He had seen her at his office building on Park and 9th one day. It wasn't as though he didn't recognize her, but he'd never really seen her. She was standing by the copy machine, picking a piece of lint off her shirt. She had a tan Band-Aid on her right thumb and a cup of lukewarm coffee in her left hand. He didn't really know if it was lukewarm, but it wasn't steaming anyway. It couldn't have been hot, at least.
Asking her out to dinner wasn't hard. She knew his name. She scribbled her phone number down on a piece of copy paper with his chewed-on pen. She gave it back to him and swayed out of the copy room. He put the pen back in his pocket and wondered which was worse, her touching his mouth-germs with her hands, or him touching her hand-germs with his mouth. He tasted the plastic. It tasted like Purell.
The restaurant was dark and hard to breathe in. He gave a ten to the bartender and ordered two martinis. She would be a martini girl, he knew.
His drink was half gone by the time she showed up. He stood up fast. His coat fell on the floor.
She smelled like cigarettes covered up with rubbed-on perfume strips from Cosmopolitan.
“Cold out there.”
“It's January.”
They sat. She ordered a vodka soda, then a shot of tequila.
The date was on Friday night and she called on Sunday afternoon.
“It's me.”
“I know.”
She invited him to a club for the following Saturday. He had never danced at a club before. The week went by fast and he was lacing up his shoes and putting on a button-up shirt. He didn't own cologne.
She smelled like a doctor's office and chewing gum. Her face was red. She pressed up against him with her ass and rubbed to the beat ricocheting off the walls. He was hard. He grabbed her hips. She was all bone.
He blinked and they were kissing. She backed him into a wall and was hot and cold against him simultaneously. Her hair was thin under his hands. They were sober but he called a taxi. His apartment was hotter than it was before.
They had sex.
“I love you.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
They fell asleep. He woke up to St. George's incessant bells and the scent of rubbing alcohol. She had gone home.
They had sex four more times. She stopped coming to work. He tried to call. He got her answering machine.
He saw her in the Sunday newspaper the first week of April. It was a shorter column than all the rest.
She was survived by her brother five states away.
Sheetal Tadiparty
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