The Neighbor's Son

I'd known Marcus since he was fourteen years old.

He used to mow our lawn during summers, a gangly teenager who talked too fast and tripped over his own feet. His mother Diane had been my neighbor for fifteen years, one of those comfortable friendships built on borrowed sugar and watching each other's houses during vacation.

Then Marcus went to college. Then I got divorced. And when he came back four years later, everything was different.

I was Priya Sharma, forty-three, single for the first time in two decades, trying to figure out who I was outside of being someone's wife. And he was... not gangly anymore. Not fourteen. Not anything like the boy I remembered.

He was twenty-two, six-foot-three, with shoulders that filled out t-shirts in ways I definitely shouldn't have noticed. He'd grown into himself, traded the awkwardness for an easy confidence that came from whatever he'd figured out during those four years away. And he looked at me like I was something worth looking at.

I told myself I was imagining it.

The first time it happened, I was in my garden. Sweat sticking my kurta to my back, dirt under my nails, definitely not thinking about looking attractive. I was just trying to save my roses from the brutal July heat.

"Need some help, Mrs. Sharma?"

I looked up. Marcus was leaning over the fence, all easy charm and white teeth against dark skin. He'd been home for a week, and I'd been carefully avoiding him because something about the way he said my name made me feel like I was still capable of blushing.

"You don't have to call me that anymore, Marcus. It's just Priya now."

His smile shifted. Just slightly. Something more present in his eyes.

"Priya, then. Do you need help?"

"I've got it. But thank you."

"My mom said you're doing everything yourself now. Since the divorce."

I didn't answer. Turned back to my roses because it was easier than looking at him.

"If you ever need anything. Lawn work. Heavy lifting. Whatever. I'm right next door."

"I appreciate that, Marcus."

A pause. Then, quieter: "You look good, Mrs. Sharma. The garden suits you."

I definitely blushed that time. Forty-three years old, and a twenty-two-year-old's compliment had me flustered like a schoolgirl.

This was going to be a problem.

Summer stretched on. I saw Marcus almost every day, working out in his driveway with weights he'd set up, washing his car with his shirt off (every woman on the block had suddenly become very interested in gardening), helping his mother with groceries.

And finding excuses to talk to me.

He'd appear when I was checking my mail. When I was taking out trash. When I was sitting on my porch with my evening chai, trying to convince myself that forty-three wasn't old, that being single wasn't a failure, that I still had a life to live even if the life I'd planned had fallen apart.

"What are you reading?"

he asked one evening, settling into the chair beside me like he belonged there.

"Nothing interesting. Just a novel."

"Can I see?"

I handed it over. Watched his eyebrows rise as he read the back cover.

"This is a romance novel."

"Your powers of observation are remarkable."

He laughed. Handed it back. "Didn't peg you for the type."

"What type did you peg me for?"

Dangerous question. I knew it the moment the words left my mouth. His eyes met mine, and something electric passed between us.

"Someone who deserves better than reading about it."

I didn't respond. Couldn't. He held my gaze for another long moment, then stood.

"Goodnight, Priya."

First time he'd used my name. It sounded different in his voice. Deliberate. Intimate.

I couldn't sleep that night.

The August heat was relentless. My air conditioning died on a Thursday, and the earliest the repair company could come was Monday. By Friday evening, my house was an oven and I was sitting on my back patio in a thin sundress, wondering if I should sleep in my car.

Marcus appeared at the fence like he had a sixth sense for when I needed something.

"Hey. Mom said your AC is out?"

"It is. I'm surviving."

"It's ninety-five degrees, Priya. That's not surviving, that's suffering. Come stay at ours. Mom's visiting her sister in Cleveland. There's plenty of room."

The smart answer was no. The sensible answer was that I'd figure something out, that I didn't need to be alone in a house with a young man who looked at me like I was still worth looking at.

I said yes.

I told myself it was just practical. Heat exhaustion was real. I was just being smart about my health. It meant nothing that I changed into a fresh sundress before going over, one that maybe showed a little more skin than strictly necessary. It meant nothing that I'd shaved my legs in the shower earlier, for the first time in weeks.

Nothing at all.

His childhood home felt different with just the two of us in it. Quiet. Full of possibility I shouldn't have been entertaining.

He made us dinner, grilled fish and vegetables, surprisingly competent for a recent college graduate. We ate on the back deck as the sun set, talking about everything and nothing. His plans for the future (a job offer in New York he wasn't sure he wanted to take). My past (a marriage that had slowly gone cold until it shattered entirely). The way life sometimes veers in unexpected directions.