Call Me! Read Free Page B

understand. Unless you knew him better.
     
    At any rate, when he asked me to stay with him I said, “The least I can do is pay half the expenses.”
     
    He wouldn’t hear of it, but I insisted.
     
    “Any other demands?” he said.
     
    “I want two nights a week for myself.”
     
    “Excuse me?”
     
    “Two nights to myself. Each week.”
     
    “What, you want me to stay in a hotel?”
     
    “No. I want to leave the house, leave this life, two nights a week.”
     
    “Sounds like you’ve thought this all out.”
     
    “Actually, it just now came to me.”
     
    “There’s another man,” he said.
     
    “No.”
     
    “No?”
     
    “I promise.”
     
    “What will you do every week on these two nights?”
     
    “Different things. But the other five nights I’ll be available for you.”
     
    “But not sexually available.”
     
    “Not sexually, no.”
     
    “Define available,” he said.
     
    “When I’m not working a case I’ll buy groceries, cook dinner, go out with you to your functions and fund-raisers, or to dinner, plays, movies, whatever. I’ll run errands, help you entertain friends and colleagues. I’ll help you grade papers. I’ll—”
     
    “I get the point,” he said. “And I assume on these two nights a week you’ll be available to have sex with other men?”
     
    I looked him in the eyes. “Ben, I’m not looking for another man.”
     
    “But if one happens to show up? One you can’t resist?”
     
    “If that happens, we’ll have another discussion.”
     
    “Before you date him?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Promise?”
     
    “I won’t cheat on you. I promise.”
     
    Ben didn’t know about my decoy work back then and still doesn’t know I occasionally get paid to lure strange men to hotel rooms. Ben might consider this dating, but I have no problem separating my decoy work from my social life.
     
    “Which nights?” Ben said.
     
    “You pick.”
     
    “Monday and Tuesday. That gives us the weekends.”
     
    “Done.”
     
    He said, “I believe you.”
     
    “Thank you.”
     
    “If you wanted the weekends, I’d know you had someone else.”
     
    “Because someone else would demand my weekends?”
     
    “Exactly.”
     
    “You can live like this? Having me as a roommate instead of a wife?”
     
    “I’ll manage.”
     
    “How?”
     
    “After the third year of marriage, twenty-five percent of married couples sleep in separate bedrooms.”
     
    “They keep statistics on those sorts of things?”
     
    “They do. And most wives want less sex with their husbands every year, especially after they’ve had kids. Eventually, sexual frequency for married couples is statistically nonexistent.”
     
    “But for us it’s already nonexistent.”
     
    “But we get along great,” he said. “And you gave me three wonderful years of sexual memories.”
     
    I smiled. “Those were fun times. But, the two nights I’m gone every week from now on?”
     
    “What about them?”
     
    “I don’t want to talk about them.”
     
    He pauses.
     
    “Fine,” he says.
     
    “Really?”
     
    “I won’t ask what you do if you don’t ask what I do.”
     
    We laughed and shook hands on it, like two moguls closing a business deal.
     

“WHAT ABOUT BIRTHDAYS?” Ben said.
    “Birthdays?”
     
    “I think it’s customary for wives to give their husbands a blowjob on birthdays, and have sex on Valentine’s and anniversaries.”
     
    I frowned. “Maybe this isn’t going to work out.”
     
    “Forget the BJ’s. How about sex? Three days a year. What do you think?”
     
    I wonder why it’s so hard for me to accommodate him. Ben’s a handsome, wonderful man who adores me. This is the man who saved my life by loving me when I was in the depths of despair. This is a man who’s willing to live under the same roof without intimacy, a man who’s capable of trusting his wife to be gone two days a week without requiring any explanation for her actions or whereabouts.