"Fidelity is a personality trait"

I sat in a chair in front of Jack's desk and watched him read. At first his face was blank, but as he kept reading a small smile played on the corner of his lips. Jack's lips are very red, he looks like he's wearing plum-colored lipstick, except in the height of winter, when they get chapped from skiing and are covered in flakes of white peeling skin. His upper lip is curled at the edges, and his smile begins on the right-hand side. His lip fluttered in a half smile, once, then again. By the time he'd reached the end he was laughing.

"This is very good," he said.

"Thanks."

"Judge Gibbs is going to burst a blood vessel when he reads this."

I have very pale, freckled skin and I blush easily, but not prettily. I mottle. Knowing that I am blushing makes me self-conscious about how bad I look, and so I grow ever redder until, often, someone asks if I am in need of medical attention. Jack watched his words of praise have their effect on me. His eyes flicked to the V of my shirt. I had on a white cotton blouse that day, its collar starched into stiff wings on either side of my neck. This left my throat bare, an effect which that morning had struck me as demurely sexy. Now it served as a wide-open canvas for the most startling pyrotechnics of my cardiovascular system.

"I mean that in the best possible way," Jack said.

"I know," I said.

He studied my throat, and something about his face shifted; it was as if he began to glow. Now I know that he was blushing, too, but in those days, I was not well versed enough in the topography of his skin to understand what the variations of color and tone meant. He has his mother's olive complexion, and when he blushes he does not turn red like I do. Instead, his face takes on a subcutaneous, burnished, coppery hue. It is a subtle change, and at first one senses only that he has become even more beautiful, more alive, more vibrant. Jack shines when he is embarrassed or ashamed.

"I have just a few notes," he said.

Jack spread the pages of the brief out on the black credenza against the far wall of his office. The credenza is ever so slightly too low for comfort, and when I went to look at his notes, I ended up bent over a bit at the waist. The tabletop was wood, varnished to a high shine, and as we stood side by side our reflections were clear, almost as if we were looking into a mirror. I could see inside my shirt. One of my breasts had fallen forward and swelled outside of the molded cup of my bra, bared almost to the nipple. Jack stood to my left and a little behind me, his left hand pushing the pages aside, one by one, his right shoved into his pocket. I know now, because he told me, that he was doing his best to camoflage his erection.

I was wearing a black miniskirt, not so short that it was unseemly, but neither so long that it would pass the scrutiny of the headmistress of a Catholic school. Underneath I wore stockings and a garter belt. Had it been July or August, I might have claimed that I wore this outmoded style of lingerie because it was hot, and because wearing panty hose in the summer in New York is an invitation to a yeast infection. This was, in fact, the reason that I owned the garter belt. But it was March. The first crocuses were just beginning to peek through the remains of the last snowfall. I wore a garter belt and stockings because I had fantasized about seducing Jack. I had dressed for the fantasy, but had not planned for it. I had not imagined I would work up the nerve.

I bent low over the table and reworked a sentence he had marked. While I agreed that my phrasing had been awkward, I thought his correction even more so. I leaned my cheek on my left hand, scribbled a better sentence than the one he had written, and crossed out a line in the next paragraph that now seemed redundant. At that point, I realized that my skirt had ridden up, that the black straps of my garter belt were surely visible, cutting into the flesh on the backs of my thighs, that the tops of my stockings were sagging just enough to leave bare an few inches of soft, white skin. I paused, the pen hovering over the paper. I could hear the hiss of Jack's breath coming from his nose. Before I could stop myself, before I could even think through the ramifications of what I was doing, I stepped one foot ever so slightly away from the other, parting my legs, and then I leaned gently backward, until I felt the wool of his trouser leg brush against my thigh.

Jack pressed back. It was like junior high school, like a Friday night dance, bumping and grinding against the hopeless boner of a pimple-faced boy who knows with a desperate certainly that he will never, not in a million years, get laid. Except that there was no bumping and grinding, just soft, insistent pressure. And except that I would have fucked Jack in a second, right there, with the door open for everyone to see.

I turned to the hallway and standing in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, was Marilyn. Our eyes met, and then she shut the door with a firm click of the latch.

Next page: "Maybe all men sit in dark rooms, fingers itching to explore the plump bodies of girls younger than their daughters"