The silence in this house has a texture. It settles on the furniture like dust, thick and grey and impossible to wipe away.

I stand before the full-length mirror in the master bedroom. The glass is spotless. I wiped it down yesterday with a microfiber cloth and a vinegar solution because I am efficient. Because I am good. Behind me, the room is a landscape of beige. Beige duvet, cream walls, oatmeal-colored carpet that muffles footsteps so effectively you can ghost through this life without making a sound.

I drop my robe.

The silk pools around my ankles, a puddle of predictable luxury. I look at my reflection, but I don’t smile. I assess. That is what I do. I manage the household, I manage the schedules, and I manage this body. Thirty-two years old. Still firm. Still held together by Pilates reformers and green juices and the terror of letting myself go.

But in this pristine, beige room, my reflection has a stain. A dark, deliberate rebellion.

I reach for the drawer, the one in the back of the vanity I keep disorganized on purpose. My hand closes around the scrap of black lace I bought three days ago during my lunch break. It felt illicit just buying it. A slip of nothing. A provocation.

I step into it.

The lace slides up my thighs, gliding over the smooth, shorn skin of my inner legs--the deception--before it settles over the truth.

My husband believes in clean lines. He likes things aerodynamic, modern, stripped. And for the outside world, I comply. I keep the bikini line manicured with surgical precision. If I wear a swimsuit, I look just like the plastic dolls in the gym locker room: bald, streamlined, safe.

But inside that border? I am a forest.

Hidden beneath the civilized waistband of the panties I usually wear--cotton, nude, functional--I have let it grow. A thick, dark triangle of hair. Soft, dense, and defiant.

I run my thumb over the fabric. I can feel the ridge where the smooth skin ends and the wildness begins.

It feels archaic. It feels heavy.

I haven’t shaved the center in two years. At first, it was laziness. Then it became a test. I maintained the edges--a frame for a picture he never looks at. I waited for Scott to notice. I waited for him to run his hand past the smooth thigh, to find the rough heart of me, to ask why I had built a fence around this part of myself.

He never mentioned it.

He doesn’t touch me deep enough to know the landscape has changed.

Now, it is my secret rebellion. The edges make me look like a wife; the center makes me feel like an animal. The lace pulls tight, compressing the softness, hiding the evidence. I stare at my crotch in the mirror. The black fabric strains slightly, unable to flatten what lies beneath.

A secret.

I turn away from the glass. The air in the room is set to seventy-two degrees. Perfect. Sterile. Stifling.

My dress is hanging on the closet door. It’s a dark emerald sheath, modest enough for a wife, but cut close enough to suggest I remember what it’s like to be a woman. I step into it. The zipper fights me halfway up the spine. I have to exhale, emptying my lungs, making myself smaller to fit inside the casing.

Zip.

The sound is loud in the quiet room.

Constraints. I feel them everywhere. The underwire digging into my ribs. The control-top of the pantyhose I decided against at the last minute. The fabric of the dress clings to my hips, a second skin that feels too tight.

Tightness.

It’s a trigger. The constriction makes me hyper-aware of my own pulse. I can feel the blood moving in my wrists. I can feel the shallow rise and fall of my chest. My nipples brush against the fabric, sensitive, hard. Not from arousal. From friction. From the sheer proximity of something touching me, even if it is just polyester and silk.

I am starving.

I smooth the front of the dress. My hands are shaking. Just a little. A tremor in the fingers. I clasp my hands together to stop it.

I turn to the room.

Scott is on the bed. He isn’t lying down, but he isn’t sitting up, either. He is propped against a mountain of pillows, his legs extended, crossed at the ankles. He is wearing the grey sweatpants he has owned since college. The ones with the drawstring that has frayed into a tassel of threads. He is wearing a t-shirt that says Nantucket in faded letters.

He is comfortable.

He is an object of supreme safety.

The television is on, volume set to eight. Low enough to be background noise, loud enough to fill the void so we don’t have to speak. A sitcom rerun. Canned laughter bubbles up, phantom joy from a dead audience.

Scott is holding his phone. The blue light from the screen reflects in his glasses, turning his eyes into opaque rectangles. He is scrolling. His thumb moves in a rhythmic, hypnotic swipe.

Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause.

He doesn’t look up when I turn around. He doesn’t look up when the floorboards creak beneath my heels.

I stand there, waiting.

I am a silhouette in emerald green. I am wearing underwear that cost ninety dollars and barely covers my labia. I am wearing perfume that smells like vanilla and something sharper, something like smoke. I applied it to the pulse point in my neck, behind my knees, between my breasts.

I smell like an invitation.

Scott breathes out, a long, sighing exhale through his nose. He taps something on the screen.

I walk toward the bed. My heels sink into the carpet.

“Scott,” I say.

My voice sounds thin. It lacks resonance in this room. The furniture absorbs it.

He pauses his thumb. He doesn’t lower the phone. “Yeah?”

“I’m heading out.”

“Okay,” he says. Swipe.

I stand at the foot of the bed. I am a statue. I am waiting for the chisel. I want him to look at me. Not the glance he gives the mailman, not the vague scan he gives the refrigerator contents. I want him to look and snag on something. I want him to see the tightness of the dress. I want him to wonder what is underneath it.

I want him to tell me I can’t go.

I want him to sit up, drop the phone, grabbing my wrist. I want him to drag me down onto the beige duvet and ruin the ironing. I want him to smell the vanilla and the musk and tear the zipper down. I want him to find the thick, dark hair between my legs and bury his face in it, tasting the salt, tasting the years of waiting.

“Do I look okay?” I ask.

The question is a surrender. It is pathetic. I hate myself as the words leave my mouth.

Scott stops scrolling. He looks up.

His eyes focus on me. For a second.

He sees the dress. He sees the hair I curled. He sees the lipstick.

“You look nice, honey,” he says.

His voice is warm. It is kind. It is the voice you use when you tell a child their drawing is good. There is no heat in it. There is no blood.

“Have fun with the girls,” he adds.

Then his eyes drop back to the screen.

The blue light washes over his face again. He has already forgotten me. I am part of the room now. I am a lamp. I am a nightstand. I am a wife.

The disappointment hits me in the stomach. It is physical. A cramp.

It isn’t sadness. Sadness is wet and heavy. This is sharp. This is dry. It feels like an itch under my skin, somewhere deep in the muscle where I can’t scratch it. A buzzing, electrical static.

Nice.

He said I look nice.

The word feels like acid in my mouth.

I look at his hands. They are soft. Uncalloused. They are holding the phone with a gentle, terrifying slackness. He is so content. He has everything he needs right there in his palm. He doesn’t need to hunt. He doesn’t need to chase. He has been fed.

I am the one starving.

The hunger wakes up. It stretches inside me, rattling the bars of my ribs. It creates a hollow feeling in my pelvic floor, a phantom ache that demands to be filled. I squeeze my thighs together. The lace of my panties rubs against me. The friction sends a jolt through my nerves, shocking and immediate.

My breath hitches.

Scott doesn’t hear it. He chuckles at something on the internet.

I can’t stay here. If I stay here for another minute, I will start screaming. I will pick up the vase on the dresser and throw it through the mirror. I will shatter the reflections. I will tear this dress open with my bare hands just to feel something break.

He prefers peace. He prefers the quiet.

“Don’t wait up,” I say.

“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs. “Drive safe.”

I turn my back on him. The movement is violent in its precision.

I walk to the door. I can feel the sway of my hips. I am exaggerating it now, a performance for an empty theater. I grab the handle. The metal is cold.

I look back once.

He hasn’t moved. The indentation of his body on the duvet is permanent.

I open the door and step out into the hallway.

The silence follows me. It flows out of the bedroom like water, lapping at my ankles. I close the door. The latch clicks.

Click.

It sounds like a lock turning.

I lean against the wood for a second, closing my eyes. The darkness of the hallway presses against my eyelids. I can feel the pulse in my neck, hammering against the collar of the dress.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I am going to a bachelorette party. I am going to drink cheap wine and watch women scream over plastic penises and pretend that marriage is the beginning of a fairy tale. I am going to smile and nod and toast the bride.

But my body knows.

My body is humming with a terrible, dangerous energy. It is vibrating with the things I didn’t say.

I push off the door. I walk down the stairs. My heels strike the wood, hard and sharp. Gunshots in the quiet house.

I need noise. I need heat. I need something that bites back.

I open the front door and the night air hits me. It smells like rain and asphalt. It smells like the city.

I step out, and I don’t look back at the window. I know the light is off. I know he is already asleep.

I am awake.

I get into the car. The leather seat is cold against the back of my thighs. The engine roars to life, a growl that moves through the floorboard and up into my legs.

I grip the steering wheel. My knuckles are white.

I am a good wife. I tell myself this as I shift into reverse. I am a good wife.

But the itch is still there. Burning.

And I am driving toward the fire.

The club smells like strawberry vodka and desperation.

It is a wall of noise, a physical thing that shoves against my chest the moment we walk past the bouncer. The bass is too high, rattling the fillings in my teeth, vibrating the floorboards until the soles of my feet buzz.

“Oh my god, this is it!” Jessica screams.

She is wearing a plastic tiara that is already sliding off her blow-dried hair. A sash drags across her shoulder: BRIDE TO BE. It’s pink. Everything is pink. The lights, the drinks, the penis-shaped straws bobbing in the glasses.

I force a smile. It feels tight, glued to my face. “Great,” I yell back.

My voice is swallowed instantly.

We push through the crowd. It is a sea of women. Women in sequins, women in jeans, women clutching each other and shrieking with a performative joy that sets my teeth on edge. It’s a ritual. You come here, you drink the overpriced shots, you objectify the men, and then you go home to your husband and your mortgage and pretend you got it out of your system.

It is safe. It is sterile.

We find a table near the stage. The surface is sticky. My elbows adhere to the wood.

“Shots!” someone yells.

A tray appears. The liquid is neon blue. I knock it back. It tastes like cough syrup and ethanol, burning a path down my throat. Good. I need the burn.

I use the alcohol to drown the itch.

“Ladies!” the MC booms over the speakers. His voice is warped by the microphone. “Are you ready to see some meat?”

The room detonates. A collective, high-pitched scream that sounds like a tea kettle left on the stove too long.

I lean back in my chair, nursing a gin and tonic, watching the spectacle with the detached fascination of a scientist observing rats in a maze.

The lights flash violently. Smoke machine hiss.

Out come the dancers.

They are caricatures. Three of them. They are painted orange with spray tan, their muscles highlighted with body oil until they gleam like rotisserie chickens under the heat lamps. They are wearing fireman costumes. No, wait--policemen. The pants are tear-away Velcro.

They gyrate. They thrust. They grin with blindingly white veneers.

It’s hilarious. It’s pathetic.

One of them, the blonde with the jawline that looks like it was chiseled from plastic, slides across the floor on his knees. He stops in front of our table. He winks at Jessica. She squeals, stuffing a dollar bill into his waistband.

He grabs her hand and kisses it. Safe. Calculated. He doesn’t want her; he wants the tip. He is an actor playing the role of Desire, and he is overacting.

I watch his hips snap back and forth. Routine. One-two-three, thrust. One-two-three, grind.

I feel nothing.

Actually, I feel superior. I look at Jessica, flushed and laughing, her hand on her chest. I look at the other women, their mouths open, their eyes wide. They are buying the lie. They think this is dangerous. They think this is wild.

I sip my drink. The ice clinks against my teeth.

This isn’t danger. This is a petting zoo.

I check my phone. Mark hasn’t texted. I imagine him at home, asleep in the blue light of the television. Safe. Boring. Mine.

I am a good wife. I am here for my friend. I am enduring this.

I shift in my seat. The lace of my underwear bites into my skin. The thick, coarse hair beneath the fabric creates a friction that is annoying, constant. It’s a secret texture that doesn’t belong in this world of waxing and laser removal. Everyone here is smooth. Everyone here is aerodynamic.

I am overgrown. I am hidden.

The song ends. The policemen bow. The room applauds.

Then, the air changes.

It isn’t gradual. It is a guillotine drop.

The frantic, pop-synth beat cuts out. Silence hangs for a heartbeat, heavy and thick.

Then the bass hits.

It is low. A sub-frequency that I feel in my uterus before I hear it in my ears. A slow, predatory throb.

Thump ... pause ... Thump ... pause...

The chaotic, spinning strobe lights die. The room plunges into darkness.