Like any reasonable woman, I stayed out of my room from 7:00 A.M. to 2:00 A.M. the next two days. Since I didn’t have an answering machine, I could thus protect myself from knowing whether he had blown me off or not. Granted, if he did try to call me, this plan would prove self-defeating, but only in one sense. In another, it would allow me to retreat back into my unfettered life, the life in which I had only two more months of adventuring in Paris to do and could then move on to a country that didn’t give me lung cancer.

England, I kept thinking. I’d never been to England and had just applied to Cambridge’s summer program.

I did go on a special shopping trip to buy skin-clinging black leather pants and a black nylon top that dipped down to my navel, just in case this French waiter came to the party without calling. Not that I wanted him to call or come or anything, but if he did, I wanted him to realize I was a leather-wearing sex goddess and not a shy and desperate woman with a ridiculous crush. I only succeeded in having to spend a night protecting my tail from drunken fellow students in the big, dark, smoky main hall filled with amateur strobe lights, plastic cups stained with Adela’s very own sangria, and a mass of people in various stages of inebriety. He never showed.

“Sorry,” I said to Adela.

“Sorry about what?” she asked, busy flirting with some new person. “Did something happen? Oh, hey, where’s that guy you asked out?”

By Monday after work, my guard was down, and when I walked into my room to find the phone ringing, I thoughtlessly picked it up.

The half laughing, half embarrassed male voice over the phone sparked no recognition. “Bonjour, Laura?”

“Oui, c’est moi.”

“C’est Sébastien, Sébastien Florand.”

I stared blankly at the phone. He laughed again, more embarrassed. “You left me an invitation. I’ve been trying to call you all weekend!”

I giggled, which was supposed to pass for sophisticated conversation, and sat down on the bed. My legs had collapsed under the weight of excruciating embarrassment. “For the party Saturday, right.” He had called? Was he crazy? Was he desperate? He looked way too cute to be desperate. Why would he call me?

“I couldn’t make it,” he said. “I had to be at a friend’s birthday party out in the country. But I’ve been trying to call you.”

“Yes, I—haven’t been here very much.” I am a very popular person even if I am so desperate as to leave invitations for strange men. And don’t you forget it. I wondered if there was a way I could work my leather pants Saturday night into the conversation. Subtly, you know, as in, “Eat your heart out.”