9. The Souvenir
nine
The Souvenir
“So, our anniversary,” Wendy said last week, tapping a red nail against her tooth.
“What do you want?” I gave her the filthy list because she’d asked, and because my role was to want things I would never get to have.
A room full of guys. Two at once—Black, if possible.
Used by strangers in a parking lot. A surprise that proved she still understood the ranking.She laughed.
“It’s not a present if you know what it is.
” She tilted her head, her smile turning sharp.
“Or did you just want Mrs. Steve Johnson again?”“Yes,” I said, too fast. Her question wasn’t a question at all; it was confirmation of a plan already in motion.
The weekend before, she moved through the house with a restless energy, a constant hum, and wouldn’t give me a single hint. Wait, she said. Just wait.
* * *
Monday I came home to an empty house. That wasn’t strange. Wendy sometimes hit the store after work. I didn’t text her, in case she was out buying my surprise. I carried my drink into the living room and stopped cold.
A pink envelope sat on the coffee table with my name scrawled across the front in her handwriting.
Inside was a pretty anniversary card, the kind you pick off a grocery rack when you still want it to look like love. Her signature. Taped to the left panel was an SD card and a note in the same ink: play me. Hope you like it!
My mind raced ahead of the image. Steve, probably.
Or the nameless man from the hotel, more than just the still photo she’d taunted me with.
I walked to the TV, my hands feeling clumsy and slow.
She’d already cabled the camera in, staging my evening with the detached precision she reserved for client meetings.
I sat down with the drink and hit play.
The picture was our office. She’d started the recording and backed away from the lens until she filled the frame the way she wanted. Bright red hair. The tight tank. The jeans she had to lie down to zip. All his. She held her hand toward the camera so the diamond caught the light.
“Hi, Doug. It’s me. Wendy Johnson.” She wiggled the rock. “Mrs. Steve Johnson. God, that sounds sexy.” She pinched her nipples through the thin fabric until they stood out against the material. “Mmmm. Steve will take care of that later.”
She told me the cow and the kids had been sent on a summer trip so she could move back into our home — she said our and she did not mean ours. She’d missed her closet, missed waking up with him already inside her. She said it the way another woman might talk about coffee.
Then she looked straight into the lens and I forgot what I was supposed to be doing with my hands.
“Your anniversary is coming. You should know you don’t have a wife. She’s gone. I dumped her in the trash can in the office. You’ll be alone thinking about your wedding day. You and your hand can celebrate.”
She laughed. The sound wasn’t cruel. It was excited. That was worse.
“I’ll have Steve’s cock in me.” Her gaze through the lens was unwavering. “Bridal lingerie he bought me. His house. His bed. And I’ve decided to get pregnant, like you asked. The next time you see me, I’ll be carrying his child.”
She had a waxing appointment. Then a train. Her husband would be waiting to take her home. She leaned in to kill the recording and almost whispered the last line, nipples still hard, red hair falling into the shot.
“You and your hand have fun. Steve is starting our family in me.”
The screen went black. I sat there with a drink I wasn’t tasting and a hard-on that had no business being there. I watched it again. Then I remembered the trash can and walked to the office, each step landing a half-second late, like my body was getting the instructions by mail.
* * *
She hadn’t been speaking in metaphor. In the can, I found the artifacts of her public life first: her wallet, her laptop, her ID badge.
Then, the personal—her jewelry. Deeper still, she’d buried our marriage: wedding pictures pulled from the wall, the framed invitation, even her diaphragm case and jelly.
Under it all was something new, a ledger I had never seen.
I laid everything on the desk like I was building a case against my own marriage. I opened the diaphragm case, my gut tight with certainty about what was inside. Her engagement set was nested in with the cup, gold against rubber, the whole joke in one little plastic shell.
The ledger was a planner. Calendar on the left, notes on the right, the same red-pink-green code she’d kept on the closet door. Stars on certain dates. Steve written next to the stars in her tight, practical hand.
I flipped to the Davis month and there he was: Davis (BJ, Px2) — 2yr / every 6 months. Blowjob, two positions. A two-year client, serviced on schedule. The extras were all parked off the pink days. If she popped, the math was supposed to belong to Springfield.
I found the nameless month. No name (BJ, Px3?). The next day: no name, P. Under that, in a looser script, like she’d written it after she’d come: first Black! Now a BBC slut. She’d drawn a heart.
There were more names than she’d given me.
Customers I could guess. Hotel Black guy again.
One or two a week, mouth or cunt, logged like mileage.
This was the slut I’d asked her to be, but her stories were just edits, summaries.
When had she stopped telling me everything?
This book—this was the truth. I was the husband.
This month stopped me cold. A customer early on. A star on Thursday — our anniversary. The word Anniversary written out. Today was the first of five pink days. On the right-hand side she’d written Breeding, surrounded by hearts, and underneath it, like a doctor’s scrawl: due Mar 8.
She was really doing it. Not teasing. Planning a due date the way other wives plan a dinner reservation.
I was terrified. A deep, painful ache settled in my groin.
I flipped back through the pages and saw my wife on her back in ink.
Men finishing in a place I still wasn’t allowed to go.
A Thursday circled for the one man who was.
* * *
The video and the ledger became my whole world that week.
I’d watch her say Steve’s name, then trace the entries in her book, each one a door slamming shut.
The possibility she might not return was a constant, low hum beneath the floorboards.
The ledger, at least, offered facts. I mapped her cycles on a notepad, the pink days from her planner forming a perfect, terrible pattern.
Ovulation landed on Thursday. Our anniversary.
That wasn’t a coincidence; it was a signature.
On Thursday, I got drunk in our empty house.
I used my hand to the video, her voice filling the silence.
I used it to the ledger, her handwriting a map of my own obsolescence.
Most of all, I used it to the idea of her in bridal lace, in another man’s bed, while I sat here counting the years we once called ours.
I kept the phone on the arm of the chair. It never lit.
* * *
She came home Sunday afternoon looking like the tape. Same jeans. Same thin tank. The red had gone wavy from a week of somebody else’s shower. Her nipples strained the fabric. The diamond was back on the finger that was supposed to be mine.
I opened the door before she could knock.
“You look hot,” I said. It was all my brain could produce.
“Thanks. My husband thinks so too. He likes me in this. He likes other men looking.”
She stood on the threshold and waited, amused, a guest in the house she paid half the mortgage on.
“You going to invite me in?” She canted a hip. “Or are you just going to stare?”
“I like staring,” I said. “But come in. I’ve been waiting.”
“I am.” She brushed past me, and I smelled his house on her—his soap, his scent. “I put out for lots of men,” she said, her voice dropping. “Maybe even you.” The words hung in the air between us before her eyes landed on the coffee table. She tipped her head. “Oh. Your anniversary?”
I heard her own taped voice in my head. You don’t have a wife.
“I’m without one at the moment.”
She smiled and kissed me. Redhead. Another man’s ring clicking against my jaw when she held my face.
The ring kept clicking. My hands found her ass and the weight of her breast and she pulled me in like she’d missed this part too, or like she was performing missing it. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t care.
When she broke the kiss she was already breathing differently.
“Bedroom,” she said. “We use protection, though. My husband and I are trying for a baby, and I want to be sure it’s his.”
The words landed in my gut and in my cock at the same time.
I followed her to the office. She took the disc and the jelly from the drawer like she was clocking in.
In the bedroom she stripped without ceremony and then made a performance of filling the cup, tilting it so I could see the gel, sliding it into herself with two fingers while she watched my face.
“I know I’m probably pregnant,” she said.”
“And you’re sure.”
She climbed onto our bed and lay back, knees up, and explained it like a status report.
Fertile since Monday. He’d filled her a few times a day, all week.
Thursday she’d tested and known she was ovulating, so they’d spent the day on it.
She tipped her hips the way she’d tipped them for him, demonstrating, so I could see how she’d held his come against the place it needed to go.
“Thursday was your anniversary, wasn’t it?” The edge was gone from her voice, replaced by something soft, almost consultative. “That’s the day I would have conceived,” she said. “With Steve.”
I crawled between her legs. She was wet enough that I didn’t need my hand.
“Be careful,” she whispered, when I pushed in. “His baby is probably in there.”
I lasted minutes. I came with a sound I was ashamed of and stayed hard anyway and took her again, fucking a woman in the wrong ring who talked like the math was already done. She came with her eyes on the ceiling, and I could tell she wasn’t all the way in this room.
After, she left the diamond on and talked to the plaster.
“If he knew I was in this bed with you, he’d kill our relationship,” she said. “I told him it was a final work trip I couldn’t get out of. He thinks this is all still a secret. He thinks you’re the clueless one.”
The red was still his. The voice was half in Springfield, back in his world.
“I cheated on my husband with you,” she said, turning her head on the pillow. “On the week he’s putting a baby in me. That’s worse than Davis. That’s worse than the nameless one. That’s his wife coming home dirty.”
* * *
The next day she washed the red out in our sink and put my ring back on her finger the way you close a window you’d only opened to check the weather.
She said she wouldn’t know until she missed.
A home test the day after a period that might not show.
Same as last time, she said, as if last time had been a drill.
Two more weeks of “business” trips. She came home talking about customers and strangers, always with the same footnote: not fertile, she was sure.
No Black guys—it was too much of a risk.
The disc with me. Always the disc with me.
I stopped asking to see the closet. She wasn’t hanging the calendar there anymore anyway.
We watched the days like a verdict. The morning her period should have started, nothing happened.
The next morning, the same. A taut silence stretched between us.
Last scare she’d been a day late, and the test had shown a single, unambiguous negative line.
Nothing was definite. She knew it. I knew it.
And neither of us said what we both knew: we had asked for this. For something definite.
Sunday night she stood in the bathroom doorway with her arms crossed under those tits and looked at me like she was about to file a report.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll pee on it in the morning.”
I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.
The souvenir wasn’t the SD card. It wasn’t even the ledger with the little heart next to BBC slut. It was the week she’d spent in another man’s bed, making something she might carry home inside her, and the silence in our house while I waited to find out if it had taken.
I slept that night with my hand on her stomach, feeling nothing but the slow rise and fall of her breathing, and I kept it there anyway.