This wasn’t the smile, though. This was the grin-a version of it he seemed to save just for these sessions. She had an idea that to Gerald, who was on the inside of it, the grin felt wolfish. Piratical, maybe. From her angle, however, lying here with her arms raised above her head and nothing on but a pair of bikini panties, it only looked stupid. No… retarded. He was, after all, no devil-may-care adventurer like the ones in the men’s magazines over which he had spent the furious ejaculations of his lonely, overweight puberty; he was an attorney with a pink, too-large face spreading below a widow’s peak which was narrowing relentlessly toward total baldness. just an attorney with a hard-on poking the front of his undershorts out of shape. And only moderately out of shape, at that.

The size of his erection wasn’t the important thing, though. The important thing was the grin. It hadn’t changed a bit, and that meant Gerald hadn’t taken her seriously. She was supposed to protest; after all, that was the game.

“Gerald? I mean it.”

The grin widened. A few more of his small, inoffensive attorney’s teeth came into view; his IQ tumbled another twenty or thirty points. And he still wasn’t hearing her.

Are you sure of that?

She was. She couldn’t read him like a book-she supposed it took a lot more than seventeen years of marriage to get to that point-but she thought she usually had a pretty good idea of what was going through his head. She thought something would be seriously out of whack if she didn’t.

If that’s the truth, toots, how come he can’t read you? How come hecan’t see this isn’t just a new scene in the same old sex-farce?