He sat there pretending to listen, but the truth was his focus was already broken. She leaned just close enough that her perfume blended with the faint warmth of her breath against his collar. It wasn’t a kiss, wasn’t even a touch, but the weight of it unsettled him. Every word she spoke carried less meaning than the space between them—her pause, her glance, the deliberate way her voice softened when his wife’s name surfaced. He told himself it was accidental, but he knew better. She knew better too.
The tension didn’t come from what she said; it came from what she didn’t. The tilt of her head lingered longer than necessary, the way her hair brushed forward as if offering him the excuse to look. His hand twitched, tempted to adjust his collar, yet he didn’t. She was watching for that small reaction, the confirmation that her nearness wasn’t ignored. And when her lips curved, not into a laugh but something slower, he realized she wasn’t simply leaning closer—she was testing how far his restraint would hold.
By the time she pulled back, nothing had actually happened. No touch, no crossing of lines. Yet he carried the sensation as if she had traced her mouth against his skin. That was her game: not the act itself, but the implication, the lingering question of how much longer he could play innocent if she kept whispering with her breath instead of her words.