I can’t tell him. We’ve been married eleven years.
But I love her more.
I love to curl the autumns of her hair around my fingers.
I prefer her pink plastic fingernails tracing my face and breasts.
The fake eyelashes and the brows and the thickness of her make-up sweat away to a sexy mess as we make love.
I wasn’t sure at first. Neither was she. (He introduced us not knowing how well we’d get along.)
Her awkwardness is endearing. She has this way of drawing both sides of the front of her hair back from her face with thick poised fingers and peering out at me, all shy and unsure. And she can’t walk for shit in those pumps.
I see in her the light that had attracted me to him once.
We drink beer in the kitchen and laugh together like teenagers.
Her spark, it lit me right back up.
I wish she could stay.
Because I never know when she will return.
She is all I think about and the more she is on my mind the more I avoid his eye and his touch.
You see, when he is her he is her, but she isn’t she without him.
I haven’t told her just how deep this goes because he will find out.
She and I, we have no say
in when she will be wiped and brushed away
and then
there he is again:
The man I used to love.
