The Other Man · Part 2: Eleventh Floor

Previously: you found a secret phone and followed your wife Ashlyn to a hotel bar, Thursday at nine, only to learn the booking was your forgotten anniversary. Now a stranger in a suit wants her, and she hasn't decided between you.

The man in the suit is still smiling, still waiting, and Ashlyn is still watching you with her chin on her hand. "I haven't decided yet," she says.

"So what's it going to be," the suit says, sliding the fresh drink toward her. "The guy in the polo, or a man with a table?"

And you've got nothing. No line, no suit, six years of sitting across from her at dinner saying *how was work.* You take a breath and reach past all of it.

"I'm the one who knows she hates champagne," you say. "I'm the one who knows she calls her sister every Sunday and pretends it's a chore. I'm the one who forgot Thursday and doesn't deserve this stool, and I'm still the one who turned up." You look at her, not him. "I'd rather lose to him knowing I said that."

The suit raises his hands, half a laugh, takes his drink and goes. Ashlyn looks at you for a long second, and then she laughs — a real one, helpless, her hand over her mouth — and it's the first laugh you've heard from her in months, and you caused it, and it goes through you like a shot.

"That was terrible," she says, wiping under her eye. "The polo. God."

"You're the one who married the polo."

"I married the man in it. He used to talk to me like that all the time. Then he stopped." She says it lightly, but she doesn't take it back, and it lands somewhere under your ribs and stays there. "He stopped looking at me.

I'd walk past him in a towel and he'd check his phone. I started wondering if I'd turned into furniture. Then I started wondering worse things."

You listen. That's all you do, and it's the hardest thing you've done all night.

"So one day I bought a dress he'd never see coming, and I booked a room he'd never book, and I decided that if he followed me — if there was enough of him left to be jealous — I'd give him one night to prove something." She finishes her wine. "You followed me."

"You wanted me to."

"I wanted to know if you'd still fight for me. That's a different sentence."

She stands. The green dress falls back into place and she picks up her clutch, and from it she takes the key card — your key card, the one from the laundry — and holds it up between two fingers like she's showing you a card trick.

"Eleventh floor," she says. "Are you coming, or are you going to sit here all night being sorry?"

In the lift she makes her move before the doors have finished closing. She presses 11, then she presses you against the mirrored wall, her hands flat on your chest, looking up at you.

"Six years," she says, "I've never once kissed you first. You want to know the worst thing about being furniture? You start to believe it." Her mouth is an inch from yours and her voice has gone low. "So I'm going to kiss you like I'm not. And you're going to remember it."

She kisses you slow, deliberately slow, like a first one — her fingers curling into your collar, her mouth soft, then not soft, then her tongue, and the lift is rising and the mirrored walls give you back her dress and your hands and the numbers counting up.

You kiss her back and you're clumsy with it, like a virgin, because she is kissing you like a stranger and it's undoing you.

The doors open on eleven. She takes your hand and walks, and you watch the open back of the green dress all the way down the corridor, her spine, the little dip above it, and at the door she hands you the key card without turning around.

"You forgot Thursday," she says. "You don't get to open the door. Oh wait." She glances back at you. "That's you tonight. Open it."

The room is dark except for the city — floor-to-ceiling glass, the whole grid of lights below, and she stands in front of it with her back to you.

"Unzip me," she says.

You pull the zipper down slowly and the green dress opens like a seam, and she lets it slide off one shoulder, then the other, then it pools on the floor and she steps out of it. Bare back, black bra, black underwear, the heels still on.

She turns around and lets you look, arms slightly away from her body, and her face is doing something brave and scared at once.

"Say something," she says. "You never look anymore. Look properly and say something."

"Jesus, Ashlyn." Your voice comes out rough. "You're — I forgot what you look like. That's the truth. I forgot, and I'm looking now."

"Take your shirt off," she says. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me in a year, so take your shirt off."

The clothes go on the chair, her bra, your polo, her hand already at your belt, impatient, and she walks you backward to the window until your shoulders touch cold glass and the whole city is behind your back.

"Tell me what to do," she says. "You never tell me what to do. Six years of *whatever you want, honey.* I want to be told."

"Turn around."

She turns. She braces her hands on the glass, the city spread under her, and looks back at you over her shoulder, and you slide into her slow and deep and her whole body drops an inch and she groans — loud, unguarded, a sound she never made at home with the walls thin and the habits thick.

"Oh — okay, okay, that's —" she laughs and shudders at the same time, "that's what I've been missing. Fuck. Deeper. I want to feel you tomorrow, I want to sit in the car tomorrow and still feel this."

You give it to her harder, and the glass fogs where her breath hits it, and the city lights blur under your feet. "There — right there — don't you dare stop — say something, tell me you're —"

"I'm not stopping," you say against her ear. "Not this time. Not ever again."

She comes with her forehead against the window, saying your name twice, and it doesn't take long after that for you, her body pulling you over the edge with hers.

Afterward you're on the floor in matching hotel robes, backs against the bed, champagne from the bucket, the city still going about its business eleven floors down. Her legs are across yours and she's turned the key card over in her fingers a few times.

"I left the phone in the laundry," she says. "On purpose. Under your shirt. Where you'd find it."

You look at her.

"I almost didn't do tonight. I almost did a different thing with it." She takes a breath. "I needed to know if you'd come. If there was enough left of you to be jealous, to follow me, to fight for me. If you'd found it and done nothing —" she shrugs, "— then I'd have known that too."

"You put everything on a phone in a laundry basket."

"You put everything on a phone," she says, "every night, for two years."

She's quiet for a minute, and then, instead of answering, she picks up the silver phone from where it fell with her dress.

"There's something else on here," she says. "I want you to see it before you find it later and think the worst." She thumbs through it and passes it over, and her jaw is set like she's braced.

Drafts. Unsent. One message, dated last month, addressed to a divorce lawyer in her contacts. *I'd like to talk about starting proceedings. —*

No body after the dash. Never sent. Never deleted.

"I wrote that on a Tuesday," she says, "in the car outside the house, because I couldn't remember the last time you touched me without asking for anything. I sat there for twenty minutes. Then I drove to the store and bought the green dress instead."

The city hums below and the champagne has gone flat and she's watching you read it.

You read it twice, though the words don't change. *Starting proceedings.* Dated three weeks before she bought a dress and booked a room and slid a phone under your shirt like a lit match under a door.

She takes the phone back gently, sets it face-down, and waits. Six years of marriage and this is the part you didn't follow her for.