She was watching me intensely, and I could tell how nervous she was. I had a feeling that if she wasn’t pregnant and already feeling sore from sleeping in a car for goodness knows how long, she might have declined all together. But the moment I hit the arch of her foot, she let out a groan and her entire head fell back against the plush arm of the couch.
That was more like it. That one grateful little sound reminded me of all the sweet, wanton notes she had hit in Vegas, and I had to focus on the pledge of allegiance before my body started responding and she got the wrong idea.
“How did you get so good at this?” Her voice was practically a heady whine but it was endearing. “Don’t you normally, like, pay someone to do this?”
“My mom had pretty bad rheumatoid arthritis when I was a teenager. A lot of the time I’d end up rubbing her hands or her feet when she was in too much pain to get up and go somewhere. Sure, she could have hired a massage therapist, she saw one every week as it was, but it was sort of our time together. We’d put on cheesy old science fiction movies, she’d ask about my day and I’d test out different lotions to see which one helped the most. Those are some of my fondest memories of her.”
“That’s… very sweet.” Nicole murmured, sounding surprised. “I take it she’s passed?”
“Oh yeah, long ago. She had a surrogate birth me when she was fifty-two and her husband was sixty. A lot of people criticized them for bringing a baby into the world so late in life, but the first twenty years of my life were full of more support and love than most people could ever ask for. Not to mention they left me an insane inheritance that’s allowed me to build my company the way I have.”
She said nothing for several moments, just seeming to absorb my story. “Wow. I guess if you had to choose, I would definitely take amazing parents for a short time instead of shitty parents for the rest of her life.”
I heard something in her voice, some slight tremor of bitterness that had a whole story behind it, and I debated on asking her or not. It seemed slightly invasive, but then again, considering that my child was inside of her, maybe I could afford to ask some personal questions.
“It sounds like you might have some experience with shitty parents.”
“Is it that obvious?” She scoffed slightly, not at me seemingly but at herself. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” She paused, no doubt expecting me to gloss over the slightly uncomfortable silence. But I had no problem waiting for her to find her words, and after a couple of minutes she started talking again.
“My Mom and Dad were never mean to me per say, but they didn’t make it easy. They absolutely hated each other with a passion and were always fighting and screaming. I remembered being scared a lot and exasperated that they wouldn’t just break up. But they were staying together for me, apparently, not realizing that their staying together was what was stressing me out so terribly.
“My mother was never very supportive and my father… well he mostly tried to disappear as much as possible. He got a job as a trucker when I was in high school, so he was only home once every two weeks or so. Things were a little smoother for a while. Then, once I went away to college, they divorced, and I’ve seen him once since then.”
Huh, I could understand now why she might have wanted to run away to Vegas. A land of so many sparkling possibilities and so few parents. “You’ve graduated, right? Were you able to fix things with your mother now that your father was out of the picture?”
“No… not really.” She heaved a sigh and I could feel the tension building in her, so I squeezed the sides of her heels before moving up to rub the balls of her feet. “I tried making it on my own for a while, but eventually I had to move back home. Things went south there after some stupid crap that happened, and she seemed like she just wanted me to get out of her hair, so I left.
“…and then I met you.” She finished, looking at me with a sort of sheepish expression.
“Funny how life work out that way, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if funny is the word for it, but yeah.”
With all the talk of parents done, we fell into quiet, me rubbing more of her feet then moving onto her ankles and calves, and her making appreciative little sounds. Time passed, but the more we sat there, the more and more I found myself becoming aware of her body, sitting right there next to me on the couch.