She sat across the table from him in a booth at a club where you couldn' t distinguish which was thicker: the smoke of what seemed to be eighty four soggy cigarettes or the smooth rhythms that touched your most primal of places. Any patron passing by would either think she was humoring the guy or consider asking her who had next. She had a mistress' beauty to her-the kind you didn't want to recognize because you knew she'd take advantage of you for it. The way she fit into that booth and the way she smiled both said that she knew something that you didn't. When that smile didn't fade, you knew she was either using it against you or against everybody in the room. The hazy lights of the club, like spotlights in the fog, made her eyes glow in a suspiciously perfect fashion. Her hair was a perfect blonde; alive, like fields of wheat on a breezy summer afternoon. Her lips looked like flush, strawberry-red pillows that were so vibrant they made everything else seem grayscale. He immediately fell into his routine of extreme sarcasm and flirtatious insults that would normally scare away the venomous beauty. However, this dame saw right through his jaded demeanor, and he found himself searching desperately for rebuttals like a comedian searching for laughs from a sleeping crowd. He was profoundly interested, his mind buzzing with the same frantic fury of a broken beehive. While they continued their robust conversation, his mind would return to ponder why a girl of such perplexity had found interest in his existence. He guessed that perhaps she had found him to be so utterly pathetic that it was amusing to her. As the conversation became more and more personal, their chemistry matched that of the singer's sweet voice skipping over the smooth, melodic bass line coming from the stage. He began to relax, became domesticated, and before he could wipe the sweat from his brow she glided across the table like a valkyrie and kissed him hard on the lips. It had felt like God had reached down to manually pump the blood through his body. He could hardly breathe, let alone do anything sufficient with his lips or tongue to satisfy her. When their embrace was through, he was afraid to open his eyes again; afraid to break this dream. He wanted to crawl up and die in that moment, in that booth-it couldn't last. When courage found him his eyes opened up like the heavy doors of a mortuary. She was gone, and much like his heart, her cigarette was left smoking in the ashtray with not more than a hit or two missing from it. And while he no longer had an excuse to remain, he laid back deep into the booth, into the melancholy, and let out a most familiar sigh. He carefully eyed the cigarette as he rolled it between his fingers, and then pulled it as if he was trying to capture the feeling left lingering in the air. It was as if they ended right at the plot twist right at the climax of a novel...just as she intended. And as the band was packing up their equipment, the regulars left their tips, and he ordered himself his first drink.