The First Time She Made Me Watch

Author's Note

Chapter 1

The water in the sink has gone cold. I don't remember when I stopped washing the dishes. My hands are in the water up to the wrists, the sponge is somewhere at the bottom of the basin, and Rae is at the kitchen table behind me, turning a glass of wine by the stem.

She hasn't said anything yet. She sat down ten minutes ago with that glass and told me she needed to tell me something, and then she just looked at me, and now I'm standing at the sink with my back to her because I'm a coward, and the water keeps running.

"You can turn that off," she says.

I do. The room goes quiet except for the drip from the tap. One drip. Then another. I count them. The dishwater is cooling on my forearms, drying into a film, and I'm counting the drips because counting them is easier than turning around.

There's a plate still in my hand. I don't remember what was on it. I set it down in the rack and the clink of it against the others is too loud in the quiet, and I can hear the kitchen clock in the space the clink leaves behind.

"I met someone," she says.

The words land somewhere between my shoulder blades. I don't turn around. I should turn around. A husband turns around when his wife says she met someone, because it probably means a friend, a client, a woman from the gym, and he looks at her face to read which one it is. I know all of that. I still don't turn.

"His name is Dominic," she says.

The stem of the glass taps against the table. A small, precise sound, and I hear the wine move when she shifts in her chair. She's nervous. I can hear it in the glass, not in her voice.

"He's a personal trainer. I met him through Jess."

Jess is her friend from spin class. Jess has been married twice. Jess is the one who told Rae, three years ago, that a woman should never do anything in bed she doesn't want to do, and Rae came home and repeated it to me like it was scripture, and I remember standing in this same kitchen and nodding along, because of course, of course she should never do anything she doesn't want to do. That was the whole point. That was supposed to be the whole point.

"How long," I say. My voice comes out flat, which surprises me. I didn't rehearse it. I didn't rehearse any of this.

"A few months."

A few months. I run the math in my head and then I stop running it, because I don't want to know what a few months contains. Tuesday nights when she said she was at spin class and came home with her hair damp in a way the gym showers never got it. Thursday mornings when she left early and came back smelling like a shower that wasn't ours, like soap I didn't buy.

"There's something else," she says.

I finally turn around. She's looking at me over the rim of the glass. Her hair is down. She always wears it up when she's working. She touches her throat with two fingers, the way she does when she's thinking, and I know whatever comes next is the part she's been turning over for a while, the part she's been holding in her mouth.

"Tell me," I say.

She sets the glass down. She does it carefully, like the glass matters, like the whole evening can be held together if she just doesn't spill anything.

"I've been doing something for him that I never did for you."

The refrigerator kicks on. I notice the refrigerator. The hum fills the silence while the sentence rearranges itself in my head, while my mouth opens and nothing comes out.

I know exactly what she means. That's the thing. I know before she says it, because there's only one thing she ever refused me with that particular look on her face — the one she has right now, which isn't guilt. It's the look of someone setting down a weight.

"Say it," I tell her. I don't know why I need her to say it. Maybe because I've imagined it for years and I need to hear it out loud, in her voice, so I know it's real.

"Oral," she says. "And I swallow for him. Every time."

Every time. The phrase is worse than the act. It means there's a routine. It means this isn't a thing that happened once in a moment of weakness. It's a thing she does now, the way she does her hair or takes her vitamins. It has a slot in her week.

And then, before I can stop it, the image is there: Rae on her knees. Rae's mouth open. Rae looking up at a man I've never seen, her lips around him, her throat working. I see it whole and exact for one half-second, and then I kill it, and it comes back anyway, and I can feel my own pulse in my throat and a heat low in my stomach I don't have a name for.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I'm standing in my own kitchen with dishwater drying on my forearms and my wife is telling me she does the one thing she swore she would never do, and she's telling me the way you'd tell someone about a new lunch place you tried.

"Three years," I say finally. "I asked you for three years."

"I know."

"You said it was demeaning."

"I know what I said."

"And now you—"

"Now I do it for him," she says. "And I like it. I didn't know I would. But I do."

The memory comes up fast, the way it always does, the way I've never been able to stop it. Our bed. Her hair spread on the pillow. The conversation I'd rehearsed for a week and then fumbled, and her answer, so gentle it almost didn't hurt until it did: Some women just don't. It's not about you.

It was always about me. I knew it then. I know it now.

And underneath that memory, older and harder to look at, the other one. Nineteen years old, outside a door I wasn't supposed to be near, Claire's voice through it: He tries so hard and it's just— no. Like a puppy humping a cushion. I fake it every time. I never said anything. I stayed eight more months. I told myself it didn't matter. And now I'm thirty and standing in my kitchen and learning that the thing I spent a decade trying to outrun was never behind me at all.

"Why are you telling me this," I say. It's not really a question. It's me trying to find the shape of what's happening.

She picks up the glass again. Takes a sip. Sets it down. Her throat moves when she swallows, and I watch it, and I can't not watch it.

"Because I'm not going to stop," she says. "And because he's coming here on Friday."

The refrigerator hums. The clock on the stove ticks. I stand there and let both sounds wash over me.

"Here," I repeat.

"Our apartment. Friday night."

"And what do you want me to do?" The question comes out before I can stop it. I already know the answer is going to cut me open and I still ask, because there's a part of me that has to hear it, that has been waiting to hear it for years.

She looks at me for a long time. Then she says it, and her voice is calm, and that calm is the worst part.

"You can watch or not. I don't mind either way."

The glass turns. The stem catches the light. My hands are dry now, and cold, and I can feel my own pulse in my ears. And lower, in the place I don't want to look at, a heat I don't understand and can't make go away. I feel it and I want to step away from it and I don't step away from it.

I should leave. I should say something about respect, about our vows, about the three years I spent swallowing the rejection and staying anyway. I should at least leave the room. I know all of this. I'm a smart man. I've been told I'm a smart man my whole life, and I'm standing in a kitchen listening to my wife tell me she's going to let another man use her mouth on Friday and I can watch if I want.

"What time," I say.

The word is out before I can catch it. It sits in the air between us like something I dropped, and I watch her face change around it, and I understand that this was the answer she was waiting for, that the whole conversation was a door and I just opened it for her.

Her smile comes slow. It's not cruel. That's the thing that gets me. It's not cruel at all. It's the smile she gives me when I remember to water the basil plant, the smile that says she expected me to do exactly this.

"Eight," she says.

She picks up her glass and walks out of the kitchen. Her bare feet make almost no sound on the tile. At the doorway she pauses, just for a second, and I think she's going to say something else, but she doesn't.

The refrigerator shuts off. The silence rushes back in, and now it's a different silence than before — emptier, the kind of silence a room makes when someone has just left it.

I stand at the sink until my legs start to ache. Then I walk to the table and pick up her glass and drink what's left of the wine. It's warm. It tastes like the inside of her mouth, the way it always does, and tonight that taste does something to me I don't have a name for.

I look at the empty kitchen. ...