The Gentlemen's Hour

86

Petra is

très

pissed off.

No man has ever stood her up before, ever, certainly never under these circumstances. Now she’s sitting on her sofa dressed in a lovely blue satin negligee ready to give herself to a man who has apparently, in the California vernacular, “spaced her off.”

It’s humiliating.

Completely, totally, utterly humiliating.

She feels like the second lead in a bad romance novel, or a modern, sexually loose Jane Austen character, vainly waiting for a man to come and take her away from her mundane existence. Pity the apartment lacks a harpsichord. A hovering mother, a dotty father, an earnest sister in whom to confide her heartbreak.

Heartbreak? she thinks.

Over

Boone Daniels

?

Please.

She is furious, though. I invited him here, she thinks, for what was obviously going to be our first sexual encounter, and the man

forgets

, doesn’t even have the common courtesy to ring and apologize? A flaw in character or a failure of nerve? she wonders. Either way it doesn’t bode well for a relationship. Do you really want a man who’s afraid to have sex with you?

Or, she thinks, does he just not fancy you? Not in “that way,” as they say. Fair enough, but what about that kiss? That took you totally unprepared. He certainly seemed to fancy you then, didn’t he?

A bottle of good red wine sits open on the coffee table, flanked by two long-stemmed glasses. She picks up one, pours herself a long drink, then changes her mind and goes to her liquor cabinet for some whiskey. God, she thinks, first I make myself into a slut—albeit rejected—for him, now he’s turning me into an alcoholic.

She takes her Scotch neat, sits down, and turns on the television.

Damn

Boone Daniels.