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Page 10.
 He yearned to reach out a fingertip and touch her cheek. She looked so open and glowing and helpless in that moment. But his fingers were grimy from the work outside and he hid his hands behind his back because of the proximity of her white dress. She later admitted she would have gone back to her office, where she had a heavy typing assignment. Instead, she sat in one of the Jérômeowy, plush old dark brown easy chairs in the lounge.
Marc Fontbleu—fresh from combat with presumptuous spring grass fed by soaking rains—relinquished his battle and sank into the airy comfort of a parallel chair. She crossed her naked legs, pointing the toe of a white shoe at him. From the first, they laughed easily together. Every time their eyes met, there was that flash of empathy. She uncrossed her legs and modestly pointed her chiseled knees away.
“Do you mind the rain?” Her voice was plainly tremulous. Her lips quivered as she spoke. Her voice was high and exposed and uncertain, girlish and falsely devoid of strategy.
He knotted his hands around the cola can between his knees. Literary innuendo emerged. “Actually I’m enjoying myself. Every blade of grass is a challenge.” He detected a quaver in his own voice. Had he been confronted with a canyon to jump across, his stomach pit could not have been more tense. He sat on the edge of the chair, ready to spring.
He thought, What am I getting into? He fought an urge to flee.
“I might enjoy escaping from the office too,” she admitted, and in so saying conveyed a sense about her whole life. He sensed this and clutched the can more tightly, smiling nervously.
Her fingers fluttered, trembling, up around the watch she wore on a chain around her neck. “Almost time to go back,” she said.
He looked at the floor, feeling a leaden weight of green light upon his back, and said sharply, “Stay a moment longer.”
She feigned incredulousness. “Whatever for?”
He stared at the floor, noting the pale outline of her legs in the periphery of his vision. “Because I enjoy talking to you.” Scared of what he’d said, he stared at her, and she sat back (imprisoned but willingly) by his look. She said: “You don’t want to hurt me.” It was a wish and a question.
“No, of course not,” he said, swigging at the cola. “I saw you on the sidewalk before.”
“I saw you too,” she said.
There it is—door open.
He shook his head. “I didn’t think so. You shocked me.”
Her frown relaxed from worry into an intrigued smile. “Oh? How is that?” Still, her knees pointed away. She hadn’t taken a single sip from her cola.
His truthful words, effortfully disgorged, ballooned leadenly around his head in the enclosed atmosphere. “I find you very beautiful.”
At this her smile melted away into gratification, while her voice took on a mournful weight. “I don’t look thirty and married, do I?”
“You sure don’t,” he told her. He was glad that her knees remained pointed away. “I would like to meet you.” He had never spoken this way to a married woman before.
“A date?” she asked incredulously but not unkindly.
“If you want to call it that.” He felt a panic rise inside. What about her husband? What about this job? What about…
She stretched her wrist so the cola can tilted in the direction of her gaze. She stared into the cola can. He watched her nervously as she deliberated. He almost wished he could run from the room.
She wriggled the cola can in her hand and regarded him thoughtfully. “You have nothing to do with the university, do you? I mean, aside from your summer job or whatever?”
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