【Lao Song · Husband】
October 9, 2006. Hongqi Road, Jiangcheng, Hongfa Hotel, room 203. Sixty-eight yuan for the room, a hundred yuan deposit. When the woman at the front desk slapped the key tag down on the glass, A-Lan was hiding behind me, one hand clutching the back hem of my jacket.
She was twenty-one that year, I was twenty-three. We had been together a year and two months, gotten a room twice, and it had never worked. Not because she would not. Because I could not. Too much jerking off, I could not get it up, and I had never dared tell her that.
The room smelled of disinfectant. The TV was a fourteen-inch, snow jumping all over the screen. I turned it off and the only light left was the bare bulb in the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the bed with both hands pressed to her knees and said, “Turn that light off too.”
“If I turn it off I can’t see you.” “What’s there to see, it’s not like you haven’t seen it.” Her face went red before she had finished. “Last time was the same. You looked, and then… then nothing.”
“Today’s different.” “Different how?” I had no answer.
I knelt by the bed and started with her lips, kissed my way to her ear, her neck, and by the time I had her third shirt button open her breathing had gone ragged. Her tits were neither big nor small, nipples pale pink, and the moment I took one in my mouth she let out a little hum and then bit her lip to stop it.
I went all the way down. Her belly, the dip at her waist, then I pushed up her skirt and peeled off the white cotton panties. Her legs were clamped shut, I pried them apart one at a time and buried my face in her and licked. Her little pussy sat closed and neat, and it took a quarter of an hour of licking before it slowly opened into a slit, her juice mixed with my spit, my chin slick with it.
“Song Jianjun, don’t look…” She covered her face with her hand. “Who else would I look at.” “When you lick me like that… my legs go weak.”
And then, I do not know if the heavens took pity on me or what, but my cock got hard. Hard enough to ache. I did not think about anything else, I held it and pushed in.
She cried out, high and sharp, and her whole body shrank up toward the headboard. “It hurts! It hurts, hurts, hurts, pull out!” I pulled out at once and did not dare move. She sat up, hugged her knees, and cried. On the sheet, on her side, a small smear of dark red blood, about the size of a coin.
I gathered her whole body into my arms, and her tears and snot smeared all over my shoulder. I said, “A-Lan, I swear. I’ll be good to you my whole life. I’ll cherish you my whole life.”
She sniffled and asked, “Why didn’t you just tell me you could do it.” “I didn’t know I could, until today.” She laughed out loud in my arms with tears still hanging on her face. “Well, you sure know how to pick a day.”
“Does it hurt?” “It hurts.” She buried her face in my neck. “Hold me tighter. If you hold me tighter it won’t hurt.”
We did not try again that night. I held her until dawn, and after she fell asleep her hand was still clamped on my wrist. It left four marks.
Later we got married. Married ten years. She is thirty-two, I am thirty-five, both of us at a motor factory in Tangxia, Dongguan. She is a clerk, I am a technician.
Ten years, and I have never forgotten that coin-sized bloodstain. The other thing I remember is that these last two years, in bed, she has started turning her back to me.
Once a month, sometimes once every two months. She lies down in her nightdress, I go in from behind, three minutes, five, and her hand stays resting on her phone on the nightstand the whole time. Afterwards she goes to wash up, comes back and says, “Early shift tomorrow.”
Once I asked her, “Are you sick of me?” She said, “No. Tired.” The next day she stewed pork ribs for me, the way my mother taught her. I ate the ribs and could not figure it out. She could stew ribs like that, so why only three minutes in bed.
This year her mother’s back went bad, and in August she took a long leave to go back to Jiangcheng and look after her. The factory was slow, and the dorm was just me.
After work I had nothing to do. First I played the slot machines at the village gate for a while and quit after losing over two thousand. Then I downloaded a few novels on my phone, all the same kind: wife-swapping, hotwives, wives getting fucked by other men.
At first I just read. By the third book I noticed the woman in the story was wearing A-Lan’s skirt, walking the way A-Lan walked, and when another man pinned her under him and she cried out, it was A-Lan’s voice.
On that 1.2-meter iron bed in the dorm I jerked off again and again, and every time, in my head, it was her with her legs spread, being fucked to tears by a man I did not know. I came and called myself a piece of shit. Then the next day I read some more.
One night I called her and she said her mother was asleep, she was going to sleep too. After I hung up I looked at her profile picture on my screen, the one of her in her work uniform outside the workshop door. I thought, if she knew what had been playing in my head these past months, would she slap me across the face.
For National Day I took seven days off and went back to Jiangcheng. The third night, lying on our old bed at home, she turned off the light and I said, “A-Lan, go out and meet someone from the internet.”
She rolled over and laughed. “Are you drunk?” “I haven’t been drinking. I mean it.” In the dark she was quiet for a while. “What do you mean by that.”
“You came to me at twenty-one. Apart from me you’ve never touched another man. I want you to know what other men are like.”
“Song Jianjun, you’re sick.” She yanked the blanket over and turned her back to me. “I know I’m sick.” I said it to the back of her head. “In Dongguan I think about this every day. So much I can’t sleep.” “Think about what?” “You with someone else.”
She did not move. After a long time, from the far side of the blanket, one line: “You want me to sleep with someone else?”
“I want you to go and meet him. What happens after, you decide.”
She said nothing more. The line in my heart I did not dare say out loud: I want to know if you turn your back like this under another man too.
【A-Lan · Wife】
He thought I was asleep. I was not.
I listened to him breathe, one breath after another, sinking deeper. What was turning in my head was not what he had said. It was the person in my phone.
Xiao Jiang. Twenty-seven, Jiangcheng local, equipment maintenance in the development zone. I fished him out of a QQ drift bottle, and we had been chatting for over three months. He never sent anything dirty. He just asked what I was eating today, whether the factory got the holiday off, what I looked like when I smiled.
Last month he asked me for a photo. I sent one in my work uniform, and he wrote back: “Ms. Lan, with a waist like that you’d look great in a skirt.”
I read that message three times, then deleted it. Then regretted deleting it. Song Jianjun went through my phone once and asked why I hid it from him when I chatted with people. I said I had stopped. What I did not say was that I had not deleted the contact.
After thirty, the guard at the factory gate, the line leader in the workshop, the man ladling food in the canteen, they all started looking at me differently. Song Jianjun did not know. It took him three days to notice when I changed my hair.
That day Xiao Zhao from the workshop helped me carry printer paper, and his eyes stopped on my chest for two seconds. Back in the office I checked myself in the glass door. Thirty-two. The waist was still there, the chest still held up. The last time Song Jianjun told me I looked good was three years ago.
What I wanted to know was not what other men were like. I wanted to know what I looked like in other men’s eyes.
The next morning I was frying eggs in the kitchen and he sat at the table waiting. With my back to him I said, “I’ll go.”
The spatula stopped. “What did you say?” “I’ll go meet him. Not because you told me to. Don’t get that wrong.” I slid the egg into his bowl. “I set the rules. Where I go, who with, what time I come back, that’s my call. You don’t ask anything I don’t want to tell.”
“Who with?” “See, you’ve already asked.” He put his chopsticks down, then picked them up again. “Just that one.”
“Someone I chat with online. Local. Younger than you.” I sat down and took a bite of egg myself. “That’s all you get.”
It took him a long time to squeeze out one word: “Okay.” “And another thing.” I stared at him. “If I want to come home halfway through, I come home, and you don’t say a word.” “Okay.”
“You agreeing this fast, it kind of scares me.”
He did not answer, just bent his head and shoveled rice. I saw his ears go red, red all the way down to the base of his neck. Ten years, and it was the first time I had ever seen him like that.
In the afternoon I went into the bathroom. The navy A-line skirt he bought me last year, tight at the waist, so that when I put it on my ass lifted a notch. Black pantyhose, a pair of black leather shoes with three-centimeter heels. Only one layer of lipstick, in case it was too red.
I texted Xiao Jiang: “Are you free tonight? I’m in the city.” He answered fast: “Yes! Ms. Lan, name the place, I’ll drive over and pick you up.”
I tugged the skirt straight and took a picture of myself in the mirror. The phone was an OPPO from last year, so-so camera, and there were water spots on the mirror.
I sent the photo, then typed three more words: “Are you serious?”
【Lao Song · Husband】
The MMS came in while I was on the balcony smoking.
In the photo she was standing in front of that bathroom mirror, the skirt so tight at the waist, and I stared for a long time at that lifted notch of her ass. The ash fell on the top of my foot.
Under it, one line: “Are you serious?” My finger hovered over the keypad for close to a minute.
Then I typed one word: “Yes.”