Allure of the Vixen by C. C. Morian Page B

trysts. I considered taking the train to the country, to my
house, where she had never been.
    I shook my head. Screw it. She wasn’t going to take
this from me.
    Once inside I stripped off my clothes and took a
long hot shower, losing myself in the hiss of the water. When I was finished I
dropped onto the bed. The missed message light on my phone flashed. I regained
some of my dignity by ignoring it totally.
    I hadn’t set the alarm so was surprised to
wake up when it was still a little dark. I had finally drifted off after a few
hours of restlessness, my mind whirling with thoughts of Joanne, of how I had fucked
up. I even thought of Peter. In my dreams he had come at me like an angry bee,
appearing far more of a threat than he had at the office, when he had seemed
rather—I couldn’t describe it. Like he had discovered some secret, but it
wasn’t the one he had expected to uncover.
    Maybe Peter wasn’t surprised to learn that his wife
had been cheating, only who she had been cheating with. The guy he was just
talking to. Me.
    I thought about skipping the office, I had to get my
head on straight before a chance run in with Joanne. I didn’t trust myself to
just ignore her as I had managed to do last night.
    As I started to get up my apartment buzzer snapped
my mind into the present, and I realized it was the angry bee of my dream. Who
the fuck would be buzzing me at this hour?
    Only one person.
    I sat on the edge of the bed. If I ignored her,
she’d go away.
    No such luck. She leaned on the buzzer, a raucous
obnoxious sound, so utterly incongruous an announcement of a woman so refined.
    A lying refined woman.
    I pulled on a shirt and shorts and went to the foyer,
buttoning up along the way. Without thinking I leaned against the very part of
the wall where Joanne and I had fucked. Would this be my fate, to be constantly
reminded of her, even by a blank wall?
    The buzzer had stopped, and I thought she’d given
up.
    “If you don’t open the door, I’m going to say
something really nasty that your neighbors will hear.” Joanne’s voice was
actually cool and collected, and not at all loud. She was assuming I was on the
other side of the door.
    How did this woman know me so well? Was there
something in my semen that gave her an insight into my moods and thoughts?
    I opened the damned door.
    As she had the first time at my place, Joanne pushed
past me. She was dressed for work, even though it was still almost dark out.
“Going incommunicado is not you,” she admonished.
    I shut the door and followed her into the living
room. “You don’t know me. I keep telling you that.”
    “Bullshit. You deal with problems. You think this is
a problem. You aren’t the type to ignore it, you face it.”
    “I don’t think we have a problem,” I said. “I don’t,
anyway. Not anymore. You on the other hand, probably have one with your
husband.”
    “You’re the one who doesn’t know me. Peter and I
don’t have a problem at all.”
    Joanne sat down on the sofa without waiting for an
invitation, crossing her elegant legs. I looked in spite of myself, and when I
pulled my eyes back to her face she had that little smile, she had caught me.
    “Your legs aren’t going to get you out of this one,
with me or your husband. Actually, I don’t give a shit about your problem with
your husband.”
    “I told you we don’t have a problem.”
    “That’s not what it looked like to me. I saw the
look on his face, he knew something was going on with the two of us. And before
you showed up, he had just been telling me how he didn’t like going to parties
with you, because he sees everyone checking you out. I bet he’s always
suspicious of you fucking around.”
    Joanne’s face was composed, her lips tight, only the
flare in her eyes a clue to her reaction. “I am not fucking around.”
    “Oh no? What do you call what we were doing?”
    “You are my lover. We were fucking, yes. But I
wasn’t fucking around on my husband. That