“I know, but I don’t want to be a burden. I feel like I’ve been hanging off someone else’s neck my whole life.”
“I know how that feels,” he said. “You know, some nights I lie there awake and I just can’t believe I’m an adult? I’m almost thirty.”
Oh. Wow. I couldn’t even imagine the concept of Lilly passing the big Three-Oh. I’d just turned nineteen myself, which put her at a little past twenty-nine. Now she was going to be a mother, too. No wonder she was pissy.
“Lilly’s upset about it,” he said, not really looking at me. “She wanted a baby so bad, but now that she’s finally pregnant, she’s always moaning about her looks.”
“She’s as beautiful as she ever was,” I said. “She glows. She looks even better now.”
“That’s what I tell her, but she just yells at me and accusses me of saying that so she’ll keep having sex… nevermind.”
He looked away and I did the same, rubbing my arms. Conversation over.
So, that’s what was bothering them.
“Hey, would you hand me that tomato paste?”
I snapped out of it and bent to grab one of the cans.
“No, the one on the bottom shelf. A little to the left. Right there.”
I stood up, can in hand, and felt a little… odd. My butt itched and I had that weird, pinchy feeling on my shoulders I get, like someone is watching me. Todd took the can, inspected it, and dropped into the cart.
It didn’t hit me until later that I did a lot of reaching and bending on that shopping trip.
***
When it came time for finals, the library was too crowded and too noisy. College students can be really loud in a quiet space. There was nowhere to sit, anyway. I’d end up on one of the big long library tables, crowded in by people on either side, all of them bullshitting at each other.
I didn’t want to work in my bedroom, either. So I was in the kitchen. It was past midnight and I was agonizing over a statistics problem about box and whisker plots. I hate box and whisker plots. I kept ranting at myself, demanding to know why anyone in the world would ever need to know any of this useless crap.
Todd came down, yawning. He worked late a lot. Lilly was in bed, asleep. She was still working, but she was really showing now. She spent most of her time at home in bed, demanding that Todd wait on her and yelling at him all the time. I mostly kept out of the way.
I was clutching my head in my hands, staring at the paper.
He came over, holding a glass of milk.
“You okay? You look a little tense.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Math. Math is not my subject.”
“What kind of math?”
“Statistics. I have to make a box and whisker plot.”
“Let me see.”
He spun my paper around and looked at it.
“Oh, I see what you’re doing. Here, let me show you.”
He sat down and spent the next twenty minutes showing me how to work the problem. I leaned over and he leaned towards me, keeping his voice low as he spoke. Lilly was snoring loudly, and it struck me as a little funny.
When it came to draw the diagram, he took my hand in his and guided my pencil. I swung my feet under my chair, and my calf brushed his. Sitting so close to him made me feel a little fluttery, and I didn’t know why. He smiled at me when I let out an excited little squeak when my plot came out matching the one in the answer to the practice problem.
“Good job,” he said. As he stood up, he patted my shoulder. “Tense, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my forehead.
I started to gather up my stuff, ready to take it back up to my room and get some sleep. He put both hands on my shoulders and started working the tension out of my neck with his thumbs. He was good.
I let out a soft, mmm sound.
“You do this a lot?”
“Your sister gives me a lot of practice. She works up a lot of tension at her job.”
I leaned back and let him work my neck. My head dipped forward. His touch grew softer as the tightness eased out of my shoulders. His fingers moved lightly under the collar of my shirt, tracing over my skin, leaving little hot trails of sensation. My eyes fluttered open a little as his movements grew wider, over the outside of my shoulders, down my back, and one time down my chest, almost to my collarbone. I gasped a little and he moved his hands up, tracing his fingers up the side of my neck.
He worked his hands into my hair and his fingertips over my scalp. It felt really weird, and I liked it. It made my chest go tight as this chilly, shivery pleasure moved through my body, chased by his fingertips. I made a sound almost like a purr and closed my eyes.
Suddenly, he drew back.
I looked over my shoulder at him. He downed his glass of now lukewarm milk and headed upstairs.