This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell

of Fame in Cleveland, get and maintain a flat stomach, and win a dance contest.
    On the list of infinite dreams: write some poems together, go to Paris, buy a nice watch, and make enough money so we can learn to play golf.
    Our friends asked us about the lists sometimes. They wanted to know why they were in the bathroom. That’s the room where most of the aging happens, we said.
    …
    I sometimes wonder if you’ve ever thought about hiring a seductress to test me. Maybe a friend of yours I haven’t met before, or a stranger.
    Would she come to my work and start hitting on me? Slip me her phone number with a wink? I would get suspicious if that happened.
    Or maybe when I go to the grocery store, you call the secret seducer and tell her what store I’m going to. What happens next—does she dress up sexy and find me in the cat food aisle? Does she ask my opinion on the organic beef and make a bad joke about how much she loves meat?
    That might actually work.
    Is there a website where you can find people who test the will of your husband, wife, or lover? I imagine a logo with an apple, a snake, and naked cartoon bodies trying to hide their guilt.
    You once said, “There’s no such thing as entrapment when loved ones are involved.” At least I think I’ve heard you say that before.
    Sometimes, late at night, we find ourselves watching a reality TV show in which unfaithful people are secretly followed and filmed. They are seen with their lovers eating at places like Olive Garden or some bar in the next town over. We hear them talking on their bugged cell phones, telling their waiting loved ones that they have too much work to do or will be out late with “friends.” They drive to cheap hotels and then we watch the minutes lapse away on the corner of the screen. When they are done, they come back outside and then the host of the show exits his surveillance van and jogs with a cameraman and the betrayed lover across a parking lot. We watch through the eyes of the shaky handheld camera as it readies its attack. There is a stunned pause and then an ugly confrontation.
    I sometimes imagine that it’s us on the screen because I know you fantasize about this too.
    …
    I found a couple of journals of yours and they were full of peppy inspirational sayings right alongside depressing entries about how you see yourself. It didn’t seem like you at all but I knew it was you because of the handwriting. If I had found the journals somewhere, like on a bus, and they were written by someone else, I would have shown them to you and we’d likely make fun of them.
    I read bits of the journals when I found them mixed into a box of old fashion magazines. I felt a little uncomfortable, so I put them back. That night I asked you slyly about how long you’d been keeping journals and you said that you’d started when you were a junior in high school. You told me that there were possibly twenty or thirty journals stored away in a box somewhere, but you never looked at them. “It’s like when people want to be frozen and brought back to life later,” you said. “I’ve frozen parts of my youth.”
    I didn’t tell you about the ones I’d found. One was pretty recent, from when we first started dating. There were a lot of entries about your job at the library. Wonderfully fantastic daydreams mixed with complaints about coworkers. Many of the entries were more neurotic and adult, as opposed to the trivial and childish thoughts of a teenage diary.
    “Do you want those years of your youth brought back to life?” I asked you.
    “I should burn them,” you said with a laugh.
    The rest of that week, I found myself drawn to that more recent journal. I tried to keep it in a secret place in the bedroom, where I could get it out and read it whenever I had time. There were a few parts where you expressed uncertainty about me. You wrote a couple of things about me that weren’t totally accurate, and I wanted to cross them out and correct them. Or