Yes, yes.

I did more than amend my arithmetic. And more, yes. Yes, more than cast my eyes across her thighs. (And yet woke today with a calm that was nearly pathological). The article in Evolution and Human Behaviour had stirred a craving for confirmation of client R.'s menstrual cycle. Although in eighteen years of practice I have never touched a client, please god I spared her that, and the physical stirring while strong was containable, yet as our session closed the yearnings became one, a terrible, intolerable need to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. And so, without the word ever formulating itself in my mind, I was soon at ground level, on the High Street, stalking my client.

I was darting in and out of the crowd, the traffic. Walking is not the word, suggesting a conscious ego, whereas my body was simply moving itself into space, as if the breath of the crowd were inhaling me. I saw her stop at a cash dispenser, waited as the notes entered her palm, spotted the decrease in waist-to-hip ratio as she strode up some steps, indicative of ovulation, saw a unusual increase in facial animation with a mere street vendor, indicative, again, of ovulation, and then stared at her reflection in the window of a boutique for second hand clothes, indicative, again. I was losing my mind.

And yet later, calmed with a brandy and a quarter pipe in my kitchen, having decided I was certain she had not seen me, I sensed the whole meaning of my pursuit lay, less with client R., but in the insatiable need for endings (they that will be the death of us) and, therefore, lay earlier on in the day, at breakfast, in my failure to finish reading that intolerable article in the latest edition of Evolution and Human Behaviour. And so, as the awareness of this seeped from my mind into my body, I threw the journal into the bin, took myself upstairs to bed and slept like a baby.