Forbidden Fruit by KristenK2
Written for Rev. Anna
He enjoys watching her eat grapes at her desk. It's a secret pleasure he's allowed himself over the years; in his most lighthearted moments, it amuses him to think of it as "forbidden fruit". She shouldn't be eating at her desk, and he shouldn't be spying on her. But neither one can seem to break the habit, and after a while it feels like it's a mutual vice.
The first
time, there is a measure of guilty concern involved; is he
working her so hard she doesn't have time for a full lunch break? Is she
unable to keep up with the unrelenting pace of his office? Has he brought
her up from the general clerical pool too soon for her skill level? He
debates approaching her with his worries, or lessening her workload in
the late mornings, but neither move seems practical.
Soon after,
he realizes his concerns are, well, fruitless; eating her
afternoon bag of grapes is a perfect reflection of her abilities. From
the angle of their desks, he can't see her face, but he can hear her.
As she grabs another grape, the sound of her fingers on the keyboard ceases
only for the briefest of moments, then resumes its rhythmic pace. Clack,
clack, pause, clack, clack, clack. It takes him longer to find the shift
key.
He can't
see her, but he can see the fruit. Pre-stripped from their
stems, the fresh green grapes lay flat in a clear bag, the opening just
wide enough to fit her small hand. It darts in and out too fast for him
to actually see her take the fruit out, but he knows she's eating them
just the same. As the afternoon progresses, as calls come in and meetings
are scheduled and reports are typed, the bag of fruit empties steadily.
When she surreptitiously slips the bag into her top drawer, he rightly
takes it as a signal that someone is heading for her office door. By three
o'clock sharp, her desk is clean once again, and the only evidence that
anything not work-related was ever there is a faint lingering sweetness
on her breath.
The efficiency of her system charms him. Everything about her afternoon snack -- from the rapid-fire way she eats the grapes, to the assumed preparation involved in stripping and bagging them at home, even to her choice of fruit -- echoes the qualities he appreciates most about her. Grapes are a simple fruit, uncomplicated and tidy and reliable. Their small rounded shape doesn't necessitate messy cleanup, and they don't require a lot of attention or effort to enjoy their full flavor. He's not a man given to the abstraction of metaphor, but even he can't ignore how aptly her illicit snack describes her.
He feels
foolish for his original doubts about her competence. If she
wonders about the over-abundance of praise in her performance review the
following month, she says nothing. She only smiles and thanks him, her
eyes bright with a piercing honesty as she tells him working for him is
one of the great pleasures in her life.
It's only years later that he realizes her comment disheartened him.
+++++
That feeling
of disappointment festers unexamined until the day she
switches fruit. He notes the change in the color inside the clear bag,
but it doesn't register at first; he assumes the grocery store only had
red grapes available this week. Then the sharp sweet smell of raspberries
wafts from her space to his, and a surprising flash of anger rushes through
him.
The anger continues to swell as he watches and hears her, her neat and organized system unchanged by the switch in fruit. Clack, clack, pause, clack, clack, clack.
The discordant
noise grates on him all afternoon, disrupting his
thought processes even when the door is closed between them. The oblivious
agent sitting in front of his desk drones on about the successful results
of his case, all of which are documented in the file on Skinner's desk.
A file handed to him by Kim just as the meeting began; under the pretense
of the debriefing, he skims through the pages looking for a telltale red
stain. There's nothing there but clean white edges, but the absence only
serves to fuel his irrational anger hotter.
Raspberries
should be savored, not eaten furtively under fluorescent
lights, not nibbled at while printers spew out copies of memos. They're
meant to be eaten slowly, in a cool ceramic bowl brimming over with heavy
white cream on rainy Sunday mornings. In a silver spoon aglow under flickering
candlelight, the brittle crack of the crisp layer of the creme brulee
softened by her laughing voice. In the wild, the heady rays of the sun
burnishing coppery hair and bald scalps, the tiny thorns nipping at his
fingertips as he pulls a berry off the bush and raises it to her stained
lips, his own mouth following the path of his fingers and tasting the
sweet fruit against her tongue.
At the unbidden
images, Skinner sits forward with a start, but he
manages to brush off the agent's concerned look with a wave of his hand.
He focuses all of his attention on the details of the remainder of the
meeting, not giving the unfading thought of kissing her any consideration
until he asks the other man to close the door behind him as he leaves.
Forbidden
fruit. Once alone, the irony weighs heavy in his chest; as
his admin and closest subordinate, she's as forbidden to him as the apple
was to Adam. The reasons are myriad, and he barely needs to remind himself
of their existence. He knows them all instinctively, as if they've hovered
in the back of his mind for years.
Maybe they have, he concedes with a sigh. Not that the timing matters; he's no more likely to act on his desires now than he was then. Too much is at stake, and he can't put his position -- or hers -- at risk like that. His anger fades into resignation as he banishes the thought of kissing her back into the furthest corner of his mind, where it should have stayed from the beginning.
Still, it's
difficult to resist the temptation of being near her, and
when the opportunity of handing her a file arises, he takes it. She
doesn't notice him approaching right away, and he stops in the doorway,
transfixed by the naked expression on her face. A damp lock of her hair
strays across her forehead in the unremitting afternoon sunlight, and
her eyes are half-shut, unfocused in pleasure. A quiet, womanly smile
curves one corner of her unstained lips, and it strikes him hard that
she would look just like that as she came. Before he can push the thought
away, she turns her face toward him, her startled gaze immediately connecting
with his embarrassed one, and her smile expands to engulf them both
in a shared secret.
In that brief
instant, he realizes the desire for forbidden fruit has
been mutual all along.
THE END
