Chapter 3

Sunlight hits my eyelids before I’m ready for it.

I lie there for a second, bracing for the full-body catastrophe that greeted me yesterday morning—that deep, brutal ache in every muscle from my shoulders to my ankles, the kind where even blinking feels like too much effort. But when I shift under the sheet, testing, it’s ... not that bad. Sore, yeah. My shoulders are tight and my thighs feel like I ran a marathon I don’t remember signing up for. But it’s a normal sore. A human sore. Not the “my skeleton is trying to crawl out of my body” sore from yesterday.

Small victories.

I push the sheet down to my waist. Then I look down.

Still hard. Still swollen. Still roughly twice the size it has any right to be, straining against the cotton of my boxers like it’s trying to make a break for it. I stare at it for a long moment, the way you’d stare at a weird rash or a dent in your car, clinical, resigned.

But it’s not bigger than yesterday. That’s something. It’s not growing. It’s not pulsing or throbbing or doing anything new and horrifying. It’s just ... there. Thick and hard and impossible to ignore, but stable.

This is just the new normal, I guess.

Could be worse, I suppose.

I swing my legs off the mattress and my joints pop in three places. Boxes still stacked against the wall, half of them unopened, the rest gutted and flattened. Morning light cuts through the window at an angle that makes the faded oatmeal walls look almost warm.

I don’t bother with the toilet. I learned that lesson yesterday, trying to aim while your whole body is working against you is an exercise in futility and cleanup. I head straight for the shower, feet quiet on the hallway floor.

The bathroom door clicks shut behind me. Cracked tiles, rust-stained sink, mildew curtain. Home sweet home. I step into the tub, and turn the water on cold first because apparently I enjoy suffering. Then I angle myself toward the tile wall and let go.

It takes a few seconds. The pressure is still weird, the stream still fighting the swelling for exit space. But it comes, and when it does, there’s this slow unclenching in my lower abdomen that almost makes me groan with relief. I watch the water carry it down the drain and try not to think too hard about the fact that this is my life now, peeing against a shower wall like an animal because my dick won’t cooperate.

When I’m done, I look down again.

Semi-hard.

Not soft, I don’t think soft is in the vocabulary anymore, but noticeably less rigid than when I woke up. The swelling is still there, still visible, still way bigger than it should be. But the angry, straining hardness has dialed back to something more like ... heavy. Present but not urgent.

Okay. That’s progress. Maybe.

I turn the water warmer and let the shower do its work. The heat loosens my shoulders, unknots something in my lower back that’s been clenched since Friday. I stand under the spray longer than I need to, eyes closed, letting the white noise of the water fill up the space where my thoughts usually spiral.

I shut the water off, step out, and dry myself properly this time. The towel is rough and thin but it’s clean, and I wrap it around my waist and tuck the corner in tight. It does a passable job of hiding the situation, as long as nobody looks too closely.

I open the bathroom door.

Jess is leaning against the hallway wall directly across from me, arms crossed, one bare foot propped up behind her against the baseboard. She’s in pink panties today, low-cut on her hips, and a white t-shirt that actually fits her in the shoulders but stops about four inches above her belly button. The hem is uneven, slightly jagged. She took scissors to it. Of course she did.

“Aaah,” she says, lower lip pushing out in an exaggerated pout. “I was hoping for a show again.”

“Morning, Jess.”

“You’re no fun.” Her green eyes drop from my face to my chest, to the towel, to the visible ridge underneath it. The pout dissolves into something lustier. Something that’s becoming way too familiar.

I step forward to pass her. The hallway is narrow, and she doesn’t move. She never moves. I try to angle my body sideways to squeeze past, and her hand comes up, quick and casual, like she’s reaching for a doorknob. Her fingers close around me through the towel.

She squeezes. Not hard. Just enough for me to feel every finger.

“Still impressive,” she says, like she’s commenting on the weather.

I pull away, stepping past her before she can get a better grip. My pulse jumps but I keep my face neutral.

I’m already through my bedroom door, pushing it shut behind me. I don’t lock it, she’d just make a thing of it, knock and whine and turn the whole morning into a production, but I lean against it for a second, eyes closed, breathing through my nose.

Okay. Sunday. Game plan.

I need a plan. Not a big plan. Not a “fix my entire life” plan. Just a Sunday plan. A today plan.

I drop the towel and pull on clean boxers, then jeans, loose ones, the pair with the relaxed fit that does the best job of hiding my situation, and a plain gray t-shirt.

While I lace them up, I think.

Help Mom unpack and organize downstairs. That’s the move. The living room is still a maze of cardboard, and the kitchen could use actual organizing instead of the dump-and-shove method we used yesterday. Real work. Physical work. The kind of work that keeps your hands busy and your brain from eating itself alive.

And here’s the key: Jess can’t get up to too much mischief with Mom in the room.

That’s the theory, anyway. If I’m downstairs, in the common areas, with Mom present, Jess has to behave like a normal human being instead of whatever she’s turned into this weekend. She’s bold, but she’s not going to grab my dick in front of our mother. Even Jess has limits.

Probably.

And Mom, I chew the inside of my cheek, thinking about last night. Her eyes going soft and unfocused across the dinner table. The way her gaze kept drifting down to my chest, my shoulders, lower. The color in her cheeks. The way she murmured sorry to nobody.

She’s fighting it. That’s the difference. Whatever the venom does to women around me, Mom recognizes it’s wrong and she’s actively, visibly, deliberately keeping herself in check. She breaks eye contact. She creates distance. She smooths her hair and takes careful breaths and keeps her hands busy.

Unlike Jess, who has apparently decided that boundaries are a suggestion and scissors are for making crop tops.

So the play is simple: stay downstairs where Mom is. Keep a reasonable distance, not weird-far, not close enough to make it harder for her than it already is. Just ... normal distance. At that range, based on what I’ve seen, she should be okay. She was fine at the grocery store yesterday as long as I didn’t brush against her. She was fine in the car as long as there was a console between us.

She’s strong. Stronger than she knows, maybe. She doesn’t need me making it worse by hovering, and I need to avoid disappearing upstairs where Jess can corner me again.

Downstairs. Stay busy. Keep distance reasonable. Let Mom handle what she needs to handle on her own terms.

It’s not a perfect plan. But it’s a plan.

The house is quiet when I hit the bottom of the stairs. No humming from the kitchen, no creak of floorboards overhead. Just the fridge doing its thing.

I stand in the living room and take stock. Boxes everywhere. Stacked against the walls, shoved into corners, piled two and three high around the sagging couch. Some are labeled in Mom’s careful handwriting—KITCHEN MISC, LIVING ROOM, BOOKS/DVDs—and some are just sealed shut with packing tape and prayers. There’s a system here somewhere. I just have to find it.

But first, the Kia.

I remember Mom mentioning yesterday that she hadn’t finished unloading it. A few bags from the grocery run, sure, but also some boxes that got shuffled from the U-Haul into the trunk and backseat when we ran out of arm strength on Friday.

The morning air hits me and it’s already warm. Not the punishing heat of yesterday afternoon, but that slow-building August warmth that promises worse by noon. I pop the trunk and find three boxes and two plastic bags of stuff that never made it inside. The boxes are heavier than they look, one of them clinks when I shift it, probably the kitchen stuff Mom wrapped in newspaper.

I make three trips, stacking everything just inside the front door with the rest of the living room chaos. By the time I set the last box down, my arms have that pleasant warm-burn thing going, and I can feel my shoulders loosening up. Yesterday’s soreness is still there, but it’s background noise now. Manageable.

I’m sliding the last box against the wall when I hear the stairs creak.

Mom appears at the bottom step, blinking like the sunlight from the front windows caught her off guard. She’s wearing khaki shorts that stop mid-thigh and an old faded t-shirt, some 5K charity run from years ago, the logo cracked and peeling. Her light brown hair is down, tucked behind both ears, and she’s barefoot. No makeup. She looks younger than thirty-eight without it, which is something I’ve noticed before but never really thought about.

“Hey,” she says, and her voice has that soft morning quality, not quite awake yet. Then her eyes land on the boxes I’ve stacked by the door and her whole face changes. “Chris. Did you unload the car already?”

“Yeah. Figured I’d get a head start.”

She crosses the living room toward me, and her expression does that thing, the one where her mouth pulls into a smile but her eyes look like they might water. “You are,” she says. She shakes her head. “Honestly, you are the man of the house now. You know that?”

Before I can deflect, she’s got her arms around me. Full hug. Face pressed into my shoulder, hands flattening against my back, and she just holds on. I can feel her exhale slowly, like she’s been holding her breath since we pulled up to this dump two days ago. She smells like sleep and the lavender stuff she puts on her pillowcase.

It’s nice. It’s Mom. It’s the kind of hug that used to fix everything when I was eight.

Except I’m not eight. And I can feel the warmth of her body pressed against mine, and the way her fingers spread across my back like she’s trying to memorize the shape of me, and the hug is lasting four seconds, five, six.

I clear my throat.

She steps back immediately. Too fast. Her hands drop to her sides and she smooths the front of her t-shirt down, a gesture I’ve seen three times in twenty-four hours now. Color rises in her cheeks, faint pink, barely there, but I catch it.

“Sorry,” she says, though I didn’t ask for an apology. She tucks her hair behind her ear again. “I just, you’ve been such a huge help. I don’t say it enough.”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

“Okay.” She takes a careful breath. Bright smile, snapped into place like a light switch. “Breakfast. I’m making eggs. And I think I saw the cereal in one of those grocery bags, did we get milk?”

“We got milk.”

“Perfect.” She’s already retreating toward the kitchen, putting distance between us with a casualness that’s almost convincing. “Scrambled okay?”

“Scrambled’s great.”

I watch her disappear around the corner, hear a cabinet open and close, the clatter of a pan on the stove. The fridge door opens. Closes. Normal sounds. Normal morning.

I go back to the Kia for one final check, backseat is clear, nothing under the seats, and by the time I come back inside, the smell of butter melting in a pan is drifting through the downstairs. My stomach growls so loud it’s almost embarrassing.

I’m breaking down an empty box, the one labeled BOOKS/DVDs, when Jess comes down the stairs. Pink panties. That white crop top she apparently took scissors to sometime yesterday, the hem jagged and uneven, sitting a solid four inches above her belly button. Bare feet. Hair down and messy like she finger-combed it once and called it good.

She pauses at the bottom step, one hand on the chipped railing, and takes in the scene: me standing in the living room surrounded by boxes, Mom visible through the kitchen doorway whisking eggs in a bowl.

“Wow,” Jess says. “Somebody’s productive.”

“Morning to you too.”

She pads into the kitchen ahead of me, and I hear Mom’s bright voice, “Morning, sweetie! Eggs are almost ready,” followed by the sound of Jess rummaging through a grocery bag. A moment later she emerges with the box of cereal, already eating a handful dry.

We eat at the mismatched table. Mom sets down plates of scrambled eggs, fluffy, with little flecks of pepper, and Jess pours herself a bowl of cereal with milk. I eat everything. Two helpings of eggs, a bowl of cereal, a glass of orange juice. My body wants fuel, and I give it what it wants without thinking too hard about anything else.

“So what’s the plan today?” Mom asks, sipping her coffee. She’s sitting across from me, same as last night, but this time she’s being careful about where she looks. Her eyes stay on her mug, on Jess, on the window above the sink. Everywhere but me.

“I figured I’d help you unpack down here,” I say. “Living room and kitchen. Get the TV set up, maybe organize the cabinets.”

“That would be amazing.” Genuine relief in her voice. “I was going to tackle it myself, but with two of us—”

“Three,” Jess says.

We both look at her.

She’s leaning back in her chair with her cereal spoon dangling between two fingers, green eyes bouncing from me to Mom and back. Her expression is perfectly innocent. Perfectly Jess.

“What?” she says. “I can help.”

“That’s great, honey,” Mom says.

I take a bite of eggs and don’t say anything. But I catch the look Jess slides me across the table, quick, sharp, amused. She knows exactly what I’m doing. Staying downstairs. Staying in Mom’s orbit. Creating a buffer zone.

She’s not fooled for a second. And worse: she thinks it’s funny.

We clear the table and get started. Mom takes the kitchen, her domain, her system, pulling plates and glasses out of newspaper wrapping and washing them before stacking them in the cabinets. I tackle the living room, slicing open boxes with a house key since we don’t own a box cutter, sorting contents into piles: keep here, goes upstairs, trash. Jess floats between both rooms, carrying things when asked, breaking down cardboard, generally being more helpful than she’s been since we got here.

For about twenty minutes, it works. It actually works. The three of us moving around the downstairs, Mom humming something tuneless from the kitchen, the house slowly starting to look less like a storage unit. I’m crouched behind the TV stand trying to find an outlet when I feel a hand drag across the back of my neck.