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slowly,
pausing twice to pretend I had to reposition her breasts, my fingers slipping
over her nipples.
    “If you keep doing that, I won’t be able to control
myself.”
    “That was the point. Or at least getting you to
admit it.”
    “You are a bastard.” She pulled away and
quickly slipped into her skirt.
    “So much a bastard you won’t be back?”
    Joanne’s green eyes burst on me. “Do you want me
back?”
    “You know I do.”
    “I want to hear you say it.”
    “I want you back.”
    Joanne held my eyes for a moment, as if deciding
whether to believe me. Then she slipped into her heels and brought her lips to
my ear. “You don’t even know me,” she whispered.
    I took her shoulders and held her so I could see her
eyes, I didn’t know if I could trust anything she said, I wasn’t even sure I
could trust her eyes, not because I thought she was a liar, but because of the
way she affected me, making me lose all sense of reason and rationality. “I’ll
learn,” I said.
    “What if you don’t like what you find out?”
    “I could say the same thing.”
    She shook her head and pulled away. “It’s not the
same thing.”
    I didn’t know what she meant, but sensed she wasn’t
going to explain, not now. I followed her to the door.
    She gave me another quick kiss, this time on the
lips, just a hint, a promise. She turned to go, but stopped and looked back at
me in the doorway. “I won’t fall in love with you, ever.”
    I don’t know why that hit me so hard. “As you said,
we barely knew each other, who can predict something like that?”
    “It’s not that.”
    “So how will you know what you might do?”
    “It’s not that I might not want to, or wouldn’t, in
some other life. But I simply can’t.”
    And she turned and walked down the hall to the
elevator,  her stride purposeful and elegant as it always was, but the cadence
of her clicking heels giving off the barest hint of uncertainty.
    Or maybe that’s what I wanted to hear.
    I was away all the following week,
traveling for business, my days filled with meetings, the evenings with working
dinners, the hours crammed full. I struggled to focus, my mind on Joanne, her
eyes, her body, her words. An enigma wrapped around the body of a goddess.
    The first night away I wanted to hear her voice, but
I didn’t even have her phone number. How crazy that was, she had been to my
apartment, I had kissed her, seen her naked, fucked her, but I had no way to
talk to her.
    I considered calling her at the office, but she
worked in a group, anyone might pick up the phone. As Joanne had said, women
noticed everything, and I know that if someone saw my cell phone on the caller
ID they’d jump to conclusions, in this case the correct one.
    After the third day I couldn’t take it anymore, I
snuck out of a meeting in the middle of the day and called her from the hotel
phone. If I couldn’t have her today I could at least talk to her, a poor
substitute for an afternoon delight. Someone else answered and I hung up,
fearing they’d recognize my voice if I even mumbled something about a wrong
number.
    I tried again later that day, and this time it
rolled over to her voicemail. “Call me,” I said, and hung up.
    I normally turned my phone off in business meetings,
but now I kept it on, glancing at it every time it vibrated with a message.
Nothing from Joanne. I felt like a foolish teenager, with a crush on the class
beauty queen who had for reasons of her own picked me out of the horde of boys
who would have kissed her feet.
    By the third day I was pretty angry; if Joanne
wanted to contact me she could find my cell in the company executive directory.
She must have known I didn’t have her number, it wouldn’t be listed there. She
didn’t seem like the old fashioned type, to wait for a man to call.
    Or maybe she just didn’t care.
    That didn’t seem right, with all her talk about fantasizing
about me, getting wet, thinking about what to wear when she saw