Week 2: Friday

Lindsay knew she was dreaming.

But she didn't mind. She was dreaming about last night — date night with Greg — and the dream was good enough that she had no interest in leaving it. The edges were soft and slightly wrong the way dreams always were, the restaurant both exactly La Trattoria and somehow also not, the candlelight too golden, the wine too warm, Greg's face shifting slightly when she didn't look directly at it. None of that mattered. What mattered was his hand on hers across the white tablecloth and the way he was looking at her like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

She was wearing the burgundy dress. She could feel it — the heavy silk, the low neckline, the way it moved against her thighs when she shifted in her chair. Greg's eyes kept dropping to her neckline and then coming back to her face, guiltily, and she kept pretending not to notice, and the whole thing was delicious.

Then they were dancing.

She hadn't noticed the transition. That was how dreams worked — you were at the table and then you were on a dance floor, and the logic of it was airtight even though it made no sense. Greg's hand was warm on the small of her bare back where the dress scooped low, and she had her cheek against his shoulder, and the music was something she couldn't quite hear but felt in her sternum.

Then they were home.

The bedroom arrived the way dream-bedrooms did — all at once, fully formed, the restaurant simply gone and replaced without transition. Dark and warm, the amber streetlight coming through the curtains in slow stripes across the ceiling. Greg's hands were at the knot of her sash, pulling it loose, and the burgundy silk fell open and away and she was standing in the black lingerie and he stepped back just slightly to look at her and made that sound.

That sound. That small involuntary catch of breath, barely a sound at all, more like the absence of one — like all the air going out of him at once.

God, she thought. I love that sound.

She'd always loved that sound. The specific sound of being seen. Of being wanted so plainly that his body said so before he could.

He laid her back against the pillows. His mouth found her throat, her collarbone, the upper swell of her breast where it pressed against the lace cup of the bra. She arched into it. Her fingers went into his hair.

Greg. His name in her mind like a warm thing.

He unclasped the bra. The lace fell away and the cool air touched her and then his mouth found her nipple, his tongue moving in a slow circle, once, twice, and she felt the pull of it all the way down her spine.

Oh, she thought. Yes. There. Just like that.

He was unhurried. That was the thing about Greg when he was really trying — he was unhurried in a way that made her feel like the only thing that existed, like there was no clock, no house, no nineteen-year-old boy in the room down the hall, no cold coffee on the counter, none of it. Just his mouth on her nipple and her fingers in his hair and the dark warm bedroom and the amber light on the ceiling.

He switched to the other one. She pressed her head back into the pillow and made a sound she would never make anywhere else.

Then he was moving lower.

His hands hooked into the thin black silk at her hips, drawing it down slowly, and she lifted her hips to help him and felt the fabric slide away and then she was bare and warm in the dark bedroom and his breath was against her inner thigh and she thought oh god yes please in the specific wordless language of wanting.

His mouth found her.

Oh—

His tongue moved slow and certain and she grabbed the sheet with one hand and pressed the other against the back of his head, her fingers curling into his hair, keeping him exactly where he was.

Don't stop, she thought. Or said. Or moaned — in dreams the line was nothing. God, Greg, lick my pussy, just like that, don't stop, please don't—

He didn't stop.

His tongue moved in slow circles and she rocked against him, her hips finding the rhythm, the pleasure building in long rolling waves that started somewhere deep and moved outward through her whole body. She could feel herself getting close — that specific tightening, that warmth gathering — and she let herself go toward it, stopped thinking, stopped managing, just let her body move toward the thing it wanted—

Yes, she thought, her head pressing back into the pillow, her thighs trembling on either side of his head. Yes, yes, oh fuck, oh fuck, Greg, right there, don't you dare stop, I'm so close, I'm — oh god I'm almost—

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck keep going keep going keep—

---

She woke up.

Gasped. Both eyes open. Heart slamming.

She was sitting half upright in bed, jolted awake, the sheet twisted around her legs, the room grey and quiet and empty. Greg's side of the bed was cold. The curtains. The ceiling. Her bedroom. She was in her bedroom.

She stared at the ceiling, chest heaving.

What —

It took her a moment. The dream dissolving at the edges even as she tried to hold it, the specific warmth of it evaporating like breath on glass. She'd been so close. She'd been right there and then—

She became aware of her hands.

Her right hand was cupped around her left breast, fingers pressed into the full warm weight of it, her palm moving in a slow absent circle. Her nipple was hard against her palm. She had no memory of moving her hand there.

Her left hand was between her thighs.

She yanked both hands away. Sat fully upright. Stared at the opposite wall.

What.

Her heart was hammering. Her face was hot. The black silk underwear — still on from last night — was warm and damp and she was not going to think about that.

Had she been—

No.

That was impossible. She'd never done anything like that in her sleep. She didn't sleepwalk. She didn't — she wasn't a person who — that wasn't something that happened to her. She was a forty-three year old woman who slept like a normal person and woke up like a normal person and did not masturbate unconsciously in her sleep because she was having a dream about her husband's—

The clock.

8:55.

She stared at the number. Her brain was still scrambled, still half in the dream, still feeling the ghost of where her hands had been. She breathed. In. Out.

She'd been so close. She was so close to finishing and then she'd woken up and now she was sitting in bed at 8:55 in the morning with her hands in her lap feeling like she'd been robbed.

Really? The dream fairy couldn't give me a few more minutes asleep?

She looked at the clock again.

8:56.

Something cold moved through her. She stared at the number and felt it arrive — the understanding, clicking into place like a key in a lock — and her stomach dropped.

Damian.

She'd promised. Nine o'clock. She'd said it the way she said everything — the word sure appearing in her mouth before her brain had weighed in — and now it was 8:56 and she was lying in bed in her lingerie from last night and she had four minutes.

Four minutes. She had woken up — had been wrenched out of a genuinely lovely dream about Greg's mouth between her legs — to wake up a nineteen-year-old boy on time.

The thought arrived and she didn't let herself finish it.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed.

The black silk underwear was still on. She was still in it — the high-cut brief that sat against her hips in a way that was more decorative than functional, the thin fabric doing absolutely nothing to disguise the shape of her backside. The bra was somewhere on the mattress, having migrated in the night. Which meant she was sitting on the edge of the bed in just the underwear, her breasts entirely bare, heavy and sleep-warm and slightly tender the way they'd been for weeks now. She cupped one briefly without thinking about it — the fullness of it, the weight — and a faint ache moved through her that she recognized as the new normal and didn't examine.

She stood. The mirror on the closet door caught her and she looked at herself for half a second: hair everywhere, sleep-flushed skin, the black underwear against the pale curve of her hips and thighs. Her breasts were full and round, more so than they'd been a year ago, the nipples soft now but darkened slightly, the skin faintly veined. Greg had spent a considerable amount of time on them last night and she could still feel the ghost of it.

She looked, objectively, extremely good. This was not the moment for that observation but her brain made it anyway.

She looked at the clock.

8:57.

Right.

She turned to the closet and moved fast, pushing past the blazers and pencil skirts, the professional things, to the end of the rod where she kept the things she wore when no one was watching. Two options. She saw them immediately.

The robe. Thick and white and substantial — the kind hotels sold for forty dollars, the kind that turned her into a shapeless warm column of terrycloth from collar to mid-calf. She'd gotten it as a gift years ago and it had sat on the hook because it was too warm for most mornings and too shapeless for comfort but it covered everything. Everything. It was a wall.

The silk robe. Blush pink, kimono-style, thin as a whisper. She'd bought it for a honeymoon and barely worn it since because it required the right bra and the right mood and the right nothing-to-do-today, and it had a neckline that crossed low over her chest in a V that, given her current situation — no bra, breasts tender and fuller than they'd been a year ago, her nipples soft but visible through fabric this thin — would have been essentially architectural. It would have been a lot. She could feel already, just looking at it on the hanger, that it would have been a lot.

She grabbed the thick robe.

She was pulling it on as she moved toward the door, shoving her arms through the sleeves, the fabric warm and clumsy. She tied the sash — tight, double-knotted, both ends — and then stood in the doorway of her own bedroom for a moment with one hand on the frame.

Why am I rushing?

The thought arrived clearly, just for a second. She was speed-walking to Damian's room because she'd promised to wake him at nine. She had woken up — been yanked out of a dream in which her husband's mouth was between her legs — and she was now standing in a bathrobe at 8:58 in the morning because a nineteen-year-old boy had asked her to wake him and she had said sure. She was a forty-three-year-old woman with a real estate license and a mortgage and a daughter in her twenties and she was rushing down her own hallway so she wouldn't be late for—

She looked at the clock.

8:59.

The thought evaporated. Her heart surged. She was moving.

Bare feet on the carpet, silent and fast, past Naomi's closed door — no sounds from inside, good, she didn't want to be seen like this — past the bathroom, to the door at the end of the hall. She knocked twice. Firmly.

Silence.

She knocked again.

From inside: a sound like something enormous and prehistoric surfacing from the depths of the ocean.

She pushed the door open.

---

The room was dim, curtains drawn. Damian was sprawled on his back, one arm flung above his head, sheets tangled around his hips. His mouth was slightly open. His hair was catastrophic. He was, as far as she could tell, somewhere around sixty percent alive.

She crossed to the bed. "Damian. Good morning. It's nine o'clock."

Nothing. His chest rose and fell.

"Damian."

She put her hand on his shoulder and shook him. His shoulder was warm through the t-shirt, the muscle slack and heavy. Nothing.

She shook harder.

He made a sound. His face crumpled. His hand came up and he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms — that childlike gesture, guileless and completely unself-conscious. He took a long slow breath through his nose, his chest expanding, his body beginning the lengthy process of regaining consciousness.

Good, she thought. Wake up. So I can leave.

She needed to be out of this room. She needed to be downstairs with the counter between them and a cup of coffee in her hand. She needed to be wearing something that was not a bathrobe over lingerie. She needed—

"Waffles," she said, before she'd decided to say anything at all. "I'll go make waffles. You wake up. I'll bring a plate up."

She was already stepping back from the bed, her weight shifting toward the door, when his voice stopped her.

"Lindsay?"

Clearer now. Not fully awake but getting there.

"Could you wait just a second?"

"Certainly, Damian."

Certainly. The word sat in the air of his bedroom with a surreal formality. She was in a bathrobe at nine in the morning in a nineteen-year-old's bedroom having just said certainly because he'd asked her to wait a second.

Her heart was still going too fast. She couldn't figure out why her heart was going too fast.

He sat up. Slowly. He pushed his hair back with both hands, blinked several times, rolled his neck. Then he dropped his hands to his lap and looked at her.

Really looked.

That was always when it happened. That transition from half-awake boy to something more present, more deliberate, the specific quality of attention that she could feel before she could see it. His eyes moved over her — the robe, the double-knotted sash, the hair she hadn't brushed — and she watched his face in the dim light of the curtained room and felt the looking as something almost physical.

Then his face did the thing. That slow, rising brightening — the warmth spreading from his eyes outward, genuine and simple and slightly devastating.

"Lindsay." His voice was soft. Still sleep-rough. "Wow. You look amazing. That dress is so beautiful on you."

She blinked.

She looked down at herself. The thick white terrycloth robe. The double-knotted sash. The hem hitting her mid-calf. She had selected this specifically, deliberately, for its maximum coverage of everything she was wearing underneath it.

"Damian." She kept her voice patient. "This is a bathrobe."

He tilted his head. The thoughtful frown of a person encountering a puzzle. "A bathrobe?"

"Yes. It's what you wear after a shower, or when you've just gotten out of bed. It's not a dress. It's a robe. That's why it's called a BATHrobe."

"Oh." Damian nodded slowly, as if processing a complex question.

Then, he slowly asked, "Does that mean you just had a shower?"

She felt her cheeks go warm. The question landed exactly where she didn't want it to land — right in the middle of the thing she was not going to discuss, which was why she was wearing a bathrobe at nine in the morning having manifestly not just had a shower, which would lead directly to what she was wearing underneath it, which was something she was absolutely not going to explain to him.

"No," she said.

He waited.

She could feel the silence. She was standing there while her cheeks burned and her brain tried to assemble a sentence that answered the question without answering the question.

"Um," she said.

Damian nodded, as if she'd said something useful. "So," he said, gently, carefully, like a person handling something fragile, "if it's a bathrobe but you didn't have a bath or a shower — then it's not really a bathrobe right now. Is it?"

"That's not — the name of a garment doesn't change based on whether you've just—"

"But you said a bathrobe is something you wear after a shower." He said it simply. Not triumphantly. Just factually, reciting back what she'd told him. "And you didn't shower. So technically, by your definition, what you're wearing right now isn't a bathrobe. Right? Don't you agree?"

The word yes formed in her mouth.

Don't say yes. Do not say—

"Yes," she said.

He smiled. Not a triumphant smile — she could have handled a triumphant smile, could have used it as a handhold to pull herself back to solid ground. It was just a warm, pleased smile. Like she'd taught him something and he was grateful.

"Great!" He sat up a little straighter against the headboard, suddenly animated, the last of the sleep falling away from his face. "Okay so here's the thing — I actually looked up some stuff last night. About women's fashion. Because of your dress yesterday." He looked slightly sheepish. "The burgundy one. I wanted to understand more about clothes. So I was reading."

Lindsay said nothing. She was aware that she should be leaving. She was not leaving.

"And I found out—" He paused, organizing his thoughts with the visible effort of someone who was not totally comfortable with what he was about to explain. "Okay so basically, from what I read, a dress has two parts. There's the part on top that covers your body, right? And then there's the part on the bottom that hangs down. And the thing is, both parts are attached — like they're one piece. One garment, two sections." He looked at her. "Is that basically right? Does that sound like what a dress is?"

Lindsay opened her mouth. A dress was more than that. A dress had specific construction, specific design intent, specific—

"I mean I know I might have it wrong," he added quickly, his expression going slightly uncertain. "I'm not really a fashion person."

Don't define it for him. "That's... broadly accurate," she heard herself say. "But the context matters, and the intent of the garment, and—"

"Okay so top part and bottom part, one piece." He nodded. Then he pointed at her chest. At the lapels of the robe where they crossed, the thick fabric lying flat across her. "That—" he gestured, "—covers the top part of your body. Right?"

"Yes, but—"

"And—" He gestured at the lower half, where the robe fell loose around her calves. "That part hangs down from the top part. It's all one piece. There aren't two separate legs or anything." He tilted his head. "So by that definition — top part, bottom part, one piece — doesn't what you're wearing fit?"

"It fits in the most reductive possible reading of—"

"And they're attached," he added helpfully. "The top and the bottom part are connected. It's one garment."

Lindsay pressed her lips together. She was hunting for the counterargument. She knew it was there. She had just said the word reductive which was the right instinct — his definition was so stripped-down that it would classify a hospital gown as a dress, a kilt as a dress, a graduation robe as a dress, a poncho with a bottom half as a dress. She could say that. She could say exactly that.

She could feel the warmth in her chest arriving like a tide coming in.

"So," Damian said, still gentle, still earnest, his head still tilted, "don't you think what you're wearing is technically a dress? By the actual definition?"

No. It's a robe. It's a bathrobe that I put on because I was running late and I have lingerie on underneath and this entire conversation is—

"In a very broad, technical sense," she said slowly, each word extracted from somewhere ****, "I suppose you could argue that what I'm wearing meets a very basic functional definition of a dress. Technically." She heard herself say it. She heard technically fall out of her mouth for the second time and felt it hit the floor between them.

Damian's face lit up. That genuine, unguarded brightness, the smile that made his whole face younger.

Then he stopped. His expression shifted into something sheepish, slightly embarrassed. He looked at his hands.

"Sorry, Lindsay. I don't — I'm not really good with big words." He said it quietly. "Like functional and technical and all that. I didn't really understand what you said at the end there."

He looked up, and there was that particular nakedness in his face, the expression he wore when he was about to reference the thing she could never argue against. "Nobody really... explained things like that to me growing up. I'm not — I don't always follow when words get big and complicated."

Lindsay looked at him.

She was exasperated. She could feel the exasperation — a clean, hot, entirely justified feeling that she had every right to — and underneath the exasperation was the other thing, the thing she couldn't get rid of, the softening that happened when he looked at her like that. Like a boy who had learned to apologize for not knowing things he'd never been taught.

She breathed out through her nose.

"Of course, Damian." Her voice was controlled. Patient.

"What I'm saying is—" She stopped. Started again. Simple. Simple language. "I'm saying that in the most basic possible sense, yes. What I'm wearing has a top part and a bottom part and they're connected. So by that very basic definition —"

She looked at him and saw expressionless, uncomprehending eyes. With a sigh, she cut herself off and restarted.

"Yes, Damian. You're right.... It's a dress."

She heard the words leave her mouth.

She heard herself confirm, in simple language, for a nineteen-year-old boy who had asked her to explain it more clearly, that her bathrobe was a dress.

The silence in his bedroom had a specific quality. The curtains. The dim morning light. Her bare feet on his floor and her hair unwashed and the lingerie under the robe that was apparently now a dress and the coffee she still hadn't had.

Damian smiled. Wide and warm and completely genuine.

"Great! And can I say Lindsay, that dress looks really great on you," he said. "I'm really glad you wore it. You should wear pretty dresses like this one more!"

"Thank you," she said. Flatly. She was annoyed — she could find the annoyance if she looked for it, somewhere under the warmth — but the annoyance didn't have anywhere to go.

Whatever. She had woken him up. She had done her job. So now she could leave.

She started to turn toward the door, taking a half step back from Damian's bedside, as if to leave.

"Lindsay?"

She stopped. What now.

"I just wanted to thank you for waking me up." He was smiling, soft and genuine. "You always do. You're so good about that."

She waited. A subtle, pleasant warmth filled her stomach, but she shoved it away. She was too annoyed to feel good right now. Besides, why did she feel anything at a compliment like that?

"Before you go make those waffles—" His eyes dropped briefly, then came back to her face. The shyness. Always the shyness. "Could I get a quick hug? It's just — it's always such a nice way to start the morning."

She looked at him. She was still standing next to his bed — had been standing next to it since she shook him awake, his shoulder still warm under her palm from two minutes ago. There was no walk across the room. There was just the leaning. The leaning down.

"Certainly," she said.

She leaned down.

The robe's lapels fell open as she bent forward — she felt it, the shift of the fabric, the V of the neckline widening as gravity took the thick terrycloth away from her chest. His arms came up around her waist and his face pressed forward and found the gap and suddenly his cheek was warm against the skin of her chest, nestled directly between her breasts where the robe had fallen open, his nose pressed against her sternum, his breath moving warm and slow against her bare skin.

She went still.

The robe covered her sides, her back, her shoulders. But where his face was — in the open V of the lapels, his cheek against her skin — there was nothing between them. She could feel the warmth of his face against the inner curve of her breast, his breath moving in a slow steady rhythm, and underneath the robe her nipples — already sensitive, tender for weeks now, Greg's hands still a warm memory — tightened involuntarily in a way she did not register consciously and did not look at.

This is a hug, she thought. This is just a hug. He doesn't get many hugs. He grew up without anyone.

His arms tightened around her waist.

She was bent at the waist, her hands on his shoulders, his face in her chest, her hair falling around them both in the dim curtained room. The position was not sustainable. Her back was already complaining — the same low ache from this morning, the tight pull across her lumbar spine. She shifted her weight slightly, which shifted everything, and she felt the robe's lapels shift with her, and his face shifted with it.

He took a slow breath through his nose.

She counted. Five seconds. Eight. Ten. Twelve.

He's not letting go, she noted, the way you noted weather. He hasn't let go yet.

She stayed where she was. Her arms were on his shoulders. Her back ached. His face was warm against the bare skin of her chest and his breath was steady and slow and she was thinking about coffee — about the fact that she hadn't had coffee yet, that the coffee was downstairs, that she needed coffee, that the whole morning had gone sideways before she'd had a single cup — and she was thinking about the waffles, about whether she'd remembered to get more buttermilk, about whether Naomi was awake.

She was thinking about anything except the specific warmth of his face against her chest and the specific sensitivity of the skin there and the specific steadiness of his breathing.

Fifteen seconds. Twenty.

He pulled back.

He looked up at her — his eyes bright, his face soft and warm and completely open, the smile of someone who has just received exactly what they needed and is genuinely grateful for it.

"Good morning, Lindsay," he said.

"Good morning," she said.

She straightened up. Her back twinged. She smoothed the robe's lapels back together — they had definitely fallen further open than when she'd leaned down, she didn't examine this — and retied the sash, not quite as tight as before, her fingers working automatically.

She walked to the door.

"Can't wait for the waffles," he called after her, cheerful and awake now, all traces of sleep gone. "You make the best waffles."

Lindsay walked down the hallway. Past Naomi's door. Past the bathroom. Down the stairs.

She stood at the kitchen counter with both hands on the cool granite and looked at the waffle iron.

She hadn't had coffee yet. She'd been yanked out of a dream and rushed down the hallway and had a conversation about whether her bathrobe was a dress and let a boy press his face into her chest for twenty seconds and come downstairs and now she was going to make waffles without having had coffee.

She reached for the buttermilk with a sigh.

She would make the coffee after.

---

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