The Female Mid-Life Crisis

He also looked a lot like my husband.

At the conference, he gave a speech about our shared line of work. I don't know what he said. He could've been speaking Chinese. All I knew was that his voice affected me like wine and chocolate. In that cold conference room, I was suddenly loosened, languid, and I wanted more. Cupid surely giggled in the shadows behind the PowerPoint. Such a direct and easy hit I was.

He was divorced but had a girlfriend—had had one, that is. A week after we met, he informed me sadly by e-mail, from afar, that she'd dumped him. He was heartbroken.

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And so it began, the help-me-I'm-lonely Facebook messages, slowly graduating into (my) e-mailed confession of attraction, followed by “But you're married, aren't you?” followed by our arranging to meet in a city neither of us lived in.

It was a June day, just about the longest of the year. Not wanting to examine too closely how our day would, or could, end, we walked for miles and miles, from neighborhood to neighborhood, until I could barely stand. Swooning, stricken by desire, I kept catching his eye, staring at him like one mesmerized. Later, he'd tell me that he couldn't get “the look” I gave him out of his mind.