Union (Snatch 1)

He didn't start to notice her, really look at her, until he'd been through any number of shrinks. (The “any number” was as close as he could come to estimating, as he'd never liked math, avoided it whenever possible. Had he cared, he knew, he might have gone back in his memory and listed them—the shrinks—by body language: fidgety, bored, tedious, intense, male, female, ambiguous, obese, anorexic, intimidating, timid, that sort of thing, in any combination. But he hadn't. It was Aggie, he realized with a start, who was the constant in all of this. The shrinks came and went. Never any reason given. It was Aggie, the nurse or aide or secretary or whatever she was—hospital administrator for all he knew—who remained. And when the moment arrived that he realized this, when it dawned on him, slapped him awake from wherever he'd been, from whatever depth of cognition or intuition or somnolent withdrawal or last-ditch delusion or—what the hey—unwitting denial, the suddenness and clarity of the recognition of Aggie, disturbed him more than anything that had come to mind thus far. Disturbed him so much the erection he'd begun to think of as permanent grudgingly released its tyrannical grip.)

[to be cont.]