"One boring day in September, a co-worker brushed her fingers against my bare forearm, and when I glanced up, she held my eye contact a fraction too long. A millisecond."

"In the time it took for me to blush, the entire world shifted, came into focus, brightened. She was a charismatic person in the workplace with an unofficial fan club. It wasn’t her masculine energy that attracted me. It was her ability to make any day fun, her intense brown eyes and my own strangling loneliness. Her attention was flattering. I was stunned that I had worked with her for a couple of years and not noticed our chemistry before. How could I have missed it? I had been boy-crazy in junior high and married to my husband exactly 20 years. I had never considered anything other than male partners. She became my work wife, in office terms, and then some. Though I considered myself straight, I crushed hard. The idea was in my head, and this woman was in my heart. My husband lived only in my house...."

From "Seduced, Then Scorned, by My Work Wife/With my husband checked out of our marriage, I found flirtation at the office. It didn’t go well" a NYT "Modern Love" column by Carrie Malinowski.