Making Her Watch

*This one came from wanting to write something playful and hot without any angsty betrayal, just a wife reminding everyone she's the one. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the tease.*

Work used to be simple. Show up at six, dig a hole, build a pool, go home. Nobody followed me around a job site asking what I thought about limestone coping.

Then I married Callie.

Not that I'm complaining. Mostly. It's just that she's a real estate agent with a good eye and lately she wants to see everything I build. She took the day off for this one. A big mid-century spread up in the hills outside Austin, kitchen and pool reno, Dan running the job. Big money, big client. I figured she'd poke around for an hour and go.

I figured wrong.

We pulled up in my truck, her in the passenger seat in a sundress she'd changed into twice before we left. She's 34, been my wife three years, and she still makes me forget what I'm carrying when she walks toward me.

"Malik. What is this place," she said, stepping out.

"House. It's a house, baby."

"It's a masterpiece with a dead kitchen." She was already walking. "Come on."

Dan met us at the front. He's 38, known me since trade school, and he had sawdust in his beard like always.

"Hey, man. Yard's a mud pit, watch your step. Client's on their way back from Houston, so we got the place to ourselves for a bit." He shook my hand, then nodded at Callie. "And this is the famous wife. Damn, Malik, you didn't exaggerate."

"He better not have," Callie said, and shook his hand.

We walked through the plastic sheeting into the kitchen. Exposed studs, new window openings, a stack of cabinets wrapped in foam. And a woman standing over a set of blueprints on a folding table, on the phone, pacing a little.

I stopped walking. Callie didn't notice for a second, then she looked back at me.

Sheila. My Sheila. Well, not mine, but you know. She's 36 now, we dated two years back when she was 25 and I was 26, broke up at 27 when she took a design job in London. Nine years ago. I haven't seen her since. She was on video calls with Dan about the project, and her name never once came up in his emails.

She hung up and turned around.

"Malik?" She said it like she wasn't sure, which stung a little, honestly, because I've put on maybe fifteen pounds of pool-deck muscle since then.

"Hey, Sheila. Yeah. Hi."

"Oh my god, look at you." She came over, and there was this half-second where we both didn't know if we were hugging people now, and we ended up doing the awkward one-arm pat thing. Very cool. Very adult. "Dan said the pool contractor was Malik but I didn't, I mean, I figured it was some other Malik."

"There's a lot of us," I said.

She laughed at that, real laugh, and for a second it was nine years ago and we were splitting fajitas in a parking lot. Then I caught myself.

Callie cleared her throat.

Sheila turned. "And you are?"

"Callie. The wife." She said it easy, smiling, hand out. "You must be the designer. Malik mentioned a Sheila on the email chain but he didn't mention she was..." She let it hang.

"His ex," Sheila said, filling it in. "Ancient history. We were babies."

"We were 27," I said.

"Babies," Sheila said again, and smiled at Callie, and something passed between the two of them that I did not like being in the middle of.

Callie drifted over to the blueprints to give the two of us room, and I answered maybe six questions about the pool layout, and it was fine, it was professional, and then Callie called out from the table.

"Can I look at these? I'm nosy and this is my whole dream house."

"Be my guest," Sheila said. "It's a knock-down gorgeous spec, if the budget holds."

Callie leaned over the prints, and I watched Sheila watch me instead of the prints. Not staring. Just little glances, up and down, the kind you think nobody catches. Except my wife catches everything. She always has.

We got to talking timelines. Dan wanted the pool shell done before the landscaping crew came in, and Sheila wanted the infinity edge moved six inches and I told her six inches was a whole other engineering problem and she told me I used to be more flexible. Dan snorted coffee into a rag.

"I was 26," I said.

"You were very sure of yourself at 26," she said, and looked at me when she said it, and okay. That landed.

Callie looked up from the blueprints.

So here's the part I didn't understand until later. My wife has been after me for months to pay more attention to her, and I've been buried in jobs, and I come home smelling like chlorine and fall asleep before the news ends. She took this day off to see my world. And then she walks into my world and finds a woman from it who used to have me, standing in the middle of it, looking at me like the last nine years were a scheduling error.

Callie is not the kind of woman who stands in the corner about that. She's the kind who walks over.

"So Sheila," she said, straightening up from the prints, "the master bath tile. Show me?"

They stood over the samples together, and to her credit Sheila was generous, pointed out a gorgeous zellige, explained grout lines. Callie asked good questions. Then Callie said, "And the pool, the infinity edge, that was Malik's idea originally, right? He pitched it before you came on?"

Sheila paused. "That's... actually yes."

"He does that," Callie said, warm as pie. "Comes up with things nobody else sees. Took me three years to figure out how lucky I got."

It was said so sweetly. It was not sweet.

I excused myself to check the yard stakes, which was a lie, I just needed air. When I came back in Callie had her hand on my arm and was asking me something about where the spa jets would sit, and her thumb was moving on my forearm while Sheila watched us, and I realized my wife was performing. For an audience of one.

"Anyway," Sheila said, gathering her samples, "I should go over the deck plans with Malik later. Dan, we good?"

"We're good," Dan said. "Lunch Thursday?"

"Thursday," she agreed, and then she looked at me. "Good seeing you, Malik. Really."

"Yeah. You too."

She left. The plastic sheeting swung behind her.

Callie turned to me with the sweetest expression I have ever seen on her.

"She seems nice," she said.

"Callie."

"She does. Very professional. Very put together." She picked up her iced tea off the stud ledge. "She was looking at you the whole time, you know."

"Was she?"

"Don't 'was she' me. I have eyes. I sell houses to people lying to each other all day, Malik, I know what looking looks like." She sipped her tea. "Anyway. Show me the backyard. I want to see where my pool goes."

"Our pool."

"My pool. Walk."

So we walked out back through the mud, and it really is a beautiful site, the view down the hill toward the greenbelt, the forms half-set for the negative edge. She stood at the lip of the excavation with her arms crossed and her dress moving in the wind, and she was quiet a while.

"You could've told me," she said finally.

"Told you what? I didn't know either, I swear. Dan hired her, I didn't read the name right on the email chain, it's been nine years, baby."

"I know it's been nine years. I did the math in the kitchen while she was undressing you with her eyeballs." She looked at me. "It bothered me."

"Okay."

"It bothered me a lot, actually." She turned to face me fully. "And you know what I decided?"

"What'd you decide?"

"I decided she can look all she wants. Look at this. Look at what you go home with." And she stepped in and put her hands on my chest, right there in the mud with the whole site around us, and kissed me, which she asked with her eyes first and I said yes with mine, and it was a good kiss, a long one, and when we broke she looked over my shoulder and I turned and saw Sheila's silhouette was in the kitchen window.

Callie waved at her. Sweet as anything.

Sheila's silhouette did not wave back.

"Oh, this is gonna be a fun project," Callie said.

So the next week I got the text. Dan wanted me on site Tuesday to walk the deck layout with Sheila before the concrete crew came in. Fine. Normal. Work.

I told Callie about it over dinner as if it were trivial. Because it was nothing. I genuinely thought it was nothing.

"The designer? The one who wouldn't wave at me?" Callie speared a green bean. "Tuesday, huh."

"It's deck plans, Cal."

"Uh huh. Deck plans." She chewed. "What time?"

"Why?"

"I'm gonna be in your neck of the hills Tuesday. A listing off Lamar. I'll swing by around noon. You two can show me the deck."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't have to. I want to." She pointed her fork at me. "Don't argue with your wife about a deck."

I did not argue with my wife about a deck.

Tuesday was hot even for May. Austin hot, the kind where the plastic sheeting sticks to itself and the crew quits at two. Sheila was there at ten, in linen again, some color between white and sand, hair pinned up, sunglasses on her head. We stood over the deck drawings spread on a sawhorse and hashed out where the steps would drop down.

"You're losing six feet of terrace if you keep the lounge depth," she said, tapping the print.

"I'm losing six feet if I don't. Pool needs the shallow shelf."

"The shelf can shrink. Nobody stands on a shelf."

"Everybody stands on a shelf. That's the whole point of a shelf."

"It is not the whole point of a shelf."

And it was fine. It was actually fine, just two people arguing about a shelf, except every so often she'd laugh at something I said and tuck hair behind her ear, and I'd remember she used to do that in apartments with no furniture, and I'd pull myself back to the print. Nine years. Married man. Shelf.

That's when I felt Callie before I saw her. I don't know how to explain it except that the air changed. I turned and there she was, walking across the dirt in wedges that had no business being on a job site, holding two paper sacks, sun on her face.

"Lunch," she announced. "I brought enough for four."

"You're early," I said. "It's barely noon."

"I finished early." She came straight to me, stood close, closer than she needed to, and put her hand flat on my chest. "Hi."

"Hey."

"Hi, Sheila," she said over my shoulder. "Dan around?"

"Supply run," Sheila said. "Back in twenty."

"Perfect. More tacos for us." Callie set the sacks on the sawhorse right on top of my drawings. "I hope you like brisket. Malik says everyone in Texas likes brisket but he's from Ohio so what does he know."

"He's from Ohio?" Sheila said.

"Born in Dayton," I said.

"Huh." Sheila pulled her sunglasses off her head, put them back on, took them off again. "He told me he was from Chicago."

"I never said Chicago."

"You absolutely said Chicago. The apartment on Ashland."

"I said my roommate was from Chicago. I was from Dayton."

She stared at me a second, then laughed, and Callie watched her laugh, and I watched Callie watch her laugh, and I understood I was a brick in a wall two women were building on either side of.

We ate on the plywood over the future dining room. Callie sat next to me, knee pressed to mine the whole meal. She kept doing small things. Brushing something off my sleeve. Feeding me a chip. Telling the story about how I once drove two hours to bring her cold medicine and stayed awake all night in a motel because she wouldn't let me sleep in her germ apartment.

"He didn't," Sheila said.

"He did. Brought the pharmacy. Sat in the parking lot of the Walgreens for an hour deciding between two kinds of tissues."

"Lotion coated or not," I said. "It matters."

"That is disgustingly sweet," Sheila said, and she smiled, and then she leaned back on her plywood and got a look I didn't like. "You know what, I have to tell you the counterpoint. Because I knew him at an age you didn't."

"Uh oh," I said.

"Uh oh is right." Sheila dipped a chip. "Tell her about the flamingo pool."

"Oh no."

"There's a flamingo pool?"

"There is a flamingo pool," Sheila said. "Backyard in Round Rock. Client wanted a pink pool. Pink plaster, pink coping. Malik stood in that backyard and told the client, dead serious, that pink would date the pool. That pink pools were a fad."

"It was a fad."

"Then the client asked what he'd do instead, and he said, and I quote, because I have never forgotten it, 'I'd do a lagoon. Natural. Earth tones. Like a lagoon.'" She spread her hands. "So the client says do the lagoon. And for the next six weeks your husband drew lagoons. Every job after that was a lagoon. Lagoon, lagoon, lagoon. Dan used to call him the Lagoon Man."

Callie was already laughing. "The Lagoon Man."

"Every single job," Sheila said. "And then one day a magazine wrote up one of his lagoons and he called me at eleven at night and said, 'I think I accidentally have a brand.'"

I put my face in my hands. "That was a real phone call."

"He was so proud," Sheila said. "It was honestly, and I mean this, it was one of my favorite things about him. That he could be that excited about a hole in the ground at eleven at night. He'd show up at my place with a sketch on a napkin like it was a winning ticket."