They kept the fucking a secret, as their workplace rules compelled: more difficult than it seemed since between them vibrated a palpable giddiness, a rosy zone of inclusion. In the frequent office meetings, they sat separately, though when he glanced her way, an electricity zoomed from her nipples to her clit.
Fortunately they were assigned to independent units – he to the North; she to the South.
They were young: five or six years into their careers and one day in the anteroom to the women’s room, beside the pale pink “fainting couch,” she was approached by a middle-aged supervisor whose eyes overbrimmed with a secret, wanting to sound her out about a still confidential vacancy – Manager over the North group.
Immediately she responded yes of course she was interested and it wasn’t until later that she considered that if she ever did get the job, he would not be able to stay. Again, those prudent workplace rules. In any case he was not happy there, his talents hardly utilized. The bearish good humor, his amiable directness. His superior analytic ability and the way he worked hard like an ox. She often wondered how he could accept being bossed around by the current manager, a weasely little nincompoop, with wide set blinking blue eyes. In due time she would tell him about the opening and the supervisor (someone fairly high up!) encouraging her to apply.
Surely he should be in a place where his contribution was valued.
*
Not long after, late one November afternoon, the two of them were crossing the Congress Street Bridge when a glint by the water line caught his eye: something winking, something blue, and he leaned over for a closer look. A blue bottle, catching the final rays of the sun, embedded somehow in the sea wall. A vial really, not a bottle, a blue glass vial crammed into the narrow gap between two stone blocks.
“What is it?” she asked, grasping the cast iron railing beside him. Their bare fingers touched and he resolved to get her the bottle. She could put it in her cube, alongside her other mementos: troll dolls with neon hair, a row of miniature wooden ducks. A wine cork inscribed with a recent date.
They were already a bit drunk. Work had been sluggish and first one, then five minutes later the other, snuck free, taking different bridges over the channel to a dark workingmen’s bar none of their colleagues would ever have ventured into.
The bottle was wedged into a crack some feet down. His plan was to climb over the railing, crouch, then seize the bottle. Confidently (for in college he had been a pretty good shot putter) he swung his leg over.
“No!” she shrieked but too late for he stood on the water side facing her with a smile so self-assured she gave him a kiss.
“You’re going to get arrested.”
He reached low, very low, so low she grew alarmed and grasped the collar of his wool jacket which made him laugh as if her small fingers could ever hold the weight of him. He wrenched the bottle free, an instant later standing street legal beside her on the pavement.
He opened his palm. The vivid cobalt glowed, in places glinting white like the crown of a wave and he tilted the bottle to indicate the clear liquid inside. He pulled out the glass stopper, and sniffed. Rum, familiar, its warm vanilla overtones, but lurking deeper was another thing, a breeze that smelled of salt.
“It’s just rum,” he said. She began to object, as if she knew before he did what he would do next. He took a swallow.
“Hank!” she said, snatching the bottle away, yet his flesh felt vitalized as if he had dived into a cool green wave.
To her the liquor smelled of port, its dark complexities though wafting above a canvas sail snapped in the wind. Alcohol kills bacteria, right? She lifted the bottle to her lips. A moment later a formidable heat came upon them and she pulled the wool hat from her head.
*
The grinding of the long bones shortening and the shriek of the short bones lengthening. The sky blurred and darkened, and the murk of the channel clarified, unveiling submerged rocks and abandoned railroad ties. With a pattering thud, the air quaked as a gull launched from a creosote-soaked post. Too too hot: their flesh was being cooked and the tipping into the cold water gave immediate relief. Home. Deeper he dove, at once propelling himself to the harbor’s cleaner depths, purposefully barreling ahead to chase a shimmering panel of fish. She followed, but a prickling in her whiskers alerted her to even more fish, a spinning silver globe of them not so distant, and with resolution, she turned that way. Not a length had she swum before he changed direction to target her, grabbing her neck with his jaw. Downwards they tumbled in a skein of frothy bubbles. She bent her lower half towards him as the seabed rumbled, the hum of the earth’s fiery core, orienting them anew.
Mary Crawford has published in The Kenyon Review Online, Salamander, and Blackbird.
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