Don’t Wait Up

Sunday evening. The light through the bedroom windows was going amber and long across the floor, and Jenna stood at the closet pulling things off hangers while James sat on the edge of the bed pretending to read.

“Diane texted,” she said, stepping out of her leggings. “Drinks at that place on Fourth. The one with the bad breadsticks.”

“On a Sunday?”

“She’s had a week.” Jenna stood in front of the closet in a thin ribbed tank and black underwear, scanning the rack for exactly the right thing to wear for exactly the wrong reasons. The tank was tight across her chest — no bra, hadn’t been wearing one all day, and her nipples pressed against the ribbed cotton in a way that made James’s hands curl against his thighs. She reached for a sage-green wrap top — fitted silk, cap sleeves, a neckline that sat high at the collarbone and draped close at the waist — and held it against herself in the mirror.

“Too dressy?”

“For Diane?”

“For breadsticks.” She hung it back. Pulled it out again. Considered. The green was good on her — it made her skin glow, made her eyes look darker. She pulled it on over the ribbed tank. Tucked and adjusted, watching herself in the mirror: the silk fell close to her waist and the wrap cinched her hips and lay flat across her stomach, and the neckline sat just below her collarbones, demure enough for drinks with a girlfriend, alluring enough for everything else.

She stepped into the skirt — black, straight, a heavy cotton that hit just above the knee and held close through the hip. Not pencil tight enough to confess anything, but close enough that when she zipped it and turned, the shape of her ass was simply there, high and full, impossible to dress past. She turned sideways in the mirror, then all the way around, watching it move.

“What do you think?”

James looked at her. She watched him take it in — the silk against her waist, the bare legs, and then, when she turned to reach for her bag on the chair, the skirt over her ass, and the way his eyes stuck there a beat too long before he found her face again. His throat moved. He looked like a man watching his wife leave the house already halfway gone.

“You look great,” he said. Thick. Not enough.

“For breadsticks,” she said, and smiled at him in the mirror.

At the dresser she lifted the jewelry-box lid as if choosing earrings — her body between his book and her hands — and palmed the thin gold chain from under the tangle, the movement small and practiced. The lid came down on nothing taken.

She went to the bathroom, the chain cool in her fist. Closed the door. Opened the vanity drawer, pushed aside the cotton pads and the concealer. The plug was in the back, washed and cool.

She held it in her palm and had the argument one more time. The short version: she was going to a man’s apartment to interrogate him, and she was about to put a plug in her ass for the occasion, and if she couldn’t explain that to herself she had no business getting in the car.

The long version she already knew. He’d find it. She could tell herself his hands would stay off her all night and it would be a lie before she’d finished telling it, and at some point his fingers would land on the silver base and he’d laugh — that low, delighted huff — and two words from this man would empty her head like a drained pool, and the empty was better than anything. Better than James’s praise. Better than closing Braddock. Better than almost anything she’d ever managed to give herself. Some switch in her was wired to pleasing him specifically, to being *good* for him specifically, and she hadn’t found the breaker box in weeks of looking. She was walking in with a list of questions. The questions were real. So was the plug. Both. That was the problem.

She hiked the skirt up around her waist and braced one hand on the counter and worked it in slowly, watching her own face in the mirror — the flush climbing her throat, her mouth coming open at the stretch, dark eyes gone soft and surprised at herself. She turned enough to see the rest: her own ass in the glass, cheeks framed by the rucked black skirt, the silver base seating flush between them. Cute face. Filthy posture. She hated how much she liked the woman doing this. It seated with that dense little pressure she felt in her molars. She smoothed the skirt down and took two experimental steps — each one a reminder, deep and secret — and the walk alone nearly changed her mind about leaving. *Answers,* she told the mirror. *You’re going for answers.*

The woman in the mirror was not convinced.

She uncurled her fist. The thin gold links, the looping script — out of the clutch that morning, into the jewelry box, now here. She worked the clasp — one try, two — and the word settled at her throat, cool for one second, then warm from her skin. She looked at herself. She was going to stand in that apartment and demand the whole truth while wearing the name he’d given her, in gold, where he’d put it — coined without asking, and that was the charge of it: a man who renames you is a man who means to keep you. The word at her throat was a claim, and the part of her she couldn’t argue with liked wearing it — liked being wanted on a scale that renamed things. He’d see the chain in half a second and he’d read it as surrender no matter what came out of her mouth. She tried to see it differently — armor, evidence, a flag planted on his field — and failed, and wore it anyway, because underneath all the framing the simple fact sat there: she liked pleasing him. More than she liked being right. That was the whole sickness in one sentence, and naming it had cured her zero times.

Timing. Diane’s drinks had a shape — out at seven, two drinks, home by ten with a story about whoever Diane was feuding with this month. That gave Ray forty-five minutes. Questions, answers, gone. She would not stay. She would not let tonight become the suite — five minutes of questions and then his cock in her mouth and the whole list of them swallowed. She’d get the truth, drive home, have it organized by midnight, and James would never hear a clock tick.

She checked the mirror twice. The chain didn’t show. Nothing showed. That was the point, and also the joke, and she didn’t laugh.

She came out of the bathroom.

James was still on the bed. His book was face-down on his thigh, unread.

She sat at the vanity. Mascara, a touch of color on her lips — nothing she wouldn’t wear for Diane, nothing that said more than *I feel like looking nice tonight.* She ran her fingers through her hair, letting the waves fall the way they fell.

“Maybe Ray will be there,” she said. Light. Casual. Watching his face in the vanity mirror.

His jaw moved. “At Diane’s drinks?”

“At the place on Fourth. He goes there sometimes. He mentioned it.” She capped the mascara. “Would that bother you?”

“Should it?”

“I don’t know. Should it?” She turned on the stool to face him. The skirt shifted above her knee. “Would you want me to leave if he showed up?”

“That’s up to you.”

“That’s not an answer, James.” He didn’t respond. She said it again, same words, same mild tone. “That’s not an answer, James.”

He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me what you’d want.” She crossed one leg over the other, slow, letting him watch. “Say he shows up. Sits down next to me at the bar. Buys me a drink I didn’t ask for.” Her voice stayed light — the drinks-with-Diane voice, which was the cruelest part. “Do I drink it?”

“Jenna.”

“I’m asking.” She slid off the stool and came and sat beside him on the bed, close, her knee touching his. “What if I let him walk me to my car after. What if I let him kiss me up against the driver’s side door in the parking lot, with people coming out of the restaurant walking past us. Would you want me to stop him?”

His jaw worked. She watched the pulse going in his temple.

“Or maybe we don’t leave at all.” She leaned in, mouth near his ear, her hand landing light on his knee. “Those booths in the back, the ones with the long tablecloths. What if I slide under the table while he’s ordering us another round and take out that big cock and suck it right there — waiters walking past, people eating breadsticks three feet away — and I swallow all of it and climb back up and wipe my mouth and nobody at the next table knows anything.” His thigh went rigid under her hand. “What if I text you after. A little note. *Guess what I just did.*”

His breathing had changed. She let her eyes drop — the grey sweatpants weren’t hiding anything — and then come back up to his face, and she let him catch her checking.

“You’d be hard,” she said. Not cruel. Almost gentle, which was worse. “You’d read it standing in the kitchen and you’d be hard before the end of the sentence. Mad, sick, hard. All three. That’s why I’m asking, baby — because *you* don’t seem to know what you want me to do if he shows up, and I think you should know before I leave.”

“Jenna—”

“So when you tell me *that’s up to you*—” she stood, did a couple of small adjustments to her collar, making sure the name he’d given her was hidden against her throat “—you understand why that isn’t an answer.”

He met her eyes. He looked like a man running calculations he didn’t want to finish. “Have a good time,” he said. “Whatever it turns into.”

“Whatever it turns into,” she repeated. Held his gaze for two full seconds. Then she smoothed the skirt, and picked up her bag.

He followed her down the stairs, down the hall, to the front door. She paused with her hand on the knob. The hallway was narrow and he was behind her and the distance between his body and hers was eighteen inches and she could feel him wanting to say something — a pressure in the air, a charge building.

“Jenna.”

She turned. He was standing in the hallway in his socks and a grey t-shirt and weekend stubble and his eyes were red-rimmed and his jaw was tight and his hands were at his sides and his fingers were curling and uncurling against his thighs. He looked at her face.

She saw the question in him. In his shoulders, in the set of his feet, in the way his weight had shifted forward half an inch as if he wanted to close the distance his mouth couldn’t cross. The hour. The outfit. The skirt she never wore on a Sunday. The way she’d said *whatever it turns into* and not flinched. Something in him was pushing against the door he’d been holding shut since November, and she could see the effort it took to keep it closed.

“Have fun,” he said.

She kissed his cheek. “Don’t wait up.”

He held the door for her. She walked to her car and backed out of the driveway and he stood in the doorway with the porch light on and his arms at his sides and she watched him shrink in the rearview mirror until she turned the corner and he was gone.

---

James closed the door. Leaned against it.

He had almost asked. The question had been right there — a live thing in him, pushing — and he had swallowed it. He had watched his wife choose a skirt and a silk top and put on makeup for what she said was Diane, and she had floated Ray’s name like a lure on the water and he had let it drift past him without biting.

*Stay warm. Stay in front of her.*

Ray’s logic. Ray’s framework. The man who was fucking his wife had given him a set of instructions and James was following them. He could dress it up as strategy — going cold now means she notices, going cold now means she asks questions, going cold now means the whole cover starts to tear — and underneath the dressing it was simple. He was afraid. He was afraid of the truth and he was afraid of losing her and he was afraid that those two fears pointed in opposite directions and there was no version of courage available to him that didn’t cost him everything.

Mike Reeves was sleeping in a guest room in Erie because Laura had walked out a door one Saturday morning and driven to a man who wasn’t her husband and Mike hadn’t asked where she was going and hadn’t asked when she came home pink and different, and the not-asking had gone on for five months and by the time Mike asked the answer was already packed in boxes.

James was Laura — the lying, the months of it. And he was Mike — the not-asking, the door held open and the eyes held down. He’d known it since the night he helped Mike label boxes with a Sharpie and carried the cracked wedding photo to a storage unit with orange doors and listened to his best man say *the lying is the affair, James. The rest is just bodies.*

He was standing in his own kitchen holding a door for his wife. Inside himself he was holding the same door shut.

He went to the kitchen. Opened a beer. Stood at the counter looking at the herbs on the windowsill — the basil, the rosemary, the thyme — and drank it in four swallows and opened another.

He went upstairs. He told himself he was getting a sweatshirt.

Her clutch was on the bench at the foot of the bed where she’d left it Friday night. He opened it. A lip color, a receipt folded in half, mints loose in the bottom. No chain. He put everything back the way it was, the way she’d trained him to without ever knowing she had.

The jewelry box on the dresser. He lifted the lid and moved the tangle of earrings with one finger, carefully, the way a man handles something he intends to leave no mark on. Studs, hoops, the pearls from her mother. No thin gold links. No looping script.

He stood there with the lid open.

She’d worn it at the benefit. He’d found it at two in the morning with Ray’s cum dried on the *B*, and he’d said nothing, and she’d never known he knew. Now it wasn’t in either of its hiding places, which meant it was out of the house. On her. Under the wrap top — the neckline that sat high at the collarbone. He’d watched her turn in the closet mirror twice, and adjust her collar standing by the bed. He’d thought she was checking the fit.

The vanity drawer. Cotton pads, concealer, a spare razor still in its packaging. Behind the pads, where the plug lived — the medium one, the one that had been in her bag in Dayton — the space was empty. Washed and cool and gone.

He closed the drawer. The patterns were loud when they broke, and this one was screaming: his wife had put another man’s name for her around her throat and what was effectively another man’s toy inside her body, and walked out their front door saying *Diane*, and he had held the door.

He took his phone from the nightstand. He opened the folder — three screens deep, no label — and looked at the photograph. Jenna’s face, tipped up. Dark eyes. Swollen lips. The thread of saliva catching light. Ray’s cock pressed against her cheek, thick and dark, her hand wrapped around the shaft, her fingers not closing.

That face. His wife’s face. The one that smiled over coffee mugs and remembered the server’s name, looking like porn, looking *pleased* about it. He knew what the camera didn’t show — what she’d looked like from behind while that mouth was busy, ass up, knees wide, the rest of her offered. His cock kicked hard enough that he had to put the phone face-down.

He put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down.

She was in the car right now. Or at the bar. If there was a bar.

*What if I let him walk me to my car. What if I slide under the table. Guess what I just did.* When she’d said them, an hour ago, he’d heard the game — the voice she used in bed, the fuel, the teasing that was just talk until it was in a voice memo. That was the agreement. That was what it always was.

Now the words played back differently. *The booths in the back. The ones with the long tablecloths.* He’d never been to the place on Fourth. He didn’t know if there were booths, or tablecloths. She did. She’d described the room like a woman standing in it.

Stop. He put the phone down.

The chain was out of the house. The plug was out of the drawer. Those were facts, and facts pulled scenarios behind them like a wake. If she was really at Diane’s table, then the chain was under the silk where Diane couldn’t see it — which meant she’d worn it for no one, or for someone who wasn’t Diane. And if she wasn’t at Diane’s—

He saw it anyway. That was the hell of it. His wife on a barstool with another man’s name for her warm against her throat. His wife against a driver’s side door in a parking lot with people walking past. His wife under a table with her mouth full, waiters going by three feet away, coming back up and wiping her lips and nobody knowing. He couldn’t tell if he was imagining it or remembering it — she’d described all of it, in detail, in her own voice, an hour before she walked out, and he’d sat there and gotten hard and called it teasing, and now he couldn’t find the line between the game and an itinerary.

He did not touch himself. Not because he didn’t want to — his cock was hard against the cotton of his sweatpants and his hand wanted to be there. But if he touched himself now, to this photograph, while his wife sat somewhere with that man’s name on her throat and that man’s plug inside her, he would be finishing the act the photograph had started. He would be the thing the Reddit thread said he was, with no accident left to hide behind. And that would be the last step he could take without admitting what he was.

He went downstairs and opened a third beer and sat in the armchair and stared at the TV without turning it on and waited for the sound of her car in the driveway.

---

See video of first chapter inspired by the story here: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/sharpdarkkhakiflicker

Next chapter (equivalent in length to 5-9 posts here), newsletter for updates, and discord server for discussion/ai video in my profile link.