"Hallo?"

Jim sat cross-legged on his velvet armchair in the living room, a glass of cognac sitting chilled and refreshing beside him. He was just about to begin reading Schieder's biography of Frederick the Great when his wife picked up the phone.

Jim didn't exactly demand silence while he was reading, but his mind had a habit of picking up on the sounds around him and dwelling on them to an often unbearable extent. Every unexpected hum and buzz required some logical explanation in his brain, an intense investigation and thorough analysis before he could settle his mind and return to the task at hand. Telephone calls were the worst of all possible disturbances in this way. They left half a conversation up entirely to the imagination, a mystery that by a simple fact of physics could not be solved: sound travelled much slower than paranoia.

Jim propped the book open halfway on his lap to simulate the act of reading. He leaned his head against the backboard of his chair to hear better from the wood's vibrations. The voice on the other end of the phone wasn't male, which was a small relief, but it was speaking in French, which hardly put Jim's concerns to rest.

Jim could make out most of Evi's speech when she was facing him and speaking slowly enough, but whenever a relative from back home called her, as was now clearly the case, she took on a Breton affectation and became more or less unintelligible. With the flurry of hand movements, Jim assumed his wife was engaged in a lively discourse of some sort, but that was hardly unique given the Frenchman's predisposition to melodrama.

Jim's linguistic education had begun with a gnarled, dithering old nun who had been born in the south of England and spoke French with all the gusto of a drunken Anglo dock-worker wheezing with smoke addled lungs and work-crippled back, attempting to proposition a Parisienne for certain unspeakably lewd acts (Given her vocabulary, that caricature was hardly too far off the mark, too.).

It was infinitely superior to the sexual education Jim had received at his Catholic school, of course. One didn't have to pray to God to conjugate verbs. It was a very different story for orgasming out of wedlock.

No, Jim could hardly claim to have had any kind of education at all until he had met Evi, in both of the aforementioned categories, though perhaps he had grown further with one than the other. It was funny how listening to her spew provincial French over the telephone brought him right back so clearly to those days when he was but a lonely, shy, cowering second-year, sitting uncomfortably at the edge of her dorm-room bed.

She would talk to Freddy on the phone for hours at a time back then, always in Spanish, and always ignoring Jim sitting next to her, silently working on a homework project the two had allegedly come together to complete.

Jim hated those phone calls. It was a level of humiliation he had never known was possible to experience, but one which, once experienced, could never be forgotten. They could have been saying anything, and he would have been none wiser. With every other word they were laughing at him, spitting at him, demeaning and attacking him in every conceivable way from every conceivable angle.

Here they were, giggling at how some stupid Canadian had been strung along to help her with her work, and all he needed was a few glimpses of flesh or touch on the knee to enslave him forever. There they were, howling at how he struggled to hide his erection every time Evi's feet, with long, bare legs splayed out across the bed, grazed ever so closely to Jim's groin. Here was Jim, shivering in the cold, watching the woman he loved wrap herself in the tender embrace of another man, just barely two feet away from him.

It was a torture Jim couldn't fully describe or even comprehend at the time. He just wanted it to stop. He had imagined throwing the phone from her hand, expressing his true feelings and then violently throwing her flat against the bed to press her lips in a long, passionate kiss. He imagined it hundreds of times.

And he never did it, of course. Evi was too delicate for that kind of thing. Freddy was too important to her for Jim to ever want to intervene. After all, if he truly loved her, he should want what made her happy, and what could possibly make her happier than the clever, artistic, athletic heir to some obscure Spanish fortune she was already dating. No flabby, penniless, unilingual Englishman was going to change that.

But Evi had taken pity on him. Or perhaps she had grown lonely, spending too many nights apart from her love back in Barcelona. Jim never knew the reason exactly, but he generally aired on the side of the former.

"So, you've really never kissed a girl before?" Evi had asked.

"Well, I mean, I'm not totally inexperienced in this area, Evi," Jim replied, rolling his eyes. "I've gotten some tonsil hockey action here and there before," he winked.

Jim had always tried to cover his embarrassment with Evi's questioning with a mix of sarcasm and flirtation: the sarcasm to cover and normalize his obvious falsities and the flirtation to make it go down a little sweeter, the proverbial spoonful of lying sugar, as it were. Evi never failed to see through this, but on most nights when they had their heart to heart chats she ignored them or let them pass. That was until the night. On the night, everything changed.

"So, ... what? You got a peck on the cheek? You locked lips? You slipped tongue? You went French? What the fuck does that mean, Jim?" Evi said it so matter-of-factly, as if she was a stock-broker looking to get all the details and sell fast before the closing bell.

Jim broke down. Dejectedly, he stared askance at the bedspread and closed his jaw in frustration. "Nothing like that. The only woman I've ever kissed was my mother, and even that was sparing to say the least."

Jim's parents were publicly secular, but in private veered towards a very intense and positively medieval set of religious and moral values that precluded them from any real intimacy with the children, at least in the modern sense.

"Have you just never had the balls to go for it?"

Jim grimaced. At that time, he was still rather uncomfortable hearing women talk in the way Evi did about sex, so effortlessly and shamelessly. "I guess that's probably why, yes. But there's hardly a line-up of women outside that door to come in and kiss me, you know. You can't get angry at a guy for squandering his chances when he doesn't have that many chances to go for."

Evi looked at him quizzically. "I don't understand what you're talking about, Jim. You're pretty good looking. You clean up well. You know how to cook. You're probably the funniest guy I've ever talked to-."

"Then why don't you line up, Evi?" Jim burst out.

An uneasy silence settled over the room. Evi swung her legs off the bed, making as if she wanted to go. Jim placed his hand on her arm, anchoring her down. She looked back up at him, with something like tears in her eyes.

"Don't go, please. I didn't mean it," Jim pleaded. "I, I, I was just ... joking, you know?"

Evi smiled, but her look was glazed over. She leaned back against the bed. Further away than before, but slowly becoming more comfortable.

"You're not as alone as you think, Jim. That's all I was saying. If you really wanted a girl, you could find one."

"Whatever you say, Evi."

They broke eye contact again, their gazes turning back the floor. Jim realized he needed to say more if he was going to get her to stay.

"It's just... I wouldn't know where to start, you know. I don't..." Jim's face contorted, and he raised his hand to gesture, but it began to waiver about. "I don't want to embarrass myself."

Evi looked up, thinking.

"That's it. That's why," Jim finished, unable to make eye contact, his shame too great.

Evi crawled over to him so that there was but a few inches of precious, warm air between them.

"That's a stupid reason."

She kissed him.

"There, now you know what to expect."

Jim was petrified. The blood rushed from his face, and his skin became pasty white. His arms were cold and lifeless. His feet tingled with numb electricity. Evi touched the palm of his right hand, just delicately tracing the lines with her fingers, prickling him.

"I guess you might need a little more practice than that. Do you want to try again?"

Evi didn't wait for a response. She held Jim's head in place and plunged her tongue down his throat. Jim's hands flurried around, unsure where to go before he awkwardly placed them statically on Evi's shoulders like they were in some kind of middle-school slow-dance that had gotten just a little out of hand.

Jim came up for breath. "So, anything I could maybe work on? Any tips you might want to give me?"

"No," Evi replied, more under her breath than truly responding. She waded back in, her hands now running up and down Jim's back: soft and gentle going up, then nails rending his flesh tearing down. Jim started fighting back, biting her lower lip and moving his mouth in rhythm with hers, moaning gently as he clung to the few mouthfuls of air he could manage.

"Do you mind if I touch you bum?" He asked.

Evi put his mouth back on hers and forced his hand all the way below the bed's comforter, firmly cupping her buttocks. Jim's breathing became erratic, and his hand started shaking under Evi's bottom.

Evi pushed herself off Jim's lips, and a thin but noticeable strand of saliva marked the trail between their mouths in the air. "Jim," she said, taking exaggerated breaths in between each word, "you need to relax."

"I'm sorry, Evi. I really, really like you, I just, I'm not sure..."

Evi placed his hands along her the small of her back and slowly pushed him down against the bed.

"It's okay, Jim. I want you." She looked right into his eyes, a hungered frenzy in her eyes. "I want you, Jim. No one else. There's no else here. It's just us. It's just you and me."

She kissed up and down his face and bit the tip of his ear.

"You can relax, Jim. Just fall into it. Let yourself go. Feel your desires. Feel me."

Evi placed Jim's hand back on her bum, and after some uncomfortable flapping around, he grabbed onto it, feeling the flesh between his fingers and a growing girth in his pants. Evi squealed with delight. She began suckling on Jim's neck and shoulder, leaving him gasping for air while her hands slowly, methodically undid the buttons on his shirt.

"Shouldn't you be getting undressed too?"

"Yes," she replied, each word expressed between violent, mind-bending episodes of flesh-sucking, "but if you want it off, you're going to have to take it off."

Jim fully pushed himself into the moment, and he tore Evi's shirt right off her body, giving her just enough time to lift her arms before shredding it to bits with in a fit of lust. Evi wasn't wearing a bra, and her plump breasts stood fully exposed to Jim's gleaming eyes. He looked up at Evi for a moment, who, smiling, nodded her permission, and Jim kissed down her neck all the way to her breasts, seizing them in his hands and running his tongue along her nipples to harden them.

"Do you like having your nipples pinched?"

"I like you pinching just about everything."

They quickly undressed each other, gently wrestling: their tepid, naked bodies rolling over each other like waves crashing against a beach. Finally, Jim pinned Evi down with his superior weight and began kissing down her navel, his hands running over her outstretched arms, her toned torso and strong legs to meet back in her quivering, warm inner thighs. Finally, his mouth reached her vulva and he looked back up at Evi for confirmation.

Evi reached down and removed Jim's glasses.

"Take those off, Jim. We don't want to get them stained."

She hurled the spectacles against the wall with such ferocity that Jim lost his erection for a moment, worrying that they had been completely shattered, but after he saw they were fine, he turned back to the task at hand.

He stared in complete wonderment. He'd never really seen anything like it. He had no sisters, and his mother might as well have worn a niqab for all the showing off she did. It really looked nothing like any of the diagrams he had seen in school or even the videos he'd watched online extra-curricularly. Was she deformed? No, probably not. He'd heard they all looked very different from each other; there was certainly no problem with that.

Jim's curiosity took over. He imagined he was back in biology class, dissecting a bloated, pickled pig foetus, prodding and slicing in fascination while his classmates vomited and fainted from the grotesque sacrilege of the act. His eyes narrowed and he bit his lip in concentration as he carefully lifted the folds of Evi's labia and began probing. He had made similar faces when attempting a complicated math problem in calculus. He had absolutely no idea where he was going to end up, but he figured he needed to start somewhere.

"Wow," Jim whispered, totally in awe.

Evi's cheeks reddened. "Don't stare, s'il te plaît." She leaned up a bit. "You're ...," she searched hopelessly for the word, her linguistic skills rather diminished, "em-barr-ass...ing me."

Jim's face softened. "Oh, I'm sorry. It's just ... so new to me."

Evi smiled, tenderly. "It's okay. That's why we practice." She settled down. "Let's try some oral."

Jim had to stop himself from wincing. With her accent, it came out sounding more like orale, reminding him of nerve-wracking days preparing for oral exams, ready to be publicly humiliated before dozens of his peers as he gave a presentation in dithering French, hearing the light giggles and barely-concealed mocking every time he butchered a word or stammered through a conjugation. God, how did porn-stars do it? It was difficult enough with one person in the room, much less millions.

"I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea where to start," he chuckled nervously, addressing more the vagina than the person attached to it at this point.

"You need to get me excited first."

Jim stared up in disbelief. "You're not excited already?"

Evi reached up and touched Jim's chin, smiling ever so condescendingly.

"Honey, if the bedsheets aren't completely soaked, then there's still a ways to go."

Jim looked back down. The obstacle before him seemed almost insurmountable.

"Start by kissing up and down my thigh, and give me a little tease with your tongue each time you make the trip."

Jim complied, improvising some toe suckling that Evi seemed to enjoy, or at least was more or less indifferent about.

"Good, now, put your mouth here." She pointed to her clitoris. "Lick it a bit, then put your whole mouth on it. Use some sal-e-va and try to get some suction."

"Saliva?" Jim asked for confirmation.

Evi squirmed in frustration. "Just ...." She grunted. "Do it, Jim. Please!"

"Okay. Going in."

Jim pressed forward. He was expecting a more unpleasant taste, but Evi was clean and her lower mouth tasted little different than the higher one, perhaps just slightly meatier. He guessed this is why chicken sashimi was all the rage in Japan, although he immediately tried to expel the thought from his head the instant it materialized.

Evi closed her eyes in pleasure, and she wrapped herself under a pillow. "Okay. Try a finger now."

Jim poked a finger down. Evi immediately spasmed and sat up.

"Wrong! Try again." Evi slapped Jim across the face hard enough to leave a mark. More gently, she directed, "lower."

"Sorry," Jim beseeched. He moved his finger to the hole below.

"That's better."

Jim moved his finger back and forth, back and forth like a giant saw slowly sliding down the trunk of California Red-wood tree.

Evi cooed with pleasure.

"You like that?" Jim asked, somewhat incredulous.

"Yes, very much." Evi nodded. "Maintenant, bend your finger a little when you go out so you can catch my G-spot."

"Like this?"

Evi shivered and stuck Jim's nose back near her clit. "Let's use that tongue for something else, Jim."

As Jim sped up his fingers and tongue, he noticed Evi moving her hips back and forth, her abdomen fluttering up and down, Evi muttering pleasurable sounds into her pillow.

Jim hurried his pace. He felt Evi close down on his fingers, contorting around them like some kind of delicious anaconda, then releasing itself only to clench even tighter than before. Evi's whole body began to twinge as she cried out, no longer muffled by the pillow.

"Evi, are you okay?" Jim enquired.

He got no reply, so he continued forward.

Eventually the heaving stopped, and Evi pushed back Jim's head and fingers.

"You can't..." she laughed, but was so out of breath it more came out like a wheeze. "You can't expect a girl to ... to answer you right away when you just made her cum. It's," her eyes were slitted, like a bat staring out at the morning sun-rise for the first time. "It's very difficult."

She collapsed on her pillows, the both of them laughing harder than they had ever done before.

That night, they experimented like two scientists on the verge of discovering a cure for some terrible, fatal disease. Each time Evi contracted around Jim's tongue and fingers, he felt a rush of euphoria more powerful than anything he had ever experienced before. It was the very opposite of schadenfreude, something a Buddhist monk might call Mudita: the pleasure of bringing pleasure to others.

He had known in that moment that it didn't matter what obstacles might block his way, what challenges posed themselves or opponents might cross his path, he was going to do everything in his power to keep this woman in his arms, and make her cum and cum and cum and keep cumming for all the rest of the days of her life.

Once he had felt her quiver underneath him, he could never go back. No other man was ever going to touch her the way he did again, not even Freddy. A line had been crossed, and neither of them could do anything to uncross it.

They laid in that bed for hours, their skin mingling so close it became difficult to disentangle one body from another, and they told each other things that they had never told anyone else in the entire world. Things that they would never tell anyone else.

Or, that was what Jim hoped, at least.

Evi could be spilling everything over the phone right now. He would never know.

Evi groaned as she slammed her hand against the alarm clock and lurched out of bed. On any other day, Jim would have ignored the interruption and afforded himself another hour of sleep, but today was different. Today, it was only going to look like he was asleep. In reality, he was very much awake. His body tensed in anticipation.

Evi crept over to kiss her husband good-bye, and Jim tried his best to keep his mouth loose and uninviting, as if he were still in the throes of unconsciousness. Evi lingered a bit longer than customary. Was his breathing off? Could she tell he was awake? Jim's heart was racing, but his body was as rigid as a corpse as he tried to force it into inertness.

His wife left soon enough. Perhaps he was just freaking out. She must have suspected nothing. And besides, what reason did she have to suspect him? If she were innocent, she'd have no reason to be suspicious. If guilty, she could hardly blame him for his suspicion.

As soon as he heard the door close, Jim leapt from his bed and into a pile of clothes he had carefully laid out the night before. There was no time to waste on basic hygiene. His wife would be gone soon enough, and by then, it would be too late.

Assuming Evi needed some time to change into her athletic wear before beginning her work-out, if Jim left immediately, he could just reach her gym during the window when she'd be in the change room and unable to monitor the street outside. There was a two-storied cafe facing the long line of treadmills from across the road, and Jim could set up on the top storey in that time, finding the perfect spot where he could lay in wait, unseen to the unsuspecting. After that, he'd know for sure.

If Evi didn't come out, the matter would be settled. Evi's credit card was still being billed by the same gym (he'd dug the paperwork out of the trash and checked) and she'd taken her work-out bag (Jim had quickly ruffled through Evi's closet and found it missing). If she was leaving early every morning with a spare change of clothes, it would be fairly obvious what was going on. She'd be getting her work-out, just not at the gym.

It was such an Evi thing to do: have an affair at six in the morning when it was the most inconvenient for everyone. She always had been an early riser, bursting with energy from her disgusting green liquids and bizarre Mesoamerican grains. Jim generally felt he was a weight around her ankles, dragging her down with his permanent exhaustion and lack of imagination, but as he grew older and Evi's temperament never changed, he had begun to form other conclusions.

Evi was a puppy, and Jim was a cat. One had been domesticated and the other had not. Now, he just needed to stop her from piddling on everything.

Jim stretched out his binoculars. They were perhaps not completely necessary to spy on a building no more than thirty metres away from him, but their heft and steely frame gave Jim an air of professionalism with which it was difficult to part. He had waited more than a week for these to arrive by Amazon anyway so he could hardly be blamed for wanting to use them now. Jim had never handled anticipation particularly well. It probably had something to do with his inclination to dwell on things....

He spotted Evi coming onto the floor and performing some warm-up stretches. A sigh of relief. He knew he was taking things too far. There had never been any reason to worry. Evi was hardly the kind of girl to start-.

Those pants, though. They weren't exactly the most modest article of clothing in the world. They certainly didn't look bad. Jim could hardly complain. But then again, neither would any other pair of eyes that happened to come across them, either.

They were quite tight with a mauve base and wild geometric patterns running across the legs in various vivid, bright colours. It was more or less impossible not to be drawn in by them. The fact that they highlighted two mounds of firm, plump flesh was surely not lost on anyone.

Of course, it was her right to wear whatever she wanted; Jim understood and celebrated that, but did she really have to exercise her right in that exact way? Her pants literally had giant arrows pointing towards her buttocks. And that wasn't even mentioning her top (not there was much to mention). It was essentially a bra with slightly more support around the chest. A patch of mid-riff was eagerly exposed, her soft, supple skin advertised like the smell of sugary, fatty beef from a filth-stained donair shop, and just like that smell, it was clearly a deliberate and premeditated attempt to provoke hunger.

Jim turned his attention from his wife to the other creatures in the gym. It wasn't too terribly crowded, but there was a spattering of men in various states of undress mingling about the floor. The more corpulent specimens kept to themselves, locked away in the corners, angrily peddling on their spinning machines, before taking a wheezing, gasping break to clutch at their throat and struggle for air. The more attractive men wandered closer to the women, running purposefully and confidently down their treadmills as if they were a lion chasing a maimed gazelle.

There was something strangely alluring about watching those men stretch their glowering thighs on the treadmill, flex their bulging arms with the weights or tighten their steely chests at the bench-press. Their rigid, pulsing bodies glistened with a fine mist of hard-won sweat, their bright, waxy hair shining with perspiration and virility. One particularly well-sculpted man picked himself up from the rowing machine for a moment to splash a long, achingly slow-moving stream of sun-glinted water down his throat, a clear bulge of muscle, vein and meat spreading down his neck and to his groin as he swallowed. Perhaps it was simply an illusion, but it was an overly transfixing one at that.

Was this what Evi saw every time she wandered out onto the gym floor? Were her eyes engulfed by a steady stream of sex-stuffed hunks and beefy, shimmering bodies desperate to be padded off and touched? Did she scan the rows of these newly awoken marble statues, choosing one whose chiseled features and masculine demeanor sent a radiating wave of heat down towards her genitals? Did she begin stretching just within the corner of his eye: close enough that her curves and flexibility would not go unnoticed, but just far enough that she would remain clouded in mystery and sexual illusion?

Did she thrust out her hips and pump up her chest in hopes that he, idly gazing about that bristling brook of forest nymphs and bodacious sirens, would rest upon her, a gentle stirring in his stomach as she ran her hands over her luscious, supple skin? Would he imagine the taste of her taut nipples perking out of her sports-bra, or the feel of her round, soft ass on his hard, chalked hands or even the heat of her tight, sopping pussy as he rubbed his nose along her well-trimmed bush of glossy, dark pubic hair?

A man approached Evi as she began a set of squats with a twenty-pound weight cupped in her hands. Jim could only see her front, but given the wide bend in her meaty thighs, Jim could only assume the gentleman received quite a show as he walked up behind her. The man stopped, hovering over as his hands fell uncomfortably to his sides. Jim could see them clench ever so slightly as Evi stood up to acknowledge him.

A smile spread over her face, a wave of subtle pleasure rushing through her body. Evi clasped her hands in front of her and bowed her head slightly, obscuring her features, but there seemed to be some red rushing into her cheeks. The man's arms loosened up, and he pulled them back from his side, his mouth flapping as his hands started moving more in an almost wild, frenzied pattern. Evi giggled, nodding along, and then held one hand to her mouth and another to the top of her chest to keep herself from bursting in laughter. The action seemed a little performed, but then again, no more performed than any of the times she had pretended to laugh at Jim's jokes as well.

The man's head was turned away from the window, but Jim could make out his frame quite well. He was much chunkier than the other beastly gym-dwellers; this was clearly not his natural habitat. His backside was fairly flat; the only real protrusion was a girthy bulge between this buttocks and lower back: gravity's most unpleasant handiwork. His body was wide, but his arms fairly spindly, whatever meat packed onto the top near his shoulders was almost entirely fat, for lower down, they were as small and frail as a starving mouse. His legs suffered more or less the same affliction: thick, fatty thighs that must have rubbed together when walked and slapped like an old French woman beating her rug with a tennis racket when he ran, followed by little more than skeleton connected to his giant, duck-flipper feet. He was some kind of cartoonish elementary school project made with marshmallows and toothpicks that roughly resembled the human anatomy but was far from a fidelius representation of it.

His fingers were poorly wrapped sausages, uneven chunks of animal carcass tossed haphazardly into their casings and strung together with budget butcher's twine. They reached out and tapped Evi on her shoulder. Just ever so lightly. One could barely call it a tap at all. More of a brush, like a single thread of truffle falling onto your risotto you sometimes get at fancy restaurants. Evi smiled in response, though her eyes remained cold and aloof. Was she hiding something?

The man raised his hand to his head and made some kind of salute before turning away to leave. Evi touched the spot on her shoulder where he had tapped her just a moment ago, massaging it like it was the source of all her body's unpleasant knots and ties. Or rubbing it in like one does a fine-smelling oil or perfume. Her face was lowered and her expression unreadable, but Jim could see from the slight contractions along her chin she was thinking of something.

She looked up and called after the man. He spun around and came back walking towards her.

Jesus fuck!

It was Gregor.

He had been right along! Evi had been sleeping around. He had all the proof he needed. They were probably working out when and where to fuck next, right there, right in front of him, right beneath his nose. Oh, what he would pay to hear their-.

"Sir?"

Jim dropped his binoculars and looked over his shoulder.

"Sir!"

A barista clad in a green apron and infantilizing white paper hat glowered at him, his hands clasped firmly in front of him and a patronizing smile plastered uncomfortably across his pale, nearly featureless face.

"Sir, I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to leave."

"Oh, don't worry. I'm not a creep or anything."

Jim realized his words were coming out too quickly just as he spoke them. The barista's sinister smile twisted ever deeper, wrapping itself around his pallid cheeks.

"Sir, if you please.... We do not want to have to call the police."

Jim grunted and shook his head. "Hey, just," he held his hands up, letting his binoculars fall back onto his chest, "just come here a sec, will ya." His index finger beckoned the barista closer.

The barista leaned in, his torturous smile still occupying enemy territory on his face. "Yes?"

"I'm a," Jim quieted down to a just barely a whisper, "I'm a private detective."

The barista's eyebrow rose just ever so slightly, not quite enough to indicate interest, but just enough to suggest that interest might be possible.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I've been tailing this broad whose husband thinks she's sleeping around on him." Jim didn't fully understand why he had started talking like a mafia boss from some 1950's film noir, but so he was, and he wasn't about to stop in mid-sentence.

The barista's face remained unchanged, but he put his hands on his hips, his right leg protruding ever so slightly. He was clearly annoyed, but the threat was passing. Jim needed to start selling.

"And what do you think?"

"Well, just look at 'er." Jim held up the binoculars, which the barista reluctantly accepted.

"I don't... Where am I supposed to look?"

"You see the one with hot purple pants squatting by the weights?" Jim pointed downwards.

"The one with the small tits?"

"Yeah...?" Jim remembered his character. "They're hardly the gazongas I regularly see in this business, if you know what I mean."

Jim playfully slapped at the man, but there was no response.

"But, she is still kinda hot, right" Jim tried to keep the defensiveness out of his voice, but it was creeping up.

"Yeah, I can see it."

"See what?" Jim sat up, forgetting his newfound demeanour for a moment.

The barista put the binoculars down, his face blank and expressionless.

"Why she'd sleep around." He held the binoculars up to his face, his tongue peeking out just a few millimeters from behind his lips.

"She's quite attractive."

He was stating it in the same way a long-time acquaintance might discuss the next day's weather. His tongue stuck out a little further, and his words slowed, more precise and lecherous. "Yes, very attractive indeed."

Jim tipped the binoculars from the barista's face.

"Okay, pal. Let's not get to oodling." Jim pounded his chest. "That's what they pay me for."

The barista chuckled. "Watching chicks like that, sure as fuck beats my job."

Jim smiled a little out of the corner of his mouth. The strange sense of validation he was getting from this complete and total stranger was starting to make him a little queasy, but the feeling was undeniable.

The barista leaned in and whispered, "but seriously, it's time to go now."

Jim forgot about his accent, "wait, what? I thought you were-."

"I really don't know what's going on between you and that woman, but you gotta stop, man." He pointed to Jim's ring. "You're married. You can't be doing this kind of thing, especially out in public."

Jim shook his head, but he was having trouble getting his words out. It was like they were geostationary satellites orbiting around his spinning head, just fast enough to leave the surface, but still too weak to leave his overwhelming mental gravity. "No, no, no, you've got it all-."

"Look man, we all have eyes, we have crushes, but you can't start fixating like this. I'm sure you're a nice guy and all, but you're going to make that lady really uncomfortable if you keep staring all the time, much less all the other people in the cafe."

Was Jim really getting sex advice from a teenager dressed in a green, coffee-stained smock right now? Was this how far he had fallen? When his five year-old nephew had explained where babies come from unprompted at dinner one night, he had assumed it was simply a childish lack of censorship. Now, he realized the truth; Jim was such a sad-sack the world had decided he needed an education in everything. Surely a man as decrepit and sniveling as him had never experienced the realities of the world beyond his icy, pallid bed-chamber, much less the touch of kind, loving woman, after all.

"Thanks, dear." Jim made sure to linger on the hypocorism so that the condescension in his voice would be impossible to miss. "I'll be sure to get out of your hair."

With that, Jim tipped up his chair, and slowly plodded away. He made sure to register his steps so that he didn't scurry, keeping his shoulders held high and his posture confident and tall. He had nothing to fear. He was not in the wrong.

It was not until he fell against the bathroom stall, finally at his work, that his muscles collapsed and his skeleton disintegrated. He slid to the cold, anomia-steeped floor, breathing heavily into the wall, a tsunami of shuddering, torturous spasms passing over his body.

It was more frigid than the frozen oceans of an Antarctic winter, but there was nothing Jim could do to warm himself up. And so he shivered, waiting helplessly for the cold to pass.