I can feel the other woman on his neck. I drink it in and I breathe it out, hacking coughs that stick to my lungs and slide themselves along my ribcage, burying itself deep between layers of skin, I try to forget. And when I do, I look into his eyes and I remember the glimmer that looks beyond me and into the eyes of the waists and the breasts that so harshly sit in the palms of his hands.

He leaves like usual, in his tight black suit and his shiny shoes to his office and to his women that lick the polish off of his wristwatch, tongues they bite off when they think of his money and penthouses that blur in the clouds. Their tongues lay bloody in between the fibers of his white collar, flapping around, wet and loud. I can see it so clearly it hurts and I can't get away, and so, I try to forget.

I stuff dirty laundry back into the drawers, I don't fold or iron, but I ram my fist into necklines and sleeves until it can't close properly anymore. The whispers I keep tucked inside my breast pocket leaping out and yelling all the things I don't ever say because I'm supposed to be in love and I've never been, I've never been.
I can hear her approaching the door. My curved back and my arms that dangle and reach the floor, my hands and the claws that dig into the ground, the sweat on my forehead.

It's all so wrong. I scrub myself raw with dry sponges, sawing at my brain and sewing my lips shut until I'm mutilated (and I've forgotten everything I want to forget.) I can taste her name and feel the ring in my throat when I do, drowning myself in the sound, I want her to see me choke on her name and I want her to cry when my eyes close and I take my last breath.

Before the children rush through the doors for lunch after school, I allow myself a moment of feeling, I can let it rush through my spine and burst out of my veins and launch itself at her, I let myself watch her run away from me: afraid and disgusted and knowing it's all wrong and nothing is right.

I am in love with the woman who kneels down and lashes at my ankles, leaving bloody gashes at the bone. My husband and his life with his money and his job and his woman. His woman. She haunts me. His woman, my woman, his and mine. I scream in the lust of our shared desire, I'm in love with the other woman.

She's the last puff of a cigarette, the one that burns your fingers. She's caviar on death row, she's the sun when the moon is out and the stars when they die, thousands of little sparks that dissipate ever so slowly. I don't let myself think, but sometimes, in this empty, dark den of a home with echoes so loud they burn poison into your ears, I think of her dress and the way the wind pushes through it, I think of touching and hating and all the things lovers do. The churches sizzle down. The Lord, the Lord, he sings a song and it hurts, pierces my soul so awfully, it shames me entirely, I catch fire and my ashes smoke out for days and days until I flatline into a pile in the fireplace. How disgraceful! These feelings, this awful scorning disgust that consumes my entire body, electrifying my hair, straightening into power lines, summoning God's frowns and the Devil's loud, boisterous laughter that come in waves of treachery. A woman, a woman I've known only through the sins of my husband, why do I feel like this? Why do my lips tingle and why does the dark of my little cabinet of a room light up so bright my eyes blaze when she walks in, why does it hurt and why does it feel like love? Why? Why?
Depravity, that must be it, I must be corrupted by the malfeasances of my husband, I can feel it, the wrong that bubbles in my stomach, (I want her to touch me, I want her next to me, touching my breasts and the peak of my soul.)

I know who I am, I'm a widow in spirit, he goes off and she touches him, and she comes here for dinner, claiming to be some work partner, but I can feel the way her thighs twitch when he looks at her, and some sick part of my sick soul craves her so awfully, so terribly. The lies and the tragedy, the loss of it all, my own thighs twitch too.

I know what she does, I know who she is, I know he isn't in love with me, and I know she isn't in love with him. (I can tell by her sewn up clothes, the cheap makeup she uses trying to look pretty, wealthy.) As if she takes pity on me, she sits down next to me after dinners and we stay up late talking about this and that. My eyes wander and our faces come too close, noses nearly touching, our cheeks pink. Pull away and pretend it didn't happen, because we know we can't do things like this, we know, we know all too well. Blame it on the wine and the sleepiness.
She lives for his money, not for the sin of looking in my eyes a moment too long. Not for the sin of a touch on my collarbones or my neck, my chest. She lives for the sin of being on her knees for him, she lives for the dollars, feeding her crying, suffering children. She doesn't live for me.
She doesn't live for me.

Filthy, I'm so filthy, so very filthy, it stains my skin dark and greasy in splotches. I wonder if she can see my impurity, my crime. I wonder if her eyes linger on my skin and get so close so that she can see the dirt that buries itself deep down in my pores. The dirt that never washes off. Feeling for her like this. The thrill, the rush, the excitement of feeling, I'm drunk on it. Drunk on everything. Drunk, I must be. Drunk on the liquor crafted from the sweat on her forehead and the violence in which my desire for her stems, the violence with which I violate her in the dark corners of my skull.

I have fallen in love with this sin, this deep desire that bleeds out from the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers.

After he has gone to sleep, we sneak out to the yard, opening the door and setting it on its hinges, not making a sound. We sit in the rocking chairs on the balcony. I try so desperately to turn this love into hate, hate, hate, hate. I must hate, I must! I can't love, I can't, I can't. I can't feel this way, not for another man, let alone for another woman! I'm disgusted with myself, violently perverted, depraved. I can't push it away under this lamp light, under the thousands of little stars.

I look to her hair, jet black and long, it reaches down to her shoulders and splits itself along her back. Her eyes sparkle so brightly when she looks at him, it makes me want to tear myself apart until I'm weak kneed and headless, chasing after her, claiming her arms and her legs and her chest as my own, bringing her down into the soil. When she looks at me, something surfaces beneath the glimmer, something so very sad, it pierces my eyes just by looking, making the wires in my brain short circuit, zapping and hissing.

"Are you in love with him?" I ask, I see the side of her head, her eyes turning to the floors, the grass, the stars.

"No." She frowns even though it looks like a smile, I can see it, the feeling that eats her alive, the pure terror and hate and lust and disgust, I feel it from her pores, I soak it in and I revel in the feeling.