“Wait,” I said, but I knew I’d signed my death warrant.

“We made love for six hours, and you still felt tempted by this little bimbo in a bikini?” She leaned forward in her seat, turned, and looked at me.

“I didn’t say tempted,” I said. “I said ‘nervous.’”

“Same thing.” She smiled, shook her head. “Guys, I swear.”

“Right,” I said. “Guys. Don’t you get it?”

“No,” she said. She raised her fist to her chin, squinted so I’d know she was concentrating. “Please. Elucidate.”

“All right. Desiree is a siren. She sucks men in. She has an aura, and it’s half innocence, half pure carnality.”

“An aura.”

“Right. Guys love auras.”

“Okeydoke.”

“Any guy gets around her, she turns this aura on. Or maybe it’s on all the time, I don’t know. But in either case, it’s pretty strong. And a guy looks at her face, her body, he hears her voice and smells her scent, he’s a goner.”

“All guys?”

“Most, I’d bet.”

“You?”

“No,” I said. “Not me.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

That stopped her. The smile left her face and her skin paled to eggshell, and her mouth lay open as if it had forgotten how to use words.

“What did you just say?” she managed eventually.

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, but…” She turned in her seat, looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she turned to the middle-aged black woman sitting in the seat beside her who’d been following our conversation since we got on the plane without any pretense to be doing otherwise.

“I heard him, honey,” the woman said, knitting what appeared to be a small beaver with lethal-looking needles. “Loud and clear. Don’t know about all this aura bullshit, but I heard that part just fine, thank you.”

“Wow,” Angie said to her. “You know?”

“Aww, he ain’t that good-looking,” the woman said. “He maybe rate a ‘gee’ but he don’t rate no ‘wow,’ seem to me.”

Angie turned back to me. “Gee,” she said.

“Go on,” the woman said to me, “get back to telling us about this slut made you coffee.”

“Anyway,” I said to Angie.

She blinked, closed her mouth by placing the heel of her hand to her jaw and pushing up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to that.”

“If I wasn’t, you know—”

“In love,” the lady said.

I glared at her. “—with you, Ange, yeah, I would’ve been a dead man in there. She’s a viper. She picks guys—almost any guy—and she gets them to do her bidding, whatever that may be.”

“I want to meet this girl,” the woman said. “See if she can get my Leroy to mow the lawn.”

“But that’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Guys are that stupid?”

“Yes.”

“What he said,” the woman said, concentrating on her knitting.