Leather and Latex

The jacket arrived on a Tuesday, in a box that sat on the kitchen counter like it had every right to be there. I got home from the warehouse at six-fifteen, same as always, and found Jennifer standing in front of the hallway mirror with the tags still on. Black leather. Cropped at the waist. She turned when she heard the door and something in her face had already shifted, a look I couldn't name then but would learn to recognize later.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I think it's not your birthday."

"Sinead says every woman needs one."

There it was. The name again. Sinead this and Sinead that, for two weeks now, ever since Jennifer had come home from the gym with a new phone number and a story about a woman in the sauna who'd complimented her skin. I didn't think much of it at the time. Jennifer had been the same Jennifer for eleven years. High school sweethearts, married at twenty-two, a mortgage we could barely afford, and a routine so solid you could set your watch by it. She made lasagna on Sundays. She hummed while she folded laundry. She wore cardigans.

The cardigans went first. Not all at once, but over the next month, replaced by things that hugged her body in ways I wasn't used to. Then the makeup appeared on the bathroom counter. Not the drugstore mascara she'd worn to our wedding, but tubes and compacts with names I didn't recognize, gold lettering, prices that made me wince when I saw the receipt in the trash. She started tanning. Not a tanning bed, she said, a spray, but the color came out too orange at first and she cried about it in the bathroom with the door locked.

I stood outside that door with my hand raised to knock and didn't knock. That's the thing I think about now. I didn't knock.

The hair came next. Her natural brown, the color I'd run my fingers through on a thousand nights, went up in foils and came down platinum. She walked in the door that evening and I swear the room got brighter and colder at the same time. She was beautiful. She'd always been beautiful. But this was a different kind of beautiful, the kind that knows it's being looked at.

"You like it," she said. Not a question.

"It's a lot."

"It's me now."

Sinead had a vape. That's the detail that matters, though I didn't know it then. Jennifer mentioned it the way you mention the weather, casually, over dinner. Sinead vapes this weird stuff, she said, tastes like grape but makes you feel like you've had two glasses of wine. I told her that sounded like something I'd want to try and she laughed and said it was a girl thing.

The night out happened on a Friday. Jennifer spent two hours getting ready, which was two hours longer than she'd ever spent on anything in her life. I sat on the couch pretending to watch a game I couldn't have told you the score of. She came down the stairs in a dress I'd never seen, black, short, with the leather jacket over it, and she kissed me on the cheek like I was a brother.

"Don't wait up," she said.

I waited up.

She got home at three in the morning and I heard her in the bathroom for a long time, water running, and when she finally came to bed she smelled like smoke and something sweet underneath it, something chemical. She was asleep in minutes. I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to her breathe, and I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself a lot of things that night.

The truth is I didn't know what was happening. Not really. I saw the surface, the jacket and the hair and the makeup, and I thought it was a phase. A midlife thing. Something she'd get bored of. I didn't understand that I was watching my wife being replaced, piece by piece, from the outside in.

Sinead came to the house exactly once. A Wednesday, I think. Jennifer hadn't told me she was coming. I walked in from work and there she was, sitting on my couch with her boots on my coffee table, and the first thing I noticed was the latex. Black, shiny, tight in a way that made me look away and then look back. The second thing I noticed was her eyes. Pale green, almost yellow in the light, and they didn't move the way eyes should. They stayed on me too long.

"You must be Nathan," she said. Her voice had an accent I couldn't place. Irish, maybe. Or something older.

"That's me."

"Jennifer's told me so much."

She pulled something from her pocket, a slim black vape pen, and took a long drag. The vapor that came out was purple and it hung in the air between us too long, curling like it had its own mind. Jennifer walked in from the kitchen and the look on her face when she saw me standing there was the first honest expression I'd seen in weeks. Guilt. Real guilt. And underneath it, something else.

Excitement.

That night Jennifer came to bed and pressed herself against my back and whispered things in my ear I hadn't heard since we were kids. She wanted me to know she loved me. She wanted me to know that whatever changed, I'd always be her husband. She said it like a promise and a warning at the same time.

I didn't sleep. I lay there with her arm around me and I thought about Sinead's eyes and that purple vapor and the way Jennifer's skin felt warmer than it should have, almost feverish, and I understood that something was coming. Something I couldn't stop. Something that had already started.

The next morning Jennifer was gone before I woke up. A note on the counter in her new handwriting, the looping script she'd practiced for hours at the kitchen table.

Gone out with Sinead. Back late. Don't wait up.

I read it three times. Then I crumpled it and threw it in the trash and stood in the empty kitchen with my coffee going cold and realized I didn't know where my wife was. I didn't know who she was with. And I didn't know what she was becoming.

But I was going to find out.