7. Mrs. Johnson
seven
Mrs. Johnson
Iheard her car in the drive around noon and went out too fast, like a man who’d been watching the window for an hour, except she’d been gone a week in another man’s house, and I had spent that time in a chair, her panties still on the hall floor.
I’d called in sick just to be standing here.
My legs wouldn’t have let me sit anyway.
She stepped out of the car and I stopped short.
The blonde ponytail was gone. Her hair was red, bright and down over her shoulders—the color she’d chosen for her week in Springfield, the one she wore in the tape I did not yet have.
Skintight jeans. A thin tank with no bra, nipples showing through the fabric like she had forgotten how this house dressed or remembered how his did.
On her left hand, where my ring used to live, a diamond big enough to look vulgar in our driveway in the middle of a workday.
She pulled a plastic garbage bag out of the back seat, shut the door with her hip, and saw me late. Surprise first, then something she covered.
“Oh. Hi.” Her shoulders tightened for a second. “I didn’t expect you home.”
“I took the day off so I could wait for my wife.” I nodded at the bag. “I assume she’s in there.”
Her expression faltered, searching for a mask that fit the moment. I let her off the hook the only way I knew how. I took the bag from her hand. It was heavier than just clothes. “Let’s leave her in there,” I said, “while I get to know you, Mrs. Johnson.”
The name landed. She smiled, small and dangerous, like it was a dare she already knew how to play.
“Yep,” she said. “Still married.”
I let her walk into the house ahead of me so I could watch.
The jeans fit like they had been sewn onto her that morning.
The red moved when she did. She still walked like she had been used for a week, careful in the hips, and I was hard before we reached the kitchen.
Inside I stared until she fidgeted, standing in our hall in somebody else’s clothes with a bag of her old life at her feet.
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess it’s rude to stare at another man’s wife like that.”
“Yeah.” She tried to laugh and didn’t quite get there.
“Those from his closet?”
“My closet.” The giggle was nervous. Springfield closet. The one she said she missed on the phone, that she had moved back into while I slept in a chair and drank.
I took her hand and turned it, so the rock caught the light from the front window. It was ugly-beautiful, a stone bought to make a point, not to be admired. “He must really love you.”
“That’s what he says.”
I was close enough to smell him on her—soap that wasn’t ours, perfume I hadn’t bought. I looked her in the eye and said the thing I had been turning over since the voicemail about a family issue.
“I understand he’s trying to start a family with you. You said he wants to put a baby inside you. You’ve been letting him try, right? Whenever he wants? A guy gives you a ring like that, you keep your legs open for him.”
She swallowed. “He wants to put a baby in me. I’m not so sure I want one yet.”
“But you’ve been trying.”
The excitement on my face finally registered. I watched her see it, the same look she had given me the first morning she called me a freak, except this time, with the ring on her finger and another man’s scent on her skin, she didn’t look away.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Several times a day. All week.” Something flickered behind her eyes, the calendar trying to surface through the fog of travel and sex and somebody else’s bed. “I have to check something.” She turned toward the bedroom.
“Three days,” I said, and the words stopped her in the hall.
She looked back, relieved in the wrong direction. “Oh. Good. Three until I’m fertile?”
“No.” I kept my voice flat because if I let it shake I was going to come apart in the doorway. “You’ve been fertile for three days. Live ammo. Steve may have already put a baby in you.” I tapped the diamond with my thumb. “Good thing he put a ring on it.”
I watched her absorb the information: her mouth went still, then her eyes moved sideways, running numbers, then something settled into her jaw that wasn’t quite fear. Her eyes met mine, and her voice was barely a whisper. “So what happens now?”
“Are you a slut wife?”
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“I asked if you were a cheating slut wife.”
“Um. Yeah.” Then, firmer, because she could see what I needed, and she had decided somewhere on a pink day in Springfield to give it to me. “Yes. I’m a cheating slut wife.”
“Good. I always wanted to fuck someone else’s wife.” Her eyebrows went up. I didn’t smile it off. “What we’re going to do, Mrs. Johnson, is this. You’re going to strip and give me what you’ve been giving Steve all week. In the bed my wife used to sleep in.”
Her mouth opened on a practical objection, then closed again, firmly. She stared at me with an incredulous look that slowly sharpened into a dangerous curiosity. I took her hand and led her down the hall.
* * *
She pulled the tank off in our bedroom and put it on the chair like it belonged to another woman.
The jeans took work. When they were gone I saw what I hadn’t seen in years of asking.
She was smooth. Bare. She had never given me that, not as a gift, not as a joke, not even once when I had my mouth on her and begged.
“Shaved?” I said, because my brain was stupid when I was this hard.
“Waxed.” She almost smiled. “Steve likes me smooth.”
I picked up her diaphragm from the dresser. She glanced at the jelly and I shook my head.
“Not this time.” I told her to lift her hips.
She gave me a puzzled look until I said it again, sharper, and then she did it, watching my face.
I stripped while I talked because if I stopped talking I was going to finish before I got in her.
“Right now all of Steve’s come is sliding deeper.
In a minute you’re going to push that cup in and trap the pool against your cervix. Give your husband’s sperm some help.”
I watched something move through her that her face couldn’t quite name, ending somewhere below her waist before her mind had weighed in. She tilted her hips higher and looked down at herself as if she could see the math happening.
She hesitated, her fingers tight on the disc, then folded it and slid it in.
It went easier than usual. I didn’t know if that was the week of him or the wet or both.
She wriggled it into place with more care than she ever used for me, and I stood there with an erection that had nothing to do with wanting her and imagined her scooping him, gathering what three pink days had left, seating the cup to seal in the work she’d just been told was the point.
I got on the bed between her legs. She was already breathing like the first night on the phone.
“Fuck my whore pussy,” she said, and there was no joke in it.
I pushed in easy. She was so wet and so loose that I had to bite down on a sound.
She gasped and started climbing immediately, the week still in her, the train and the stall and three days of live ammo.
I hooked her ankles and spread her, high, so I could get deep enough to bump the cup.
I felt the head of my cock hit that little wall and I stayed on it, talking, because talking was how I kept from disappearing.
“Feel that? I’m pushing his load into the chamber. You know orgasms open your cervix. You suck him in when you come. So come.”
She wailed and clenched around me, and I kept bumping the barrier through it, second cock in a cunt that had been breeding all week, finishing against plastic that was holding his first. I came with a broken, animal sound and didn’t pull out until I went soft.
After, she kept her hand low, two fingers pressed under the bone like she could keep the math from leaking.
I stayed over her, listening to her breathe like a man waiting for thanks he knew would never come.
* * *
We didn’t get dressed. The jeans and the tank stayed in a pile. I had to know the rest of the exit, how it ended. The truth she gave me now was filthy, not careful.
His wife — she called her the cow — had landed early.
They had grabbed a bag and run for the train.
One of the crew kept checking on her, or more accurately on her nipples, walking the car like he had a reason.
She laughed when she said it, then looked at me with that defiant tilt I was starting to recognize as her checking the edge.
“I really would have considered it under normal circumstances,” she said. She patted her stomach, the same place my hand had been in the dark all week. “But then I might have a Black baby in here on top of Steve’s.”
She watched my face. Filing it away, gauging if it was too far. I told her it wasn’t by putting my mouth on her tit, still someone else’s work clothes in the chair, and she laughed into my hair like we were both insane and she had decided she could live with that.
* * *
Thursday morning she still had his ring on. I saw her reach for it at the bathroom mirror, habit, clocking out of a shift, and I said no before she could work the band over her knuckle.
I stood behind her so we were both in the glass. Red hair. Bare tits. That vulgar diamond. Someone else’s wife in my bathroom, toothpaste foam at the corner of her mouth, looking at me like she wasn’t sure which house she had woken up in.
I lifted her hand and touched the stone. “Steve married you with this. Remember? You share a house. You share a bed. You were eating dinner with him yesterday. You are Mrs. Steven Johnson. Wendy Johnson, of Springfield.”
I watched the fog come down. I knew what it could do to my lungs and kept watching anyway. I had been waiting for this version since the night she called me a freak and didn’t have the word.
She looked at me in the mirror with a confused expression that wasn’t acting. “I am? Then what am I doing here with you?”