Page 2 of Service Included

In the doorway to her bedroom, she stopped. Sheer white curtains hung motionlessly in front of the open windows. For thirty-five years, the wordhomehad usually conjured an image of these soft old fir floors and slightly canted plaster walls, but this wasn’t her room anymore; she lived in Seattle. The house keys dug into her palms. They weren’t her house keys. They were just keys, and this—

She blinked several times, clenching her lips and cheeks to fight back what she knew were tears. This was her room. She couldn’t lie to herself about that. This was her room for one more day.

Stop overthinking.Grown-up Megan had a list to tackle.

Megan crossed the threshold to the battered white desk. Her mother had provided black bags for trash, white bags for donations, paper bags for recycling, sticky notes to mark big items, and boxes for things destined for Megan’s Seattle town house. The iced latte Megan had finished and abandoned on the desk earlier hadn’t miraculously refilled itself, even though she rattled the cubes and sucked at the straw. Nothing more than a few drops of slightly flavored water, so she dropped the plastic cup into the black bag—trash, in her mother’s system—and wiped the condensation from her palm onto her denim shorts.

It was hot up here tucked under the eaves.

With no witnesses but the second-story squirrels, her racer-back sports bra would be fine for working in her room. The slick technical fabric of her shirt snagged on her ponytail, but then she wiggled free and tossed the garment on the double bed.

There really wasn’t any way to keep delaying.

The first thing she considered was a framed photo of her high school cross-country team. In the decades since, her blonde hair had darkened slightly, and the gawky arms and legs of an adolescent who’d reached five-ten by surprise had changed intothe hips and breasts of a woman who’d given birth and worked in an office.

Keep. Next.

Half an hour later,with the desk drawers emptied and the spinning black metal CD tower’s thrift-store destiny marked by a sticky note, Megan paused. Sweat irritated her forehead and gathered behind her ears, and she wanted a cold drink. But until she finished this room and stroked blue permanent marker through an item on her mother’s list, she would not think about whether the nearest convenience store had a refrigerator filled with bottles of cold, fizzy, sparkling water.

The next hurdle was her bookshelf. For all Hercules’s mastery of the Augean stables’ muck, even he hadn’t confronted sixty-twoSweet Valley Highpaperbacks. Space in her narrow North Seattle town house had to be earned, and Megan had no idea if her daughter would eventually like the series, or if it had even held up across the decades, so only the first five books went in the keep box.

Another step closer to the green glass bottle with the cold, cold fizz.

The top shelf contained her mythology collection. Next to the coffee-table-sizedDictionary of Imaginary Places, a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s version of the Greek myths looked insignificant, its pages yellowed. Her thirteen-year-old incarnation had huddled under a blanket with a flashlight to stare at the cover, which featured a nude statue of Perseus brandishing Medusa’s head, his sword artfully positioned across his muscle-thickened thigh at the point where it emphasized and simultaneously obscured his sculpted genitals. Despitethe educational content, this book had seemed magnificently indecent to her pre-internet eyes, the cover eroticized by Perseus’s sharply defined muscles. The statue had shown her what the teen boys swimming at the pool never could: a man’s body, powerful and mature. She had sensed, even before having formal art training, that the sculptor intended to lead the viewer’s gaze directly to the sword, a substitute for the hero’s concealed penis. Her late-night reading had resulted in majoring in classics, which in turn led to the career she loved, so Edith Hamilton’s book won a place in the keep box, never mind that she owned two other editions. They didn’t have this cover.

Reliving her childhood obsessions was “having fun,” she could assure her mother if interrogated. Too bad it wasn’t as easy to find a keeper in real life as it was on a bookshelf. Seven hundred thirty thousand people lived in Seattle, and a couple million in the greater metro area. She didn’t demand sculpted abs, didn’t need a man who swooped in on a winged horse. Her requirements didn’t include a heroic crew of sidekicks, an enchanted shield or other gimmicks, only a reasonably compatible sense of humor, the good manners to return calls and be on time, and the willingness to date a single mom. And acceptable hygiene. That was nonnegotiable. Finding an unattached male who met that short list shouldn’t be as challenging as rolling water uphill.

Maybe she had to be more flexible, more willing to spend time away from Callie. That’s what the last guy she’d dated had wanted. Like some six-foot-tall Peter Pan, he hadn’t seemed to understand that even if she could find a babysitter without notice on a Thursday, she didn’t necessarily want to spend the fifteen dollars an hour one cost in Seattle in order to go to a trivia night and drink beer with people she didn’t know. She wasn’t a co-parenting single mom with off-days when her daughter went to the other home. Eight years ago, Callie’s bio-father hadn’teven told Megan he was leaving Seattle, leaving her, and leaving their future before he quit his own graduate program and fled every responsibility to run back to Italy.

She took a ragged breath. Fuck it, if she wanted to finish packing, she had to focus, same as she reminded her daughter when Callie abandoned a half-unloaded dishwasher.

Nothing jumped out from the shelves and begged to be driven five hours north. She’d spent years visiting, but didn’t even remember any of this stuff when she wasn’t standing in front of it. Any books she didn’t take with her would go to the public library sale and land in a good home, so before she second-guessed herself, she slapped a single note with one word—Donate—in the middle of the shelf and turned her back.

Done, with a speed and decisiveness her father would admire and her mother couldn’t fault. She licked her lips and repeated that word—done—under her breath until it broke any lingering chains between her and the books that she was giving up. This way, she wouldn’t have to cram books under her couch or sort her overflowing shelves for the twentieth time to accommodate onesies and twosies. There was joy, a lot of joy, in finishing this task.

The sole piece of furniture that remained unlabeled was the double bed. The faded blue comforter printed with white cartoon clouds was no heirloom, merely a department store find. Because her mother’s master list designated all remaining sheets and blankets for donation, she didn’t have to do anything with the bed except collapse on it to rest.

As she looked at the ceiling, the cotton momentarily refreshed the backs of her legs and arms. Unsettled feelings tickled inside her chest and throat. If she ignored the garbage bags in the middle of the floor, the room could be a time machine, with the furniture in its original spots and the stick-on constellations discernibly yellow against the white ceiling. She exhaled and letherself sink into the mattress. Even shirtless and unmoving, she noticed the sweat trapped between her breasts. She’d sweated in this room back when she was a teen too, sweated as she held a romance novel in her hands and wadded a pillow between her thighs while her imagination filled in the story’s gaps. She remembered pressing the doorknob button to lock herself in, and then searching for that other button, the one on her body, trying to transform her yearning into satisfaction.

She moved as if making a snow angel. Nubs on the much-washed fabric caught the skin on the backs of her arms, not rough enough to be a man’s morning stubble, merely a tiny pull. Because she’d never had a boy in her room, there had never been sex on this mattress. Since the movers had instructions to take it to the dump, there never would be. Until she’d gone to college, fumbling under clothes and dry-humping in dim family rooms with one ear alert for footsteps had been her limit. When she’d been a teenager, even rubbing herself against an erection through a pair of jeans had sent tremors to her fingertips.

Two decades later, she couldn’t recall any of those high school boys’ faces, only how overflowing their shared desires had been, boys as thirsty as she was for experience, seizing any moment away from supervision to follow the siren’s call into corners of dead-end high school halls, where they recognized mutual need in each other’s quivering bodies. She’d dated boys who’d held her at awkward angles across the middle consoles of their small cars, boys who’d rolled with her on carpets in front of television sets, boys who’d wanted her so fiercely, she’d felt like Aphrodite.

That girl was a long time ago, so long ago she felt almost like someone Megan had watched on television or read about and then forgotten until a passing reference recalled a faint story. But that girl had been her, once upon a time.

She rested her fingertips on her breastbone, above the edge of her sports bra. Her skin was damp, as much from the memory ofthrusting against a denim-covered thigh as from the morning’s work. Awash with remembered sensations of hands fumbling with bras and caressing her body, she closed her eyes, savoring the break. She trailed two fingers across her chest and into the sweat-slicked valley where her sports bra crammed her flesh together, seeking to recall someone, or something, a sensation, a touch, anything from when she’d been so carefree.

One boyfriend had owned rec room carpet of bristle quality, but he’d enthusiastically taken the chafing across his back after she’d straddled him and removed her shirt. She’d watched his hands, tanned from mowing lawns, gather her pale breasts and gently pluck her nipples. Better than candy, he’d said, and she’d thought the compliment so charming, she’d ground harder against his fly.

Her nipple pushed at the stitched armor of her bra, a barely detectable bump. It was there, pinchable, and she closed her thumb and two fingers together. She rolled the tip through the fabric, but it wasn’t enough sensation, not nearly enough, nothing to compare to the feel of hands on bare skin. Her buttocks tightened to lift her hips off the bed. She’d liked straddling and rubbing herself over a guy until she fit the bulge trapped in his jeans against the groove where she needed pressure. When a date would shudder under her, she’d felt sexy and powerful, confident of her desirability.

She yanked both cups of her sports bra lower, popping her breasts over the top. Her breathing was loud enough that she imagined it to be the sound of a partner, and she gave herself permission to make more noise. The reinforced fabric constricting her rib cage could be a man’s hands on her adult body, a man with more assurance in his grip than those high schoolers, a man who understood that pleasuring took all sorts of touches.

An urge, out of place when she had tasks waiting, yet impossible to be ignored, hummed under her skin. She flipped onto her stomach and found a familiar position, one pillow folded into a ridge that she straddled. The pillowcase felt cool and smooth against the bare skin of her stomach while she humped the pillow itself into the best spot, the place where the seam of her denim shorts pressed into her core. Then her hands returned to her breasts, fingers scissoring around her nipples, until the flesh lengthened and stiffened while she flexed her hips. It was good, so good, the sensation that linked her breasts to her pussy. She loved to touch her nipples in the shower, or when she dressed. Sometimes, she cleared a spot on the steamy mirror to watch her fingers pluck the pink-brown bumps into stiff points, a morning jolt as delicious as an extra dose of caffeine.

Behind her closed eyelids, she visualized other hands, not her own, but big, tanned hands, playing with her body. When she pinched harder, like those hands would, and twisted her nipples, like those hands would, spikes of desire spread from her breasts to the muscles in her butt. When she rolled her thumbs against her fingers, hard enough on those trapped points to hurt a bit, a good small pain, she was doing what those hands would do. Those hands would belong to a voice, deep and slow, that would fire her nerves with promises. He’d say something dirty, a command, but what? What would the man with the rough hands say?

I want to fuck you, that’s what. He’d be direct and simple. Anonymous, so she wouldn’t have to see him later. He’d be a bit crude, as well as young and hard. And he’d be available. Most important, he wouldn’t be someone she had to plan for or schedule around.

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