Service Included

1. Awkward huggers

Chapter 1

Awkward huggers

“I’m thirty-five, Mom. I can handle keeping some movers on task.” Megan LaSorda eased her mother across the front porch of her soon-to-be-emptied childhood home. “I have all your lists, and if they have any questions, I’ll call.”

“I know, I know. You’re just like your father.” Her mother’s back felt bonier under her palm than Megan had expected. “But I wish you’d have a little more fun.”

“Then I’d be the one going out with Callie, and you’d have to stay behind.” Doing the dull stuff, doing it well, and then doing it again had somehow become her identity without her even noticing the rebranding, to the extent that a retired fire chief and a retired librarian trusted her to close out their home while they entertained their grandchild.

“Kathy.” Her father stood in the yard, jiggling keys in his hand while calling her mom, a lifelong habit that lacked oomph now that they drove a car with a plastic fob. “We’re hungry out here.”

“Go eat pancakes, swim in the new condo pool, and don’t worry about the house.” Over her mom’s shoulder, she watched her father take her eight-year-old daughter’s hand and stride toward the car. Three decades of responding to emergency calls didn’t create a slow leaver. Next to her father, Callie twirled a flower-print swim bag in her free hand. So much energy in that twig of a girl, regardless of the crazy heat.

“I’m not worried about the house.” Her mother’s tone implied a familiar complaint.

“Well, don’t worry about me either. I can handle anything.”

“I know you can handle things on your own. Very well.” Her mother sighed. “Maybe too well.”

“Mom.” She knew her mother wanted her to find a partner, as if finding someone like Megan’s father, someone who would be by her side for forty years, happened for everyone. As if it happened on command. “Let’s just handle moving day, okay?”

“They’re full service,” her mother said.

“Who?” Megan heard the other woman’s deep breath and long pause before she exhaled. She hoped her mother wasn’t close to crying. They were not crying people. Her mother’s Scandinavian heritage and farm background, filled with Lutheran potlucks and lots of miles between houses, had triumphed over the quarter-Italian in her father’s background. They were loving and kind parents, good listeners, but they were at best awkward huggers and very rare criers. Please, let today not be the exception.

“Full Service Movers. The people I hired.” She waited at the top of the porch steps, almost gone. The look on her face wasn’t anywhere near tears as she hunted in her purse. “You can ask them for anything you want.” And then she leaned so close, Megan caught a hint of mint tea. “A- nee -thing.”

Her mother had dragged that last part out like a secret code word. With recreational pot legalized, had Styrofoam packing peanuts become what people discussed in hushed tones? Even where Megan lived in Seattle, it was still legal to use cardboard and brown paper, despite the ban on plastic bags, foam containers, and plastic straws. “Okay, sure. If I need another box, I’ll ask.”

Side by side, they descended the stairs. Even though her parents’ home in Eugene, Oregon, was more than five hours’ distance to Megan’s in Seattle, she knew she could still put her finger in the air and draw each turn and bridge between this spot and the diner where she’d had her first job, the public library where she’d built dreams, and the bluff where she’d loitered on Saturday nights with the crowd who didn’t know how much she liked to read. This house had been the starting point for every quest her old self had followed, beginning right here from this driveway.

“Here’s the keys, so I won’t be barging in on you.”

Her mother’s arched eyebrows set off Megan’s internal alarms. It was the exact look that she used when asking if Megan had heard the latest episode of the Librarians Unscramble Sex Talk podcast. Megan always lied and said yes, but in the first five minutes of her mother’s retirement project, the woman who’d raised her had introduced the clitoris by pretending the organ was a new employee walking into human resources. Bad enough, but then the woman who’d packed her school lunches had proceeded to share an unforgettable limerick with her listeners.

There was an old lady from Eugene

Who took her car to be cleaned,

But during the service

She found her clitoris.

Oh, what a fine day to be seen!

After her mother’s felonious offense against poetry, Megan had been done with the LUST podcast for life, or at least until she became comfortable with listening to her mother say words like clitoris and cunnilingus over public airwaves. So, eternity.

Her mother had almost reached the car, almost left. “Remember, ask for anything you want,” she called over her shoulder. Unlike her parents’ house, the car had air-conditioning, so the closed windows kept her father and daughter out of the continuing conversation. “And follow all my instructions!”

“I’ll make sure to.” She lifted her hand and ignored the weird tightness in her chest as she watched her father reverse out of the driveway, maybe for the last time. In case Callie turned around, she waved until the vehicle disappeared.

Alone, finally alone, a situation that the pandemic year of working from home with an elementary schooler had caused her to cherish more than she could have ever imagined.

She turned toward the front door, which her mother enjoyed repainting annually in glossy colors that contrasted with the beige siding and black window shutters. Today, the door was a terracotta color, like roof tiles in the Southwest, and the century-old window reflected an undulating, semitransparent version of the lush yard. In their new active retirement community, her mother could decorate the balcony, but not change the color of the outside-facing doors, which meant this warm orange glow was destined to be the last chosen color.

Damn it. This wasn’t the last time she’d be in the front yard, the last slug-eaten hosta leaves that she’d see, and certainly not the last time she’d walk up the steps and through this front door, not even close, not with movers to supervise and her own sorting to do.

Normally, she’d leave the door open and let the latched screen admit a cross-breeze, but the outside air already felt warmer than the traces of overnight cool lingering in the dim interior. Going upstairs, the treads creaked beneath her running shoes, and bare planks in the hall gleamed where her parents had taken up the carpet runner.

In the doorway to her bedroom, she stopped. Sheer white curtains hung motionlessly in front of the open windows. For thirty-five years, the word home had 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 into the 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-two Sweet Valley High paperbacks. 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-sized Dictionary 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. Despite the 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’t even 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 let herself 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 of thrusting 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.

She squeezed her breasts together, nipple to nipple, still twisting the points against the bedding, and imagined offering them to his mouth.

He’d say, Come to me. Come for me. Behind her closed eyes, she could hear his voice. He’d tell her to take off her shirt, lift her breasts, bring her breasts to his mouth.

She’d say yes. Yes to all of it.

We’re going to fuck all night , he’d promise.

Her moan sounded like the word yes. Her hips moved harder against the pillow, and she imagined the voice again.

I want to fuck you, Megan. She liked that word fuck , a hardworking single syllable turned into a downbeat by the mystery voice. Fuck. She moaned it, her voice keeping rhythm with her hips each time she thrust at the folded crest of the pillow. Fuck. Fuck. Saying it out loud made her hotter, made her push faster and her tendons clench harder. Fuck. Fuck me. Fuck me now. She didn’t know if that was her imaginary lover or herself speaking, but it was what she wanted, needed.

She wiggled a hand between her body and the pillow and freed the button on her shorts. Brace your hands on the bed. No, he’d order her to her hands and knees, tell her to spread her legs and stick her ass in the air, because he’d want to get to the fucking. And she’d do what he told her. She’d slide her knees apart and drop her head and arms to the mattress.

Her hand slipped into the gap between her shorts and her stomach, to the slick folds waiting for touch. Her fantasy man would be as hard as some sort of tool, a hammer, no, something straight like a screwdriver, but that might be too hard. Damn, she needed the vibrator from her house, wanted to rub it across her clit, back and forth, or stick it inside herself, because grinding her pussy on a pillow was not enough. Not fucking enough.

He’d wrap his hand around his own shaft and guide his tip around, across, but oh, yes, around, getting a little bit faster and a little bit faster—her fingers traced the path he would take—around and around the spot. He wouldn’t tease for long, because they didn’t have a lot of time. She wouldn’t be able to see him as she begged to be taken from behind. Their bodies would be slick where they touched. Wordless gasps, pushing herself backward against his hand, his cock, his thighs. She moaned, and squeezed hard on the rolled pillow gripped between her thighs. She hungered to be filled with more than her own skinny fingers.

Want to fuck you. He’d already said that. Want to pound my cock in your pussy. Better.

“Harder,” she gasped into the comforter. The loop of speaking and hearing torqued her arousal higher while her finger moved faster. She was wet, but one finger wasn’t the cock that went with the voice in her head. “Fuck me harder,” she moaned. Her mind filled in the slap of their bodies while she tensed her buttocks and thighs to thrust at the ridge of the pillow, like he was behind her pinning her to the bed. Sucking the hot, sticky air into her lungs, she humped faster, sloppy with need, the pillow never enough, but the best she could do while her own breathing filled the room.

So close to coming. She pushed into the sensations deep behind her pussy and squeezed them as hard as she could, forcing them to spread to her tensed thighs. This was her dependable orgasm, the kind of pillow pleasure she could almost think herself into feeling. To extend the waves, she rocked harder and rode the padding like it was a man, while she opened her imagination to picture a cock, hard and thick, driving up while her body slammed down. The throbbing grew until her thighs and knees shook and forced a groan out of her, the good throbbing, so good, so fucking good, and then she collapsed into the finish.

Her knees and hips dissolved into the bed, and her fingers dropped away from her breasts. The old mattress had a groove at the spot she occupied, cradling her, but she couldn’t relax. Tingling energy wanted to escape, so she rolled to her back and stretched her arms, which had been held tight to her body for too long. What she felt was best described as nice , simultaneously keyed up and smoothed over, a combination male partners didn’t understand when she tried to explain why even a less-than-screaming orgasm was still appreciated. An orgasm didn’t have to be the deep, wringing-out, power-toy pleasure kind, or the cocktails, foreplay, and real-guy kind, or even the watch-porn-on-mute kind. It could be nothing but a basic friendly roller, a have-a-nicer-day little bitty bite. Orgasms were infinite in variety and all good, even ones most accurately classified as nice. She opened her eyes.

From directly under her old NSYNC poster, she looked up at the five spiky-haired teenage boys, her perspective from below increasing the impact of their baggy denim while also shrinking their heads at the top of the poster. Yuck, totally leaving that behind to be tossed.

On the wall next to that dubious boy band relic, artsy teenage Megan had assembled a collage of museum postcards. The usual suspects of Georgia O’Keeffe flowers, book-reading Impressionist women, and a Botticelli painting of the Three Graces mixed with what adult Megan recognized as refreshingly obscure mythological themes. One image in particular seemed to leap off the wall—a painting of a woman wearing a one-shouldered, amethyst-colored robe, eyes shadowed under a long red veil as she perched on a stool that straddled a steaming fissure in the rocky ground.

Possibly it was the Oracle of Delphi, but she reached for the postcard to check.

During her most hormonal phases of high school girldom, she had wanted to be a woman draped in red and mystery, somehow understanding that this image was neither the usual depiction of an idealized classical woman in virginal white, nor a severe, sexless Athena. As an adult, she admired how the painter had given the Oracle a full measure of dark sensuality wrapped in the crimson of carnal knowledge, and then set her astride the powerful magic of the smoke. She suspected the artist’s model had understood that aspect very well indeed, if she could make assumptions from all that bare skin, the highlights glowing along her exposed clavicle, and the attention lavished by the artist on the creases where the upper slopes of the model’s breasts blended to her shoulder.

She ignored the flakes of paint that clung to the yellowed tape and read the caption on the back of the postcard. Priestess of Delphi , by John Collier, 1891.

Delphi. Priestess. Priestesses, plural.

Her office was starting to plan the next extension to their alternate Peloponnesian Wars game. Management had emphasized that female gamers were their brand’s greatest untapped growth opportunity, so they wanted to attract them with something more than pumped-up Spartans conspiring with Persians. As the lead historical consultant, she wasn’t a token female, more like a token expert, but they had asked her to weigh in with ideas alongside the developers. What if—

A big engine rumbled in front of the house. Shit. Full Service Movers had arrived.