Dawn's First Kneel

Mark had carried the secret like a hot coal in his chest for most of their six-year marriage. At thirty-four he still looked at his twenty-eight-year-old wife Dawn and felt the same helpless hunger that had seized him the night he proposed. She was petite, soft-hipped, with a cascade of dark hair that always smelled faintly of vanilla and the kind of full lower lip that made filthy thoughts inevitable. Yet the hunger had twisted over time into something sharper, something that only sharpened when he pictured another man’s hands on her. He had finally confessed it three months ago, voice cracking in the dark of their bedroom while she stroked his hair and listened without judgment.

“I want to watch you take someone else,” he had whispered. “Someone bigger. I want to see you enjoy it more than you enjoy me.”

Dawn had gone still, then rolled atop him, eyes bright with something that looked dangerously like eagerness. “How long have you been thinking about Derek?”

He had laughed, embarrassed, because of course she had known. Derek was his coworker, thirty-one, confident in the way men who were hung and knew it tended to be. Broad shoulders, easy smile, the casual way he filled out jeans that left little to the imagination in the company locker room. For months after the confession they had teased the idea back and forth—Dawn texting Mark dirty hypotheticals during the workday, Mark coming home half-hard and desperate while she described exactly how she might sink to her knees for his friend. They had agreed, finally, that talking was no longer enough.