“Jim, are you having an affair with your new secretary, Lynn?”
I spotted a lay-by through the driving rain a few hundred yards ahead, dropped down a couple of gears and pulled in. Our old Ford Estate was immediately rocked and buffeted by wind and spray from passing cars and goods vehicles as they streamed relentlessly North away from London up the A1.
I was tired. It was the end of the working week. Our home was only 10 miles away. It would be warm and comfortable and everything I had worked for as an advertising executive in the City of London over the last 20 years. I didn’t need this conversation.
“What on earth gave you that idea, Jenny,” I said, mildly.
Since I’d picked her up at the railway station, something had felt wrong. Her brown hair was combed tightly to frame her face. Her whole body language suggested she was shrinking away from me. Her hazel eyes, typically determined, looked sad.
“I asked you a question, Jim,” Jenny said. Her tone was clipped, almost detached.
“It’s a very strange question, coming out of the blue,” I replied. “You’ve never asked me that in 25 years.”
“I didn’t think I ever needed to.”
Jenny reached for her hand bag and pulled out a small mirror to examine their face. She was paying particular attention to her eyes. Perhaps she was afraid I would see tears she wanted to hide. She hated to look vulnerable – ever.
Jenny’s demeanor was always tense and unyielding. Her severe and sober jacket and matching skirt was all part of the battery of weapons she used daily to control the staff in her busy London legal practise. At weekends, she would change into more casual clothes but she always looked like a legal executive dressing down.
Lynn was my new personal assistant secretary. She was a single mother with two young children. She had long blond hair and a soft smile that grew as you gazed into her eyes.
When she sat on the sofa in my office, it became her kingdom. The softness of her face and the flowing colorful clothes she preferred created an oasis of calm around her. When she came near me, all thoughts of work and my office diary disappeared.
All I could think of was to find out more about her. I wanted to know what she liked doing; what she liked eating; how was it that she had decided to work for me in my busy office.
Instead of her revolving around me, her overwhelming Earth Mother presence compelled me to honor and worship her needs and desires.
I gave in to her steady smile almost immediately. It was almost as if she was controlling my every act. Yet, as each separating layer of cloth was shed, her mystery grew. Eventually, I reached in desperation within her to find the answer to her mystery and power. But still the mystery remained although I searched again and again.
Then her hand was cool on my brow as I fought to recover my senses. Her voice was assured as she suggested we continue the briefing on Monday. The sway of her hips as she departed left me intoxicated.
“I would have thought your legal brain would have been able to tell the difference between truth and lies,” I said.
She gazed into the dashboard, looking for answers.
“As a lawyer, I go on the evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“How otherwise would she have been able to tell me about the heart shaped mole on your stomach?”
I dropped Jenny off at our home, turned the old Ford around and headed back to London with the Sat Nav programmed with Lynn’s South London address.
I wasn’t angry with Lynn for telling Jenny or sad that my relationship of twenty-five years had evaporated.
Instead I was thrilled that the weekend ahead offered more than cold and empty smalltalk.
I wasn’t even surprised that Lynn had made the decision that we should be together and acted accordingly.
Obediently and willingly, I sped through the night drawn like a moth towards my destiny.
I must have dozed off. Just in time, I opened my eyes to see the parked articulated lorry towering over me. I heard the tires of the old Ford hissing on the wet road as I braked. But I was too late.
The impact left me numb. One word came into my mind before the darkness.
“Lynn…”
The End.
Bye for now.
Rob
(Rob Hopcott – online author – fiction – news – philanthropy)
Copyright Rob Hopcott 2007, all rights reserved. All characters and places in this short short flash fiction about affairs and infidelity and other free on-line humor, short stories, flash fictions, micro-fictions, sudden fictions, post card fictions or very short stories on this site, are fictitious and no reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.