Pat touched her face. “Oh, isn’t it wonderful, my kind master! You have bestowed smooth skin upon your pock-marked servant! Now at last she’s worthy to have your hands placed upon her body!”

Danny was completely flummoxed. He hadn’t meant anything at all by touching her. He didn’t know why he had even done it. He didn’t go around touching people.

There was nothing he could say to change her false impression. “Have a seat while I put my pants on,” he said.

“I told you I’m not staying long.” But she sat down and watched him pull up his jeans. “I don’t even know why I came.”

“Well, we’ve settled that you aren’t here to have sex with me,” said Danny. He meant it as a self-mocking joke.

“Right, just because I don’t want your hands on me, you think I’m some kind of cold frigid bitch.”

Her words were so out of proportion to anything that had come before that Danny couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind. “Is that what I think?”

“For your information, no, I wasn’t molested as a child, no, I wasn’t abused, no, I don’t have any repressed memories of terrible things that now interfere with the natural development of my sexuality. I’m just a private person who doesn’t like to be touched.”

Danny just stood there for a couple of seconds. “It’s so good of you to come all the way over here and tell me that,” he finally said.

Pat sat there, looking at him in surprise. It was as if she was only hearing now what she herself had just finished saying. “That’s not what I came here to say,” she said. Her face turned red and she looked away. “I can’t believe I went off like that, I don’t know what I was…”

Danny pulled up one of the kitchen chairs across from her—he didn’t even have to take a step to do it, the kitchen being the other end of the living room—and sat on it. “Let’s pretend I didn’t touch you and so you didn’t react the way you reacted for whatever reason you reacted that way, and let’s just say that I asked you to come in and take a seat and here we are.” He put on an air of jovial welcome. “Pat, my good friend, what brings you here so late at night, considering that you don’t want to sleep with me or have my babies?”

Pat was not amused at his humor. “My parents made me see a shrink because I like to be left alone.”

“Well, that explains the ‘repressed sexuality’ thing.”