Arlene never said so. She came close a couple of times. She almost cried several times. What had started with her crying to Bill about her mother being sick ended with them being friends, then friends with benefits, then friends with one of them in love with the other and still wanting intimacy.
This was made clear mid-June when Bill and Arlene found themselves at Arlene’s apartment after work.
It was a hot summer night. They had been very busy at work and Bill had been planning to go straight home until he’d called home and his wife told him that Tim was having a hard time and she was going over to his house and would probably sleep there.
For his part, Bill had empathy for Tim, real feelings for him. Tim was a sad-sack, a choreographer whose career was stuck with him being an adjunct-faculty choreographer with no real prospects for going to New York and working there, which is what he wanted, what everyone in the dance world wanted to do. He had no friends other than Bill’s wife and her small group of friends, did not have a lover, was a loner and a brooding sort.
No one could know yet, but Tim would hang himself from a tree in Bryant Park some fourteen years later while they were all living and working in New York. The police would find Tim hanging from a tree and his family would come and take the body and send it home and that would be the end of Tim, another in a string of gays that Bill would know, even if tangentially, and have to say good-bye to.
They showered together. In part that was because they had done it like this before sometimes, many times actually. Bill would wash her back and let his hands slip down to down there in the back. He would play down there and she would help him by assuming the position and not saying anything to discourage him.
He couldn’t help but get aroused. He was young and as virile as almost all young me his age were.
Playing and fooling around, he couldn’t help but help her enjoy herself with his fingers and his rubbing himself on her, and he couldn’t help the explosion that came from him, all over her in the front down there as he rubbed himself on her.
No apologies. No I’m sorries. From either side no mea culpas. She kissed him right after his explosion and laughed happily.
“Least you did it yourself,” she said there in the shower.
“You did it to me,” Bill said, “except you didn’t do it. It was your body did it to me. I couldn’t help myself.”
That night, there with Arlene, Bill set the definition of cheating. It became not entering the doorway, not going into her house. Of course he was already in her apartment and whether or not he should have been there was a different issue.
So after the shower they sat on her sofa. They popped Quaaludes and smoked a joint. She poured cold white wine and they talked. She was wrapped in a summer-cotton bathrobe. He wore underwear she had bought him because the last time he didn’t have any clean skivvies after their shower. She gave him her feet and he massaged them, played with them, started getting frisky with them.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
She let the robe slip away to reveal her nakedness underneath it and she sat so he could not help but see her.
Seeing the bulge in his skivvies, she asked “What are we gonna do about this?”
Bill finished his wine and refilled his glass and hers. “We’ll figure it out,” he said.
