The Anniversary Guest

*This one came from thinking about how even good marriages can get quiet, and what happens when you let a stranger's hands remind you what your own hands used to do. Thanks for reading something a little tender and a little messy.*

Let me tell you how I nearly wrecked my marriage by trying to be romantic. Or maybe I fixed it. Honestly, I still can't decide which, and I've had a lot of showers to think about it in.

First, the basics. My name is Dustin, I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've been married to Kate for a decade. We met in grad school when I was twenty-six and she was twenty-four. She dropped a stack of index cards in the campus coffee shop and I helped her pick them up, and she informed me that I'd alphabetized them wrong. That was it. Twelve years, one bungalow, zero kids, one very spoiled cat.

So why mess with a good thing? Well. Have you ever been dependable for so long that you start to feel like furniture? I knew Kate's coffee order, she knew mine, we knew which nights we watched what shows. It was nice! It was really nice. It was also, some Thursday in April, boring in a way that scared me. Not Kate-boring. Life-boring. I missed the guy who once drove two hours for tacos on a dare. Where had that guy gone?

I asked Kate about it, sort of sideways, over dinner. "Do you ever miss being spontaneous?"

She looked up from her lasagna. "What did you do?"

"What? Nothing! Can't a guy ask a philosophical question?"

"You alphabetized the spice rack last weekend, Dustin. You asked me to admire it."

Okay, fair. But in my defense, the spice rack looked incredible.

Our tenth anniversary was coming up in June, and I decided I was going to surprise her. Not jewelry. Not a trip to somewhere with a buffet. I was going to build her the library loft she'd been talking about since we bought the house. The spare room had twelve-foot ceilings in a 1920s Craftsman, and for ten years Kate had said, "You know what that room needs?" and I'd say, "A loft with a ladder and a reading nook," and she'd say, "God, yes," and then neither of us would do anything about it. Classic marriage move.

Here's the problem, and you can probably see it coming better than I could: I own a station wagon and a drill. The drill works. That's the extent of my qualifications. So I did what any sane man does. I hired a professional.

Ike Hudson. Forty-two, divorced, been swinging a hammer for over twenty years. Kate had actually met him once, three years ago, at the hardware store on Fifth Street. She came home and said, "There's a contractor at Hartley's who told me our porch columns are original and I should fight any contractor who wants to replace them." I remember thinking, wow, a guy with opinions about porch columns. I should get his number. I didn't get his number. Three years later I found his card in the junk drawer, because that's where all important things live.

We shook hands on the porch in April. He looked at the spare room, whistled at the ceiling, and said, "Oh, she's going to love this. Oak or cherry?"

"Oak. Kate's a pine dissenter but she's neutral on cherry."

He laughed like that was the funniest thing he'd heard all week. Big guy, gray coming in at the temples, forearms like rope. Seemed like a good hire. Remember I said that.

The plan was simple. I'd found a grant-funded fellowship thing attached to my old grad program, which meant long days on campus and Ike working in the house while I was gone. Kate worked days at the county office across town, so the schedule was clean: Ike in the house from eight to four, Kate home at five-thirty, me home around six, nobody the wiser. The loft would be done by mid-June and I'd blindfold her, walk her up the stairs, and win anniversary for the rest of our lives.

Week one went great. Truly. Ike tore out the old plaster, found the original beams underneath, and texted me photos like a proud dad. "Look at this grain. Look at it, Dustin." I looked. It was very nice grain. He built the platform frame, started the ladder rails in his shop, left the house spotless every day except for sawdust, which is apparently not a spot you can sweep, it's a lifestyle.

I'd come home and Kate would say, "The house smells amazing, like lumber?" and I'd say, "That's just me," and she'd say, "It is not," and we'd laugh. Was I lying to my wife? Yes. For her own good. That's a thing people say, right?

Then came the second week. Wednesday night Kate said the strangest thing over dishes. "That Ike guy is really something, huh? I ran into him again. He remembered the porch columns thing."

"Contractors remember wood. It's their whole deal."

"He's funny, too. He made me laugh so hard at Hartley's I nearly dropped a bucket of screws." She dried a plate and grinned at nothing. "He's got a great laugh."

Great. My wife liked the contractor's laugh. Fine. People like laughs. I liked his photos of grain. We were all adults with normal feelings about lumber.

Thursday I got out early. The fellowship seminar got canceled, professor had a conference, whatever, I was on the road by two and home by two-thirty, thinking I'd sneak in, peek at the loft progress, maybe move my car so Ike wouldn't have to dodge it.

The truck was in the driveway. Ike's truck, I mean. That's normal! He works there! But the house was quiet, and quiet at two-thirty on a workday felt wrong the way your house always feels wrong when it's quiet and it shouldn't be.

I came in through the kitchen door, real quiet, mostly out of habit from years of trying to sneak past the cat. And that's when I heard it. A thump. Then another thump. Then a sound I want to call a laugh but it wasn't quite a laugh, it was lower, rougher, coming from upstairs.

From the spare room.

I want to tell you I immediately thought, intruders! Be a hero, Dustin! I did not think that. My brain did the math it always does and went somewhere worse. Ike and Kate. Both supposedly elsewhere. A laugh from a room that was supposed to be full of sawdust and my anniversary surprise.

I went up the stairs the quiet way, the third step skipped because it howls. The spare room door was almost shut. Ike's crew had been propping it with a sawhorse but the sawhorse had migrated, and there was a gap, maybe four inches wide, between the door and the frame. Daylight and dust motes coming through it.

I stood there like an idiot with my hand on the banister and my heart doing something I could feel in my ears. And through the gap I saw the floor. All the furniture was still under dust sheets, big white shapes like sleeping ghosts around the edges of the room. The new platform frame sat in the middle, half-built, oak boards stacked and gorgeous.

And on that platform, on top of the half-built anniversary surprise, was my wife. Kate, thirty-six years old, steady Kate, county-office Kate, was on her back on bare oak with her work blouse unbuttoned and her skirt shoved up around her hips, and Ike Hudson was between her knees doing something with his mouth that was making her make noises I hadn't heard from her since our honeymoon.

I should have coughed. I should have banged the door open. I should have done one of about forty reasonable things.

I stood there in the hallway with sawdust on my shoes and watched my wife arch her back off the boards, and I'll tell you the truth, the thing I felt first was not anger.

It was want.

Her head was tipped back against a stack of lumber and her hands were in Ike's hair, and every time she breathed out it came out as this low, broken sound, like she was surprised by her own body. Ike had his shirt off, boots off, jeans shoved down just enough, and he was doing that thing with his mouth and two fingers where I could hear exactly how wet she was, and I could hear it, is my point, through a four-inch gap in a doorway from the hallway.

So here is where I admit something, and you can judge me, plenty of people would. I did not move. I was supposed to be angry. I found the anger later, I promise you, it showed up fashionably late like a guest at a party. But standing there at two-thirty on a Thursday with my briefcase still in my hand, what I felt was my own cock getting hard against my zipper, fast, almost painful, and my whole face going hot, and my feet absolutely refusing to walk anywhere.

Kate gasped and said, "Oh, God, right there, don't stop," and Ike made a happy rumbling noise against her, and I watched her hips come up off the oak boards to meet his mouth. Her blouse was open all the way now and I could see her nipples, dark and hard, and her necklace was stuck to her throat with sweat. She looked incredible. She