At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfo rt.

This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she'd given all of two hours' thought to her decision. She'd taken a liking to Don Armour's eyes and mouth, she'd determined that she owed him the thing he wanted—and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to her (I could lose my virginity tonight), and she'd leaped at the chance.

She was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn't what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, "Sorry —big mistake." She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted. She expected that an affair, if you took the trouble to start it, went on for quite a while.