Desire

The mirror in our bathroom used to be just a mirror. Lately it had become something else, a place I caught myself standing in front of a little too long, turning sideways, watching the way the muscle moved under my skin like it belonged to someone younger.

Six months of lifting had done more to my body than I expected. I'd started because Tucker and Emery were both gone most of the year now, off chasing junior hockey in some frozen town three states away, and for the first time since I was seventeen years old I had hours in my week that didn't belong to anyone else. I threw them at a barbell. Fifty pounds came off. What replaced it surprised me every time I looked down at my own forearms, veins running up through them like the lines on a road map I hadn't asked for.

Tara noticed. She'd run a hand across my stomach some mornings and just shake her head, like she couldn't quite believe I belonged to her. I liked that look on her more than I probably should have admitted out loud.

That Tuesday afternoon, the house was quiet in that particular way it gets when everyone is somewhere else. Tara had gone to the grocery store. I was looking for my phone charger, the one that always disappeared into the black hole of her nightstand drawer along with hand lotion and old receipts and a paperback or two she never finished.

I opened the drawer expecting the usual clutter.

Instead I found a stack of books, spines cracked from being read more than once, covers dark and moody with titles I wouldn't have expected my wife to be caught dead holding in a checkout line. Beneath them, tucked flat against the bottom of the drawer like she'd hidden it there on purpose, was a spiral notebook.

I told myself I wasn't going to open it.

I opened it anyway.

Her handwriting filled page after page, small and careful the way it always was when she wrote something she cared about. Grocery lists. Birthday cards. This wasn't either of those things. This was fantasy, written in detail, my name woven through nearly every scene like she'd built the entire thing around me without ever once saying a word out loud.

My hands were not shaking when I started reading. They were by the third page.

There was a scene where I had her wrists bound to our headboard. There was another where I made her wait, made her ask, made her beg before I gave her what she wanted. There was a page where she'd written the word please so many times it looked like a chant, like something you'd find carved into the wall of a room built specifically for what I'd spent twenty years pretending I didn't think about.

I sat on the edge of our bed with that notebook open in my lap and felt two things at once, so tangled together I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Anger, sharp and hot, that she'd carried this alone for God knows how long. And underneath it, something worse. Something that made my jeans feel tight and my pulse show up in my throat.

She had wanted this the whole time.

I heard her car in the driveway before I'd decided what I was going to do about any of it.

The garage door groaned open. Grocery bags rustled. Her keys hit the bowl by the door the same way they had every day for twenty years. I didn't move from the bed. I sat there with the notebook still open, one of the books stacked on top of it, and waited.

"Monte?" Her voice carried up the stairs, easy, unaware. "Can you help me with the rest of the bags?"

I didn't answer. A minute later I heard her feet on the steps, and then she was standing in the doorway of our bedroom, grocery bag still looped over one wrist, looking at me sitting on the edge of the bed with her secret spread out in front of me like evidence at a trial.

Her face went through about four different expressions in the span of two seconds. Confusion first. Then recognition. Then something that looked a lot like fear.

The bag slipped off her wrist and hit the floor.

"Monte, I can explain."

"Explain what, exactly." My voice came out lower than I meant it to, and steadier than I felt. "Explain the books? Or explain why you filled a hundred pages with things you never once thought to say to my face?"

"I didn't want you to think I was..." She stopped. Her arms wrapped around herself, that same posture she used to get when the kids were small and she thought she'd done something wrong. "I didn't want you to look at me differently."

"Twenty years, Tara." I stood up, the notebook still in my hand, and closed the distance between us slower than I wanted to. "Twenty years I have laid next to you every single night thinking about things I was too damn scared to say. Thinking you'd be disgusted with me if I told you what I actually wanted to do to you."

Her eyes went wide. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the same thing you were writing about in this notebook." I held it up, watched the color drain from her face and something else creep in behind it. "You think you're the only one who's been lying awake at night imagining tying someone up? You think I haven't laid there next to you a thousand times wanting to grab that curly hair and pull it, wanting to hear you beg me for something, and talking myself out of it every single time because I was terrified you'd look at me like I was some kind of monster?"

She was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice had dropped to almost nothing.

"I thought I was the broken one," she whispered. "I thought if you knew what I wanted, you'd think there was something wrong with me."

"There is nothing wrong with you." I stepped closer, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to keep looking at me. "But you hid your soul from me for twenty years, Tara. You let me believe I was the only one carrying something dark, when this whole time you were dreaming about the exact same thing."

Her breath caught. I watched the shame in her eyes start to shift into something else, something I recognized because I'd been fighting it in myself for half an hour already.

"Are you angry with me?" she asked.

"Furious." I let the word sit there between us. "Furious that you didn't trust me enough to tell me. And so goddamn turned on right now I can barely think straight."

Her lips parted. Whatever she was about to say died before it reached her tongue.

I set the notebook down on the dresser, walked past her, and pushed the bedroom door shut behind me. The lock clicked, small and final, louder in that moment than it had any right to be.

"No more secrets," I said, turning back to face her. "I'm going to read every word you wrote, Tara. Every fantasy, every page. And then I'm going to show you exactly what happens now that I know the truth about what you've been wanting this whole time."