My Neighbor, the Night Nurse

I drive the number fourteen bus, which goes from the train station out past the hospital and the big outlet mall and then loops back along the river, and I've driven it for six years. You'd think it would get boring. It doesn't, quite. There's always somebody running for the bus with a coffee held up like a torch, and there's always somebody who wants to tell me about their grandson's wedding, and twice a year somebody throws up. I'm thirty-four. I like the big wide windshield and the hiss of the doors and the way the whole city looks small and orderly from up in that seat.

What I don't like is ice. I especially don't like the patch of ice on the back steps of my own building, which I'd walked over every winter morning for four years without a problem, right up until the morning in February when I didn't. I went down hard on one leg, heard something inside my knee make a sound like a rubber band snapping, and lay there in the snow looking up at the gray sky and thinking, very calmly, Well, that's the bus gone for a while.

It was my ACL, it turned out, and a little torn something else besides. The surgeon was a cheerful woman who drew a picture of my knee on the back of a form and told me I'd be on crutches for a few weeks and in physical therapy for a few months. She also told me, more seriously, that the first few nights would be the hardest, and that I shouldn't be alone.

I wasn't supposed to be. My friend Dana was going to stay with me. Then Dana called the morning of the surgery from her own bed with a fever of a hundred and two, crying because she felt so bad about it, and I spent ten minutes telling her it was fine when it very much wasn't.

Which is how Ellis came into it.

Ellis lives across the hall from me. I knew him the way you know a neighbor in a building like ours: nods at the mailboxes, a hand with the door when somebody's carrying groceries, the sound of his shower at odd hours because he works nights. He's a nurse in the intensive care unit at the same hospital my bus goes past. He's tall and lean, with close-cropped dark hair going silver at the sides and a long, calm face, and he has a way of looking at you when you talk like he's genuinely listening and also quietly taking your pulse. He mentioned once, at the mailboxes, that he'd just turned forty-four and working nights was starting to feel like it, and I remember thinking he didn't look tired at all. He looked like the kind of man who'd be very good in a crisis.

He was. He saw me come home from the surgery center in a cab, with a brace on my leg from hip to ankle and a nurse's aide trying to help me up the steps, and he came straight down and took my other arm.

"Where's your person?" he asked, once I was on my couch.

"My person has the flu."

He looked at me for a long moment. "I have a week of vacation I keep forgetting to use," he said. "I'll take the couch tonight. Don't argue with me. You won't win, and it'll hurt your knee."

I didn't argue. I was too relieved.

The first night was every bit as hard as the surgeon promised. The nerve block wore off around midnight and my knee woke up screaming. Ellis gave me my pills on schedule and brought me ice packs and sat on the end of the bed while I cried a little. And then, at three in the morning, I needed the bathroom, and I needed it fast, and I learned that a woman on new crutches with a locked brace cannot do anything fast. I got halfway there. I didn't get the rest of the way.

I stood in my own hallway in my sleep shorts with my face burning and my eyes squeezed shut, and I wanted to die.

Ellis didn't make a big thing of it. He got me sitting down on the closed toilet lid, brought me a towel and clean shorts, and mopped up the hallway, all without one word that would have made it worse. When I finally made myself look at him, he was rinsing the mop in the tub as if he did it every night, which I guess he more or less did.

"Lena," he said, "half my patients do that the first night. Nobody gets a medal for crawling to the bathroom on a fresh knee. Tomorrow I'll go to the pharmacy and get you something for nights, and you won't have to do this dance again."

"Something?"

"Briefs," he said simply. "Adult diapers. Just for the first week, so you can rest."

I said okay because I was too tired to say anything else. I didn't think about it at all. I definitely didn't think about how I'd feel.

In the morning he made oatmeal with brown sugar and too much butter and brought it to me in bed on a cutting board, because I don't own a tray. Then he pulled the desk chair up beside the bed and said it was time for my exercises.

"The surgeon gave me a sheet," I said. "I'll do them later."

"You'll do them now," he said pleasantly, "because later you'll be stiff and grumpy and you'll lie to me about it."

The exercises were small and humiliating. Tighten the muscle on top of my thigh and hold it. Press the back of my knee down into the mattress. Lift my heel half an inch off the bed and fail. He sat beside me with one hand resting lightly on my thigh, just above the brace, so he could feel when the muscle tightened, and he counted with me under his breath. His hand was warm and dry and very steady. I'd never noticed his hands before. They were long and clean, with short square nails and a thin white scar across the back of one knuckle, and when I managed to lift my heel all the way for the first time he squeezed my thigh and said, "There you go. That's the hard one," and I was absurdly, stupidly proud of myself.

"Do you do this for all your patients?" I asked.

"My patients are mostly unconscious," he said. "You're a nice change. You talk back."

"Is that good?"

He looked at me for a moment with that calm, careful face. "It's very good," he said, and then he got up to wash the bowl, and I lay there with the place on my thigh where his hand had been still warm, and told myself it was the painkillers.

He came back that afternoon with a plain white package under his arm and set it on my dresser without comment. That night, before bed, I wriggled into one on my own while he waited in the hall, with the brace making it twice as awkward as it should have been. It was thicker than I'd imagined. It covered me from my belly button down to the tops of my thighs, and when I lay back on the bed it crinkled softly under me, and the padding pressed warm and snug between my legs.

I lay there in the dark, and something in me went very quiet.

It felt like being held. That's the only way I can describe it. Not like a hug, exactly. Like the bed had decided to take care of me so I didn't have to. I didn't have to worry about the hallway or the crutches or the clock. I could just lie there and let my body do whatever it was going to do, and it would be fine. Somebody had made sure of it.

I didn't use it that night. I lay awake a long time thinking about it.

The second night I woke up around four with my bladder full and my knee throbbing, and I lay there and looked at the crutches leaning against the nightstand and thought about the long dark hallway. Then I thought about how warm I was, and how nobody would know. And I told myself I was only being sensible, and I let go.

It was slow at first, and then not slow at all. Heat spread under me and between my legs and up the front, and the padding swelled soft and heavy against my pussy, and I felt a pulse of something between my legs that had nothing to do with my knee. I pressed my palm flat against the front of the diaper, through the blanket, and pushed. The warmth pressed right up against my clit. I bit my lip so hard I tasted it.

I fell asleep with my hand still there.

When I woke up, it was light, and Ellis was sitting on the edge of my bed with my morning pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and he was looking at me with that calm, careful face. The blanket had slid half off. I was lying with my legs open and my hand still resting on the very full front of a very wet diaper, and my face, I could feel, was bright red.

"Good morning," he said. He handed me the pills. I took them. My hands were shaking a little. He watched me swallow and took the glass back and set it on the nightstand.

"Lena," he said. "Can I ask you something personal? As your neighbor, not your nurse."

I nodded.

"Did you need to use that, last night? Or did you want to?"

There is a kind of question you can't lie to, if it's asked kindly enough. I looked at the ceiling. "Wanted to," I said.

"And did you like it?"

"Yes." It came out tiny. "I don't know why. I'd never even thought about it before. And now I can't stop."

He was quiet. When I finally looked at him, he wasn't shocked, and he wasn't laughing. He looked, if anything, a little relieved. "Can I tell you something personal back?" he asked.

"Okay."

"I've been a nurse for twenty years, and the part I love most is the part they don't pay us for. Tucking somebody in right. Making a person feel safe enough to stop holding everything together." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the blanket. "At work there's a line, and I never cross it. I'm not at work. If you'd like somebody to take care of you this week, really take care of you, all of you, I would very much like to be that person. And if you'd rather I just bring you pills and ice and keep my mouth shut, that's fine too. You get to choose."

I thought about the warmth in the dark, and his hands on the mop, and the way he'd said all of you.

"I want that," I said. "Please."

"You're sure?" he asked. "You can change your mind any time. Tonight, tomorrow, halfway through. You just say stop and everything stops."

"I'm sure."

"Then say yes, Nurse."

It should have been silly. It wasn't. It went through me like the warmth had. "Yes, Nurse," I whispered.

He smiled, and it was the first time I'd seen him really smile, all the way up into his eyes. "All right," he said. "Nurse's orders, then. You don't move that knee. You let me do everything."

He stacked pillows under my bad leg until it was propped just right, and then he folded the blanket all the way down to the foot of the bed. I lay there in my T-shirt and my soaked diaper in the morning light, and he looked at me for a long moment, and then he laid his palm flat on the front of it and pressed, gently, the way you'd check a pillow.

"Very wet," he said, in his nurse voice. "We'll need to change you."

He tore the tapes open one at a time. He folded the front down. I was soaked, and I was swollen, and I was slick, and he could see all of it. His breath caught, just once.

"That isn't all pee, is it, sweetheart?"

"No."

He wiped me with a warm washcloth he'd brought from the bathroom, slowly, between my lips and around my clit and down, and I arched off the bed at every pass. He took the wet diaper away. He didn't put a new one on. Instead he leaned over and pressed a kiss to the soft skin just above my mound, and then lower, and then his mouth was on me.

He licked me like he did everything, carefully and thoroughly and with complete attention, and he held my good thigh open with one hand and kept the other hand flat on my bad knee to keep it still. When I tried to lift my hips, he pressed down. "Don't move," he murmured against my clit, and I nearly came from that alone. He licked me until I was shaking and making little broken sounds, and then he stopped.

"Is there anything in your nightstand I should know about?"

I covered my eyes with my arm. "Bottom drawer."

I heard him open it. I knew what he'd find: a pink remote-control egg I'd bought on a lonely night and never been brave enough to try, and a little clit sucker with a soft round mouth that I used more than I'd admit. He made a pleased sound in his throat.

"Lena. This one still has the tag on."

"I know."

"Let's fix that."

He washed it in the bathroom, came back, and warmed it in his hand. Then he slid it into me, slowly, the smooth rounded weight of it pressing up inside me until it settled. I felt so full and so exposed I could hardly breathe. He took a fresh diaper out of the package, slid it under me, and brought the front up and taped it snug, egg and all, and patted it twice.

Then he sat back in the chair by the bed and picked up the little remote.

The first buzz was so low I almost didn't feel it. The second was not low at all. I grabbed the sheets. The egg hummed deep inside me, and the thick padding held it pressed right where it was, and every time I squirmed the diaper crinkled. Ellis watched my face with complete calm, and turned it up, and turned it down, and turned it up again, and I could see the outline of his cock hard against his jeans.

"You're doing so well," he said. "Don't move the knee."

"Please, Nurse."

"Please what?"

"I need to come."

"Not yet."

He kept me waiting, with the egg humming and pausing and humming again, until I was babbling and I'd soaked the new diaper in a different way entirely. Then he came back to the bed, opened the tapes, and found the little clit sucker. He switched it on and fitted its soft mouth over my clit, and it began to pulse, gentle sucking waves, while the egg buzzed deep inside me at the same time.

I came so hard I saw white. He held the toy on me through all of it and pressed his other hand on my knee, and he said, "Good girl, good girl, stay still, I've got you," the whole time.

When I could see again, he'd turned the egg off and eased it out of me, and he was standing beside the bed pulling his shirt over his head. He had a lean, runner's body and a line of dark hair going down his stomach into his jeans. He opened them, and his cock was long and hard and curved up toward his belly, and he wrapped his hand around it and looked down at me.

"Tell me what you want."

"You," I said. "Inside me. Please."

"We have to be careful with that knee."

"Then be careful."

He was. He helped me roll onto my good side, so slowly, and built a whole wall of pillows to hold my bad leg out straight and still, and then he lay down behind me on the bed and fitted himself against my back. I felt the heat of his chest, and the brush of his hair against my neck, and the head of his cock nudging between my legs from behind. He lifted my good thigh a little with his hand, and found me, and pushed inside me in one long slow slide that I felt in my teeth.

"Okay?" he breathed against my ear.

"So okay."

He fucked me like that, spooned behind me, slow and deep, his hips rolling against my ass, his arm wrapped around me so his fingers could find my clit and rub it in small, steady circles. Every time I tensed my bad leg he said, "Easy," and slowed down until I relaxed again, and then he went a little deeper. It was the most careful sex I'd ever had and the most intense. I came again, clenching around his cock, crying out into the pillow, and he held me through it, and then his own breathing changed and he pushed deep and stayed there and came inside me with a long, shaking groan against my shoulder.

We lay there a long while. He kissed the back of my neck, over and over, like he was counting something.

Then he got up, and he took care of me. He brought a warm cloth and cleaned me gently. He slid a fresh diaper under me and taped it on snug and checked the leg cuffs with his finger, completely matter-of-fact, the way he'd have checked a bandage. He put a new ice pack on my knee and wrapped it in a towel and pulled the blanket up to my chin. He brought me water and stood there until I'd drunk half of it.

Then he took the clipboard I hadn't noticed he'd made for my pills, the one hanging on my bedpost with times written on it, and uncapped his pen.

"What are you writing?" I asked.

"Patient tolerated procedure well," he said, writing it down. "Recommend repeating as needed."

I laughed so hard it hurt my knee. He sat on the edge of the bed until I stopped.

"The surgeon said six weeks on crutches," I told him. "And three months of therapy."

"I read the discharge papers." He clicked the pen closed and tucked it in his pocket. "I've already put myself on the schedule."