11. Save It for His Father
eleven
Save It for His Father
Wendy didn’t travel in the last month of the pregnancy.
The company let her sit at a desk and keep the accounts warm, and she came home every evening with a belly that had stopped being a secret and started being a person.
The first time she tipped her head at the bedroom I thought she was joking.
She wasn’t. She put my hand on the place where Steve’s son was stretching her from the inside ...
and looked at me like she was waiting for me to fail a test.
I found out I wanted to fuck her every time I felt him move.
It was a stupid, animal thing. Each kick under my palm when I was in her was a reminder of the ranking, a dare to come hard enough to reclaim something.
She let me. She liked it, too. She’d smile like she was letting me in on a joke I was also the butt of, and say something about his father saying hello.
I’d finish into plastic and stay there with my hand on her belly, a man guarding a door that was already wide open.
March eighth lived on the fridge calendar in her handwriting, and in a thread of texts with Springfield I was not allowed to read, and in the way she stood sideways in the bathroom mirror and looked at herself like she was checking a job.
Steve still thought the shop was closed.
Steve still thought he was the only one who had been in her bare.
The extras had stopped for the last stretch — not because she had gotten careful, but because the belly made the lounge a different kind of attention, and she said she wanted the last weeks to belong to the one who had put it there.
I did not argue. I had asked for the ranking. Living in it was the rest of the work.
***
Her water broke at home in the early morning, on the kitchen linoleum, while I was pouring coffee like it was any other day.
For a second we both stared at the floor.
Then she laughed, one short burst, and said it was time, and I put the mug down and got the bag we had packed three weeks early because she is a planner even when the plan is somebody else’s son.
I don’t remember much of what we said in the car.
I remember her hand on her belly and the way she breathed through a contraction at a red light, and the way I was hard under my seatbelt the entire drive.
The hospital took her from me at the doors with a clipboard and a wheelchair, erasing me from the equation, and then later they let me back in...
wearing a gown that was supposed to make me look like a father, and I stood at the business end of the bed with her hand crushed in mine and watched my wife push another man’s baby out of her.
They pulled him out. They handed me scissors.
I cut the cord and thought, with a clarity that would have looked like love from across the room, that I got to evict the little bastard.
He only got to borrow her, the way his father did.
She still came home to me. The scissors were just the punctuation.
I spent the time watching my wife’s body, torn open and then emptied, marveling at how both Steve, and now his baby, had left her gaping for to me.
They shooed me out while they cleaned her and the baby.
I waited in a hallway where someone had left a paper cup on the floor and I kept looking at it, thinking I should pick it up, and then not picking it up.
A little while later they led me to a room where she was sitting up in bed, flushed, wrecked, beautiful, with a double room and the other bed empty, which felt like luck we hadn’t earned.
***
“Hey,” she said when I leaned in and kissed her. She tasted like effort and hospital water. “That was quick, according to the nurse. I got lucky. Did you watch? What did you think?”
I chuckled. If I didn’t make a sound, I was going to say something the walls would remember. “I got my wish. I watched another man destroy your pussy.”
Her smile turned slutty, the one she puts on when she wants the room to know what we are. “You saw another man’s son destroy my pussy. Just like his father did when he put it in me.”
Her eyes flicked past my shoulder. I turned enough to see the nurse in the doorway with the baby, ready to present him for nursing.
The look on the nurse’s face said she had heard the last two sentences.
Wendy’s gaze came back to mine — excited.
I gave her the smallest nod, confirming that I felt the same.
The nurse entered, looking confused and uncomfortable, and helped fasten the baby to Wendy’s breast. He latched like he had been practicing.
Milk. The wet sound of it. Wendy glanced at the nurse over the top of his head.
“Did you want to ask something, hun? Looks like it.”The nurse swallowed.
“Um. Do you need any changes to the birth certificate?”Wendy let the question hang in the air, tasting the nurse’s discomfort.
She shrugged, all innocent. “We’ll be putting my husband’s name on the birth certificate, if that’s what you mean.
”I knew. She knew. Wendy was getting off on not giving her the truth.
I could see it in the flush on her throat, in the way she held the baby a little tighter while she lied.
The nurse turned to me. “You’re okay with that?”
I was so hard I had to sit on the edge of the bed. “Sure,” I said. “Anything she wants.”
The nurse gave her own wedding band a quick rub and left. The door clicked. The room was ours again, and the baby’s, and Steve’s in the only way that counted.
Wendy smiled and winked at me, still flushed from the performance. “That was fun.” Then she looked down at the boy on her breast and went quiet for a second, ...and for a flash, her expression turned soft. Uncomplicated. A look I hadn’t seen since before Steve.
She shifted the baby and hissed. “Ouch. He attacks them just like his father.” She looked up at me, still pink from the lie. “You want a taste?”
“No. I’m sure it’s great. Just not for me. Save it for his father.” Milk has never been my kink, and I wasn’t going to start pretending now.”
She held my eyes when I said it. Something moved behind hers that wasn’t the show and wasn’t the arousal.
She nodded once, small, and went back to watching the boy empty her, and I sat on the edge of the hospital bed with a hard-on under a gown and a wife who had just used a nurse as a mirror, and I understood that the delivery room had not been the end of anything.
It had been the start of the part where the souvenir had a face.
***
They released her the next day. We drove home in a car that suddenly felt too small and too quiet, the boy in a seat we had installed facing backward, Wendy in the passenger seat with a pad between her legs and a tank top already damp at the nipples.
I carried the bags in. She carried the baby.
The house smelled of us—stale coffee and laundry soap.
It did not know yet what we had brought into it.After we got settled — bassinet, diapers, all of it — Wendy sat on the couch with him asleep on her chest and looked at me like she was about to ask for a favor she already knew I would grant.
“Go out,” she said. “Beer. Two hours. Steve wants to visit. He wants to see his baby.”
I stood there a second with my keys in my hand.
The hospital bracelet was still on her wrist. I said so.
She was insistent the way someone is when they have already decided and are only waiting for you to catch up.
She said he’d been waiting for this day longer than I had, which was true in a way that still hurt.
The boy should meet his father. Alone. I took my keys.
I kissed the top of her head and the top of his.
At a bar three miles away I sat in front of a beer I didn’t taste and watched the clock like a man serving a sentence he had written himself.
About two hours later the text came. OK to come back. I paid and drove home under the speed limit because I did not trust my foot.
The baby was sleeping in the bassinet. Wendy was on the couch in a different tank, smiling, the particular post-Steve softness I had learned to read years ago. The house smelled faintly of his cologne under our detergent.
“How did it go?” I asked, not sure I wanted the inventory.
“Oh. He was so excited to see his son.” She said it bright, teasing already, the way she gets when she has something in her phone.
“I love how they look so alike. Especially in the eyes.” She shifted, reached for the device on the cushion.
“And he still loves these.” She tipped her chin at her chest. “Wait. Just a sec.” She flipped through. “Here.”
I took the phone. The first picture was father and son on our couch, the boy asleep on Steve’s chest, Steve looking at the camera like a man who had been told to pose and didn’t mind.
Ordinary. Almost. I felt the shock go through me anyway.
The second picture was not ordinary. Wendy looking up at the lens with Steve’s cock in her mouth, wedding ring on the hand that held him.
The bassinet was out of the shot. I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She watched my face. “See? He likes sucking your wife’s tits as much as his son does.” She glanced at the bulge in my pants and held my eyes. “Does that make you horny? Another man feeding off me in our living room, two hours after we got home from the hospital?”
I didn’t answer with a word. She took the phone back and studied the picture herself, almost fond.
“I certainly got a belly full.” She ran a thumb over the photo on the screen, a lazy, satisfied gesture.
I couldn’t form a word. There was a roar in my ears, and the room felt like it was shrinking to the size of that picture.
“So he’s going home now?” I finally managed.
“No.” She held my gaze when she said it. “He’s staying overnight. He’s going to stop by in the morning before he heads back. I’m going to need you to leave again for a while so we can be together.”
My stomach did the churn it always does. I nodded because nodding was the job, and because I had stood in a delivery room yesterday and cut a cord that belonged to him, and because she had lied to a nurse for the thrill while his son emptied her.
“Save it for his father,” I had told her in the hospital.
She had. She was still saving it. I took my keys off the hook again and went out into the evening with the picture of his mouth on her burned behind my eyes, and I understood that the damage in this marriage was not done.
The souvenir had a face and a name and a father who still thought I was the clueless one, and my wife was going to keep putting miles on the rest of the car while that stayed true.
I sat in the driveway for a minute before I started the engine. Through the front window I could see the lamp on in the living room. She was still on the couch. She did not look lonely. That was the point, and the problem, and the thing I had asked for.