In Case This Happens Again
Sooze looked at me with pleading eyes. “It’s not like I want to cheat,” she said, the guy she called Rondo lolling off to the side, his member flopped across his thigh.
“Then what do you want to do?”
She let that one hang, as if an honest answer would contradict. I didn’t want to admit how simultaneously impressed and diminished the whole scene made me feel. I began to regret leaving work early, but here we were.
“I love you baby, but this can’t continue.”
“I can’t help myself,” she wailed.
I looked at her pussy. It was drooling and snarling, cute as a chained mastiff, one of several reasons I alternately loved her and lived in fear of her and her parts. On a regular basis, they destroyed me. Now they looked like they wanted to destroy the union of us.
After I showed Rondo the door – I feared what might happen in the hallway if I left the task to Sooze – I returned to our matrimonial enclave. We discussed options to ensure exclusivity. I told her I had something in mind.
The next day, seated side-by-side on the edge of the treacherous bed, I watched her open the gift. I even had the boutique apply a ribbon, although I was pretty sure by then that she wasn’t much impressed by ribbons.
“What’s this?” she asked, turning the hardware in her hands.
“Let’s try it on,” I said, and showed her how to slip it over her legs, so the security strap stretched between the front of the belt and the back. “And just like this – Click! – you’re safe as milk,” I said, leaning back to survey my handiwork.
She pouted, began to cry.
“Aw, baby, don’t cry,” I said. “You know I love you, but this is the only way I can think of to protect you from your worst instincts.”
“Worst? You never complained before.”
“We swore fidelity,” I said. “Maybe this will help. I don’t know what else to do.”
It worked fine, until I lost the key. I guess I should’ve known that was inevitable. Rely on technology, and technology will let you down. In the way that a wife who’s like a smartphone may possess an uncontrollable itch.
“What do you mean you lost the key?” she cried, just as we were getting going one evening a couple of weeks after the belt’s arrival. I was digging through my dresser drawers, dumping the contents of the box where I kept my bolo ties, cufflinks, Lions Club 20-year membership pin and the key.
At least that’s where I thought I remembered putting it. Nobody was more frustrated by the loss than me. Except, perhaps, Sooze.
“Aw, sugar, I’m so sorry,” I said, frustration evident in various quarters of my anatomy.
She had turned red as a boil. Steam poured from her ears. Doubt me? I’ve got photos.
“You better fix this, and fix it soon, buster, or I’m outta here,” she spat, and I felt her pain. I knew she wouldn’t need to go far – on this floor or any of those above or below our one-bed flat – to find a welcome mat.
I ran to my phone, spun up a quick search and called the closest locksmith.
“Easy as pie, mate,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Hellton Towers.”
“No shit? I’m on the ground floor. Maybe you’ve seen my sign. Keys Made?”
I told him I’d seen it. I said it was urgent, we needed to go out and wanted to secure our valuables. In less than thirty minutes, I heard a knock at the door.
The locksmith had his back to me, but he looked familiar when he turned, his toolbox in hand.
“Rondo?” I said.
“Good memory,” he said.
I went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea while he picked the lock. I heard Sooze telling him to take it easy.
“Yes, easier. Oh, yeah, that’s easy. A little to the left. Oh, that’s good. That pick works really good.”
In forty-five minutes, he came to the kitchen.
“That’s a tough nut,” he said. “Pick don’t work. We need Incident Response. They’ve got the Jaws of Life.” He paused, grinned to himself, then looked at me. “More like Jaws of Sooze. Am I right?”
Cheeky, but hard to argue. An hour later, five guys showed up with a cumbersome tool and extracted Sooze from her enforced virginity. Rondo came into the kitchen holding up the chastity belt.
“They messed it up, but I can fix it,” he said. “Mind if I take this to my shop? To make a new key?”
I nodded and held the door for him. Halfway to the lift, he turned and looked back. “I’ll make you a copy, too,” he said. “In case this happens again.”
“Thanks,” I said, although knowing my propensity for losing things, I wasn’t sure I had seen the last of Rondo.
Biography
Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. He has fiction in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), Erozine, The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and others. Poems appear in The Muleskinner Journal and The Broadkill Review. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their current “best” dog.