Home from Massage, Underwear Straight into His Hand

The place is two blocks past the Target, Thursday evenings at seven, in the back of a strip-mall storefront that also sells bath salts and socks at the counter. The masseur is a man. I never planned it that way, but the first time I walked out and felt how wet my underwear had become I knew one thing for certain: my husband had to know about it. And not just know.

I rode the bus home working out what to say. When the door opened he dropped to his knees the way he always does. Still in my coat I said, “Stay there.” In the bathroom I stepped out of the panties, came back, and laid them across his open palm. He looked at the fabric, then at me. “Massage,” I told him. “Ninety minutes. I’ll tell you if you want.” He answered “I want” in the voice people use when they agree to something that might hurt.

Thursdays have been Thursdays ever since.

This is how it goes. I come in loose and warm, shoulders still slick. He waits on his knees in the chastity belt; the lock never opens on Thursdays, that’s the rule. I sit in the armchair, he settles on the floor between my feet, and I talk. I tell him exactly how I was lying, where the hands moved, where they paused, what I felt in my back and lower down. I don’t make anything up. The weight of another man’s thumbs along my spine, the way the towel shifted, how I held my breath when he tucked the edge lower. The minute I stood in the changing room afterward, not ready to get dressed yet.

He listens because he has to. While he listens he serves me with his mouth, the story running alongside the work. Every sentence about someone else’s hands makes him hungrier and more helpless at the same time. The cage shifts; he can’t do anything about it, and the fact that he can’t is what starts the heat low in my stomach when I look down.

Jealousy is fuel, not poison. There’s a limit, though, and I stay on the right side of it. I never say the other man is better. I never compare. I just describe what happened to my body, and he is the only one who gets the rest of it. Someone else touched my back; my husband gets everything after that, and he knows the difference. A year ago he asked, “What if it had gone further?” I said, “You’d be the first to hear.” He went quiet, and I could see the answer settled him.

What I get, and it’s honest, is the feeling of being wanted twice in one evening. First by hands that had no right to anything more. Then by the man who only has the rights I give him. That the second wanting always feels stronger still surprises me.

What he gets I asked him once. He was quiet a long time and finally said, “That you come home.” I hadn’t expected that answer. It was the right one.

He washes the underwear himself. Hands in the bathroom sink after dinner. I never asked him to start; he just did, after the third or fourth time. I didn’t question it. Some things are better left alone. He folds them and puts them back in the drawer the way they come from the store.

The oil on my shoulders stays until morning. He likes the smell. He told me so himself.