The air buzzed over the line. “Listen, I’m telling you this off the record,” the guy said. “I read her statement. I’ve seen her. Getting a boner at work isn’t really sexual harassment according to the law, not unless you try to do something about it. There’s no way this thing will go anywhere, but it just doesn’t look good for us to send our girls there.”
“Do you have any male assistants?”
“Unfortunately, we can’t allow gender-specific requests. That would be sexual discrimination.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
I hung up the phone, taking an internal poll of my feelings on the matter. Probably I should have felt outraged to be accused of something I didn’t do. And by someone so wholly incompetent! But she probably had thought my boner was for her, damn her nosy hide for peeking over my desk anyway.
I had some concerns of a practical nature. If she really did decide to file charges, she probably wouldn’t win, but she could. And even if she didn’t, I’d still have to pay for lawyers, and the reputation of my financial services firm would suffer.
And Melissa.
How incredibly humiliating for her. Everyone would take one look at me, one look at Babette, and think I had said or done something inappropriate. I had done something inappropriate. Not dirty thoughts about Babette, nothing that trite or, frankly, uninteresting. No, I’d daydreamed about Melissa in the presence of Babette, and somehow that made it worse, as if even my fantasies of my wife were dirty.
Would Melissa even believe me? Would she stand by me if this came out in a big, messy scandal? I didn’t deserve her loyalty, but God, I craved it. I had never meant to test her love for me. I had always been happy to take it at face value, afraid to look beneath the surface, but this was unavoidable.
I’d have to tell her about this, and like it or not, live with the results. Even if nothing ever came of the sexual harassment bit, I shared everything that happened at work and this was a big one. I’d have to get a new secretary and I wasn’t about to come up with a wall of lies and betray her trust just to shield my own ego. If she wanted to leave, she could. I would just be fucking miserable, that’s all.
I would tell her when she got back, I decided. She was flying back in tomorrow, on the fifth day. That way she could see in my eyes and face that I was telling the truth and how very much I loved her. It was the only way.
And when the phone rang, I let it ring. I couldn’t lie to her, couldn’t subvert or omit the truth, not to her. All I could do was avoid it.
The phone rang again, a bit later. Rang and rang.
* * *
On the fifth and final day of Melissa’s trip, I left my empty home and drove to my empty office. Everyone was leaving me. It would be funny, but it wasn’t.
I called my tennis partner, who also happened to be the lawyer who had set up my company’s legal structure, for advice. Jim assured me that even if she were to file charges, it was hearsay. And even if the state board were to believe her, they wouldn’t levy damages for a first-time offence where she even admitted there had been no touching, crass jokes, nothing. The only thing she could possibly do was damage my reputation.
The only upside to this whole thing was that I actually got work done. Resigned to being alone and without the infernal scratching of Babette’s nail file, I managed to finish all the work I’d been slacking off on all week. I even finished early, and though waiting at home sounded like the worst possible thing, it was also the only thing I could do.
I pulled up and sat in the driveway for fifteen minutes, until the car began to cool. I entered the house and threw my briefcase onto the sofa.
A squeak brought me up short.
A shadow detached from the couch, rubbing her head. “Wyle?”
“Oh damn, baby. I didn’t know you were home. Are you okay? Here, let me help you.”
She waved me off. “I’m fine. It bounced off the couch.”
I stood in awkward limbo, dying to touch her but restrained by the strange energy in the room. She sounded the same, she looked the same despite my baggage assault, but she was supposed to return tomorrow. Instead she sat here in the dark.
“I can get you some ice,” I offered lamely.
“No, don’t worry about that.”
Don’t worry about that, as if I should worry about something else. “What’s wrong, baby?”
I couldn’t see her expression beyond the lowering of her eyes, but tension prickled my skin. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”
My mouth went dry. So she had noticed my sexual melancholy. Okay, come clean. Don’t panic. And don’t lie! “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”