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Love, Lust and the Imaginary Lover

She wanted to cry and tell him she loved him, and he meant the world to her. Then she would immediately want an Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s. Hot. She wanted it hot, wrapped in a grease-soaked paper with black coffee and a room full of strangers ignoring her eating it.

That’s love, she supposed–thwarted by food.

She did not understand why she loved him other than he was older, past his prime and looked oh so comfortable. What was she but older, just past her prime and oh so uptight?

Fantasies whirled about in her mind about him while she was alone in her apartment. Wonderful visions helped her sleep at night. Those same romps through fantasy land had the most evil tendency to crop up in her mind while on the phone at work or during a committee meeting.  The imagined groan of ecstasy or the most uninhibited scenes of physical love she contrived in her mind would make the tips of her ears glow red while glimpsing him in his office. Male coworkers looked away confused, female coworkers clucked at her “isn’t the change awful,” or “those hot flashes, my mother went through that, just terrible.”

Wanting to cackle, turn green and rubbed her crystal ball for some weird reason, she just bent her head and prayed for mundane concentration.

While on her ten-minute breaks in the basement, she thought back to her teenage years while on her 10-minute breaks; those new awkward years when boys looked tantalizing. A quiet girl who never took part in the wild antics of youth because she discovered too late that she was normal. She never played out her fantasies as a girl, and it looked as if she would not now as a “mature” woman. In her more sane moments, which was when he was present, oddly enough, she often thought her fantasies were more rewarding than probable reality.

Why the fast food craving at her lowest ebbs was beyond her.

What was to become of her? Those low flowing moments when her own life weighed down upon her; being alone, budgeting for a ripe old age, thinking of cats and knitting as a hobby all made her shudder with despondency and long for a lover.

Imagining him not able to speak English and the two of them explaining what shirt, panties, bra meant in their respective languages, she almost choked on her coffee next morning during a sales team meeting.

He asked her once to make copies for him and dictate a letter; he was the old-fashioned type, but she could accommodate. His black suit was double-breasted and hung perfectly across his wide shoulders. He wore a silk tie, a shade of blue she couldn’t name, but him wearing black and blue made her shiver and smile.

“You must be having a good day,” noticing her smile. His voice deep and relaxed said the words in a preoccupied manner.

“Yes,” she said, barely raising her head and imagining a missed fleck of shaving cream just behind his left ear.

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