“Okay, I’m going to show you something, but you have to take it to the grave, okay?”

Carmen, with a quick look around, wiggles down her jeans a bit, presenting to Kierk her left hip where there is, peeking out from behind the surprising red lace of her underwear, the black outline of a small dolphin.

“That. Is. Fantastic.”

“I got it when I was modeling with my girlfriends in Paris. Nobody actually spoke French but we were in a French tattoo parlor. It was a mess. I don’t know. I like it now because it reminds me of who I was. And who I am now.”

“I’m so telling Alex.”

He blocks Carmen’s kick.

“So do you want to play hooky?” she asks.

They report back to Max and let him know everything went (Carmen’s word) “swimmingly” and tell Max not to forget the mouse head waiting for him in the freezer. Kierk feels like he is the victor of this game and so he grins his best shit-eating grin at Max as they leave.

When Max hears their high-five before they get on the elevator his anger fades. Thinking of office romances brings only sadness. Karen’s been avoiding him. Karen who up till now had always been drama-free, had always been wet and humorous (a sense of humor, when had his wife lost hers?), and it was that sense of humor, that thrown-back horse laugh, an equine whinny, even at her own jokes, that attracted him so much. Without her he feels like he is slowly reentering some sort of prison, that gates are closing behind him . . .

After their last liaison, Max had left to pick up Chinese food for his family. Then at home he had watched his son try to open the white box of fried rice, and Max had insisted—“Let him do it himself.” And his son, who at that age should have been in school learning trigonometry, instead couldn’t open even a simple takeout box, and after fiddling with it for a while (hands along the top, then the sides, then even the bottom) had just stopped and stared at it like it was the greatest puzzle in all the universe.

The two forms brush past Karen as they exit the CNS, so wrapped up in each other they don’t glance up to acknowledge her. She watches Carmen double over laughing as Kierk is gesturing, and then they are out of view. Maybe just a year ago she would have disapproved, but now since Max and she had begun the affair (even though it feels clichéd to even think the word) she just wants people to do what makes them happy.