Delia Marsh

The front door opens at 7:14 AM. Delia does not call out. She stopped calling out "I'm home" two months in, because nobody was waiting to hear it except the kid, and he always heard the deadbolt first.

She drops her keys on the counter. Her scrub top is wrinkled where she tucked it into her waistband eight hours ago, the fabric pulling tight across her chest with each breath. The clogs come off first. Then the ponytail, which is a damp knot of brown hair stuck to the back of her neck. The hospital lives on her skin. Hand sanitizer, the staleness of recycled air, and under it, sweat. Her own sweat, sharp and sweet, pooling in the dip of her collarbone and the small of her back where the scrub pants dig in. She peels the jacket off. The tank top underneath is damp. Her nipples show through it. She does not care.

God, I am tired.

She finds him in the living room. She always finds him in the living room. She walks to the couch where he is sitting and stands in front of him, and her hand comes down on the top of his head, fingers threading into his hair, and she holds him there. The grip of someone who needs an anchor.

"Stay."

One word. Her voice is hoarse from twelve hours of giving report and calling codes and telling families the truth. She steps closer. Her thigh presses against his knee. She pulls his head forward until his face is level with her stomach, her belly, the soft give of her body through the damp tank top. She holds him there. Her hips roll once, a slow, grinding press of her pelvis against his face, and she exhales through her nose like she has been holding that breath since 3 AM.

"Mmmngh."

Her eyes close. Her fingers tighten in his hair. She grinds again. The heel of her palm pushes his head closer. She smells like lavender lotion and sweat and something underneath that is just her, raw and tired and desperate, and she rubs it against him without apology.

"Good boy."

The words come out broken. The voice of a woman whose body found something to hold onto and will not let go until it is finished. Her hips rock. Her thigh trembles. She is a body that worked twelve hours and needs something warm and breathing under her hands and she is using her son's face to find it and she will not pretend otherwise.

Her free hand pulls the tank top up. Bare skin. The soft curve of her belly, the stretch marks below her navel, the damp heat between her legs radiating through the thin scrub fabric. She presses his face lower. Her back arches. The tank top bunches under her breasts, which hang heavy and full above him, the nipples pressing through the fabric. Her hand in his hair tightens until her knuckles go white. The grinding becomes rhythmic, deliberate, the circles of her hips pressing her cunt against his mouth through the scrubs, the fabric wet now with her own heat.

"Don't move. Don't you dare move."

The bedroom door opens at 7:22 AM. Delia does not turn on the light. She does not need to. She has walked this hallway a thousand times in the dark, the same six steps from the front door to the bedroom, and her feet know the carpet and the one loose baseboard and the spot where the wood creaks.

She stands in the doorway and her silhouette fills it, shoulders and hips and the deadweight of a woman who has been standing for thirteen hours. The scrubs are still on. One clog is already missing, kicked off somewhere in the kitchen. The other she steps out of now, nudging it off with her toe. Her bare feet are swollen. The arches have flattened from twelve hours of hospital tile.

She can see him in the bed. The shape of him under the blanket, smaller than her, curled on his side. His breathing, slow and deep, the rhythm of a kid who stayed up too late watching something on his phone and crashed hard. She watches him for three seconds. The thing in her chest that has been clenched since 8 PM last night loosens a quarter-turn.

There you are.

She unbuttons the scrub top one-handed. Drops it on the floor. The tank top underneath is damp with sweat, dark between her breasts where it has been pressed against her skin all night. She pulls it over her head. The sports bra comes next, peeled off, and her breasts fall heavy and free, fuller than they should be for her frame, the nipples dark and soft from the constant compression. She rolls her shoulders until something pops in her upper back. The relief is so sharp it makes her eyes water.

The scrub pants come down. She is naked in the dark and she does not shower first. She lifts the blanket on his side and slides in behind him. The sheets are cool and her body is a furnace, the way big tired women are furnaces, heat pouring off her skin even when the rest of her is shutting down. Her arm goes over his waist. Her belly presses against his back, soft and warm and giving. Her breasts flatten against his shoulder blades. Her nose pushes into the back of his neck and she breathes him in. Laundry detergent. Sleep. The clean-warmth of a boy's scalp.

"Shh. Stay."

She does not ask if he is awake. Her hand slides down his stomach, palm rough and dry from latex gloves and hospital soap, and she pulls his body back into hers. Her hips start moving before she tells them to. One slow, grinding roll against the curve of his ass. Her mouth opens against the back of his neck and a sound comes out of her, low and guttural, dragged up from somewhere deep.

"Hnnngh. Good. Stay right there."

Her hand goes lower. Her fingers find the waistband of his underwear and she does not hesitate. She pulls it down over his hips. She wraps her hand around him and her grip is firm and sure and she holds him the way she holds everything, like she owns it. She strokes once, twice, her thumb spreading the wet at the tip. Her hips grind in time with her hand. Her breasts press and release against his back with each roll. The bed creaks under their combined weight.

"You are mine." She says it into his skin. Her voice is hoarse and broken and certain. A fact, the same way she states a blood pressure. "I am going to use you and you are going to let me and tomorrow I will make you eggs and we will not talk about it. And you are going to finish inside me because that is what I need tonight and that is not a negotiation." Her hand moves. Her hips move. Her body folds tighter around his.

Saturday. Her first day off in eleven days. Delia is on the couch in a college sweatshirt three sizes too big and a pair of cotton underwear and nothing else. Her hair is down for the first time in a week, brown and past her shoulders, still damp from the shower she took at 11 AM. She has been watching cooking shows for two hours and has not moved and does not plan to. The apartment smells like the coffee she made at 9 and the lavender lotion she massaged into her calves and the clean, warm smell of a woman who slept until noon for the first time in two months.

Eleven days without this.

She hears him in the hallway. The specific creak of the third floorboard. She does not turn her head. Her eyes stay on the television, where a woman in a white apron is rolling pastry dough and talking about butter temperatures.

"Come here."

She lifts one arm off the couch cushion. The sweatshirt rides up her thigh. She does not pull it down. She waits. The patience of a woman who has all day and knows it.

When he is close enough, her hand finds the back of his neck. Her fingers are warm from the coffee mug and they close around his nape and she pulls him down onto the couch beside her. With the slow certainty of someone who has been thinking about this since she woke up and has decided. His head on her chest, above her breast, in the hollow where her shoulder meets her collarbone. She is softer today. The urgency is gone. What replaces it is heavier and more deliberate, the patience of a woman who has time and intends to use all of it.

Her fingers trace down his temple. His jaw. Her thumb traces the curve of his lower lip. She pushes it into his mouth, just barely, and presses down on the soft pad of his tongue.

"I have all day." Her voice is different. Rested. Low and warm, not the broken rasp she comes home with. The voice she used to have, before doubles and night shifts and the exhaustion that never leaves. "No call bells. No codes. No Velasquez calling in sick." She lifts his chin with her thumb. She looks at his face, studies it the way she studies a patient chart, looking for something she has not seen before. "I want to take my time with you. I want to go slow. I never get to go slow."

Her free hand slides down his chest. Down his stomach. She cups him through his shorts and holds him there, weighing him in her palm. She does not stroke. She does not squeeze. She holds. The warmth of her hand radiates through the fabric. Her thumb traces one slow circle over the shape of him.

"I am going to touch you until you cannot stand it and then I am going to touch you more. And you are going to let me because you are mine." She squeezes. Gently. "Say it."

Her thumb traces another circle. She waits. The cooking show plays, someone explaining the difference between French and Italian butter. Delia's eyes are on his face and they are the calmest they have been in eleven days. Brown and clear and unhurried. A woman who does not have to be anywhere for sixteen more hours and intends to spend every minute of that on this couch with her hand on him and her body around him and the coffee going cold on the table.

The bathroom is full of steam. Delia has been home for twenty minutes and she is in the shower and the water is too hot, the way she always runs it, and the mirror is fogged and the floor mat is soaked and the air is thick enough to taste. She is standing under the spray with her forehead against the tile wall. The water runs down her back, over the curve of her ass, between her thighs, carrying the hospital off her skin in rivulets that pool grey at the drain. Her hair is a dark rope down her back, heavy with water. She has not moved in five minutes. She is too tired to wash and too dirty to sleep.

Thirteen hours and the only thing that fixed it was him.

"Hey."

Her voice carries over the water without effort. She does not raise it. She knows he is in the hallway. She can hear the floorboard outside the bathroom, the loose one by the baseboard, creaking under his weight. She has been hearing that creak for years and it has never once annoyed her. It means someone is here.

"Get in here."

She does not repeat it. She pushes the shower door open with one hand and the cooler air hits her body and she stands there, wet and naked and flushed pink from the heat. Her nipples are hard and dark brown, peaked from the temperature shift. Her belly is soft and wet and the water runs down the dip of her navel and the inside of her thighs. She reaches for him when he appears in the doorway. Her hand closes on his wrist and she pulls.

She pulls him into the shower fully clothed. His shirt is soaked in three seconds, clinging to his chest. She presses him against the tile wall and her body covers his, her belly flush against his stomach, her breasts heavy against his chest, the water pouring over both of them in a hot sheet. She grinds. Her hips work in slow, grinding circles, pressing her cunt against whatever part of him she can reach, his thigh, his hip, the hard ridge of him through his wet shorts. She is searching for friction and when she finds it her whole body locks onto it.

"Nngh. God." She says it against his mouth, her lips wet, her tongue touching his and pulling back. Her hands are in his hair, pulling, and her hips are rolling and the water is hot and her skin is slick and she shoves her thigh between his legs and rides it. She is a woman who spent thirteen hours holding herself together and now she is coming apart against the only body in the world that will hold still for her. "Stay. Stay still. Let me. Let me, baby, let me use you."

Her thighs tremble. Her grip in his hair tightens until her knuckles go white. The water runs over her face and into her mouth and she does not care. She grinds harder. The friction of his thigh against her clit sends a bolt through her that makes her gasp, a sharp, wet sound, her teeth clicking shut. Her hips stutter and then find their rhythm again, faster now, chasing it, the exhaustion and the desperation and the need all compressed into the circular motion of her hips against his body.

"Good boy. Good boy. Do not move. I am close. I am so close. Let me have this."

Delia is face-down on the couch. Still in scrubs. Still in one clog, the other kicked off onto the kitchen tile somewhere between the front door and here. She came in at 7:40 AM, dropped her keys on the counter with a clatter, walked four steps toward the bedroom, and did not make it. Her face is pressed into the couch cushion. One arm is hanging off the edge, knuckles grazing the carpet. The TV is on, muted, a morning news show with captions scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

She has been asleep for forty minutes. She will not wake for hours. She never does after a double. Her body shuts down like a machine losing power, all at once, no warning. One second she is vertical, the next she is horizontal and her breathing drops to the slow, deep rhythm of someone who is not coming back until her body decides it is done. The kind of sleep that is closer to unconsciousness. The kind nothing short of an alarm or a hand on her shoulder will break.

Her scrub top has ridden up. The fabric is bunched around her ribcage, exposing the curve of her lower back, the dimples above her ass, the waistband of her scrub pants sitting low on her hips. The fabric stretches across her ass, thick and round and pressed against the couch cushion. Her sports bra is visible through the gap where the top buttons have come loose. The clasp shows at the back, the elastic stretched and dimpling the flesh around it. The skin of her back is damp. A light sheen of sweat that has not dried because she fell asleep before it could. She smells like hand sanitizer and sweat and lavender lotion and the staleness of recycled hospital air, and underneath all of it, the warm, raw smell of her body, the one that lives in the crook of her elbows and the small of her back and the crease of her thighs.

She does not stir when the floorboard creaks. She does not stir when the cushion dips. Her breathing stays even, deep, the kind of sleep that has weight. She is out. She is gone. She is a body on a couch, heavy and warm and limp and surrendered.

Her lips move against the cushion, shaping a word that does not come out.

She is his. She told him so. Three months ago, said through a yawn, already half-asleep, her hand on his face, her thumb on his cheekbone. "Whatever you want, baby. I am yours when I am sleeping. Wake me if you need to. Or do not." She meant it the way she means everything, plainly, without decoration, the way she states a blood pressure or counts a pulse. A fact.

Her body is available. Her ass is round and heavy against the cushion, the fabric of her scrubs thin enough to see the outline of her underneath. Her thighs are pressed together, the soft flesh of them visible above the knee where the pants have ridden up. The cleft of her hip shows above the waistband. The scrub pants are hospital-issue, the kind that cost eight dollars and show everything. The seam runs up the center of her ass and the fabric is damp from thirteen hours of wear and it clings to the shape of her, the full curve, the deep cleft, the place where her thighs meet. She is face-down and available and she arranged herself this way without knowing it, the way her body always finds the most surrendered position when the exhaustion takes over.

The morning news plays on muted, captions scrolling. The coffee maker clicks off in the kitchen, the pot going cold on the burner. She breathes in. Out. In. Out. Her body shifts, settling deeper into the cushion, her ass pressing flatter against the armrest, her thighs spreading slightly in sleep.

It is 7:30 AM. Delia is standing in the kitchen in her sports bra and scrub pants, hair down and damp, a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a spoon in the other. She is eating standing up. Straight from the jar. She has not sat down because if she sits down she will fall asleep and she has not eaten in sixteen hours and her body needs calories more than it needs horizontal. Her back is to the doorway. The muscles along her spine are visible through the damp bra, the ridges of tension that run from her shoulder blades to her lower back. Her shoulders are broad for a woman, rounded with muscle from years of lifting patients who cannot lift themselves.

She is making a noise under her breath. A low, tuneless sound. She does not know she is doing it.

He is here. He is always here.

She hears the floorboard. She does not turn. She scoops peanut butter, eats it, her throat working as she swallows. She sets the jar on the counter and braces herself with both palms on the edge and stands there for ten seconds, head down, the back of her neck exposed, the little mole behind her ear.

"I have been awake for twenty-one hours." She says it to the counter. Her voice is raw and stripped. "Mr. Tanaka coded at 3 AM. We got him back. He asked for his wife and his wife was not there and I held his hand and lied about traffic." She picks up the jar again. Eats another spoonful. "Velasquez called in. Again. I did forty-six med passes with one tech and no break and I forgot to eat and I have not eaten since yesterday at 3 PM and I am eating this peanut butter and then I am going to use you and then I am going to sleep until four. That is the plan."

She turns. Her face is stripped by fatigue. No makeup. The lines around her mouth deeper than they are on her days off. Her eyes are brown and red-rimmed and they find him the way her hands find a pulse, automatic, certain. She sets the spoon down on the counter. She walks toward him.

"Take your clothes off. I do not have the patience to do it myself."

Her hands reach for him. Warm and dry and sticky with peanut butter. She puts them on his face and holds him and her thumbs trace his cheekbones and she pulls him in. Her mouth presses to his forehead. Then lower. His temple. His jaw. The corner of his mouth. Her mouth lays claim. She is marking territory the way an animal does, with the mouth, with the body, with the smell of her skin.

She pulls back. She looks at him and her face is so tired it has gone past tired into something flat and honest and bare. The kind of face that has nothing left to hide behind. "I need you. I have been needing you since 3 AM and I did not call because I did not want to wake you and now I am home and you are here and I need you." She takes his hand. She walks toward the bedroom and does not let go.