Nighttime Hobbies
Bridget Corey. Valesport.
Bridget Corey. Valesport.
There were a lot of things that sucked about being five pounds and six inches.
All of them, actually. Bree hadn’t found a single upside. It was called a curse for a reason.
But right now, the one she was feeling most keenly was the general helplessness.
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh, Eric!”
And inability to wear headphones.
“Ohhh gooood yes!”
Bree dug her head under a pillow, frustrated. Her mother was breaking their agreement right now, but that wasn’t really unusual. It would serve her right if Bree started scratching at the bedroom door. Because that would be breaking their agreement too. Bree stayed in her room at night; period. Mom didn’t have anyone over at night. That was how it worked.
This wasn’t actually so that Bree wouldn’t have to listen to her mother have loud, headboard-banging sex in the next room, though that would definitely have been a plus. It was to keep Bree safe and her “condition” a secret. It would be very hard to explain to a nighttime guest why there was suddenly a small dog in the apartment. Technically, they weren’t even supposed to have pets.
Mom wasn’t supposed to have anyone over at night, and Bree wasn’t supposed to leave her room except to use the bathroom. Her mom mostly slept at night, so it rarely became a huge issue, but Bree was careful anyway. Her mother coming out for a glass of water and seeing her leaving the toilet was enough to give the older woman a small heart attack. Sometimes she actually screamed, especially when she was still half asleep.
You would think seven years would have been enough to get used to the concept... But it wasn’t. And Bree tried not to push the subject. ...Anymore. The first three years had been extremely tense, what with her mom’s drug use and the uncomfortable places where fear felt like it overlapped with hate.
But she made it work. They. They made it work. Bree stayed in her room, and tried very hard only to pee when the house had been quiet for a while. During the day, she never removed her hat outside of her bedroom, when she had her curtains drawn.
And her mom... didn’t bring people over at midnight and fuck them. Generally. It was a common enough occurrence, depending on how things were going with her boyfriend-at-the-time, of which there was always at least one. Things must have been going great with Eric, because this was the third time in a month.
Bree had met Eric. As a human, of course. She had mixed feelings. He was nice enough, and a carpenter and pretty handy with plumbing, which made him useful to her. That was a good quality in her mother’s boyfriends. He didn’t do drugs, which was even better. He was a bit old for her mom, at forty-six, but she understood that age gaps became less significant the older one got. He’d never made a pass at her, which was a necessity. He hadn’t even stared that one time when she hadn’t realized he was over and left her room in nothing but underwear and a tank top. He’d just politely focused on fixing the sink.
Overall, he was one of her mother’s best. She probably would have even liked him, if not for the fact she had to listen to them having sex so goddamn often.
Frustrated and getting no help from the pillow, Bree jumped down from her bed, which was mostly there for decoration. She had stairs to make this task less dramatic. She was profoundly less sturdy in this form, and a two foot drop would at least jar her. Not that she hadn’t done it. But she’d also injured herself practicing backflips off of it. Good decisions weren’t really a consistent part of her MO.
She slipped through the skirt under her bed, into her little doggy kingdom. Obviously, she was normally far too large to fit under her bed, but it was quite cozy as a six inch dog. She spent a goodly amount of her night down here, because it was very easy to hide dog-related things under her bed. There was a reading light glued to the underside of her bed, and a nice flat dog bed to make the floor more comfortable.
With some difficulty, she pulled her headphones--half as heavy as she was, easily--onto the pillow, and nestled herself between them. They were already hooked up to her tablet, and she had a lot of practice operating it with paws.
The tablet had been a huge splurge for her, coming directly out of the money she’d gotten from... selling her book. It was so much easier to use than her phone, and she’d told herself it was justified because she used it as a laptop at school.
She turned on music, as loud as she dared. It didn’t entirely drown out the noises from the next room, but at least it helped a little. Then she opened up her e-reader app and settled in to The Oldest Dead White European Males & Other Reflections on the Classics. Which had proved thus far to be at least passingly interesting. The author was almost self-aware. Almost.
Enough for her to finish the book, in any case. But that wasn’t really high praise; a book had to be pretty bad for her not to finish it.
After the sounds of sex and banging died off, she briefly paused in her readings to dart out from under the bed, over to her mini-fridge. She pawed it open with little difficulty, then pulled a covered plate off of the bottom shelf with her mouth. It had on it small piles of cracker sandwiches with meat and cheese. She kicked the fridge shut and dragged it back under the bed.
A little daytime preparation went a long way at night.
She just needed to be careful not to fall asleep under here, or lose track of time. It had happened before.
She finished The Oldest Dead White European Males and moved on to Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, which was actually much more interesting. A fact she found both ironic and pleasant.
Fifteen minutes before sunrise, her alarm went off. She yawned, then stood and stretched. She glanced over the various things under her bed, then licked some cracker crumbs off of the ground while it was still appropriate for her to do so. No sense attracting ants. She dragged the plate out with her; the rest was close enough to the side of the bed that she could grab them just fine in human form. Then she climbed up onto her bed to watch the sunrise, waiting.
--
“Oh!” Eric said with surprise, starting as Bridget, his girlfriend’s daughter, came out of the shared bathroom. She was already up and fully dressed--mercifully--despite the fact it was eight AM. “I, uh, didn’t realize you were here,” he said, trying not to seem weird or awkward or like he’d been boning her mom. He was all of those things, so it was difficult. But he really liked Angela, and appealing to the daughter was pretty key in these situations.
Normally, kids liked him alright. But Bridget was already an adult, and already more educated than he was. She had a way of looking at him that made him feel like she knew more than he did, possibly about everything. They were also tied in arm wrestling matches. And it wasn’t because he let her win to earn brownie points.
It was possible he was somewhat intimidated by his girlfriend’s 20-something daughter.
“I am, in fact, here,” she said, in that way of hers that always made him confused as to whether she was being rude or not. Angela insisted she was just socially awkward, so he always wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, even when it sounded like she was being a sarcastic little shit.
He moved out of her way so that she could get into the kitchen. When he came out of the bathroom, she had settled in at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, which she had once informed him was not actually tea, since only some large, long word was actually tea. What she drank was “Tisanes” because she disliked caffeine.
It had been a very pretentious way to inform him she preferred chamomile.
She was reading a book, which she always seemed to be doing. He stole a glance at the cover as he walked past--the awkward had already happened. He might as well finish making breakfast. Just for, uh, three, instead of two. The book was entitled Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.
He would take the book’s word for it.
Eric ran through what he knew of Bridget’s food allergies in his head--she was a very persnickety eater. No grapes, no chocolate, didn’t drink caffeine or alcohol. She was picky about citrus, which he’d learned upon offering her a glass of orange juice. She was always checking the ingredients lists of things, so he assumed there were other allergies he didn’t know about. But if he cooked using things in their house, he should be fine.
No one was allergic to pancakes, he was pretty sure.
She ignored him entirely as he mixed the batter, sipping her not-tea, but she perked right up when she heard the sizzle of bacon hitting a hot pan, glancing over as if just now noticing he was there.
“You got work today?” he asked, in a desperate bid for conversation. It was an obvious question--she was dressed in a black skirt and vest over a button up blouse, a fashionable sort of houndstooth hat on her head. Most of the time when he saw her, she was dressed in a style that probably had a name like “street grunge.” To him it just looked like torn jeans and tank tops designed for someone three sizes larger than her, but whatever. It wasn’t his job to judge what kids wore these days. He’d been a teenager in the 80s. He was not capable of throwing stones where young-person fashion was concerned.
“Mmhmm,” she replied, glancing back at her book. “Then class in the afternoon.”
“Oh? What class?” asked Eric, relieved for the obvious conversation topic.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were always sort of narrow and glaring. He was pretty sure it was just her face, and she didn’t mean much by it. After a moment of trying to detect something from his tone or posture or whatever it was she did when she stared like that, she looked back to her book and replied.
“Pedagogies of Reading and Writing,” she replied simply.
“Ah. Sounds... interesting.” Was she the type who would make up a word to poke fun at an old man?
Silence stretched. She was not holding up her end of this conversation.
“Will you be here this evening?” she asked after the silence had just passed out of the uncomfortable zone and into normal.
“Oh, uh... No, probably not,” he replied, focusing on putting bacon on a plate before it burned and not on the obvious implications of the question. He had a good stack going. Almost a full package’s worth. He was going to think about the bacon and not about whether or not she’d been woken up by his and Angela’s nocturnal activities. He’d been told she was at a friend’s house--clearly a conversation about her daughter’s boundaries needed to be had with Angela.
“Alright,” she said, folding her book shut and standing. She set her empty mug in the sink, and then walked over to the oven, where she picked up the entire plate of bacon. “If you are, however, please have sex more quietly.”
And then, while he was still stunned, she walked out the door with the entire plate of bacon in hand, a piece of it already disappearing into her mouth.
He glanced down at the skillet, which was sadly devoid of bacon.
Er... hopefully Angela liked awkward conversations about her daughter over just pancakes, then.
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