The Apple of My Eye

Time of Your Life

There wasn't a woman I'd meet in those days that I wouldn't fall in love with. Some for five minutes. Some for months. But the whole thing with Michelle was beyond all logic and had gone on for too damn long.

It was clear now that Michelle really was nuts. She stormed into my office the next day fuming and demanding an explanation.

"Stanley, what the fuck do you think you were doing last night? I can't believe you were really checking out some girl's butt at the reception!" She raged.

I declined to offer her an answer. It was useless. I just stared at her like she was insane or something.

"Like you don't get enough ass as it is, you son of a bitch," she was kind enough to add.

Next, she called me a two-timing bastard and several variations thereof, lifted her hand up as if threatening to hit me, and finally threw herself at me in a mess of lips and tongues. Michelle often kissed me these violent, bruising kisses. Tonight was no exception. She was out of her fucking mind. And she was delicious.

The funny thing was, she really was going steady with some guy, as it turned out. And not just any guy: she was going out with someone who had been our client a few months earlier. He had dropped his account at the agency, but he sure as hell hadn't given up on his account manager, the fucker.

How did I know all this? I knew everything that went on in there. Sooner or later, someone was bound to tell me where someone else had really been when they called in sick, what the team talked about when they went out together for drinks—sans me, naturally—and so much more.

Turned out Michelle had a boyfriend she had already taken home to meet her parents. Can you imagine that? This was some serious relationship she had gotten herself into. Of course, let's not forget that while all this shit was going down, she was busy stripping to her bare ass just for me, in the workplace, of all places, in the middle of the afternoon. Many an afternoon. And that's not all she was doing in my office.

We had been engaging in these very unorthodox forms of sexual deviancy for weeks now. Sometimes we'd be so good at it she'd come back for more at the end of her shift, when almost everybody was gone and the place was quieter than an empty church.

And she deported herself in a myriad of different ways, too, depending on her disposition. There were times when she'd act all wild, all bossy, in complete control of me and everything we did there—and I'd let her, of course. There were other times when we'd have so much fun together doing all sorts of nasty shit we'd both break out laughing like desperados. Like the time we accidentally spilled the contents of a Slurpee all over my desk. Don't ask me why we had a Slurpee in there in the first place—and one of the big ones, too. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a hopeless mess. We ruined contracts, prints, our garments, you name it. She laughed so hard I had to cover her mouth with my hand to silence her, which is something I often had to do for a variety of reasons, by the way. She could be a noisy one, my Michelle.

And then there were those times, fewer, it's true, when she was feeling needy and all she wanted was to kiss me and kiss me and kiss me some more. She'd run her fingers through my hair and I'd reciprocate. Then, at the end of each passionate kiss, we'd embrace for minutes on end. We'd hold each other so tight it seemed as if we were lovers at a railroad station and I was going off to war and she'd never see me again or something.

It came as a real shock to me when, a few days later, during what turned out to be one of those more sentimental rendezvous, she whispered in my ear, "I love you."

She had never said that to me before. Never. Not when we were still getting to know each other, not when we were fooling around in the very first weeks of our liaison, and certainly not now that we were acquiescently treating each other like the sex toys we were.