Sunday Showing

Niko and I had been married twelve years that September, and we'd done a lot of things together in that time, but wandering through a stranger's half-furnished house on a sunny Sunday afternoon had to be the laziest thing we'd ever done.

We were both forty-something and old enough to know better. He was forty-four, I was forty-two. We were supposed to be home mulching the flower beds. Instead we'd seen the open house sign at the old post office on Route 9, and Niko had slowed the truck down, and I'd said, "Oh, pull in, I've always wondered what that place looks like inside," and that was that.

The place had been a rural post office until about six years ago, and then somebody with more money than sense had turned it into a house. The main room was huge, with the old mail counter still along one wall, all dark wood, and a stained glass window above it throwing red and green and gold light across the floorboards. There was a couch in the middle of the room like an afterthought, and boxes stacked in the corners, and honestly it smelled like dust and old paper.

"Cozy," Niko said, in the voice he uses when he means the opposite.

"It's weird," I agreed. "I kind of love it."

We wandered. There was a kitchen with copper counters. There was a hallway with four doors. One door opened onto a little back room, probably where the postmaster had sorted letters once, with a squat window looking out at a field of dry grass.

We were in the main room again, Niko studying the mail counter like he was thinking about buying it, when the boredom hit me all at once. Not boredom with him. Never with him. Boredom with being good. With mulch and grocery lists and being in bed by ten.

I stepped up close to him, close enough that I could see the gray coming in at his temples, and I put my mouth near his ear.

"I'm bored of being good," I whispered.

Niko turned his head and looked at me. His eyes went from confused to interested in about two seconds flat.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yeah."

He took my hips in his hands and walked me backward until my shoulders met the wall under the stained glass window, and then he kissed me, deep and slow, the way he does when he means it. His hands slid up under my shirt, warm palms on my ribs, and I laughed into his mouth because it tickled and because it was thrilling, both at once.

"Someone could drive up," I said, not pulling away.

"The sign says open house. We're potential buyers." He kissed my jaw, my neck. "Very interested parties."

"Get it? Interested parties," I giggled, and he shushed me, and I grabbed his shirt and hauled him with me down the hall, into the little back room with the squat window. There was an old sorting table in there, solid oak, and a shape under a dust sheet against the far wall. The colored light didn't reach this far. It was just plain afternoon sun.

I pushed Niko back against the table and dropped to my knees on the dusty boards.

"Ana," he said, half warning, half plea.

"Shh. Potential buyers are inspecting the merchandise."

I undid his jeans and drew the zipper down, and I could feel him already half hard through his boxers. I pulled him free and wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked him slow, base to tip, feeling him fill and stiffen in my fist. He let his head fall back and breathed out long through his nose.

"You're going to be the death of me," he said.

"Do you remember the ski lift?" I asked him, working my hand, watching his face.

He opened one eye. "The one at the fair? That stopped yesterday? What about it?"

"Yesterday," I said. "When it stopped. You and me, halfway up, hanging there in the little chair with the whole fairgrounds below us. Everyone down there got let off in ten minutes and we just hung there in the wind for forty."

"I remember being annoyed."

"You remember being annoyed. I remember thinking, the whole time, what if they never fix it. What if it's just you and me up here forever. I had my hand halfway up your thigh under the safety bar and I chickened out because there were children in the next chair."

Niko laughed, low, and his hips pushed a little into my fist. "You chickened out."

"I did. And I've been kicking myself for a full day, Niko. A whole day. So this is me, unchickening."

"Unchickening is not a word."

"Neither is the way you're holding my hair right now, and yet here we are." I twisted my wrist on the upstroke, the way he likes, and his breath caught. His cock was hard as an iron railing in my hand now, warm and smooth and leaking a little at the tip, and I licked him once, flat, just to hear him groan.

His hand tightened in my hair, gentle, guiding without pushing. Twelve years of marriage and the man still groans like it's the first time every time.

"God, Ana," he managed.

"That's it," I said. "That's my good husband. Now. I have an idea, and I want you to hear the whole idea before you agree, because it's a big one."

He looked down at me, flushed and wrecked already, and said, "I'm listening. Mostly."

I stood up, kept my hand on him, and leaned in close so my lips brushed his ear.

"This table," I whispered. "This dusty old sorting table in this stranger's house. I want you to bend me over it. And I don't mean the usual. I mean my ass, slowly, with lube and a condom. The way we talked about in the car on the way home from the fair, remember? You went quiet and red and wouldn't tell me what you were thinking, and I made you tell me in the driveway before you'd let us inside."

Niko went very still. His eyes searched my face.

"You sure?" he asked. "Here?"

"Nobody's here but us. There was a note taped inside the door that said back at four, help yourself, and it's barely three. That's the point of an open house." I was rambling and he put two fingers over my lips.

"I'm in," he said. "Obviously I'm in. I've been in since you whispered in my ear in the big room. But we don't have anything, you know. In the truck there's..."

"There's what?"

He went red. "There's the stuff in the glovebox. From your sister's bachelorette weekend. The joke gift bag. Don't look at me like that, I forgot to take it out, and I've been meaning to."

I stared at him, and then I started laughing so hard I had to put my forehead against his chest, my fist still holding his cock through everything, both of us shaking.

"The lube shaped like a snowman," I wheezed.

"The very one."

"Okay. Okay. Go get the snowman. Walk casual. If a realtor drives up, tell her we're very serious about the property."

He kissed me quick and went, tucking himself away, and I heard his boots cross the main room and the front door and then the truck, and I stood there in the little back room with dust motes swimming in the sun and my heart going hard, pulling my shirt off over my head, wondering what in the world I'd gotten us into and knowing full well the answer was exactly what I wanted.

He came back grinning and jingling the little tube like a set of keys. The snowman's painted face had worn off on one side from rattling around the glovebox for two years, and somehow that made it funnier.

"Mission accomplished," he said, holding it up. "Nobody saw me. I checked the road twice."

"My hero." I took it from him and turned it over in my hand. "Cocoa and peppermint flavor, according to the label."

"We're not eating it, Ana."

"You never know where the afternoon goes."

He laughed at that, and then he looked around the back room like he was seeing it properly for the first time. The oak sorting table stood in the middle with its old brass slots along one edge, and against the far wall sat a couch, a squat little thing covered in a sheet of dust, with a folded blanket draped over one arm. Somebody had staged it. The realtor, probably, trying to make the place look like somebody's home instead of what it was.

Niko shook the blanket out over the couch and a cloud of dust rose up and caught the light. "Too dusty up here," he said, and instead he spread it flat on the floor between the table and the wall. It was a thick quilt, brown and white, and it landed with a soft whump that stirred the smell of old paper up around us again.