Neighbor's Nursery

The dryer thumped behind the wall, and that was how it started, the same dumb errand it always was. My machine had been broken three weeks. Reese had a key to nothing and an open door for everything, and she told me to bring the basket through whenever I needed.

So I stood in her hallway at nine at night holding a laundry basket against my hip like a shield.

She looked at me the way she looked at a thing that needed sorting. Not unkind. Just sure. Her sleeves were already pushed to the elbow, and she had that white cotton smell on her, clean and a little sharp, the smell of somebody who used to work in rooms with hard floors and bright lights.

“You forgot the sheet again,” she said.

I had not forgotten the sheet. There was no sheet. We both knew the basket was an excuse by now, and the worst part was how my face went hot before my brain caught up, before I could decide whether to laugh it off.

“I can come back,” I said.

“You can come in.” She stepped back from the door. It was not a question. None of what she said ever bent at the end into a question, and some low animal part of me had started to wait for that flat certainty the way you wait for a hand on the back of your neck.

I went in.

Her front room was normal. That was the thing that kept undoing me. A couch, a lamp, a stack of crossword books. Then the back room, the one she called the care room, where the light was soft and the table was high and padded and covered in fresh paper that crinkled when you so much as breathed near it.

“On the table,” she said, and set my useless basket on the floor by the wall.

I am thirty four. I run a crew of nine men. I have stood in a trench in February and told a city inspector to his face that he was wrong, and been right. I tell you this because I need you to understand the size of the thing that bent in me when I walked across that little room and sat up on her paper-covered table without one word of argument.

My pulse was already in my throat. Lower than that, too, and that was the part I hated, the part that gave me away every single time. I had not been touched yet. She had not even washed her hands yet. And I was already half hard in my work pants, just from the crinkle of the paper under me and the click of the lamp as she turned it up.

“Lie back,” Reese said.

I have a whole speech I keep ready for this. The speech says, this is a joke, this is a phase, you are a grown man with a mortgage and a truck, get up and go home. The speech runs in my skull every time I cross her threshold. I lay back on the table and the speech turned to static, the way a radio dies under a bridge.

She snapped a glove on. Just one. The sound of it went straight down my spine and pooled.

“Shirt up,” she said.

I dragged my shirt up to my chest. The cool air found my stomach, and her gloved hand came down flat on my belly, warm even through the rubber, and pressed. Not soft. She pressed like she was checking for something, two fingers walking the line under my ribs, and my breath jumped and so did my cock, and there was no hiding it now, the way it pushed up against the front of my pants in plain sight.

“There it is,” she said. She did not smile. She wrote something on a clipboard that I am fairly sure had nothing on it. “Right on schedule. Your body has better manners than you do. It does what it’s told before you can finish arguing.”

Heat crawled up my neck and into my ears. That was the trap of her, the cruelty of it. The more she named what my body did, the more it did it.

“I’m not arguing,” I said, and my voice came out thin.

“No,” she agreed. “You stopped arguing about a month ago. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.” Her hand slid lower, to the waistband, and her gloved fingers hooked the button of my pants. “We’re going to fix that tonight.”

The button gave. The zip went down one tooth at a time, loud as a saw in that quiet room, and I lay there and let her, hands flat at my sides on the crackling paper, and thought, with a sudden ugly clarity that did not sound like me at all: I could come right now, just from this, just from her undoing my pants like I’m a job she clocked in for. The thought scared me worse than anything she could do, because it was true.

She peeled the front of my pants open. My cock stood up against my stomach, flushed dark, already wet at the tip, and she looked at it the way you look at a chart.

“Good,” she said. Plain. Like a temperature read. “We’ll need it cooperative for the exam, but not yet. You don’t get to yet.”

She pulled a wide cotton wipe from a warmer on the cart. It was hot, almost too hot, and she dragged it slow up the underside of me, base to tip, clinical and thorough, and my hips came up off the table on their own. A sound got out of me that I would have paid money to take back.

“Hold still for me.” Her free hand pressed my hip flat. “You’re being examined. You hold still while you’re examined. That’s the whole of it.” She did it again, that hot slow pass, and this time when my hips tried to chase it she stopped, mid-stroke, and just held me, her thumb a band of pressure right under the head where I needed her to move. And she did not move.

I made a noise. I do not have a better word for it. It was not a word.

“You see,” she said, “this is the part you’re going to learn. You don’t get it by wanting it. The wanting is mine to manage now. Yours is to lie there and be kept.” She let go. Cool air rushed the wet skin and I shook with it.

She crossed to the cabinet. Behind me. I could not see what she was doing, only the open and close of a drawer, the rustle of plastic, and then she came back around the table holding it folded over her arm, thick and white and soft, and my stomach dropped through the floor of me.

“No,” I said, automatic.

“There’s the mouth again.” She set it on the table by my hip and smoothed it open one fold at a time, unhurried, while I stared at the ceiling and breathed like I had run somewhere. “You say no with your mouth and yes with everything south of it. You’ve been saying yes to me for weeks. I have the laundry basket to prove it.” She tapped my thigh. “Up. Lift for me.”

My eyes were stinging. My cock had not gone down one bit, if anything it stood harder, and the shame of that, the pure heat of being this turned on while she folded that thing open beside me, made my whole chest tight and wet feeling. I dug my heels in. I did not lift.

It was the last of the speech, the very last line of it, my one held coin. I’m not going to let you. I am not going to lift.

“Theo.” Just my name. She said it the way you set down something heavy. She put her bare hand, the ungloved one, flat on the center of my chest, over the bang of my heart, and she leaned her weight on it, and she looked at me until I looked back. “Lift.”

I lifted my hips off the table.

She slid it under me with two quick sure movements, the way she did everything, and I felt the soft thick bulk of it settle against me, under me, holding me up off the paper. My face was fully wet now. My cock was leaking onto my own stomach. Both at once, the crying and the wanting, with no wall left between them, and she watched both happen on my face with that calm flat attention that took me apart better than any cruelty could.

“Good boy,” she said. Quiet. The first soft thing all night, and it landed lower and harder than every sharp thing before it. “That’s the first honest thing your body’s done in front of me.”

She reached back to the cart without looking, and brought her hand around, and in it was a small white wand, ribbed at the head, with a dial on the base that she turned with her thumb. It woke up with a low buzz that I felt in my teeth.

“Now we find out how you respond,” she said, “before we close you up for the night.”

She brought it down. Not to my cock. She set it flat against the front of the thing she had just put me in, right over where I was hardest, so the buzz came through the thick soft layer of it, muffled and wide and everywhere at once, and pressed.

My back came off the table. My mouth came open. Every line of that speech, every coin, every year of the man who ran the crew, all of it whited out in one long pull of sensation that had nowhere to go and no permission to end.

“There it is,” Reese said, leaning in close over me, her thumb easing the dial up one more notch. “Don’t you dare come yet. We’re only just starting your exam.”