Say It in Daylight

For a year she had been telling her husband about another man, only in the dark, and only in the one voice of hers that ever moved.

At twenty past five the man on line four had been pushing on his wife's chest for six minutes, and Darlene Dwyer had been counting with him for every one of them.

"One, two, three, four," she said. "That's good. Hard and fast, right in the middle of her chest. Five, six, seven, eight. You're doing it right, Wayne."

"She's not—" He was breathing like a man who had run up stairs. "She's not doing anything."

"I know. That's why you're doing it for her. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Don't stop to look at her face. Keep your arms straight."

On the screen in front of her the address sat in its little box — a farmhouse out on Gilchrist Road, eleven miles from the nearest station — and under it the unit times ticked over in green. Medic Two, en route, four minutes out. Three. She did not tell him three. Three minutes was a long time to a man on his knees on a kitchen floor, and a number he could not do anything about was only a weight. What she gave him was the count, because the count he could use.

Her braids were pulled back in a low ponytail, tight at the nape so they sat clear of the earpiece, and the reading glasses hung on their cord against her breastbone where she had let them drop an hour ago. Twelve hours since six that morning. Her lower back had stopped complaining at about two and moved on to a dull, settled opinion. None of that was in her voice. Her voice was the one thing in the building that did not get tired.

"Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Is the front door unlocked?"

"I don't—"

"You don't have to go check. Keep pushing. They'll come in the back if they have to. Sixteen, seventeen."

At the console beside her Pat Syverson had a hand up, the flat of it toward Darlene, which meant I've got your other lines, don't look at me. Pat had been sitting next to her for fourteen years and had never once said anything that could be put in a hand.

Medic Two, on scene. The green went white.

"Wayne, I need you to listen. I can hear them on the radio. They're pulling in your driveway right now. You keep pushing until somebody puts a hand on your shoulder and tells you to stop. Not before. Twenty-one, twenty-two."

She heard the door. She heard boots, and a woman's voice that was not his wife's say Sir, we've got her, sir, and then a sound out of Wayne that she had heard a thousand times and that had no word attached to it, a sound like a man setting down something he had been carrying too far.

"You did everything right," Darlene said. "I'm going to let you go now."

She released the line. She did not get to know how it ended. Nobody on this floor ever did, unless it made the paper, and she had stopped reading the paper about the third year.

Pat swiveled halfway round, pushed her own glasses up into her hair on their beaded chain, and looked at her over nothing. "You good?"

"I'm good."

"You want coffee? It's the bottom of the pot. It's mostly opinion."

"I want to go home."

"Forty minutes," Pat said, and turned back to her screen. "Then you can want whatever you like."

The relief came on at six. Darlene logged off, unhooked the headset and coiled the cord around her hand the way she always did, and walked out into an October evening already gone thin and gold, the light lying flat across the county lot. She sat in the car with the engine off for a full minute, which was also something she always did. Then she pulled the elastic out of her hair, shook the braids loose down over her shoulders and drove north.

The north side of Oakvale was ranch houses and basketball hoops over garages and lawns that men on riding mowers had all cut on the same afternoon. Theirs was the brick one with the white trim and the maple that dropped its leaves in the gutter every year as if it had a grudge. Twenty-one years married, eighteen in this house, and the mortgage had eleven to go; Greg could tell her to the month and generally did. No children. They had decided that at a kitchen table in an apartment on the east side when she was twenty-three, decided it again at thirty, and then stopped deciding it, because there was nothing left to decide. People still asked. She had a voice for that too.

Greg was in the kitchen with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, standing over a pot of chili he had made in the spirit of somebody who would be forty-seven in the morning and wanted credit for it in advance. He was in a gray T-shirt and the jeans he wore on Saturdays, and his feet were bare on the tile.

"There she is," he said.

"Here I am."

He didn't ask how the shift had gone. Nineteen years had taught him that the question had nowhere to go. He put a bowl in front of her and a spoon in the bowl and sat down across from her and talked about Dale Rusk, who had called about the fire hall in Rendale — the new station, the floor Greg's firm had put down in June — and who had turned out to have two tickets to the benefit supper next Saturday he didn't want. They were already on the fridge, under the magnet shaped like a slice of watermelon. Rendale Volunteer Fire Company. Benefit Supper and Live Auction. Doors 5:30.

"You want to go?"

"I want to see your floor," she said, and watched it land. He went a little pink at the throat. He always had. All this time and a man who could price a hospital lobby to the square foot still colored up because his wife said she wanted to look at his work.

She ate. He washed the pot. She went and stood under the shower until the building came off her, and then she put on the nightgown she wore when she meant something by it: old black satin, cut on the bias, the straps thin as shoelaces. It had been good when she bought it and it was better now, because she had grown into it — it held close over her breasts, slipped in at the waist and then had to make room, pulling smooth across her hips and the full round of her backside, the hem riding high on her thighs when she moved. Against her skin the black went almost blue. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror for exactly as long as it took to decide that she looked like a woman who was about to get what she wanted, and then she turned off the light.

He was already in bed. The lamp was off, the blinds were down, and the only light in the room was the little red eye of the smoke detector on the ceiling. She got in on her side and lay on her back, and for a while neither of them said anything, which was how it started. It always started with nobody saying anything.

Then his hand found her hip through the satin and rested there, not asking for anything yet. Just letting her know where it was.

"Tell me," Greg said.

She told him.

It was the same story. That was the point of it; she had never wanted a new one. A hotel bar in a city that was not Oakvale — not anywhere she could have named, just somewhere with a brass rail and low light and a long mirror behind the bottles. She was at the bar. Greg was at a table across the room, where he could see her. And a man came and stood beside her: tall, in a good dark suit, a suit somebody had cut for him. He never sat down. He never said a word.

He never had a face, either. She had noticed that about six months in, and had not mentioned it, and had not changed it.

In the dark her voice was not the headset. It went lower and slower and it took its time over things it would never have stopped for on a call. She told Greg how the man put his hand flat on the small of her back. How she let him. How she looked past the man's shoulder to the table and found her husband looking back at her and did not look away. Her husband's breath went uneven beside her, and his hand on her hip stopped being still, and she felt the change in him against her thigh and kept talking, because that was part of it, because she liked to feel exactly what every sentence did.

"And then what," Greg said. His voice had already gone ragged. He always got there before she did.

And then she said it, the sentence she said every time, the one that had not changed by a single word in a year:

"I want a man's hands on me that aren't yours, and I want you in the room, and I want you to watch me stop being careful."

He made a sound low in his chest, and rolled toward her, and his mouth was at her neck before she had finished breathing out the last word.

She found his hand and took it down to the hem of the nightgown and then up under it, and left it there, and he understood her, because he always did. The satin went up over her hips in one long cool slide. She was ready already — the story had done that, it always did — and he found that out with his fingers, two of them sliding through the wet of her pussy and opening her, and said her name against her collarbone like it was the answer to something.

"Keep going," she told him. "Just like that. Don't you hurry."

He didn't. She lay back and let him, his hand doing exactly what she said and nothing she hadn't, his fingers working slow and steady over her clit and then inside again, her own breathing getting away from her by degrees. When she wanted more she reached up and pulled the straps off her shoulders herself, one and then the other, and pushed the satin down to her waist, and his mouth went where she had made room for it, his tongue circling one nipple and then the other while he kept his hand between her legs. Her braids had fallen across the pillow and across his face, and he didn't move them.

Then she put a hand flat on his chest and pushed, and he went over onto his back without a word, and she came up over him in the dark with the nightgown bunched at her waist. She held still a moment above him, making him wait for it, and then she took him in, slowly, at her own speed and no one else's, sinking down onto his cock until she had all of him, and heard what it did to him.

She moved. He put his hands on her hips and then on the full round of her backside and held on, not steering, just holding. The bed answered under them, the same complaint it had been making since they bought it. She leaned down so her braids closed in around both their faces and put her mouth to his ear.

"He'd be watching you watch me," she said. "That's what he'd like best."

Greg made a sound she had no word for, and his hands tightened, and she sat back up and set the pace herself, harder now, riding his cock in long strokes while she let her voice go. She had never been quiet in bed, and it had taken her years to stop apologizing for it, and she was not sorry now. When it came for her it came long and slow and she rode all the way through it, clenching around him, and Greg held off until she was done — he always did, it was a point of pride with him — and then followed her down with her name, and only her name, coming out of him like the last thing he knew.

She stayed where she was, folded down on top of him, both of them breathing like they'd been running. He started laughing first. Then she did.

Afterward they lay in the dark with the sheet kicked down to their knees. The nightgown was somewhere around her middle. Greg's hand was moving up and down her spine in a long, lazy stroke, slow enough that she could feel each braid shift under his palm and settle again. The furnace came on in the basement with its usual small thump.

She was most of the way to sleep when he spoke.

"Dar."

"Mm."

"Do you ever think about it being somebody?"

He did not say it like a man asking for anything. He said it the way he asked questions on a job site, mild and literal, a man looking at a number on a drawing and wondering out loud what it was covering for.

And she heard herself answer before she had decided to.

"It's a story, baby."

It came out level. Unhurried, warm enough, a hand laid flat on a frightened man's shoulder: everything is under control, everything is being handled, you do not need to look at this part. She knew that voice. She had used it at twenty past five on a man in a farmhouse on Gilchrist Road. It was not the same voice — it had a softer edge on it, it said baby — but it was a cousin, and she recognized it a half second after it was already out in the room, too late to call back.

Greg's hand stopped on her back, just for a beat. Then it started moving again.

"Okay," he said.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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