We go to Wiley's

Sarah’s hands shook as she handed me the old phone, screen lit up with a single text. “Wiley wants to know if we’d come over this weekend. You know, like a visit.” There was a hopeful tremor in her voice, but also that pinch of anxiety she got whenever Wiley’s name came up. I wrenched my gaze away from the screen, found her face: beautiful, ****, and begging for my okay.

If I’m honest, the thought of stepping foot in Wiley’s house—his fucking lair, his childhood museum of loser energy and misplaced genius—made my stomach clench. I could see it in my mind already: Wiley, staring at Sarah with the same hungry, smug, entitled look I remembered from high school, his brain spinning up a thousand subtle little ways to make me feel like a guest in my own relationship. He probably did have, somewhere, a literal shrine to Sarah. Framed pictures, a lock of hair behind museum glass, a box of locket-pendant mementos labeled “Sarah’s Smile, 2014.” The idea was so fundamentally revolting that it circled right back around to being hot—perverse and dangerous in a way I couldn’t quite admit to myself. I wanted to see it, see if I could handle it, see if Sarah would do something that would prove she was only mine, even in the heart of his territory.

I had never been more excited, or more deeply in dread, for a trip in my life. A full week of anxiety had built up behind my ribs, humming like a second heartbeat, ever since Sarah had passed me that text and watched my face for disaster. Now, with the day of the trip upon us, time seemed to fold itself into weird, sick little loops. Everything that happened—Sarah packing, me going through my sock drawer, the way she kept checking the weather for the city where Wiley lived—was both excruciatingly normal and freighted with meaning. By 4 p.m., my nerves were so shredded that I started our drive with the radio blasting, my left foot tapping the floor mat until the rubber was almost worn smooth.

We left straight after work, Sarah in a long blue new over coat, me in the only jeans I owned that didn’t have a hole in the crotch. She had the GPS open in her lap, her thumb idly swiping the screen, and for the first half hour neither of us said a word that wasn’t directly related to driving or directions. She’d hum under her breath, or drum her fingers along the shifter, but the air in the car felt dense, pre-loaded with the knowledge of where this trip would end. Every twenty minutes or so, she’d turn to me and say something inane, like, “Remember that time Wiley tried to microwave an egg and it exploded all over the ceiling?” or “I bet Wiley’s still got that Star Wars Lego set.” Like that was what was making her heart race. Like she didn’t know that I could see her jaw clenching, her leg crossed and uncrossed, hands in her lap squeezing the phone so tightly the knuckles stood out white.

I pretended not to see it, and she pretended not to see me pretending not to see it. That was our dynamic: a long, slow game of chicken, each of us daring the other to admit we cared about this more than we wanted to let on.

But honestly? I drank it in. I loved the way she looked in the passenger seat—her cheekbones lit up by the passing semis, lips parted in concentration, thighs pressed together because she always ran cold and wouldn’t let me turn the heater down. She was beautiful, but not in some gauzy, distant way. She was beautiful in the way a knife is beautiful: sharp, impossible to forget once you’ve felt it, and always a little bit dangerous.

We both knew that hidden under the over coat she was wearing the sexiest dress she owned.

—

That morning, she’d spotted it, a dress the color of antique silver, so thin and insubstantial that it looked poured, not sewn, onto a body. She fished it out of the closet with a sheepish grin and held it up, letting it ripple and catch the sun like a flag. “I should wear this for the Wiley,” she said, and waited for my reaction, eyes narrowed. “Or is that too on-the-nose, you think?”

I could tell she was joking, and she had no intention of actually bring the dress with her, by the way she giggled as she turn to but the dress away. But after seeing the dress I blurted out “Yes you should”

She froze. For a second, the bravado slipped away, replaced by something softer, almost stricken with vulnerability. “Now look who is joking,” she said, trying to pivot away, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off my face. When she realized I wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling—just locked in, deadly serious—she swallowed, hard.

“Wait—you’re not joking. Liam…” Her voice drifted off, thick with implication.

She looked down at the dress, running her fingers over the straps with a thumb’s worth of hesitation. “I bought that for, you know, the night we get engaged,” she said quietly.

Oh boy did it hurt thinking about him seeing her in a dress she picks out for that special moment, but that pain made me want her to wear it even more. “Ok… if that the case it should be the first thing he see you in.”

She stood there, dress in hand, trying to read my face. Then she smiled, closed-mouthed, and gave a little nod. “Okay,” she said, so softly it was almost a dare. “Maybe I will.”

She hung the dress over the chair, and for the rest of the day it was there, a silent fourth presence in the apartment, watching and waiting to see if either of us would blink.

—

The house itself was the first blow. When we pulled into Wiley’s neighborhood, past row after row of bland but perfectly kept lawns, I could feel Sarah’s posture change, see her steel herself for whatever old memories and resentments would be waiting on the doorstep. We were so far out in the suburbs that the air tasted faintly of fertilizer, and the houses weren’t houses so much as accidental palaces—every one with a driveway big enough for a fleet of rental cars, a mailbox you could use as a safe room, and windows that glared down with the cold, unblinking confidence of a thousand mortgage payments being made on time.

But Wiley’s house was the monster at the end of the block. It was modern in that aggressive, magazine-cover way, a low slouching thing draped in glass and matte-black siding, all sharp corners and expensive stone, as if cut from the same tectonic plate as every other rich kid’s resentment complex. It reminded me of a high-end art gallery, or a dentistry practice for the ultra-rich—a place designed less for living than for impressing upon visitors the sheer, unrelenting inevitability of its owner’s taste. When we stepped out of our car, the battered Honda looked like a stray mutt lost at the Westminster dog show.

Sarah was the first to speak. She leaned over the center console, her nose almost touching mine, and for a second her voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it. “Liam,” she said, “before we go in, I want you to know: this is for you, okay? Despite everything… Despite what happened, he still like a brother to me, and if you didn’t want this, I would be very happy to never sleep with him again.” She took a strand of hair behind her ear as he waited for my answer.

But my voice didn’t have the strength to speak, so I just nodded. With my confirmation in hand, she handed me her blue coat. The gesture was unceremonious, but when she shrugged it off, the dress underneath made my brain short-circuit. The silver fabric caught the last of the sun, liquid and dazzling, turning the inside of the car into a disco ball. It hugged her body so closely it looked more like an optical illusion than a piece of clothing.

She let me look for a full five seconds—long enough for my pulse to spike, for my mouth to dry, for the bottom to drop out of my confidence—before she motioned for me to ring the door bell.

Wiley answered the door with all the bluster and immodesty I remembered from high school: barefoot, underdressed, and already a little bit sweaty, like he’d just run a marathon on the treadmill and couldn’t be bothered to towel off before greeting his guests. He was still fat—fatter, even, than the last time I’d seen him, which was the week before Sarah went to college and I lost her for the first time. His cheeks were a kind of cartoonish cherub-pink, and his glasses had gotten even wider, as if they were actively trying to shield the world from the **** of his eyes. He wore a T-shirt from an ironic science conference (“Nobel Prize Afterparty 2018”), and a pair of gym shorts that had seen better centuries.

But the thing that struck me most was how instantly he zeroed in on Sarah, like I was a coat rack or a pizza delivery guy standing nearby for ambiance. “Sarah-bear!” Wiley sang, his voice a weaponized falsetto, and he gathered her up in a hug that was less a greeting and more a full-body siege. His arms locked around her waist and pulled her tight, so tight the silver dress wrinkled at her hips. For a moment, Sarah’s head fit perfectly under his chin, her hair fanned across his collarbone, and I watched her body go from rigid to yielding in the space of a single breath.

She made a sound—half laugh, half yelp—then let herself melt into the embrace, her arms reaching up to clutch the back of his hoodie. There was familiarity in the way their bodies settled, a choreography that came not from sexual chemistry but from years of practice, like they were siblings who’d grown up wrestling each other for the last Pop-Tart. I told myself it was nothing, but I could see the way he grinned down at her, the way her lips quirked up at the corners, the way she blinked rapidly, as if the moment was too much, too fast.

Wiley held her just a second too long, then released her with a little flourish, like a magician revealing the final card in a trick. Only then did he pretend to notice me.

“Liam!” he said, and for a brief, nauseating instant I thought he might hug me, too. But instead he stuck out his hand in a parody of masculine solidarity, as if this were an awkward business conference instead of the most loaded social call of our collective adult lives. I shook his hand, and he gave it a single, exaggerated pump, then pivoted back to Sarah as if I’d already evaporated from the narrative.

“Come inside, come inside!” Wiley chirped, opening the door wide, and ushered us into a foyer. “Here let me tour of the place.” Everything he showed us was near top of the line if not top of the line, as if he wanted to show off how much money he had made since high school.

I trailed after Sarah and Wiley, trying to keep my eyes off the way her dress moved with each step, but it was like staring into a solar flare—painful, addictive, impossible to stop. Wiley led us through the house at a breakneck pace, pointing out renovations (“I installed all the smart glass myself, you know—it’s UV-tinted and self-cleaning!”) and trivia (“That’s a real Banksy, or so the guy on eBay swears”). Every room was a curated shrine to one facet of his brain: a “reading nook” with a thousand dogeared manga, a server closet lined with blinking routers and modems, a living room with a TV so massive it looked capable of broadcasting directly into Sarah’s amygdala.

The kitchen was the crown jewel, a radiantly sterile expanse of granite and steel, with a fridge the size of a small moon. Wiley motioned for us to sit at the island, where he’d set out an array of hors d’oeuvres that looked like they’d been flown in from a molecular gastronomy convention. He poured Sarah a glass of wine, then poured himself one, but didn’t bother to pour me anything at all. I counted the seconds until he’d address me directly.

“So, how’s teaching?” Wiley asked, finally flicking his gaze in my direction. Not “How are you?” Not even “What’s new?” He wanted me to know he remembered I was a high school math teacher, and that it was the single least impressive line on my resumé. My answer caught in my throat, and I managed to grunt out something about standardized testing and principal drama, but he was already pivoting back to Sarah.

She smiled at me apologetically, then sipped her wine and laughed at all of Wiley’s jokes, even the ones that required footnotes. It was like watching an improv troupe where I’d been cast as the straight man, and the other two actors were having a reunion special without me.

Dinner, at least, was good. Wiley cooked, which surprised me; he’d always been the type to burn a Hot Pocket and call it a meal. But the food he made was genuinely excellent—pasta handmade, sauce subtle, flavors layered so perfectly it was unfair. I wanted to hate it, but I couldn’t. I watched Sarah eat and recognized the pleasure on her face, the way her eyes closed as she tasted something genuinely transcendent. It was like Wiley had gotten a head start on adulthood and left me scrambling to catch up.

After dinner, we migrated to the living room, where Wiley put on a movie and dimmed the lights with a swipe of his phone. Sarah curled up next to me on the leather sectional, her knees tucked under her, the dress pooling out in a puddle of silver. But she kept glancing over at Wiley, who’d sprawled out on the floor like an overgrown cat, arms behind his head, taking up an extravagant amount of space.

The movie was indecipherable, but I pretended to follow the plot, if only to avoid the sense of being a third wheel in my own relationship. Every time Sarah laughed, I felt it in my molars. Every time Wiley made a joke, Sarah responded before I could even process the punchline.

It was only after midnight, when Sarah yawned and announced she was ready to turn in, that Wiley addressed the sleeping arrangements.

“Liam, I put you in the main guest room. It’s the one with the biggest bed. Right next to the master.” Wiley grinned, as if this was a benevolent gesture instead of a calculated move, and for a second, I wondered how much he actually knew. The way he lingered on the word “master,” the way his eyes flickered just past me, as if Sarah and I had already become background noise. She and I exchanged a glance—hers was anxious, mine probably more so, as we both wondered if he already knew I like listening to them fuck. He must of have notice the look because he eventually speaks up “Oh… ah the only thing I ask is that the walls are thin and I am a light sleeper so please keep it down.” Which ease our fears of being discovered

The next morning Sarah tells me to be a good guest and make breakfast for everyone. While I am making breakfast, I overhear them talking

Wiley “I honestly don’t see what you see in that guy.”

Sarah laughs “and that why I am dating him and not you.”

Wiley continues to argue “But your parents don’t even like him.”

Sarah “There is a lot of things I like that my parents don’t.”

Wiley “I think you should really value the opinion of the people that care for you”

Sarah “I do… But they need to value what I feel in my heart.”

She than walk around the corner and see me staring right where they were talking causing her to blush.”Oh shit you heard.”

“Yes I heard…