The wait for a table at Houston’s on Arroyo Parkway is an hour-and-a-half. Smokers sit along the rim of the koi pond outside, Matt and his girlfriend crowd into the bar with everyone else. He’s been hanging out with her for a couple of weeks, so when his old buddy Kerrick punches him in the arm, Matt doesn’t hesitate to introduce him to Anna. 
            
            “I know you,” says Kerrick, smiling into Anna’s upturned face.

            “You do?”  Anna swings her foot and sips her dirty martini.

            Matt thinking, wait a minute. “How do you know each other?”  He leans between Anna on her bar stool and Kerrick who’s standing too close.

            “Around,” says Anna and brushes Matt’s cheek.

            The hostess in her black dress and high heels interrupts. “Matt?  Party of two?” 

            Matt won’t make the same mistake twice, no more introducing Anna to any more friends. She’s clearly out of his league. He takes Anna’s elbow, grimaces at his friend. “See ya, Kerrick.”

            “See ya, Kerrick.”  Anna’s eyes linger for the briefest of seconds on Kerrick’s lips.

            Once the waiter leaves them alone at the table, Matt asks Anna how she knows his friend, a fast-track kind of guy, gel in his hair and Hugo Boss shoes.

            “I met him once,” she says and smiles. When she smiles, the scar on her upper lip whitens. Sometimes when he wakes up alone in the morning, thinking of her, the word “harelip” pops into his brain. He’s hinted to her about childhood operations, bringing up tonsillectomies, appendectomies, avoiding the words “quadrilateral mirault flap,” but she says nothing. Looking at her mouth now, he can almost feel its slight ridge on his tongue. He coughs. “And?”

            “And what, Matthew?”

            “You were flirting.”

            “I know.”  And she slips the side of her naked leg along Matt’s calf and tucks it behind his knee. “I’m sorry.”


            Later, up in her apartment on the second floor, after he’s taken the opportunity to kiss every one of her various ridges, Matt stares at the darkened light fixture, suctioned like a flying saucer to the ceiling, shimmering in the faint yellow cast from the street lamp.

            He remembers their first date, her coming up behind him to press her breasts into his back at the Huntington Library ticket counter. Shocking him, yes, but he’d liked being shocked. How could he not?  His only other girlfriend had lived down the street from his parents for most of his twenty-two years.

            At the Huntington, they’d wandered into the Japanese garden where, near the steep lacquered bridge, three men on ladders were applying fake cherry blossoms onto the branches of a huge tree.

            “Must be a movie,” Matt said.

            Anna placed palms and fingers together in front of her chest and bowed. “I could be your geisha,” she whispered. Her eyes flickered up to his, then down, but not before he caught her lips spreading into a smile, her scar becoming a white tattoo. He led her into the forest of bamboo and made love to her on a spongy carpet of dirt while the murmur of voices, laughter, an occasional shout, all melted away like snow.

            But even then he wondered just as he does now, his body wrapped around hers, snug inside her deep burgundy sheets, if all this binding together, the two of them, means the same to her as it does to him. 


            Matt calls Kerrick the next day from the bank where he works. “I want to know if there’s something between you two.”  He tries to sound casual, but his voice carries a tremor.

            “What?  You really like her or something?” asks Kerrick.

            “Or something,” says Matt.

            “Look, we met at a party. Nothing to it.”

            “Nothing?”

            “Never saw her after that one night. Too bad. She’s hot.”

            “You slept with her?”

            “Did I say that?”

            “But you did…sleep with her.”

            “Dude, I’m sorry, but, you know, she can’t say no.”


            Matt parks across the street from Anna’s apartment on Allen. Her windows are black, her porch light glows like a cigarette.

            It’s been two days since he’s seen her. He hasn’t called. Hasn’t returned her calls to him. He shouldn’t be here, but he can’t stay away. He needs a glimpse of her, just one, before he calls it quits.

            When he falls asleep in the cramped bucket seat of his car, he dreams he’s at work at the bank. A couple fills out a loan application across from him while Anna, hidden beneath his desk, busies herself with his zipper. He struggles to keep the grin off his face, but he can’t. The loan manager, a middle-aged woman weighing about nothing stomps over and lifts the desk into the air. Everyone in the bank—tellers, customers, the security guard, even the loan applicants—circle him and Anna and chant, “She can’t say no, she can’t say no, she can’t—”

            A hard rapping on the window startles him awake. His head knocks the glass; his right leg is tangled around the stick shift. Anna, her face cupped between her hands, peers in.

            “Is that you?”

            “No,” he mumbles, trying to unfold himself and push open the door. “Who?” 

            She’s laughing and when he steps out of the car, she drapes her arms around his neck, presses her body hard against his, looks up at him. “Are you stalking me?”

            He tries to keep his hands away, kneading the night air. “No…yes. I don’t know.”

            “Why haven’t you called me back?” 

            He reaches up to remove her arms, but the heat from her skin melts his fingers down to the small of her back. He kisses her damaged lip, slow and gentle as if she were a bride.