Starting Out in the Evening - Brian Morton
Sitting at his kitchen table, she took off her sweater. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt; she wanted to show off her bare arms. She had muscular arms for a woman, from years of working out.
This is what a seductress is, she thought.
It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him -- not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people -- male or female -- was one of the supreme pleasures of life. Ever since she was in high school -- ever since fifth grade, really, with her failed poet of an English teacher -- intellectual communion and intense flirtation had grown from the same root. She'd always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: she desired this man's learning or that woman's. The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. Heather didn't merely want her teachers to teach her: she wanted them to single her out.
She had broken a few of her teachers' hearts with all this.
This is what a seductress is, she thought.
It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him -- not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people -- male or female -- was one of the supreme pleasures of life. Ever since she was in high school -- ever since fifth grade, really, with her failed poet of an English teacher -- intellectual communion and intense flirtation had grown from the same root. She'd always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: she desired this man's learning or that woman's. The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. Heather didn't merely want her teachers to teach her: she wanted them to single her out.
She had broken a few of her teachers' hearts with all this.