On Ritual, Rot, & Rescue Pt. 03

The television throws out static optimism--interest rates steady, a good time to buy--as if the fabric of life could be stitched tighter with bricks and deeds. I slump, half folded in my chair, a comfortless tangle of limbs. The room holds me like a used glove. Outside, the evening limps along: the sky sagging, grey as the sponge in the sink, and a fine wetness clings to everything. The maple buds shimmer under the streetlight, little blisters waiting to burst. Across the road, windows glow amber--lives cooking dinners, loading dishwashers, watching game shows with mouths slack and full of pudding.

I pick at a thread on my sleeve, long and white and eager to be undone. It stretches as I pull, a slow unravelling, like the hours since I'd woken, or the weeks since I last felt needed. Not wanted--needed.

The stairs creak. The sound climbs down before Imogen does.

She appears in the doorway like something unspooled, hair damp, eyes unfixed. Her jumper looks borrowed from a man twice her size, the cuffs worrying her fingers like they've grown teeth. She drops into the sofa, her limbs scattering in the way of someone newly returned to gravity.

She says nothing at first, and I, aware of every square inch of this small room--the mug-stained side table, the coat I meant to hang, the leftover sock beneath the radiator--wait. The girl is watching. Not rudely. Just watching, the way dancers do--eyes always scanning for alignment.

I remember being pregnant, catching the TV cord with my foot, the heavy set nearly tumbling forward. Chloe inside me, kicking as though to say: *Don't let me be born into a world without noise.*

"Is everything okay?" Imogen asks.

I'm taken aback slightly. Recover. "Yes, fine. And you?"

"Oh, perfect, honestly." Imogen rolls her head on the cushion, her voice overly bright. "The room's amazing--got my stretching corner sorted. And the kitchen..." she wriggles, pressing deeper into the cushions. "A proper oven after that death trap in halls."

I nod. Imogen's words come in bursts, as if rationed and then released in a rush. She speaks as if held too long and then let go all at once.

"I've started this new piece about feminine power. How women move. Got a scrapbook full of stuff--magazines, drawings, poems..."

Something flickers in my mouth. Not quite a smile. Her feverish conviction has a gravity to it, drawing me closer even as the specifics--the feminist collages, the performance pieces--slide past like birds too fast to name. It's men, then gallery openings, then something about octopuses with souls. I watch it all go by, not following but still somehow carried along, like a stick in a flood.

"Maybe I'll just forget everything," Imogen says, fingers in her hair, pulling until the strands stand like static. "Put everything into the box marked dancing instead. It'd be better than all the noise. Better than dating apps. It's a complete circus out there." Imogen can't keep still--one leg folded under her, then out again. "This one guy, right--every photo's of him holding different cheeses. Then you get the entrepreneurs. It's code for living off mummy while flogging protein shakes on Instagram." She pauses, her head angled. "Are you seeing anyone?"

The question comes out of nowhere--not unwelcome, but unexpected. Before I can gather myself, Imogen continues: "I had this date with a vegan once. Wouldn't shut up about mushrooms having cosmic powers. But really though--why aren't you dating?"

My throat tightens, not painfully. Just enough. The question isn't cruel. Not even pointed. But it's there, pale and open. My first instinct is retreat, to turtle back behind the frame of my own limbs, hide beneath my sleeves, tuck myself out of sight. But then I remember: I'm safe here. Baggy jumper, soft with years. Jeans worn smooth at the thighs. My body is clothed in forgetfulness.

"I just..." I start, the air too much to move words easily. "I don't have the time."

Imogen's gaze softens, her green eyes doing that thing the young can do--sincerity without irony, belief unshaken by disappointment. "You should date," she says, certain as breath. "You have amazing cheekbones."

I feel the heat before I know I'm blushing. It climbs my neck like ivy. I cough out a laugh, batting the moment away with my hand. "Sure. Hollywood's been calling."

But Imogen doesn't retreat. She leans forward--weight carried in the ribs, voice fluid with conviction. "But you're gorgeous--in this powerful way. You're strong and confident. You know who you are. It's very attractive."

I shift. My jeans feel wrong suddenly. The seams press where they shouldn't, my skin oversensitive to the familiar. "That's very kind of you to say so."

"What about Chloe's dad?" Imogen asks, curling her feet beneath her, small again. "Is he still around?"

"Tom." The name scrapes my tongue, dry and underused. "Good with numbers. Quiet type. We met at this awful pub quiz--both stuck on teams full of strangers."

"Love at first sight?"

"God, no." I snort, the memory half-bitter, half fond. "He was wearing this brown jumper with elbow patches. Looked like someone's geography teacher." A pause, then the warmth returns. "But he made me laugh. Proper laugh, you know? Not just being polite."

The television mumbles on--something about weather patterns in Wales. My voice dips beneath it, easy now, unwinding.

"We got married because that's what you did. Had Chloe. Bought a house. All very..." I gesture, fingers slicing the air without finishing. "Normal."

"What changed?"

"I did. Or maybe I stopped pretending." My voice cracks gently, like something long-frozen yielding to touch. "I had this friend at work--Carolyn. She'd come round for coffee, stay for hours. Tom loved having her over, said she brought out my better mood."

I don't have to say it. Imogen's body stills, gaze sharpening not with judgment but comprehension. A student recognising the shape of a truth.

"Fifteen years of marriage," I say, more to the room than to Imogen. "Fifteen years of thinking there was something wrong with me. Then Carolyn touched my hand one day, just passing the sugar, and everything..." My voice wavers, but I push through. "Everything made sense."

Imogen processes this with a kind of reverence. Like a dancer hearing the rhythm of a new piece.

"Did you get together after? Carolyn and you?"

I shake my head. "No. When I told Tom the truth--about me, about who I am--that was enough to end it." My eyes flicker towards the window, where the dark has thickened. "He took it better than I deserved, really. Still speaks to me about Chloe. But he hasn't forgiven me."

"What's to forgive?"

The question lands quietly, but something inside me shifts--not sudden, not sharp, just a tilt in the floor that wasn't there before. I smile, slow and a little bitter. "In his head, I made myself gay to spite him. Like I spent fifteen years plotting it."

"Jesus."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. That's life." I lift a shoulder, not quite a shrug, more a movement to check my own temperature.

Imogen curls further into the sofa, pulling her jumper's hem between her fingers until the wool purls. "Well I think that's awful of him. Truly. No one should live in denial like that." She hesitates, waiting for a flinch. "It's both for me. Boys and girls. There's nothing wrong in that."

I don't respond. Not at once. I watch my hands--the way they can't keep still--and feel the old skepticism rise. That reflexive doubt: how they all say it at that age, how queerness gets worn like thrifted velvet, dramatic and temporary. But the irritation that follows isn't with Imogen. It's with myself. That after all this time, some part of me still guards the wound like a prize.

"It's really not a big deal anymore," Imogen continues. "Being bi or gay or whatever. Not like when you were..." She winces, mid-sentence.

"When I was young?" I say, with just enough humour to soften it.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"

"It's fine." I nod, eyes distant. "You're right. Things now are different. Better, mostly."

"There's a gay bar near uni," Imogen offers, cautious, almost shy. "A nice crowd. It's not just students. You should come along sometime."

I should shut the window that's just opened between us. Draw the curtain. I am not the girl's friend. Not her confidante. I'm twice her age and worn out from years of being a grown-up.

"These days," I say, after a pause, "I really don't do bars."

But the words don't land with finality. They drift. I can still feel the imagined thrum of music in my chest, and the taste of lipstick that isn't mine.

***

Autumn now. The light has thinned and changed direction, slipping into the house from angles it hadn't used in months, making old corners feel new and newly exposed. The gay bar stays in my mind--not urgent, just persistent--but I do nothing. No text. No night planned. I tell myself there's no need.

Then the hospital moves me. Management, faceless and brisk, slots me into days without asking. After years of nights, daylight feels too sharp, too public. The rhythm of my body resists it--food tastes wrong, sleep is patchy. But I'm home now at the same time as my tenant. I catch the girl mid-song in the kitchen sometimes, little runs of melody that vanish when noticed. Find mugs left like breadcrumbs: one by the window, another half-full beside the radio. Traces of her, gentle and unthinking.

Imogen unsettles me. Not with anything direct. She simply lives--but in a way I can't quite track. One moment she chatters without breath, a monologue about nothing: shoe brands, conspiracy theories, some new protein snack. Then the next, she vanishes into silence, moving like a ghost through the house, or skips meals until she's faint, then devours cereal by the handful over the sink. It reminds me of Chloe at sixteen--all that veiled rebellion and elliptical hurt.

But Imogen's rebellion doesn't belong to me. There are no shared battlegrounds here. No accusations. No slammed doors, no arguments about heating bills or career choices. What comes instead is domestic residue: apologies murmured in doorways, a lavender scent lingering in the bathroom, socks or underwear forgotten in the dryer--small cotton things curled like petals in the machine's drum.

These minor trespasses warm me. I time my coffee now, stand in the kitchen like it's coincidence, catching Imogen between dance sessions. My shoulders lose tension when Imogen is near. The house feels occupied. More than that--it feels *attended to*, like it matters again.

At 6:30am, the floorboards creak outside my bedroom. I lie still, on my side, already awake, letting the sound reach me. Imogen's movements thread through the walls--soft footfalls, water running, the scrape of a drawer. I know them all. Have memorised them like verses.

The stairs complain as Imogen moves down. Through the thin wood of the door, I hear the rustle of clothes, the click of a water bottle lid, keys in motion. Then that pause by the front door--always a pause--followed by the clean snap of the lock. Footsteps down the path. Then absence.

I roll onto my back. The sheets are warm where I've been, cool beside me where no one is. The ceiling carries the dull bloom of first light. In the distance, a blackbird offers its tight, silvery song. My hand slides across the bed, meets nothing but cotton and air.

I get up.

The carpet is warm, worn smooth by years of passage. I pad to the bathroom, where light comes in slow through the frosted pane, casting pale geometries across the tile. I sit. The toilet seat chills the back of my thighs. My urine hits porcelain in a splash too loud for the hour, startling in the silence.

At the sink, my reflection waits--hair matted, cheek marked with the faint seam of sleep. My skin looks tender, unfinished. I don't study it. Just turn my face from the mirror and lift the tap.

The hallway unfurls ahead of me as I exit--cream walls, worn skirting, the morning light drawn in soft folds across the carpet. But something's wrong, or not *wrong*. Just *different*. Imogen's door, always closed like a lid, stands ajar. A hand-width opening. A theatre curtain caught mid-drift. I stop, mid-step, as if the house has shifted beneath my feet.

That door has been a boundary, not spoken but respected--the room beyond a mystery preserved since the first brief tour. Now it gapes slightly, accidental or not, and the gap hums with a quiet invitation. I hover at the threshold, hand grazing the frame. My pulse quickens with something shameful: anticipation.

My fingers drift along the doorframe, finding a nick in the wood--thin and vertical, just below eye level--that I've never noticed before. A notch from a moved-in desk or careless suitcase. The gesture feels worn in. Muscle-deep. From the years of quiet crossings into Chloe's room, always with the same excuse: *I'm her mother. I need to know.* Searching for cigarettes, condoms, pills--objects that never lied. You could argue with a girl. Not with a crumpled foil wrapper at the bottom of a waste bin.

But Imogen isn't my daughter.

The knowledge lands thick, like something misdelivered and too heavy to hand back. Imogen: slim limbs in motion down the stairs, laughter with the television on, the wet ring her tea mug leaves beside the sink. A clutter I once cleaned with resentment now pulls at me with a milder ache. The girl's things--not mine, but not foreign either--gather where Chloe's had fallen away. The bathroom smells like citrus and eucalyptus again.

I've been hoarding these fragments. Smoothing them, cataloguing them, the way children press flowers, each moment thinned and flattened into something survivable.

Then, the heat: quick, ungracious. At Imogen, for slipping so easily into those hollowed places. At myself, for letting it feel like balm. For the small, stupid pride I feel when the girl laughs too loudly in the kitchen and doesn't lower her voice. For the lie I let myself sit inside--that the rent money is an afterthought, that this is something else.

I straighten. The pull of my shoulder blades feels righteous. This is my house. My wall, with its dings and oil-glossed corners. My hallway carpet, with its threadbare strip where traffic moves most. I pay. I make the calls when things break. I have earned knowing.

I step in.

The room is cool and smells of sleep. The bed unmade, sheets in a churn, as if someone woke in distress and left quickly. A sports bra coils from the bedpost. On the floor, dance clothes collapsed in layers, shed in exhaustion. There's a smell--body-warmth, faint and sour, still intimate.

On the desk, a laptop sits closed beside a stack of books--spines cracked, pages marked with coloured tabs. A half-empty glass of water. A tube of muscle rub, its cap missing. Nothing remarkable. Nothing hidden.

But the walls. They hold something else. Each square foot, covered. Clippings, printouts, pages folded and pressed flat with tape. Women in motion, or moments after--sinews strung in pose, bodies in suspension, skin lit from behind or pressed into shadow. Necks, fingers, arches. And slotted between them: diagrams, cool and clinical. Nerves branching like winter trees. Bones without their sheaths. Cross-sections of the self. Not pornography. Not quite reverence either. A kind of hunger.

I move towards the dresser, my fingers trailing across the wood. It's cluttered with small, ordinary altars: a cracked crystal that throws a rainbow when touched by sun, hair ties coiled like sleeping creatures, poetry books with dog-eared spines and titles I don't know. A silver ring sits beside a jar of dried rose petals. Nothing here is tidy, but none of it is careless.

Then, the bedside table. Squat, broad, its drawers nudged open just enough to tempt. I shouldn't. Every part of my training--nurse, mother, landlord--says *no*. But my hand moves anyway.

The top drawer yields without resistance. Inside: clothes folded tight, as though packed for travel. Underwear, silks and cottons in careful stacks, colour-coordinated. My hand moves through them slowly, searching for drama. Beneath a layer of socks, my fingers catch on something firmer, cooler.

I stand still, not stiff but suspended, like I'm a figure in an old photo taken mid-turn. The object warms quickly in my hand, slickening at the base where my grip has tightened. I hadn't meant to pick it up--my fingers had simply followed the trail my eyes refused. Now, there it is: a weight, real and intimate, no longer theoretical. Flesh-toned and smooth.

A thrum moves through me--not desire, not yet, but the precursor, that dislocation of self that follows any breach. My own breath grows audible. Behind me, the house holds its breath too, walls thick with that peculiar quiet that follows a vacuum cleaner or an argument. My armpits bloom with sweat. I'm too warm suddenly, my blouse clinging under the arms, my bra band cutting into my skin with its familiar, domestic bite.

I turn, slightly, as if caught. The door remains ajar. Nothing moves.

Then the images come, uninvited and whole. Imogen--bare, arched, her spine in that clean line dancers have, taut as a bowstring. Hands--not childish, but slim, capable--working this thing with practiced rhythm. The breath, I imagine, would hitch then stretch, a low vowel drawn from somewhere deeper than speech. I see the girl biting her lip--not out of shame but control, the kind that sharpens pleasure into something edged. I see a chest--flat but not sexless--dappled with pink, nipples rising like startled buds. I see too much.

A flush rises in me, unwelcome and bright. I want to laugh, or spit, or cry. The thought is grotesque, intrusive. Worse: it excites me.

Imogen, with her winged shoulder blades and coffee-cup constellation of bruises on her thighs. Imogen who sings absentmindedly while peeling vegetables. Imogen who's slipped, molecule by molecule, into every inch of this house like steam after a shower. Who reminds me, terribly, of Chloe. That same effort to appear indifferent, the way girls do when they're frightened of wanting too much.

My thumb moves, tracing the silicone. The ridge down its underside, the rubbery vein, the mushroomed crown that's neither vulgar nor innocent. It's not a novelty. It has heft. Someone chose it with purpose.

I wonder who Imogen thinks of when she uses it. A boy, lanky and polite, with acne still healing along his jaw. Or a girl--bold, reckless, already knowing too much. Or someone else entirely. Someone older. Someone who watches her come down to breakfast in a too-big shirt and bare legs. Someone who lets her borrow things, quietly, and likes the trace of her scent left on them.

Stop. Just stop.

I place it back with care, aligning it exactly as I found it. Close the drawer. Run a hand along the edge of the desk to steady myself.

Downstairs, the kitchen stretches into the day. Sunlight fills the tiles, each one lit like a small canvas. I move without thought--kettle, cupboard, mug--the routine practiced. I don't speak to myself. Don't name what's happened. The body knows what to do.

The kettle clicks. I pour the water slowly, watching the tea stain the bag dark. A cloud of milk softens the surface. The spoon clinks, bright and ordinary. My hand is steady now.

I take a sip. The heat moves down my throat, settles in my chest. The guilt is still there, but it no longer has teeth. Shame, too, softened at the edges. Excitement flickers, brief, like a match already blown out.

I set the mug on the counter. The morning, somehow, has resumed. The house is still. The walls breathe.

And everything, at least for now, appears untouched.