Pit Stop Proposition

*This one is for anyone who ever wondered what happens when the fantasy meets the oil-stained floor. I wanted a funny, awkward, heat-filled mess that ends in a laugh instead of tears. Thanks for reading and not judging the blueprint too hard.*

The pan under the Buick was dripping again. I knew it was. Pedro knew it was. The pan didn't care what either of us knew.

I was flat on the creeper under a lifted sedan when my phone went off in my shirt pocket. Bad spot for a phone when you're under a car. I wriggled out, dragged a greasy thumb across the screen.

Lynn.

"Hey, hon," I said. "Can't talk long, I've got my own Buick up on Pedro's lift crying on me."

"Wade." Her voice had that note in it. The one I'd learned to notice somewhere in our third decade of marriage. "Shona's coming by the house tonight. Around seven."

"Shona." I wiped my hand on a rag, which did nothing. "Shona from your night class? Thirty years ago Shona?"

"Thirty, but who's counting. She's in town. She called me last week, I told you."

She had told me. I'd been half watching a game and nodded in the wrong places. That's a confession, I guess. Thirty years in and you learn which nods your wife believes.

"So she's coming for dinner?"

"She's coming for dinner. And Wade? Could you come home early? Like, before she gets there."

I looked at the Buick. The Buick looked back, metaphorically.

"Pedro's gonna grumble."

"Pedro's always gonna grumble. Please?"

"Sure. Sixish. What's the occasion?"

"Oh, you know. Old friends." A little pause. "See you at six."

She hung up before I could ask the next question, which is a skill she has.

Pedro grumbled. He grumbled the way he does everything, loud and without any real heat behind it. Sixty-two years old, been running Reynolds Auto & Salvage since before I studied engineering, which is a sentence that makes me feel old every time I say it. He's had me weekends for five years now. Mostly I hand him tools and hold things and get blamed for things.

"Go on," he said, waving a wrench at me. "Tell Lynn I said hello. Tell her if she ever wants to trade up, I know a guy."

"You're the guy."

"I'm the guy. Go."

I got home at 5:50. The house smelled like the good cooking, the company cooking, not the Tuesday cooking. Lynn was at the stove in the green dress. The green dress meant something. It had meant something since a wedding anniversary in 2004.

"Green dress," I said, kissing her neck. "Shona must be somebody."

"Shona is somebody." She stirred something that didn't need stirring. "Wade, before she gets here, there's something I need to tell you. So you don't make a face at the table."

"I never make a face."

"You make a face. It's a whole thing, your face. Sit down."

I sat. She told me.

The short version, since she took the long version and the long version had a lot of pacing in it: Shona was her lover for about a year and a half in college. Before me. During me, technically, at the overlap, which is the part Lynn had never mentioned in thirty years. The affair ended when Lynn picked me. Shona moved away, married, divorced, and now she was back, and she had called last week not to catch up, exactly.

"She's proposing an arrangement," Lynn said. "Fridays. Her place. You know about it, you always know about it, nothing hidden."

I sat there. The clock over the stove ticked, which clocks in stories always do and which mine actually does, smugly.

"An arrangement," I said. "You and her."

"Me and her."

"Every Friday."

"Every Friday."

"And I just, what, sit home?"

"You'd know. That is the entire point. She was clear about that. No sneaking, no texting from other rooms. You know the days."

Here's what went through my head, in order: nothing, then everything, then a weirdly specific image of the Buick's drip pan. I'm an engineer by training. I like systems. This system had a flaw in it and the flaw was shaped like me.

"Why now?" I finally asked. "Why after all this time?"

Lynn sat down across from me. She took my hand, which she does when she's about to be honest, so I braced.

"Because I'm fifty-five and she's fifty-four and we ran out of reasons not to," she said. "And because our spark could use a log on it, Wade. Don't pretend otherwise. We're good. We're not what we were."

That landed harder than I wanted it to. Because she was right, and I hate it when she's right in the kitchen, where there's nowhere to pace.

The doorbell rang at seven sharp.

Shona had gotten older the way some people do, like a good barn. Gray coming in at the temples, laugh lines doing their job, jeans and a blazer like she couldn't decide between the class reunion and a board meeting. Fifty-four and she filled the doorway the way some people fill a room.

"Lynn," she said, and hugged her, and I watched my wife of thirty years melt about four percent into that hug, and something in my chest filed that away for later.

"Wade," Shona said, shaking my hand. Firm grip. Direct eyes. "So you're the one she picked. She wrote me eleven pages about it in 1995. I still have them."

"Eleven pages," I said.

"Single spaced."

Dinner was fine. Genuinely fine. Shona was funny in a dry, sideways way, told a story about a warehouse fire she'd witnessed in Tulsa that I won't repeat here because it deserves its own evening. And the whole time, there it was. The electricity. Not sparks flying, nothing so vulgar. More like a current running under the table, low voltage, steady, between those two women who had thirty years of unfinished business sitting between their forks.

Lynn laughed at things Shona said in a way she doesn't laugh at my things. I noticed that too. I noticed it the way you notice a check engine light.

Shona left at ten. At the door, she hugged Lynn again, longer, and said, "Think it over," like I wasn't standing right there, and left.

We didn't talk that night. Lynn said I should sleep on it, and I said fine, and we both lay in the dark not sleeping on it.

I thought about it for two days. At the shop I dropped a socket twice. Pedro asked if I was dying. I said maybe.

Wednesday night I told her yes.

She put down her book. "Yes?"

"Yes. With conditions."

"Name them."

"Nothing behind my back. Whatever happens, I hear it from you. And no overnights. She's home by midnight, whichever house it is."

"That's it?"

"That's it. And one more. If I say stop, it stops. Not a discussion. It stops."

Lynn held my gaze for a moment, and I wish I could tell you what her expression did, but I truly cannot describe it. Relief mixed with something else. She crossed the room and sat on the arm of my chair.

"Deal," she said. "Wade?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay? Really?"

"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truth, and she nodded like the truth was the payment she wanted.

Then she stood up and pulled her nightgown over her head in one motion, which she hasn't done in years, and I stopped thinking about systems and flaws.

She pushed me back into the chair and knelt and took my cock out with the kind of certainty she has about car keys and coffee mugs. She went down on me slow, her tongue doing the thing, my hand in her hair, and I was hard in about nine seconds which at my age is a personal best worth framing.

"Stand up," she said after a while, and I stood, and she bent over the arm of the couch.

"Condom?" I asked, out of some habit older than our marriage, and she looked back at me over her shoulder.

"Thirty years, Wade."

Right. I pushed into her and she was wet and ready and she made that low sound she makes, the one I'd know blindfolded in a crowd. I fucked her steady, hands on her hips, and she reached down and worked her clit in small circles, and she came fast, faster than usual, saying my name twice which is once more than usual. I followed right after, coming deep, both of us breathing like we'd climbed something.

Afterwards she lay across me on the couch with her head on my chest.

"Thank you," she said.

"For the sex or the deal?"

"Both. Either. Don't fish."

I stroked her hair and looked at the ceiling and told myself this was fine. This was a system with a manageable flaw. I told myself that jealousy is a fuel, and fuel can be burned clean if you run the engine hot enough.

I want to note that I believed all of that, Wednesday night, with my wife warm on my chest.

Belief is cheap on a Wednesday.

The first scheduled night was a Friday, two weeks later. Shona's place, across town, a brick duplex with a rose bush that had seen better decades.

Lynn got ready upstairs for over an hour. I sat in the kitchen with a beer I didn't drink. When she came down she was wearing the green dress.

"You wore that for her?" I said.

"I wore it for me. It still fits. That's my whole point."

Fair. We drove over in the Buick, pan still dripping, me with both hands on the wheel at ten and two like the car was the problem.

The plan, agreed in advance, was simple. Shona had a porch. I was allowed on the porch. The living room had a wide doorway, and Lynn had said, in that matter-of-fact way of hers, that if I wanted to come in and stand there, I could stand there.

"Doorway only," I'd said.

"Doorway only," she'd agreed.

We sat on Shona's couch for a while and talked about a woman we all knew from college who now sells insurance in Omaha. Then the talking stopped, the way talking does, and there was a quiet with a shape to it.

"I'm going to kiss you now," Shona said. "Doorway rules. I'm telling him so he hears it's allowed."

"Then kiss me," Lynn said.

So I stood in that doorway and watched a woman kiss my wife.

I want to describe the jealousy accurately, because I'm an engineer and accuracy is what I have. It was not a slow burn. It was a snap, like a breaker tripping. One second the current was running through the room at a voltage I'd signed off on, and the next second every breaker in my panel was hot and I wanted to cross that living room and pull them apart with my hands.