I'd never seen him caught up like this. In the past, his relationships with women had been easy to track, light-hearted forays with no emotional strings attached. A few laughs, some quick sex, a couple of weeks of companionship. I'm not sure how it appeared from their perspective. The women he dated were often smart but self-deluding, announcing up front that all they were looking for was fun and games when in fact they bonded with him at the drop of a hat and quickly shifted into emotional bait and switch. The turnabout became apparent in the way they looked at him, in their determination to be understanding, nonpossessive, compliant, and considerate. I'd watched eight or ten of these women pass through his life in a period of ten months. All were slim, attractive, bright, and competent – professional women with careers in advertising, sales, graphic arts, TV production. Each would become fixated, hooked by his availability, his casual charm, the sexuality that hovered in the air around him. They'd begin to service him, cooking meals, ironing shirts, subtly demonstrating how much better his life could be if they were somewhere on the premises. They'd begin to quiz him about his past relationships, trying to figure out what the last woman did wrong, trying to delete from their own behavior the qualities that had generated their predecessor's demise. This phase was brief because Jimmy's behavior would remain exactly the same throughout. Personal sacrifice netted these women nothing except, perhaps, a case of housemaid's knee. He was irresponsible, as promiscuous as ever, though he tried to be polite. He never flaunted his indiscretions, but he made no secret of them, either, since nonexclusivity was the agreement he and this latest girlfriend had started out with. Their anger would begin to surface because there was no payoff to the subservience. Each woman, in turn, would start to feel victimized, and Jimmy was the obvious target of the discontent. This, of course, provided him with the perfect justification to pull away from them. Within a month, never much more than two, they'd make some demand, perhaps complain, voicing barely controlled expressions of disappointment and rebuke. The minute that happened, Jimmy Tate was out the door without so much as a "Thank you, ma'am." I'd never seen him look at one of them the way he looked at Bibianna Diaz.

She returned to the table, where she arranged herself provocatively on Jimmy's lap, straddling him, with her skirt hiked up to her crotch, her breasts so close to his face I thought he'd munch on them like cupcakes. I spent the next half hour having my hearing impaired by the music while Jimmy Tate and Bibianna Diaz exchanged steamy glances, (more or less) making love in an upright position with then-clothes on, the resulting friction scorching all the layers of fabric between them. The air smelled of desire, like the sweet perfume of wet grass after a rainstorm. That or cat spray.