Read Online The First Affair by Emma McLaughlin - Free Book Online

the file on his desk. “Water, or a soda?”
    “Yes, a Coke,” I managed. “Please.”
    He walked behind my couch through the doorway to the room where we had kissed and I tightened one palm on the other as the grandfather clock ticked. The dog snored. It was taking a while, longer than it would take to go to a refrigerator and pull out a can. I turned and was totally unprepared to see him standing in the door frame, his expression serious, set on me. He took a beckoning step back, his fingers at his sides, twitching as if he wore a holstered gun.
    I could see his secretary at her desk, but he remained intent, so I crossed the carpet. He stepped against the wall, indicating I should pass, and I realized what we had been in the last time was actually a short hallway with four doors—one to the Oval Office, one to the dining room, one to his study, and the last one, toward which he was directing me, to a dim, windowless powder room. Within a breath he was behind me. I could feel him standing there, his frame creating a shadow from the hall light. I started to turn but he said, “Please,” so simply that I froze. We stood like that for a few seconds, maybe longer.
    “Are you okay?” I asked, not daring to move my head. “How have you been?”
    “No.” His voice was low. He stepped closer. Right behind me, touching. And again, I felt surprised by the firmness of his frame, the flesh-and-bloodness of him. I didn’t lean back, didn’t move, didn’t know the extent of what his “please” was requesting. I thought I could feel his heart through my back—could feel him bend to my hair and the warmth of his breath as he inhaled me.
    “I want you,” I heard myself tell both of us the truth, “I do.”
    His forearm circled my waist and his mouth was on my neck as I felt myself tilted forward against the marble vanity. My palms braced on the cold stone as he pressed himself against the back of my legs, his hands roving down to the hem of my skirt, tugging it up. I tilted my head back, twisting to find his lips as he made contact with where I’d been waiting for days. At the discovery that there was no fabric to delay him he moaned into my mouth, slumping forward. I reached down to caress him through his trousers and he gripped my hair, a second from coming, I knew—but he pulled my hand away. Our eyes caught in the mirror as he slid one hand into my bra, the other inside me until I couldn’t not—not—his palm flew over my mouth as I shuddered. I dropped to my forearms from the relief.
    I turned around to finish reciprocating, but he stopped my hand and shook his head, both of us panting, our foreheads dropping together as he gathered my face into the deepest kiss.
    The bathroom door was still open beside us. Trembling, he tugged down my skirt and nodded me out. I stood in the shadows of the silent hall, my breath returning. I didn’t know where I was supposed to wait or for how long. There were pictures along the wall in gilded frames and I forced my dilated pupils to zero in on one. He was in shorts and a Nantucket T-shirt, sitting on a porch. And he was laughing. Really laughing. Susan, her tan dark against a pale yellow bathing suit, lay with her feet in his lap and he was tickling her, the space between them soft and familiar, not hard and panting. There was nothing about that captured moment—which, judging from Susan’s haircut, was not long ago—that I could convince myself looked remotely arranged. It looked real, like love.
    Which meant this was . . . what?
    The toilet flushed and he emerged, wiping his bangs back. He looked at me as if he knew me and pulled me into a tight hug, but my eyes were locked on the picture, trying to analyze which of these two embraces was real. He brushed the hair off my face before going to the small bar in his private study to get me a Coke. Weaving his fingers through mine, the feeling of his wedding band intruding between my knuckles, he led me out of the shadows