Wife's Leave

My husband Andre has been deployed since March, and by October I was going a little strange in the head. We got married when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, six years ago now, and this is the second deployment. I thought I'd be better at the waiting part this time. I wasn't.

I'm Selina, I'm twenty-seven, and I work part time at a vet clinic outside Fort Barstow, which mostly means I clean kennels and get yelled at by poodles. The pay is bad and the town is small. When Andre's gone, the days sort of blur together into one long Tuesday.

So when Lieutenant Will Archer mentioned at a unit family dinner that he needed someone to house-sit his place out in the scrubland while he was at a training course in Virginia, I jumped on it before he finished the sentence. Well, that's not true. Andre jumped on it for me, actually. They're old friends from his first enlistment, and Andre likes doing favors for people he trusts.

"It's four months," Will told me over the paper plates. "House is modern, well is temperamental, and I'd rather a real person live in it than leave it dark. Rent's free. Just keep the pipes from freezing and feed the cat if the cat shows up. I don't actually know if the cat shows up."

"Deal," I said.

Andre was glad too, honestly. He worried about me rattling around base housing alone. "Go stay out there," he said on the phone. "It's quiet, you can study for your vet tech cert. And Will's good people. Weird, but good."

I should have asked what he meant by weird. I'm telling you that now so you can't say I wasn't warned.

* * *

The house sat about twenty minutes past the last gas station, down a dirt road with more tumbleweeds than signs. It was the kind of modern box house you don't expect in Texas scrub country, all sharp angles and big windows looking out at nothing. Two bedrooms. One bathroom that cost more than my car. A cat door in the back that no cat ever used in the entire time I was there.

The first week was boring in the best way. I slept nine hours. I made real dinners. I sat on the back deck at sunset with wine and watched the heat shimmer off the ground like the whole county was underwater. My only complaint was the bedroom at the end of the hall, the one Will never mentioned, which had a keypad lock on the door.

I noticed it the first night because the keypad was the only thing in that house that wasn't beautiful. It sat there on the white door like a pimple. I tried the handle once, out of pure reflex, and it didn't budge. Fine. It's his house. People lock rooms. I let it go.

For about nineteen days.

You should know this about me, and Andre says it's my worst quality. I cannot leave a closed door alone. It's not nosiness exactly. It's more like an itch. And that October, with Andre gone and nobody to talk to except a dog with behavioral problems, the itch got loud.

On a Thursday evening, day twenty of my stay, I walked down the hall to get to the linen closet and found the locked door sitting ajar.

Not open. Ajar, maybe four inches, the keypad dark. I stood there like an idiot with a towel in my hands, telling myself every sensible thing there was to tell myself. Then I opened it anyway.

The room was dim, the blinds half down, and it smelled faintly of powder and something else, something clean and chemical I couldn't name. It took my eyes a second to make sense of what I was seeing. Then it took another second to believe it.

The closet stood wide open, and inside, on rows of wooden hangers, was latex. Gleaming black latex. Catsuits, hoods, gloves, dresses with zippers in places dresses don't usually have zippers. There was a rack of what I can only describe as accessories, and a padded bench, and a full-length mirror angled just so. Everything hung in perfect order, sorted by some system I couldn't guess at, polished to the point where the room's low light slid off it like off water.

I don't know what I expected to find. Paperwork, maybe. Exercise equipment. Not a wardrobe that looked like the inside of a very organized spy movie.

I stepped in, and I'm not proud of this, I reached out and touched one. A catsuit on the end, heavy and thick, colder than I expected, with a smoothness on the other side that made my fingers want to keep moving. I'd never touched latex in my life. It was sort of like holding a second skin that belonged to someone much more interesting than me.

That's when the front door opened downstairs.

I froze. Then I did the single dumbest thing available to me, which was standing very still in a locked room holding a catsuit, like stillness could undo the keypad code I'd never entered. Footsteps came up the hall. The door swung the rest of the way open, and Will stood there in his travel jacket with a duffel bag over one shoulder.

He looked at me. He looked at the catsuit in my hands. He set the duffel down on the floor without hurry.

"Okay," he said, in a voice like he was reading a grocery list. "So. You're here."

"I'm so sorry," I said, all in one breath. "The door was already open, I mean it was ajar, I didn't force anything, I know the code's locked, I just, the door was open and I panicked and now I'm holding your, uh." I held the catsuit up like evidence. "This."

"Yeah, that's the Selina special. My best one." He came in and shut the blinds the rest of the way, then leaned against the bench with his arms folded. He didn't look angry. He looked like someone calculating sums in his mind. "How long were you in here?"

"Maybe two minutes. Less. I touched one thing. That's it, I swear."

"Okay." He nodded slowly. "So here's my problem, Selina. That room is private. Very private. And you're living in my house for another ten weeks, and now we both know it exists. So we can either be weird about that for ten weeks, or we can not."

I put the catsuit back on its hanger with the care of someone defusing a bomb. "I'd like to not be weird. I really would. I'm so embarrassed."

"Don't be. It's a fetish. It's mine, I've had it since I was nineteen, and it's expensive and I keep it locked because it's nobody's business, especially not on a post where everybody knows everybody." He shrugged. "I dress in it, sometimes I like a partner in it, and mostly I just like that it exists. That is the entire mystery. There's no dungeon. There's a bench. The bench is new, I sit on it."

I laughed before I could stop myself, and he smiled a little at that, which loosened something in my chest.

"It's beautiful," I said, because it was true. "I've never seen anything like it up close. I've barely seen it at all, honestly. It just looked so..." I trailed off, because I didn't have the word.

"Shiny?"

"Expensive."

"It is that too." He straightened up and looked at the rack the way people look at old photographs. "Can I ask you something, and you can say no to it?"

"Sure," I said, and then, because my mouth runs ahead of me, "probably."

He huffed a laugh at that. "Do you want to actually look at it? Not sneak around. Look. I'll show you the whole collection, tell you what everything is. Nobody's ever seen it who didn't already know what they were walking into, and honestly, showing someone who's curious sounds kind of nice for a change."

I thought about Andre, four time zones away, who had called me the night before just to hear about my dinner. I thought about how the last interesting thing to happen to me was the dog biting a mailman.

"You'd really show me?" I said. "After I broke into your sex closet?"

"It's not a sex closet."

"Will. It's a sex closet."

"It's a garment room with a bench," he said, but he was grinning now, and something about that grin made my face go warm. "Look, you can say no and we go eat dinner and never mention it again. Or you say yes and I show you why I spent a fortune on climate control for one bedroom. Either way, the catsuit goes back on the end hook, because you're holding it wrong and it's going to crease."

I looked down. I was absolutely holding it wrong.

"You're supposed to support the shoulders," Will said, reaching over and sliding one hand under the hanger. "Like this. It's not a bag of groceries."

"Got it. Latex etiquette, lesson one."

"Lesson thirty. Lesson one is don't leave it in the sun." He hung the catsuit back on the end hook and stepped back, and then he was doing the math thing again, standing there with his hands in his pockets, working up to something.

"Okay," he said finally. "Second question. Bigger question. And I need you to understand that the answer no costs you nothing, and I will never bring it up again, and you finish out your ten weeks here and we play Scrabble on Saturday like normal people."

"That's a lot of setup for one question."

"The question is this." He looked at the rack instead of at me. "Would you want to try something on? With me here. Me helping, since there's a technique to it. Or you leave the room right now and that's the end of it."

The room was very quiet. The climate control hummed. Somewhere outside a wind chime clicked against the scrub wind, the one piece of decoration in that whole box of a house.

I want to tell you that I thought about Andre first, because I did, but I will not claim the thought was a stop sign. It was more like a compass needle, pointing at a man who called me every Sunday, and then the needle swung right back to the rack of rubber in front of me and stayed there. Andre and I had been married six years. I had never been with anyone else. I was twenty-seven years old and the most exciting thing I owned was a slow cooker.

"Can I think about it out loud?" I said.

"Sure."

"I've only ever been with my husband. Since I was twenty-one, basically. And he's gone, and I'm here, and nothing about tonight was planned, and I feel like I'm standing on a diving board." I took a breath. "But I also haven't felt looked at in eight months, and just now, when you were talking about it, I felt looked at. So I don't want to leave."

"Okay," Will said. "Thank you for saying it straight."

"You're not going to make this weird?"

"I'm going to make it weird in the specific way I'm good at, which is I'm going to be very particular about how the dress goes on." He crossed to the far side of the rack and pulled out a dress, a heavy black one with a high neck and long sleeves, and held it up. The