Moral dilemma - a short story

She was sitting at her desk, punching away at the keyboard keys when he walked in. She looked up as the door to the office opened and saw that it was him. She blushed in an undetectable way. He cheerfully greeted everyone in the office and said something along the lines of "you choose blah blah blah..." She was not really listening to him but she watched him do his theatrics, while wearing a bemused expression. 

He was dressed casually, unusual for a Tuesday, because she had come to know him to dress up during the week. He only went casual on Fridays. He went about taking his work equipment out and laying it on his work-space. Then he walked over to her and gave her a friendly hug. He made a point to linger and prolong the contact of their bodies. As was now usual, her body came alive with sensations that only he could awaken in her. She longed to kiss him. To discover for herself what that would feel like. She wished everyone could just disappear but alas, that was not to be.

"What's got into you?" began the tirade of questions that always followed similar episodes in the past.

"He is a married man. And who says he is even into you?"

Nevertheless these guilt-ridden questions did little to deter the desires of her heart. She wanted this man even though she could not understand why. He was not exactly her type. Not that she had one, but married-with-kids would not be one if she had.

She was feeling under the weather, but in her desire to answer to her baser urges, she seemed to have no qualms about spreading her germs, sharing them with this man in a saliva infused dance of their lips and tongues. 

These thoughts scandalised her, because she had never been one to think positively or even remotely favourably towards french kissing. Yet here she was dreaming about such a kiss with some other woman's husband.

She had to attend a meeting with her other colleagues, so when they started shuffling out of the office to the meeting venue, she reluctantly followed suit. He was standing by the door, laughing while ushering everyone out. She could not even remember what had started the hilarity. He made sure to touch her arm as she passed him. He was certainly sending her a message that he was drawn to her, or at least that was what she thought.

Perhaps in the past she might have done something to discourage him, but he was laying the groundwork to immoralise her.

The week that was the prelude to the long Easter weekend, on that Thursday afternoon, as they were leaving to go home, he insisted that she take a lift with him to her car. She wasn't parked very far, but it was raining and his car was closer.

So she obliged him, after-all being with him gave her such pleasure that she was secretly pleased to prolong it. He drove his car the short distance to hers and took the empty parking immediately to the right of her car. 

They sat and talked, and while they did that, he opened a bottle of red wine, which happened to be in his car. She, not being a fan of alcohol, expected this discovery to break some of the chains he had enlaced around her proverbial heart, and endear him less to her.

He used her water, to rinse a glass into which he poured the wine and started drinking. She couldn't get over how handsome she found him. Sitting there, laughing or smiling. She told him she wanted to kiss him and he said she had his permission.

She brought her face to his, and he leaned towards the passenger seat, and their lips met. She was steeling herself for the repulsive smell of alcohol from his breath, which never came. At the back of her mind she worried about getting the urge to hurl and offending him. The urge never came. Instead, the sweetest interlude of lips happened.

This, being a first kiss where she was a willing participant, was unlike anything she could ever have had words to describe. It created a mind shift. Caused her to view kissing more favourably. She loved kissing him. She wanted to kiss him some more, but she didn't want to appear overzealous.

She asked him why she could not smell the wine on his breath, and he said it was because he knew what to drink. He alluded to this knowledge of what to drink drawing forth from his many years of drinking. She brought her nose close to his mouth to smell it, and she caught a gentle whiff which was not offensive to her at all.

He stole a brief kiss from her while her nose was leaning in to smell his breath. Her mind was racing a mile a minute. Analysing. Speculating. Postulating. Wondering what was happening to her when she was around this man, that things that once repelled her were not, when he was doing them.

She wondered if she was losing the essence of herself in him. She was becoming amorous with him, when she had never been so with anyone in the thirty-seven years of her life. Or maybe we could say in the twenty-four years since becoming a teenager.

She had often found it difficult to understand why, women seemed to act and make weak decisions, when it came to men. Now she was eating humble pie, because she not only understood, but was subject to the same faulty logic now.

When the rain had stopped, she thought it wise to jump out to her car, but still she didn't. She found herself not wanting to leave this wonderful love cove they were having in his car. She kissed him again and kept it brief, then she opened the door and got out before she could change her mind. He needed to go and so did she.

***

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