Matthew sat up, his limbs aching. The reddened skin on his back and neck, cupped into perfect circles, hurt. Everything on him seemed to sag with exhaustion.
"Sir," the acupuncturist whispered, offering him a cup of steaming tea in a while round glass, "drink before you go." Her smile, warm previously, seemed to wear down the same way Matthew's body felt. "You're still too stressed," she told him, returning to organize her equipment. She folded away the acupuncture needles. "You'll never fully heal if you don't relax a little."
He brought the tea to his lips, taking it in small gulps, the earthy scents going down easier than before. Matthew didn't have the heart to tell her that she was right, yet there were too many moving parts that he had to keep track of – Lloyd's conversion; the house's restoration, which had fallen behind schedule; cleaning when everyone was asleep. No amount of whatever this was would make him feel less worthless.
Instead, he whispered a measly, "I know," and brought the tea back to his lips. He could see the growing rings under his eyes.
"How was the moxibustion?" she asked.
"...fine."
"And the cupping, was it too much?"
'Yes,' he wanted to say. He shook his head. "No, it was fine," he answered, his back growing more and more sore. He felt worse as the weeks droned on, yet what marveled him more was how milquetoast he had become. Withdrawn. This wasn't him. He handed back the empty teacup.
The acupuncturist retrieved it, offering her weak smile and returned to packing up her things.
Matthew threw on his shirt, checked his neck for stray needles, and departed.
The house rattled with the wind, the scaffolding overhead finally having started its enclosure of the bedroom wing, inching its way across the house. The floors and walls of the kitchen wing, torn up from replacing yards and yards of radiant heating pipes and rewiring, finally started looking less like an apocalyptic set and more like a house under construction. An auxiliary kitchen, set up in the children's playroom, supplanted the now-gutted kitchen.
The discarded and to-be-donated toys and clothes huddled against the pavilion windows, punctured by the holes where wood trim and drywall had once been, eaten away by mold and rodents.
But everywhere, Matthew's 'To Do' list grew. Audrey wasn't using the right nozzle cleaning corners. The children were leaving behind their things, not putting them away properly. Dirt from Toby's treks outside were scattered into the grooves of the concrete floor.
A wave of dizziness washed through Matthew's head. He shook it off and turned back to his bedroom. He checked his phone for any new messages, though only one from his mother prompted him to drop the phone back onto the bed. Matthew took to the bedroom's squat bathroom, half-tucked underneath the landing of the ramp.
By the time he came out, dressed and drying his hair, rubbing himself all over, Toby and Liza appeared, waiting for him. He sighed.
YOU ARE READING
It's Definitely Not All Mary Poppins
General Fiction[A Slice-Of-Life LGBTQ+ Story about Found Family] Matthew Robinson's career as a teacher seemed to have stalled, yet when the winds in the East suddenly lands him in the employ as a nanny, Matthew realizes he's probably signed up for more than he ba...
