by Peg Duthie
(07/02/03)

As she brought a gherkin to her lips, she said, "My husband and his best friend used to play a game called 'I Would Never.'"

"The drinking game?" he asked.

"No, not that one," she scowled. "Too coercive," she added, pairing the remaining bite of pickle with a sliver of hard, pale yellow cheese. "If you play that game, you have no control over the secrets other people want you to reveal. Which is fine if you don't have any secrets worth keeping, which is probably true of the people who want to play it--"

"Unlike you," he concluded.

"And you," she responded. "At least, I'm guessing that's true about you." He raised his coffee mug towards her, as if he were about to offer a toast. "I don't claim to be so interesting, but I don't mind if that's how you want to see me." He set the mug back down on top of the small, round table. "Tell me about your husband's 'I Would Never's."

"Well. Bill and Eli liked to send each other these elaborate descriptions of things they would never do to each other. The more painful and violent and disgusting, the better. They were very artistic about it, you understand," she said, grinning. "For instance, Bill might say, 'Eli, I would never pound seven-and-three-quarter-inch nails into your chest in the pattern of the constellation Orion, and then glaze each nail with the blood of an albino fawn before setting you in the path of a ravenous bear in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a year of poor acorn yield.'"

"I...see," he replied, eyebrows lifted. "And they were the best of friends, you say?"

"They still are," she grinned. "These days, they pummel each other in poker. Better stakes. The 'I Would Never' days were back in college, when they'd email each other during all-nighters."

"It's funny," he mused, taking another sip of coffee. "Looking at Bill, I never would have guessed--"

"You mean, you would never--"

"Oh, yes, I meant, I would never have guessed he'd have that sort of mania for violence and action. He's so...professorish, you know. The stooped shoulders, the horn-rimmed eyeglasses, the way he always ends up rushing back to the movie theater because he's left his cell phone in the cupholder."

She chuckled. "It's imbecilic, of course, but I find it adorable anyway. But we already knew I'm besotted. Aren't you going to start in on your flan?"

He looked down at the dessert in front of him and blinked. "Oh. I suppose I could." He lifted his fork, then thought better of it and set it back down next to the plate. "On the other hand, we still have plenty of time. Perhaps I'll just keep watching you eat until I finish this cup of coffee."

"Sweetheart," she said, "you had better be careful. Anyone who heard what you just said might well conclude that you were besotted. With me. And that would never do."

"No," he said, "it would never do at all." He took another sip of coffee. "Because, of course, I would never be so silly as to delay my consumption of dessert just to watch a pretty woman eat her lunch extremely slowly. Especially a woman I've known for ten-odd years who's been married to somebody else for most of them." He regarded his coffee cup, and the ramekin of flan next to it, and then he placed his elbows on the table and looked directly into her eyes. "And I'd certainly never threaten to snatch that elegant slice of p'té from her plate and gobble it down myself, because then she'd have to go to back to the counter and order another serving, and then we'd be here even longer, and that would never do."

"No," she replied, "it would never do at all." She slid her knife through a quarter-inch of p'té; with her other hand, she picked up a slice of bread the size of a playing card. She placed the portion of p'té on top of the slice of bread and then lifted it to his lips. "I've had it before," she said, "it's extraordinarily good." He obediently parted his lips and let her push the bread between them. As he bit down, he lifted his own left hand to the slice to support it as she drew her fingers away.

"It would never do," she continued, "because I would never go to the counter and order another serving of p'té when I could simply sit here and pout and wait for you to give in to guilt and buy the second serving for me. But that isn't something I would ever do, because I know you well enough to know that you wouldn't be influenced by such passive-aggressive nonsense. And even if you could be, you would never want to give me the satisfaction of that kind of influence."

"No, I'd never do that," he admitted, "at least, not on purpose. What's more, I would never be so foolish as to waste time in a cafe with an empty coffee cup, ever, much less confess that the cup was empty because I couldn't tear my eyes away from a woman sitting across from me, even if I could say that it was because the sun was striking her hair at a really arresting angle." He tilted his head and then threaded his fingers through the ear of the cup as he added, "But now there's someone standing on the sidewalk, and that's made the copper highlights vanish, so I'm going to go get my refill now."

As he walked from the row of tall black carafes back towards their table, he saw that she had turned to look out of the window. As his reflection drew into focus, she returned her gaze to his face and smiled sweetly at him as he settled himself back into his chair. "While you were gone, I was thinking," she purred, "of all of the things I would never do with your flan. For instance, I can't say that I would never steal a bite of it directly from your fork, but I do think I could say that I would never lure you to my house with the promise of a flan, and then kiss you into a state where you let me strap you to a chair and take small, sweet bites of you while I mixed together the eggs and the sugar and the milk."

"I must say I'm sorry to hear that," he answered, lifting his spoon and gently sliding it into the surface of the custard. "Because it follows, you understand, that if you would never torture me in such a manner, then I would never presume to kiss you for such a duration that you eventually found yourself pinned against my kitchen counter. And even if I could maneuver you so easily -- as if I'd be able to move with such precision while kissing you senseless -- I suspect I'd be so distracted by how you were kissing me back that I'd never be able to get to the part where I open the drawer of silverware." His lips stroked the spoon as the flan glided into his mouth. He tilted the spoon back down towards the ramekin, but stole a glance at her before pressing the spoon back into the custard. "And even if I could muster up the coordination to pull the drawer open while kissing you passionately, I would never want to bet on whether I'd done the washing-up, which I would have had to have done in order to find what I'd need."

"A spoon?" she asked, smiling. "You would have me so stirred, my dear?"

"Later, perhaps," he replied, closing his eyes as he savored his second bite of flan. "Later, I think I would use the spoon to ladle soft drifts of sugar and cinnamon over your belly and thighs, after I'd warmed them with a massage of sweet butter. But, where were we...? Ah, yes, I imagine we would never quite get to that point, because first I'd need to complete our tryst at the kitchen counter, which means I'd be pressing the tines of a fork lightly against the edge of your wrist, and slowly raking it up and down the length of your forearm. I'd press it so lightly there wouldn't be marks -- just a trail of white grooves that would vanish even before you remembered you needed to breathe."

She glanced at her fork, at her arm, and then at him. She shook her head. "Your dinner parties would never be the same if word got out about those forks." The corner of her mouth quirked up as her eyes flickered towards his hand, which had just returned the spoon to the plate underneath the ramekin. "Of course, I would never tell anyone where your forks had been, just as I would never let on to anyone at your parties how much I would enjoy spreading towels all over your dining room table and making you bend face-down across that table, your torso flat against the towels and your hands dangling off of the edge of the table, just above your head. Being the genteel, staid sort of woman--"

He couldn't help raising his eyebrows at this, which only deepened her smile as she continued.

"--I would never be the kind of lover who would stretch your ankles away from the table until your knees were straight, until your body became a delicately balanced jack-knife, half-prone on the table and half-taut at an angle to the floor. But if I could indeed find it within me to engineer such a lovely suspension, surely you would never deny me the pleasure of placing one palm against the small of your back to steady you as I let my other palm travel up and down each leg. Just as you would also never flinch if I were to climb on top of the table and straddle your back to hold you in place while I pulled the pins from my hair. I would never be so unreasonable, though, to demand that you lie perfectly still while I sketched out verses from Ronsard across your back with the tip of one of the hairpins."

"I would never accuse you of excessive expectations," he responded, "but I wonder..." He traced the inside rim of the table with his thumb. "I wonder if you would never lose patience were I to twitch, just by accident, while you wrote on my back with the tip of your hair." He made as if to reach for one of the pins anchoring her chignon. She instinctively drew back.

He smiled, not entirely happily. She glared back at him for a long, silent moment, and then defiantly snatched out the pins and tossed her head. Thick waves of hair spilled across her shoulders and unfurled over her arms. At the table next to them, heads turned, looked, and admired, but neither he nor she noticed: her eyes remained locked with his, daring him to trespass further.

He broke away from the tension with an almost inaudible sigh, gently capturing the tip of a long, slender tress between his fingertips. "Look," he murmured, "see how it's copper in this light?" He tugged on it half-playfully and twirled it between his forefinger and his thumb. "It'd be perfect as a brush. You could write on me with ink, or syrup, or soy sauce -- or coffee." With the lock still trapped between his fingers, his hand paused above his cup as if he meant to dip the point into the liquid. She continued to gaze at him, her eyes expressionless. He moved his hand away from the table and released the lock of hair. It drifted back towards her body, falling towards her chest as she exhaled. She reached towards him and caught his hand as it dropped towards his side, bringing it to her lips. The kiss she dropped onto his knuckles was gentle, but when she spoke, her voice was austere: "I think it's time we got going, yes?"

He looked at her but did not speak, instead turning his hand over so that it rested on hers with his palm facing up. She pressed another kiss in between the heart line and the head line of his palm. She then covered his palm with her other hand. Held captive thus -- his hand loosely cradled between hers -- he felt his breath catch inside his chest like the fluttering of an untamed bird.

The sun had risen higher in the sky during the course of their meal. Now pouring through the delicatessen window, the sunlight danced over the facets of her engagement diamond and glinted over the scratches on her wedding ring.

"I would never ask you to break a vow that still mattered to you," he murmured.

"I would never want to lose your respect," she whispered.

He withdrew his hand from hers and pushed his chair back from the table. She stood up, stacked the cups and the ramekin on top of the plates, and carried the lot to the tub for dirty dishes. He held the door open for her as they left the cafe. They stood for a moment on the sidewalk as if to get their bearings, blinking as they adjusted from the cafe's cool, airy interior to the unfiltered weight of summer heat. Then, with a sidelong glance, he drew her hand through the crook of his arm, so that it rested there lightly, neither possession nor possessing. In the pause that followed, he sensed rather than saw how her thumb settled each of the rings on her other hand in a silent, swift inventory. And then they began to walk together toward their cars.

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