So I decided, because he was on to me—on to me perhaps even before I’d been on to my own scheming—to touch myself in our bedroom that night instead of spend his money. Our money, of course and the cliché of it burned me just about as much as the truth, but I knew the way he thought of it since I owed on a car and school loans and a few less understandable personal debts that amounted to full closets I hated anymore to open.

And I decided to touch myself instead of eating, too, for though he never tsk-tsked the way a helping always lapped over my plate’s green spiral rim, he didn’t know the half of what my desk drawers held—just the janitor who tipped out the sacks and wrappers, the restroom’s wadded paper towels become napkins. No, he didn’t know the half of how many bites a day could hold, how many sugared swallows.

But that would be behind me now, too. Compulsions traded away for something I would never tell him but always know: the night when he yelled about overdrafts, when he said normal people don’t buy $500 ottomans, they buy $500 couches, while he dealt out Omaha downstairs to friends, I slipped one hand between my legs, worked my lips apart and once I was wet enough to want to move faster, I ran through the names and the bodies clicking chip stacks on the dining table downstairs but nothing, no one, stuck.

Wet as I was becoming, I thought of a boy I taught that semester: legal to drink but all mutter and curls. I did not say his name aloud but shut my eyes, pressed my tongue into the shape of it, and that’s when I came.

It was like a divorce that night. Like winter in between the toes and sickness that eats the flesh. I could not take it back, any of it—the fingers were mine after all. And I did not want to.

But there was our baby sleeping down the hall. Through the monitor on the kitchen counter for the poker game to hear, came his shifting sighs slow and heavy as crows’ wings.

I pulled my hand free, took up my magazine again, an article about sleep and dreaming, no mention of dignity. It was so easy to be afraid of shutting one’s eyes, but nowhere near as easy to fear keeping them open.

No matter. None at all. I flipped pages until I fell in and out of the words and sleeping, finally turned off the lamp on my side of the bed. He would be here soon and touch my face, move some hair away from my eyes to behind my ear—maybe that’s what he would do, because he’s seen it in the movies. If he noticed the scent in the room, he’d never suspect the hollow of my mouth held anyone but him.

He tried not to wake me, pulled the bathroom door to damper the sound of his belt sliding free of its pants loops, the quick piss, and tap of his toothbrush. He didn’t touch me, just slid through the dark to his pillow.

I sent one hand out to him, an invitation, a bridge. He sighed and moved closer, to where he usually slept, where he wanted to be: my shoulder against his chest, the curtain’s gleaming edge out of sight. My forehead found his. Our noses briefly touched. And he kissed me, his tongue inside my mouth, warm and breathy where the other boy waited.