Trepidation

He lived in fear of his wife's new career. She had begun writing stories, and the stories touched vaguely on the lives of almost everyone she had ever known. He kept warning her that she had better be careful, that she'd lose all her friends and antagonize her relatives. But in reality he was worried that one day she'd write about him.

He couldn't verbalize what she might write, yet he viewed each story with trepidation. There was one in which dirty clothes oozed out of the closet. That's me, he thought, panicstricken. But when he read the rest of it, he realized that it couldn't possibly be. He looked at the love stories, and the not-so-loving ones. With even greater relief he realized they were excerpts from her distant past, or someone else's. Or from her imagination.

Then one day it happened. He began reading a story that was definitely about him.

It was this one.