On Fridays, Dan Harper zipped his wife into her date dress, and he had come to think of it as the best two minutes of his week.
“Red or the black one,” Megan said from the closet. “Be honest.”
“I’m always honest.”
“You told my mother her meatloaf was ‘structurally ambitious.'”
“That was honest. It was a compliment to the engineering.” Dan leaned in the bedroom doorway of the two-story on Larkspur Court, a beer sweating in his hand, the late September light coming in low and gold through the blinds. “Red. Definitely red. The black one says ‘work happy hour.’ The red one says ‘I’m not coming home tonight.'”
She stepped out holding the red one against herself and gave him a look over it. Thirty-four years old, honey-blonde hair she’d curled and then shaken out so it looked like she hadn’t tried, a few laugh lines at her eyes that he had personally helped put there over eleven years of marriage. She was not a magazine woman. She was better than that. She was a real woman with real hips and a real laugh and a chest that had made him forget his own name the first time he met her at a friend’s Fourth of July party in 2014.
“I am coming home tomorrow,” she said. “By noon. You have to drive Mason’s soccer carpool, remember. I’m not doing it in a red dress.”
“The other moms would riot.”
“The other dads would riot.” She stepped into the dress and turned her back to him. “Zip.”
He set his beer on the dresser and came up behind her, and they both looked at themselves in the old mirror leaning against the wall, the one they’d been meaning to hang for three years. The laundry basket was full. The bed wasn’t made. On the nightstand his reading glasses sat on top of a library book about bridges. It was the most ordinary bedroom in Willow Creek, and his wife was standing in it in a dress cut low enough to show the freckles on the tops of her breasts.
He zipped her slow. He always did. He liked the sound of it, and the way her back disappeared an inch at a time, and the little shiver she gave at the top when his knuckles brushed the nape of her neck.
“You look incredible,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“He’s gonna lose his mind.”
She laughed, a real one, and caught his eye in the mirror, and her face did the thing it did on Fridays, a kind of warm brightening, like somebody had turned up a dimmer switch behind her skin. She was excited. She was excited to see her boyfriend, and she didn’t hide it from him, and he didn’t need her to. It was his favorite thing about Fridays: not the quiet house, not the game, but this. Watching her light up.
People didn’t understand that part. The few who knew, anyway. Dan’s brother had asked him once, carefully, over a beer at Thanksgiving, whether it “bothered” him. Dan had thought about it for a long time and then said, honestly, “Does it bother you when your wife’s happy?” and his brother had said, “That’s not the same,” and Dan had said, “It’s exactly the same,” and they had dropped it.
It was the same. Megan loved him. He had never once doubted that in eleven years. She also loved Jordan. That had surprised Dan less than it surprised her.
The doorbell rang at 6:58. Jordan was always two minutes early.
“Hey, man.” Jordan Ellis stood on the porch holding a bunch of sunflowers in one hand and a six-pack of Sun King in the other. Twenty-seven, six-one, a physical therapist’s easy, careful build and a DJ’s taste in shirts: tonight a black button-up with the sleeves rolled. Short fade. Neat beard. A smile that made you feel like he’d been looking forward to seeing specifically you. “Flowers are for her. Beer’s for you. Don’t get confused.”
“I’ll try.” Dan took the six-pack. “The sunflowers might be for me, though. I’ve had a rough week.”
“Bridge stuff?”
“Culvert stuff. Don’t ask.”
“I was never gonna ask,” Jordan said, and they both grinned.
That had taken a while, the grinning. The first few months, two years ago, they’d been painfully polite with each other, two men circling a backyard grill like dogs at a park. It had broken, finally, over a fantasy football league, when Jordan beat Dan in the playoffs with a waiver-wire kicker and Dan had texted him a four-paragraph protest and Jordan had replied with a single GIF of a crying baby. After that they were friends. Real ones. Jordan came to Mason’s soccer games. He’d fixed Dan’s rotator cuff for free, mostly by yelling at him. He’d been at their table for Christmas dinner last year and brought a sweet potato pie his mom made that was so good Dan’s mother asked for the recipe and then pretended she hadn’t.
Megan came down the stairs.
Dan watched Jordan watch her. That was the moment, if he was being completely honest with himself, that he waited all week for. The way the younger man’s whole body went still. The way his eyes went down the red dress and came back up to her face and stayed there, soft and stunned, like it was the first time. Two years in, and every Friday it looked like the first time.
“Damn, Meg,” Jordan said quietly.
“Hi,” she said, and she was blushing. His wife of eleven years, mother of an eight-year-old, office manager at a dental practice with a label maker she guarded like a firearm, was blushing on her own staircase.
Jordan handed her the sunflowers and kissed her. Not a peck. Not a performance either. Just a kiss, the kind people give each other when they’ve missed each other all week. His hand came to her waist. Hers came to his jaw. Dan stood in the foyer holding a six-pack and felt the familiar warmth spread through his chest and lower, a slow, contented heat he’d stopped being embarrassed about a long time ago.
“Okay,” Megan said, pulling back, laughing a little, wiping her lipstick off Jordan’s mouth with her thumb. “Okay. Vase. Dan, can you—”
“I got it.” He took the flowers. “Go. You have a reservation.”
“Sushi Kiyo at seven-thirty,” Jordan said. “I called ahead about the booth.”
“The good booth?”
“The good booth.”
Megan kissed Dan goodbye at the door, a real kiss too, her hand on his chest, and said against his mouth, “Mason’s asleep by nine. Don’t let him talk you into another episode.”
“He’s going to talk me into another episode.”
“I know.” She smiled. “Love you.”
“Love you. Have fun. Text me.”
“I always text you.”
She always did.
The first one came at 7:41.
It was a selfie from the good booth at Sushi Kiyo, the little strip-mall place between a Great Clips and a tax preparer that had, inexplicably, the best spicy tuna in Indiana. Megan’s cheek pressed to Jordan’s. Both of them laughing at something, her eyes squeezed nearly shut. A platter of nigiri between them. The red dress doing exactly what Dan had predicted.
Meg: he ordered for me and got it all right. even the eel
Dan: I got Mason through dinner and he only cried once (about a tooth he isn’t losing)
Meg: 😂 tell him the tooth fairy has standards
Dan: You look so happy. You look so beautiful.
There was a pause, and then three dots, and then:
Meg: I am. I love you for this. you know that right
Dan: I know. Go eat your eel.
He put Mason to bed at 8:52, after exactly one more episode of a cartoon about a dog who was also a police officer, and then he sat on the couch with one of Jordan’s beers and the Pacers preseason game on mute and looked at the selfie again. He zoomed in on her face. He liked to do that. He liked to see the exact shape of her smile when she was with Jordan, because it was a little different from the smile she had with him. Not better. Different. Younger, maybe. Looser. A woman on a date with a man she was falling for, over and over, on purpose, every week.
He knew her smile with him, too. He’d see it tomorrow afternoon, when she came home in his old hoodie with her hair a mess and her lipstick gone, and kissed him in the kitchen, and told him about her night while he made grilled cheese. He’d see it on Sunday morning, in their bed, when it was just them. It was a smile that said home.
He loved both. He was lucky enough to get to see both.
His phone buzzed at 9:37.
Meg: heading to his place. 🙈
Dan: Have the best night. I mean it.
Meg: I will. goodnight baby â¤ï¸
Jordan’s apartment was the third floor of a converted brick building in downtown Noblesville, above a coffee shop that made the whole stairwell smell like burnt sugar. Megan had been coming there for two years and she still loved walking up those stairs behind him, his hand reaching back for hers on the landing, his keys jingling, the anticipation building in her stomach on every step like an elevator rising.
Inside, he turned on the lamp and the string lights over the bed he’d hung for her the first month, because she’d said once, offhand, that she liked them. Vinyl records on the shelf, his mother’s photos, a plant he kept alive mostly through stubbornness.
He put on a record. He always did. Tonight it was something slow and old, a woman’s voice like honey poured over gravel.
“Come here,” he said.
She went to him.
He kissed her the way he’d kissed her on the stairs at home, but there was nobody to be polite in front of now, and so it went deeper, his tongue in her mouth and his hand spreading wide on her lower back and pulling her against him until she could feel how hard he already was through his slacks. She moaned into his mouth. She couldn’t help it. All week she held herself together, scheduling cleanings, soothing patients, managing a front desk that ran on her label maker and her patience, and then on Friday nights she walked into this apartment and something in her just unlatched.
“I thought about this all dinner,” he said against her neck.
“You did not. You were talking about the eel.”
“I was talking about the eel and thinking about this.” His teeth grazed her throat. “That dress, Meg. Your husband’s a genius.”
“He picked it.”
“I know. I’m gonna send him a thank-you card.”
She was laughing when he found the zipper. It went down a lot faster than it had gone up. The red dress slid off her shoulders and down her hips and pooled on his floor, and she stood in front of him in the black lace bra and panties she’d bought for exactly this, and watched his eyes go dark.
“God,” he said, very quietly. “Look at you.”
She unbuttoned his shirt while he looked. Her fingers knew the buttons by now. Underneath he was warm and solid, deep brown skin over muscle he kept up not for vanity but because his job was lifting people, and she pressed her palms flat against his chest and slid them down his stomach and opened his belt.
He groaned when she got her hand inside. He was thick and heavy and so hard it was almost hot in her palm, and she stroked him slowly, watching his face, loving the way his jaw clenched and his eyes went half-closed.
“Bed,” she whispered.
He walked her backward until her knees hit the mattress, then laid her down under the string lights, and knelt on the floor between her thighs, and peeled her panties down her legs like he was unwrapping something.
He went down on her with the same patience he gave everything. Long, slow licks from the bottom to the top. His tongue flat and warm, then pointed, circling her clit in slow, tight loops that made her hips lift off the mattress. He held her thighs open with his big hands and didn’t let her squirm away. When he slid two fingers inside her and curled them she grabbed the comforter in both fists and said his name loud enough that the downstairs neighbor could probably hear it over the record, and she didn’t care. She came on his mouth with her thighs shaking and her back arched and her bra still on, gasping, laughing, saying “oh my God, oh my God, Jordan.”
He kissed his way up her stomach, unhooking the bra on the way, and took one of her nipples in his mouth and sucked until she whimpered.
“I need you,” she said. “Now. Please.”
He stood and pushed his slacks and boxers down and stepped out of them, and she propped herself up on her elbows to look, because she always looked. Two years and she still looked. He was beautiful hard, long and thick and dark, curving up toward his stomach, the head flushed and shining. The first time she’d seen him, in this same room, she’d actually said “oh, no,” out loud, half terrified and half thrilled, and he’d laughed so hard he’d had to sit down.
Now she just reached for him.
He climbed over her and she guided him with her hand, and he pressed into her slowly, an inch at a time, her body stretching and opening around him in that sharp, overwhelming way that made her breath catch every single time. He held still when she gasped. He always did. His forehead against hers. His breath on her lips.
“You okay?”
“Yes. Yes. Keep going. Don’t you dare stop.”
He sank all the way in and they both groaned together. She was so full she could feel her heartbeat around him. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, and he started to move.
He fucked her slow for a long time, long deep strokes that dragged against everything inside her, while the record played and the string lights blurred above his shoulders. He kissed her the whole time. He told her she was beautiful. He told her he’d missed her all week, that he’d thought about her at work, that he’d almost texted her something filthy during a session with a seventy-year-old knee replacement and had to go stand in the supply closet. She laughed so hard she clenched around him and he groaned and buried his face in her neck.
Then she said “harder,” and he gave her harder.
The headboard knocked the wall. Her breasts bounced with every thrust. She dug her nails into his back and met him stroke for stroke, crying out, and came again with him buried to the hilt, her whole body locking around him, her vision going white at the edges.
“Turn over for me,” he said, his voice rough.
She went to her hands and knees. He took her hips in both hands and slid back into her from behind, and that angle hit something deep that made her moan into the pillow, a long, helpless, unashamed sound. He fucked her hard and steady, his thighs slapping against the backs of hers, one hand sliding up her spine and into her hair. She pushed back against him, wanting all of it. Wanting him.
“Meg,” he panted. “I’m close. Where—”
“Inside. Inside me. Please.”
He thrust deep and held there, his hands tightening on her hips, and she felt him swell and pulse and spill into her, hot and deep, and he made a low broken sound she’d only ever heard from him in this room. She came a third time just from feeling it, from being filled, from being his.
They collapsed in a tangle. The record had ended and was hissing softly on the turntable. Neither of them got up to fix it.
For a long time they just lay there, her cheek on his chest, his fingers drawing slow circles on her shoulder. She could feel him leaking out of her and didn’t care at all.
“I love you,” Jordan said into her hair.
“I love you too.”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Mm.”
“I want this forever.” His fingers paused. “Not instead of Dan. Never instead of Dan. I just mean… I want to keep doing this. All of it. The dinners. You in my bed. Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s where she pretends not to like my mom’s pie. I want…” He stopped.
She lifted her head. His face was serious in the string-light glow, more serious than she’d seen it in a while.
“You want what?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Another night. Ask me another night.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She had the strangest feeling, the kind you get on the stairs before the elevator stops, that something big was waiting on the other side of that sentence.
She put her head back down on his chest.
“Okay,” she said. “Another night.”
At 1:14 in the morning, Dan’s phone buzzed on the nightstand on Larkspur Court.
He’d fallen asleep with the bedside lamp on and the bridge book open on his chest. He fumbled for his glasses.
It was a photo. Megan in Jordan’s bed, under the string lights, the sheet pulled up to her collarbone, her hair a wild mess on his pillow and her lipstick long gone. Jordan asleep behind her with one arm thrown over her waist. Her face, looking right into the camera, flushed and sleepy and completely, unmistakably happy.
Meg: goodnight. home by noon. love you so much.
Dan looked at the picture for a long time. Then he saved it to the folder on his phone he’d named, two years ago, after a lot of thought, simply Fridays.
Dan: Goodnight, beautiful. Tell him he owes me a thank-you card.
He turned off the lamp and lay in the dark in their unmade bed and smiled at the ceiling, warm all the way through, and fell back asleep thinking about the addition he’d been sketching on graph paper at his desk for three weeks now: a bedroom off the back of the house, a little kitchenette, a door that locked from the inside.
He hadn’t told either of them yet.
