"It just seems¹ like this could become a conflict of interest."

_____________________________

¹      Thomas said this not as transcribed, for that would be nearly impossible — taking into account the weight of his breaths and the sweat in which he was covered that hadn't even dried to stickiness when he began to drift into sleep would be a monumental feat in itself.

"It just seems¹ like this could become a conflict of interest."

____________________________

¹      Thomas said this not as transcribed, for that would be nearly impossible — taking into account the weight of his breaths and the sweat in which he was covered that hadn't even dried to stickiness when he began to drift into sleep would be a monumental feat in itself. And that doesn't account for his mathematical way of speaking, for he had found in grad school that he preferred to speak as though each clause was a logical function of which he was considering the validity, though he generally wasn't and couldn't even, after half a decade in a high school classroom teaching 30 students at a time totaling 60 students a day (or 120 students a week) why we have so much trouble dividing by zero, and then another few years as principle of a different school (with an understandable time in between spent in various, and equally numbing, administrative positions) that found him in the middle of a bullying epidemic, remember the symbols of formal logic — except for his favorite, the triple-bar, or three-lined equals sign, which indicated, as he liked to explain on first dates, that while one side equals the other, the other also equals the one. Suffice it to say that Thomas did not often go on second dates. But this is only the beginning of our difficulty, as his word choice and diction also invoked his feelings about Bailey, whom he met when he interviewed her and with whom he fell in love during a staff meeting that found her making the last possible clever Titanic joke, this being eight years after the fact, but knowing that she was taken so that his feelings had to become lust, and then become nothing at all — or so they seemed, anyway, while they were only waiting for her to lose her attachments. And now, of course, she shared his bed and had early-morning hair and breath, and the fact of a body was much newer to him than the fact of no body so he didn't know, frankly and surely, that he couldn't expect her to look and smell the same now as she had. Lastly, there was a nearly imperceptible element that, though he could barely understand it, Thomas felt to be the most important to reflect, which was how she felt about him; or, rather, how he thought she saw him — in his post-coital state the last few weeks had been forgotten and only his best qualities were emphasized: intelligence (and who should not be proud of a graduate degree in mathematics?), power (for if his wasn't a powerful position in actuality, it seemed so, at least, to those who didn't have it, and the perception of power is just as well as power — which is, in fact, the crux of the conflict, for he wasn't lying about that [please don't mistake our unease for his being dishonest], the fear that once a conflict is conceived, the conception is impossible to clear), his sense of humor (because he had not grown stodgy enough to dismiss Dane Cook), and his ability, which he praised above all as humility, to recognize his own weaknesses. Still, our attempt to encompass his full meaning is meant in earnest.