silent thrusts, her hand fisted in the sheet, her skirt up around her waist.
"Mom? You still there?"
"Still here." Her voice cracked in the middle. "Yes. Still here."
"Good," RJ said. "Get some rest tonight, okay?"
"Okay," Mia whispered, and RJ said goodnight, and hung up, and left her lying there in the daylight in her church clothes with her face in the pillow and the wet spot spreading under her and the seam of her own skirt still rubbing the last pulses out of her, and she came.
She lay afterward with the phone dark on the comforter and the garage silent now and the afternoon light going gold at the window, and she did not feel clever, or righteous, or even ashamed. She felt like a woman who had been given back the thing she had spent twenty years pretending she did not want, and she felt the shape of the evening ahead of her, long and empty and patient, and she began, already, to count.
The calls became a ritual within a week. Michael left for the plant at seven, and by seven-fifteen Mia was upstairs with the bedroom door shut and the blinds pulled and the phone propped against the lamp, and RJ would call on her walk to class or from the dining hall or from her bed at night, and Mia would lie on her side with the pillow wedged between her thighs and take her daughter's voice into her the way she had once taken communion, slowly, on her knees. Sometimes RJ talked about nothing at all. The radiator. The roommate. A professor who pronounced her name wrong. Mia would roll her hips down into the pillow in long, unhurried strokes and listen, and the ordinary became obscene in her mouth, the way the word gutter would, and she began to understand that she was not having a conversation anymore; she was being fed.
By the second week she had stopped pretending the pillow was a pillow. She would strip her skirt off at the waist sometimes, or push the whole thing down her thighs, and let it be her own body against the cotton, and she would come while RJ described her statistics lecture, quiet, mouth shut, hips stuttering, and then she would say, "That's good, baby, tell me more," in a voice that did not shake, and RJ would tell her more. And never once did they name it. That was the whole trick of it. They built a room with no windows and lived inside it and called it a phone call.
Then RJ started telling her about the girls.
It came out sideways, the way everything with RJ came out, over three or four calls, in pieces Mia had to assemble. There was a girl named Cass in the room two doors down who had a boyfriend back home and a habit of knocking at midnight. There was a redhead on the crew team RJ called only the rower, who had a way of climbing into RJ's bed with her sweatshirt still on and coming with her hand over her own mouth. There was a pair, a roommate pair, who had asked RJ to stay, both of them, and RJ had. Mia lay with the pillow between her legs and listened to her eighteen-year-old daughter describe, in that flat unhurried voice, what she did to the rower in the dark of the dorm room, and how the rower had asked for it again the next night, and the next, and had started leaving her bracelets on RJ's desk so she would have a reason to come back.
"She's clingy," RJ said one afternoon, walking somewhere with wind in the phone. "I had to tell her I needed space. She cried. It was a lot."
"You made her cry," Mia said. She had the pillow between her thighs and her skirt around her waist and her hand flat on her own stomach, holding still, holding back.
"She made herself cry." A shrug in the voice. "I don't promise anybody anything."
"And the girl from home. The blonde."
"Her too." RJ's voice slowed. "She's been calling. She thinks she has a claim on me."
Mia pressed her hips down into the pillow and said nothing, and the nothing sat there between them both, and she could hear RJ's breath on the line, steady, easy, the breath of a girl who had not yet broken a sweat. Jealousy came up through her like something she could not cough out, hot behind her ribs. She did not have a claim either. That was the joke. She was the mother.
"She wants the whole thing," RJ said. "Every night. She wants to be the one. But I don't do that. I don't give anybody the whole thing."
"She's pretty," Mia said, and it came out small.
"She is." RJ paused, and when she spoke again her voice had gone that low patient way it went, the way that made Mia's whole body go quiet. "Cass is prettier. The rower's got a body you wouldn't believe. There's a girl in my seminar who is honestly the most beautiful thing on that campus." Another pause. "But I would never use my strap for any of them. That's for a special person. You know."
Mia's hand was shaking where it lay on her stomach. She closed her eyes and the bedroom was warm and the sheets smelled of her and she could feel the wet soaking the pillow beneath her, and she knew exactly what her daughter was doing, exactly, and she smiled into the pillow because she could not help it, because it was ugly and it was hers and no one else in the whole world could have it.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," RJ said, and went back to talking about the dining hall.
The calls went on like that, three or four a day, and Michael never knew. He would come home from the plant tired and she would have his dinner on the table and ask him about his day and he would tell her and she would nod and clear the plates and go upstairs and the phone would be lit on the nightstand, RJ's name on the screen, and she would shut the door and take off her clothes and answer it.
Then one Thursday, late, Michael asleep beside her, RJ called and for once did not do the ritual. She did not talk about the girls, or the radiator, or the rower. She let the silence run, and Mia lay in the dark listening to her breathe, and the breathing was enough, and she did not touch herself yet, she only held the phone and let the wanting pool in her belly and go nowhere.
Then RJ said, very quietly, the way you would ask about the weather, "Mom. If I came inside the room right now. What would I see?"
Mia did not answer.
She could see it herself, with terrible clarity, lying there in the dark: her own body on the rumpled sheets, phone at her ear, hand between her thighs, a dark wet patch under her, her ring hand sweating. She knew RJ could see it too. RJ had known for weeks. Mia had known RJ knew. And there it was, out in the open, the whole room with no windows, and it did not matter at all, because they were still not going to say it, either of them, because saying it was the one thing that could end it.
"Mom?"
"I'm here," Mia whispered.
"That's not what I asked."
The phone ticked softly with the silence. Mia lay absolutely still, and the ache between her legs was so hard now it was almost a hurt, and her daughter waited on the other end for an answer that neither of them would let her give, and after a long moment Mia heard RJ make a low, satisfied sound in her throat, half a laugh, half something else, and say, "Goodnight, Mom."
"Goodnight, baby."
The line went dead. Mia set the phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark beside her sleeping husband with the wet sheets under her and her own hand still hovering at her stomach like a question, and she did not touch herself, not once, not that whole night, and it was the worst pleasure she had ever given herself, and she kept it.
The week that followed was a room with the lights off.
Monday came and went with no call, and Mia told herself the girl was busy, that it was syllabus week, that there were boxes and orientations and a thousand small frictions to a new life. Tuesday she carried the phone from room to room in her apron pocket and checked it at the sink, at the mail, at the window over the driveway. Wednesday she called and it rang until the voicemail picked up, and she listened to RJ's recorded voice say her own name so flatly that she played it back three times. Thursday she called twice. Friday she did not call at all, she was proud of that, and by Saturday night she had stopped being proud of anything, and she lay awake beside Michael listening to the snore and the rain and counting the number of hours since she had last heard her daughter speak, and the number was a hundred and sixty and it was still climbing.
She went through the old calls instead. She scrolled back through the weeks of them, the little gray times, seven-fifteen, seven-forty, nine at night, and read the short text messages under them like a woman reading her own diary in a language she had only just learned. She did not embarrass herself. She looked at the photo only twice. But she kept it open on the nightstand some nights, face up, the strap-on and the open shirt and the bare wall, and she did not touch herself; she had made herself a rule about that, that the thing had to come from RJ or not at all, and it made no sense and she knew it made no sense and she kept it anyway, because she had to keep something.
Sunday morning she put on the cream blouse. She zipped the dark skirt. She stood at the mirror and put in her earrings and heard Michael call up the stairs that the car was running, and she was reaching for the door when the phone lit on the dresser.
RJ.
Mia answered it before she had taken a breath.
"Go on ahead," she said down the stairs, not into the phone. "I'm not feeling well. I'll catch up. Tell the pastor I'm sorry."
Michael said something about her being flushed again and she said yes and go, go, and she heard the front door open and close and the car start and pull down the drive, and the whole time the phone was against her ear and RJ was saying nothing, nothing at all, just breathing on the line, and Mia stood in the middle of her own bedroom in her church blouse with the phone in both hands and felt the relief pour through her like warm water.
"You didn't call," she said.
"I was busy."
"All week."
"All week," RJ said, agreeing, as if weather had been discussed. "I'm calling now."
Mia sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she got up and shut the door and crossed to the window and pulled the blinds down over the Sunday light, and she did not take off her skirt, she did not unbutton the blouse, she did not even step out of her panties; there was no time for any of that, or she told herself there was no time, and the truth was that she could not bear to wait one more second, not one. She lay down on her side on the rumpled bed and pulled the pillow up between her thighs the way she had a hundred times now and pressed down on it through her skirt and her underwear and her own heat came back up through the cotton and the linen to meet her, and she curled her free hand around the edge of the mattress and said, "Okay. Okay. I'm here."
"I know you are," RJ said.
The line went quiet again. Not empty quiet. Waiting quiet. Mia rolled her hips down into the pillow once, a long slow stroke, and her whole body moved with it, and the pleasure was so immediate and so total that she had to close her eyes.
"Mom."
"Yes."
"What would I see if I came into your room right now."
Her hips stopped. Her breath went out of her in a single long exhale, and the exhale was the answer, it was the whole answer, and she heard it leave her and she knew RJ heard it too, and it hung there in the phone for a long moment and neither of them picked it up.
"Mom."
"I'm here."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," Mia said.
"So."
She was shaking. Not the small private tremor of the other calls, this was deep, it ran from the tops of her thighs up through her ribs, and she understood that if she did not say something now the moment would close over like water and there would be another week of it, another six days of the voicemail and the gray times and the counting, and she could not do another week. She would rather burn the whole thing down than do another week.
"I'm lying on the bed," she said.
Her voice came out low and steady and she did not recognize it.
"On my side. The door's closed. The blinds are down, I closed them before I lay down, the light's coming through the slats, it's striped across the sheets. I didn't have time to get undressed. I still have my church clothes on, the cream blouse, the skirt. The ring's on my finger. I can feel it against the sheet when I turn my hand."
"Keep going," RJ said. Her voice had gone quiet in a different way. Flat. Careful. Close.
"My skirt's up around my waist." Mia reached down with her free hand and pulled it the rest of the way, shimmying on the mattress, the slip of it over her thighs loud in the quiet room. "I'm holding the pillow between my legs. I've been pushing down on it. Through my underwear. I can feel how wet they are, the whole crotch of them, it's gone all the way through the cotton, it's touching the pillow. I've been doing this since you called. Since before you called."
The word wet moved something in the room. She heard RJ's breath change on the line, one small catch, and she knew she had found the board that was loose, she had found the plank to pry, and she pressed.
"I'm so wet it's dripping down onto the sheets, baby. It's running down the inside of my thigh when I move. I can feel it on the skin. My hand's shaking on the mattress. I haven't touched myself yet. I told myself I wasn't going to, I haven't all week, not once, and I don't know why I made that rule, because I'm here now in my church clothes on a Sunday morning with a pillow between my legs and I want to so badly my teeth ache, and you're not here to do it and I don't think I can wait for you to come do it, I think I'm going to have to."
"Say it again," RJ said. Hoarse. "Say it like you mean it."
"I mean it." Mia's hips had started moving again without her choosing it, slow grinding pushes into the pillow, and every push dragged the wet cotton up over her clit and pulled a short breath out of her. "I'm fucking myself on a pillow through my underwear because my daughter won't come home and touch me. That's what you'd see if you came in here. Your mother, forty-four years old, in her church skirt, ruining the sheets, with your picture on the nightstand beside her and my ring hand out." She turned her face into the mattress and the next words came out damp and muffled and filthy. "I have been so patient. I have been so good. I lay here every night with my hand on my stomach and I don't touch it because I'm saving it, I'm saving all of it, and you don't even call."
The grinding sped up. Her breath was ragged now and the pillow was soaked under her and she did not care, she bit down on the sheet and made a high thin sound into it and heard herself do it, and RJ said, very quietly, into Mia's ear from a hundred and sixty miles away:
"If I come in right now. Will you let me lick your juice off you. Where it's dripping down your thighs."
Mia stopped. Everything stopped. Her hips froze mid-stroke and her breath came up in her throat and her eyes came open all at once in the dim striped room, and it was not the words, though the words had gone through her like a wire, it was the preposition. The now. The room. RJ's voice had come out of the phone, but the phone was not in her hand anymore, she had set it down on the comforter beside her face at some point without knowing, and the voice was coming from the phone, yes, it was coming from the phone, and it was also coming from just beyond the closed bedroom door, through the wood, half a beat behind itself, the same two voices layered over each other like a thing seen twice.
She lay perfectly still. She did not turn her head. Her thighs were shaking and the drops were running down them and there was a cold bead of it at the top of her knee and she could feel every inch of where it went, and on the other side of the door, in the hallway of her own house, on a Sunday morning, someone was breathing very slowly and deliberately, waiting.