The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Page B

nipples? You know what, don’t answer me now. This is a good place to stop.”
    â€œBut we’ve only been here twenty minutes,” Russell said.
    â€œWe don’t go by the clock in my practice. I intuitively know when it’s time to stop. Is this time next week good for you?”
    â€œYes,” Russell said, and I looked at him in disbelief. He couldn’t even say no to this fat nipple-pervert. I was going to have to be the one to stop this.
    â€œWe’ll have to look at our schedules—you know two worlds, two schedules—and give you a call,” I said and opened the door to his office. As soon as I opened the door someone fell in.
    â€œOh, sorry. Howard, do you have a moment?” He was beet red from embarrassment.
    â€œIt’s like a Three Stooges movie,” Russell said.
    I walked quickly down the hall with no one leading me by my nipples.
    For some reason I thought of a man I had met once years before when I was single. He was the kind of man I made sure to stay away from, the kind usually named Roman or Camus, with gorgeous curly manelike hair and a thousand girlfriends all trying to follow him to South America, which he was going to do something like “check out.” This particular man I was thinking of I had met in a club the same night I’d met Russell. We’d talked for a long time and he’d told me he was leaving for Paris the next evening. He was leaving his wife, he said, and I was horrified to even be talking to him. “Why would you throw away a marriage?” I had asked him, and he’d said something like, “There has to be more heat to a fire than that.” I couldn’t remember exactly how he’d put it, but it had to do with heat and fire and passion that had left his marriage and something about it had always stayed in my head after that. I couldn’t remember his name or even what he looked like exactly, but I remembered this man saying something like that to me, his voice filled with a certainty and a longing that I admired but had also detested at the time. I could never walk away from someone like he did. Even if I wanted to, I could never do it.
    There has to be more heat to a fire than that , repeated itself in my head.
    I wished I’d said it in couples therapy. I almost felt like walking back down the hall and into Howard Klein’s office and saying it now.
    â€œYou should come with me to Paris,” the man had said.
    â€œI’m not going to Paris!” I had guffawed. But a small part of me had thought about it.
    â€œI think we should give it a try,” Russell said when we were in the elevator. “It’s a trust exercise.” He tried to grab my nipples through my shirt. “For the sake of our marriage.”
    â€œWe don’t even kiss anymore,” I said. “We never kiss.” We didn’t even kiss hello or good-bye, even when Russell came back from a business trip. We didn’t kiss when we had sex.
    â€œSo we’ll kiss,” Russell said.
    But we didn’t kiss, and when we got out on the street, he looked at his BlackBerry and then called a moronic writer whose first name was just the letter “C” and immediately started talking to her. We walked that way for a few blocks and finally I just signaled to him that I was going to go in the other direction, and he put up his hand to wave to me, and I walked away without him.

11
    A couple of weeks later I was pushing Duncan in a swing in the playground when my cell phone rang. It was the man—Gabe Weinrib—calling to make an appointment for me to work on his portfolio.
    â€œIs this a bad time, Mizz Brilliant?” he said confidently.
    â€œNot at all,” I said, all business.
    â€œSo, m’dear, I seem to have won your services.”
    â€œThat does seem to be the case,” I said, thinking this guy sounded like a complete idiot.
    â€œCan I make an appointment to come by