by K T Morrison
Chelsea laughed, forearm muscles flexing as she twisted the corkscrew out of a bottle of red wine. “Relax, Ben. Maybe it’s good news.”
“What’s good news?”
“Maybe it’s done. Maybe Finn is zipping up right now and Libby’s—”
“Don’t say that,” he hissed.
Chelsea laughed again and emptied the bottle into four glasses sparkling in the fading sunlight. “Could you imagine? All these years, Libby Sanders was that kind of girl after all…”
“She’s not.”
“They’re up there so long, Ben. There’s like two rooms, for sure they’re doing it right now.”
He muttered remonstrations, thrust fists into his pockets, marched around behind her, leaning on the deck railing so he could peer into the house better. Without sunlight in his eyes now he could see the interior of the kitchen. No one. “They’re still upstairs,” he murmured.
“Looks like you’re safe, then, my friend. You got what you wanted.”
“This isn’t what I wanted.”
“Well, run up there, grab my husband off your poor sweet and innocent wife...”
“I would... Except there’s no way that that’s happening up there, you’re just being an asshole.”
Chelsea snorted laughter into the bowl of her wine glass as she tipped it up to take her first sip. Her eyes never left him, narrow slits watching him as she drank. She savored the wine, swirled the glass then set it down. “Just think, Ben, this all works out, maybe while they’re up there it’s you and me on the couch. We can take off where we left off...”
He wanted to condemn her, spit disgust and defend his wife’s honor with a renewed appreciation of his own. Only no words came. He hunched his shoulders up, flexed his back muscles, his brow lowered angrily.
Chelsea came to stand beside him, peering into the kitchen. She said, “Who knows, maybe we can do it tonight. I think they might be on round two…”
“Look, there’s no way.”
“I sure saw old Lib’s eyes light up when Finn came in the room.”
He grumbled.
“What was that?”
He shook his head no. He could see Chelsea smiling wide in his periphery. “Aren’t your steaks going to burn?”
“Don’t worry, Finn’s the chef around here. If there’s one thing that will pull him off your sexy little wife, it’ll be tending to his meat.” The dirty phrase hung in the air, and he grumbled again. Chelsea tittered quietly, said, “Right now it’s your wife that’s tending his meat…”
A ball of surprising energy swirled up in the center of his core. Lust and anger, and the image came to him now of him twisting at the hips, somehow having his glass of wine in his hand and dashing it into Chelsea’s face at the offense of her words. But then he heard laughter from the front of the house, could see movement in the narrow dim gap of the archway where the kitchen met the front hall. Then Libby and Finn were there, coming into the light. Finn spun around and opened the fridge, stuck his rump out as he dipped his head inside, bottles clattering. Libby stood at his side, putting one foot over the other nervously, hand on her hip, eyes lowered—and he swore to God she was checking out Finn’s ass.
Finn pulled out two cold ones and set them on the counter; Libby came to join him, putting her elbows on the island and watching his hands work. He had large hands, tattooed and capable ones, and his wedding ring clinked on the glass as he spun the two twist-tops off and Libby took the bottle that was hers. They clinked necks, then took swigs of beer with their eyes watching each other. Libby tilted forward, as if preventing a laugh, covering her fingers over her mouth. She shook her head no, and he could hear Finn’s deep voice saying, “No?”
Libby turned up her nose and shook her head to affirm her response. She didn’t like his beer selection.
Finn laughed, tilted his bottle up and imbibed more. Libby watched his Adam’s apple work.
Chelsea murmured, “Should I get the garden hose?”
“Shut up,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth to Chelsea who’d sidled alongside him with her wineglass held up. They were watching Finn and Libby joke around with each other, talking close, Libby’s chin turned up, her eyes not leaving this other man.
“She’s in heat, Ben, I swear, let me get the hose...”
“Even if she is, I don’t think I want this...”
“You can always say no… You can always change your mind…”
4
Finn was quite the chef. Served at their patio table from Finn’s wood-fired grill: four moose steaks in a maple glaze, and scallops wrapped in bacon. He’d also made a salad of shoots and greens and dried apricots with lemon and poppyseed dressing. It was unexpected given his appearance. Ben would have expected Chelsea to have done the meal preparation so her rock music husband wouldn’t embarrass her by serving Jack Daniels and cigarettes and some Kraft Dinner with chopped up hot dogs. It inspired Libby to say admiringly: “Wow, a real renaissance man,” and it provoked a long-lasting irritated rumble in Ben’s belly while he ate the scallops.
Three bottles of wine were drained between the four of them. The weather was perfect. The sun a golden orange hue that deepened while they finished their drinks. Slowly the night turned blue. The porch lights came on by timer.
And a steady hum and percolation coming from the hot tub made Ben’s stomach tighten.
5
Chelsea took him under the arm and led him from the kitchen where the four of them were talking. The conversation had switched to music now, Libby saying how excited she was about seeing Dorchester. Once she got talking, telling Finn all about the last time they’d gone to see the band—which must’ve been 2007—Chelsea brought Ben into the living room, whispering, “Leave them alone for a little bit.”
They made their way to the couch, flopped in it together, Chelsea curling up next to him, twisting at the hips and slinking one knee up her thigh until it touched his hip. With her elbow on the back of the couch, she eyed him closely. He broke first. “What?...”
“What do you think now?”
“Do I think she would go for it?”
“Do you?”
“There’s no way. I mean, I know how it looks…” He glanced over his shoulder toward the archway into the kitchen, but Chelsea led his chin back with the point of her finger. “Let them be…”
“I don’t want it.”
“What about your guilt?”
He shrugged, sunk heavily into the couch seat. Chelsea stroked his cheek. Her eyes looked down on him like he was a curiosity. He said, “Do you think if Libby slept with him, she would forgive me?”
She withdrew her hand, thought about it a moment. “It was my suggestion, Ben.”
“But you’re a woman… and as a woman...?”
“I’m not like Libby, Ben, that’s why you’re in this position.”
He hummed an affirmative sound then groaned. He folded his arms over his chest, bit the inside of his cheek. From inside the kitchen, he heard Libby giggle.
Chelsea looked in the kitchen, said to him, “I tell you what, Ben, I think Finn’s right.”
He sighed. “There’s no way...”
“Maybe not. But it looks a lot more likely than it did a few days ago, you couldn’t argue with me on that one.”
It was true, this experience had been completely unexpected.
Now Libby was trotting in, bright eyed and rosy cheeked, smiling so she showed her teeth; she came directly to the couch, and he lifted his knees protectively. She grabbed at his wrists. How many glasses of wine had she had?
She said, “Come on, Ben. Show me how you dance...”
“I don’t dance,” he insisted.
Libby pouted playfully in a way that poked at his heart and wound up a strange curiosity. She said, “We’re going out, don’t be a poop...”
“Don’t be a poop, Ben,” Chelsea purred near his ear.
“Come on, please,” she pleaded, even pooching out her lower lip childishly.
This was a test. This was a test and he could see it very clearly now. In small increments, maybe he could warm up to doing this thing they were proposing. They’d said they would stop if he requested...
He prepared himself, examined the words in his mouth, studied them like they provided meaning from the heavens. Then he uttered them.
“You go on and dance with him, I know you want to. Go have fun with Finn…”
The words hung in the air, pregnant with dread. He could see them, wished to snatch them, swipe his hands through their fluttering butterflies and gather them again into a protective basket. Stuff them all back in there and get the lid closed.
“You’re not going to come out?” Libby said and pouted again.
Behind her, Finn stood by the patio deck, saying, “Isn’t somebody, anybody, going to come out and dance?”
“I’m coming,” Libby said, eyeing Ben with her mouth twisted to one side. It was there. He could see it. Maybe it was his imagination, maybe everything he saw in her eyes was conjured up by his own beliefs and had nothing to do with his wife’s truth. But he swore he could see it now.
Something under his stomach pulled tight like a string, getting it jittering, the tension in it singing out in desperation. It was going to snap. He shifted uncomfortably where he sat, grimacing with a look he tried to pass off as gastric distress from eating too much of Finn’s delicious dinner. But the hurt wasn’t in his stomach. It was below there. A sexual spot, a primal walnut, and, like a leaky faucet, the purest bad juju dripped from his brain like black molasses over his swelling testicles. “Go on, Libby, I like to watch you dance...”
The words were cold and distant. A robot’s voice on an answering machine. It wasn’t him who’d said it... surely it wasn’t him...
6
The music got turned up, and Ben was treated to flashes of either Finn or Libby bouncing into view, spinning, shaking their hips.
Chelsea asked him if Libby liked to go dancing and he told her she never went out. Chelsea said it sure looks like she’d have a good time. He told her he just didn’t like to dance. Chelsea asked if Libby ever requested they go out. Not to dance, no, he told her, she never asks. Chelsea stroked her fingernails on his forearm. “Don’t fret,” she said.
“It’s my own fault,” he said.
“I just can’t believe you keep thinking this is a negative somehow.”
“Don’t make me go through it again.”
“Don’t make me go through it,” she said.
He turned to regard her, curled up like a cat on the couch next to him. “So you just let Finn fuck groupies?”
“He doesn’t anymore. Not now that we’re married. But if he did, he would tell me. There’s a singer that he hooks up with whenever she comes through Toronto.”
“Who?”
Chelsea ran an imaginary zipper over her closed mouth. Then she hummed a tune in her throat, but he didn’t recognize it. “Finn just has a way with women,” she said then, and shrugged.
It was true. Every time he saw Libby twirl into view, her eyes were seeking Finn or already locked on him. Her mouth was peeled in a perpetual smile. Her cheeks were rosy and bright in the lantern’s light...
7
After a long dance session, someone out there turned the music down. As the music faded, Libby’s laughter was bright over top of it. Lib and Finn were saying something in rushed and hurried tones, something funny to each other, laughing again. Then it was just the two of them talking. Chelsea was saying, “...that’s why I always—”
He shushed her. She laughed.
It was Finn’s low voice, then Libby’s. They were moving deeper onto the deck, maybe toward the railing where it dropped off to the garden below where the hot tub was. A tragic thought struck up through him like a spear: rushing out there to find Finn and his wife naked in the hot tub, the lit up bubbles camouflaging the movements below the water’s surface...
It actually had him moving forward, looking to climb out of the seat. But now he could see them. Or at least see all of Libby, and a quarter of Finn. Their backs were to him, and they were indeed leaning over the railing, standing side-by-side. Libby was watching what Finn was doing, but his hands were hidden from Ben.
Chelsea asked: “What are they doing?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Then there was a tuft of smoke that flashed in the lantern’s shine before disappearing into the night again. Smoking.
But his eyes tracked sideways now, seeking Finn’s face. Then into the frame of the open door, he could see Finn passing something toward Libby. It was bulbous, with a stem, and glimmered like it was liquid. Libby smiled tentatively, eyes watching what was presented to her. Her own hand came up, and the item was passed into it. Ben knew what it was now. A glass bubbler, a handheld one. A marijuana pipe.
Libby turned it over, studying it from side to side, running a sheet of hair behind an ear. She asked Finn something, nodded when he answered. She swapped hands, then took a lighter from him.
Now Ben watched as his perfect track record wife—a hundred percent attendance at school, straight-A student, never drank until she was in college, and had never ever done a drug in her entire life—put the pipe to her lips. She flicked the lighter, and Ben could see the chamber fill, blotting out with pure white smoke. Libby inhaled it and held. She crossed both wrists over her mouth, items clumsily held in her small hands, her eyes squinted shut. Finn’s hand came into view, caressed her shoulder and rubbed her arm. Libby turned her back, coughed and blurted into the starlight. A puff of smoke slashed away from her sideways in the brisk summer night breeze. She coughed, and Finn rubbed her back.
When she turned, her face was redder, her eyes glassy, and the smile stretched to its limit. She passed both items back to Finn who took them, while she twisted knuckles into her eye sockets like a crying child. Then they were both laughing, and they exited stage right where Ben couldn’t see them.
8
When Finn and Libby came back in the house from the deck, Lib came right to him, saying, “Why are you two still inside? It’s so nice out there…”
He said, “We were just talking,” looking up at her and smiling wanly.
Chelsea said to Lib, “Look at that smile on your face...”
Libby blushed on her already red cheeks, covered her face with her hands and said, “Am I smiling?” into the cup of her palms.
“Someone looks very happy,” Chelsea said.
Libby backed herself to the couch next to theirs, scooped her skirt underneath her knees and plopped down. Finn was coming in, taking a swig from his beer bottle then sliding the glass door shut. Libby said to Ben, “You should come out dancing with me,” kicking a foot out and pointing at him with her toes. She looked playful and happy and he loved to see it.
Finn came around the couch, and since it was Ben and Chelsea together, Libby all alone on the other couch, it made sense for him to drop himself down next to her. He threw an arm over the back of the couch, slunk into it like his arm was around Libby. Libby didn’t jump away or even dip her head forward. She still smiled dumbly, lifted her shoulders a little then dropped them again, as if she didn’t notice Finn’s close proximity. Or mind it. She even leaned toward him a little, turning her face toward his and saying, “They’re party poopers.”
Finn said, “Chelsea’s not much of a dancer, either.”
“I do alright,” Chelsea said, “but Libby can take my place at all the dances...”
Libby raised her hand as if volunteering, saying in a cute voice, “I’ll do it.” She giggled, and Finn took the opportunity to grip her shoulder with his big hand, his arm full around her now, his tattooed fingers curling around the soft curve of Libby’s shoulder, her tank top strap swishing and revealing the color of her brand-new bra. Pastel pink.
Now Libby pointed with both feet, aiming her toes at Ben and Chelsea, saying, “What were you guys talking about?”
Ben’s mouth opened as his brain floundered for a
falsehood, but Chelsea was quick, shooting from the hip and saying, “Bad news, I’m afraid...”
Libby looked puzzled. She put her feet down, hands clasped between her knees. “Oh no, something’s wrong?”
Chelsea said, “Shoot, I guess it’s not for me to say. Sorry, Ben...”
Ben looked to see Chelsea watching him. He frowned.
Libby said, “What’s wrong, Ben?”
“I…”
Chelsea patted his arm, said, “I’ll say it since I started it. It’s about the Ragna-Rock Festival… about Dorchester…”
“What about them?” Libby said hesitantly, her voice tinged with worry.
“Ben can’t make it. He’s got to be out of town… That boat…”
He threw his palms up as if to say What are you going to do? His heart pounded in his ears. What the fuck was this?
Libby’s happy expression collapsed. “Oh, no,” she whined, “Ben?…”
“I can’t, Lib, that boat… It’s like going to be twenty percent of my income this year.”
“But Dorchester…” She pouted.
“You can still go,” Finn said.
Libby said, “When do you have to be away?” Her beautiful eyes were still fixed on him.
“Friday and Saturday, both days, I got to head around the lake and meet with the guy who’s going to sail the boat.” Not bad.
“But why that weekend?”
“The guy I got, Lib. I’m beholden to his schedule. I wish there was a whole list of guys I could get to do this for me, but there’s only one guy… At least who can do it when I need it done.”
“Shoot, Ben,” Lib said, brow dipping and her mouth turning down in a sullen bow.
Finn said again, “You can still go.”
“I’m not going alone,” she said.
Finn said, “I’ll be there. Come with me...”