By Jack Stratton

To meet the husband of your lover is a strange thing. To realize he was flirting with you was quite another. Henry poked at his eggs and smiled nervously as Adam and Kay whispered to each other, both pairs of their pretty eyes sparkling at him as they conspired.

Henry squirmed under their eyes and attention. The whole thing wasn’t going the way he had planned at all. He had expected brunch to be something formal, like meeting your girlfriend’s parents, but he should have known any man who would have the balls to marry Kay would have to be an interesting character himself.

When they asked him back to their apartment, Henry choked on his cold brew. Still, it was put so innocently, he had to say yes.

In the cab, Kay, who Henry felt like he had just started to understand, bickered with her husband relentlessly. There was a familiarity and an aggression in their conversation that seemed alien to him. It was like having your parents fight in front of you or, more accurately, being over a friend’s house and being privy to their parents’ argument.

The acute foreignness of other people’s fights.

Still, there was an intense love between Kay and Adam that showed even brighter in their argument than their silences. Henry smiled quietly at them as their little spat, about which he still wasn’t clear, faded, and the two of them studied him, communicated things to each other with glances that Henry couldn’t translate.

At their big apartment, Henry marveled as they showed him around. Lots of art on the walls, lots of thought in the design. So far from his rather spartan studio in Brooklyn.

As he was given a tour, Kay noted that Henry had spilled coffee on his jeans and led him to a beautiful bathroom to clean up.

Henry found a cloth and dabbed at the stain. As he pressed the terry cloth into the denim, he looked around at the bathroom in awe.

A huge clawfoot bathtub, fed by lithe snakes of copper pipes and fat vintage faucets. Decadently thick towels piled on wrought iron towel warmers.

The wide porcelain his and hers sinks in front of him were rimmed with the affectations of their owners. Kay’s fancy skin creams, perfumes, makeup, and implements of curling, primping, and pampering. Adam’s side holding combs, pomades, beautiful scissors, clippers, an ornate straight razor with a matching nickel handled shaving cream brush.

Henry picked up the razor and measured the surprising weight of it in the palm of his hand.

“Have you used one?” Kay’s smooth voice asked from the door.

Henry jumped, as he turned to see her standing with her arms folded under her breasts, watching him with a smile that was both warm and wolfish.

She wore a light white gauzy sort of summer dress, which set off the dark brown of her skin and the vivid black of her hair. She had a wide hungry smile.

“Oh, no. I’ve thought about going for a shave at one of those old fashioned barbers, but I never seem to have time.”

She watched him for a beat, then turned with her eyes still on him and called “Adam!”

“Adam can show you. He’s very good. His father did it for a living, you know. A fancy place down on Wall Street,” she said, and his eyes again locked on the fullness of her lips.

“I even have him do my legs sometimes,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.