Free The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley

choices and single answers. Something with a title like The Caveman at Your Table or How Gone Is He? I closed the door quietly and leaned my head against it, listening to the sound of Hunter’s footsteps as he bounded down the stairs and out of the building.
    At midnight my husband returned, reeking of cigarette smoke.
    “Where have you been?”
    “Out.”
    I was sitting up in bed, wearing my white cotton pajamas and tortoiseshell glasses. The remains of dinner had been cleaned away long ago: I wasn’t the sort of woman to leave the tomato on the wall as a kind of unspoken recrimination.
    Especially since Hunter would just leave it there.
    “Out where?”
    “Movie.”
    In the background, I was half aware of the television’s still reporting the day’s disasters.
    Hunter threw his clothes off without looking at me and climbed into bed. I was relieved he didn’t feel the need to shower: That’s one of the first signs of infidelity, according to The Six Signs of Infidelity by Louise Rosegarten. I had discovered this earlier, during my visit to the bookstore. You also had to watch out for a new style of underwear, particularly a switch to bikini briefs. Of course, Hunter already wore bikini briefs. When he wore underwear.
    “Which movie did you see?”
    Hunter tossed a thick lock of brown hair out of his eyes, like a fractious horse. “Womb Raider. Rated triple X. Want to check the times?”
    I didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
    Heaving himself dramatically out of bed, Hunter went to the back door and fished the paper out of the recycling pail. He returned to the bedroom, loudly flipping through it till he found the page, then slammed it down on the bed in front of me. We glared at each other until we both started to laugh.
    “You didn’t really go to this, did you?”
    He was still laughing. “Why? Did you want to see it with me?”
    The tension lifted, he pulled on his tattered robe before excusing himself and heading into the bathroom. As I waited for my husband to come back to bed, I opened up this week’s New Yorker magazine and tried to come up with a caption for a wordless cartoon. There was a couple in a marriage therapist’s office, being shown a tank of water. Befuddled, I looked up, startled by the chime that meant the computer was being turned on in the living room.
    “Hunter?”
    No response. For a long moment I just sat in bed, trying to figure out if the monster in the closet was real or a trick of shadows and imagination. Was Hunter really changing toward me, or was he just caught up in some internal drama that had everything to do with his work and nothing to do with me?
    I walked into the living room and watched him. After a while, he turned around.
    “Can’t you sleep?”
    “It’s my birthday,” I said. I couldn’t help it: I was asking for special favors.
    “Is it? Is it? Christ, what’s the date?”
    “October seventh.”
    “So it is. God, I’m all messed up with dates since I got back. So what are you now, twenty-nine?”
    “Thirty.”
    “Well, why don’t we have an unbirthday dinner tomorrow. I’ll bring you orchids and take you someplace absolutely fantastic, where virgins massage the beef before they serve it. We’ll stay up atrociously late, go to some smoky blues bar, and tip the piano man to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with extra vibrato.”
    “Tomorrow is Monday. I have to work.”
    Hunter raked his hair back with his hand. “Do you? Of course you do. Aw, baby, I’m sorry. We’ll find another night. Friday night? We’ll do Friday. It’ll be even better. Listen, I’m almost done for to night. Just give me two more minutes and I’ll be in. Give you a birthday cuddle.”
    I watched him turn, begin to work, cast an anxious, almost irritated glance over his shoulder when he saw I had not yet moved.
    “Hunter?”
    “What is it, Abs?” He was trying to keep the impatience from his voice, with some success.
    “You were with someone else, weren’t you?” As he opened his