Being Remade (Part 6 of Series)

I am taking you out. Be at my place at five, and we will go somewhere with tablecloths. I love you.

Beth: Five. Tablecloths. I will try to look like a person with clothes that go with shoes that aren’t sneakers or clogs. Love you too.

I set the phone down and stared at Tyler’s bedroom wall.

Passed out. Silent like an idiot. Fine. Every word had a true cousin and a false one. I had passed out. I had not passed out in my own bed. I was fine in the way a house can be fine while a slow leak works under the floor.

I put the plug back in because he would want me to.

That sentence should have stopped me. It did not. I used more lube this time, learned my lesson from the dry extraction, and seated it with my jaw tight.

Walking through his house to gather my bag, I felt claimed in a way that was starting to feel like clothing. I locked his door behind me with the key he had pointed to on the hook, which was its own small domestic horror, and I drove toward a version of Wednesday that could still pass for mine.

The market was fluorescent and ordinary. I bought what we were out of. I crouched for pasta on the bottom shelf because the universe enjoys a motif, and when I glanced back along my own shoulder I found an old man at the end of the aisle doing nothing to hide where he was looking.

My ass. Bent. Offered, as far as he was concerned, by the geometry of grocery stores.

Gary’s window arrived so fast I almost dropped the box.

Last night, with the fire illuminating me in all my glory while Tyler moved behind me like a machine, I had seen a stranger’s face in glass. I thought of the intense way I had come staring at him instead of at the man who had told me to send heat through me in a humiliating rush. I was wet before I’d even stood up. I put the pasta in the basket like a person who had not just replayed being fucked for an audience next to the dry goods.

I did not look at the old man again. I paid. I sat in the car with the bag beside me and my pulse in my throat and thought, not kindly, that my body had started collecting watchers the way some people collect mugs.

The gym was midmorning busy in the way that means retirees and people who work from home and Izaak on the row of free weights he preferred.

He had been flirting with me on and off for six months. He was tall and handsome, with dark black skin and a perfect smile.

He said good morning as if he meant it, and he always asked how the hospital was treating me as if the answer mattered.

“You look like you’re good, almost glowing,” he said, racking the bar. “That is rare on you lately. I was starting to think nurses were grumpy by default.”

“Grumpy is still the official position all nurses must adhere to in public,” I said. “But today I had bacon with breakfast and am breaking the rules. Please don’t tell the board.”