Something Forbidden Read Free Page B

years, although I thought about her all the time. She showed up in my advanced statistics class, a course I had to take for my MBA, and one Katie was taking because she was looking for a challenge. It was like fate; before, she’d been 16 and I was 21, but now, 19 and 24 didn’t seem all that implausible. When I asked her out and she said yes, it turned out she’d been thinking the same thing.
    I looked over at her now, studying the more mature Katie. Her cheeks were more pronounced than that girl I’d first met, the cuteness of youth falling away to chiseled beauty. She had her head cocked to one side, her focus on the couple on the dais who were exchanging their nuptials. She’d always liked weddings, even if she didn’t particularly like the bride for this one...
    Which led my thoughts down a more lurid path. Nadia looked like a fucking model up there in her strapless white gown. Her lustrous black hair had been curled and constructed up and off her long neck and round-faced beauty. Despite her Indian roots, her parents had grown up in Canada and this wedding was a hundred percent Western. A few bright saris dotted the audience, but most wore black suits and formal dresses, like Katie.
    I was attracted to Nadia. It was pointless to deny that. Even Katie knew it. But there was a difference between attraction and temptation. With Katie by my side, it was pretty easy to have one without the other.
    “Do you, Nadia Bhatti, take John Mitchell to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
    “I do.”
    The love in Nadia’s words was almost tactile. I reached over and squeezed Katie’s hand. She glanced at me, smiling back. Then returned to the exchange of vows.
    My mind returned to its wandering path. To one night, back at the original Callahan, when Nadia had just been a shift manager with a lot of promise. I’d been working the bar along with her, but it was quiet so I’d decided to take off early. Only when I got half-way home, I remembered I’d forgotten something back in the office—so I turned around.
    To this day, my ears still get hot at the memory of what I saw next. By the time I got back, she’d already closed down the bar and most of the lights were off. I entered the bar from the back, where the office was, and was about to call out a hello when I heard the unmistakable timbre of a woman’s moan. I should have left at that moment. I knew all about Nadia’s liberated spirit and she’d been flirting mercilessly with a patron all night. I couldn’t not look.
    Creeping down the hall, I saw them as clear as day. Nadia was splayed across the bar on her back, one leg looped over the bartender as his hips rose and fell, the other dangling off the polished edge. I drank it all in: her black hair spilling around her, her smooth, dusky skin, the way her breasts bounced with each thrust.
    Fuck me, fuck me! She was moaning, her cries high and ragged like his thrusts were tearing them out of her throat. She arched up into him, her dark brown nipples hard.
    “I now pronounce you Husband and Wife.”
    The groan of the organs broke me out of my revelry. Katie squeezed my hand, and when I looked over at her, my face flooded with guilt. It had been almost four years since that incident—Mya had been nothing but a bump in Katie’s belly—and I’d never told her about it. She’d always been jealous of Nadia. Finding out that I’d watched my young employee climax on my bar wouldn’t be productive.
    The triumphant chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March washed most of my guilt away. I decided to wash the rest of it away at the reception’s open bar.
    Some guys love dancing with their women. Something about showing them off, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t like dancing and it was never something the two of us did very much. Truth be told, I can probably count the number of dances we’ve shared since our wedding on one hand.
    Katie, on the other hand, loved dancing. She’d taken lessons when she was a teenager for her