I’d Die If My Husband Found Out

It was the most fun job I'd ever had. Not the best job, mind you, nor the best paying job. And certainly not the longest lasting job, because I could only do it for three years, before I had to get back to serious career building. But, it was the most fun job I could have imagined. And there were side benefits too. Pat was one of them and this story is about what she saw in me and why I got lucky. It took place when I was a lot younger than I am now.

But, perhaps I should start at the beginning. I'm a scientist and a damn good one. And a physician - and I'm even better at that. I've got every college degree that counts and two of the three-striper kind – plus all the post-doc work you can imagine. I was building my career in academic medicine at a big league university in the northeast. For those of you who think of friendly professors inside quiet, ivory-covered walls – think again! Academic medicine is the most cutthroat, vicious, competitive sport there is – it makes bare-knuckle, ultimate fighting seem tame by comparison.

I had just got my tenure. Most of the bodies lie in the trench just short of tenure. But the guys who get tenure are the most competitive of all, so that's when the fighting over space and budget gets even dirtier.

And then I got an offer I could not refuse. Congress had just approved a big budget increase for research in a really bad killer disease – by coincidence a disease that was my specialty. The NIH (don't worry about the initials because nothing in Washington has a name, just letters and numbers) had received authorization for a three-year appointment for an outside expert to run the expanded program.

To make a long story short I got the job. It paid half of what I was earning, but it gave me the power to fund most of the investigators in my specialty all across the country. To be fair, committees recommended the funding, but I appointed the committees and I didn't have to deal with Study Sections.

A lot of empires were going to be built – research empires – at selected universities from coast to coast. Each one would have a king. A lot of would-be kings were going to bend over and kiss my ass – and smile as they did it. That's power!

When I got the job a very wise friend of mine gave me some advice: "The smartest guys in the country are going to start telling you how smart you are and you'll know they're lying through their teeth, so you'll give them money. But, remember, the time will come when you start to believe them. That's when you'll be just like every other asshole in Washington – and that's the time to leave."

He was right! Boy was he right! I had planned to leave after three years and it's a good thing I did, because that was just about the time his prediction came true. When Nobel laureates tell you how smart you are and you start to believe them, it's time to leave Washington and go back to the real world. And I did. But I had a hell of a lot of fun for three years and I learned how Washington really works – and you don't want to know that. And – maybe – just maybe – I did something useful.

So, anyway, I got an apartment on Mass Avenue, just north of the British Embassy, and moved the stuff I hadn't placed in storage to my apartment. Then I met my staff, such as it was. Suffice it to say I would never have hired any one of them. They had cushy jobs, most serving out the remaining years of their PHS (don't ask) appointments. The young administrative assistants, however, I certainly would have hired. Most of them were knowledgeable as well as lookers and they traded on their looks – that's the way Washington is.

There were about a hundred PO1 grants (don't ask), all seven figure programs, that would be under my supervision and all would be competing for their share of the new funds – along with a bunch of wanna-bees. These grants were divided up among the professional level people of my staff for supervision and administration.

My first staff meeting was an unmitigated disaster. I began asking my staff about the programs under their supervision and it was like a contest in ignorance, each guy trying to show that he knew less than the guy next to him. I got the sick feeling that I was on my own – I would get no help from my staff. The only positive thing that happened the first day was that I discovered a gal with a choice set of lungs – Pat was her name and she was an administrative assistant to one of the dorks. I figured I should reassign her duties immediately – and I did – to me.

Then I went to lunch over at the clinical center. These guys were not administrators. They were top medical scientists and I knew several of them in my specialty quite well. They asked if I had met my staff and, when I said I had, they started to laugh. It was no secret that the grant administrators were at the bottom of the barrel in the institute. We talked about my opportunity to do some good – and to screw up. Big opportunities for both!

"You're not gonna get any help," one of them said. "You're gonna have to figure out how to spend the whole damn thing yourself. The only thing they're gonna give you is bad advice."

He was right. I had work to do. When I got back, I asked for all the grant application files to be brought to my office. My request was greeted with open-mouthed disbelief.

"All of them?" My Deputy asked.

"All of them," I responded. "Just pile them up along that wall over there." I pointed to where I wanted them.

"You're gonna read them all?" My Deputy asked in wonder.

"Just get me the files," I said.

They figured I was bluffing. No one, they thought, could possibly read all of those grants – much less understand them. I suspected that not one of them understood the science behind even one of the grants they were supposed to fund and supervise.

I left early and went to get some things for my new apartment.

The next morning when I got to my office the grants were there. They were stacked about four feet high and covered at least ten feet of wall space. Each grant was about the size of a thick "problem patient" chart. The kind I had to master every time I changed services at the university hospital. Difficult, but not impossible. I took off my coat and tie, got out a yellow note pad, and started to work.

A scientist I respected, once said to me that, "Science is like one of those old fashioned mailboxes you used to see at hotels – you know, a little box for each room. Some of them have notes in them – others are empty. In science you need to get a grasp of what we know – the boxes with notes – and what we don't know – the empty ones. What we're trying to do is fill the empty boxes and you gotta know which is which."

As I read each grant I moved it to the other side of the office. Good scientists write good grants – straightforward and easy to understand. They describe what they had done and what they planned to do and how they would do it and what it would cost. It was easy to summarize and to remember their work. Bad scientists write bad grants, telling what they planned to do, but with very little idea as to how they would go about doing it. They were easy to summarize too. The ones that took most of my time were the ones in the middle – where I had to separate pearls from horseshit.

By the end of the first week, working late each night, I had been through everything once and all the grant folders were stacked against the opposite wall. The good ones and the bad ones I didn't need to read again. I spent the next week re-reading the ones in between. Then I started to summarize my notes on three-by-five cards. My first time through I had a dozen cards – too many. I re-grouped the grants and wrote down only what I couldn't remember – mostly dollar numbers, priority scores, and a few words next to each PI. Finally, writing very small, I got the whole thing on three cards. Still too many!

There is nothing like a face-to-face conversation to understand what a scientist is doing and how well he is doing it. So, after two weeks of drudgery in my office I hit the road. For another three weeks, I site visited most of my programs and when I finished I was down to only one three-by-five card. That card became famous among my staff and later throughout the institute.

I knew what I thought about these guys, and what my reviewers described on their "pink sheets," but what did they think about each other? I found a company that makes an index of citations on every paper published in a peer-reviewed journal. I got a contract with this company to prepare a composite citation index on all the investigators listed on each big program project grant. When a scientist cites the work of another scientist it is an indication that he respects that work. These data went on my three-by-five card so I could compare different programs (but, by now, I had to use both sides of the card).

A little over a month on the job and I had busted my ass big time! But I knew everything in my program – knew what I had – knew what I needed – knew who to give more money to – who to ditch at the first opportunity – and hardest of all, I knew who I had to study a lot more to figure out if they were real.

And I had the stuff to back it up: what my reviewers thought of each project, what I thought of each project, and what the scientists themselves thought of each other's work, based on citations. Now I could sit back and figure out how Washington works, so I could do what I had to do. And I found out how Washington works – boy did I find out - but again – you don't want to know – you really don't. In the end I had to use every trick of a very ugly trade to get the job done right. But I did it!

Pat had been helping and watching me every day as I learned the job. At first she thought I was just like everybody else in grants administration – a dullard. Then, slowly, as she watched me work with applicants and top scientists who wanted money, she got more interested and showed a new respect. She saw that I was different – I really understood what our money was paying for. Sometimes, when she saw respected scientists defer to my opinion, she would look at me in a very strange way.

Pat was a twenty-something, brunet, Italian gal from south Philly – built like a masonry comfort station, with a face men dream about, and eyes that could flash pure sex or utter contempt. She was about five foot four, with nice hip moves when she walked, and a lovely dark complexion. Her tits were what guys noticed first, but she had a great brain that kept her on top of her work. She was a big help to me.

Pat was married to a very nice guy, a pathologist at the clinical center, and they were obviously very much in love. He was an extremely bright scientist and treated her well. He was clearly a young guy on his way up. I met them as a couple on several occasions at institute functions and they were great together. I liked him.

Pat didn't play around, but she was obviously starting to get interested in me. I could tell by the looks she kept giving me, especially when we met with top scientists who were applying for support. I made no moves on her – I just waited. I think the big moment came when the institute director had his quarterly meeting with his advisory board – over a dozen big league scientists from across the country – including two Nobels.

When my program came up on their agenda, they began to bombard the director with questions they wanted him to answer, about where all the new money was going to go, which programs needed help, and what he knew about the science in each program. The director started making notes and promised to get the information they wanted - and they wanted a lot of information and all of it in detail. Finally the director turned to me, looking very nervous.

"Jack, can you start to put some of this stuff together for our next meeting?"

I had been making a list of what they wanted to know, but instead of simply saying that I would put some stuff together, I began to answer their questions off the top of my head - no notes - but occasionally referring to the three-by-five card in my shirt pocket. More questions followed and after about two hours, that three-by-five card was famous, along with its owner.

They got everything I had learned during over a month of hard work. Which investigators were doing what, and how much it cost and how much more they needed to do it right and, of course, who was not doing enough. I didn't pull a single punch – and the numbers from my card backed up what I said.

The thing that turned them on the most, I think, was the citation index on each program. They'd seen that for individual papers, of course, but had never seen it used to evaluate an entire program. The director sat back proud and smiling and taking the credit for my appointment.

Pat was sitting across the room looking at me, and throughout the meeting her expression gradually changed from interest, to respect, to fascination, and finally to big league horny. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes were frozen on me, she was breathing heavily, and her body language was starting to say, "Fuck me!" I didn't know it at the time, but Henry Kissinger is famous for having said that power is the strongest aphrodisiac. He was right! Boy was he right!

As the meeting was finishing, the director asked me to have lunch with him the next day. The room emptied out and I fielded a few more questions from some board members who stayed late. Pat was standing in the hall as I left the room. She stared at me, with that horny look still on her face. She was obviously waiting for me. I took her by the arm and walked her out to my car. Then I drove her, without a word, back to my apartment on Mass Avenue, stripped her down, put her to bed, and fucked her all afternoon.

Neither of us said a word (groans and moans don't count). It was pure unadulterated sex. I pounded her hard, but she met every thrust, lifting up her ass to meet me with a vigorous thrust of her own. After about ten minutes of heavy fucking she clinched her eyes tight, arched her back, groaned, pulled me close, and her body began to tremble in the most powerful orgasm I have ever felt – before or since. I thought my pecker was gonna get crushed by the tightest pussy I could imagine. She just squeezed the juice right out of me and we collapsed, sweating and panting.

I lay there for a moment thinking I had done a damn good job, but she wanted more. She rolled over and started sucking my dick to get me up again and then crawled on top like a cowboy. Her face was a mask of erotic pleasure and desire. Her tits were big and they bounced in a most attractive manner as I reached up to play with them. Her belly was tight and flat and she had a big hairy beaver. And she was strong and she knew how to rub her clit against me when she fucked. She fucked like a horny rooster, just pounding me. Steady and strong.

Her sweat was dripping down on to my body as she humped. In minutes she drained me of my second load and kept on pounding till she collapsed in another violent, throbbing orgasm. I began to think about what a girl must feel like during a gangbang. I got a little rest after she clamped down on my overworked instrument with that second orgasm – but not a lot.

This hot-blooded, horny, Italian broad still wasn't finished – not by a long shot. Her mouth was on my dick after a few minutes and somehow (thank God) I responded appropriately. It was a long, hard afternoon. It was just about the greatest fuck I had ever had. When she finally let me rest I just lay there beside her and panted like a worn-out puppy.

Only then did I notice that she had put her wedding ring on the bedside table. I thought that was a nice touch. Really nice! It showed respect for her marriage vows. We hit the shower and I had her back at work by five. We still hadn't talked very much. Hardly a word.

But, back at the institute, as I helped her out of the car, she looked up at me, smiled, and said, "That was the most remarkable performance I have ever seen in my life."

I should have said thank you. I should have quit while I was ahead. But I was younger then, and an egotistical male chauvinist – some would call me an asshole - and I got exactly what I deserved for my arrogance.

I said, "The bedroom or the boardroom?" Confidently expecting her to smile and say it was both. I was wrong.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, "The boardroom of course. I expect the bedroom performance to improve with practice."

So much for masculine over-confidence! So much for an inflated male ego! But I had three years to improve. And, trust me, I tried my damndest, several times a week, plus traveling on site visits. We were always extremely careful, because she loved her husband very much and didn't want to hurt him. Every time we fucked, that wedding ring was always on the bedside table.

I think I was the only guy Pat had ever played around with – she was a loving wife and very loyal to her husband. So, why would she fuck like a mink with me? What did I have? I wasn't especially good looking. I really wasn't sure what it was. So, one time I asked her what she saw in me.

She thought for a long minute and finally said, "I really don't know. I can't explain it. I don't know why I feel it, but when I watch you work I get really horny. Wherever you are, you control the whole damn thing. You always dominate the room. Every bright guy in the country respects you and trusts you and all the dullards are scared shitless. You're the guy with the power to make things happen. It just makes me horny - and I can't turn it off. I try – I really do try, because I love my husband. I'd die if he ever found out I was acting like a whore. But I just can't turn it off and I don't understand why."

I didn't understand it either, until I read what Henry Kissinger said about power being an aphrodisiac. But I was damned grateful for three years of absolutely fantastic pussy.