Read my mind read my mind readmymindreadmymind, the mind reader’s wife thought. Her thighs tensed, neck sweated slick. The mind reader’s hand gripped her wrist behind her head. Wait, no, she was gripping her own wrist, she realized. Pinning herself in place like a tack in a board. She was about to, just on the brink of, almost—there. Read my mind read my mind oh FUCK read my fucking mind.
“Fine,” the mind reader said. She pulled her fingers out from between her wife’s legs. Slow and wet. The mind reader’s wife heard the unsticking and was struck by the impulse to jam the mind reader’s hand back inside. Impulses like this, the desire for more and more from the mind reader, especially from her hands, were becoming more frequent, and the mind reader’s wife didn’t know what to do with them. It was a hunger she didn’t know how to feed, and it had overtaken her without warning in the past weeks? Months? The mind reader’s wife was getting worse at keeping track of time. I need a calendar, she reminded herself.
When the impulse subsided, the mind reader’s wife realized what the mind reader had said. Fine. She had said fine, hadn’t she? For a moment, the mind reader’s wife thought it had already happened. The mind reader had read her mind and seen it all. But no. She felt a hardness nestled in her throat, the after-tickle of having just screamed out loud. Somewhere on the precipice of orgasm, her internal monologue had leaked out.
The mind reader got up without saying anything else. All business now. Fine hung there between them, and the mind reader’s wife couldn’t decide if she wanted to grab it or swat it away. The mind reader always used as few words as possible, especially during their fights. Especially during this one. The one they had over and over. Read my mind, the mind reader’s wife would urge, and the mind reader always said no. Cue fight.
◆
It always went one of three ways.
One, the mind reader accused her of deflecting. “It’s you who wants to read my mind.”
The mind reader’s wife always laughed at that one. “If you’d read my mind, you’d know that isn’t true.”
Two, the mind reader sighed. The deep, loud kind of sigh people perfect over the course of a marriage. A sigh that cuts conversation short and says nothing. The mind reader’s wife hated this response the most.
Three, the mind reader called her crazy. She didn’t always use that word, but it was beneath the surface of delusional, unhinged, difficult. Just say crazy, the mind reader’s wife thought. Just say fucked up. The euphemisms stung more, like the mind reader was trying to hurt and protect her at the same time. Like the mind reader was jabbing a knife against her flesh without ever breaking the skin. The mind reader’s wife would have preferred a cut to a bruise. Sometimes, the mind reader screamed at her when the fight got to this point. She was succinct but ruthless. She brought up other flaws, too. Like the fact that the mind reader’s wife didn’t work, and to this, the mind reader’s wife always replied it was the mind reader who hadn’t wanted her to work, who had insisted she quit working long ago.
◆
This, this fine, this reluctant agreement, this was new. The mind reader had never said anything close to fine before. The mind reader’s wife remained hushed. She didn’t want to break the spell. She watched the mind reader dress in a hurried huff, briefly amused at the sight, like she was watching a one-night stand’s departure instead of someone she’d known for eleven years. The mind reader often amused and charmed her even when it wasn’t intentional.
She studied the mind reader as if she really were a stranger. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know the mind reader was tired. Maybe she was tired from the days before, which they’d spent moving into this new house five hundred miles from the last one.
The new house was small, plopped at the end of a dirt road and surrounded by a dark grove of trees, all the same, but the mind reader’s wife didn’t know what they were, only that they made the house look even smaller. The trees were wide and full but sat close to the ground, so when the mind reader’s wife squinted at them through the old house’s windows, they looked trunkless—big green balls of wild. There were dozens of them. Sun touched the house but barely anywhere around it, the ground smothered by shadows. The mind reader’s wife knew the mind reader liked seclusion, but this was the most remote move they’d made yet.
But she was almost certain it wasn’t the move. The mind reader’s wife knew it was her request that wearied the mind reader. It was the fight they’d had so many times it was a part of them now.
Read my mind. No. Read my mind. No. Read my mind. No.
The mind reader’s wife stared as the mind reader exhaled deeply after every piece of clothing she pulled on, making it all seem like a great big effort. It was cold in the house, and the mind reader’s wife wondered if she had the right clothes for wherever it was they were living now. She knew the mind reader would get her new ones if she didn’t.
Though they were the same age, the mind reader looked ten years older. Occupational hazard. Mind reading was tricky work, and it gradually dulled the mind reader’s edges, made her dark coiled curls hang limp and grayed, sagged the skin around her once blunt jaw. It seemed new moles popped up on her shoulders every week.
The mind reader’s wife didn’t care how the mind reader looked one bit. The mind reader was always sexy to her. Over a decade together, and she still yearned for the mind reader, could watch her like this, pulling clothes over the body that had just fucked her. But lately, that yearning had grown into something huge and perplexing. She wanted more, she wanted different. She wanted to feel subjugated beneath the mind reader’s hands.
Neither spoke. The mind reader’s wife sat still, mind racing. Eleven years of the same fight. Had she finally won? The thought alone sent a jolt through her skin like she’d fingered a socket, and she leaned forward.
“Say something,” the mind reader’s wife said.
“I said fine,” the mind reader said, shrugging. She was done dressing and hovered awkwardly at the end of the bed. She was the one watching now, and the mind reader’s wife instinctively spread her legs a little wider. Look harder, look all the way in.
This wasn’t what the mind reader’s wife had ever expected. This dull, easy giving-up. This tattered white flag. Was she fucking with her? That couldn’t be it. The mind reader rarely minced words. In the whole time they’d known each other, the mind reader’s wife had never once heard the mind reader say something snarky. Sarcasm usually went over her head. She wasn’t humorless, but she favored directness over subtext.
“You’re really gonna do it?” The mind reader’s wife was cautious. She avoided the mind reader’s eyes, instead looking down at her own hands, palms up and tingling with her want. She couldn’t look at the mind reader. She couldn’t bear for any of this to be a sleight of hand.
“Yes,” the mind reader said. Still hovering. She looked almost like she was floating above her wife, haunting her. “It seems to be the only thing you want.”
“That’s not—”
The mind reader held up her hand. “I don’t wanna to talk about it. As long as you’re sure it’s what you really want.”
The mind reader’s wife nodded. Inside, the jolt spread even farther. She felt overcome by her own want. She thought it might split her in two. The mind reader nodded, too. Her resignation should have made the mind reader’s wife feel guilty or sad, but all she could feel was the electricity of getting her way.
“I have to work,” the mind reader said. “But we can do it tonight.”
She left her post at the foot of the bed and slunk to the door. “Happy anniversary,” the mind reader said as she pulled the bedroom door closed behind her, not looking back. She didn’t see her wife’s face sink.
Oh, right.
◆
She had completely forgotten—how could she have forgotten? A damn calendar, she reminded herself again. Now her selfish request felt even more selfish. She wanted to bury herself back under the covers and stay there all day, instead of pretending to be busy with nothing, which was her usual routine. There were things to do. Probably. Moving things. Those could keep her busy for a few days, maybe a week. Then it would be back to lurking around the house like she was looking for clues to solve the mystery of her very existence. The mind reader was shrouded in secrecy, and so were their lives. In truth, secrecy thrilled the mind reader’s wife. Her own life had been flattened over time. But despite all the repetitive days with nothing to do, there was never really a dull moment being married to a mind reader. The mind reader’s wife supposed this was why their marriage sustained itself. You couldn’t get bored of someone who you could never quite figure out.
Gurgling guilt threatened to replace the excitement coursing through her. What kind of person forgets their own wedding anniversary? How could she forget when this marriage was her whole world?
What kind of person so desperately wants the one thing their beloved can’t give them? Someone never satiated. Someone who views boundaries as an obstacle. Someone who wants to be consumed. The mind reader’s wife knew she was exactly this kind of person. For eleven years, she begged the mind reader to break the strictest rule of their relationship. What had started as mere curiosity had turned into obsession. It was as simple and common as the human ailment of wanting what one cannot have. It would be her undoing.
The mind reader’s wife pulled the blanket over her entire self, blotting out the morning. She briefly hated herself, which made her wish the mind reader would read her mind and see how much she truly hated herself. She needed her to understand how out-of-control she felt so maybe she could understand why she so desperately needed to be understood. She could tell the mind reader she hated herself, but it wouldn’t have the same effect. She wanted her to see it, all its edges and dimensions. She wanted the mind reader to know she knew it was fucked-up to push so hard and to understand so little about her own desires.
◆
The mind reader once told her reading minds was like peering through a kaleidoscope. No one ever felt one thing at a time. Every emotion had subsets and layers and overtones. The mind reader had seen it all, the full expanse of human thought. It made her muted at times, manic at others. The mind reader’s wife was never sure exactly which version of the mind reader she might get on any given day. It was like the feelings of others had etched over the mind reader’s own brain, always carving in new grooves. The mind reader’s wife wondered how much the mind reader carried of the people she read. She wondered if this what made the mind reader so selective with words, as if she were afraid someone else might slip out.
“I need you,” the mind reader’s wife told her years ago. Before they were married. Before they were so enmeshed. “I need you to be here when I get home. I need someone to be with when I resurface from the maze of other people’s minds.”
The mind reader’s wife was thrilled to be so needed. It was the last time she heard the mind reader say I need you.
◆
She knew she could not stay in bed all day. She felt like a kid on the eve of her birthday. Waiting. Wanting. She dressed and wandered out of the bedroom into a hall with dark blue walls. Who painted walls so blue? the mind reader’s wife wondered. Someone who liked the feeling of drowning? She ran a finger along them, collecting dust on her fingertip, and wondered if the mind reader knew what drowning felt like. The mind reader knew too many things.
As usual, the mind reader’s wife hadn’t had much say in where they moved, but that was fine with her. She had learned not to be too attached to any one place, to vaulted ceilings here, natural light there. They moved often. Another occupational hazard. Cities were the most difficult for the mind reader, who had less control over the minds she slithered into when there was too much noise around her. Back when they still went out, they could be having a nice time at a bar when suddenly the mind reader was leveled by accidentally slipping into someone who just lost their mother. She didn’t feel their pain exactly, but seeing it was enough to ruin an evening.
They moved from secluded house to secluded house, and the mind reader’s wife had fewer friends in each new place, found it harder to fake her way through establishing roots when she knew they’d inevitably be ripped out. She had chosen this life, she reminded herself often. The mind reader had been clear about how it would be from the start, and the mind reader’s wife said goodbye to her own life easily. Too easily. She stopped working, she stopped seeing friends, she shrunk her life down until it fit snug inside the capsule of their relationship.
The mind reader rarely lied, at least not in any overt way the mind reader’s wife could catch, but she did withhold information, especially when it came to her work. She gave various reasons for all the moves, but the mind reader’s wife knew the truth: Mind reading was dangerous work. She happily let the mind reader think she knew as little as possible and meanwhile collected small clues the same way she now gathered dust from these ugly blue walls.
The mind reader would be holed up in her private office by now, this one completely separate from the main house, an old barn. It was going to be harder for the mind reader’s wife to snoop here, but she would find a way, because it’s what kept things interesting.
The mind reader’s wife descended the stairs and went to the kitchen, which glowed warm in morning light. More dust swirled in the air, made glitter by the sun.
Why had the mind reader changed her mind?
The mind reader’s wife made tea. She realized the kitchen was already stocked with food, something the mind reader must have taken care of ahead of time. She took care of everything. Their life was isolated but easy. The mind reader’s wife could have everything she wanted. Almost everything.
Was it something about this new house that had changed the mind reader’s mind? Was something different here? Sometimes it seemed like the mind reader could read more than minds, could read shifts in the air, could look at a tree and know something about what was beneath the bark. The mind reader was plugged into a network of tiny transmissions the mind reader’s wife didn’t have access to. Sometimes she loosened after a few drinks and spilled more about her work, and the mind reader’s wife savored these moments, pried open the mind reader’s hinges little by little, peering in and piecing together her puzzle.
She looked out the kitchen window as she drank her tea and watched as a woman in a brown suit marched toward the office-barn where the mind reader was surely sitting with a cup of coffee, a bit of whiskey mixed in. She liked to do readings a little buzzed. It helped her detach from the emotions she saw.
The brown-suited woman was tall with broad shoulders, a wide stride, head topped with a tight bun. She was pretty, the mind reader’s wife thought. And she felt a twinge of jealousy, but not about how the woman looked. It was about what could be coming. Soon this woman could be wholly known by the mind reader. She could have her layers peeled back, her innards plucked out and examined.
But the mind reader’s wife also knew this was a silly thought. This woman likely did not want her own mind read. People rarely did. They wanted the mind reader to enter others. They came to her and gave their story, gave their theories, and then asked her to do her mental detective work, to come to their homes and read their cheating spouses. Those readings were particularly lucrative. The mind reader was a glorified private investigator.
This was a card the mind reader’s wife liked to play when they fought the old fight. How could the mind reader be okay with invading people’s minds without their permission and then refuse to read hers when she was asking for it?
◆
On one of those instances when the mind reader was more forthcoming, she told the mind reader’s wife about one of the odd clients who did want her own mind read. A woman who claimed to be in love with two different women. The client had begged the mind reader to tell her which one she loved more. The mind reader’s wife marveled at that. At the need to be told exactly what one wants. She quietly obsessed over the client. There had been a lull in the old argument between them at the time, but it returned with new urgency. If the mind reader could tell that woman what she wanted, couldn’t she tell the mind reader’s wife what she wanted, too? Couldn’t she tell her everything she needed to know about herself in order to live? In order to be happy? The mind reader wife’s obsession with the woman in love with two women fueled her ongoing obsession with pressuring the mind reader to read her mind. Shortly after the argument’s spike, the mind reader’s hair turned gray.
◆
The mind reader’s wife felt bad for the woman in the brown suit. No doubt one of the ones with a lying husband. She wondered how sound proof the barn was and if day one in the new house was too early to snoop. No, she needed to play it safe if she was going to get what she wanted. What she was pretty sure she wanted. She wanted it, didn’t she? Now that it was so close, she was less sure.
She sipped the final dregs of her tea and thumbed the tea bag. Text on the tea bag boasted: “A taste of home.” The mind reader’s wife laughed. This wasn’t home. None of the places they lived were. Home and certainty were things she left behind in her old life before the mind reader. Back then, she had had normal things like friends and work and lovers, but none of it had given her the rush that the mind reader’s magic and mystery provided.
She walked from room to room with her tea and imagined what she could fill them with, imagined being someone who bought things and assigned emotional value to them. They had some things they moved from house to house, but they were just that. Things to fill space. A vase of purple tulips sat in the windowsill of the house’s living room, and the mind reader’s wife reached out to touch a bulb and was surprised. They were real. She’d assumed them fake. The work demanded their life be easy to pack up, but fresh flowers were markers of a real home. She felt another pang of guilt as she considered the mind reader might be trying to make their lives feel more normal.
The mind reader’s wife squeezed the tulip bulb until it lolled off its stem like a snapped neck. She didn’t know where exactly in the mind that impulse came from. She was sure the mind reader could tell her.
When she thought of home, she thought only of the mind reader, her mind reader, the person responsible for injecting her life with excitement and mystery. The mind reader’s work was everything. Every decision, every movement stemmed from it. And even though it wasn’t the mind reader’s wife’s work exactly, she felt she played a part in it. The mind reader needed her.
Maybe the only thing left in her life untouched by the mind reader’s work was her own interior. And yet, the mind reader’s wife still wished to give her that. To be swallowed whole. She wanted the mind reader’s boundary to become a fault line, a gash in the earth she could fall into. Together, they could quake the earth.
◆
She passed the time like she always did: alone. She waited, and she fantasized. This was something she had always been good at. She could fill hours, whole days, with daydreams. What would it be like to be married to a farmer? A chemist? What would it be like to share friends with the mind reader? To have friends again at all? What would it be like to be in a book club? What if she really did go back to work? She could barely remember what she’d even done for work before. The time before the mind reader was a smudge.
What would it be like to have a kid with the mind reader? Was it even possible with her work? Why had they never talked about it? Why was so much between them implied? What would it be like to live in the same place for more than a year? What would it be like to feel the mind reader’s hands clenching around her throat enough to hurt, enough to bruise?
There it was again. The want. The hunger getting harder to ignore.
It was always during sex that she most wanted her mind read. There were parts of herself she didn’t understand, and she wanted to pull them out. Sex brought them close but not all the way to the surface. She spent so much time trying to solve the mystery of the mind reader, but she knew she was full of secrets, too. Secrets she kept from herself. They popped in from time to time. The want. The want beneath the want. She wanted the mind reader to read her mind so they could both know exactly what she wanted. She didn’t want to ask for it.
◆
The mind reader’s wife thought the end of the work day would never come. Then it did, and she wished for more time.
The mind reader returned from the barn and cooked while the mind reader’s wife uncorked and poured wine. The mind reader roasted a chicken, taking her time, placing the bird on a bed of cabbage and purple carrots. It was a special dinner, an anniversary dinner. The mind reader didn’t usually cook so elaborately, even on special occasions, but the mind reader’s wife had a feeling this had something to do with the forgotten anniversary. She was being punished with a good meal. So she exaggerated her gratitude. She didn’t bring up the morning. She eyed the mind reader’s quickly drained wine glass and decided not to bring up work yet either. She poured more.
The low sun made spiky shadows of the tree branches, and the mind reader’s wife traced them with one hand while she forked more chicken into her mouth.
“The trees are quite something,” she said.
“They’re walnut trees,” the mind reader said.
“Yes,” the mind reader’s wife said, though she had not known this.
“Did you know walnut trees release chemicals to prevent other plants from coming too close?”
In addition to knowing everything that goes on inside a person, the mind reader apparently also knew random facts about trees. The mind reader’s wife was once again charmed by the strange and marvelous mind reader—passive aggressive roast chicken be damned.
◆
And then she fell for the mind reader all over again.
On the evening of their eleventh wedding anniversary, the mind reader read her wife’s mind.
After dinner, they cleaned quietly, neither able to fill the air with pretense anymore. Again, the mind reader’s wife didn’t want to break the spell. But the mind reader did it for her.
“You should know a bit more about how this works,” the mind reader said, plunging their plates into a sudsy basin.
“Okay,” the mind reader’s wife said. She felt a rush of arousal at the tease of new information.
“I see everything when I do a reading. Every emotion and the emotion beneath that emotion. But it’s only what you’re feeling right then, in that exact moment. I can’t rewind or fast-forward.”
The mind reader’s wife had more or less figured all this out already, but she nodded.
“Once we do this, it’ll be harder for me to stay out of your mind,” she continued. “I’ll have to focus a little more to stay out.”
This was actual new information for the mind reader’s wife, and it became a little more clear why the mind reader had resisted so long. This was going to take more out of the mind reader than the mind reader’s wife realized.
Again, the guilt. But there was no going back now though. She knew that much was true. You can’t ask for the same thing for eleven years and then reject it the second it’s given. She glanced out the window at the walnut trees and thought of their chemicals warding off others. The mind reader’s wife was always touching leaves without knowing if they were poisonous or not. Isn’t that what this whole marriage was? A seduction and a risk.
“I assume you wanna do this, you know…” the mind reader trailed off.
“While fucking? Yeah, I thought I’d been pretty clear about that,” the mind reader’s wife finished for her. She was giving the mind reader a hard time, and she knew it probably wasn’t the time for that, but the mind reader’s shyness amused her.
It was always going to happen in bed. That’s the part of herself the mind reader’s wife wanted to know better. The part that changed without her permission and without any warning. She’d always been adventurous in bed, but lately, it was more than that. With as much intensity as she wanted the mind reader to read her mind, she wanted the mind reader to physically command her in a way she’d never before. Total consumption of body and mind.
They started slowly. As if neither were sure the other was fully committed. Lazy hands, the way two people have sex when they’ve had sex with each other too many times to count.
Then the mind reader’s wife looked in the mind reader’s eyes and saw her own hunger reflected back at her.
“Now,” she said.
For a moment, there was nothing. The mind reader’s wife had expected a tingle or a prick. Some warning sign that someone else had slipped all the way into her. She concentrated, but all she felt was her own self grinding on the mind reader’s thigh. Then the mind reader’s hand clenched her ponytail and pulled her head back. Hard. Gnashing teeth on throat. A surge of strength. Crescent-moon nail marks on the mind reader’s wife’s shoulders. A drip of blood. The wet, clenched feeling of being swallowed deep into the belly of something living. The mind reader’s wife couldn’t tell if she was still being punished, and she didn’t care.
They finished with screams and heaved chests. Still straddling her, hovering over her, the mind reader looked feral.
“Are you?” the mind reader’s wife managed between panting.
The mind reader shook her head and got off of her, lowering her body next to the mind reader’s wife. “I’m not in there anymore.”
“That was?”
The mind reader nodded. “Like nothing I’ve ever felt.” She sounded genuinely surprised.
They held each other for a bit, still catching their breath. The mind reader’s wife briefly considered rubbing it in the mind reader’s face. Told you so. Knew it would be incredible. Why’d you resist all that time?
Instead, she lapped at the mind reader’s earlobe and kissed the frame of her face. She wasn’t entirely sure what they had experienced, but she knew it was much more than good sex. It was a kaleidoscope of desire. It was something no one else could ever understand. It was theirs, and they were each other’s. The mind reader’s wife hadn’t felt a physical sensation when the mind reader psychically entered her, but the ingress imprinted indelibly on her. She had felt more naked than sheer nudity. She had felt almost entirely known. The pulse of her pleasure would soon subside, but unsheathed sensation would stay with her for the rest of the night.
The mind reader kissed her. “I didn’t know you wanted.”
The mind reader’s wife wasn’t sure if the mind reader meant to say more or if the sentence simply ended there. And then the mind reader was asleep.
◆
Even the mind reader seemed to have the hunger now. They followed the rules: Mind reading only happened during sex. The mind reader’s wife reserved the right to tell her to stop at any point. The mind reader could call it quits, too.
But neither wanted to stop. The sex was transcendent. It reminded the mind reader’s wife of way back before. Before the mind reader’s work took over. When they still listened to the way each other’s bodies sounded when pressed like this, touched like that. When they would start fucking with the lights on and then fall asleep with them still on, too, passed out and parched and fuck-drunk. But then the convergence of their lives had felt so natural, like creaming butter and sugar, a soft melding. The mind reader’s wife had folded herself into the mind reader, and the sex became not just rote but almost masturbatory. Not bad but lacking. Now, it was overwhelming, all-consuming. By finally having the mind reader inside her head, the mind reader’s wife’s secret desires could burst forth, and she thought this to be her most individual expression in years. She believed they had unlocked a paradox: In converging, she could be her own self. She was wrong.
One night, the mind reader cut dinner short. They’d only taken a few bites of their food, but they were both too hungry for other things. The mind reader tugged at the mind reader’s wife sleeve, undressed her all the way before pushing her down to the floor and roughly lifting her chin.
“I need you,” the mind reader said.
◆
Their new intimacy made the mind reader’s wife feel more vulnerable and more alive than ever before. She shared more with the mind reader—about her desires and fantasies, but about other things, too. She confessed to the years of snooping, and the mind reader laughed, really laughed. “I kinda figured,” she said.
They stopped fighting, stopped nagging in that way that becomes inevitable when two people are stuck in a home together. They tried new things giddily. They became one another’s sustenance. Shame fell away. Discomfort fell away. Secrecy fell away.
The lines between them fell away, too. While the mind reader’s wife felt newly alive in her ability to act out and receive her fantasies, she also felt more overpowered by the mind reader than ever before. It had been exactly what she’d wanted, but it was also frightening.
They’d always operated like a unit despite the walls the mind reader put up. But now the merge was unmistakable. The mind reader’s wife looked into the mind reader’s eyes and felt like she was the one who could read minds. Like they suddenly had all of each other.
The mind reader opened up about her work more. No snooping or prying required. There was a new level of trust, and the mind reader’s wife was so grateful to be let in that she didn’t linger long on the fact that the mind reader hadn’t trusted her before. Does anyone really know anyone? she wondered. We do though, she marveled. The mind reader’s wife was certain no other lovers in the history of time had ever understood each other the way they now did.
◆
“People fantasize about love like this, but they’ll never have it,” the mind reader’s wife said to the mind reader. They were post-fuck, sprawled on the floor in the barn-office. It wasn’t a restricted space anymore. Everything was shared now. “It’s sad.”
“People fantasize about all kinds of things they’ll never have,” the mind reader said.
The mind reader’s wife nodded, and the back of her head caught on something sharp. She sat up and brought her hand to the spot. But before she could check for blood, she bristled at something else. The mind reader had done the same thing, was awkwardly sitting upright with her hand on her head as if she’d been pricked, too.
The mind reader’s wife was too stunned to say anything, so the mind reader spoke for her. Or tried to.
“It’s not, I didn’t, I wasn’t.” The mind reader was flustered, something the mind reader’s wife had never really witnessed before.
The mind reader’s wife wasn’t sure of the best way to go about this. It was the first snag in the arrangement, and she didn’t want to accidentally pull on something that would unravel what they’d made.
“If you’re reading my mind without me knowing about it, I think you should tell me,” she finally said. She stood and wiped her hand on her bare legs. She thought the wetness of her hand was from sex, but then she looked down and saw the blood smeared across her thigh. Her head was bleeding after all.
“I’m not,” the mind reader said. She jumped up quickly like she had the day she first agreed to mind-read her wife. They both dressed, an old tension reappearing like a haunting. The barn was thick with it. The mind reader’s wife’s head throbbed, and she eyed the mind reader, who was wincing through something, too.
“You felt the same thing I did,” the mind reader’s wife said. There was no other explanation. The mind reader must have been in her head when it happened.
But the mind reader swore she wasn’t. She swore that wasn’t even how mind reading really worked. For days, she swore. And the mind reader’s wife secretly reveled in the mind reader’s groveling. So there were still secrets between them. The mind reader maintained her innocence but also apologized profusely. This was not a typical dynamic of theirs. The mind reader’s wife felt newly in control.
◆
They kept doing readings, but the mind reader’s wife also tested the mind reader. Over morning tea, over dinner, over the cups of whiskey they passed back and forth in the barn between clients—there were fewer and fewer clients these days—the mind reader’s wife imagined all sorts of horrible things that could happen to the mind reader. She daydreamed tragic, violent deaths. She pictured the mind reader’s eyes pecked out by birds. She pictured herself with her own hands clenched around the mind reader’s throat. Over and over, she killed her wife in her daydreams, and she knew it was fucked-up, but she needed it to be as explicit as possible to make the test work. She needed her daydreams to be nightmarish enough that the mind reader might shudder or gawk or finally say something. She studied the mind reader’s face and body language for betrayals. To the mind reader’s wife’s frustration, the mind reader kept passing the test. She kept testing anyway.
◆
The mind reader’s wife and the mind reader walked beneath the walnut trees in the morning glow, and the coverage the trees provided felt like a haven, a safe place for the mind reader’s wife to ask the difficult question that was gnawing at her.
She slid her arm into the mind reader’s elbow.
“Do you know why?” the mind reader’s wife asked.
“Why what?”
This had been happening more frequently—the mind reader’s wife forgetting the mind reader was not always in her head. She realized she’d have to do the hard work of speaking her mind if she wanted answers. The questions, then, came in a waterfall.
“Why do my desires feel so potent? Why the sudden change? Why do I want you to destroy me? Was I boring before? In bed I mean? Were you bored? Was I?”
The mind reader stopped walking. The mind reader’s wife laughed at herself, because she wasn’t sure what else there was to do. The mind reader looked very serious. “That’s a lot of questions,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the mind reader’s wife said, though she wasn’t sure for what.
“I don’t like to speculate on matters of the mind,” the mind reader said.
“I suppose you could just take a peek then,” the mind reader’s wife said, laughing again.
The mind reader’s body stiffened, and the mind reader’s wife pulled her arm away. They stood, facing each other, flanked by the great walnut trees, the only real witnesses of their lives anymore.
“I was joking,” the mind reader’s wife said.
“I know,” the mind reader said. “Some people want me to be their therapist though.”
“What if you spoke to me not as a mind reader but as my wife?” the mind reader’s wife said.
This seemed to surprise the mind reader, as if the thought had never occurred to her to separate the identities.
“You want to know why your sexual desires shifted?” the mind reader asked, and the mind reader’s wife winced at the clinical wording. She had thought that this conversation could be as intimate as their mind readings had been. Just without the sex. But it was starting to feel like there was an entire walnut tree between them.
“I don’t think wanting to spice things up in a long marriage is anything new,” the mind reader said. “I’ve seen it many times in—“
“Forget it,” the mind reader’s wife said. She did not need the mind reader to explain something as easily understood as monotony in monogamy. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know everything. She also knew, or hoped, that what she felt was more than something so easily understood.
The mind reader’s wife had turned back toward the house, but the mind reader reached for her. “Wait, wait.”
The mind reader’s wife turned back to her and waited. She did not wish to say anything more. The disconnect between her brain and her words felt insurmountable.
“If I had to guess, and this is sheer speculation, it’s not something I’ve picked up on when I enter you. Readings where people are trying to unlock something in their subconscious are difficult, because I can only read the present and sometimes it’s not as simple as a reason anyway, more like a constellation of reasons or—“
“I know all this,” the mind reader’s wife interjected. “I said I don’t want you to be a mind reader right now.”
“If I had to guess,” the mind reader repeated. “I think you wanted all this before. The rough sex, the domination. But you also wanted other things. Then you stopped wanting the other things and were left with only this. So it grew.”
The mind reader’s wife felt it then—the last piece of her relinquished. She felt completely known, completely seen, a puzzle finally solved. And it was not the ecstasy she assumed it would be. It was an annihilation.
The coverage of the walnut trees was no long a haven. It felt like a smothering.
◆
Still, the mind reader’s wife did not tug at the thread. It seemed too late to turn back. She was falling into the fault line. She had gotten what she wanted, and she would not let go of it.
The mind reader and the mind reader’s wife swaddled themselves in sweaters and set up camp outside the barn to stargaze. The mind reader’s wife had imagined exactly this during sex the day before, and the mind reader had seen it and said, “We could do that.” It was such an innocent, silly thing to imagine in the middle of being fucked, and the mind reader’s wife was more embarrassed about this, that she suddenly wanted youthful romance, than she was about any of the sexual fantasies.
Now here they were, sweater-wrapped and entwined on an extra-large woven blanket neither of them remembered buying. There was only a small patch of sky between the walnut trees for them to gaze through.
The mind reader’s wife used her finger to trace the moles peeking out of the neck of the mind reader’s sweater. “These look like stars,” she said.
“You have them, too,” the mind reader said.
“I do?”
“Right here,” the mind reader said, resting a hand on the mind reader’s wife’s chest, swiping a nipple on the way there.
The mind reader’s wife pulled up the neck of her sweater so she could peer in at her own chest. The mind reader was right. A few moles had cropped up. She’d never had any before. It looked like the mind reader had plucked them from herself and transplanted them there. She dipped her head back out.
“What ever happened to the client who was in love with two people?” The mind reader asked softly. The mind reader’s wife looked at her, confused, and the mind reader snapped out of something. “I meant, do you want to know what happened to the client who was in love with two people?”
The mind reader’s wife nodded.
“I told her I could see she thought one was more dependable than the other. She loved them both, but she feared one could leave her at any point. And she knew the other would never leave her.”
“Who did she pick?”
“The undependable one,” the mind reader said. She nuzzled into her wife’s neck, and they both stopped pretending to look at the stars.
◆
In the morning, the mind reader’s wife snuck out of bed early and let the mind reader sleep in, something she never used to do. But after the first mind reading, they both were tired all the time. It was like the mind reader was catching up on years of sleep lost to her work.
The mind reader’s wife walked naked to the bathroom. When she turned on the light, she screamed and then brought a fist to her mouth as if to stuff the sound back in.
But it wasn’t her own hand on her own mouth. They were the mind reader’s. She blinked, but it wouldn’t go away, this reflection of herself that was not herself at all. She stared at the sight of her wearied wife. The gray curls, the soft skin pocked with dark moles, so much more than the mind reader’s wife had seen under the stars.
The mind reader’s wife turned off the light and turned it back on, and the reflection was her own. Straight black hair, full cheeks, round nose. She flicked the light. Nothing. Still her. The moles were gone, too. Had they been a trick of the light under the stars? But, no, hadn’t the mind reader said she’d seen them, too? She was tired, she decided. She would go back to sleep.
When she returned to the bedroom, the mind reader was sitting up and yawning, pawing at her hair absentmindedly, and the mind reader’s wife was disturbed to see the mind reader’s hair was now black all over. Like hers.
“Do you have work today?” the mind reader asked. The mind reader’s wife hesitated. Was the mind reader making fun of her?
“Did you do something to your hair?” the mind reader’s wife asked. A chill descended upon her.
“What?”
“Your hair is black,” she said.
“My hair is always black,” the mind reader said.
The mind reader’s wife moved closer to the mind reader.
“Hello? Do you have clients today?” The mind reader asked, her exasperation familiar. It was exactly how the mind reader’s wife sounded when she didn’t get the answer she wanted.
The mind reader’s wife moved even closer. She tried to make out her reflection in the mind reader’s eyes, but she was too far.
“If you have clients, you should cancel,” the mind reader said. She reached toward the mind reader’s wife. “Let’s stay in bed today.”
The mind reader’s wife placed her hands in the mind reader’s. When the mind reader opened her mouth, the mind reader’s wife leaned in and let herself be devoured.