Another Man In My Bed

It’s a Tuesday. The garbage needs taking out. I’m standing at the kitchen sink rinsing a plate, watching the water hit ceramic and spin down the drain in a thin, greasy spiral. Sarah is on the couch with her laptop, the blue light of some spreadsheet casting her face in that glow that means she’s working but not really working. She’s thinking about something else.

We’ve had six months of this. Six months since the corporate retreat, since Victor, since she came back to our hotel room at 4 a.m. with his cum drying on her thighs and told me, voice cracking, exactly how he’d made her feel. Little girl. The words still land in my stomach like something with weight.

Now it’s Tuesdays. Now it’s Thursdays sometimes. Now it’s me hearing about it after, or cleaning her up with a warm washcloth while she sits on the edge of our tub and tells me how he talks to her, what he makes her say. Now it’s me fucking her afterward with my eyes closed, pretending her moans are for me and not the ghost of his hands still on her skin.

“Mark.”

I turn off the water. “Yeah?”

She’s looking at me over the top of her laptop screen. Her hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she’s wearing my old Northwestern sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She looks like the girl I married, except something shifted at that retreat. A hunger moved in where something quieter used to live.

“I was thinking,” she says, and closes the laptop. Places it carefully on the coffee table. “What if he came here next time?”

The plate is still in my hand, dripping onto the linoleum. I set it down. The sound it makes is very small.

“Here,” I say.

“Here. Our place.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “His apartment’s getting complicated. Roommate situation. And hotel rooms feel transactional.”

“You want him in our bed,” I say.

She doesn’t flinch. “I want him in our bed.”

My cock is hard. It’s been hard since the word here. I don’t understand this about myself and I’ve stopped trying.

“You can stay out for the night,” she says. Soft now. The voice she uses when she knows she’s crossing a line. “Go see a movie, get a hotel room. Come back when it’s done.”

“Or?”

“Or you could stay.” She looks at the floor. “In the guest room. Or the living room. I don’t know. You could hear it.”

Hear it. The bed frame hitting the wall. Her gasps, the ones that don’t sound like mine, the ones that are higher, broken, involuntary. Him. What he says to her, the filthy, specific things that I know he says because she’s told me, and because I’ve begged her to tell me, and because I’ve come with my face buried in a pillow imagining his voice in my ear.

“I can’t do that,” I say. My voice sounds distant, like it’s coming from the hallway.

She nods. Just once. She knew.

We don’t talk about it for the rest of the night. We watch an episode of something I don’t remember. We go to bed at our usual time. She falls asleep with her back to me, one hand tucked under the pillow, and I lie there staring at the ceiling fan making its slow rotations, counting each one.

In the dark, I map our apartment from memory. Front door. The little table where we drop keys and mail. The hallway with the framed photos. Us at the lake, us at her sister’s wedding. The bathroom. Our bedroom. Our bed. I imagine him walking through each space. I imagine him using our soap. I imagine him opening our refrigerator, drinking our beer, leaving the bottle on the counter instead of in the recycling.

I imagine his cock in her mouth on our couch.