Linda woke up that morning in a sweat. She came to, half buried in bedsheets, slowly conscious of the silence of the big empty house hovering beyond her. She was flat laying on her stomach and somehow her panties had made their way down to her ankle. She realized she'd been dreaming - a very sexy dream - about Bobby Salazar, the brother of her best friend, Lana. She had always had a thing for Bobby, and now she couldn't stop thinking about him because today she'd be seeing him for the first time in eight years.
Bobby had been living on the east coast, first for college and then several years afterwards, but he was back now. From Lana's gossiping about Bobby, Linda knew he'd just been through a rough break-up and was back in California living with their parents.
Linda was house sitting for a professor, but had to leave for the weekend, and she needed a substitute. She'd mentioned it to Lana, and as innocently as possible, suggested Bobby might do it for pocket cash. She had to admit to herself that her motives were mixed. In her memories, Bobby was very handsome, or somewhere in between handsome and cute - a Latino James Dean. Long ago she'd written in her pre-teen diary that she wanted to marry him, and later in her teenage diary about how she wanted to lose her virginity to him, all that stupid stuff. She thought she'd dropped some hints over the years, but Bobby never gave her the time of day.
In college, she had dated half a dozen guys here and there. She was too smart for most of them, and the ones that were her equal were too ambitious to make any sort of relationship work at a young age. She had been single for a good year or two now, though she'd dated a lot - no one seemed to click, and Grad School didn't leave time for much of a social life, though it had helped her develop an appreciation for casual sex. She'd even dated a few girls, but decided she - mostly - preferred men.
It had been a long time, but Linda knew from occasional innocent Facebook stalking that Bobby still had his good looks, his goofy grin, and that he still liked Radiohead - all elements gelling into a perfectly attractive image in her mind.
Linda's mind strained to recall the details of her dream and what Bobby had been doing to her in it. Her hand found her center as she pressed her naked torso into the mattress, breaking the silence of the large empty house with a pleasured whimper.
——————
Roberto put on the turn signal and swung his parent's mid-90s Honda Accord into a palatial neighborhood. He was on his way to meet Linda Tanaka. Linda was a long-time friend of his younger sister Lana. Linda and Lana had been friends since junior high, as inseparable as their names were
alliterative.
Now Linda was a graduate student in some kind of health program, and apparently she spent some time house and dog-sitting for professors. According to Lana, Linda was off to a conference for the coming weekend and needed somebody to watch the current house she was sitting while she was gone.
Roberto welcomed the opportunity to make some extra money and, even more so, a chance to get away from his parent's house for the weekend and forget his pathetic situation - unemployed and heart-broken. So when Lana had asked if he was willing to do it, he jumped at the chance.
As he drove through the neighborhood, big suburban estates passing by, he remembered what he could about Linda. In high school she was always at their house visiting Lana, but still, his memories weren't all that acute. She was always very quiet and shy and he wondered if that's why he couldn't remember much. He remembered thinking she was cute, sort of, but stick-thin and awkward, which led him to ignore her at the time.
He summoned a faint memory of a night she'd attended one of Lana's few large sleepovers. He had holed up in his room, playing Radiohead in effort to drown out the adolescent giggles elsewhere in the house. Linda had knocked on his door, told him she liked the music and asked if she could sit in his room and listen. They spent a silent half-hour sitting there, the album Kid A on the stereo, before Lana came in proclaiming Radiohead "boring," and off Linda went to giggle with his sister about boys or watch Dawson's Creek or whatever teenage girls did. He'd forgotten about that until now.
The Radiohead incident gave Roberto the impression Linda was smarter than some girls, and now that she was a grad student, he figured it was true. But still, he didn't think much of it - or her - as he pulled into the drive-way of the large suburban home. He noticed it looked like all the others up and down the block: small over-manicured lawns, tall fences. He'd grown up in a more modest part of town, and his folks owned a small rambler. The town had been growing a lot, though, modesty swallowed up by affluent makeshift McMansions like the one he'd be house-sitting. The monotony reminded him of why he had left for the east coast.
Once at the door, he pushed the bell and waited. After a few short moments, the door swung open and Roberto momentarily forgot his ennui. There stood Linda, greeting him with a smile.
"Hi Bobby."
He smiled. "Long time no see," he replied. It *had* been a long time. No one had called him Bobby since high school.
"Come in," she offered, and he stepped into the house. She asked him to remove his shoes, and waited a moment while he undid his nice loafers. For some reason he'd dressed business casual, like it was Friday at the bank. Maybe it was because he was so self-conscious about his unemployment. He didn't know for sure. It's not like he had anyone to impress, unless he was really trying to impress the best friend of his kid sister.
After what seemed like a silly amount of time getting his shoes off, he followed Linda down a dark hall out of the entry way, past a stairway, to the back of the house, where large windows illuminated an open concept kitchen. A living room stretched in one direction, and a backdoor led to a patio. It was a big house.
"This is the kitchen, the living room. The backyard is nice," Linda pointed it all out, feeling dumb for pointing out the obvious. Butterflies were flying in her stomach already. Bobby was looking sharp. In the time it had taken him to remove his shoes, she'd had the chance to take a long lingering look at him - smooth dark brown hair, muscular brown arms rolling out of a dark blue polo shirt, and a pair of khaki pants. He even smelled good, faintly like Old Spice or something.
Lest she give the impression she was anything but calm and composed, Linda jumped straight to describing the responsibilities of the house-sitting.
"The dog needs to go out once in the morning, and once at night. He's really old."
"What's his name?"
"Brewster."
"Where is he?"
"Asleep, like usual. All he does is sleep."
Roberto noticed the pile of fur just beyond the couch in the living room. That must be Brewster, he thought.
He looked back to Linda. Linda continued explaining the ins and outs and dos and don'ts of the house: feed Brewster this medication at noon, fill that water bowl at all times; the mail comes around 3pm on Friday and Saturday. Roberto interjected with a clarifying question or two.
As they talked, his eyes began to register Linda in the natural light of the kitchen. She certainly wasn't a kid anymore. He was pretty sure she wasn't wearing any make-up - if she did it wasn't obvious - yet she had a face that somehow had bold features and remained soft. Perhaps it was her large, sleepy, almond-shaped eyes. She wasn't an Amazon - in fact, she was short - but she was taller than he remembered. She certainly was scrawny any longer; she was still slender, but by no means stick-thin: age had given her a curve or two, especially in the hips. She was dressed smartly too, a grey cardigan pulled over a yellow blouse, and black skinny jeans. It was a cute outfit, but nothing that screamed for attention.
Roberto felt compelled to learn more about her. He waited for a moment of pause between Linda's on-going laundry list of house-sitting duties. "What is this conference you're going to?" Roberto asked.
"It's on global health and social medicine, which basically are fancy words for how people in different cultures organize health care..." Linda said a word or two about her program, trying hard to keep it in lay person's terms. She hated how graduate school specialized language, and she hated even more how that language could shade people's perceptions of her. Or maybe she was just afraid of dis-interesting Bobby.
Roberto was intrigued. He could hear confidence in her voice for the first time since he'd gotten there. Linda obviously cared deeply about her program,the way she talked about it, but she was clearly editing herself. Maybe she thought he wouldn't get it? He didn't have much time to think about it before she turned the conversation back on him.
"What are you up to these days?" Linda asked him, though she already knew, in a way - Lana never shut up about Bobby, his nasty break-up with his fiance, and how it had supposedly made him a lazy slob, living at home, mooching off their parents. But Linda wasn't so sure - Lana had a way of exaggerating and contradicting herself. She had also shared that Bobby spent all his time either at the gym or working on art photography - which didn't jive with the lazy slob description. Linda wanted the truth from Bobby himself, whatever that was.
"Looking for a job, I suppose." Roberto wondered if it sounded as pathetic as it felt.
"Lana said you've been doing photography?"
"Yeah," Bobby admitted.
"What do you photograph?
"Mostly cultural scenes. I've been driving around taking photos of small-town bodegas, you know the little Mexican mini-marts..." Roberto tailed off; he was a little embarrassed by it. Britt, his ex, had always berated his interest in the arts, and he had little confidence in his abilities in that area. We'd worked at a bank for most of the years they were together, and he blamed her for his wasted ambition. Then again, she'd run off with a musician. Britt wasn't a model of consistency.
