“ I touched myself,” she said, and my heart stopped for a second. Apparently my dick knew better than my brain sometimes-who knew? “I guess I’m so used to getting it every day, and I had to get myself off.”
“ Yeah?” I managed to croak.
“ I thought about you.”
My hand flew to my crotch, but didn’t touch. Just hovered over it like some sort of goddamned levitation trick because up it went, imagining Melissa touching herself.
“ What did you think about?”
“ I imagined you. Remember that time we played the principal’s office? I had on those high heels, patent black leather. I made you lick them.”
“ Oh shit.”
“ And then you got paddled. While I had you jerk yourself off.”
“ Melissa!”
“ And to make sure you learned your lesson I had you write lines. Pity we didn’t have a chalkboard. You had to write them on yourself with a black marker: I will not touch myself during class. I will not touch myself during class. I don’t think the ink came out for days.”
I was rubbing myself through my pants, bucking up into my own hand, when she said, “Stop that.”
I froze.
“ Didn’t I tell you not to come?”
“ I didn’t,” I protested quickly.
“ That’s not attitude I hear, is it?”
I bit my lip. “No, ma’am.”
“ You aren’t to come. You aren’t to touch yourself except to wash and piss. Understood?”
I snatched my hand away, sat on it. My hips rocked futilely in the air, finding no friction, none. “Yes, ma’am,” came out as a whisper.
“ Now,” she said. “Tell me about your day. How’s the new secretary working out?”
On the fourth day, I kept to my usual schedule. I sat down for breakfast, even though the other chair was empty. I went to work during my normal work hours, ignored Bambi’s contradiction of slacker and seductress, and returned home at the usual time. I puttered around the house, doing laundry and cooking for one. All the things we would do together, but instead I did them alone.
The loneliness was less acute now, more like a dull ache. Even my horniness was muted, more like longing. Before she left, I had thought my desire had taken a nosedive. Now I wondered if it had been a natural smoothing out.
When I first met Melissa, I was out of my mind with lust for her. Her beauty, her willingness to explore my long-repressed kinks, the excitement of a new relationship and infatuation-fueled sex frenzy.
Now I loved her. I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. I still adored her body, enjoyed our play, but the urgency had dimmed. The taint of hopelessness, the fear that I’d never find it, was gone. Because I had found it; I had her.
Or at least I did. Now she was gone, and the impact of her absence made it clear that what I felt before was nothing at all. I was embarrassed to even have thought it was a problem.
Was it possible I had been so stupid as to mistake contentedness for boredom?
Never mind. I hadn’t broken anything yet. She’d be back in two days. I could make it up to her, even though she’d hopefully never known and never would. I would reaffirm my love to her, exercise my lust for her.
It was still too early for her to call, so I flipped on the TV. I’d found some unfamiliar sitcom to bide the time when the telephone rang. Not the home phone, but a strange number on my cell.
“ Melissa?”
“ No. Is this Mr. Tripp? Wyle Tripp?”
I turned off the TV, sat up straighter. “Yes, that’s me. Who’s speaking?”
It turned out to be one of those people with a first name, a middle name, and a hyphenated last name, who worked for the temp agency. Apparently there had been a complaint filed against me by a certain Babette Franks for creating a hostile work environment.
Since I actually paid the agency, too much money at that, the guy was polite but firm. The agency was forced to stop working with me. Liability, he explained, a hint of apology peeking through the solemnity.
“ Hell,” I said.
The air buzzed over the line. “Listen, I’m telling you this off the record,” the guy said. “I read her statement. I’ve seen her. Getting a boner at work isn’t really sexual harassment according to the law, not unless you try to do something about it. There’s no way this thing will go anywhere, but it just doesn’t look good for us to send our girls there.”
“ Do you have any male assistants?”
“ Unfortunately, we can’t allow gender-specific requests. That would be sexual discrimination.”
“ That doesn’t seem fair.”
“ Tell me about it,” he said.
I hung up the phone, taking an internal poll of my feelings on the matter. Probably I should have felt outraged to be accused of something I didn’t do. And by someone so wholly incompetent! But she probably had thought my boner was for her, damn her nosy hide for peeking over my desk anyway.
I had some concerns of a practical nature. If she really did decide to file charges, she probably wouldn’t win, but she could. And even if she didn’t, I’d still have to pay for lawyers, and the reputation of my financial services firm would suffer.
And Melissa.
How incredibly humiliating for her. Everyone would take one look at me, one look at Babette, and think I had said or done something inappropriate. I had done something inappropriate. Not dirty thoughts about Babette, nothing that trite or, frankly, uninteresting. No, I’d daydreamed about Melissa in the presence of Babette, and somehow that made it worse, as if even my fantasies of my wife were dirty.
Would Melissa even believe me? Would she stand by me if this came out in a big, messy scandal? I didn’t deserve her loyalty, but God, I craved it. I had never meant to test her love for me. I had always been happy to take it at face value, afraid to look beneath the surface, but this was unavoidable.
I’d have to tell her about this, and like it or not, live with the results. Even if nothing ever came of the sexual harassment bit, I shared everything that happened at work and this was a big one. I’d have to get a new secretary and I wasn’t about to come up with a wall of lies and betray her trust just to shield my own ego. If she wanted to leave, she could. I would just be fucking miserable, that’s all.
I would tell her when she got back, I decided. She was flying back in tomorrow, on the fifth day. That way she could see in my eyes and face that I was telling the truth and how very much I loved her. It was the only way.
And when the phone rang, I let it ring. I couldn’t lie to her, couldn’t subvert or omit the truth, not to her. All I could do was avoid it.
The phone rang again, a bit later. Rang and rang.
On the fifth and final day of Melissa’s trip, I left my empty home and drove to my empty office. Everyone was leaving me. It would be funny, but it wasn’t.
I called my tennis partner, who also happened to be the lawyer who had set up my company’s legal structure, for advice. Jim assured me that even if she were to file charges, it was hearsay. And even if the state board were to believe her, they wouldn’t levy damages for a first-time offence where she even admitted there had been no touching, crass jokes, nothing. The only thing she could possibly do was damage my reputation.
The only upside to this whole thing was that I actually got work done. Resigned to being alone and without the infernal scratching of Babette’s nail file, I managed to finish all the work I’d been slacking off on all week. I even finished early, and though waiting at home sounded like the worst possible thing, it was also the only thing I could do.
I pulled up and sat in the driveway for fifteen minutes, until the car began to cool. I entered the house and threw my briefcase onto the sofa.
