The crucifix at my throat felt hot against my pulse. The music below was thudding through my heels. And I was twenty minutes from another man’s hands on me with my husband’s blessing.
I checked the lock on Becca’s downstairs bathroom door. Took a breath. Looked at the woman in the mirror who I had been trying not to see for six years.
The black dress was Daniel’s idea. He had said it last week from the dark side of our bed at one a.m. with his mouth at the back of my neck, the way he always said the dangerous things. Wear the trouble dress, baby. And see if anyone looks at you the way I used to.
He had meant it as a kindness. We had stopped touching each other in the daylight years ago. The cuckold thing had started as a question two years back, after one of the long Saturday wine nights when we had finally said out loud that we were not fucking enough anymore. He had asked, quietly, if I had ever thought about another man. I had said yes. He had said, even more quietly, that he had thought about me with one. Since then, it had lived in our bedroom, in the dark, in the moments when we needed something to make us reach for each other again. It was supposed to be bedroom talk.
I touched the silver cross at my collarbone and tried not to think about my mother. The crucifix had been my confirmation gift. I had been an altar girl until I was fourteen. I had said the rosary every night until I was nineteen. Then Daniel happened, on a futon in his off-campus apartment, and I stopped. I had not worn the cross to bed with him since the night sex became something we did in the dark. But I wore it to parties. I told myself it was for my mother. I knew it was for me.
I looked at a woman who was bored. Six years bored. The kind of bored that walks past her wedding photos in the hallway and does not look at them. The kind of bored that wears the trouble dress to a friend’s birthday party because her husband whispered it to her once in the dark and she did not know what else to try.
Four vodka sodas in.
I could not tell if I was four drinks of brave, or if I had finally stopped pretending I had not been hungry for this since the day Daniel whispered it to me.
I did not want to know.
I left the bathroom.
Connor was at the kitchen island when I came back through.
He was older. Fifty maybe. Broad-shouldered with the kind of dead-tired quiet that men carry when they have recently lost something they were not done with. He was nursing a warm beer he had stopped tasting. He looked like he was at the party against his will. He looked like he wanted to go home, except home was not a place anymore.
I knew, the way you know things you should not, that he was the one.
I crossed the kitchen for a refill I did not need. He shifted half an inch to make room at the island. I felt my wedding ring catch on the lip of the granite as I poured. I did not look at it.
“I should tell you up front.” He did not look at me when he said it. His voice was low, just to me. “I do not usually do this. I am two months out of a fifteen-year marriage. My sister-in-law dragged me here. I do not know a soul in this room. But I am two beers from doing something I will hate myself for in the morning. If you walk away right now, sweetheart, you save us both a lot of trouble. I have a daughter your age. Probably. I am asking you to walk away.”
I should have walked.
I touched the cross at my throat instead.
“My husband,” I said quietly, “would want to know about you.”
Connor turned his head and looked at me for the first time. Slow. His eyes had the kind of warm that the worn-down men have when they have finally decided to be reckless about something small.
“Then tell him about me.”
I left the kitchen without finishing the drink.
I texted Daniel from the top of the stairs.
Can I call you?
His reply came before my thumb had left the screen.
Of course, baby. Always.
I slipped into Becca’s guest room and shut the door. Slid the lock. Lowered myself to the edge of the bed, still in my heels, with the crucifix burning at my throat, and Daniel picked up on the first ring like he had been waiting in the dark with the receiver against his cheek.
“Talk to me.”
His voice was steady for one breath. Then for half of the next breath I heard something move underneath it. A tremor. He caught it before the third breath came back.
“Daniel.”
“I’m here, baby.”
“You sound scared.”
A long pause. He did not pretend.
“I am scared. I am a lot of things right now. Tell me what’s happening.”
“There’s someone here,” I said. The words came out too fast. “Daniel. There’s someone here and I think he’s the one and I don’t know if I’m allowed to want it and I don’t want to do a single thing without you saying it. Out loud. To me.”
Another careful breath.
“Tell me about him.”
“His name is Connor. He’s older. Fifty or so. He’s two months out of a fifteen-year marriage. He told me up front at the island. He told me to walk away. He said he had a daughter my age and he was asking me to walk away.”
“And did you?”
“No.”
The pause on his end was the longest of the night so far.
“Baby.”
“Yes.”
“If you do this, we don’t get to come back. You understand that, right? We can decide together what comes next, but we don’t get to pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t get to put it back in the box.”
“I understand.”
“I want you to. God, I want you to. I have been wanting this for two years and I am sitting here on our bed right now with my heart in my mouth because I am scared of the man I am going to be on the other side of it. I am scared of who you are going to be in the morning. I am scared we are going to look at each other across the kitchen tomorrow and not know what to say.”
I started crying without meaning to. Quiet, so the party could not hear me through the floor.
“Daniel.”
“But baby. If you want him.” He stopped. Took a breath I could hear him needing. “If you want him, then go get him. Do not lie to me about a single thing. Not one. Promise me. And keep the phone on. Not for a second do you hang up. I want to be there. I want every word he says to you and every word you say back.”
“I promise.”
“I love you. I’m proud of you. I’m afraid of you. All of it at once. Go open the door.”
I texted Connor with my free hand.
Top of the stairs. Last door on the right. Five minutes.
The reply was two letters.
OK.
Five minutes felt like five years.
When the soft knock came I almost did not stand up. My legs were not entirely mine. I crossed to the door, turned the handle, and Connor was already in the frame with one hand on the wood and the other in his pocket and a look on his face like a man who had decided to do one bad thing and only one. He saw the phone in my hand.
The corner of his mouth pulled down.
“Husband?”
“On the line.”
“Sweetheart.”
“I know.”
“I am not the man who does this. I told you. Two months out of a fifteen-year marriage and I came up here anyway, which tells you something about the kind of man I am tonight.” He looked at me for a long second — the dress, the hair, the makeup, all of it — before he looked away. “If your husband is on this phone right now, I will not do it in front of him. And sweetheart, and I say this with respect, I don’t know what’s happening in your marriage. But I am not a pawn in it. I am not a test or a dare or whatever you two have decided I am tonight. I am a person. Two months out of my own wreckage. I don’t have the constitution for someone else’s.” A beat. “I’m sorry.”
The air went out of my chest.
I felt Daniel hear it.
“Give me the phone,” my husband said quietly.
I held it out. Connor stared at me for a long second, then took it from my fingers like a man lifting a knife by the blade, and put it slowly to his ear.
I do not know what Daniel said.
I know that Connor listened for two minutes without speaking. I know his shoulders dropped halfway through. I know that whatever passed between the two of them was the most honest thing any two men had ever said to each other about a woman they both wanted to be inside of. I know that when he handed the phone back to me he was already stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him with the back of his heel and turning the lock with two fingers.
“Your husband told me,” he murmured, low, just for me, “that you have been bored for six years and he’s afraid he’s losing you.”
I closed my eyes.
“He’s right.”
“He told me to be careful with you. That you have not done this before. That you have not done anything before.”
“That’s almost true.”
Connor reached up with two fingers and touched the crucifix at my throat. Did not pull at it. Did not move it. Just touched it, the way you would touch a thing you knew you were about to break.
“We have to be quiet, sweetheart.”
“I know.”
“If you start to make a sound, you let me. I’ll help you.”
He set the phone carefully on the dresser, speaker up, and Daniel’s breath came through the small grille of it, present and patient.
Connor knelt in front of me, which was not what I had expected.
