Free Zen and Sex by Dermot Davis

the bathroom is and hurry upstairs through a pokey hallway where the newly acquainted single people can flirt and get to know each better away from the maelstrom of the other hunter-gatherers downstairs.
    There’s a line for the bathroom and every woman that goes in takes an age to come back out again. My heart starts beating faster with every minute spent away from Frances. I can imagine every single guy in the place, positioning themselves closer to her group: people they would never normally be interested in, even if they were the last people on earth.
    When I finally get my chance to relieve myself, I rush downstairs and instantly check out the armchair where I just left her: it’s empty. My heartbeat increases as I rapidly scan the room, seeking her presence. She is nowhere to be seen. I try not to panic as I come up with possible places where she might be. She could have found that secret bathroom that every party seems to have, the hidden downstairs half-bathroom, the one only the females seem to know about.
    Or maybe she’s in the kitchen, exchanging cheese dip recipes with the host’s mother and the elderly next door neighbors. But deep down, in my gut, I know…she’s been stolen.
    When I finally find her, my heart flat lines: it’s worse than I’d imagined. Sitting on the stairs at a party is like putting up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the motel room front door, yet there she sits in bubbly conversation with a cosmopolitan, wealthy guy who looks like he just walked off the front page of GQ Magazine. Worse still, their knees are touching, which is a very bad sign.
    I know that the thing to pay attention to in these types of situations is how she reacts when she sees me. If she runs down the stairs, swings her arms wildly around me and plants a big kiss on my lips, I will know that my fears are irrational and that I have been totally overreacting.
    When Frances finally breaks her gaze away the most handsome man in the world, she reacts like her fun is over and that it’s now time to go back to doing the laundry.
    “Hi, Martin,” she’ll say, “I want you to meet Roger…” but she doesn’t know his last name which tells me that they have just met.
    “Papasmear,” the guy will help out, “Roger Papasmear.”
    Of course he’ll say it with some continentally inflected accent that makes the last name sound sophisticated and not, well funny. As he talks about the economy or some such gibberish, I’m not able to tell if he’s from Paris, Sicily, Timbuktu or is merely a recent immigrant to the oppressed people’s ghetto on the other side of town where he’s sleeping rough with some fellow ex-pat winos.
    “We should get going,” I’ll say to Frances as she reluctantly extracts herself from his deadly charms. I will feel like a parent who has just ruined his daughter’s life by embarrassing and telling her, in front of the hot, mature guy, that it’s way past her bedtime.
    “Where did I leave my coat?” Frances will say as a ruse to get me to go find it and leave them alone for a few more seconds. I don’t fall for it, as I know how critical it is not to leave them alone for any further intimacy. Standing watchful of them both should prevent the dreaded exchange of business cards (the grow-up version of scrawling your phone number on a prospective date’s palm with a ball point pen).
    “Let me give you my card,” Papasmear says brazenly, almost sneering at me, as if he fears little for my proximity and, at this stage, fails to take me seriously as a rival. If Frances offers up one of her cards in exchange, I will know that I am history. She goes one step further and writes her personal number on the back of one of his cards. I am so toast.
    “What are you thinking?” asks Frances, taking me out of my finely constructed mental horror story, “you’re miles away.”
    “Oh, nothing. Just wondering what this party is going to be like.”
    “To be honest, I’m kinda apprehensive about