Little Bee

It was simply a question, I had told the office airily, of applying one's pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling them individually on sample boxes.

The men seemed limp and hypoxic--half-garroted by their ties.

Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.

Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fulled formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.

It became a source of worry, hiding the affair. The actual assignations were simply concealed from Andrew, of course, and I made a point of never mentioning Andrew or his work when I was with Lawrence, in case he himself got too curious.

Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up --adulteress, --cuckolder, and --narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun.