The Nanny's Midnight

I turned forty-four on a Thursday. I want to note that up front because it matters later, or I think it does. Forty-four. Brynn Hartman, forty-four years old, wife of Cyril, mother of two kids who barely live at home anymore, and a nanny for other people's babies three days a week. That's the resume. That's the entire card.

Cyril had been in hackathon mode for two weeks. That's a real thing at his company, a 48-hour code binge where the whole staff sleeps under their desks and lives on pizza. He'd done it every year since Specter Analytics got off the ground. Every year I made excuses for him. This year I decided not to make excuses. This year I decided to go see him.

I baked cupcakes at nine that night. Chocolate, from scratch, because if I'm being honest the boxed ones taste like drywall. I put one candle in his, a big orange one, and stuck a little foil number 44 next to it. Then I wrapped a bottle of wine in a dish towel, stuck it in my purse, and drove downtown at eleven at night as if I were half my age.

The building used to be a fabric warehouse. Now it's loft offices and exposed brick and a doorman who regarded me as though I were lost. Maybe I was. I showed him my ID anyway and he waved me up to the top floor.

The elevator opened right into the penthouse office. Blue light everywhere. Monitors on every desk, servers humming in the corner like a hive. Empty pizza boxes all over the long communal table, at least a dozen, some of them still holding crusts. And at the far end, one man, hunched over a laptop, tie hanging loose around his neck, typing like the building was on fire.

"Happy birthday to you," I sang, quiet, because of the hour. "Happy birthday, dear Cyril."

"You're not supposed to be here," he said. He didn't look up. His fingers kept moving on the keyboard.

"That's a funny way to greet your wife."

"Investors come through at eight tomorrow. We're not done with the demo." He swiped at his screen with two fingers, dragging some chart around. "How'd you even get past Benny?"

"I showed him my ID. I brought you a cupcake."

"Mm." Swipe. "Set it by the coffee machine, okay? There's creamer in the mini fridge."

That's when it landed on me. He had no idea. I stood there holding a cupcake with a candle in it and he had no idea what day it was. Eighteen years married. Met him at a career fair when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four, and he'd charmed me in about nine minutes flat, and now I was standing in his office at midnight holding a lit candle and he thought I was the catering girl.

"It's my birthday, Cyril," I said.

His head came up. He actually looked at me then, and I watched him do the math behind his eyes, and I watched it not arrive.

"Thursday," he said. "It's Thursday?"

"It's Friday, technically. But yes."

"Oh, hell." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Bryn. Bryn, I'm sorry, I lost the whole week. I'll make it up to you, I swear, Sunday, we'll do the whole thing, dinner, the works."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine."

"It's fine," I said again, and I meant it in the way you mean things when you've stopped arguing about them years ago. I set the cupcake down by the coffee machine and blew out the candle myself. The smoke smelled like a burnt match. I left the wine on the table and told him to drink it whenever, and he said sure, sure, and then his eyes went back to the screen before I'd even turned around.

I wandered. What else do you do in a silent office at midnight? The blue glow off the monitors made everything look underwater. Desks with names on little brass plates. A wall of whiteboards covered in arrows and words like "latency" and "churn." Somebody had drawn a cartoon shark in the corner of one board. I stood there a while looking at the shark.

The city was all windows on three sides. Downtown glittered below, orange and white, like somebody spilled a jewelry box. Four floors down, people were actually asleep, ordinary people, going about it without candles or cupcakes.

Then I saw the box.

It sat on Cyril's own desk, off to the side where the lamp didn't quite reach. Small, matte black, heavy feeling. No branding at all except a sticker that said PROTOTYPE ALPHA in plain letters. Company handwriting. My husband orders gadgets the way other men order steaks, so at first I figured it was some new dongle for the servers. But the label said prototype, and prototypes in his world meant product samples, and products for who, exactly?

I looked over my shoulder. Nobody. The far end of the office still glowed with his screen and his typing. Nobody was coming.

I opened the box.

Inside, nested in black foam, was a smooth curved thing, sort of dove gray, about the size of my hand. Silicone. Silky. It didn't take a genius. It took about one second. A vibrator. A very expensive, very sleek, app-controlled vibrator, sitting on my husband's desk at midnight on my birthday.

There was a card in the box. White, thick stock, printed. "Prototype Alpha, user testing round two. Please document all feedback." Signed with a doodle of a shark. The same shark that was on the whiteboard.

So the story, whatever the story was, was market research. His team made these things and he was testing them, or meant to, or was supposed to hand them around. That was the story I chose to believe, standing there under the blue light, turning the thing over in my hands. Honestly it didn't matter why it was there. What mattered was that it was there, and that it was midnight, and that my husband had forgotten I existed for about six hours running.

I sat down in his chair. His ergonomic throne, fourteen hundred dollars, I know because I bought it for him for Christmas one year. It reclined. I reclined it a little and looked out at the city. My heart was doing something stupid in my chest. Not fear exactly. More like the feeling right before you jump off the low dive at the Y, the one you've done a hundred times but still get that drop in your belly.

I'm not going to write here that I've never done anything like this. I'm forty-four, I've been married eighteen years, I've had two kids. But I will say the last few years have been quiet in a particular way. Cyril works. I work. We sleep. There was a time, back in San Diego when we were young, when he couldn't keep his hands off me, and I have spent a long time being polite about the fact that the time ended.

I took out my phone. There was a QR code on the bottom of the box, and a line of small print: Companion app, iOS and Android. My hands were not steady. I scanned it, downloaded it, watched the little progress bar crawl. The office was so quiet I could hear the servers breathing in the corner and my own blood in my ears.

The app opened to a single dial. One control. Power and intensity. I looked at the toy in my lap. I looked at the far end of the office, at the glow of my husband's screen, at the back of his head bent over his laptop.

I pressed the power button on the side of the thing and it came alive with a low hum, a soft pulse against my palm, quiet as a cat purring in the next room. The dial on my phone lit up, waiting.

"Well," I said to nobody. "Happy birthday to me."

I took off my blazer first. The nanny uniform blazer, navy, sensible, the one I wear three days a week for other people's babies. I folded it over the arm of the couch like a good girl, and then I didn't feel like a good girl anymore.

The couch was black leather, cold through my jeans when I sat down. Cold is the wrong word. Bracing. I held the toy a second longer, just feeling it hum against my fingers, and then I pressed it against my clit through my jeans. Lowest setting.

Oh.

Well, that was that, almost. Four layers of denim and cotton between me and it and it still went through me like a current. I rolled the dial up one notch on my phone and my breath caught in my throat. Down again. Up. Down. I was teasing myself on an app dial in my husband's office at midnight, and I was forty-four years old, and nobody on earth knew where exactly I was or what I was doing.

I stood up long enough to unbutton my jeans. The zipper sounded loud in that quiet. Servers humming, city humming, my zipper. I slid the jeans down my hips, then the panties, and stepped out of them both and left them in a puddle by the couch like a woman I used to know.

Then I lay back.

The leather was cold against my bare ass and I shivered, and then the toy found me again, direct this time, no denim in the way, and I stopped caring about cold. I was wet. Genuinely wet, which had stopped feeling like a given somewhere in the last few years. My body remembered things my schedule didn't.

The app had more settings than the box let on. The dial was the main screen, but swipe left and there were patterns. I found that out by accident and I gasped, actually gasped, alone in an office on the top floor, because the pulse setting hit my clit in little stuttering beats and it was rude, frankly, how good it was.

The ceiling over the couch is mirrored. I had noticed it earlier and thought it was pretentious, some startup designer's idea of lounge chic. Now I was flat on my back under it with my jeans off and it was the most useful feature in the building. I could see myself. All of myself. A pale woman with her blouse still buttoned and her legs open, silver-blonde hair fanned out on black leather, holding a small gray thing between her thighs.

"God," I whispered, to her. "Look at you."

I watched her cycle through the patterns. Pulse first. Then a wave setting that rolled slow and built and rolled back down, like surf, like San Diego twenty years ago, and I let it carry me up and set me down and up again. Then constant, full power, and my hips came off the couch on their own like my body had signed something without asking me first.

I turned it down. I made myself turn it down. I wanted this to last longer than Cyril's last six conversations with me combined.

The wave setting, again. I watched my own reflection's chest rise and fall. My nipples were hard under the blouse and I pushed the fabric up over my bra and pressed my palm flat over my breast, just holding, and even that felt like a fortune. Eighteen years of being touched only in passing. Hand on the shoulder. Routine. I squeezed, gently, and the woman in the mirror squeezed too.

The wave rolled me up again and this time I didn't fight it. I slid the toy lower, wet now, soaked, and let it sit right there against my clit while the pattern climbed, and I thought about nothing. That was the luxury of it. No cupcakes, no investors at eight, no nanny schedule, no who's picking up whom. Just my body doing the oldest thing a body does while my husband typed forty feet away about churn.

I came fast on the second pass. Faster than I meant to. The wave crested and my whole back arched off the leather and a cry came up out of me, sharp and choked, and I clapped my own hand over my mouth because the office was empty except for my reflection and I still couldn't help it. Twenty-some years of being quiet. Old habit. I shook against my own hand, the toy buzzing away against me through the whole thing, prolonging it, dragging it out until I had to pull it away because it was too much, it was honestly too much, and I lay there panting at my own mirrored ceiling with my hand still over my mouth.

The woman in the mirror was smiling. So was I.

I gave myself a minute. Then another. The city glittered on, indifferent. Somewhere below, a taxi turned a corner. I sat up slowly, feeling the leather peel off my damp back, and laughed a little at myself, at the puddle of jeans, at the blazer folded neat as church on the arm of the couch.

Then housekeeping. I'm a nanny. Cleanup is a whole skill set of mine.

The break room had a drawer, and the drawer had, this is true, individually wrapped Wet-Naps, because startups think of everything except their employees' souls. I took two, cleaned myself up, got my jeans and panties back on, checked the mirror ceiling one last time to make sure I looked like a person and not a person who had just done what I had just done. Mostly passed.

I rinsed the toy in the break room sink with dish soap, dried it with a paper towel, and set it back in the black foam exactly the way I'd found it. Lid on. Sticker facing out. If Cyril opened it tomorrow and it had been used, well, user testing round two, that's what the card said. Let him document that feedback.

The cupcake stayed. I set it on the center of his desk where the lamp would catch the foil. Number 44, straight as I could get it in the dark. I found a sticky note in a drawer and a pen, and I sat there a second with the pen hovering, thinking of all the things I could write, some sweet, some not sweet at all.

I wrote: Happy Birthday to me.

Underlined it. Stuck it to the lid of the black box so he'd have to lift it to understand. Then I put on my blazer, buttoned it, and walked the length of that silent glowing office on legs that still felt loosely put together.

Benny was at the desk downstairs reading something on his phone. He looked up and smiled.

"Late night, ma'am."

"Early morning," I said. "He's still at it up there. Tell him his wife came by?"

"You bet."

The street air hit me like a slap of cold water and I loved it. It was after one by then, technically Friday, my birthday half gone and never better spent. I walked the twelve blocks home because I didn't want to sit in a car yet, I wanted to feel the cold on my face and the leftover hum in my body and keep the whole thing to myself a while longer.

Somewhere around the third block I realized I was smiling and didn't stop. One hour. I'd taken one hour of my life back for myself, out of a very long ledger, and I intended to remember exactly how it felt.

My birthday. My hour. Mine.