Free The Jezebel Remedy by Martin Clark

starting with a week-early hair appointment, a spa facial and a manicure from the masked, yipyapping Koreans at the mall and finishing with a trip to Winston-Salem for new crimson underwear that matched and was patterned for show and low-slung tease, not comfort or eight-hour slogs at a law office. She loved the extravagant prelude to her pretend first date, had a ball splurging on hair and nails and clean, scrubbed, treated skin, the reclamation nearly bone deep. She also bought new shoes, a pair with a higher heel than her normal.
    A week after Dr. Corbett’s deposition and the evening at Metro! Brett—as promised—had sent her a short e-mail, confirming the details of the seminar. She’d replied the same day. When she arrived in Roanoke for the program, lawyers were milling around, drinking coffee and nibbling free bakery pastry, everyone talkative. Brett wasn’t there, and he didn’t appear until fifteen minutes into the first lecture. She’d tried to keep an empty seat beside her, but another Martinsville lawyer had spotted her and taken the chair, pleased to see a colleague from home. He immediately smothered her with a dry narrative about a land dispute he was handling, warring hillbillies squabbling over a worthless acre of Henry County dirt.
    She and Brett met at the ten o’clock break, and he casually stretched an arm around her so they were touching at the hip, his trunk twistedslightly away from her, and he gave her the kind of brief, social hug that a garrulous character like Brett Brooks would give any woman he’d met at least once.
    “I can’t believe you didn’t save me a seat,” he said, pretending to be upset.
    “You were late.” She smiled.
    “Damn. You look like a million bucks.” He was facing her now. “Glad you could come.”
    “Thanks. I appreciate your telling me about this. I’ll almost satisfy my CLE hours for the year.”
    “Sure. My pleasure.” He laid his hand in the center of her back and left it there, his palm and fingers pressed into her so she could feel the push, the directness, and he slipped closer, just for an instant. “Maybe we’ll be able to visit when this is over. See what the afternoon brings.” He kept his eyes on her point-blank as he took his hand away. “Last time was fun. Hope we can get together again.”
    Somewhere, she realized, every flirt and two-step has to either stall or grab traction and bull ahead, to cross its own particular Rubicon, because you can only dally and dip and dance and double-entendre for so long, and now Brett was blunt and clear. This was his offer, a plain overture to fuck and fool around and live louche and veer down a route with corrupt sex and catch-as-catch-can trysts and a do-not-disturb placard hung from a hotel door handle while the two of them were twisting free of their clothes—pants kicked off here, a skirt tossed there—and she was jazzed by the temptation, wired, excited by the prospect of what was at stake, tiptoeing toward lovely vice and happy as much as anything to be, well, so happy.
    “Yeah.” She paused, and without meaning to she recalled stealing a bottle of sweet grape wine from the grocery store when she was seventeen and drinking it in a friend’s basement, screwing off the metal cap and pouring her virgin taste of alcohol into a paper cup with foldout cardboard handles, the purple almost over the brim. She quickly ran through the memory, and she shifted so she rubbed against Brett’s shoulder. She was wearing perfume. Two buttons from the top, there was a small gap in her blouse. “Last time
was
fun. I’m betting today will be even better.”
    After the seminar ended, they drove separately and met in the HotelRoanoke’s Pine Room and sat side by side at a square table underneath a framed photograph of a locomotive. A bearded man was nursing a dark beer at the bar and another couple was eating sandwiches and gabbing up a storm near the middle of the room. It was closing in on four-thirty and