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wine—still arched upwards at the corners, giving Laura a sly, feline look. 
    True, her job as a Senior HR representative for a national law firm wasn’t as glamorous as the lifestyle of a groomed 26-year old heiress; but she was articulate, cunningly intelligent and possessed of a rapier-sharp wit. At 34, she may not be as young and bubbly as she once was when she first started dating Dan; but she was hardly an old maid, either. Laura was pretty enough, compassionate enough and adventurous enough (in heart, at least) to have her pick of any number of eligible men. So why have I been drinking wine alone for the past two years , she thought.
    For one, she had resigned herself to the luxury of remaining single. After overcoming her initial skepticism, she ventured into online dating a year after the divorce. It was a move she wound up regretting, since she found herself having to contend with a teeming horde of the perpetually cheating, aggressively creepy and just plain dull. She had needs like everyone else, perhaps even more so. But the few late-night and drunken trysts she spent after meeting relative strangers at a bar left her unfulfilled. The sex was, at best, mediocre—detached of any physical intimacy or connection, merely a rote standard default to friction -passionless, artless, dull friction. It was sweat-stained and humid, perhaps but still—both insensate and ungratifying.
    The sole exception—the only possible concession she would have made in those two years—would have been Rick, a patent attorney she worked with side by side. Rick was hardly Laura’s standard physical type; gaunt, pale and almost painfully thin, with a healthy shock of salt-and-pepper hair that was permanently unkempt, he resembled an artist rather than an attorney. Which he in fact was, taking up litigation only in the past ten years solely to help pay for his MS-stricken wife’s treatment. There was a fierce intelligence in Rick, erudition owing to his encyclopedic knowledge of classical Greek literature and philosophy, which he could quote and expound upon from memory alone. Laura admired and respected this eccentric figure, whose brown eyes seemed to burn with an inner torment. But what attracted her to Rick was something unspeakable—a primal magnetism he exuded from each pore, a feral passion she could sense burgeoning under his countless reference books and perpetually furrowed brows. She felt it reverberating in the pit of her stomach, and suspected it was mutual. They had taken to working late hours together, more often than not adjourning to Kelly’s, a nearby Irish bar directly across from their office. Over her proverbial gin and tonic and his proverbial Irish whisky—” Neat please, Jim-meh”—they’d shoot the breeze well into the evening, discussing anything from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to their own respectively rocky relationships. He took his marriage vows seriously, all the while admitting that as a man, he also had his own needs; and that where he could once release his frustrations through art, he now no longer even had that option.
    Laura sympathized with Rick, and felt an even stronger admiration for this man almost twenty years her senior. At the same time, it didn’t do anything to quell her draw towards him. On the contrary, it only fed the flames and she suspected that each time he caught a glance of her pouty lips trembling and her wide-open eyes that the feeling was likely mutual. One night, as they were walking past Love Park at around 10 p.m., she could take it no further. She stopped the taller (by nearly a foot) Rick dead in his tracks and seized him, forcing him to crane his neck down as she kissed him violently, hoping that the force and torpor of her lips would unlock his steely reserve. Her estimate proved correct, for they were soon groping one another furiously, obscured by the trees and serenaded by the rush of the fountain. They leaned back against a tree, their bodies pressed with