Her eyes sparkled. She seemed to be smiling.
This, after all, was what she lived for, wasn't it? Her entire raison d'etre.
Nothing else mattered.
Ralph felt suddenly sick to his stomach, but there was precious little inside him he could still vomit out.
"I love you," she said after a time. "No one else can satisfy me the way you do. You know that, don't you? You're the best, Ralph. The absolute best."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," she said.
"You won't go out again tomorrow, will you?" he asked.
"No," she answered. "Not tomorrow."
He wanted to believe her.
"Maybe the next day, though," she said, her voice already sounding emptier.
SOMETHING EXTRA
J. N. Williamson and James Kisner
My wife said she didn't really mind if I thought about someone else when we made love," I told her on impulse. "So I thought of you."
Monica's response was instant. She slapped me across the face, stingingly, and then walked off in a huff. Her hips were fighting her natural impulse to wiggle and I was glad I'd said it on the premises of Rollins Advertising Agency. If it had been a less public place, she might have torn my head off. If Monica's husband had been around, he would have. Larry still has a tattoo of an eagle on the back of his right hand, and I've heard that bird takes wing when he gets good and pissed.
Sighing, I poured myself a cup of coffee and took it back to my desk.
I hadn't meant to blurt that out to Monica Patterson, but what I'd said was true. When I'd seen her standing next to me in the kitchenette, where the agency always has two pots of coffee brewing, the words had just tumbled out of my mouth. Maybe it was her perfume or merely the fact that Monica looks like such a naturally sexual woman — not sexy, sexual. She has long black hair that tucks in at the ends and a figure that's more like seventeen than early thirties, so I had to say something.
No, it was none of that. It was her dark brown eyes that seem to be far away and fixed on something far more interesting than writing ad copy, and how she said «Hi» as she accidentally brushed against me. She'd reached for a Styrofoam cup and her left breast had touched my shoulder as it rose, she had let it stay there for a second, and…
No, I admitted as I returned to my little cubicle, it wasn't those things either. I'd wanted her to know. Out of perversity, maybe — just to see what she would do, perhaps.
I worried that one of our co-workers might notice how my face was red from Monica's slap, but nobody paid much attention to me. Everyone was busy at their word processors, banging out copy. Which was my job, too. Banging out copy. I sat down and stared at the word processor screen. I was banging away about sleeve bearings for one of Rollins's biggest clients. It wasn't exactly like writing the Great American Novel, which I didn't especially want to do anyway, but it paid the bills. The majority of them, anyway.
I sipped some coffee, set it down, rested my fingertips on the keyboard. My mind searched for some brilliant phrase to describe the client's new sleeve bearings, but it proved elusive. Instead, my thoughts drifted to the night before. When I was making love to Sheila and Monica Patterson popped into my mind, saying «Hi» in the breathy way she did it at the office.
I felt guilty at first. There I was, dutifully pounding away on my wife Sheila (who isn't bad-looking, has always been faithful, has kept slim after bearing two children, and who can even cook without looking anxiously to the microwave), and I was imagining another woman. One who is definitely good-looking, slim only where it counts, has macho Larry-with-the-tattooed-eagle and no kids, and might or might not be faithful.
To my surprise, Sheila told me what I'd done was okay.
She didn't specifically say it was okay to picture Monica beneath me, but Sheila is a liberated woman and reads a lot about sex. Dr. Ruth, Graham Masterton, Masters and Johnson. Once she read that it was healthy to fantasize about someone else while making love to the spouse. The newer sex books even encouraged mental cheating, Sheila explained. She startled the hell out of me by admitting she sometimes thought of Tom Selleck when we were going at it; so she didn't really mind if I imagined Elvira or Kathleen Turner or Kim Basinger.
Trouble is that I'd tried those women, mentally, and they didn't do the trick. They were beautiful, desirable, and inaccessible. Remote. Unavailable. Additionally, I hadn't been able to persuade my libido to believe that any of those women would look twice at a junior copywriter named Ron Bowers.
So I'd begun thinking of someone real (so to speak). Someone I knew.
Monica.
I guessed I'd sort of spoiled it by letting her know and getting slapped. I'd been stupid, ignorant. Monica had probably believed I was hitting on her, and I really, truly was not.
Of course, I'd thought about it a lot.
I bumped into Monica later at the front door when we were coming individually back from lunch. I blushed; she gave me a dirty look. I followed her to her cubicle anyway, needing to explain. She was secretary to the media guy, who buys the ads for the firm that makes the bearings I try to describe. Monica never exposes an inch of the flesh I'd imagined infinitely better than sleeve bearings, and her clothes aren't tight-fitting but they're far-out, unmatching blouses or sweaters with long skirts that sort of swing between her legs or jeans that are always worn at key spots and look as if just a tiny bit of earnest rubbing might make the skin show through.
She sat behind her desk, pretending I wasn't there. Trying to come up with something clever as an opening, I hovered around until I noticed a big jar of peppermint pinwheels rising from a stack of printed-out pages. "Can I have a mint?"
She stared at me. Through me.
I took a mint, unwrapped and popped it into my mouth. I figured it might sweeten my pizza breath. "I'm sorry," I said. The pinwheel was rolling around on my tongue and making me mumble. Another stupid mistake, I realized. "I wasn't coming on to you but I shouldn't have said that." I turned to leave. "I didn't mean to be insulting." Abased, I grinned a little and took a step away.
"Wait," Monica said.
I stood stock-still. She was glancing around as if she intended to say or do something and needed privacy. No one else was back from lunch yet, and we were alone. "Do you want to slap my other cheek?" I asked her.
"No, I–I just wanted to say that I'm sorry." She got her cigarette case out of her purse, evading my gaze for another moment. "I shouldn't have hit you, Ron."
"Sure you should," I disagreed. "You've met Sheil, I've met your husband Larry at the Christmas party. We might've all been friends and I messed it up."
Monica lit a Vantage Ultra Light, puffed it with an enigmatic expression. The puffs of smoke came my way like hot breath. "Did you really mean it?" she asked.
"Did I mean what?" Hell, I could be mysterious, too.
She frowned. It made her prettier than ever. "You only said one thing." Monica leaned across the desk. "Were you really thinking about me while — while you were with Sheila?"
"Sure," I confessed. "It was okay with Sheil. She's very liberal."
"But," Monica continued, "why me? I'm married, too. It seemed kind of weird when I heard it." She sucked in smoke. Lucky Ultra Light, I thought, it had the advantage. "Don't you think that's — well, sick? A little?"