The Rejuvenation Pact

Sunny had heard about Solace from two different women at the commissary, which was how she knew it was either a real thing or a really good joke. Nobody spread a rumor that fast unless somebody wanted it spread.

"Rejuvenation treatments," Cain said from the driver's seat, slowing the truck down as the town's one main street came up. "Like a spa?"

"Like a miracle, supposedly. Claudia swears her hands stopped aching after one visit. She's fifty-eight and she was opening jars again by the weekend."

"Claudia also swears she saw a UFO over the motor pool."

"Both things can be true." Sunny leaned forward as a narrow storefront slid past, then pointed. "There. That's it. Solace."

Cain pulled over and cut the engine. The building was squeezed between a feed store and a boarded-up barbershop, and it looked like it had been there since before the base was. Faded paint. A wooden sign with the name burned into it. A tiny window with a velvet curtain behind the glass, dusty at the edges.

"It looks like a place where people get swindled," Cain said.

"It looks like a place where interesting things happen."

"It looks like both, honestly." He turned the truck off all the way and looked at her. "We're really doing this?"

"You're the one who pulled over."

"You pointed."

They had been married five years. They had met at twenty-seven and thirty, both on leave from different bases, both stuck in the same airport bar outside Phoenix for six hours because of a storm. She liked to tell people she married him because he gave her the window seat without being asked. He liked to tell people he married her because she ate airport food like she was mad at it. Both stories were true enough.

Now she was thirty-four and he was thirty-seven and they had two weeks of leave and nothing planned, and Sunny had woken up that morning feeling sort of invisible in her own life. Not sad. Just flat. Like the days had been ironed.

So when Claudia mentioned the parlor again, Sunny wrote down the town name on a receipt and stuck it in her pocket.

* * *

The bell over the door was an actual bell, an old brass one, and it rang twice because the door stuck halfway and had to be shoved.

Inside, Solace smelled like sage and hot stone. There were tattered velvet curtains hung across the back wall in deep red, gone orange at the edges from sun. The floor was old wood, worn pale down the middle where people walked. Amber bulbs in sconces along the walls gave everything a warm, low glow, like the light in a photograph from before either of them was born.

A woman came through a curtain from the back. She was gray-haired and small and moved like she had all the time in the world, and Sunny guessed her at sixty or older.

"Well," the woman said, smiling at them like they were expected. "Two of you. That's nice."

"Hi," Sunny said. "Are you Maisie?"

"I am."

"I'm Sunny, this is my husband, Cain. Somebody at the base told us about your treatments and we kind of laughed about it and then we drove out here anyway."

Maisie laughed too, a low easy laugh. "That's usually how people come in. Laughing. It's a good way to come in. Better than scared."

Cain looked around the room as if checking exits. "What exactly is the treatment?"

"Rejuvenation," Maisie said, like that settled it.

"Right. But what does that mean, actually?"

Maisie tilted her head at him, amused, and pulled a stool out from behind the counter and sat down on it like her knees appreciated the offer. "It means I use my hands. Heat and touch. There are no needles, no pills, no machines, no electricity. Nothing goes in you and nothing comes out of you. You lie on a warm table and I work, and afterward people tell me they feel the way they felt at thirty. Or twenty-eight. Whatever age they liked being."

"Feel how," Cain said. "Like less pain, or..."

"Like more. More than less. It isn't medicine, young man. I don't fix anything. I just remind the body what it was like to feel good, and the body remembers. That's all."

Sunny looked at the curtained doorway. "How much?"

"For you? Sixty dollars. For him too, it'd be a hundred, but he doesn't look like he wants it."

"He doesn't," Cain said, and Sunny elbowed him.

"Sixty's fine," she said. "Do I take my shoes off? Is there paperwork? What's the deal?"

"There's no paperwork. There's never been a need. Come on back whenever you're ready. Your husband can wait out here. There's coffee, it's terrible, but there is some."

Cain raised an eyebrow at Sunny. "You're really going in?"

"I really am. Sixty dollars, Cain. We spent more than that on the tacos we didn't even like last week."

"I liked those tacos."

"You left half of yours."

"That's because I'm honest about my limits." He sat down in a chair by the wall that looked like it had been sat in by a thousand men waiting for their wives. "Fine. Go. I'll be here judging quietly."

"That's what you're best at." She kissed the top of his head and he made a face and she grinned, and it felt like being twenty-seven in an airport bar for a second, and that alone was probably worth the sixty dollars.

Maisie held the curtain open for her.

The back room was smaller than the front, lit by more of the amber bulbs, and warm. Not hot, just warm, as if the air itself had been sitting near a fire. There was a table in the middle of the floor, padded and covered with a clean white sheet, and Sunny had a brief thought about how many people had lain on it and whether the sheet had always been white.

"Lie down on your back," Maisie said. "You can keep your clothes on. Most people do the first time."

"The first time." Sunny climbed up onto the table, the sheet warm under her. "So people come back."

"Most people come back." Maisie pulled a low stool over and sat beside her. "Give me your hand."

Sunny gave her her hand. Maisie held it in both of her own, and her palms were warm, warmer than skin should be, like she'd been holding a mug of something. Sunny felt the heat go into her wrist and up her forearm and she almost laughed, because it was the strangest thing, and Maisie smiled at her.

"You feel it already."

"I feel something. Is that normal?"

"That's normal." Maisie set her hand down on Sunny's arm and left it there. "Now breathe slow and stop talking if you can manage it. This takes about an hour, and talking makes it take two."

Sunny closed her mouth. The heat moved through her arm like water moving through a hose, slow and steady, and it reached her shoulder and sat there, and then it started to spread down into her chest.

She had expected something mystical. Chimes, maybe, or chanting, or Maisie saying things in another language. There was none of that. It was just an old woman in a warm room with warm hands, working down Sunny's arm the way a mechanic works down an engine, thorough and unimpressed, and the heat followed her fingers everywhere and pooled in Sunny's collarbones and then her ribs.

Somewhere around twenty minutes in, Sunny realized her breathing had changed. It was deeper. Easier. Her chest felt loose in a way she hadn't noticed was tight.

Somewhere around forty minutes in, she stopped keeping track of time at all.

* * *

When she came out through the curtain, Cain looked up from his phone and did a small double take.

"You look different," he said. "Rested. Did you fall asleep?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I think I dozed off. The last half is a blur." Sunny flexed her hands and then, on an impulse, jumped in place, just once, both feet off the floor. She had not jumped in years, not for no reason. It felt good. It felt like being a kid in a backyard, which was a ridiculous thing to think, and she thought it anyway.

"Told you it was a gimmick," Cain said, but he was staring a little.

"It's sixty dollars, Cain. I can jump. Watch." She jumped again.

"Okay, I see it. You're a jumper now."

Maisie came out behind her, moving slow. "She'll sleep well tonight. Eat a real dinner. Drink water. And if she wants to come back next week, the hour after this one costs half."

"The hour after this one," Cain repeated.

Maisie just smiled that knowing smile of hers, the one she'd worn when they walked in, and rang the sixty dollars up on an ancient register that slammed shut like a safe. Sunny took Cain's arm on the way out, and the bell rang twice again, and out on the street the sun was going down over the feed store and everything looked brighter than it had an hour ago.

"So," Cain said, unlocking the truck. "What did she actually do in there?"

"I told you, I dozed off. The last half is a blur, like after a really good nap."

"A blur."

"Is that suspicious to you?"

"Everything about that place is suspicious to me." He glanced over at her as the engine turned over. "You look good, though."

Sunny settled back into the seat and looked out the window, and something warm was still sitting in her chest, right where Maisie's hands had been, and it wasn't going anywhere.

That night Sunny stood in the bathroom of their rental and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. Her skin looked the same. It felt different. Tighter, like it had been ironed from the inside. She pressed a finger into her cheek and it bounced back fast, faster than it should have.

She was thirty-four years old. She had felt thirty-four for a while now, in her knees and her lower back and the way she got tired at nine. Tonight she felt twenty-five, and she hadn't felt twenty-five since she was actually twenty-five.

Cain knocked on the doorframe. "You've been in there a while. Everything okay?"

"I'm looking at myself."

"Can I look at you too, or is this a solo thing?"

She laughed and opened the door. He leaned against the sink and studied her face, and then he did the thing he did where he frowned and tilted his head, working a problem.

"You're glowing," he said. "That's not a figure of speech. You're actually glowing. What did that woman put in you?"

"Warm hands. That's all it was. Warm hands and an hour of nothing."

"Sixty dollars for warm hands."

"Worth it."

He put an arm around her waist and pulled her against him, and that was when Sunny felt it, the thing that had been building since the table. A warmth low in her belly, heavier than the one in her chest, sitting there like a stone that had been heated in a fire. Her whole body leaned into him before her brain got a vote.

"Okay," Cain said, into her hair. "Okay, wow. Hello!"

"Hi."

"You're about to knock me over."

"You'll survive."

He pulled back enough to look at her, and he was grinning, and she loved that grin, had loved it since an airport bar outside Phoenix seven years ago when a storm grounded both their flights and he'd offered her half his basket of fries.

"So this is a side effect," he said. "Of the gimmick."

"Apparently."

"I want it known that I still think it's a gimmick."

"Noted."

"And I want to be in the same room as the side effect."

Sunny took his hand and led him to the bedroom, and the whole way there the warmth in her belly got bigger, and her skin felt tight everywhere, and she felt young in a way that made her laugh out loud for no reason, and Cain laughed too, because he didn't know what else to do with a wife who was laughing and dragging him down a hall at the same time.

At the bed she stopped and turned around. She wanted to be sure of herself before she said it, and she was.

"I want you," she said. "Right now. Is that all right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's all right."

It was different and they both knew it was different. Five years of good, familiar sex, and this was not that. She pulled his shirt off and he did the same to hers and her skin felt alive under his hands, every nerve turned up, and she made a sound she hadn't made in years and didn't bother being embarrassed about it.

"God," Cain said. "Okay. Slow down or don't?"

"Don't."

They didn't. He laid her back. "Can I?" he asked, fingers at her waistband, and she said "Please," and he worked her pants off and went down on her, and the warmth in her belly met his mouth and she grabbed the headboard with both hands. Her hips came up off the mattress on their own. She came fast and hard, faster than she ever had, and she was still shaking when he moved up over her.

"Condom," he said, reaching for the nightstand.

"Yeah. Yes!"

He got it on. "Ready?" he asked, and she said "Yes" and pulled him into her, and for a while neither of them said anything that was made of words. She wrapped her legs around him and he drove into her and the heat in her belly spread outward through her whole body, through her arms and her thighs and the back of her neck, and she thought, distantly, that whatever Maisie had stirred up in her, it had been waiting all evening for exactly this.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked at her. He was sweating and his hair was stuck to his forehead and he was thirty-seven years old and she had never in five years found him this handsome.

"I'm close," he said.

"Wait. Wait, wait." She put her hand flat on his chest. "Together. I want to feel it at the same time."

"That's a big ask."

"I know. I'm asking anyway."

He slowed down, breathing through his nose the way a man carrying something heavy up stairs would, and she got herself there with two fingers on her clit while he held steady, and when she started to come he felt it and let go, and they finished together, loud and graceless, and she laughed again while it was still happening, which had never once occurred to her before tonight.

Afterward they lay there in the dark of the rental, both breathing hard, the ceiling fan turning slow overhead.