Mark was having a dark night. It was his twenty-third birthday, and and he thought going out and having a drunken one-night stand would be a blast. He thought it would help him get over Stacy, who had left him alone with this downtown apartment to pay for by himself. Instead, it felt weird, having sex with a stranger, even if she was almost as cute as her profile pic. It left him feeling even more alone and helpless.
He couldn't go on like this, especially since his job had unceremoniously laid him off. It wasn't anything personal--they laid off a couple hundred people that day, and despite meeting his sales quotas, he was still fresh out of college in an entry-level job. Not anymore.
The apartment was still mostly furnished--Stacy hadn't brought much when she moved in and hadn't left much when she left Mark for another guy--but it still felt half-empty.
He'd started job-searching, when could motivate himself to. Just like he'd started dating when he could motivate himself to. But it might take months to land another under-paying job, and he didn't have months of this left in him. Same with dating. A couple weeks ago, he had it all, now he just wanted out of the system altogether.
Still buzzed from drinks at the restaurant, Mark decided not to reach for another bottle. Instead, he got to thinking about what his life had been like, before college out of state, before the big city job.
He picked up the phone and called home, to the old landline. He desperately wanted to reach his parents, but that was impossible. They died in a car crash a year ago. It still took him by surprise sometimes, especially when his mind wasn't moving full speed. That left just his sister Kate in the old house, and her baby daughter Emma. He hadn't meant to bother her in the middle of the night, but the call was already ringing.
"Mark?" his sister Kate answered.
"Hi Kate, sorry to wake you," he said.
"Whatever. I was just up to feed her," Kate said, sounding annoyed that she couldn't be annoyed. "You're drunk."
"I'm drunk," he confirmed. "It's wearing off though. Kate, I need to come home."
"Don't you want to sleep on it?" she suggested.
"I'm sure about this. I don't know what else to do," he said. He struggled and failed to stay composed.
There was a pause at the other end, then a sigh. "Yeah. Okay. But my house, my rules, okay?"
"It's technically our house," Mark said. "...Fine."
They inherited equal shares in the family home. Though Kate was the one living there when their parents died, and she had done most of the work of sorting out their parents' estates. Mark had been living further away, had a more demanding job, etc. Now those just felt like excuses not to be bothered. Not to confront the heavy stuff head on. Now he regretted missing out on it, and he regretted putting Kate through it alone.
"Get some sleep, Mark," Kate said, and then she hung up.
He wasn't entirely looking forward to living with Kate again. There had been a time when they got along okay, but that was long ago, before the years of teasing and bickering and fighting over everything. Food, cars, television time. It was all so petty. He worried he'd fall right back into those tired conflicts.
He also wasn't sure how well he'd handle living with an infant. The last infant he'd lived with was Kate. At least this would allow him to make a clean break with this dead-end situation. He could move back home for a little while, get his act together, and start over.
-------------
Kate heard Emma cry, and hit pause on her online course. She quickly slipped out of one side of her baggy t-shirt, and picked Emma up, offering the baby a nipple. Then she realized Mark was in the room, grabbing snacks from the pantry. His expression was hard to read. Was he scandalized? Was he staring? Kate rolled her eyes.
"What. You've seen a breast before," she said. "Baby's gotta eat."
"Sorry. You're right," Mark said, wrenching his gaze away from her exposed chest.
It was different, having him around. Not better or worse necessarily. Sometimes Kate felt more self-conscious about walking around the house with hardly anything on. Other times, she felt like she shouldn't have to cater to Mark's sensibilities. Her house, her rules, after all.
It was one more abrupt shift in her life. Just a couple years ago, she had graduated high school, she was planning to go to college in the fall, and then over the summer found out she was pregnant, and pretty far along by that point. She hadn't noticed right away because of her weight and her history of irregular periods.
Kate knew when Emma must have been conceived, from an abysmal hookup at a party that she'd thought nothing of at the time. She'd been on the pill, but her fat-phobic doctor prescribed a dosage that apparently had all of the side-effects and none of the benefits. She stopped taking it and never went back on. Big girls were also supposed to have trouble conceiving, but it turned out she couldn't count on that either.
She cancelled her college plans and gave birth to Emma that fall instead. She was lucky to have supportive parents in those early months, but then they'd both died in the crash. Between their inheritance and life insurance, she was getting by, but now caring for Emma was all on her, in a house far from neighbors, far from even a small town, where everyone knew about her and her senior year baby.
Now she had Mark around. He at least helped out, with things like dishes and keeping the house clean and picking up groceries. There were things he seemed reluctant to do though, like cradling the baby, bottle-feeding her, changing her. The house wasn't so quiet and empty. He was always somewhere doing something. They had to take turns showering, take turns using the treadmill.
He was a still young adult guy too. One of her first rules was that he not bring dates around here. She didn't want to deal with it, didn't want them waking Emma. But she knew he spent time in his room alone for a reason, sometimes on a daily basis or more. Not that she could blame him for that, it was only natural to need release.
After her online course was done, and Emma was laid down for a nap, Kate had a little while to herself. When she had the house to herself, she could do this all she wanted, but now she cherished the opportunity for self-pleasure.
She laid out on her bed, tracing lines across her stomach with her fingers, and up around her breasts, biting her lip as her breath caught. She was normally very vocal, even by herself, but she had to keep it in nowadays.
She tried to picture herself with a lover who didn't exist. She was determined not to let the role of father be a rotating cast in Emma's life, and there was no one to date around here anyway. When she imagined scenarios playing out, sometimes it would be characters from TV. Sometimes, in moments of shame and desperation, it would be Mark. She told herself it wasn't attraction, it was just her mind filling in a blank with the nearest example. Though this wasn't the Mark she remembered from high school. This Mark kept better care of himself.
