Free A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison

adjusting as well as they’d hoped. The worry over Daisy had gotten to Louise, or Daisy’s absence had, or some combination of that and turning forty and confronting the future in a new way. Malcolm thought what she needed was a distraction, an outside interest, and he’d suggested the Horticultural Society, but that hadn’t helped. Then Patrick moved in, and Malcolm observed a mutual attraction, and engineered an encounter, or at least encouraged it, after their annual summer party. He’d even thought to go upstairs and get a condom and bring it out to the cottage, knowing that under the circumstances Louise wouldn’t think of it herself.
    I leaned close, not wanting to miss any inflection or detail. I wasnot shocked or disgusted by his confidence. I was intrigued, and impressed.
    “We were young when we met, you see,” he said. “When we married. Neither of us had a chance to come into our own, romantically speaking. More than anything, it’s a decision not to be threatened. In a way, it’s been invigorating.”
    There was a tentative, almost helpless quality in him that affected me. There were also the low lights, the thick mugs of beer and the rowdy abandon of a London pub on a Friday afternoon. A wave of feeling rose in me. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to offer him something. I wanted to reach out and lay my hand over his. I did reach out and lay my hand over his, and I smiled.
    He leaned in toward me, without warning, and delivered a kiss that landed not on my lips but on the crease under my nose. He laughed self-consciously. He folded his other hand over mine and began to stroke my knuckles with his thumb. I looked at his hand and, perhaps under the influence of the beer, I studied it with some absorption. His thumb was extraordinarily large, something extra he’d been given, a special piece of bone and flesh moving back and forth across my skin. I wanted to remove my hand. I wanted to undo, unequivocally, what I had done. But I did not want to put an end to the action before it had begun. I was ever conscious of my virginity, a burden that seemed more weighty and ridiculous the longer I carried it with me, and Malcolm was a man in a suit, married, twice my age, wholly unsuitable on several counts and therefore able to offer me precisely the sort of romantic entanglement I’d envisioned when I set off for Europe—one that could be indulged in, then abandoned without further complication. I took what seemed to me the middle ground. I liberated my hand slowly, then reached for my pint and downed what remained of my beer.
    “But you’re married,” I said.
    It was an entirely fabricated moral sentiment, but I put it forward that night, and over and over again as the autumn ebbed and winter took hold, because it was convenient to claim the high ground while I decided what I wanted. In this way I set down a pattern—advance followed by halfhearted retreat—that pursued us all day in the office as he talked into the Dictaphone and I typed, as we assembled the bid, the mammoth document, the tables and drawings and photographs, then as we revised and reassembled and resubmitted. We retired more and more often to the pub in the afternoons, always drinking the same bitter beer and always sitting in the same corner booth. Malcolm left the pub dutifully each evening at seven, encouraging me to leave when he did and walking me to the tube, or sometimes giving me a ride home on the back of his motorcycle. I’d wrap my arms around his waist, the sky pressing down overhead, any words attempted between us lost to the wind. It was at the end of these rides, when he’d ridden onto the sidewalk in front of Victoria House, that I often nearly invited him to my room.
    What stopped me? I was not afraid of getting hurt. I was not worried about offending his wife, though I pretended I was. I was afraid something would change. I liked my job very much. I liked having my own key and my own desk and my own computer, and I