7. Mrs. Johnson #2
“Steve has a fantasy of you sleeping around,” I said, close to her ear, watching us both. “You agreed to come fuck me for a couple of days. Then you go home and have his baby.”
“Um. Yeah.” Hesitant, like she was trying on a fact.
“Keep the ring. You told me it turns you on to have sex in your husband’s rock. “He likes you to be a cheating slut and wear it.”
Her expression was still lost, not amused. I wondered how much I was messing with her head, and I didn’t take my hands off her.
“Steve’s my husband?”
“Yes.”
I asked her if she wore protection with him. She said no, simply, the way you answer a form. I asked if she wore it with me. Yes. I asked her, then, who her real husband was, if the math was the proof.
She looked at the diamond in the glass like it might tell her. “Steve,” she said finally. Not cute. Like she was reading it off a line.
“And I’m the guy his wife fucks on leftover days. That’s all I am this morning.”
Her thighs pressed together. I saw it happen in the mirror, the body voting again.
I told her we hadn’t been playing. Pink days, three of them, nothing on, his bed. If there was a souvenir in her it was his. She had started spinning the wheel when she shut the phone off in a garage in Springfield and dropped her life in a bag.
Her fingers spread over her stomach. Same place she had patted for the conductor.
“What if I am?”
“Then Mrs. Johnson did her job.” I covered her hand with mine.
“You keep the ring. You keep the hair. When you go back to Springfield you don’t tell him you spent the leftover days in my bed.
He thinks this is a secret. He thinks he’s the only other man.
He doesn’t get to know I was in on it. He gets the womb. I get the truth.”
She swallowed. “He’d lose his mind if he knew I was here.”
“He doesn’t get to know.” I kissed the side of her neck and felt her pulse jump under my mouth. “That’s the deal.”
The mean smile came back, the one that files people. “Keep it,” I said, tapping the rock. “I like fucking Steve’s wife.”
“I like being a slut wife.”
The smile stayed. The fog didn’t. I watched it lift behind her eyes, like she had walked back into the room and found me standing there with my hand on her stomach and another man’s marriage on her finger. Her gaze held mine, measuring something I couldn’t see.
“Why did you let me stay in that?” she asked. She was still looking at the ring, not at me. “I asked you if he was my husband. You could have laughed. You could have snapped me out of it.”
“I didn’t want you out of it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I took a breath that came out ragged, the only honest sound I had left.
“Because it wrecks me,” I said. “In the good way. Watching you give yourself to him like that’s just what you do.
Completely. Not a dare. Not a weekend kink we talk about in bed after.
Like he’s the one who gets you bare and I get what’s left, and I’m so fucking jealous I’m shaking and so fucking hard I can’t think straight and I don’t know which one is doing it to me. ”
She waited. The faucet dripped, each drop a small, maddening tick in the silence.
“And I liked the other version even more. The one where you’re his wife and coming to my bed is the dirty part. Cheating on Steve. Role reversal. I’ve been the husband you cheat on for years. For a few minutes this morning I got to be the other man.”
“So you left me in it.”
“I’m asking you to go back in.” I touched the rock again.
“Next time you’re with him, unhook it. Come home to me believing you’re cheating on him.
Tell it that way. If you take other men — and I want to hear about every one — don’t give me the itinerary.
Give me the betrayal. You can know, underneath, that I’m Doug.
Wear the fog when you talk. I want both. ”
She stared at me for a long moment. Not confused now. Filing.
“You want me to cheat on my work husband.”
“I want you to feel it like that. Yes.”
“Even if I know, underneath, that you’re Doug.”
“Especially then. Keep the floor if you need it. Wear the fog when you talk.”
She nodded once.
“Okay.” Her voice was flat, a contract signed. “Next time I fuck somebody, I’ll tell you how I cheated on Steve.”
* * *
She needed an excuse for five days that didn’t involve a hospital.
We stood in the kitchen with coffee like people who still had jobs.
I told her to say female problems. She smirked and said it was true but wouldn't fly, then agreed no one at her design firm would ask for details past the first two words.
She went to work in a high collar and my ring and hair that was still the wrong color at the roots, and I stood at the counter for a while after she left, not sure what I was supposed to do with my hands.
The next night, I fucked her like meat that belonged to Springfield. She helped. She went away behind her eyes and whispered, “He can’t ever know about this,” and I came into the disc waiting for the next sentence like a dog waiting for a command.
Then one night she came to bed in her regular pajamas, no diamond, our ring in her palm. She said it was time. Be my husband again. Put it on and I’ll say vows. It was strange and I did it anyway, standing beside our own bed like a man at an altar he had already used.