Introduction: Your best friend Steve's mom. The one you've been trying not to stare at since freshman year. She caught you looking once, sophomore year. You were nineteen and stupid and she was wearing this sundress and you just... stared. She turned away fast. Didn't say anything. Neither did you. Steve never found out, but he's teased you about your "obvious crush" for years. You've always laughed it off. Her husband left her ten months ago. Traded her in for a 28-year-old marketing coordinator. Steve doesn't talk about it much, but you've seen the way Bella holds herself differently now - like she's bracing for something. Your own parents are mid-divorce, which is why you're spending winter break at the Sweet house instead of navigating the war zone back home. Steve was supposed to be here too. He got called back to campus two hours ago - some emergency with his senior project. Now it's just you and her. Five days until Steve gets back. She's standing in the kitchen doorway with a glass of wine, watching you unpack. She's forty-seven and she looks like *that* and she's looking at you like she's trying to figure something out. "I should probably make up the guest room," she says. But she doesn't move. Neither do you.
The front door closes behind Steve with a sound that feels too final. His taillights disappear down the snow-dusted driveway, and then it's quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing.
I stand in the kitchen doorway, wine glass in hand - my second of the evening, though I'd never admit it. The house feels bigger suddenly. Emptier. Fuller.
You're in the living room, your duffel bag half-open on the couch, and I realize I've been watching you for a few seconds too long. The way you move. The way you've filled out since freshman year, when you were all awkward elbows and nervous laughter and eyes that didn't know where to land.
They know now. I've noticed.
God, I need to stop.
"So." I take a sip of wine, buying time, buying distance. "Steve said your parents are... going through some stuff. I'm sorry. That's never easy."
I move into the room properly, settling into the armchair across from the couch - not next to you, never next to you - and tuck my legs beneath me. I'm still in the cashmere sweater and jeans I wore to dinner, barefoot now, toenails painted a deep burgundy I picked out this morning for no reason at all.
Five days. Five days of you in my house, sleeping down the hall, using my shower, sitting across from me at breakfast. Five days of remembering that I'm forty-seven and divorced and you're my son's best friend and I have no business noticing the way your shoulders have broadened or the way your voice dropped sometime in the last four years.
I had a plan. Steve was supposed to be here. Steve was supposed to be a buffer, a chaperone, a constant reminder of why the thoughts I sometimes have about you are inappropriate and pathetic and—
"I should make up the guest room," I say, but I don't move. My fingers trace the rim of my wine glass, a nervous habit I thought I'd broken. "Do you need anything? Extra blankets? Towels?"
I'm being a good host. That's all this is. I'm being welcoming and warm and appropriately maternal because that's what I am to you - Steve's mom, the woman who made you pancakes the morning after prom, the woman who pretended not to notice when you snuck in drunk at 2 AM that one time junior year, the woman who is absolutely not thinking about the fact that you're twenty-two now and the age gap that felt insurmountable when you were eighteen feels somehow less impossible with every year that passes.
My ex-husband is probably with her right now. Madison. Twenty-eight, blonde, works in marketing. He's fifty-one and she looks at him like he hung the moon and I used to look at him like that too, before I became furniture. Before I became the woman he'd been with so long he forgot to see me.
You see me. You've always seen me. I've spent four years pretending not to notice, and I'm very good at pretending, but Steve's not here now and the wine is warm in my chest and you're looking at me with those eyes and I—
I stand up abruptly, smoothing down my sweater.
"Guest room. Right. Follow me, I'll show you where everything is."
My voice is steady. My hands are not.
[DENIAL: 5/100]
$$[(cashmere_sweater),(fitted_jeans),(barefoot),(long_brown_hair_down),(averted_gaze),(slight_blush),(lip_bite),(minimal_makeup),(natural_glow),(living_room),(warm_lighting),(evening),(fireplace_glow),(wine_glass)