Sarah acts

“Oh, hey, Sarah,” he squeaked, making awkward eye contact for exactly half a second before dropping his gaze and scanning the floor tiles. “Um thanks for letting me stay here again… But it was a really long day, I am really tired, so do you mind if I head off to the guest bedroom.”

Sarah intercepted him with a tentative hug. Wiley braced himself like someone expecting to be tasered, and when she pulled away, he stood blinking, mouth twisted in confusion, as if affection were a foreign currency he’d never quite learned to spend.

“Nonsense,” Sarah said, brightly. “You’re not sleeping in there tonight.”

He blinked again, slowly this time. “Wait, why not?”

Sarah chewed her lower lip, glanced at me for support (I offered none), and then blurted: “Because after your last blind date, I realized you need to, um, relieve some stress before you go.”

Wiley’s eyes went wide. His hands immediately started fidgeting with the strap of his messenger bag. He said, “You mean get drunk first? I can do that. I brought a flask—”

Sarah shook her head, hair shining in the overhead light. “No, not that kind of stress. I mean…”

Wiley nervously interrupted “So a like massage?”

Sarah “No not a massage either…” she paused, searching for the right word, “something a bit more intimate.”

Wiley stared, deadpan. “So, like, a prostitute?”

I could see Sarah’s face start to crumple, her resolve wilting. But before she could answer, I barked, “Yeah, Sarah, a prostitute would work just fine.” I meant it as a joke, a last-ditch wedge to pry the moment back into reality, but the bitter note in my own voice caught me off guard.

I could see Sarah hating back the urge to puke as she ignored me, locking her gaze on Wiley with a weird, almost maternal intensity. “No, not a prostitute. You need someone who actually cares about you. Someone who’ll make you feel good, not just… not just take your money and run. You need to feel wanted, not used. A prostitute would just take your money and leave you more pent up than when you got to her.”

Wiley gave a nervous little giggle, the kind he used to do in class right before getting humiliated by a teacher. “So… what, I’m going to have sex with you again?” He said it like a joke, like he was reading the punchline from a script no one else had seen.

Sarah smiled as she hid her gag, but her eyes were glassy and hard. “Yeah,” she said, “that.”

He started laughing. “Good one, Sara-bear.” He made a little finger-gun gesture at her, then at me, like he was doing an impression of someone who used to be good at this kind of thing. “You guys are the best.”

Sarah kept smiling as her hand clenched her dress. “I’m not joking, Wiley.”

His laughter dried up in an instant. He looked at her, really looked at her, as if he was picturing what she looked like when he fucked her last time. “Wait, what?” Wiley said. The word strangled itself in his throat.

I had enough of this. Talking it out anymore and she wouldn’t be able to hide her discomfort from Wiley, so She said nothing. She just led him by the hand down the hallway, her face set with an expression I couldn’t read, equal parts resignation and courage. Wiley shuffled after her, shoes scuffing the hardwood, leaving me alone with the buzz of the fridge, the hum of the streetlight outside, and the **** knowledge that by the time they came back down the hall, the world would have changed in some subtle, irreversible way.

I sat there, staring at the blank TV, hearing muffled voices from the bedroom. For a while the only noises were awkward shuffles and the rise and fall of old house creaks, but eventually the sounds shifted: a soft gasp, a nervous giggle, the kind of half-whispered apologies that made my scalp prickle. I tried turning up the TV, but everything felt staged and artificial—reality TV filtered through a funhouse mirror, while the only show I cared about was happening offstage.

I fiddled with the remote for fifteen minutes, jabbing the volume higher and higher until the TV threatened to vibrate itself off the stand, and still I could not drown out Sarah moaning Wiley’s name through the rafters. I must have cycled through every channel known to man. The gentle coo of a hospital drama, the canned cheer of a sitcom laugh track, the **** monotone of pre-dawn infomercials. None of it worked. Always, in the fissures between dialogue, I heard the distant percussion of Sarah’s voice—sometimes soft, sometimes sharp, but always there, haunting the cheap drywall and the pinked tips of my ears. Just when I thought the final credits of the night had rolled, there would come another round: Wiley’s grunting about him cumming, high and sudden and so raw. And then a muffled commotion, as if the very furniture was scandalized. I poured myself a whiskey, then another, then sat with my head in my hands, doing the math on how long it took to ruin a person and whether I’d passed that point years ago.

When Sarah finally emerged, to my surprise it was nearly dawn. Only then did I realize how much time had past with my just sitting here staring at the pointless tv. They fell asleep together in my bed after having sex, and I didn’t sleep a wink. She padded barefoot into the kitchen, her hair wild at the ends, her blouse half-tucked and inside out, with Wiley putrid smell radiating off of her. She didn’t even glance at me as she filled an enormous glass with tap water and drank it down in three long gulps. I watched her shoulders, the slow, shivering motion of them, as if she’d just come in from a rainstorm rather than an unusually passionate night with an old friend. I wanted to say something—anything—but my mouth felt glued shut by the residue of what I knew and what I couldn’t bear to know.

She turned her back to the room and leaned both hands on the counter. For a full minute she stood like that, unmoving, and I recognized the pose: the way my mother used to brace herself against the kitchen sink when she thought no one was watching, right after the divorce papers came in the mail. The pose of a woman who’s just done some irreversible arithmetic.

At some point, Wiley shuffled in after her. He wore a shirt that had once been ironed and was now hopelessly crinkled. His hair, which never looked good at the best of times, jabbed out at odd angles like a battered dandelion. He blinked at me with red, watery eyes and gave a little wave. The blue half-moons under his eyes made him look both ancient and newborn, and he smelled faintly of sex and cinnamon roll. Not bad, I thought, if you can’t have dignity, at least you can have a signature scent.

There was an awkward exchange in the kitchen: Sarah wordlessly handed Wiley a cup of coffee, and he accepted it with a kind of reverence, as if she were officiating a private mass. They didn’t quite look at each other, but their orbits were unmistakable. Close enough to set each other’s molecules humming. I imagined the two of them as magnets—attracting, repelling, endlessly circling, bound by physics none of us had signed up for.

Wiley retreated to the guest room, pulling the door shut behind him with a gentleness that was probably intended as an apology. For a while the only sound in the house was Sarah’s breathing in the kitchen, deeper and more deliberate than usual, as if she was practicing for a marathon or a funeral. I wondered if she’d been crying. I wondered if I was supposed to go in there and pat her on the back, or if I should move to a different zip code and just let the place burn down behind me.

The minutes bled together. Sunlight crept over the backyard fence, painting the living room in a new kind of yellow. I noticed Sarah’s shoes, one kicked under the coffee table, the other resting neatly by the door. I tried to make this mean something, to build a metaphor about chaos and order, but at that moment I couldn’t see past the cheap green carpeting and the stale air.

Eventually, Wiley reappeared, freshly showered and wearing the only other shirt he owned. He looked bizarrely well-rested, and for a second I hated him for the ease with which he inhabited his own skin. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, hesitating, then coughed. “Um. Sara-bear?” he started, voice rickety but determined, like a shopping cart with a sticky wheel.

Sarah’s back was to him at the counter, one hand absently worrying the rim of a coffee mug. She didn’t turn around, but the set of her spine changed: a single, silent twitch betrayed her. “Wiley, please,” she said to the tile grout, each syllable a sharp bead on a rosary of regret.

He winced, as though the correction had physically struck him. “Oh. Sorry. Sarah,” he said, drawing out the a, giving it almost a reverent hush, the way you might say someone you must respected name. “I better head out. Don’t want to be late for my date.” The last word seemed to linger in the kitchen air, syrupy and uncertain, daring someone to say it wasn’t real.

Sarah finally half-turned, revealing just enough of her face that I could see her post fucked face. She managed a tight smile, surprisingly happy smile “Good luck,” she said, and then, after a second, “I mean that.”