Temptation Betrayed

I don’t know exactly what happened, what overtook me. I never imagined I’d be one to so blatantly cross forbidden lines like that.
Sarah and I were just walking from the kitchen. I remained a few gentlemanly-measured steps behind her, watching her confidently stride down the passage towards the lounge. I was appreciating the way her pencil skirt and thin, white blouse moved with, and accentuated her figure.
She wasn’t a thin waif of a girl; she was full-figured but not overweight. Her thighs and buttocks flexed and tensed alluringly with every step she took. The thin material highlighting her curves while softening their strength. Familiar thoughts of lust played across the edge of my awareness while sensual montages danced behind the rebukes I’d learned to recite in the face of temptation.
Her step faltered for a moment. This was the beginning of the end. It was the briefest stretch of time one could imagine, the merest misstep that derails the most carefully constructed of plans.
Lost in my thoughts as I was, attempting to stave off the desires elicited by my wife’s married friend, I hardly noticed when she’d stopped to right herself, straightening the ankle that had twisted on one high heel.
Clear thought was dashed in the moment that our bodies unintentionally met. I bumped into her, it was a simple and innocent mistake and would have remained as such had my mind, afloat in a pool of imagined infidelity, not lost itself to the insanities of passion.
My hands found their way to her narrow waist. To help steady her footing? Maybe. It’s hard, in hindsight, not to make excuses, but there my traitorous hands remained while I drew in her presence, breathed in her scent.
She too was betrayed by the moment, one that had already lasted longer than reason should have allowed. As I unconsciously pressed myself closer to her she drew in a soft, sharp breath and almost imperceptibly arched her body back to meet mine.
We were both lost.
In gentle silence I pushed her forward, towards the wall. I said nothing. The deed was as good as done and words could only serve to confirm our guilt. Malleable under my touch, she allowed herself to be guided, only twisting in my grasp so that she was facing me when her back thumped against the wall. Our eyes searched one another’s faces – faces we’d once come to accept as nothing more than friends – taking in each detail of the instant before innocence was lost. Moving from her bare and inviting neck, up past her parted, waiting lips, my eyes fell upon hers and any remaining question of regret was gone. Regret exists in the realm of thought and I had become incapable of thinking, I only wanted to feel.
I pressed my mouth to hers, the taste of the experience rushing through me, thrilling me as my tongue slipped between her lips. She didn’t resist. Her arm wound around me until she found a handful of my hair and forced my lips harder against hers.
Our desperate need was palpable, our lust a tangible force that launched us across imagined lines of morality, even before they could be drawn. Now was all that mattered. Consequences could not exist in the present and as my hand slid up her skirt, my fingers digging into her bare thigh, the present was all that concerned me.
She gasped into my ear as I bit into her neck.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” her breathy words tried to inject rationality into an instant lost to thought, “what about Bianca and Jonathan?” logic appealed to a forgotten sense of remorse; she conjured the names of our spouses even as her hands clutched me tighter and her bared leg wrapped around mine.
We both knew that we could not turn back. All we could do was feign resistance for the sake of posterity and hope it would be enough to assuage the certainty of tomorrow’s guilt.
For in that moment, nothing in the world mattered to either of us as much as the pleasure of enjoying the other.

Later, our lusts fed, we lay spent and gasping for air amidst the disarray of sheets tainted by our feverish passions. The moment had passed and all that was left was fading euphoria, now slowly giving way to the reality of regret.
Sarah lay on her side, her leg draped over me. I lifted her face to mine and kissed her softly, completely unlike the ravenous kisses of earlier. The act was a wordless lie, a reassurance that I was happy with what had just happened, that something deeper than fleeting lust had motivated it.
Shame compelled me to pull a sheet over our glistening bodies. Our nudity, so glorious mere minutes ago, now seemed somehow inappropriate.
“That was great,” she muttered, without conviction. I didn’t know how to respond, so I grunted what I assumed could be taken as assent.
Neither of us could bring ourselves to broach the topic of “not telling”. We lay in near-perfect silence – waiting for some unknown cue – until its burden became too much for Sarah to bear. She slipped away from me and out from under the covers. The absurd obligations of misplaced modesty turned her away from my sight as she hurriedly gathered her clothes with one hand, the other trying to block my view of flesh that so recently was openly displayed in the throes of primal desire.
“Bianca will probably be home soon,” she explained, needlessly.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t see the point.
What was done was done, and there was nothing for it but to decide how to handle the situation we had placed ourselves in.
I had chosen to do nothing.
I simply lay there, the sweat-soaked sheets cold against my skin, and watched as she rushed to get dressed, her mind, no doubt, churning with ways we could unmake the entire situation.
I had accepted that we couldn’t.
She was right, of course, about Bianca being home soon. Neither of us knew how right, though. When we both looked up at the clicking sound of the turning door handle Sarah was still mostly undressed – looking almost ridiculous with the modesty of her calf-length skirt countered by the white-laced sexiness of her demi-cup bra.
It was Bianca, it had to be.
We were caught and I felt an undeniable sense of relief.
Sarah’s face was panic-stricken but, as Bianca rounded the door and entered the room, I found that my guilt at what we had done was surreally tempered by the knowledge of judgement to come.