No Place Like Home by Barbara Samuel Read Free Book Online Page B

Blinking heavily, I stumbled down the hall, passing the closed door to the silent blue room where Malachi still slept, and washed my face, thinking about the extra strong coffee that was the secret ingredient in Michael’s sauce.
    But before I went down, I went back to my room, took off the old T-shirt I’d slept in, and shuffled through my drawers for something else. It all looked boring—the short-sleeved Henleys and simple little scoop-necked summer shirts. Mother stuff. I glared at them, digging deeper, wondering when I’d let this part of myself go. When had I turned into this person?
    Finally, near the bottom of the stack, I found a green silk tank. Not great, but a hell of a lot better than the rest of the junk. I shook it out, and the cool heavy weight of it suddenly made me remember wearing it in previous summers, good times, sometimes with Michael, sometimes with another man or some of my girlfriends. Finding a club where the music was good, the tables crowded into some dark, small space. The rush of excitement of getting ready, going out, having a few drinks and laughing, dancing, letting down our hair.
    Outside my window, there was no sound of traffic, no horns or rumbling trucks, and a part of me was suddenly, deeply homesick for those noises, for the rush and excitement of the city. Why had I come back here?
    A step sounded in the hallway, and I heard the bathroom door shut. Malachi, almost certainly.
    Maybe it was thinking of my old self, or maybe it was that lingering hint of man hunger that had been crawling on my spine all day, but I suddenly reached around and unhooked the ordinary white bra that had taken me through the responsible roles in my life—the businesswoman and the mother and the caregiver—and dug into the bottom of the drawer for a dangerous black one, made of soft lace. Just in case he needed to take another look down my shirt—the silk shirt that made a man want to run his hands over a woman. I could have told myself I was doing it for me or to celebrate Michael feeling good enough to cook or even to celebrate Malachi’s arrival here, but I learned a long time ago not to play those kinds of games with myself. He stirred me up and I wanted to stir back.
    But in that instant I happened to catch sight of my body in the mirror over the dresser and got a crashing dose of reality. Why does that happen, over and over? In my head, especially in a good mood, I’m thinking I’m still a hot mama, a little more of me than there was, maybe, but still pretty sound female stuff.
    The mirror is so brutal. Especially since I was standing in that bright gold sunlight streaming in the second-floor windows. It showed the fish whiteness of my belly, which would never stand the scrutiny of a bikini again and hadn’t for five years. Soft grayish stretch marks there along the sides. And the breasts that had once stood so high and proud were lower, not anywhere close to perky. It wasn’t an awful body—how can you really hate the body that gives you babies and pleasure and walks you around in the world?—but it was just so obviously skin and hips and breasts that had been around for forty years. For one tiny moment, I wanted a belly button that could tolerate a tattoo.
    Never gonna happen. But I put them on anyway, the black lace bra and the silk tank, because I was liking the sense of pleasure it gave me to make the best of whatever those years had left behind. Michael would love it—he hated for me to be anything less than 100-percent siren—and I was pretty sure Malachi wouldn’t
mind.
I let my hair down, too—what the heck. Maybe I’d just be a wild woman and ask him for a ride on that big old bike, and use it as an excuse to lean into his body, smell him again.
    “You are such a slut, girl,” I said to the mirror. The slut looked back and lifted one rueful eyebrow. She didn’t look nearly apologetic enough for a woman who’d been estranged from her father for twenty years over the whole