She wasn’t planning to let me off the hook easy. I had rather she hung up on me than force me to answer her. I didn’t have anything left to say. I had stopped packing my clothes and everything.

She said, “It sounded to me like you were talking to some of your friends and they told you some garbage like that. And gon’ try to make me sound crazy. So yeah, you owe me an apology,” she repeated. “Or you still don’t think so?”

She had me. Shit! I figured it was best to get it over with.

“All right, I apologize for that,” I told her.

“And do you actually believe it?” she asked me.

“Believe what?”

“That a woman has to catch some foul disease before she stops having sex? Either that or she’s a lesbian, right? She doesn’t like men anymore. I mean, you guys are just…I don’t believe you.”

“Actually, a woman said that to me,” I told her.

“Yeah, a young woman,” she assumed. “But she’ll learn. You give her five more years. Probably less than that.”

She was right again. Danni was nearly ten years younger than Judi.

I said, “Okay, you’ve made your point.” I was ready to move on. There was no sense in beating a dead horse. But Judi kept going with it.

“So you’re fucking this girl?”

Her language caught me off guard. Not that I had never heard her swear before, but under the circumstances, I figured she would want to use a bit more tact.

I said, “That’s not important. I was wrong and I apologize.”

“But why did you even bring it up to this girl? I mean, that’s my business.”

“It was just the subject that I brought up. It wasn’t like I was talking about any specific person. But look, let me finish doing what I need to do to get ready for my plane in the morning. You were right, and I was wrong. Okay?”

I wanted to cut that whole conversation short. We were headed nowhere positive. Fortunately, Judi let me off the hook.

“Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Thank you,” I told her.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, and hung up.

She had made her point. Obviously, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, and listening to one woman over another would only get me into more trouble. So I shook it off and went back to packing my clothes.

I WAS WAITING at the airport in Atlanta that next morning to fly to Chicago when I received another phone call on my cell. It was a 614 area code. I believe that was Ohio somewhere. I thought about it and remembered Rachel, the woman I had met in Miami.

Did I want to answer her call? No. She was only a Miami Jones, a craving that lasted less than an hour. After the Nicole fiasco, I needed to chill a minute from hooking up with pop-up women anyway.