Leather and Latex

The jacket arrived on a Tuesday, which is how I know the exact day my marriage started to die.

I was in the kitchen making coffee when I heard the rip of the package. Jennifer had it open on the counter before I even turned around. Black leather, soft as a held breath, cut short so it sat right at the waist. She held it up against herself and looked at me over the collar.

"Well?"

"It's not really you," I said.

That was the wrong thing to say. I knew it before the last word left my mouth. She folded the jacket over her arm and walked out, and the coffee went cold in the pot because I forgot to pour it. I stood there listening to her footsteps go up the stairs and tried to figure out why a jacket mattered so much.

It cost four hundred pounds. I saw the receipt in the bin a few days later. Four hundred pounds for something she'd never worn to anything before. We weren't broke, but we weren't four-hundred-pound-jacket people either. Not since the mortgage. Not since the car.

The tan came next. A fake one, sprayed on at a salon in town. She came home smelling like biscuits and coconut and stood in the bedroom door with her arms out like she was presenting herself to a jury.

"You look orange," I said.

"Bronze," she said. "It's bronze."

She'd changed her hair too. Blonde, but not her blonde. A harder blonde, with dark roots showing by design. She spent an hour in front of the mirror that first night, doing things with a brush I'd never seen her touch. Eyeliner. Contour. Whatever contour is. I watched from the bed and felt like a man sitting in the wrong living room.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're different."

"Maybe I got bored of being the same."

Bored. That word sat in my chest all week. I kept turning it over, trying to find the insult inside it. She was thirty-four. We'd been married nine years. We had a routine, and the routine worked, or I thought it did. Weeknights in front of the telly. Sunday roast at her mum's. Sex on Fridays, mostly, unless one of us was tired. That was the life we'd built, brick by brick, and she was telling me she got bored of it.

I should have asked her why. I should have sat her down and made her talk to me. But I didn't, because I'm the kind of man who waits for things to fix themselves. I thought it was a phase. A birthday thing. Some women buy a motorbike. Mine bought a jacket.

Then Sinead happened.

Jennifer met her at a work thing, some leaving do at a bar in town. She came home that night buzzing, actually buzzing, lit up like a plug socket. Talking fast. Sinead this, Sinead that. Sinead had a laugh you could hear across the room. Sinead knew a guy who knew a guy. Sinead wore a red dress that shouldn't have worked and did.

"She's got this energy," Jennifer said. "You'd like her."

I didn't like her. I hadn't met her yet, but I didn't like her. That's a small man's instinct and I own it. I didn't like the way my wife said her name, like she was tasting something new.

They started going out. Fridays, mostly. The pub first, then a club, then somewhere Jennifer wouldn't tell me the name of. She'd come home at two, three in the morning, smelling of smoke and something sweet. She'd kick her heels off by the door and slide into bed and I'd lie there awake, listening to her breathe, wanting to ask questions I didn't have the words for.

The first time she came home with the vape, I laughed.

"You don't smoke."

"It's not smoking. It's a vape."

"It's still smoke."

"It's vapour, Nathan. It's literally in the name."

She blew a cloud at the ceiling and watched it curl. It smelled like vanilla and something underneath, something sharper. She held it out to me.

"Try it."

"No thanks."

"Suit yourself."

She put it back in her jacket pocket and went to brush her teeth, and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to remember the last time she'd offered me anything.

That was three weeks ago.

Tonight she's out again. Sinead's, then a club, then who knows. I'm on the sofa with a beer I don't really want, watching a documentary about deep sea fish because it's the only thing on. The fish are ugly. They live in the dark and they've got teeth like broken glass and they glow, some of them, little lights on their heads to lure in whatever's stupid enough to come close.

I'm thinking about that when my phone buzzes. A photo from Jennifer. Her and Sinead in a bathroom mirror, both of them done up, both of them grinning. Sinead's in something black and shiny, latex maybe, hugging her body like a second skin. Her arm's around my wife's waist. Jennifer's got the jacket on. Her eyes are bright in a way I haven't seen in years.

*Having fun*, the caption says. *Don't wait up.*

I put the phone face down on the cushion and finish the beer. The fish on the telly keep swimming in circles, and I keep thinking about the way Jennifer looked in that photo, happy in a way that had nothing to do with me.

At half past midnight I hear a key in the door. I've been half asleep, the telly still on, the beer bottle warm in my hand. I sit up and there she is in the doorway, and something's wrong.

Not wrong exactly. Different. She's leaning against the frame like standing is hard work, and her face is flushed, and her pupils are huge, black pools swallowing the blue. She's still got the jacket on but it's unzipped, and underneath there's something I don't recognise. A strap, maybe. Something dark.

"Jen?"

She smiles at me. Slow. Like the smile has to travel a long way to reach her mouth.

"You're still up."

"Waiting for you."

"Sweet."

She pushes off the frame and walks toward me, and I notice her legs are shaking, just a little. She stops in front of the sofa and looks down at me and I look up at her, and for a second I don't know who she is. Not my wife. Someone wearing my wife's face.

"You should go to bed, Nathan."

"I will. You coming?"

"Not yet. I need a minute."

She turns and walks to the kitchen, and I watch her go. The jacket creaks as she moves. Leather does that. It's the sound of something being worn in.

I hear the tap run. I hear her open a cupboard, close it, open another. I hear her breathe out, long and slow, like she's letting go of something heavy.

Then I hear her laugh. Quiet. To herself.

I get up and go to the kitchen doorway and she's standing at the counter with her back to me, both hands flat on the surface, head down. The vape is on the counter beside her. It's not the one I've seen before. It's bigger. Black, with a little light on the side that pulses, red, then blue, then red.

"Jen."

She doesn't turn around.

"Jen, what's going on?"

She lifts her head. She looks at me in the reflection of the window, and the window is black, and her face floats there like something in deep water.

"Sinead showed me something tonight," she says.

"What kind of something?"

She picks up the vape. The light pulses. She holds it up so I can see it, and her hand isn't shaking anymore.

"Something that changes things," she says. "Something that makes you into what you were always supposed to be."

She turns around. The jacket falls open. And under it, strapped against her stomach, there's something I've never seen on her before. Something that shouldn't be there. Something that's growing.

"Want to see what I mean?" she says.

The vape pulses red. Then blue. Then red.

I don't answer. I can't. My mouth is dry and my heart is going like a hammer and my wife is standing in our kitchen looking at me with eyes that aren't hers, and for the first time in nine years I don't know what she's going to do next.

She takes a step toward me.

"Don't look so scared, Nathan," she says. "It's only the beginning."