12. In His Spot #2
This time she knew I might be there. I could not swear to it.
She looked at the door once while he had her tits in his mouth.
She said, for the room or for me, that her milk was just for him and his son.
“I make my husband watch while the boy feeds,” she said, “and I get so horny imagining if you could see him too.” Feeding him.
Feeding a man I am not related to, in my husband’s bed.
She moaned and threw her head back and I stood in the hall and took it, thinking: feeding a man I am not related to.
When he told her panties off, slut, she smiled and said the doctor still had her waiting a couple more days.
He asked if I'd had her yet. Not since your baby came out, she said. He looked around our bedroom like he was seeing the joke of it, the marital bed, the chance to be the first inside her after she had pushed out a child that wasn’t mine, and he asked if that made her horny.
Yes, she said, hand already on herself. “So what are we going to do?” he asked.
I wanted her to keep the doctor’s line and I wanted her to break it.
She looked at him for a moment — I could not see her face but I knew the pause — and then she moved her hand.
“Come here,” she said. She let him be the first man back in after the delivery, in our bed, while I watched through a crack I had made for myself, and when he came he said maybe he had just put Stevie’s brother in her, and he would love to knock her up in her husband’s bed, and she said that would be so dirty, and that she didn’t think she could get pregnant for a couple of weeks, and then he went back to her tits while I retreated to the office again, where I sat down on the floor.
When she came in later in a robe and sat down and asked how much I had seen, I told her enough.
The part where she let him be first. The part where he hoped he had knocked her up and she agreed.
The part where she said she was such a slut.
I asked if she really wanted him to put a baby in her in our bed.
She opened her mouth and closed it. I told her he might have done it just now.
I might have watched another man put a baby in her, in our sheets.
I stepped toward her. She stood. I smiled so she would stop bracing for a fight.
“That is probably the sluttiest thing I could ever imagine,” I said. “I didn’t know you had it in you, and I’m genuinely delighted that you saved it for me. You’re like my own personal porn star, and I love that you’re all mine.”
She smiled, relieved, and smirked. “Well. Not all yours.” She undid the sash and shrugged the robe off one shoulder, then the other. “My cunt is open to almost anyone, and I am always horny.”
I laughed and kissed her and said I hoped it stayed that way. We used the bed after he had used it. The ranking held. Steve did not know I had been in the hall. That was still the extra turn, the one I turned over in meetings like a coin.
* * *
The next couple of months had a shape I could live inside. I had the boy. She had the miles.
One Thursday she texted from a Hampton off the interstate: Full. Hurts. Don’t wait up. An hour later: He helped. Then a picture, from the neck down, a stranger’s mouth on her, milk on his chin, her wedding band in his hair. No face. She knew what I needed and what she couldn’t send.
She walked in after midnight smelling like hotel soap and somebody else’s cologne.
I was on the couch with a bottle warming in a mug of tap water.
She kissed me with a mouth that had already been used and took the bottle out of my hand and checked the temperature on her wrist like a mother, and then she sat on my lap in the dark and told it.
Lobby bar. A man from the conference who had been staring at her chest through the last session.
She mentioned they hurt. He offered. She took him upstairs on the understanding that her husband was at home with the baby and did not get a vote.
He was careful with the milk and not careful with the rest. She let him finish in her mouth because the doctor still had her on paper for another week, and because she liked sending me home with the part of him I was allowed to have.
“Steve doesn’t know,” she said, into my neck, like a punchline she never got tired of. “He thinks these are for him and his son.”
I finished against her hip while the bottle clicked in the mug. She laughed, fond, and went to the bassinet.
That was the shape. Springfield when he could make the drive.
Clients and hotel bars when he couldn’t.
A sentence about pressure and a hand on the ring, and the room arranged itself.
She came home and told me in the kitchen while I heated the next bottle.
I did not need the log. I needed the Thursday.
Some nights I fed him myself on the couch and talked nonsense at a face that just looked back. Bottle tonight. Mommy out. The joke sat in my head and I did not say it. I smiled into the dark of the living room and hated how much I meant it.
I never said the word to him. Thinking it was enough. It kept me company for years.
* * *
One afternoon I came home to a card on the kitchen table with my name on it in her handwriting.
Pink envelope. The deja vu hit before I had the flap open.
Anniversary card. SD taped inside. Play me.I sat hard.
The camera was already cabled to the TV in the office.
She had set it up herself this time, which meant she had planned it, which meant the first tape had not been a one-off.
I put the card in and hit play with a hand that already knew what came next and watched anyway.
Our office. She backed away from the lens into frame.
Red hair again, the Springfield color. The old thin top stretched over tits that looked almost obscene now, faint dark circles where she was already leaking through the fabric.
His diamond on her hand. The bassinet was in the other room.
You could hear a monitor tick once and then she ignored it.
“Hello, Doug.” Same bright cruelty as the first tape. “I wanted to let you know that you’ll once again be without a wife on your anniversary. Little Stevie and I are going back to our home. My husband is waiting. He can’t wait to spend time with our baby.”
She smiled like the word husband still delighted her.
Our home. My husband. I made myself keep watching.
“We’ve decided Stevie needs a little brother, so we’ll be working on that now.
” She turned her hand so the rock caught the light.
“I’m going to let his father put it in me all week. Bare. The way a wife should.”
Nipples dark against the top, she leaned in to kill the recording and almost whispered the last line. “Oh. If the nice Black conductor is working this trip, I might let him help with the pressure. Steve doesn’t get a vote.”
The screen went black. I sat in the office with an anniversary card on the desk and a hard-on and a silence that had a shape I already knew.
I did not text. I did not call. I had learned that part.
I drank. I used my hand to the tape until the week had a hole in the middle of it.
I went to work and came home and the house was just a house, and I waited.
It was an agonizing week, the same flavor as the year before and worse, because this time I knew the ending and I still could not stop the spin.
When she came home she was carrying the beginning of Steve’s second son like she carried any decided thing, already past the question of it.
She kissed me in the hall and put my hand on her stomach and said the roulette had clicked full this time, and I nodded, and I was hard, and I was the husband who waited downstairs.
I knew what the years were going to look like after that.
I started looking at listings. More bedrooms. A yard.
And, because I am who she made me and who I asked to be, I drew a radius on the map that put us closer to Springfield.
Close enough for a work husband to drop by.
Close enough for a high-mileage wife to keep the miles climbing.
The souvenir would learn to walk. Another one would come after.
And I would be in the driveway with the formula and the ranking and the word she had put on me in our bed the night she decided not to pretend anymore.
Cuckold. Number two. The man who holds the baby while mommy feeds somebody else. I had asked for it in a kitchen a long time ago. She had delivered. The odometer was still turning—she was still logging miles between her legs. I had no intention of asking her to stop.