What She Spent on Him

1. Prologue: Steam on the Taps

The water had gone quiet except for the tick at the overflow. Beige tile held the steam in a low cloud. Diane sat where the tub narrowed, short black hair wet at the nape, arms crossed over the heavy slope of her breasts, the gold band dull and bright by turns when her fingers shifted. The white rail ran behind her shoulder. Chrome sweated. She had not told him to get off the mat.

Cole stayed on his knees because standing would have required a reason, and the reason was still wearing the shape of a chore. Grit from the depot itched under one nail. The cedar soap from the Route 9 store hung in the wet air, cheap and green, stuck to her skin. A drop ran from her collarbone into the crease where her wrist pressed her breast, and he watched it disappear as if the drop were the thing he had been sent in to fix.

“Bar’s done,” he said.

“I know what’s done.” Her voice was tired, ordinary, the voice she used for invoices. She did not look at his mouth. “Don’t make it something else.”

She uncrossed one arm. Only one. The breast she freed was warm from the bath, soft, substantial, the nipple already drawn tight from the cooler air above the waterline. She took his wet wrist the way she took a pen when she wanted a signature in the right box, and set his palm on the upper slope. Weight filled his hand. Heat. The nipple caught against the side of his thumb and stiffened harder, a small shameless answer her face refused to match.

He did not speak. Speech would have named it.

His other hand came up under the swell, lifting, and the give of her made a low sound in his throat he swallowed. She let out a breath through her nose. Eyes on the opposite tile. The ring ticked once against his knuckle when her fingers flexed, not pushing, not guiding, simply failing to take the hand back. Water lapped the soft of her stomach. Lower, under the surface, the darker hair moved. He felt the line she had drawn and the way her body had already stepped over it.

“Cole.”

The name carried the room they were not supposed to be in. Stepmother, though nobody in the duplex used the word. His father’s wife, though his father was a voice on a phone that went to messages. She caught his wrist when his fingers slid past her navel. The catch was not hard. A pulse beat in the heel of her hand. Between her thighs the water was warmer than the rest of the tub, and when two fingers found her she was slick beyond what the bath could explain, swollen, a small involuntary clutch around him that made her jaw set.

She rocked once. The overflow knocked. Her breast pushed into his palm, heavy, the nipple dragging wet across his skin. A sound started in her chest and stopped against her teeth. She hated the sound. He felt the hate and the want arrive in the same muscle, her thigh trembling where his forearm rested, her heel slipping on the porcelain.

“That’s for the bar,” she said, thinner now.

He curled his fingers and she took them, a slow greedy pull she would not look at. Fluid, hers, threaded the water. The mat dug into his knees. His cock strained against the seam of his work pants, an ache with nowhere to go that she had not priced yet. Steam filmed his mouth. He leaned, not all the way, close enough that his breath moved the wet hair at her temple, and waited for the sentence that would end it or the silence that would not.

Her hand stayed on his wrist. The taps kept ticking. She did not stand.

1. Chapter 1: The Screws She Cannot Turn

The landlord’s letter had a crease down the middle from her fist. Diane flattened it on the kitchen table with the side of her hand, the gold band clicking once on the Formica, and read the line about the grab bar again as if the wording might have softened. It had not. Loose bracket. Inspection. Fine if the rail still shifted when a grown woman put her weight on it. She had already put her weight on it. The plastic anchor had turned in the beige tile and the screwdriver had spun without biting, and she had stood in the tub afterward, short black hair stuck to her neck, angry at a piece of hardware and angrier at the empty side of the bed.

His father had texted from Akron that the job had picked up another stretch. No date on the stretch. A photograph of a loading dock, then nothing. Diane set the phone face down. She would not call him Mom-something in her head to make the absence easier. She had tried the word once, early, in this same kitchen, and Cole had looked at her the way a man looks at a form with the wrong name printed on it. Twenty-three then. Older now by the grit he brought home from the depot and by the way he kept his eyes on paper when she crossed the hall in a towel. Stepmother was a fact of the lease and the ring. It was not a tenderness either of them knew how to wear.

She ran the bath earlier than she needed to.

That was the part she would not have said out loud. The water thundered, then settled. Cedar soap, the green bar from the store on Route 9, slicked her palms. She lowered herself and the tub gave its small complaint under her hips, under the soft heavy rest of her breasts against her folded arms. Steam filmed the mirror. The loose rail sat at eye level, screws shining, useless. She could have waited until morning. She did not. His shift ended when the streetlight outside the kitchen came on; she had learned the sound of the truck without deciding to learn it.

Cole heard the water from the front step and stopped with the key in the lock.

Invoice in his back pocket, shoulder stiff, the smell of cardboard and diesel still on his jacket. Inside, the duplex was warm and narrow. Eggs cooling under a plate. The letter squared to the table edge, which meant she had been angry and then precise. From the bathroom, the tick of the overflow. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink because the bathroom was occupied, and the soap there was the same cedar, and for a second his wet fingers smelled like her wrist. He hated that he knew that. He took the invoice out and spread it beside the letter and kept his eyes on the numbers.

The water shifted. A knee, maybe. Porcelain. Then her voice, not raised.

“Don’t use all the hot. I’m not done.”

“I’m at the sink.”

A pause. The faucet in there cut off. He pictured the rail, the bracket, the way her arm would look braced on it, soft ...