10. Plus Sign #2
I was ready. That was the job. Her needs at home were tempered by whatever she had already taken on the road, and I still showed up for the leftover like it was a shift I had asked for.
I fucked her with the travel skirt shoved up and a condom on, and she came talking about Steve not knowing, and I came talking about nothing, because there wasn’t a sentence left that wasn’t already in the room.
* * *
The following Friday, a small box sat on the kitchen table when she got in from the office. Inside was a short silver chain with a single charm: a Queen of Spades. She turned it in her fingers, a dubious look on her face that was also an invitation.
“For when you’re traveling,” I said. “It’s a signal. The right men will know what it means.” I let the implication hang in the air. “The ones who look like the guy in the picture.”
She asked why I wanted her to fuck Black guys so much.
I told her the truth, which was that I still had the picture of her with the nameless one, and it was my favorite thing I owned that wasn’t a person.
She looked so slutty with his dick in her mouth, eyes up at the camera, ring in the frame.
I told her it was one of the screensaver images on the office TV now.
I had put it in the cloud album with the pictures I had taken of her — the wedding-adjacent ones, the lingerie ones, the leftover ones — and now that one lived with them, cycling past our faces like it belonged there.
She agreed to try. She kissed the charm like she was trying it on as a personality, then she made me put it on her in the hall and walked to the bedroom wearing nothing else so I could see how it sat on her when she was already used.
A new picture showed up in the album the next morning. I found it the way you find a bruise. Steve, from above, her rings in his back. I didn’t ask where the rest of the roll was. Asking had already been classified as homework.
* * *
The next week she was gone two nights. No contact. I stared at the paperwork in my office, not doing it and the slut-wife slideshow running because I am who I am, and because the house is too quiet when she is in another city wrecking someone else’s quiet.
New frame. I sat forward. Hotel lamp. My wife on all fours. One man buried in her, another in her throat, both giving the camera a thumbs-up, a souvenir from a trip I hadn’t booked. Wedding ring in the shot. Charm at her throat. Belly just starting to argue with the bedspread.
I made a sound I was glad nobody was there to hear. I came in my fist looking at that one picture, and then I stayed in the chair waiting for the door, the slideshow turning her over on the wall like a product.
***
When she walked in I didn’t let her put the bag down first. I met her in the hall with my voice already wrecked.
“The necklace worked.”
She was wearing it. The charm sat in that hollow like it had always lived there. She smiled and hefted her breasts, which were larger by the week, milk starting its argument early, and said, “It wasn’t just the necklace.” She had to flaunt it.
She led me to the office, where the slideshow was still running.
“I wanted you to see the proof while I told you,” she said.
“Tuesday night. Two of them in the lounge. Both checking for wedding rings.” She started unbuttoning her blouse, her eyes on the screen.
“I was fucking horny. I knew what you wanted. So I walked past them on the way to the ladies’ room.
” She paused, her fingers on a button. “I touched the charm, made sure they saw the ring. They smiled.” Her lips curved with the memory.
“I almost came in the stall just from that. But I didn’t. A professional decision.”
On the way back they stopped her. Nice necklace. She said yeah, my husband got it for me. They grinned like that was the password. One asked if she had a name.
By then she was naked in our office, helping me out of my clothes, the slideshow throwing her used body over both of us. She went to her knees on the carpet we had picked out when we still argued about color.
“I told them I didn’t have a name,” she said, looking up, the charm against her throat. “I did have a room.” Before she took me in her mouth, she added, “So now you have the pictures and the videos.”
When she came up for air she left her mouth against me and said the part she had promised to say, the fog she wears now on purpose.
“Those two don’t get a name either. Steve doesn’t get them.
He thinks this pregnant belly is a closed project.
” She smiled, unfocused, the lounge still lit behind her eyes.
“I cheated on him with both of them. Wedding ring in the shot and everything. If you tell Springfield I took extra miles this week, I’ll deny it and still come on your hand. ”
I lasted about a minute in her mouth. She swallowed like it was part of the report and stood up and put me in a chair facing the TV.
* * *
She opened the laptop on the desk and found the videos in the cloud herself. Two files. She wanted to watch me watch. She sat on the arm of the chair with her hand in my hair and hit play.
The file opened on a hotel bedspread I would never touch.
A man on her I would never meet. She was already coming, a raw sound I knew better than my own name.
The cameraman laughed and pushed closer, capturing the gone look on her face—the same vacancy she reserved for Springfield.
My breath hitched. On screen, the man inside her grunted that this pussy loved Black dick.
She managed a wrecked “yeah,” not a performance.
He told the lens he was going to nut her.
“Come in me,” she begged. He did. The camera stayed on them, on his cock pulling out, wet with both of them.
“Damn,” he said. “That some good pussy.” The other one said, “My turn,” and the file ended, leaving the door ajar.
I made a sound. She tightened her hand in my hair.
She reached over and stopped it. The office went quiet. The slideshow had already started again behind the player: her mouth, her ring, a stranger’s hand.
She pulled me out of the chair before I could say anything that would make it smaller.
She put me on the carpet and got on me with the proof already inside, leftover as always, and I pictured those two still in her from a day ago and tried not to last long enough to embarrass myself.
She came talking about Steve not knowing.
I came with my face in the shirt she had worn on the plane, which still smelled like hotel laundry and the lounge.
After, she left the laptop open. She wanted the files there. She wanted me to be able to open them when she was gone again.
* * *
I met her for lunch that week, a gesture to prove she was more than fuel.
In the elevator on the way out, crowded with her coworkers, she put a hand on her stomach.
One of the men clapped me on the back. “Must have had fun making that one,” he said.
I smiled. In the car, she looked at me, giddy.
“They have no idea it isn’t yours,” she whispered.
“That’s the best part.” She wanted me to come back, to play the part again, but the performance felt thin.
The plus sign didn’t need a weekly tour.
* * *
A Saturday in the third month I came into the office and found a cheap frame on the wall next to the TV.
Company letterhead. Her name. Client retention.
A bonus number that made my stomach do something unhelpful.
She was in the doorway behind me in the shirt, the letters tight across tits that had gotten serious, a belly you could see if you knew to look.
“Whore of the Year,” she said, proud of the joke and the money both. “None of them mind paying more as long as they get my pussy or my mouth. HR thinks I’m a closer. They’re not wrong.”
She tapped the frame. “For closing the Davis Corporation account.” She saw the look on my face and laughed. “Come on. Mr. Davis? The one I crawled to on my hands and knees? Cunt for Commission?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. There had been so many, but I remembered it as one of the first - maybe the first - client.
“Sales leadership is so impressed I finally landed him they want me to teach a class on my technique.” She smirked. “They can practice the blowjobs, I guess. But the rest of the team lacks certain key assets.”
I looked at the plaque and then at her. I asked, once, out loud, the stupid question I had been carrying since the plus sign, if she was going to leave me. Whether Springfield was going to become the house and this was going to become the hotel.
She made a fond, dismissive sound and came into the room, putting my hand on the belly again.
“I love you,” she said. “I have no reason to leave. I just love the thrill of cheating.” She used the word cheating, not playing, not our thing. Cheating. On Steve, when she told it to me. On me, when she told it to herself in a hotel mirror. Both, and she didn’t bother to separate them anymore.
We stood there, my hand on her stomach. On the wall, the plaque gleamed next to the slideshow of her mouth, her ring, her body.
The letters on her shirt stretched tight.
Not my husband’s baby. The plus sign had turned into a person under my palm, a souvenir she brought home while still putting other men in the car like the tank would never be full.
Steve still didn’t know. He was going to meet his son in March, and I was going to stand in that room and hold her hand. In our office, her award gleamed on the wall. Her mouth cycled past on the screen, a silent promise of the wait, and I was already hard.