Second Time Around

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What is it with him? Why is he looking at me like that?

I glance across the assembly hall, and he’s staring at me as if I’m some hot chick he’s just spotted in a bar. A total stranger, but one he fancies. He’s undressing me with his eyes, the way men who know exactly what to do with a woman do. Men who know they can get away with it too.

I start to sweat. My heart flutters like a bird inside my rib cage. Down there, oh God, in my crotch, I can feel myself getting hot and slippery and aching and tense.

I can’t believe it. He’s my ex-husband. I shouldn’t feel like this.

A server hovers at my elbow with a tray of glasses and I grab a glass of sparkling plonk and take a long swallow from it. The wine’s pleasant, but I barely taste it. Even the alcohol doesn’t register, I’m so shaken…so…so aroused.

Get a grip, Willa. Stay in control. It’s James and you’re bound to feel a bit weird seeing him again after three years. But there’s nothing to get in a tizz and go to pieces over.

Yes, that’s right. It’s just surprise. Nothing more. Physical signals a bit scrambled. Bound to happen when it’s a man you’ve been intimate with.

But he never used to look at me like that, not even when we were first married. Or even when we were high school pupils here, boarders at exclusive Walton Wood College and two randy teenagers just crazy-mad for one another.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here? School reunion, not my thing really. Everybody playing at one-upmanship, my career’s better than your career, my marriage is better than your marriage, my kids are better than your kids.

Yes, stupid to come here when my marriage foundered and even the career I thought I wanted isn’t turning out to be as spectacular as I’d hoped.

And I really don’t like feeling out of control like this!

It’s all James’s fault. For being different. For being…new somehow.

Oh hell, he’s coming across again. What shall I do?

As my ex-husband weaves across the hall, amongst my former classmates and teachers, his blue eyes narrow and assess me. By the time he reaches me, he’s covered every inch of my body, and he’s retracing the journey, flicking back to hover explicitly at my breasts, at my crotch. Blushing harder than I ever did in school, I want to toss my head and look away, outraged. But I can’t. I just can’t. It’s like he’s hypnotized me.

My mouth drops open when he quirks his lips, lifts his drink to me in an insolent toast, then takes a long swallow in a way that makes my sex flutter as his Adam’s apple works in his long tanned throat. Is he ever going to speak, or just keep on staring me down, making me hot?

“Enjoying yourself, Willa?”

“Yes…sort of. I’m not sure…”

I sound like an idiot. God, I’m never like this. What is he doing to me?

He takes another sip from his glass, eyeing me over it. “That’s not like you, love. You always know what you feel. What you want.”

The word want makes me shudder. Right down there again, in my pussy.

What the hell’s happened to the man who was my James? He was my childhood sweetheart. We dated here at Walton Wood, and wed later, when we’d got our degrees, and had what I thought was the whole world at our feet. Now I feel as if some kind of Stepford Husband scenario has happened in reverse. And the mild-mannered, so often too-tired-to-fight-or-fuck man I married has turned into a dangerous stranger, a new breed of steely, threatening cyborg. Sort of like the Terminator, but with emotions. Lots of emotions, and most of them sexual confidence and charisma.

Opening my mouth to retort…something…anything…I snap it shut again when a group of circulating reunion guests pitch up beside us. It’s all “Hello,” “How are you?,” “What are you doing these days?” between James and I, and the newcomers. Under other circumstances, I’d be interested, nosy even, genuinely wanting to know how people have fared, especially one of our teachers, the cute but quirky Mr. Laurence, who seems to have been in the wars, poor man, and now walks with a stick. He had us all laughing with a surprisingly funny math joke, and even though James seemed to be laughing along, when I glanced at him, he was smiling at me. Only at me. His eyes were steady, steel in the blue, and the way they speared into me made me tremble in my smart pumps, and a fresh rush of blood made my face and ears and chest turn rosy pink.

I’m sweating now, when I look at him, and I can’t think straight. I thought I was over him that way. We grew apart. I can’t still want him, now we’ve split…or can I?

And yet like a hunter, he’s watching me, sizing me up. As the chat goes on, I try glaring at him, to make him stop, but he only gives me that smile, that goddamn smile!

“Drink, madam?”

The server, superefficient, is at my elbow with more drinks. I have to hand it to my old classmate Caitlyn, her catering firm’s really organized this shindig to perfection. As I reach for more Chardonnay, I make a note to seek her out and congratulate her on a job well done. At least