Chapter 2

None of us referred to that night in the weeks and months that followed. We seemed to go on pretty much like we had before. 'The Kiss, ' as I had begun to enshrine it in my memory, might have been forgotten by everybody but me.

Then it was spring. April. The cruelest month, somebody once said, talking about the painful awakening of new life after the death of winter, kind of like fingers recovering from frostbite. But my desire for Karen certainly hadn't died; it had survived the dead season more alive than ever, though just as frustrated.

Now, however, some subtle new developments were beginning to sprout.

I was still spending lots of evenings with Kendall and Karen, but more and more often it was just the three of us. At first I just thought it was because the others were otherwise occupied. That was when the invitations were still coming from Kendall. But by now most of the invitations were coming from Karen.

And sometimes her invitations did not include her husband. Maybe the two of us would go shopping at the mall on my day off, while Kendall was at work. Or maybe we'd just stroll along the river. And maybe I would discover that her hand had slipped into mine.

'The Kiss' had not been repeated. But there was a different feeling between us now. We looked at each other more, for one thing, making eye contact and holding the contact longer. And often when I wasn't looking into her eyes I found myself looking at details of her body.

She had almost no earlobes. Maybe that's why she had never pierced her ears and seldom wore earrings. There was just a hint of an upward tilt at the end of her nose. Her eyebrows came to little peaks near the outside of her eyes and then tapered down to tiny points. Her face was a little too broad for perfect beauty, and her mouth was a little too small. There was a very slight scar on the left side of her pointed chin. She kept her fingernails trimmed short, and she didn't color them, though she might have used a clear polish. Her wedding band was silver, with an inlaid pattern in gold.

At the office parties that Kendall hosted she began to touch me sometimes as we talked, just little touches on my hand or my knee or my arm, to punctuate her conversation. And her conversation was getting more confident and more wide-ranging. I took her seriously and complimented her often, and in talking with me she found an expressive capacity she never knew she had.

Kendall never seemed to notice.

It was about this time that she began to go without a bra sometimes. I remember the first time vividly. She was wearing a high-necked pullover that was cut short but very full, so that it dropped straight down to her waist from the two very obvious points of her nipples. If I had managed somehow to look up into that top from below, I could have seen the entire undersides of her naked breasts. But as it was I had to content myself with an occasional tantalizing flash of bare flesh at her midriff. And the amazing peaks of those cloth-covered nipples.

Kendall still didn't notice.

And on a warm Saturday in late April I saw her bare legs for the first time. Not in a skirt ... she was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, rather short, but not scandalous, and a loose white cotton camp shirt. The top three buttons were unbuttoned. There was a generous lot of skin visible, but not a lot of cleavage. Karen didn't have a lot of cleavage. The outfit was really fairly modest, except for the staggering impact of those long, bare legs, but nevertheless this was a step over the line. And my reaction was evident, if anybody was looking. When she answered the door and I saw her for the first time dressed like that, my dick began to respond, completely out of control. I usually don't wear underwear when I wear jeans, and at that moment I regretted it. There was nothing but denim to contain the growing bulge in my crotch. I hadn't put on a display like this since the hormone-storms of junior high school, and I simply wasn't prepared for it.

When I finally finished my survey of her body from the top of her lovely head past the hints of her uninhibited tits and down along the amazing length of those mesmerizing bare legs to the toes at the tips of her dainty bare feet, I looked back up into her eyes with my dick straining against my pants and saw her looking back at me with a mischievous smile on her face.

"Come in, Philip," she said as she swept her eyes down my body and then up to my eyes again. "It's nice to see you."

And she winked.

Karen had come a long way from the repressed, insecure, innocent and unselfconscious homebody I had first met. Today she certainly seemed conscious of the response she was causing. And her reaction to my response certainly wasn't innocent.

It's strange; I have no recollection at all of Kendall on that day. I know he was there. I presume most of my conversation was with him. But what I remember is Karen. That first moment at the door. And one moment later in the afternoon. It seemed frozen in time even then. She was serving drinks, and when she placed my drink on the coffee table in front of me, she leaned down and spent a long time placing the glass precisely in the center of the coaster on the table. And somehow the fourth button on her shirt had slipped loose. And as she leaned over the coffee table her bare right breast was totally revealed, but only from my point of view.

It was a perfect little cone, with a long, rigid nipple standing out at the tip. The light coming from the living room window, filtered by the white cloth of her shirt, bathed her breast in a soft radiance and highlighted a scattering of dark hairs around her areola. I was transfixed, motionless, but my dick wasn't. It was leaping in my pants.

Karen stood up and smiled that smile again. Turning away from Kendall, she secured her fourth button.

I grabbed a newspaper from the table to cover my raging erection.

"The newspaper has been covering some interesting items lately," Karen said, and she winked at me for a second time. And then she began to discuss some recently reported local scam involving driveways, sub-standard asphalt, and little old ladies.

I couldn't believe it. That display had been deliberate. Karen was flirting with me. Right in front of Kendall. I had thought Karen and I had a special relationship, but up 'til then sex had not been a part of it. Well, there was 'The Kiss.' And there was the fact that my body desired her intensely almost from the moment we met. There was that. But she was my boss's wife and my friend. Sex with Karen just wasn't part of the picture. But today, this seemed an awful lot like an invitation.

What was going on? Maybe she was teasing me ... just kidding.