Free Nowhere City by Alison Lurie

into his eyes.
    “Hey.”
    “Hey yourself,” Paul remarked inanely.
    “Listen.” Very gently, Ceci brushed her breasts across his shirt. She had no bra on; he could feel the nipples lifted to hard points. “Do you have to go home to dinner now or not?”
    “I have to go home to dinner eventually,” Paul murmured, stroking her bottom, “but now—”
    “Okay. Cut out, then.” She stepped back, and put her hands behind her head, where the hair was beginning to come loose.
    “No, I was going to say I could be half an hour late.” Automatically, Paul looked at his watch: he was half an hour late already.
    “Uh-uh. I don’t go for that, man. I need a lot of time the first time. Or like it won’t really swing. You know.”
    “But I want you.” Paul grasped Ceci again; she pulled back, half-resisting.
    “Okay, okay. When do you want me?” She smiled.
    “Now. I can stay about an hour.” What would he tell Katherine? It was after five already, he saw.
    Ceci shook her head. “Yeah, with your eye on the clock,” she said. “Make it some other time, huh?”
    “Whenever you say. Tomorrow?” With the remaining fraction of his brain, Paul began to think how he might possibly explain being absent on Thanksgiving.
    “No good. I’m on all day. How about Friday? I don’t have to be at the place till four. You dig lunch on Friday?”
    The image came to Paul of himself digging lunch, in the form of a great hole in Venice Beach, in which Ceci was half-buried, naked. “Yes,” he said. “About when?”
    “Let’s make it noon.”
    “Good.” He began to construct his excuses for Friday.
    “Okay.” Disengaging herself from Paul, Ceci walked over and opened the door for him, with a succinctness that he found disconcerting. Surely there should be more conversation, more hesitation over a thing like this.
    “You’re right near the beach here, aren’t you?” he said, moving slowly in the direction of the door. “Maybe if it’s still warm we could go for a swim; what do you think? Shall I bring my suit?”
    “We won’t have the time, man.” Ceci gave him a cat’s half-smile.
    Paul paused in the doorway. “Well,” he said. He bent to kiss her good-bye; the door was between them, and only their mouths met; warm, wet. Now, he thought, and started to go round the door; but Ceci leaned against it and pushed, hard. Thrown off balance, he staggered back and outside, on to the porch.
    “Ceci—”
    “Later,” she said, and shut the door on him.
    In a state of mild shock, Paul went down the stairs, got into his car, and began to drive home. It was because things were happening too fast, he thought, too soon, that he felt this way. He was used to having to force his way through a lengthy routine of flirtation and discussion, first base and second base; used to beating down a series of defenses with all the sensual, emotional, and intellectual energy he had. This lack of resistance threw him off balance. From an ugly, desperate girl he might have expected such directness, but not from Ceci O’Connor. Maybe she was a nymphomaniac.
    What to tell Katherine? Well, he could say something about a special project at N.R.D.C. A rush job, so he had to go in on Friday. She would believe it, because she had no idea of the real situation. In fact, no one at Nutting ever asked him to do anything. Executives from the top offices came by sometimes with visitors and he was introduced as a Harvard historian who was writing the history of the company. Even that wasn’t true yet. He was trying to write it, but the trouble was he still couldn’t find the data he needed in all those piles of paper on his desk: the basic facts and figures like the names of the original stockholders and the size of their investments. And nobody seemed to have the time to help him. They didn’t care about the past: they were only interested in the present and the immediate future.
    “So why worry?” Fred Skinner had said. “You’re pulling down