Free The Interloper by Antoine Wilson

tossed her the Frisbee. We threw it back and forth a while, under the lights, in the drained concrete fish pond. The surface was smooth and even; it was like playing on a court. We did better than usual. The Frisbee made a horrible sound whenever it skidded along the concrete, so we played more cautiously than if we had been on grass. Her hair, which she’d pulled back in a ponytail, became a half-restrained mess, then a quarter-restrained mess; her limbs became limbs I wanted to wrap myself in. The wonderful thing was that I could simply look at her, watch her move. My wife.
    When the Frisbee skidded to a stop somewhere between us, we both went to pick it up, and Patty said “Enough Frisbee,” and we headed for the bedroom. There, she discovered that I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Rather than asking why or commenting on it verbally, she hummed and smiled.
    My underwearlessness reinforced the transgressions of her ditch day and she put her hands on the crown of my head in a not-so-subtle hint to drop to my knees. We fucked like we hadn’t fucked in a long time. This was not the comfort of Owen and Patty making love. It was the animal thrill of two people fucking. The areas of my penis that had been chafed by the panties now felt extra-sensitive, raking in a sharper sort of pleasure, and despite my wanting to make it last forever, I came quickly. Life is like a dream, with alternating zones of clarity and obscurity.
    I used to want to apologize: I’m sorry I fucked you. I meant to make love. I’m sorry I was transported like that. I see the error of my ways. Because I believed that sex was all about connection, consideration, communion, and all those other C words. Icouldn’t handle the reentry from fucking to love. Eventually I figured it out. Patty helped me understand that she wanted to fuck too, sometimes, wanted even to get fucked by me sometimes. We came down together: that was our communion.
    She lay her head on my chest and looked up at me. This was one of the few angles from which, physiognomically, she didn’t look sneering, snotty, or superior. She looked like an ingenuous and vulnerable young woman. I could only handle that look in small doses. Life takes ingenuous and vulnerable creatures and makes them suffer in ways they cannot understand, and then it snuffs them out.
    “Let’s open a little wine,” she said.
    She lit candles, too, and we ate dinner—“gourmet” mac-and-cheese, salad, Brussels sprouts—in the bathrobes my aunt and uncle had given us as wedding presents.
    “This is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts,” she said.
    “All wine is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts.” I laughed at my own joke and noticed that while she laughed, too, something was holding her back. I suspected the elation of ditch day had finally caught up with her, that her mind had begun, yet again, to reckon with consequences. I raised my glass.
    “Here’s to ditch day,” I said. “A reminder to take a break from serious stuff once in a while.”
    “To ditch day,” she said half-heartedly. She sipped her wine, then held up the glass again, eyes watching the guttering candle flame. “And …” She looked me in the eye now, as if steeling herself to make an admission. “… to CJ. Happy Birthday.”
    “Happy Birthday,” I said.
    My mind flashed to the look she’d given me in the doorway of my office, the Frisbee, the fucking: ditch day. Not a real ditch day, a true ditch day, but a ditch day with a purpose, a Stocking family holiday. I knew she had deliberated all evening about whether or not to tell me, that she had gotten caught up in my belief she was letting loose “for the hell of it,” but in the end she had to tell me why she hadn’t gone to work that night. She had to give me, the last person who wanted it, a good reason why she’d taken the night off.

10
    The next morning a thick silver fog covered Our Little Hamlet by the Sea. Patty and I drove down to the local coffee shop. She