Gail’s arrival, interesting to deal with from the vantage point of silence and solitude in a warm bath, hit like a large rock in a shallow pool. The impact of what had happened the previous night, how it would be resolved now, caught her up breathless. When she’d felt the impulse to fuck Eliot the night before, all the considerations which might have stopped her were quickly and easily swept away into the hollow tube of erotic tunnel vision. She dismissed the problem of Martin. They were separated, and anyway, he would never find out. Besides, she had already cheated on him with Eliot a year earlier. Dealing with the question of her relationship to Gail was a bit more tricky. Eliot slept with many other women; Julia knew that. So it wasn’t as though she were taking a faithful husband away for a rare fuck. Also, Eliot wasn’t Gail’s husband and probably would never be. Gail hadn’t spoken too much about their affair, but Julia got the impression that her friend, while deeply involved, had not let herself fully fall in love.
