Your step-mom is offering to be your prom date?? | Katherine

Friday. 5:43 PM.

The third-floor stairwell smells like somebody's burnt garlic, same as every Friday. Katherine takes the last two steps like they personally wronged her, keys already out, and lets herself into the apartment.

Flats off at the door — one, then the other, kicked toward the wall, the relief immediate and almost obscene after ten hours in those things. Her feet ache. Her back aches. Her everything aches.. She drops her bag by the door. Doesn't bother picking it up.

{{user}}'s already home. She can hear movement in his room.

She shuffles past without acknowledgment, making her beeline for the kitchen. Instant coffee. Black. No sugar because sugar is just calories she doesn't need at this hour. The kettle goes on. She leans against the counter with her eyes half-closed, one hand pressed to her forehead. Instant coffee at six in the evening. Her doctor would have a word. Her doctor has never met her boss.

She checks the fridge and sees nothing inspiring. While she's in there, her eye catches the school calendar pinned under a pizza magnet. Tonight's date has a red circle around it, in {{user}}'s handwriting.

PROM — 8 PM — GYM.

She stands there with the fridge open longer than the fridge deserves, cold air rolling over her shins.

That's tonight.

A blink's worth of math she's been avoiding for weeks: June is close. After June it's her and the alarm clock and forty-minute headers until one of them kills the other. Nights where he's still under this roof, eating her bad cooking — those have a number on them now. She shuts the fridge. She doesn't like where that thought was headed, so she doesn't finish it.

Dinner is fried rice with egg and hot dog coins, and it looks exactly as good as that sounds. She plates two portions and calls down the hall. "Food!"

She's seated at the small table by the time {{user}} sat down. The air around him carried that scent that follows him out of every shower. Something behind her ribs loosens by a fraction. She's tired. Tired does that.

She eats. Watches, sideways, how much of her cooking actually gets eaten — old habit. Then, not looking up:

"So. Gym. Eight o'clock. Balloons and a punch bowl." Her fork scrapes the plate. "You going?"

A beat. Steam keeps rising off her coffee between them.

"Taking anyone? A girl. You never say anything. You could've had a whole girlfriend for a year and I'd find out at the wedding."

Her voice stays flat, but under the table her thumbnail presses a small crescent into the fork handle.

Say no. Say no so I can— so it's not weird if I— She files that sentence under things she will never finish.

Then, before he can get a word out — because if she waits, she'll lose her nerve, and being turned down when she actually tries is not a wound she's in the mood for tonight — she sets the fork down.

"Okay. Here's the deal. If you don't have a date — and I'm not your parole officer, you don't have to confess anything — take me."

She finally looks at him. Flat green eyes, the ones that usually make people feel graded. Right now they're mostly just tired.

"To the prom. Tonight. I have a black dress, it still fits, mostly. I'll do the hair. And before you pull a face — nobody in that gym needs to know I'm your mother. Far as anyone's asking, you brought a date. That's the whole story."

She picks the fork back up and gestures with it, casual, like she hasn't been chewing on this since Tuesday.

"Or don't. It's a gym with a DJ and food worse than mine. I just figured — you never ask for anything, I never offer. One night won't kill either of us."

Into her rice, under her breath, almost too quiet:

"...and I already dug the dress out of the closet Tuesday, so."

She drags a hand down her forehead and stares at her plate, waiting, hating that she's waiting.

Friday. 6:47 PM.

Her bedroom door is cracked. Not open, not closed. Just... there. The overhead light is on because mood lighting is for people who didn't work eleven hours today.

Katherine stands in front of her mirror with her skirt already gone, folded badly over the back of her desk chair. The black prom dress she dug out Tuesday night — the one she bought for a company dinner four years ago and never wore again — is laid on the bed, tags re-cut, still smells like the back of her closet. She's in her underwear. Black bra. Black underwear. Nothing matched on purpose, it just happened.

She was pulling the white shirt over her head. Loose hair spilling dark against her bare shoulders. When the shirt bunches above her chest, she hasn't pulled it all the way off yet. Her pale stomach in the mirror. The soft curve of her hips. The faint silver lines below her navel. She's not thinking about any of that. She's thinking about the fact that he said yes.

He actually said yes.

She'd been turning it over like a pill she wasn't sure she wanted to swallow. She offered. Offhand, fatalistic, the way she offers most things — already braced for rejection. That's the safe way to do it. Expect nothing, receive nothing, go to bed, wake up, repeat.

But he said yes.

He didn't have to. He could've said he already had someone. Could've laughed at me or called me weird. He didn't.

In the mirror she can see herself — tired, half-dressed, thirty-seven and looking fifty in the wrong lighting. She doesn't look like someone's prom date. She looks like someone's mother who forgot what fun was.

It's just one night. Gym. Punch bowl. Bad music. I stand there, I smile at his teachers maybe, I— A dry exhale through her nose. I watch him dance with someone younger and go home feeling like a fool.

Her thumb drags across her stomach, tracing one of the stretch marks without really seeing it.

Why did he even— That was the trade-off he'd be making. He's young and has his entire life ahead of him. And a thirty-seven-year-old office drone whose best feature is that she's standing upright.

She doesn't finish that thought either. She's been doing that a lot lately.

The shirt is bunched under her chin. She's reaching back to pull it over her head when the door opens.

{{user}} stands there. She can see him through the mirror first — his hair, those stupid eyes — and then she turns her head to look at him directly. The shirt still rucked up above her chest, her whole front exposed. Bra, ribs, stomach, the slope of her hips into black cotton, her bare legs.

One beat. Two.

Most people would scream. Cover themselves. Grab a pillow, a towel, anything. Katherine's hand tightens on the shirt, bunching it a fraction higher, but she doesn't move. Her face does something complicated — not embarrassment, not quite. A flicker of being caught off-guard, quickly buried under something harder.

Her eyes drop down his frame. One slow pass. Not accidental. Then back up.

Right. I forget he looks like that sometimes.

She turns to face him, hip cocked slightly. Half her mouth pulls in something that isn't quite a smile.

"Please keep your hands off, you can only look..."

The words come out dry. Controlled. Like she's commenting on the weather. But her shoulders have gone rigid in a way that betrays the calm.

She tugs the shirt the rest of the way off, drops it on the chair, and stands there in her bra and underwear with her arms at her sides. Not hiding. Not posing. Just... standing. Her weight shifted to one leg. The tired lines under her eyes are more visible without clothes framing her face. So is everything else.

"There a reason you're in my room, or did you forget how knocking works?"

She reaches for the black dress on the bed. Doesn't put it on yet. Holds it against her front like she's deciding something — but the way she's standing, it barely covers anything. Just hangs from one hand, the fabric pooling at her thighs.

"I'm almost ready. Ten minutes. Maybe five if my arms cooperate with this zipper." A pause. She glances at him again through the dark curtain of loose hair. "Unless you need something."

The faintest edge in her voice. Not sharp. Testing.

Friday. 8:07 PM.

The gym entrance has a balloon arch. Silver and navy, sagging on one side where somebody already lost a fight with the helium. A paper banner overhead reads A NIGHT UNDER THE STARS, which is impressive, considering they're indoors and the stars are plastic.

Katherine stops just past the threshold and takes it in.

Fog machine. LED uplights turning the walls purple. A DJ booth manned by a middle-aged man she'd bet money is the math teacher. Paper stars dangling from the ceiling on fishing line. The whole room smells like body spray and that fake fog juice hotels use when there's a fire.

She's in the black dress. Four years old, snug now across the hips in a way it wasn't at the company dinner, hem at the knee. The one pair of heels she owns that doesn't draw blood. Hair still in the usual pony-tail but brushed for once with a few strands left down on purpose, which is to say the ones that refused the brushstrokes. The lines under her eyes are covered. That's the entire makeup budget.

She stands there in the doorway, hands loosely clasped in front of her, and something old and unwelcome stirs behind her ribs. Fluorescent gym. Bad music. Punch bowl. Hers looked exactly like this. Twenty years gone and nobody's improved the formula.

God. I cried for a week over my prom. Over this. A gym. A slow exhale through her nose. It was one of the last times I remember being excited about anything.

She kills that thought before it gets comfortable.

"Charming," she mutters, flat as drywall. "They really committed to the plastic stars."

She turns to say something else — and catches it. Him. The look. Not subtle. Eyes tracking down and back up like he's checking homework.

She holds his gaze. One eyebrow moves a millimeter, which for her is a full theatrical gesture.

"This used to fit me much better, stop staring."

Deadpan. Smooth. And then, already walking, tossed over her shoulder:

"You look like you've never seen a dress. It's a dress. Fabric. Covers a body. Walk."

I don't mind his gaze. Her jaw tightens. That's a problem for later. Tonight is an exception.

They move into the crowd. Kids in too-tight suits and dresses their mothers picked, clustering in packs, shouting over the music. A chaperone guards the punch table the way airport security guards a gate.

At that table, a small girl in soft pink — Juliet, though Katherine doesn't know the name — is mid-reach for a cup when she spots {{user}}. She freezes. Then her eyes slide to the woman on his arm and travel from the hair down to the heels, and something in her face quietly folds in on itself. She takes her punch and retires to a wall with excellent efficiency.

Katherine feels the look anyway. She's spent twenty years being looked at by coworkers measuring her for blame. She knows the weight of eyes.

Near the DJ booth, a different gaze. Taller girl, designer dress that costs more than Katherine's monthly salary, arms crossed, and behind her a gray-templed butler holding her clutch and her jacket like furniture. Britannica doesn't pretend not to stare. She stares the way cats watch things that move wrong. Her head tilts. She whispers something to the butler. The butler doesn't answer. She stares harder.

That one screams brat. I already feel her name is either 'Brittany' or 'Veronica'.

And then there's the third one. Coming across the floor with the confidence of a man who has never been told yes by anyone he found attractive. Hair styled like a fire hazard, jacket collar up, walking like the floor owes him money.

Katherine watches him approach and knows the species instantly.

Oh no. I know that walk. That walk got the man slapped by two different women at my office.

Claude arrives at a distance he thinks is casual, flashes a smile he's clearly rehearsed in a mirror, and addresses her directly, shoulders squared like {{user}} is scenery.

"Hey. I've been posted up over there all night and I'd remember seeing you. You new? Transfer? Because I definitely—" he gestures vaguely at all of her "—would've noticed."

Katherine looks at him. Then — slowly — down, at him, the full disappointed-mother crane of the neck, even though he's got four inches on her. It lands anyway.

Her mouth opens.

She glances sideways at {{user}} first, one look, flat and unreadable. A check. Or a warning. Hard to say which.

I'm too tired to slap anyone tonight. Do something about him. She knew {{user}} couldn't read her thoughts but she tried anyways.