19-04-2026, 04:29 AM
Chapter 55: The Big Reveal
Scene 1
Selvam woke before the alarm. The room was still dark around the edges, a soft blue light bleeding in under the blinds. For a second he did not move. He lay on his back, arms at his sides, and tried to figure out what felt wrong. Then he remembered. His skin. His whole body was buzzing, a low tight hum under the surface, the way a leg felt after sitting on it too long. He shifted under the sheet and the cotton dragged against his chest and he sucked in a breath. Everywhere the sheet touched him, he could feel it.
He sat up slow. The clock on the nightstand read five forty-two. Outside, a single bird had started up in the lemon tree. The house was quiet.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked down at himself. His chest was bare in the gray light, the muscle lines sharp, the skin a little pink where the hair used to be. He ran a palm over his left pec, careful, expecting a sting. There was one, small, the kind of ache that came after a hard workout. He pressed harder and the pec flexed under his hand. He could feel every ridge. He had forgotten what his own chest felt like without the hair in the way.
He padded to the bathroom and shut the door behind him. The tile was cold on his feet. He stripped off his shorts and stood for a second in front of the mirror, not quite looking at himself yet, just feeling the cool air move across places it had not moved across in forty-eight years.
He turned on the shower. He kept the water lukewarm, because the girl had told him no hot showers for a day. Jenny. Her name came to him along with the smell of lavender and he pushed it away. He stepped under the spray.
The water hit his shoulders and ran down. He watched it move. Usually the water caught in the hair on his chest, slowed down, pooled at the center before sliding to his belly. Now it ran off him like he was a stone in a river. Straight lines, fast, down the front of him, down his stomach, over the flat skin where the trail used to be, down past his hip. He watched it run off the head of his cock and onto the tile and he looked away fast.
He soaped up. The lather was thin. He rubbed it over his chest in slow circles and his hand slid in a way it had never slid before. There was no catch, no friction. His palm moved across his own stomach and he could feel every single square of muscle under it. He had worked for those muscles for twenty years. He had never really seen them. Now they were right there, under a skin of soap, like someone had scrubbed a dirty window.
He lifted his cock out of the way with the back of his hand to wash underneath, and the skin there was smooth too, bare and a little sore. He was careful. He did not linger. He rinsed.
When he stepped out, the air in the bathroom felt colder than usual. He wrapped the towel around his waist and used a corner of it to wipe the fog off the mirror.
Then he stopped.
The man in the mirror was not the man he saw every morning. That man had a thick black shadow of hair across his chest and a softer, less defined middle, and the shape of his body was hidden under all of it. This man was lean and cut. His shoulders were wider than he remembered. His arms were heavy and veined. His stomach showed the six squares Ashok was always complaining he could not get, and the two lines that ran down from his hips and under the towel made a clean V, like an arrow pointing down.
He lifted his chin. His jaw looked sharper, somehow, without the bulk of the hair below it pulling his eye. His salt-and-pepper stubble caught the light. He turned a little to the side, the way he had seen Vanitha do, to check the angle. His lat flared out when he raised his arm. He lowered the arm. He raised it again. He felt a small, stupid laugh rise in his chest and he pressed his mouth shut.
He looked ten years younger. Maybe more. The blonde girl had been right.
The thought of her came back in the same second. Jenny. The way she had said book me and then written his name in neat letters. Ten o’clock. Full body massage. He closed his eyes and he could feel her hand again, the warmth of her palm through the thin glove, the way it had stayed too long at the base of him, the way she had held his cock against his belly and her fingers had not quite closed around him. His stomach tightened.
His cock, under the towel, began to move.
He opened his eyes and made himself stare at the fog at the edge of the mirror. He thought about his breathing. He thought about the bird in the lemon tree. He thought about anything but her small hand.
A full body massage. No gloves for that, probably. She would have oil on her hands. She would start at his shoulders and work down, the way she had worked the aloe down his chest yesterday, and she would find every sore place the wax had left, and she would press into it with her thumbs. He did not know where she would stop. He did not know if she would stop.
He pressed both hands flat on the counter and breathed out.
He was a grown man, he told himself. He was a grandfather-in-waiting, almost. He had no business standing in a bathroom in his son’s house in California with his cock stirring under a towel because a twenty-three-year-old had written his name down in an appointment book.
He finished toweling off. He was careful around the sore spots. He put the towel on the hook. He took one last look at the mirror.
The man in it looked back at him, smooth and hard and a little flushed, and did not look away.
In the bedroom he pulled on a pair of soft gray pants, the loose kind Ashok had given him for lounging, and a plain black t-shirt. He tugged the shirt down and smoothed it and then caught himself smoothing it and stopped. The cotton hung differently on him now. It sat closer to his body. He could see the shape of his chest through it.
He picked up his phone. Nothing on it. He set it down.
He looked at the door.
Downstairs the family would be waking up. Vanitha would ask. Ashok would tease. Latha would stare. He would have to walk through it and pretend it was nothing.
He took a deep breath in, held it, let it out.
Then he opened the door and went down.
Scene 2
The kitchen smelled like coffee and toasted bread. Vanitha stood at the stove in a pale blue robe tied loose at the waist, cracking eggs into a pan with one hand, her phone in the other. Ashok sat on a stool at the island in a t-shirt and gym shorts, hair still wet from his own shower, slicing a mango with the focused slowness of a man who had not had enough caffeine yet.
“Appa’s up,” Ashok said, without looking, the second Selvam’s footsteps hit the landing.
“I can hear,” Vanitha said. She turned the flame down. She put the phone face-down on the counter. “Mama, come, come. I made eggs.”
Selvam came around the corner and stopped in the doorway. They were both already looking at him.
For a long second, nobody said anything. The pan hissed. The refrigerator hummed. Ashok set the knife down on the cutting board and leaned back on his stool, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Okay,” Ashok said. “Okay, Appa.”
“What,” Selvam said.
“Nothing,” Ashok said. “You just look different, that’s all.”
“It’s a shirt,” Selvam said.
Vanitha laughed. It was a short bright laugh, the kind she used for the camera. She came around the island, wiping her hand on the side of her robe, and stopped two feet from him. Her eyes moved down his chest and back up again.
“The shirt fits better,” she said. “Admit it.”
“The shirt is the same shirt.”
“The shirt is the same shirt, mama. The man in it is not the same man.”
Ashok snorted into his coffee.
Vanitha crossed her arms. “Let’s see the results.”
Selvam shook his head. He felt his ears go warm. “Let me eat first, ma.”
“No, no, no.” She flapped a hand at him. “We did not pay good American dollars to watch you cover it up. Come on. Pull it up. We all want to see.”
“Vanitha.”
“Shirt up, mama.”
Ashok was already laughing. “She’s not going to let it go, Appa. Just get it over with.”
Selvam looked from one of them to the other. Both of them were grinning at him like he was five years old and hiding a college report. He sighed. He reached down and caught the hem of the t-shirt with both hands. He hesitated, then pulled it up to just below his collarbones, and held it there.
Vanitha whistled. Low and long, through her teeth, like a man on a construction site.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Mama.”
Ashok stood up off the stool. He came around the island and stopped next to Vanitha and they both stood there and looked.
In the hard morning light the change was even sharper than it had been in the bathroom mirror. The pink had gone out of the skin overnight. What was left was smooth and even and the color of strong tea, and under it every line of the muscle showed clean. The chest was a wall. The stomach was a stack. The two lines at his hips pointed down into the waistband of the gray pants.
“This is not fair,” Ashok said. He lifted his own t-shirt an inch and looked down at his own stomach. “This is not fair. I go to the gym four times a week. I eat no rice. I drink that disgusting green thing every morning. And my father, at forty-eight, looks like this.”
“Forty-eight,” Vanitha said, shaking her head.
“Forty-eight,” Ashok repeated. He dropped his shirt. “I give up. I am giving up.”
Selvam started to lower his own shirt.
“No, keep it up a second longer,” Vanitha said. She leaned in, not touching, just looking. She tipped her head. “The shoulders especially, mama. I didn’t realize how broad you are. The hair was hiding it.”
“Enough now,” Selvam said, and pulled the shirt down.
“Just saying.”
From the hallway came a small quick sound of bare feet on the wood floor. Latha had come down. She stopped at the edge of the kitchen in a long blue kurta and loose pajama pants, her hair in the same loose braid she always slept in, a cloth in her hand. She had clearly been passing through, on her way to the laundry, and she had heard them laughing and stopped to look.
Her eyes went right to Selvam. Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed.
“Uncle,” she said.
Selvam nodded at her, a little stiff. “Morning, ma.”
“You look…” She tilted her head, searching for the word. Then she laughed, a small surprised laugh, hand going to her mouth. “You look so young, Uncle. So strong. Like the boys in the fitness videos.”
“See,” Vanitha said, pointing at Latha without looking at her. “The young one has eyes.”
“Anna, what happened to your father?” Latha said, turning to Ashok with wide mock-serious eyes. “Yesterday he was my Uncle. Today he is a movie hero.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Ashok said, groaning. “He’s going to walk around the house like this all week. Flexing every time he passes a window.”
“I do not flex,” Selvam said.
“He is already flexing,” Ashok said to Latha. “Look. He is flexing right now.”
“I am standing,” Selvam said.
Latha laughed and ducked back into the hallway. “I will stay out of this,” she called over her shoulder. “I am just a simple girl. I cannot handle so much handsomeness in one kitchen.”
Ashok threw a piece of mango peel after her. She squealed. Her footsteps went away down the hall.
Vanitha shook her head, smiling, and went back to the eggs. “She’s not wrong, mama. Get used to the attention. That’s the trouble with American standards. Once you’re in, you’re in.”
“American standards,” Selvam said. He sat down on the stool Ashok had left. “Tomorrow I will look like a politician. The day after I will look like a movie star. Where does it end?”
“It ends when your wife tells you to stop,” Ashok said.
“I do not have a wife.”
“Then it doesn’t end,” Vanitha said, over her shoulder, and she said it lightly, but she said it.
Breakfast went on like that. Eggs, toast, fruit, coffee. Ashok complained for fifteen minutes about his own body and vowed to start waxing next month. Vanitha ignored him and ate half a slice of papaya and drank black coffee. Selvam ate quietly, keeping his eyes on his plate, answering when he had to.
When Ashok finally stood up and stretched and announced he had a call in ten minutes, he clapped Selvam on the shoulder on his way out. The clap was loud against the bare skin under the cotton. Ashok laughed again, shaking his head, and trotted up the stairs.
The kitchen went quiet. Vanitha rinsed her mug at the sink. Selvam brought his plate over and set it on the counter next to her.
She did not look up. She ran water over the plate. Then, under the sound of it, with her eyes still on her own hands, she said it.
“Did she take care of you down there, mama?”
Selvam froze.
He glanced at the stairs. Nothing. He glanced at the hallway. Empty. Latha was somewhere on the other side of the house, humming to herself.
He looked at Vanitha. She still had not looked up. A small smile was tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“She did her job, ma,” he said, quiet.
“Mm.” She turned the water off. She set the plate in the rack. She dried her hands on the robe and finally looked up at him, and her eyes were bright and full of trouble. “Tell me later, mama. All the details. Every single one.”
She patted his bare forearm, once, and walked past him out of the kitchen.
Selvam stood at the sink with the water still dripping off the plate and listened to her go.
Scene 3
Ashok jingled his keys against his palm as he stood by the kitchen island, scrolling through the directions on his phone. “Latha, you ready? We’ll be late.”
Latha came down the stairs in a clean pink kurta, a small handbag tucked under her arm. She had pinned her hair back and her cheeks were already a little flushed with nerves. “I am ready, Anna.”
Vanitha leaned against the counter with her coffee. “How long will it take?”
“Ultrasound, blood draw, then the doctor wants to talk about the next cycle,” Ashok said. “Maybe three hours. Maybe four if there’s traffic coming back.”
“Take your time,” Vanitha said. She turned to Latha and gave her a gentle smile. “Drink lots of water before they take blood, okay?”
“Yes, Akka.”
Latha glanced over toward the living room, where Selvam sat on the couch pretending to read the newspaper Ashok had brought from the corner store. She put a hand on her hip and smirked. “Uncle, don’t show off your new body too much in the mirror today. Anna will get jealous.”
Selvam looked up, startled. Ashok laughed.
“Hey, hey,” Ashok said. “I am the husband here. I can be jealous if I want.”
“Then start lifting weights, Anna,” Latha shot back, walking past him to the door. “Otherwise Akka will run away with Uncle.”
“Latha!” Vanitha said, but she was laughing too.
Selvam turned a deep red and went back to his newspaper.
The door closed behind them. The car backed out of the driveway. The house went quiet, the kind of quiet that only an empty American house in the middle of an afternoon could be. The fridge hummed. A sprinkler ticked on somewhere two yards over.
Vanitha set her coffee down. She walked to the front window and watched until the car had disappeared around the bend. Then she came back and stood in the doorway of the living room, one hand on the frame.
“Mama,” she said. “Come upstairs for a minute. I want to ask you something.”
Selvam folded the newspaper. He did not look at her. He stood up and followed her up the carpeted steps.
In his bedroom the afternoon light came through the blinds in long pale stripes across the bed. Selvam sat on the edge of the mattress, hands on his knees. Vanitha closed the door behind her. She turned the small lock with a soft click.
“So,” she said. She crossed the room slowly and stood in front of him. “Tell me. Did Jenny take care of you down there?”
Selvam looked up at her. He saw the crooked little smile on her lips and he knew exactly what she was asking and he knew exactly what she was not asking.
“She did the wax, ma,” he said. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Vanitha put a hand on her hip. “She didn’t slip a little? Her hand didn’t wander a little?”
“Vanitha.”
“Mama, I’m just asking. She’s a young girl. You‘re a handsome man. Your cock is...” She paused and her eyes went bright. “Well. It is what it is. She must have noticed.”
He looked at the floor. “I don’t know what she noticed.”
“Did you get hard?”
He didn’t answer.
“You did,” she said. She was grinning now. “You did, mama. I knew it. Poor Jenny. She probably had to take a break after.”
“Stop it, ma.”
“I’m not stopping.” She took a step closer. The toes of her bare feet were almost touching his. “I want to see.”
He looked up sharply. “Vanitha, Ma...”
“I want to see, mama. I waited all morning. I dropped you off and I drove around for two hours thinking about it. I want to see what she did to you.”
“They will be back.”
“Three hours, Ashok said. Maybe four.” She put one knee up on the edge of the bed beside his thigh and leaned down so her face was close to his. “Don’t be shy, mama. I‘m your daughter-in-law. I can look.”
He swallowed. His mouth was dry.
She straightened up and stepped back and then she lowered herself down, slow, until she was kneeling on the carpet between his knees. She put both her hands flat on his thighs. She looked up at him and waited.
He breathed in. He stood up.
He did not mean to stand up. His body did it before his head could stop it. His knees had just unbent on their own, and now he was on his feet, looking down at her kneeling on the carpet with her hands still open on her thighs, waiting.
Vanitha tilted her head back. Her hair fell off one shoulder. The pale blue robe had loosened at some point during the walk up the stairs and he could see the edge of the thali chain resting against her collarbone, the gold catching a stripe of afternoon light. His son’s thali. The one Ashok had tied around her neck four years ago in front of eight hundred people and two priests and a fire.
He looked at it. She saw him looking at it. Neither of them said anything about it.
“Mama,” she said, quiet now. “Come on.”
“Shhh.” She rose up a little on her knees and her hands moved to his waistband. She hooked her thumbs into the soft gray cotton and tugged it down in one slow pull, taking his underwear with it, and the whole bottom half of him came free.
His cock lay across his thigh, soft, hairless, the bare skin around the base pink and tender from the morning. The whole shape of him was different now. The shaft looked longer without the hair at the root, the head fuller, the heavy balls hanging low and smooth.
Vanitha let out a small breath.
“Oh my God, mama,” she said. “Look at you.”
She put her hand on his thigh, then slid it up, slow, across his hip, and then her fingertips traced the bare skin at the base of his cock. The skin was so smooth her nails caught nothing. She circled the root with one finger, then ran the same finger up the underside of his shaft, all the way to the tip.
“It’s like a different cock,” she whispered.
He twitched under her hand.
“You can see everything,” she said. “Every vein. Every line. Look how big the head is when there’s no hair around it.”
He was getting hard now. She watched it happen. She did not stroke him. She just kept tracing him with one finger, the way a person traced a leaf to see the shape of it. The shaft thickened and lifted off his thigh. The head turned a darker pink. A clear bead came to the slit and sat there.
“So pretty,” she said. She bent her head down and pressed her lips, just her closed lips, to the very base of him, where the smooth skin met the soft skin of his sack. She kissed him there once. Then she dragged her lips up the underside of his shaft, slowly, all the way to the head.
Selvam’s hand gripped the bedspread.
She opened her mouth and took just the head in. Just the tip. She held him there and let her tongue move around the crown, slow circles, tasting the bead of fluid she had seen. She closed her eyes.
She pulled off and looked at him. “I have to taste every inch, mama. It’s a whole new cock.”
She went back down. This time she took more of him, a little at a time, her lips sliding down the shaft, then back up to the tip, then a little farther, then back up. She was not hurrying. She was learning him. Her tongue ran along the vein on the underside. Her lips closed on the ridge of the head and she sucked, just once, soft.
Selvam’s breath came out as a long, low sound.
“Vanitha…”
“Shh, mama. Let me.”
She took him deep then, all the way down, and he felt the back of her throat close around the tip, and she stayed there for a moment, swallowing once around him, before she came back up. She did it again. And again. Each pass slower than the last, her hand cupping his bare balls, rolling them gently, her thumb tracing the smooth underside of his sack where the hair used to be.
She pulled off with a small wet sound and looked up at him, her lips shiny, her eyes full of something he did not have a word for. A strand of saliva stretched from her bottom lip to the head of his cock and she caught it with her thumb and pressed it back onto him and rubbed it in like lotion.
“She did a good job,” Vanitha said, quiet, her breath warm on the wet skin. “Jenny. She took her time down here, didn’t she? I can tell. Every inch is smooth.”
“Vanitha Ma, please” Selvam said.
“Tell me, mama.” She ran her tongue along the underside, flat and slow, from the base up to the head, then looked up at him again with her chin resting against his hip. “Did she hold you like I’m holding you? When she was waxing. Did she have to hold your cock?”
“She wore gloves, ma.”
“I know she wore gloves, mama. I’m not asking that.” Vanitha wrapped her small hand around the base of him and squeezed, and he jumped. “I’m asking if she held you. If she took your cock in her hand and held it out of the way.”
He looked down at her. Her face was so close to him. The thali chain had slipped further down her collarbone and was hanging loose against the slope of one breast where the robe had fallen open. He could see the small gold pendant at the end of it, swinging a little every time she moved.
“Yes,” he said. “She held me.”
“Mm.” She closed her eyes and kissed the head again, a slow closed-mouth kiss... “Was she gentle?”
“Yes.”
“Did she go hard?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
He did not answer.
She opened her eyes. The crooked smile was back. “Don’t be shy, mama. I want to picture it. I want to picture that little blonde girl trying to hold this in one hand while she did her job. I bet her fingers didn’t even go all the way around.”
“They didn’t,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Her eyes went bright. She laughed, a small breathless laugh, and buried her face against his thigh for a second, her forehead pressed to his bare hip. When she came back up her cheeks were pink.
“Oh, mama.” She shook her head. “Poor Jenny. Poor little Jenny.”
She took him back in her mouth before he could answer, all the way down this time, her nose pressing into the smooth pink skin at the base of him where the hair had been. She stayed there. He felt the back of her throat flutter. He felt the small hot huff of her breath against his belly. His knees almost gave out.
She came back up slow and let him fall out of her mouth and rested the weight of his cock along her cheek, her eyes closed, as if she were listening to it.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Her voice was low, almost to herself. “Tomorrow she’s going to put her hands on you again. For the massage. Did you know that? Did she tell you what a full body massage means?”
Selvam stared down at her. His heart was going so loud he could hear it in his own ears.
“She didn’t say, ma.”
“No,” Vanitha said. “They never do.”
She turned her face and pressed a kiss to the side of his shaft, long and slow, and then rubbed her cheek against it once, like a cat.
“It’s okay, mama.” She looked up at him. The afternoon light caught the gold at her throat. “I don’t mind. I want her to. I want her to put her little white hands all over you and I want you to think about me the whole time.”
He closed his eyes.
“Say you will.”
“I will.”
“Good mama.”
She opened her mouth again and took him back in, and this time she did not stop.
Downstairs, the fridge hummed. The sprinkler two yards over ticked off and went silent. Somewhere on the freeway a car carrying Ashok and Latha was crawling through afternoon traffic toward the clinic, Ashok’s hand resting easy on the wheel, Latha’s hand resting on the small warm curve of her belly where she was keeping her own secret. Neither of them was thinking about the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. Neither of them had any reason to.
In that bedroom, Selvam sank his hand into his daughter-in-law’s hair, and did not pull her off.
She worked him with long, patient pulls of her mouth, the kind that had no hurry in them, and then after a while she let him slip out and sat back on her heels, breathing through her parted lips. His cock stood up away from his body, wet and shining, the smooth skin at the base catching the afternoon light. She did not look at the shaft. She looked lower.
“Mama,” she said, soft. “Look at these.”
She cupped his balls in her palm. Both of them. They filled her small hand and then some, the weight of them heavy against her fingers, and she lifted them a little, as if she were weighing fruit at the market.
“I didn’t even see them properly,” she whispered. “I was looking at your cock, I didn’t look at these.”
She leaned in. Her breath was warm on the smooth skin. Selvam’s hand tightened in her hair without meaning to and she made a small pleased sound and did not pull away.
“Jenny did this,” she said. She was talking to the balls now, almost, her lips an inch from them. “Little Jenny. With her tweezers. Every stray hair. She must have been down here a long time, mama.”
“She was,” he said, because the words came out before he could decide whether to say them.
“How long?”
“I don’t know, ma. It felt long.”
“Mmm.” She turned her head and pressed a kiss to the side of his sack, soft, her lips barely parting. “It felt long because she was holding your cock up out of the way. Wasn’t she.”
“Yes.”
“And you were hard.”
“Yes.”
“And she kept going.”
“Yes.”
Vanitha made a small laugh into the skin. “Good girl, Jenny.” She kissed the other side, the same soft close-lipped kiss, then tilted her head and ran the flat of her tongue up the underside of his sack in one long slow stripe.
Selvam’s whole body shuddered.
“So smooth, mama.” Her voice had gone quieter, wondering, almost respectful. “Like a boy’s. But heavy like a man’s. Look at them. Look how low they hang.”
She cradled them in her palm and rolled them gently, the way she might have rolled two warm stones. Her thumb traced the seam that ran up the middle of his sack, the soft line of it, and she followed it with her eyes, her lips still parted.
“She had to stretch the skin,” Vanitha said, half to herself. “I’ve seen them wax me down there. They pull the skin tight like this.” She did it, her fingers spreading a small patch of his sack taut between them. The skin stretched smooth and pale and she bent her head and pressed her mouth to that exact spot and sucked, once, soft and slow.
“Vanitha,” he whispered.
“Shh.” She let the skin go and moved to the other side and did the same thing, stretching a new small patch tight, kissing it, sucking it soft. “I’m just thanking her. She did such careful work, mama. I want to feel every inch of it.”
She opened her mouth wider and took one of his balls in.
Selvam made a sound he did not recognize.
She held it on her tongue. Just held it. Her cheeks hollowed a little as she sucked, light, barely any pressure, and her eyes lifted to look up at him. His hand in her hair had gone loose. His mouth was open. He was staring down at her like he did not know where he was.
She let the ball slip out, wet. A thin thread of saliva hung between her lip and the skin and she did not wipe it away.
“She would die,” Vanitha murmured, almost to herself. “If she could see this. Little Jenny. Kneeling in her salon with her gloves on, being so professional. And here I am on my carpet, no gloves, mama, look.” She held up her small bare hand, wiggling her fingers, and then put it back on him. “No gloves. No rules. Just my mouth.”
She took the other ball in and gave it the same slow attention. Her other hand slid up his cock, lazy, more to keep him occupied than to stroke. He was leaking clear fluid freely now, a small slow drip, and she caught some of it on her thumb and brought it to her mouth without letting go of the ball she was sucking, and licked her thumb clean.
“Tell me something, mama,” she said when she came off him again. She rested her chin on his thigh, both hands cradling his sack now, her eyes on his face. “When she was holding you. Did she look at these?”
He tried to answer. His throat was dry.
“Hm?” She squeezed, gentle. “Did she?”
“She looked, ma.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He closed his eyes. “A long time.”
“There it is.” Vanitha smiled against his thigh. “A long time. Poor girl. And you couldn’t do anything about it, could you. Lying there with your legs open and your cock in her hand and her little blue eyes just looking at your balls.”
“Ma, please.”
“Please what, mama.” She kissed the top of his sack. “Please stop? Or please keep going?”
He did not answer. She already knew.
She went back down. Mouth open wider now, she took both balls in together, carefully, her tongue moving underneath them, her cheeks hollowing in a slow pull. Her nose pressed against the base of his cock. The smell of him was different now, without the hair, cleaner and sharper, and she breathed it in through her nose with her eyes closed and hummed, low in her throat. The hum vibrated through him.
His knees buckled. He caught himself with one hand on the bedpost.
Vanitha pulled off and laughed, breathless. “Mama, sit down.”
She guided him back onto the edge of the mattress with a hand on each of his thighs, and she shuffled forward on her knees and settled between them again, and now her face was exactly at the right height. She looked up at him from there, her cheeks flushed, her lips swollen, her hair a little wild on one side. The robe had come fully open. The thali hung in the shadow between her breasts. She did not move to close any of it.
“I have to tell you something, mama,” she said. Her voice had gone serious for a second. “I was a little jealous this morning. When I asked you about her and you wouldn’t look at me.”
“Vanitha...”
“Let me finish.” She lifted his sack in her palm again and held it like an offering, her eyes not leaving his. “I was jealous. And then I thought about it in the car. I thought, no. No, I’m not jealous. I want her to touch him. I want her to get him hard on her table and not be able to do anything about it. I want her to go home tonight and think about his cock in her hand.”
She bent her head and kissed his balls, soft, then looked up again.
“Because she touched you,” Vanitha said. “But she doesn’t get to do this. She doesn’t get to put her mouth on you. She doesn’t get to taste you. That’s mine, mama. She prepared you for me. That’s what she did. She cleaned you up and made you pretty for me and tomorrow she’ll do it again, with her oil and her little hands, and she still won’t get to do this.”
She opened her mouth and took one ball back in, slow, and her eyes closed.
Selvam stared down at the top of her head. The part in her dark hair. The gold chain that was his son’s hanging loose at her throat. Her small hand cradling his sack with a tenderness he could not name. A sound came up out of his chest that was not a word.
His hand found her hair again, not pulling, just resting there, and he held on.
Vanitha, with her eyes still closed and her mouth still full, smiled.
She stayed there a long time with his balls in her mouth, just holding them on her tongue, until his thighs were shaking under her hands. Then she let them slip out, wet and shining, and she turned her face up and ran her tongue all the way from the base of his sack to the very tip of his cock in one long unbroken stripe.
“Back up here now,” she murmured, more to his cock than to him. “I’m not done with you.”
She took the head in first. Just the head, her lips closed around the ridge, and she sucked once, slow, hollow-cheeked. She held him there. Her tongue moved in a small circle around the crown, around and around, and every time it crossed the slit she tasted the clear fluid that kept coming and she swallowed it and kept going.
Selvam’s hand tightened in her hair.
She took him deeper. An inch. Two. Three. She was not hurrying. She was moving at the pace of someone who had already decided how this was going to end and had all afternoon to get there. Her mouth slid down the shaft slow, her lips dragging against the smooth bare skin at the base, and then slid back up slow, and then down again, a little deeper, a little wetter.
The only sounds in the room were the small wet ones she made and the uneven rasp of his breath above her.
She pulled off, just for a second, and looked up at him with her lips parted and shiny. “Slow, mama,” she said. “I want it slow. I want you to feel every second.”
“Vanitha,” he said. His voice was not his voice.
“Shhh.”
She went back down. This time she used her hand too, her small fist wrapping the base of him, following her mouth up and down, up and down, in a lazy rhythm. Her other hand stayed on his balls, rolling them in her palm, feeling them draw up a little tighter each time she came down on him.
She felt everything. She felt the ridge of his head catch on the roof of her mouth. She felt the thick vein on the underside pulse against the flat of her tongue. She felt the way his thighs went rigid on either side of her, then went loose, then went rigid again. She felt his hand in her hair go tight and then tremble.
She knew. She had known for a minute now. She just did not want it yet.
She slowed down further. She took him almost out of her mouth, just kept the very tip between her lips, and she sucked there, tiny flicks of her tongue at the slit, holding him on the edge. His hips jerked up toward her and she pinned them back down with the flat of her hand on his lower belly, gentle but firm, and looked up at him through her lashes with a smile at the corner of her mouth.
“Not yet, mama.”
He groaned. It came out of him low and broken.
She did that to him three times. Took him to the edge, backed off, held him there, licked the tip clean, went down on him again, came back up, held him there again. By the third time his whole body was shaking. Sweat had come out at his hairline. His hand in her hair had gone desperate, pulling without meaning to, and she liked that, she liked the small sting at her scalp.
On the fourth time she did not stop.
She took him all the way down. Her nose pressed into the smooth skin at the base of him. She stayed there, swallowing once around him, her throat working, and then she came back up slow and went down again, and the rhythm tightened, her fist and her mouth moving together now, and she felt him swell against her tongue, the head growing impossibly thicker, the vein on the underside hard as a rope.
“Vanitha,” he said, warning.
She hummed around him. Yes.
“Vanitha, ma, I’m going to...”
She hummed again. Low. Encouraging. Her eyes locked on his face from below.
He broke.
The first pulse hit the back of her throat hard and hot and she swallowed it clean, her throat closing around the head of him in a tight squeeze that pulled another jet out of him a second later. She swallowed that too. The third came and she could not keep up, she pulled back a little, let the head rest on her tongue, and the fourth pulse shot across the flat of it, salty and thick, and she held it in her mouth and did not swallow yet.
He kept cumming. She had not expected this much. She had forgotten this about him. Her hand kept working the base of him in slow pulls, milking every thick pulse out, and each one filled her mouth a little more. Her cheeks rounded out with it. A small warm trickle escaped the corner of her lips and ran down her chin.
She pulled her mouth off him then, deliberately, at the exact moment he was still pulsing, and held his cock in her fist an inch from her face and looked up at him with her mouth full and her lips closed.
The last two ropes hit her.
The first one caught her across the bridge of her nose and striped down one cheek in a hot line. The second landed higher, on her forehead and in her eyebrow, and a fat drop rolled down the side of her temple into her hair. She did not flinch. She did not close her eyes. She held her mouth full of him and she looked up at Selvam and she let him paint her.
He made a broken sound.
A last slow dribble came out of him and she caught it on her tongue with her mouth still closed, tipping her head forward to let it fall onto the flat of her tongue through her parted teeth, and then she closed her lips again.
She knelt there for a long moment in the striped afternoon light.
Her cheek was streaked white. There was a line across her nose. A drop was beading on the edge of her upper lip where it had run down from her cheek. Her forehead had a smear of it cooling on the skin, glossy in the light. Her hair, where the drop had rolled into it, was damp and dark. The gold thali chain between her breasts was untouched, catching the sun, clean.
She kept her mouth closed. Her eyes stayed on his face.
Selvam looked down at her and something in him came apart and put itself back together in a different shape. He was going to remember this, he knew, for the rest of his life. The pale blue robe fallen off her shoulders. His son’s gold chain resting between her breasts. His cum on her face. Her dark eyes watching him through it, calm and proud and patient, waiting for him to see.
Then, slowly, she swallowed.
She did it with her mouth closed, her throat working once, a small visible bob under the skin. Her lips stayed sealed. Her eyes stayed on him. She swallowed again, just to be sure. A third time, small.
Then she opened her mouth.
She opened it wide. She tipped her head back a little, so he could see all the way in. She lifted her tongue and moved it from side to side. She showed him the insides of her cheeks, the backs of her teeth, the pink of her tongue. Empty. Clean. Every drop of him gone down her throat.
She held the pose.
“See, mama?” she said, when she finally closed her mouth again, and her voice was hoarse and wrecked and pleased. “All of it. Every drop. It’s mine now.”
She looked up at him from the carpet with her face striped in white, and she smiled.
Selvam’s legs gave out under him. He sat down hard on the bed. His hand slid out of her hair and fell to his side. He was breathing like he had run up a hill.
Vanitha rose up on her knees between his thighs. She did not reach for a tissue. She did not wipe her face. She let it sit there on her skin, cooling, a small badge only he could see. She laid her forearms on his thighs and rested her chin on them and looked up at him with those same bright patient eyes.
“Tell me you’re mine, mama.”
“I’m yours,” he said. It came out before he could think about it.
“Again.”
“I’m yours.”
“Good.” She turned her head and pressed a kiss to the inside of his thigh, and a small smear of white transferred from her cheek onto his skin, and she saw it, and she smiled. “Now. Tomorrow. When Jenny puts her hands on you.”
He closed his eyes.
“You’re going to lie there,” Vanitha said, soft, “and you’re going to let her do her job. And you’re going to get hard for her, mama, because you can’t help it, and she’s going to see.
Scene 4
The evening light came in low and orange through the tall back windows, spilling across the wood floor and the edge of the sectional. The TV was on, some house renovation show with the sound turned low, and nobody was really watching it. Ashok had a beer open on the coffee table, his feet up. Latha sat on the floor cushion with her knees tucked under her, picking at a bowl of gbangs. Vanitha was stretched out along the long side of the couch in soft cotton lounge pants, her phone in one hand.
Selvam sat in the armchair by the window. His thoughts mixed with guilt and post nut clarity. He still felt a little raw under his clothes, the new skin tender against the cotton. He had washed his face twice after dinner. He had not been able to look directly at Vanitha during the meal.
“Oh, Ashok,” Vanitha said, without looking up from her phone. “I forgot to tell you. Jenny offered mama a massage tomorrow morning.”
Ashok glanced over. “A massage?”
“Part of the aftercare package,” Vanitha said. She was scrolling, casual, like she was reading something else. “She said the skin gets tender after the first wax. A massage helps.” She lifted her eyes to Selvam over the top of the phone. Her eyebrows went up just a little. “Ten o’clock. She seemed quite impressed with your fitness level, mama.”
Selvam shifted in the chair. His knee jumped.
“She did?” Latha looked up from the gbangs.
“Very impressed,” Vanitha said. She was enjoying herself. Selvam could see it in the corner of her mouth. “She told me she has never seen anyone in such good shape at his age.”
“Vanitha,” Selvam said.
“What? I am just telling you what she said.”
Ashok laughed and reached for his beer. “Maybe I should book one too. If a massage will get me a six-pack like Appa‘s, sign me up.”
“It is not the massage that gets the six-pack, da,” Vanitha said. “It is the forty years of squats.”
“Then I am doomed,” Ashok said.
“You are doomed, Anna,” Latha said. She popped a gbang in her mouth. “You sit in that office chair all day. Your stomach is getting soft. I noticed yesterday when you bent down to pick up the suitcase.”
Ashok put a hand on his stomach, mock offended. “There is nothing soft here.”
“There is something soft there.”
“Latha!”
Vanitha laughed. Selvam smiled in spite of himself.
“And you, Uncle,” Latha turned on him, the same wicked little look on her face, “you are not allowed to come back from this massage with even more muscles. Otherwise Anna will start crying.”
“I won’t cry,” Ashok said.
“You will cry, Anna. I will take a video.”
“No more videos,” Ashok said. “The last one you took, Amma is still showing to the neighbors.”
Latha grinned. Selvam shook his head and looked at the floor.
“So you will go, mama?” Vanitha said. The teasing was still there, but quieter now, just for him. “To the appointment? Ten o’clock, she said.”
Selvam did not look up. “I will go.”
“Good.”
Ashok finished his beer and stood. “Alright. I have a few emails to send before I crash. Latha, leave me some gbangs for tomorrow.”
“No promises, Anna.”
He went up the stairs. Latha gathered her bowl and stood, stretching. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at Selvam, eyes mischievous.
“Uncle. Tomorrow when you come back, walk slow into the kitchen. Don’t show off the new body too fast. Anna’s heart can’t take it.”
“Go to bed, ma,” Selvam said.
She giggled and went up.
The living room was quiet then. The TV showed a couple choosing between two beach houses. Vanitha sat up on the couch and gathered her phone and a glass into one hand. She paused beside his chair on the way to the kitchen.
“Ten o’clock, mama,” she said softly. “Don’t be late.”
She did not wait for a reply. She walked through to the kitchen and he heard the faucet run, then the dishwasher open, then close.
He sat for another minute. He listened to the house. He could hear Ashok’s voice upstairs, on a call now. He could hear Latha’s door click shut down the hall. He could hear the soft tap of Vanitha rinsing her glass.
He stood up and went to his room.
He closed the door behind him. He did not turn the overhead light on. He turned on the small lamp by the bed instead, the soft yellow one, and the room filled with that same warm light from the salon that morning.
The full-length mirror was on the back of the closet door. He walked over to it and stood in front of it for a long time without doing anything. He just looked at himself in his t-shirt and shorts.
Then he pulled the t-shirt off.
Then, because he could not help it, he thought about Jenny.
He thought about her standing in front of him in the lobby that morning, her blonde hair, her blue eyes. He thought about her hand on his chest, the way her palm had pressed warm through the latex glove. He thought about her cupping him in her hand and saying nothing about it. He thought about her bending close, her breath on his skin, the small strand of her hair stuck to her lip.
He thought about her saying, you look amazing.
He thought about her writing his name in neat letters in the appointment book, ten o’clock.
A heat moved through him. Not sharp like in the salon. Slower. A kind of dread mixed in with it, and a kind of pride, and something else under both of those that he did not have a name for.
He looked at himself in the mirror one more time. The smooth chest. The hard stomach. The face above it that was his own and not his own.
He took a deep breath in. He held it. He let it out.
He turned the lamp off.
Scene 1
Selvam woke before the alarm. The room was still dark around the edges, a soft blue light bleeding in under the blinds. For a second he did not move. He lay on his back, arms at his sides, and tried to figure out what felt wrong. Then he remembered. His skin. His whole body was buzzing, a low tight hum under the surface, the way a leg felt after sitting on it too long. He shifted under the sheet and the cotton dragged against his chest and he sucked in a breath. Everywhere the sheet touched him, he could feel it.
He sat up slow. The clock on the nightstand read five forty-two. Outside, a single bird had started up in the lemon tree. The house was quiet.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked down at himself. His chest was bare in the gray light, the muscle lines sharp, the skin a little pink where the hair used to be. He ran a palm over his left pec, careful, expecting a sting. There was one, small, the kind of ache that came after a hard workout. He pressed harder and the pec flexed under his hand. He could feel every ridge. He had forgotten what his own chest felt like without the hair in the way.
He padded to the bathroom and shut the door behind him. The tile was cold on his feet. He stripped off his shorts and stood for a second in front of the mirror, not quite looking at himself yet, just feeling the cool air move across places it had not moved across in forty-eight years.
He turned on the shower. He kept the water lukewarm, because the girl had told him no hot showers for a day. Jenny. Her name came to him along with the smell of lavender and he pushed it away. He stepped under the spray.
The water hit his shoulders and ran down. He watched it move. Usually the water caught in the hair on his chest, slowed down, pooled at the center before sliding to his belly. Now it ran off him like he was a stone in a river. Straight lines, fast, down the front of him, down his stomach, over the flat skin where the trail used to be, down past his hip. He watched it run off the head of his cock and onto the tile and he looked away fast.
He soaped up. The lather was thin. He rubbed it over his chest in slow circles and his hand slid in a way it had never slid before. There was no catch, no friction. His palm moved across his own stomach and he could feel every single square of muscle under it. He had worked for those muscles for twenty years. He had never really seen them. Now they were right there, under a skin of soap, like someone had scrubbed a dirty window.
He lifted his cock out of the way with the back of his hand to wash underneath, and the skin there was smooth too, bare and a little sore. He was careful. He did not linger. He rinsed.
When he stepped out, the air in the bathroom felt colder than usual. He wrapped the towel around his waist and used a corner of it to wipe the fog off the mirror.
Then he stopped.
The man in the mirror was not the man he saw every morning. That man had a thick black shadow of hair across his chest and a softer, less defined middle, and the shape of his body was hidden under all of it. This man was lean and cut. His shoulders were wider than he remembered. His arms were heavy and veined. His stomach showed the six squares Ashok was always complaining he could not get, and the two lines that ran down from his hips and under the towel made a clean V, like an arrow pointing down.
He lifted his chin. His jaw looked sharper, somehow, without the bulk of the hair below it pulling his eye. His salt-and-pepper stubble caught the light. He turned a little to the side, the way he had seen Vanitha do, to check the angle. His lat flared out when he raised his arm. He lowered the arm. He raised it again. He felt a small, stupid laugh rise in his chest and he pressed his mouth shut.
He looked ten years younger. Maybe more. The blonde girl had been right.
The thought of her came back in the same second. Jenny. The way she had said book me and then written his name in neat letters. Ten o’clock. Full body massage. He closed his eyes and he could feel her hand again, the warmth of her palm through the thin glove, the way it had stayed too long at the base of him, the way she had held his cock against his belly and her fingers had not quite closed around him. His stomach tightened.
His cock, under the towel, began to move.
He opened his eyes and made himself stare at the fog at the edge of the mirror. He thought about his breathing. He thought about the bird in the lemon tree. He thought about anything but her small hand.
A full body massage. No gloves for that, probably. She would have oil on her hands. She would start at his shoulders and work down, the way she had worked the aloe down his chest yesterday, and she would find every sore place the wax had left, and she would press into it with her thumbs. He did not know where she would stop. He did not know if she would stop.
He pressed both hands flat on the counter and breathed out.
He was a grown man, he told himself. He was a grandfather-in-waiting, almost. He had no business standing in a bathroom in his son’s house in California with his cock stirring under a towel because a twenty-three-year-old had written his name down in an appointment book.
He finished toweling off. He was careful around the sore spots. He put the towel on the hook. He took one last look at the mirror.
The man in it looked back at him, smooth and hard and a little flushed, and did not look away.
In the bedroom he pulled on a pair of soft gray pants, the loose kind Ashok had given him for lounging, and a plain black t-shirt. He tugged the shirt down and smoothed it and then caught himself smoothing it and stopped. The cotton hung differently on him now. It sat closer to his body. He could see the shape of his chest through it.
He picked up his phone. Nothing on it. He set it down.
He looked at the door.
Downstairs the family would be waking up. Vanitha would ask. Ashok would tease. Latha would stare. He would have to walk through it and pretend it was nothing.
He took a deep breath in, held it, let it out.
Then he opened the door and went down.
Scene 2
The kitchen smelled like coffee and toasted bread. Vanitha stood at the stove in a pale blue robe tied loose at the waist, cracking eggs into a pan with one hand, her phone in the other. Ashok sat on a stool at the island in a t-shirt and gym shorts, hair still wet from his own shower, slicing a mango with the focused slowness of a man who had not had enough caffeine yet.
“Appa’s up,” Ashok said, without looking, the second Selvam’s footsteps hit the landing.
“I can hear,” Vanitha said. She turned the flame down. She put the phone face-down on the counter. “Mama, come, come. I made eggs.”
Selvam came around the corner and stopped in the doorway. They were both already looking at him.
For a long second, nobody said anything. The pan hissed. The refrigerator hummed. Ashok set the knife down on the cutting board and leaned back on his stool, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Okay,” Ashok said. “Okay, Appa.”
“What,” Selvam said.
“Nothing,” Ashok said. “You just look different, that’s all.”
“It’s a shirt,” Selvam said.
Vanitha laughed. It was a short bright laugh, the kind she used for the camera. She came around the island, wiping her hand on the side of her robe, and stopped two feet from him. Her eyes moved down his chest and back up again.
“The shirt fits better,” she said. “Admit it.”
“The shirt is the same shirt.”
“The shirt is the same shirt, mama. The man in it is not the same man.”
Ashok snorted into his coffee.
Vanitha crossed her arms. “Let’s see the results.”
Selvam shook his head. He felt his ears go warm. “Let me eat first, ma.”
“No, no, no.” She flapped a hand at him. “We did not pay good American dollars to watch you cover it up. Come on. Pull it up. We all want to see.”
“Vanitha.”
“Shirt up, mama.”
Ashok was already laughing. “She’s not going to let it go, Appa. Just get it over with.”
Selvam looked from one of them to the other. Both of them were grinning at him like he was five years old and hiding a college report. He sighed. He reached down and caught the hem of the t-shirt with both hands. He hesitated, then pulled it up to just below his collarbones, and held it there.
Vanitha whistled. Low and long, through her teeth, like a man on a construction site.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Mama.”
Ashok stood up off the stool. He came around the island and stopped next to Vanitha and they both stood there and looked.
In the hard morning light the change was even sharper than it had been in the bathroom mirror. The pink had gone out of the skin overnight. What was left was smooth and even and the color of strong tea, and under it every line of the muscle showed clean. The chest was a wall. The stomach was a stack. The two lines at his hips pointed down into the waistband of the gray pants.
“This is not fair,” Ashok said. He lifted his own t-shirt an inch and looked down at his own stomach. “This is not fair. I go to the gym four times a week. I eat no rice. I drink that disgusting green thing every morning. And my father, at forty-eight, looks like this.”
“Forty-eight,” Vanitha said, shaking her head.
“Forty-eight,” Ashok repeated. He dropped his shirt. “I give up. I am giving up.”
Selvam started to lower his own shirt.
“No, keep it up a second longer,” Vanitha said. She leaned in, not touching, just looking. She tipped her head. “The shoulders especially, mama. I didn’t realize how broad you are. The hair was hiding it.”
“Enough now,” Selvam said, and pulled the shirt down.
“Just saying.”
From the hallway came a small quick sound of bare feet on the wood floor. Latha had come down. She stopped at the edge of the kitchen in a long blue kurta and loose pajama pants, her hair in the same loose braid she always slept in, a cloth in her hand. She had clearly been passing through, on her way to the laundry, and she had heard them laughing and stopped to look.
Her eyes went right to Selvam. Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed.
“Uncle,” she said.
Selvam nodded at her, a little stiff. “Morning, ma.”
“You look…” She tilted her head, searching for the word. Then she laughed, a small surprised laugh, hand going to her mouth. “You look so young, Uncle. So strong. Like the boys in the fitness videos.”
“See,” Vanitha said, pointing at Latha without looking at her. “The young one has eyes.”
“Anna, what happened to your father?” Latha said, turning to Ashok with wide mock-serious eyes. “Yesterday he was my Uncle. Today he is a movie hero.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Ashok said, groaning. “He’s going to walk around the house like this all week. Flexing every time he passes a window.”
“I do not flex,” Selvam said.
“He is already flexing,” Ashok said to Latha. “Look. He is flexing right now.”
“I am standing,” Selvam said.
Latha laughed and ducked back into the hallway. “I will stay out of this,” she called over her shoulder. “I am just a simple girl. I cannot handle so much handsomeness in one kitchen.”
Ashok threw a piece of mango peel after her. She squealed. Her footsteps went away down the hall.
Vanitha shook her head, smiling, and went back to the eggs. “She’s not wrong, mama. Get used to the attention. That’s the trouble with American standards. Once you’re in, you’re in.”
“American standards,” Selvam said. He sat down on the stool Ashok had left. “Tomorrow I will look like a politician. The day after I will look like a movie star. Where does it end?”
“It ends when your wife tells you to stop,” Ashok said.
“I do not have a wife.”
“Then it doesn’t end,” Vanitha said, over her shoulder, and she said it lightly, but she said it.
Breakfast went on like that. Eggs, toast, fruit, coffee. Ashok complained for fifteen minutes about his own body and vowed to start waxing next month. Vanitha ignored him and ate half a slice of papaya and drank black coffee. Selvam ate quietly, keeping his eyes on his plate, answering when he had to.
When Ashok finally stood up and stretched and announced he had a call in ten minutes, he clapped Selvam on the shoulder on his way out. The clap was loud against the bare skin under the cotton. Ashok laughed again, shaking his head, and trotted up the stairs.
The kitchen went quiet. Vanitha rinsed her mug at the sink. Selvam brought his plate over and set it on the counter next to her.
She did not look up. She ran water over the plate. Then, under the sound of it, with her eyes still on her own hands, she said it.
“Did she take care of you down there, mama?”
Selvam froze.
He glanced at the stairs. Nothing. He glanced at the hallway. Empty. Latha was somewhere on the other side of the house, humming to herself.
He looked at Vanitha. She still had not looked up. A small smile was tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“She did her job, ma,” he said, quiet.
“Mm.” She turned the water off. She set the plate in the rack. She dried her hands on the robe and finally looked up at him, and her eyes were bright and full of trouble. “Tell me later, mama. All the details. Every single one.”
She patted his bare forearm, once, and walked past him out of the kitchen.
Selvam stood at the sink with the water still dripping off the plate and listened to her go.
Scene 3
Ashok jingled his keys against his palm as he stood by the kitchen island, scrolling through the directions on his phone. “Latha, you ready? We’ll be late.”
Latha came down the stairs in a clean pink kurta, a small handbag tucked under her arm. She had pinned her hair back and her cheeks were already a little flushed with nerves. “I am ready, Anna.”
Vanitha leaned against the counter with her coffee. “How long will it take?”
“Ultrasound, blood draw, then the doctor wants to talk about the next cycle,” Ashok said. “Maybe three hours. Maybe four if there’s traffic coming back.”
“Take your time,” Vanitha said. She turned to Latha and gave her a gentle smile. “Drink lots of water before they take blood, okay?”
“Yes, Akka.”
Latha glanced over toward the living room, where Selvam sat on the couch pretending to read the newspaper Ashok had brought from the corner store. She put a hand on her hip and smirked. “Uncle, don’t show off your new body too much in the mirror today. Anna will get jealous.”
Selvam looked up, startled. Ashok laughed.
“Hey, hey,” Ashok said. “I am the husband here. I can be jealous if I want.”
“Then start lifting weights, Anna,” Latha shot back, walking past him to the door. “Otherwise Akka will run away with Uncle.”
“Latha!” Vanitha said, but she was laughing too.
Selvam turned a deep red and went back to his newspaper.
The door closed behind them. The car backed out of the driveway. The house went quiet, the kind of quiet that only an empty American house in the middle of an afternoon could be. The fridge hummed. A sprinkler ticked on somewhere two yards over.
Vanitha set her coffee down. She walked to the front window and watched until the car had disappeared around the bend. Then she came back and stood in the doorway of the living room, one hand on the frame.
“Mama,” she said. “Come upstairs for a minute. I want to ask you something.”
Selvam folded the newspaper. He did not look at her. He stood up and followed her up the carpeted steps.
In his bedroom the afternoon light came through the blinds in long pale stripes across the bed. Selvam sat on the edge of the mattress, hands on his knees. Vanitha closed the door behind her. She turned the small lock with a soft click.
“So,” she said. She crossed the room slowly and stood in front of him. “Tell me. Did Jenny take care of you down there?”
Selvam looked up at her. He saw the crooked little smile on her lips and he knew exactly what she was asking and he knew exactly what she was not asking.
“She did the wax, ma,” he said. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Vanitha put a hand on her hip. “She didn’t slip a little? Her hand didn’t wander a little?”
“Vanitha.”
“Mama, I’m just asking. She’s a young girl. You‘re a handsome man. Your cock is...” She paused and her eyes went bright. “Well. It is what it is. She must have noticed.”
He looked at the floor. “I don’t know what she noticed.”
“Did you get hard?”
He didn’t answer.
“You did,” she said. She was grinning now. “You did, mama. I knew it. Poor Jenny. She probably had to take a break after.”
“Stop it, ma.”
“I’m not stopping.” She took a step closer. The toes of her bare feet were almost touching his. “I want to see.”
He looked up sharply. “Vanitha, Ma...”
“I want to see, mama. I waited all morning. I dropped you off and I drove around for two hours thinking about it. I want to see what she did to you.”
“They will be back.”
“Three hours, Ashok said. Maybe four.” She put one knee up on the edge of the bed beside his thigh and leaned down so her face was close to his. “Don’t be shy, mama. I‘m your daughter-in-law. I can look.”
He swallowed. His mouth was dry.
She straightened up and stepped back and then she lowered herself down, slow, until she was kneeling on the carpet between his knees. She put both her hands flat on his thighs. She looked up at him and waited.
He breathed in. He stood up.
He did not mean to stand up. His body did it before his head could stop it. His knees had just unbent on their own, and now he was on his feet, looking down at her kneeling on the carpet with her hands still open on her thighs, waiting.
Vanitha tilted her head back. Her hair fell off one shoulder. The pale blue robe had loosened at some point during the walk up the stairs and he could see the edge of the thali chain resting against her collarbone, the gold catching a stripe of afternoon light. His son’s thali. The one Ashok had tied around her neck four years ago in front of eight hundred people and two priests and a fire.
He looked at it. She saw him looking at it. Neither of them said anything about it.
“Mama,” she said, quiet now. “Come on.”
“Shhh.” She rose up a little on her knees and her hands moved to his waistband. She hooked her thumbs into the soft gray cotton and tugged it down in one slow pull, taking his underwear with it, and the whole bottom half of him came free.
His cock lay across his thigh, soft, hairless, the bare skin around the base pink and tender from the morning. The whole shape of him was different now. The shaft looked longer without the hair at the root, the head fuller, the heavy balls hanging low and smooth.
Vanitha let out a small breath.
“Oh my God, mama,” she said. “Look at you.”
She put her hand on his thigh, then slid it up, slow, across his hip, and then her fingertips traced the bare skin at the base of his cock. The skin was so smooth her nails caught nothing. She circled the root with one finger, then ran the same finger up the underside of his shaft, all the way to the tip.
“It’s like a different cock,” she whispered.
He twitched under her hand.
“You can see everything,” she said. “Every vein. Every line. Look how big the head is when there’s no hair around it.”
He was getting hard now. She watched it happen. She did not stroke him. She just kept tracing him with one finger, the way a person traced a leaf to see the shape of it. The shaft thickened and lifted off his thigh. The head turned a darker pink. A clear bead came to the slit and sat there.
“So pretty,” she said. She bent her head down and pressed her lips, just her closed lips, to the very base of him, where the smooth skin met the soft skin of his sack. She kissed him there once. Then she dragged her lips up the underside of his shaft, slowly, all the way to the head.
Selvam’s hand gripped the bedspread.
She opened her mouth and took just the head in. Just the tip. She held him there and let her tongue move around the crown, slow circles, tasting the bead of fluid she had seen. She closed her eyes.
She pulled off and looked at him. “I have to taste every inch, mama. It’s a whole new cock.”
She went back down. This time she took more of him, a little at a time, her lips sliding down the shaft, then back up to the tip, then a little farther, then back up. She was not hurrying. She was learning him. Her tongue ran along the vein on the underside. Her lips closed on the ridge of the head and she sucked, just once, soft.
Selvam’s breath came out as a long, low sound.
“Vanitha…”
“Shh, mama. Let me.”
She took him deep then, all the way down, and he felt the back of her throat close around the tip, and she stayed there for a moment, swallowing once around him, before she came back up. She did it again. And again. Each pass slower than the last, her hand cupping his bare balls, rolling them gently, her thumb tracing the smooth underside of his sack where the hair used to be.
She pulled off with a small wet sound and looked up at him, her lips shiny, her eyes full of something he did not have a word for. A strand of saliva stretched from her bottom lip to the head of his cock and she caught it with her thumb and pressed it back onto him and rubbed it in like lotion.
“She did a good job,” Vanitha said, quiet, her breath warm on the wet skin. “Jenny. She took her time down here, didn’t she? I can tell. Every inch is smooth.”
“Vanitha Ma, please” Selvam said.
“Tell me, mama.” She ran her tongue along the underside, flat and slow, from the base up to the head, then looked up at him again with her chin resting against his hip. “Did she hold you like I’m holding you? When she was waxing. Did she have to hold your cock?”
“She wore gloves, ma.”
“I know she wore gloves, mama. I’m not asking that.” Vanitha wrapped her small hand around the base of him and squeezed, and he jumped. “I’m asking if she held you. If she took your cock in her hand and held it out of the way.”
He looked down at her. Her face was so close to him. The thali chain had slipped further down her collarbone and was hanging loose against the slope of one breast where the robe had fallen open. He could see the small gold pendant at the end of it, swinging a little every time she moved.
“Yes,” he said. “She held me.”
“Mm.” She closed her eyes and kissed the head again, a slow closed-mouth kiss... “Was she gentle?”
“Yes.”
“Did she go hard?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
He did not answer.
She opened her eyes. The crooked smile was back. “Don’t be shy, mama. I want to picture it. I want to picture that little blonde girl trying to hold this in one hand while she did her job. I bet her fingers didn’t even go all the way around.”
“They didn’t,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Her eyes went bright. She laughed, a small breathless laugh, and buried her face against his thigh for a second, her forehead pressed to his bare hip. When she came back up her cheeks were pink.
“Oh, mama.” She shook her head. “Poor Jenny. Poor little Jenny.”
She took him back in her mouth before he could answer, all the way down this time, her nose pressing into the smooth pink skin at the base of him where the hair had been. She stayed there. He felt the back of her throat flutter. He felt the small hot huff of her breath against his belly. His knees almost gave out.
She came back up slow and let him fall out of her mouth and rested the weight of his cock along her cheek, her eyes closed, as if she were listening to it.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Her voice was low, almost to herself. “Tomorrow she’s going to put her hands on you again. For the massage. Did you know that? Did she tell you what a full body massage means?”
Selvam stared down at her. His heart was going so loud he could hear it in his own ears.
“She didn’t say, ma.”
“No,” Vanitha said. “They never do.”
She turned her face and pressed a kiss to the side of his shaft, long and slow, and then rubbed her cheek against it once, like a cat.
“It’s okay, mama.” She looked up at him. The afternoon light caught the gold at her throat. “I don’t mind. I want her to. I want her to put her little white hands all over you and I want you to think about me the whole time.”
He closed his eyes.
“Say you will.”
“I will.”
“Good mama.”
She opened her mouth again and took him back in, and this time she did not stop.
Downstairs, the fridge hummed. The sprinkler two yards over ticked off and went silent. Somewhere on the freeway a car carrying Ashok and Latha was crawling through afternoon traffic toward the clinic, Ashok’s hand resting easy on the wheel, Latha’s hand resting on the small warm curve of her belly where she was keeping her own secret. Neither of them was thinking about the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. Neither of them had any reason to.
In that bedroom, Selvam sank his hand into his daughter-in-law’s hair, and did not pull her off.
She worked him with long, patient pulls of her mouth, the kind that had no hurry in them, and then after a while she let him slip out and sat back on her heels, breathing through her parted lips. His cock stood up away from his body, wet and shining, the smooth skin at the base catching the afternoon light. She did not look at the shaft. She looked lower.
“Mama,” she said, soft. “Look at these.”
She cupped his balls in her palm. Both of them. They filled her small hand and then some, the weight of them heavy against her fingers, and she lifted them a little, as if she were weighing fruit at the market.
“I didn’t even see them properly,” she whispered. “I was looking at your cock, I didn’t look at these.”
She leaned in. Her breath was warm on the smooth skin. Selvam’s hand tightened in her hair without meaning to and she made a small pleased sound and did not pull away.
“Jenny did this,” she said. She was talking to the balls now, almost, her lips an inch from them. “Little Jenny. With her tweezers. Every stray hair. She must have been down here a long time, mama.”
“She was,” he said, because the words came out before he could decide whether to say them.
“How long?”
“I don’t know, ma. It felt long.”
“Mmm.” She turned her head and pressed a kiss to the side of his sack, soft, her lips barely parting. “It felt long because she was holding your cock up out of the way. Wasn’t she.”
“Yes.”
“And you were hard.”
“Yes.”
“And she kept going.”
“Yes.”
Vanitha made a small laugh into the skin. “Good girl, Jenny.” She kissed the other side, the same soft close-lipped kiss, then tilted her head and ran the flat of her tongue up the underside of his sack in one long slow stripe.
Selvam’s whole body shuddered.
“So smooth, mama.” Her voice had gone quieter, wondering, almost respectful. “Like a boy’s. But heavy like a man’s. Look at them. Look how low they hang.”
She cradled them in her palm and rolled them gently, the way she might have rolled two warm stones. Her thumb traced the seam that ran up the middle of his sack, the soft line of it, and she followed it with her eyes, her lips still parted.
“She had to stretch the skin,” Vanitha said, half to herself. “I’ve seen them wax me down there. They pull the skin tight like this.” She did it, her fingers spreading a small patch of his sack taut between them. The skin stretched smooth and pale and she bent her head and pressed her mouth to that exact spot and sucked, once, soft and slow.
“Vanitha,” he whispered.
“Shh.” She let the skin go and moved to the other side and did the same thing, stretching a new small patch tight, kissing it, sucking it soft. “I’m just thanking her. She did such careful work, mama. I want to feel every inch of it.”
She opened her mouth wider and took one of his balls in.
Selvam made a sound he did not recognize.
She held it on her tongue. Just held it. Her cheeks hollowed a little as she sucked, light, barely any pressure, and her eyes lifted to look up at him. His hand in her hair had gone loose. His mouth was open. He was staring down at her like he did not know where he was.
She let the ball slip out, wet. A thin thread of saliva hung between her lip and the skin and she did not wipe it away.
“She would die,” Vanitha murmured, almost to herself. “If she could see this. Little Jenny. Kneeling in her salon with her gloves on, being so professional. And here I am on my carpet, no gloves, mama, look.” She held up her small bare hand, wiggling her fingers, and then put it back on him. “No gloves. No rules. Just my mouth.”
She took the other ball in and gave it the same slow attention. Her other hand slid up his cock, lazy, more to keep him occupied than to stroke. He was leaking clear fluid freely now, a small slow drip, and she caught some of it on her thumb and brought it to her mouth without letting go of the ball she was sucking, and licked her thumb clean.
“Tell me something, mama,” she said when she came off him again. She rested her chin on his thigh, both hands cradling his sack now, her eyes on his face. “When she was holding you. Did she look at these?”
He tried to answer. His throat was dry.
“Hm?” She squeezed, gentle. “Did she?”
“She looked, ma.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He closed his eyes. “A long time.”
“There it is.” Vanitha smiled against his thigh. “A long time. Poor girl. And you couldn’t do anything about it, could you. Lying there with your legs open and your cock in her hand and her little blue eyes just looking at your balls.”
“Ma, please.”
“Please what, mama.” She kissed the top of his sack. “Please stop? Or please keep going?”
He did not answer. She already knew.
She went back down. Mouth open wider now, she took both balls in together, carefully, her tongue moving underneath them, her cheeks hollowing in a slow pull. Her nose pressed against the base of his cock. The smell of him was different now, without the hair, cleaner and sharper, and she breathed it in through her nose with her eyes closed and hummed, low in her throat. The hum vibrated through him.
His knees buckled. He caught himself with one hand on the bedpost.
Vanitha pulled off and laughed, breathless. “Mama, sit down.”
She guided him back onto the edge of the mattress with a hand on each of his thighs, and she shuffled forward on her knees and settled between them again, and now her face was exactly at the right height. She looked up at him from there, her cheeks flushed, her lips swollen, her hair a little wild on one side. The robe had come fully open. The thali hung in the shadow between her breasts. She did not move to close any of it.
“I have to tell you something, mama,” she said. Her voice had gone serious for a second. “I was a little jealous this morning. When I asked you about her and you wouldn’t look at me.”
“Vanitha...”
“Let me finish.” She lifted his sack in her palm again and held it like an offering, her eyes not leaving his. “I was jealous. And then I thought about it in the car. I thought, no. No, I’m not jealous. I want her to touch him. I want her to get him hard on her table and not be able to do anything about it. I want her to go home tonight and think about his cock in her hand.”
She bent her head and kissed his balls, soft, then looked up again.
“Because she touched you,” Vanitha said. “But she doesn’t get to do this. She doesn’t get to put her mouth on you. She doesn’t get to taste you. That’s mine, mama. She prepared you for me. That’s what she did. She cleaned you up and made you pretty for me and tomorrow she’ll do it again, with her oil and her little hands, and she still won’t get to do this.”
She opened her mouth and took one ball back in, slow, and her eyes closed.
Selvam stared down at the top of her head. The part in her dark hair. The gold chain that was his son’s hanging loose at her throat. Her small hand cradling his sack with a tenderness he could not name. A sound came up out of his chest that was not a word.
His hand found her hair again, not pulling, just resting there, and he held on.
Vanitha, with her eyes still closed and her mouth still full, smiled.
She stayed there a long time with his balls in her mouth, just holding them on her tongue, until his thighs were shaking under her hands. Then she let them slip out, wet and shining, and she turned her face up and ran her tongue all the way from the base of his sack to the very tip of his cock in one long unbroken stripe.
“Back up here now,” she murmured, more to his cock than to him. “I’m not done with you.”
She took the head in first. Just the head, her lips closed around the ridge, and she sucked once, slow, hollow-cheeked. She held him there. Her tongue moved in a small circle around the crown, around and around, and every time it crossed the slit she tasted the clear fluid that kept coming and she swallowed it and kept going.
Selvam’s hand tightened in her hair.
She took him deeper. An inch. Two. Three. She was not hurrying. She was moving at the pace of someone who had already decided how this was going to end and had all afternoon to get there. Her mouth slid down the shaft slow, her lips dragging against the smooth bare skin at the base, and then slid back up slow, and then down again, a little deeper, a little wetter.
The only sounds in the room were the small wet ones she made and the uneven rasp of his breath above her.
She pulled off, just for a second, and looked up at him with her lips parted and shiny. “Slow, mama,” she said. “I want it slow. I want you to feel every second.”
“Vanitha,” he said. His voice was not his voice.
“Shhh.”
She went back down. This time she used her hand too, her small fist wrapping the base of him, following her mouth up and down, up and down, in a lazy rhythm. Her other hand stayed on his balls, rolling them in her palm, feeling them draw up a little tighter each time she came down on him.
She felt everything. She felt the ridge of his head catch on the roof of her mouth. She felt the thick vein on the underside pulse against the flat of her tongue. She felt the way his thighs went rigid on either side of her, then went loose, then went rigid again. She felt his hand in her hair go tight and then tremble.
She knew. She had known for a minute now. She just did not want it yet.
She slowed down further. She took him almost out of her mouth, just kept the very tip between her lips, and she sucked there, tiny flicks of her tongue at the slit, holding him on the edge. His hips jerked up toward her and she pinned them back down with the flat of her hand on his lower belly, gentle but firm, and looked up at him through her lashes with a smile at the corner of her mouth.
“Not yet, mama.”
He groaned. It came out of him low and broken.
She did that to him three times. Took him to the edge, backed off, held him there, licked the tip clean, went down on him again, came back up, held him there again. By the third time his whole body was shaking. Sweat had come out at his hairline. His hand in her hair had gone desperate, pulling without meaning to, and she liked that, she liked the small sting at her scalp.
On the fourth time she did not stop.
She took him all the way down. Her nose pressed into the smooth skin at the base of him. She stayed there, swallowing once around him, her throat working, and then she came back up slow and went down again, and the rhythm tightened, her fist and her mouth moving together now, and she felt him swell against her tongue, the head growing impossibly thicker, the vein on the underside hard as a rope.
“Vanitha,” he said, warning.
She hummed around him. Yes.
“Vanitha, ma, I’m going to...”
She hummed again. Low. Encouraging. Her eyes locked on his face from below.
He broke.
The first pulse hit the back of her throat hard and hot and she swallowed it clean, her throat closing around the head of him in a tight squeeze that pulled another jet out of him a second later. She swallowed that too. The third came and she could not keep up, she pulled back a little, let the head rest on her tongue, and the fourth pulse shot across the flat of it, salty and thick, and she held it in her mouth and did not swallow yet.
He kept cumming. She had not expected this much. She had forgotten this about him. Her hand kept working the base of him in slow pulls, milking every thick pulse out, and each one filled her mouth a little more. Her cheeks rounded out with it. A small warm trickle escaped the corner of her lips and ran down her chin.
She pulled her mouth off him then, deliberately, at the exact moment he was still pulsing, and held his cock in her fist an inch from her face and looked up at him with her mouth full and her lips closed.
The last two ropes hit her.
The first one caught her across the bridge of her nose and striped down one cheek in a hot line. The second landed higher, on her forehead and in her eyebrow, and a fat drop rolled down the side of her temple into her hair. She did not flinch. She did not close her eyes. She held her mouth full of him and she looked up at Selvam and she let him paint her.
He made a broken sound.
A last slow dribble came out of him and she caught it on her tongue with her mouth still closed, tipping her head forward to let it fall onto the flat of her tongue through her parted teeth, and then she closed her lips again.
She knelt there for a long moment in the striped afternoon light.
Her cheek was streaked white. There was a line across her nose. A drop was beading on the edge of her upper lip where it had run down from her cheek. Her forehead had a smear of it cooling on the skin, glossy in the light. Her hair, where the drop had rolled into it, was damp and dark. The gold thali chain between her breasts was untouched, catching the sun, clean.
She kept her mouth closed. Her eyes stayed on his face.
Selvam looked down at her and something in him came apart and put itself back together in a different shape. He was going to remember this, he knew, for the rest of his life. The pale blue robe fallen off her shoulders. His son’s gold chain resting between her breasts. His cum on her face. Her dark eyes watching him through it, calm and proud and patient, waiting for him to see.
Then, slowly, she swallowed.
She did it with her mouth closed, her throat working once, a small visible bob under the skin. Her lips stayed sealed. Her eyes stayed on him. She swallowed again, just to be sure. A third time, small.
Then she opened her mouth.
She opened it wide. She tipped her head back a little, so he could see all the way in. She lifted her tongue and moved it from side to side. She showed him the insides of her cheeks, the backs of her teeth, the pink of her tongue. Empty. Clean. Every drop of him gone down her throat.
She held the pose.
“See, mama?” she said, when she finally closed her mouth again, and her voice was hoarse and wrecked and pleased. “All of it. Every drop. It’s mine now.”
She looked up at him from the carpet with her face striped in white, and she smiled.
Selvam’s legs gave out under him. He sat down hard on the bed. His hand slid out of her hair and fell to his side. He was breathing like he had run up a hill.
Vanitha rose up on her knees between his thighs. She did not reach for a tissue. She did not wipe her face. She let it sit there on her skin, cooling, a small badge only he could see. She laid her forearms on his thighs and rested her chin on them and looked up at him with those same bright patient eyes.
“Tell me you’re mine, mama.”
“I’m yours,” he said. It came out before he could think about it.
“Again.”
“I’m yours.”
“Good.” She turned her head and pressed a kiss to the inside of his thigh, and a small smear of white transferred from her cheek onto his skin, and she saw it, and she smiled. “Now. Tomorrow. When Jenny puts her hands on you.”
He closed his eyes.
“You’re going to lie there,” Vanitha said, soft, “and you’re going to let her do her job. And you’re going to get hard for her, mama, because you can’t help it, and she’s going to see.
Scene 4
The evening light came in low and orange through the tall back windows, spilling across the wood floor and the edge of the sectional. The TV was on, some house renovation show with the sound turned low, and nobody was really watching it. Ashok had a beer open on the coffee table, his feet up. Latha sat on the floor cushion with her knees tucked under her, picking at a bowl of gbangs. Vanitha was stretched out along the long side of the couch in soft cotton lounge pants, her phone in one hand.
Selvam sat in the armchair by the window. His thoughts mixed with guilt and post nut clarity. He still felt a little raw under his clothes, the new skin tender against the cotton. He had washed his face twice after dinner. He had not been able to look directly at Vanitha during the meal.
“Oh, Ashok,” Vanitha said, without looking up from her phone. “I forgot to tell you. Jenny offered mama a massage tomorrow morning.”
Ashok glanced over. “A massage?”
“Part of the aftercare package,” Vanitha said. She was scrolling, casual, like she was reading something else. “She said the skin gets tender after the first wax. A massage helps.” She lifted her eyes to Selvam over the top of the phone. Her eyebrows went up just a little. “Ten o’clock. She seemed quite impressed with your fitness level, mama.”
Selvam shifted in the chair. His knee jumped.
“She did?” Latha looked up from the gbangs.
“Very impressed,” Vanitha said. She was enjoying herself. Selvam could see it in the corner of her mouth. “She told me she has never seen anyone in such good shape at his age.”
“Vanitha,” Selvam said.
“What? I am just telling you what she said.”
Ashok laughed and reached for his beer. “Maybe I should book one too. If a massage will get me a six-pack like Appa‘s, sign me up.”
“It is not the massage that gets the six-pack, da,” Vanitha said. “It is the forty years of squats.”
“Then I am doomed,” Ashok said.
“You are doomed, Anna,” Latha said. She popped a gbang in her mouth. “You sit in that office chair all day. Your stomach is getting soft. I noticed yesterday when you bent down to pick up the suitcase.”
Ashok put a hand on his stomach, mock offended. “There is nothing soft here.”
“There is something soft there.”
“Latha!”
Vanitha laughed. Selvam smiled in spite of himself.
“And you, Uncle,” Latha turned on him, the same wicked little look on her face, “you are not allowed to come back from this massage with even more muscles. Otherwise Anna will start crying.”
“I won’t cry,” Ashok said.
“You will cry, Anna. I will take a video.”
“No more videos,” Ashok said. “The last one you took, Amma is still showing to the neighbors.”
Latha grinned. Selvam shook his head and looked at the floor.
“So you will go, mama?” Vanitha said. The teasing was still there, but quieter now, just for him. “To the appointment? Ten o’clock, she said.”
Selvam did not look up. “I will go.”
“Good.”
Ashok finished his beer and stood. “Alright. I have a few emails to send before I crash. Latha, leave me some gbangs for tomorrow.”
“No promises, Anna.”
He went up the stairs. Latha gathered her bowl and stood, stretching. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at Selvam, eyes mischievous.
“Uncle. Tomorrow when you come back, walk slow into the kitchen. Don’t show off the new body too fast. Anna’s heart can’t take it.”
“Go to bed, ma,” Selvam said.
She giggled and went up.
The living room was quiet then. The TV showed a couple choosing between two beach houses. Vanitha sat up on the couch and gathered her phone and a glass into one hand. She paused beside his chair on the way to the kitchen.
“Ten o’clock, mama,” she said softly. “Don’t be late.”
She did not wait for a reply. She walked through to the kitchen and he heard the faucet run, then the dishwasher open, then close.
He sat for another minute. He listened to the house. He could hear Ashok’s voice upstairs, on a call now. He could hear Latha’s door click shut down the hall. He could hear the soft tap of Vanitha rinsing her glass.
He stood up and went to his room.
He closed the door behind him. He did not turn the overhead light on. He turned on the small lamp by the bed instead, the soft yellow one, and the room filled with that same warm light from the salon that morning.
The full-length mirror was on the back of the closet door. He walked over to it and stood in front of it for a long time without doing anything. He just looked at himself in his t-shirt and shorts.
Then he pulled the t-shirt off.
Then, because he could not help it, he thought about Jenny.
He thought about her standing in front of him in the lobby that morning, her blonde hair, her blue eyes. He thought about her hand on his chest, the way her palm had pressed warm through the latex glove. He thought about her cupping him in her hand and saying nothing about it. He thought about her bending close, her breath on his skin, the small strand of her hair stuck to her lip.
He thought about her saying, you look amazing.
He thought about her writing his name in neat letters in the appointment book, ten o’clock.
A heat moved through him. Not sharp like in the salon. Slower. A kind of dread mixed in with it, and a kind of pride, and something else under both of those that he did not have a name for.
He looked at himself in the mirror one more time. The smooth chest. The hard stomach. The face above it that was his own and not his own.
He took a deep breath in. He held it. He let it out.
He turned the lamp off.
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