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"Meet me outside."
If she agreed — she always would if she could — she'd smile and dip her face almost imperceptibly. I would go out of the office into the hallway alone. My pulse would race, my hands were sweaty, and I would want to run past the bank of elevators down to the staircase landing between floors, even though I knew I would have to wait. Virginia was more discreet than I; she took her time. I was consumed with haste. I couldn't stand still as I waited. It never failed me then. It never let me, or itself, down when she joined me finally, hurrying also, and I began kissing her clumsily on the nose, cheekbone, and mouth, crashing teeth with hers so hard I thought my own must break, and squeezing and grabbing her in different places, pressing and rubbing it against her so savagely it hurt — she was panting too, but laughing as well — for the four or five seconds or one-eighth of a minute she'd allow me before she'd lie:
"Someone's coming."
Those were swift, incredible trysts we enjoyed sometimes every two or three hours a day on the landing between floors of the office of living people working above and the cramped, dingy, unoccupied storeroom below filled with cabinets of dead records that must have seemed important to somebody sometime in the past, or they would not have been kept. Hardly anybody ever looked at them anymore. They were accidents, old, forgotten casualties in blanched folders with blue or purple data on the outside and sheets of various types of legal and medical information inside. From folder to folder the facts were similarly old and uninteresting. (I soon stopped snooping into them.) They were settled cases of people who were closed.
"Somebody's coming," she would exclaim to me with a panic-stricken gasp when she decided my time was up, and be out of my hands and gone, even though nobody ever was.
I always wanted much more of her then, right there on the staircase, when I knew I couldn't have it. (I have gotten laid in bizarre and illogical places since — my wife goes for that kind of adventure too — but never, sad to say, on a staircase. We have a good staircase in our home in Co
"Slower. Slower." Her voice was cooing, soothing. "That's better, darling. You scare me."
I was flushed and perspiring like a feverish baby. I wanted to lie on my back, gurgle cherubically, and kick my feet. I had never been called darling by anyone before.
"Darling."
(It goes a long way still.)
I was usually hindered in these frenzied assaults by those damned accident folders I'd brought, for I'd invariably forgot to put them down. I'd have to slide them behind her shoulders and brace her against the wall as I kissed and licked, snorted and groped; they would fall to the floor and spill open when she wrung herself away from me. I can still remember the cool, slick feel of her panties each time I touched them, my sense of miraculous astonishment that I was able to touch them at all.
"Somebody's coming," she'd repeat in a growl.
(In another two seconds it would have been me.)
I would have to let her go, for she herself would suddenly turn wild with fright. There was boiling lunacy around us. The glint in her eyes was penetrating and slightly insane as she tugged her skirt down and made ready to run off, endeavoring to smile, I think she was more greatly aroused by my touch beneath her skirt than she had expected. And I was too rough. (She could have been wide open for me then if I knew how.) She is closed now. Virginia is closed now, like those people in the storeroom whose cases had been settled in one way or another. So am I. And lying among them like flaked stains now in that dreary storeroom for dead records are my own used-up chances for attaining sexual maturity early, for getting laid young (or what we considered young). I could have had her there. I could have done it to her right on the desk top or floor of the storeroom (she all but asked me to. But I didn't know what to say) or in one of her friends' apartments or in a hotel room while still a gawking, young, moronic, ski