5. Green Days
five
Green Days
For two weeks she called herself Steve’s slut wife like it was a nickname she’d earned and wasn’t giving back.
When she wanted me she said her work husband was out of town and she’d settle for the spare cock.
I got hard. I understood the ranking. The lingerie stayed on the chair.
The word stayed in the room. We didn’t pretend we were still circling it.
The next trip was one overnight. Foregone. She packed without the little performance of maybe-not, no speech about complications, no finger in my face telling me to stop pestering. The bag just filled. I watched it fill, the whole week settling heavy in my chest.
Morning of, she showered. I laid lingerie on the suitcase and put the diaphragm case next to it, same punchline as last time. I had to see what she would do with the joke now that she was running it.
She talked through the doorway, “Steve is using his position to ride along on more calls with me. ‘Training’ he calls it.” She snorted.
“What training? I already know how to spread my legs. Somebody’s gonna figure out how many trips he takes with me versus the rest of the team. They’ll know I’m a slut.”
“Do you care?” I said. “More cocks that want you.”
She came out with her makeup on, saw the diaphragm case and lingerie, and picked up the case first.
“I’m not taking this.”
I must have looked gutted and hungry. She crooked a finger. “Come here.”
Closet door. A monthly calendar tacked on the back, the kind you buy in January and forget. Red circles. Pink highlighter. Green.
“Red is blood, pink is fertile. No fucking on pink unless we decide we mean it.” She tapped a green circle with a nail. “Today’s green. Safe. That’s when Steve and I don’t need anything.”
She walked back to the bag and tossed the case onto my side of the bed, like she was leaving me a glass of water.
“Think about that tonight. You picked the outfit I wear the first time a man comes in me bare. Cute.” She held the lingerie up between us. “We can’t wait to feel it.”
We. Him and her. The word landed like a punch to the sternum. I was the audience, and nothing more.
She watched my face change and misread it as panic, as the husband finally hitting a wall.
“Oh. Sorry. You should be first, then. Pass me the case.”
I didn’t move. I looked at the case on my pillow, then at my wife, still in the towel. The truth I’d been walking toward since Jack in the dress finally coiled in my throat.
“No,” I said. “This is the version. I want him to be the first live load in you. No disc. No gel. Just him, deep, where a husband is supposed to go.” I put my hand on her stomach, over the towel, over the place a kid would live if we ever stopped being careful.
“I want your uterus to meet somebody else first.”
Her nostrils flared. Breath gone filthy. The towel slipped and she didn’t catch it.
“Yes. I want him first. Unprotected. I’ll feel like such a slut.”
“You are one.” I zipped the bag. “Go give him a clean shot.”
* * *
No texts. All day. I sent her two words at bedtime: No protection. It was like knocking on a door I had asked to be locked, and I got nothing back.
Morning, still nothing. I sat in the kitchen inventing disasters—a fight over the disc, him backing off, the week dying in a hallway I would never see. But I wanted the other disaster more, the one where she was too full of him to type. I hated how much I wanted it, and forced the coffee down.
Her car in the drive after work. I met her at the door. The kiss was hesitant again, like her mouth still belonged to another man, like she had to remember the shape of me.
“I wanted to hear from you.”
“I know. Sorry. It’s hard to text when I’m not getting up for a disc. I have to stay with him—completely. It’s what you asked for, right? Number two doesn’t get a play-by-play while number one is still in.”
“Yes.”
“I’m his when I’m there. I do what he wants.” She shut the door. New top. Low. A push-up I hadn’t bought. Those Ds looking bigger because he’d dressed them for show.
“Steve bought it. He likes showing me off. Age gap. People think he’s paying me. I like them thinking I’m a whore on his arm.” She looked in the hall mirror, not at me. “You, missy, are a cheating slut.” Her eyes found mine in the mirror. “And you’re the husband who sent her.”
I had her in the bedroom before the bag hit the floor. I needed the rest of it in the room with us, not in a phone.
“How was the first time bare?”
She let me strip her while she talked. Her voice wasn’t just telling a story; it was putting us back in the hotel room. She made me see it, feel it with her.
He didn’t ask about the disc. She told him she wanted him bare, wanted to feel him come in her.
I slid the new top from her shoulders as she spoke.
He got a look that wasn’t sweet. Hungry.
Knees up. First stroke slow. He bottomed out on her cervix and stayed.
She came from the knowing of it—no rubber, no gel.
A cock that wasn’t mine, in the place I’d never been allowed to finish.Then he fucked her for real.
She kept coming. He didn’t offer her stomach.
He planted and emptied. Heat. Pulse. Swearing into her neck.
She locked her legs so none of it would run out.My hands went to her jeans.
Shower after, she said, because she was leaking and he wasn’t done.
Tile. Bare. Second load while she was still shaking.
Afternoon she lost count. A customer canceled and they had the day.
She stopped being a person with a flight.
She was a married cunt he was trying to fill.
Every time he pulled out, she shoved him back in with her fingers.
She was stroking me while she told it. I was already wrecked, standing there with my pants open like a door someone had forgotten to close.
“Are you thinking about his sperm still in me? No gel. They’re alive, Doug. Swimming. Searching.” She kissed my neck. “It felt filthy letting another man do the one thing my husband doesn’t get.”
She rolled, dug in her purse, and slapped a condom packet against my chest.
“Wear that. Steve is the only one who gets me bare.” She was rubbing herself while she waited, watching my face. “I’d be such a dirty slut, making the man I married suit up while other men go in raw.”
I held the packet. The foil was warm from her bag. “Swear there will be other men. Swear they get to go bare too.”
“I swear. Lots of men. Bare. Just not you.”
I came on her hand standing up. Knees gone. She finished herself two seconds later, her eyes fixed on the unopened rubber like it was a wedding ring, like the vow had been the stroke that did it.
* * *
At dinner, the clink of her fork against the plate was the only sound. Neither of us spoke. She went to bed early, tired from being bred all night on a work trip.
I put my palm on her stomach in the dark and thought about what was still moving in there. Not mine. First. I slept like that, number two, with a wife who had given the clean shot to somebody else and brought the evidence home under a new top.
* * *
Next day I checked the closet. Green. I pulled her into bed and asked if Steve’s work wife wanted to cheat on him with the spare. I had to see if the calendar was law or just theater.
She laughed, stripped, and reached for the disc.
“It’s green,” I said. “You said green was safe.”
Sympathetic look. Jelly on her fingers. In it went, practiced, no discussion.
“I said green is safe for Steve and me. You don’t get to see the place. Sorry, baby.”
“Only him.”
“Only him for now. If I let another man in, his swimmers can have the tour too.” She watched my cock jump and smiled, mean and fond. “See. You like the ranking.”
She rolled onto her back, spread, and pulled me in against plastic. I felt the cup. I felt yesterday still higher than I was allowed to go, or I imagined I did. In this house, it was the same thing.
“Send your soldiers on their suicide mission. I’ll tell you if any of them even make it to the door.”
I fucked her like that, second, blocked, while she talked about the tile and the canceled customer and the way he had held her legs open so nothing would run out.
I came into the disc. She patted my hip the way you close a cabinet you didn’t really need to open, like finishing was just the spare cock tidying up after itself.
* * *
The next month was weekly overnights. Night with my work husband, she called them, packing the bag without asking.
Disc left on the bathroom counter so I’d see it when I got home.
Green every time. I checked. I always checked.
The pink days on the closet door were a gun on the table, and every morning we both chose to walk past.
Her drive went up. Mine too. “Come on,” she’d say, tipping her head at the bedroom, “let’s kill some of your babymakers.” “Time to send soldiers into the pussy of death,” I’d say. We both knew who got to land. The jokes were filthy, the only way we could say the ranking without starting a fight.
I stopped wondering what kind of cuckold I was. I knew. Another man’s come got to live in her. Mine died on the way in. She came home walking carefully, bought by a man three hours away in a top I hadn’t paid for, and I slept with my hand on a stomach that held nothing of mine.
Pink days sat on the closet door like a loaded gun neither of us had picked up yet. I looked at them every morning I remembered to. I wanted her to pick it up. I wanted her not to. I wanted both, which was the whole marriage by then.