Cuckold -5- Access

Because the sixth, he told himself, would be different.

The fifth was just the one where he stopped lying to himself.

That night, she fell asleep first. He lay awake, counting. Not the men. Not the nights. But the number of times he had almost left. Five. The same as the cuckolding. The same as his fingers, which he now laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sixth.

He turned off the light. In the dark, her breathing was soft, innocent, terrible. He reached for her hand. She gave it, even in sleep. That was the real cage—not the betrayal, but the tenderness that survived it. Cuckold -5-

The number was a whisper, not a verdict.

But he had told himself that at the second. And the third. And the fourth.

“Mark thinks you should try the bitter marmalade.” Because the sixth, he told himself, would be different

Outside, a car passed. Maybe Mark’s. Maybe not.

Instead, he said: “The marmalade is fine.”

He wanted to say: I have become the furniture of your betrayal. I am the chair you sit on while thinking of him. I am the mirror that watches you dress for him. I am the fifth in a series of humiliations that now have their own gravity. He lay awake, counting

She wasn’t taunting. That was the worst part. Her voice was soft, almost clinical. She had folded the affair into routine the way one folds a letter into an envelope—neat, irreversible, already sent. The first cuckolding had been a storm. The second, a drizzle. By the fifth, it was weather.

He closed his eyes and thought: Tomorrow, I will learn to like the marmalade. End of piece.

“You’re quiet,” she said.