That Day

I did, eventually, tell Sarah what was going on, though I spent a day and a half rehearsing ways to say it that didn’t make me sound like an irredeemable pervert. I ran through five drafts, scribbling them down in the spiral-bound notebook I’d used to keep track of our shared expenses, the first three of which Sarah found immediately and read before I caught her. The fourth was a voice memo I tried to record on my phone, which I then deleted in a panic, only to forget about the backup on my cloud account, which meant she got to listen to my cracked, whimpering voice admitting to the whole thing in all its self-loathing glory. In the end, though, I just said it, face-to-face, after dinner.

I stared at her across the table, the remains of our takeout stacked in greasy towers. I looked at her – really looked at her, with her hair in a loose, greasy ponytail, and her eyes ringed in black because she hadn’t slept, and the shadow of something like relief behind all her worry – and I just said it:

“I found you having sex with him sexy.”

She blinked at me, thin and tired and wary. “You mean, with Wiley?”

I coughed, suddenly mortified. “Yeah. I mean. I know he’s disgusting and I’ve always hated him, but… I don’t know, Sarah, I just do. Please don’t think I’m disgusting.”

She stared at me for so long I thought maybe the words had frozen in the air and physically failed to reach her. Then her mouth curled at the corners, the way it did when life handed her something so unexpected she couldn’t even decide if it was a punch or a present. She said, “REALLY?” with so much disbelief I felt like maybe I hadn’t said it out loud after all.

I nodded, red-faced. “Please don’t judge. I know it’s fucked up. I just—”

She cut me off, but not with anger. Her voice went soft, almost gentle, like she was brushing dust off a childhood memory. “oh… oh… oh. What about it did you find sexy?”

I groaned. I didn’t really know, except that I did. And the impossibility of it, the awfulness, made it more real and more urgent. “I don’t know!”

“So, would you find it sexy if I slept with other people?” she asked, but not in the way I’d have guessed. There was no heat or accusation, just honest curiosity, the way she sometimes asked if I’d still love her if she ever got a huge facial scar, or if she lost her mind and became a different person.

“No. I mean, I don’t want you sleeping with strangers, or anyone else.”

Sarah perched on the arm of her chair, legs pretzeled beneath her. She bit at her lower lip, knuckles pale where she gripped the ceramic mug. “So just Wiley?” She said it with a microscopic uplift in her voice, like she didn’t know if it was a joke or a **** sentence.

“Not—not exactly. I don’t know.” I hated how weak my voice sounded, the way it shrank into itself when it should have been a defense. “It’s not like I ever wanted you to sleep with him. I just… I’m saying that, when it happened, it made me crazy. Is that so weird?” My vision tunneled; I felt weirdly afraid, like she might stand up and just walk out and never come back.

She nodded, rapid and intent, as if that would **** the words to untangle themselves around us. “What about him—the whole thing—made it feel so sexy?”

I could see every version of myself, the way she must have seen me: Liam, the passive, the cuck, the emasculated. Wiley, the pervert, the fat slob, the interloper, basting my girlfriend in an aura of his own sweat. The image should have produced only revulsion, but it **** a hot, electric shiver through my stomach. “I don’t know, OK!” I said, “I just wanted to tell you about how I was feel. And now I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Sarah look at me, to my surprise she looked ashamed too, which made me feel ever worse as she said “Ok… but I want to talk about it later, I just need some time to digest it.”

She stood up, still in her pajamas, and padded off to her office. I heard the soft click of her door, and for a while all I could do was stare at my own hands, trying to spot what had changed in them.

An hour later I heard muffled voices through the drywall. At first, I thought she was on another work call, but the pitch—the rhythm—was unmistakable. It was Wiley. I couldn’t make out more than a few syllables, but he was definitely talking animatedly, and Sarah was responding in a voice so soft I almost didn’t recognize it. I tried not to listen, but the harder I tried the more I was infected by it, the way a nosebleed feels both itchy and wet inside your head at the same time.

The more I heard her talk, I realized she was talking to Wiley about me and what I just said. I hated that she found it easier to talk to Wiley about my deepest kink than to talk to me about it. I hated that I found that sexy, like I was the passive limb of some monstrous, involuntary thing. I hated that I could stop myself from pulling on my cock of the sofa, as a listen to them.

She walks in on my masturbating to her on the phone call. She smiles at me and gives me a thumbs up before turning around and walking back into her office.

She found me an hour later, fidgeting on the couch. Her face was blotchy in a way that meant she been debating this as much as I was. “Hey,” she said, standing over me with her hands in her sweatshirt pockets. “You want to talk?”

“I’d rather die,” I said, but I smiled as I said it.

She sat next to me, close enough that our knees touched through the fabric. “So, I did talk to Wiley. He’s really confused. He’s worried we’re going to hate him, or that we already hate him.”

I laughed, too loud. “Yeah, well. I can see how he’d get that idea.”

She nudged me. “But I think… I think we should try something.”

I swallowed. “What’s that?”

She shifted so she was fully facing me, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear in the way she only did when she was about to say something that would change my life. “I want you to tell me what you want.”

I snapped “CAN’T YOU SEE I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WANT!”

Her voice got soft “ok… ok.” There is a pause before she says “He said he has to come back in a few days to work on the company. I said he should stay here.” She looked at me as if she was waiting for me to say no but I had lost my voice. When I didn’t say anything, she says, “He will be here Monday night.”

Monday started like this: I was forty-seven minutes late to work, and my manager had posted my name on a whiteboard in block letters under the heading “Negative Examples.” When I asked why, he licked his thumb, wiped it along the board, and told me that if I wanted to be remembered for something, I should be careful what it was. Then he “assigned” me a new supervisor, which is to say he promoted the guy I’d just finished training myself. Kid only nineteen, at most, and every time he gave me an order he did it with a smile full of orthodontic hardware, like he was the sun and I was the patch of sidewalk his mother had just begged him not to piss on.

When I asked if this was permanent, my manager laughed and said, “Should’ve treated him better while you had the chance, don’t you think, Liam?” and then made a show of angling his jacket closed before walking off to the breakroom. I spent the rest of the morning running paperwork between departments, then spent the afternoon on punishment duty in the mailroom, culling out the spam and credit card offers everyone was too important to open themselves. The new supervisor made sure to walk past at least once an hour, ostentatiously timing me on his phone and making remarks about “poor productivity levels.”

After eight hours of that, I was so angry I couldn’t even fantasize about quitting, only about the things I would have done to the manager’s car if I ever had privacy and a hammer.

When I got home, it was a little after seven, and the house was already infected with the inertia of that particular Monday. The kitchen was empty, the living room was dark, and I could smell the undertone of Sarah’s shampoo and the faint, rotting mildew that had started in the bottom of the guest bathroom and now seemed to have spread into the drywall itself. I went looking for Sarah, but she wasn’t in her office, or the bedroom, or even on the porch staring into the vacant lot like she sometimes did when her day was extra hellish.

I found her in the guest room, sitting on the edge of the mattress with her knees drawn up to her chest. She was holding her phone to her ear, but when I walked in, she made a show of tapping “end call” and set the phone face down on the comforter. She smiled at me, but it was the tight, bruised smile of someone who’s just bit the inside of their cheek.

“Hey,” she said. “How was work?”

I shrugged. “Awful. Did that pig get here yet?”

Sarah shook her head. “He texted, said he’d be here at eight. He’s just waiting for traffic to clear.”

I flopped onto the bed next to her and closed my eyes, letting the mattress absorb the days’ worth of frustration. I could feel her watching me, the way she always did when she was holding something back and waiting for me to ask about it. But I was too tired to play that game, so I just lay there and waited for the sound of the doorbell.

He showed up at 8:06 exactly, but I knew it was him before he rang, because I heard his voice through the door. It was the same voice as before—too nasal, too eager, too much—but this time I didn’t open the door. Instead, Sarah did. She stood up, smoothed her hair, and walked barefoot through the hallway, arms folded over her chest, and for a moment I saw the faint suggestion of who she must have been when they were kids, and she was the only person in the world who saw him as anything other than a joke.

They greeted each other like distant relatives meeting at a funeral: a brisk hug, averted eyes, a fast retreat into their own bodies. For a second, Wiley locked eyes with me over Sarah’s shoulder, like he was daring me to say something, but I just nodded grimly and retreated to the kitchen.

We didn’t eat dinner together, which made it easier, but it also meant that the absence of a meal was like a blank space waiting for something to fill it.

The three of us ended up in the living room after, Sarah on one end of the couch, me at the other, and Wiley in the armchair with his legs crossed and his hands folded on his stomach like a talk show host. We sat that way for nearly two hours, the only sound the occasional glug of Wiley draining his glass and the feedback-laced whine of the ancient TV.

When it got late enough that no one could pretend otherwise, Wiley stood and announced, “Well, I think I’m gonna call it a night. Got an early start tomorrow.” He turned to Sarah he was about to say something but instead they both give each other a silent awkward nod, before he walked off.

He shuffled off to the guest room, the door closing with a soft but deliberate click. Sarah and I just looked at each other, neither one willing to declare victory or defeat.

We got ready for bed in silence. Sarah changed in the bathroom first, emerging in a baggy T-shirt and the pajama shorts I’d bought her on a drunken Target run the previous Christmas. I undressed in the bedroom, pretending not to notice when she watched me from the bathroom door, face unreadable. We slipped under the covers, and for a long time neither of us moved.

As a stared at the roof, I found myself both impossibly happy and sad that nothing happened.

The next morning, Wiley was gone before I woke up. I found a note on the fridge with his handwriting, the same weirdly precise print he used in high school:

[Thanks for letting me crash here. You guys are the best. See you tonight.]

I stared at it for a minute, trying to figure out if it was a joke, or a threat, or both. Before I could decide, Sarah came into the kitchen, still in her pajamas, and started making coffee.

“Did he sleep okay?” she asked, not looking at me.

I shrugged. “He seems… fine.”

She nodded, as if she’d had the same thought. “Yeah. I know it’s weird. I just want everyone to not hate each other.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t. We went to work in tandem, showering at opposite ends of the morning and leaving for our jobs with ten minutes of staggered silence.

The day was a repeat of the one before: more petty errands, more thinly veiled humiliation from my new “supervisor,” more time to stew in my own bitterness and think about the possibility that the rest of my life would just be a slower and slower slide into irrelevance. I didn’t even bother packing lunch, just chewed breath mints and drank stale coffee until my stomach cramped.

After work Wiley walked in ten minutes after I did. As he enters the house he nervously says, “Hello Sara-bear” To both of our surprise she just says “Hello Wiley” back with no hesitation. Enough time must have passed since last time that him calling her that no longer bothered her.

They slowly start talking again. Talking leads to laughing. By Thursday night they were back to the way they were before they had sex.

Friday night, we were all in the living room, half-watching a movie and half-scrolling our phones. Around eight, Wiley stood up and stretched, which pulled his T-shirt tight over his fat stomach. He looked at Sarah and said, “Well, I have a bunch of thing to do in town tomorrow so I gotta leave first thing tomorrow morning if I want to be home before dark.”

I felt a deep, ugly relief, like someone taking a boot off my throat, but even as I registered the feeling I also noticed the hollow pit left behind. I didn’t want him here, but I didn’t want him to go, either.

Sarah chewed her lip for a second, then said, “We can’t have you leave without playing at least one game.”

Wiley’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, Sara-bear! Cards does sound fun.”

I grunted, trying to keep my voice even. “I don’t even know how many times I have to say this, but I don’t want to play anything with this fucking cheater.”

Sarah and Wiley both glared at me, the exact same expression I remembered from every group project they’d ever done together. Wiley said, “I am not a fucking cheater, Liam.”

I rolled my eyes, “Yes you ARE.”

There was a tense pause, and then Wiley leaned in, voice low and trembling with the conviction of someone who’d practiced this speech in the shower a hundred times. “Call me a cheater one more time.”

Sarah reached across the arm of the couch and put her hand on my wrist. “Calm down. Let’s just play one hand. Please. For me.”

I knew where this was leading, I could see it written on Wiley face. I shouldn’t want it to go where it was going, but my body scream for me to take it there, I shook my head, “NO, HE’S A CHEATER.”

Wiley’s face went blank for a second, and then, suddenly, he was on his feet, grabbing Sarah’s hand and pulling her up with him. She didn’t resist. She glanced at me as if to silently ask if I knew what I had just done.

Without another word, Wiley led her the down the hall, Sarah’s hair trailing behind her like a banner. The door to the guest room slammed open, and the sound echoed through the house, sharp and final. I thought they would close it but to my surprise they left it open.

I sat in the living room, staring at the imprint of their bodies on the couch. I knew what I would see if I just turned my head to the left ever so slightly and the knowledge curdled in my stomach, hard and sweet at the same time.

I know I shouldn’t want to look, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself from turning my head.

I told myself it was just morbid curiosity that kept me watching, that I was doing it as a kind of penance, or maybe field research into the masochism of nostalgia, but the truth was simpler: I wanted to see what I thought I hated. I wanted to see it all.

Wiley didn’t waste time. He barely even spoke. He just yanked Sarah’s hand until she stumbled after him, the two of them shadowed in the hallway light. I heard the mattress springs shriek in protest as he pushed her down, the awkward scuffle of bodies negotiating for space. He was angry and loud, narrating everything with a running commentary of curses—most aimed at me, a few at her, but always returning to the grudge that had been building since we were teenagers.

“Sara-bear, I am going to fuck you now because that fucker out there doesn’t know how to watch his month do you understand?” His voice cracked a little, halfway between taunt and plea, but Sarah answered him with a sound I’d never heard her make before. She was already breathless and unguarded, and the sound of her answering him, calling him by name, was somewhere between a confession and a dare.

It was a spectacle of mutual contempt and mutual need. Wiley, in his sagging underwear, looked almost comic, and his body moved with an uncoordinated shudder that should have been pathetic, but it wasn’t. Each time Sarah gasped or cried out, he’d twist back to face the open door, making sure I had the full tableau. At one point, he leaned Sarah halfway off the bed, her hair fanned across the carpet, and **** her to look into the hallway, daring me to catch her eyes. I could see her cheeks flush with heat and embarrassment, but she didn’t turn away.

He kept calling me out. “Hay fucker who is too stupid to know the difference between skill and cheating, You watching? Oh fuck yeah he watching. He probably thinks I am fucking cheating now…” There is a pause as he licks Sarah nipple causing her to moan before he adds “Hay fucker in case you don’t know, this is skill not cheating.” His hands were rough on her, and his voice, usually so whiny and weak, was now hard and sharp, like he’d spent years polishing these insults in the back of his skull.

It wasn’t tender, but it wasn’t too cruel, either—at least not in the way I expected. Sarah’s noises got louder, more ****, and Wiley responded by doubling down on the theatrics. He started to lose control, rutting into her with an almost frantic rhythm, sweat pooling in the folds of his stomach. He came fast, but when Sarah hissed that she wasn’t done, he went down on her with a raw, almost savage hunger, like he was eating victory out of her skin.

When it was over, they fell apart, breathing hard, their bodies damp and shining in the dull hallway light. Wiley flopped his fat body onto the mattress, and Sarah lay next to him, staring at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling in slow, even waves.

I waited until the house was dead quiet, until I was sure neither of them would see me, and then I drifted to the bathroom and locked the door. I stared at my own reflection in the fogged-up mirror, trying to understand if I was angry, or turned on, or just terminally lost. I guess the answer could be found in the fact that my jeans were covered in my own cum and I was still hard.

I slept on the couch and dreamed but what I just watched.

I wake with a pounding skull and a tongue like a slab of salt beef, the sunlight already burning a stripe across the room. My phone says 7:23. My body says it’s already tomorrow. I quickly look towards my bedrooms open door and no one is there. So, I turn to look outside and there they were: Sarah and Wiley, standing in the driveway. Wiley had his duffel over one shoulder and was doing that little nervous hop he did when we were kids, like he’d just realized he was late for the bus. Sarah was barefoot on the cold pavement, in her pajamas, her arms crossed tight over her chest. The day was already too bright and loud. I pressed my forehead to the glass, breathing shallow through my teeth.

I strained to listen. Wiley’s voice carried in that peculiar, nasal way that always made the hair behind my ears stand up. “I see you, well, you know, Sara-bear,” he said, his words mangled by nerves.

Sarah flinched, her entire body recoiling. “If we’re going to do this, please don’t call me that. Not after—”

Wiley looked like someone had just paunch him in the gut. He opened his mouth, seemed to change his mind, and then murmured, “Okay. Sorry.” His hand hovered in the air, then fell limply by his side.

They stood there for a minute in silence. Then, suddenly, Sarah did something that shocked me: she reached out and picked a piece of lint or fuzz off of Wiley’s jacket sleeve. The gesture was so domestic, so tender, that I had to look away.

When I finally looked again, Wiley was halfway down the driveway, head bowed, duffel bumping behind him. Sarah stayed there, staring after him long after he was gone. I watched her for a long time, in profile. She looked more tired than I had ever seen her.

It was at least five minutes before she came inside, and when she did she practically collided with me in the hallway. She stopped short, not meeting my eyes, and pushed past to the kitchen. The smell of fresh coffee hit me like a dare.

“Hey,” I said, my voice cracked and papery.

She didn’t answer at first, just poured coffee into a chipped mug and sat down at the kitchen table, curled up around her own arms. I poured myself a cup, black, and joined her, the two of us separated by a gulf of linoleum and the impossibility of ever having a normal morning again.

She puts her phone down and stares at me. For a second I think she’s going to cry, but instead she takes a hard breath through her nose and says, “Did you sleep at all?”

I shook my head. “Some. Not really. Did you?”

She softly whimpers as if she was unsure of herself. “Sort of. It was like—” but she doesn’t finish. She just pushes her mug away and looks at a spot on the wall like she’s trying to burn a hole in it.

We sat in silence. I took in her face, the dark circles and the puffy eyes, her thumb nervously picking at the rim of the mug. There was a little crescent of dried blood under her nail, and a fresh, white bandage wrapped around her knuckle. I tried not to imagine the logistics of how it got there.

I check my phone for notifications, then glance up and see her doing the same, and it’s like we both want to be anywhere but here but can’t figure out the next move.

Finally, in that thin air of only half-concealed shame, Sarah whispered, “Are you mad?”

The words were so small I almost missed them, lost as they were in the rattle from the refrigerator and the distant whine of a lawnmower ramping up somewhere down the block. I blinked, caught off guard; we’d spent years communicating without language, and now even this simple question sounded like a foreign threat.

“About what?” I asked, and it was almost comic how quickly the defensiveness came out—like my own voice wanted to throw itself in front of whatever accusation was coming.

Sarah pressed her thumbnail into the bandage on her finger. She looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to translate her thoughts from some other, less human language. “About what he said. When he was…” She trailed off, stuck in the boundary between what could be spoken and what should be kept sealed behind teeth.

I thought about Wiley’s voice, thick and ugly with anger and self-pity, the way it echoed from the guest room and through the cheap drywall. I remembered every syllable he’d spat at her, every time he’d said my name as a curse or a question, every time Sarah had moaned like she was trapped between wanting to run and wanting to be crushed flat. The memory was so fresh I could actually taste it—coppery and electric in the back of my mouth.

I let the silence go on a little too long. “I don’t know. I can’t say I’d normally like hearing him say those things about me.” I tried to joke, to lighten it, but my voice was brittle.

Sarah exhaled hard, and her shoulders hunched, as if she was trying to slowly disappear into her own ribcage. “But was it good?” she asked, “I mean, is it what you wanted when you said…” Her voice faltered and then just quit, like the sentence had slipped and fallen down a well.

I had to look away this time, as uncertainly and humiliation overcame me. “I don’t know, maybe,” I said. The word hung there, soft and infuriatingly noncommittal.

Sarah’s head snapped up, her eyes suddenly shining with something that was almost anger. “If I have to do this,” she said, and her voice cut through the morning like a crash of plates, “I NEED MORE THAN A MAYBE.”

I stared at her, unsure if I should fold or escalate. “YOU SURE AS HELL SOUNDED LIKE YOU ENJOYED IT,” I said, and it came out meaner than I meant. I watched as she winced, but I couldn’t stop myself. “For someone that’s being **** to do it,” I tacked on, and then hated myself for needing the last word.

For a long time neither of us spoke. We sipped our coffee and looked anywhere but at each other. Across the table, Sarah’s knee started bouncing in a nervous staccato. I watched the rhythmic pulse of her leg and wondered if it was adrenaline or something else.

Finally, in a voice so flat it was barely there, she said, “Did you at least—you know… to it.” She didn’t look up, just kept tracing a crack in the faded tile with her finger.

We both fell into silence for thirty seconds before she asked, “Did you at least you know… to it.”

I almost choked on my coffee. “Masturbate?” I said, and even the word felt weird, childish, like it should come with a health-class cartoon. “Yeah. All night.” It was true, but I said it like a dare.

She nodded, as if I’d confirmed a hypothesis she’d been brooding over the week. “Okay,” she said, and then, “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

We spent the rest of the morning orbiting each other in the apartment, careful not to touch, even more careful not to meet eyes for longer than two seconds. Every mundane thing—coffee, toothpaste, the squeak of the shower tap—felt like a hostage negotiation, some elaborate choreography designed to avoid an eruption.

We both stay silent as we got ready until right before we had to leave than she said “Last night after… well he said the company is a lot worse off than he thought. As a result, he going to have to come back almost every week for a while until he gets things straighten out.”

All I could say is “Ok.” I both didn’t want to ever see him ever again but also wanted to see him fuck Sarah again.

Wiley has to come back more often to keep the company live because it was worse than he thought.