By eight o'clock, Bernie's had mostly gone dead, except for a half-dozen men and a woman speaking in low voices at the bar, and an elderly couple finishing their dinner.
Beside myself, only Xavier the cook and Big Mary the bartender remained in the darkened place. I'd put up the chairs in the back two-thirds of the restaurant and mopped the floors. I took advantage of a quiet moment to duck into the back room to refresh my makeup and replace my tee shirt with a fresh white blouse. I dabbed on a little perfume and the tiniest bit of eye color and lipstick. I hadn't brought my heels to work, but now I thought that perhaps I should have. I knew I looked good in heels, and since I was already taller than Dr. Warburton, I knew he wasn't intimidated by my height.
Let's not let our imagination run wild, RoseAnn. This is not a date. He's coming to help you pay for your next four years of college. He's obviously committed to his job and is willing to work long hours. This would be his busy season, just before the fall semester. Long hours would be par for the course.
It didn't help. My pussy grew damp no matter how I tried to distract myself.
At a quarter to nine, Big Mary turned off the 'Open' sign in the window and dimmed the lights further. I cleared away the dishes from the old couple and left their check, then filled the cup of a student who'd come in at the last minute for coffee and a piece of pie.
Outside the window, Dr. Warburton appeared like a dark ghost, drifting slowly past and then vanishing. My stomach fluttered. He reappeared again, walking slowly past.
Was he that shy? I went to the door and beckoned him in. "Why hang out in the street, Dr. Warburton? You should come in out of the heat."
His face, in the last flicker of twilight, looked terribly sad. I led him into the restaurant, to a semicircular booth I'd set up for us, directly under a spotlight. There, we could sit side by side without being crammed together in a distracting way.
He sat, and the spotlight reflected from the scalp through the thinning hair. His most striking feature, his eyes, did not appear as bright in this lighting.
"Coffee? Apple pie?" I offered. "The coffee's an hour old, but the pie is especially good today."
He nodded yes. "Please. Can I get water, too? It's still hot and sticky out." He opened his brief case and began to remove papers, stacking them on the table.
I got coffee and water for us both, and a piece of the apple pie for him. He looked at my side of the table. "Aren't you going to have pie, too?"
I smiled and shook my head. "I have to watch my girlish figure."
He smiled weakly. "Girlish? Not at all. You have the figure of a real woman, a figure to be proud of."
My face grew warm, but even in the dim light, I could see his face redden, too. That compliment must have taken all the nerve he had.
How to reply? Graciously, I supposed. "Thank you, Dr. Warburton." I smiled my most modest smile.
"I'd be much happier if you called me Craig," he said. "You're close enough to my age. It feels strange when you're formal with me."
I felt the vibration. He was like a string pulled taut, humming from tension alone. His intense desire warmed me and made my thighs tingle. Behind the professional distance and politeness, he wanted me. I wondered if he could sense the desire that swelled in me.
"So," I said, "tell me about this essay."
The next two and a half hours were torment for me, and apparently for him, as we sat and went over the guidelines and sample essays. All the while, we struggled to keep our hips or arms from touching, or to avoid looking into one another's eyes. Once or twice, he spoke in my direction, and I smelled apple and coffee on his breath. I imagined that warm breath on my neck, my breasts, my belly. The dampness grew between my legs.
Mentally shaking myself and returning to the business at hand, I chose 'the coming age of telecommunications' as the essay topic and wrote about the future of telephones in business, and new ways that people might devise in the future to communicate with one another. I imagined portable telephones that people could carry around with them. They'd connect by radio to nearby payphone booths so a person could make calls from anywhere. I imagined the worldwide telephone network expanded to carry pictures and even television from anyplace in the globe to any other place. Even computers could be wired together over phone lines that reached around the globe.
Some of what I wrote was original. Most, I'd gleaned years before from my Dad's
Popular Science
magazines, which I'd devoured cover to cover as they arrived in the mail.
Craig made suggestions as I wrote, only stopping short of actually dictating my words. It was nearly midnight when we finished. He waited patiently while I copied it out neatly, in my best handwriting, and signed it.
