eat,
shoulders back, smile winning. "Hey honey, did the bad Customs man finally let
you go?"

"He did! That sounded like a doozy of a phone conversation, though. What's
wrong?"

"You don't want to know," she said.

"All right," Art said, sitting down opposite her, knee-to-knee, bending forward
to plant a kiss on the top of her exposed thigh. "I don't."

"Good."

He continued to kiss his way up her thigh. "Only..."

"Yes?"

"I think I probably do. Curiosity is one of my worst failings of character."

"Really?"

"Quite so," he said. He'd slid her sundress right up to the waistband of her
cotton drawers, and now he worried one of the pubic hairs that poked out from
the elastic with his teeth.

She shrieked and pushed him away. "Someone will see!" she said. "This is a
border crossing, not a bordello!"

He sat back, but inserted a finger in the elastic before Linda straightened out
her dress, so that his fingertip rested in the crease at the top of her groin.

"You are *naughty*," she said.

"And curious," Art agreed, giving his fingertip a playful wiggle.

"I give up. That was my fucking ex," she said. "That is how I will refer to him
henceforth. 'My fucking ex.' My fucking, pain-in-the-ass, touchy-feely ex. My
fucking ex, who wants to have the Talk, even though it's been months and months.
He's figured out that I'm stateside from my calling times, and he's offering to
come out to meet me and really Work Things Out, Once And For All."

"Oh, my," Art said.

"That boy's got too much LA in him for his own good. There's no problem that
can't be resolved through sufficient dialog."

"We never really talked about him," Art said.

"Nope, we sure didn't."

"Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?"

"'Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?' Why yes, Art, I would. How
perceptive of you." She pushed his hand away and crossed her arms and legs
simultaneously.

"Wait, I'm confused," Art said. "Does that mean you want to talk about him, or
that you don't?"

"Fine, we'll talk about him. What do you want to know about my fucking ex?"

Art resisted a terrible urge to fan her fires, to return the vitriol that
dripped from her voice. "Look, you don't want to talk about him, we won't talk
about him," he managed.

"No, let's talk about my fucking ex, by all means." She adopted a singsong tone
and started ticking off points on her fingers. "His name is Toby, he's
half-Japanese, half-white. He's about your he