Ken Garcia had known Danita Mitchell for three or four years, but he hadn't really known her. Which is to say, he knew her because she dated and went to parties with men he knew, so he talked to her, but that was as far as it had ever gone.
Ken had heard a little about her in that time, mostly from her. She dated in those four years three men whom he knew, and probably at least a couple whom he didn't, since there were stretches when he didn't see her. She didn't really change partners a lot, but she had never found somebody she wanted to settle down with either, obviously. Or if she did, the man didn't, at least then.
When Jack and Pamela Diggs invited Ken to a party, he had just broken up with the girl he had been dating for six months, but Pam told him there were going to be some unattached women there too, so he would not really be out of place.
It turned out, he found, that Danita was one of the unattached women. She had reached a mutual understanding that Tony Rowell and she did not really excite each other, so he was there with somebody new.
Ken had never realized that Danita had been interested for some time in getting to know him better; as was said, he hadn't really known her, and she had always been with somebody else, so he hadn't paid all that much attention to her.
He remembered her, in fact, mostly for being one of the few women not to joke about his last name, which was the legacy of a Cuban great-grandfather who spoke Spanish but was of as African ancestry as could be.
Tonight, Danita's smiling face and the loose black braids around it had more of an effect on him -- but in the past he had been concentrating on the woman he was with, as he should. Ken had never been the sort to try to play with other women when he had one right to hand; he figured that if he got two of them to go to bed with him at the same time, it would be work to keep up anyway.
He drifted into talking to Danita, and started admiring the flawless brown skin on her face without being aware of it at first. For her part, Danita was smiling partly because she was getting to talk to Ken, and finding that a lot better than she had expected, better even than she had hoped.
The hours went by quickly, and at a little after midnight people started to disappear. Ken had gotten into thinking about Danita in a way that he hadn't before -- or really two ways. He was thinking that asking Danita on a date might be a good idea, since she was nice to spend some time with. On the other hand, he was thinking fairly often about something he had barely and only briefly considered before, which was what Danita would be like in bed.
Danita was considering Ken in both of those ways, but she had been doing so for a couple of years, off and on at odd moments. But the second was coming up in her mind a lot tonight, as she looked at that broad and well-built body. The first, though, that of spending more time with him, she could do something about.
"Are you doing anything tomorrow?" she broke in suddenly. "I mean, is there anything that you have to get up early on Saturday morning for?"
"No," he said. "There's nothing at all. I should do some grocery shopping this weekend, but that's always true. In fact, if you are not doing anything tomorrow night, I was thinking of asking you about going to a movie with me."
"We could talk about that. In fact," she grinned, "I was going to ask if you wanted to come to my place to talk a little anyway. I still feel lively, and Jack and Pam are going to want to get to sleep soon."
Ken thought about this quickly. Danita must trust him quite a bit to invite him into her apartment after just a few hours of conversation. But of course that wasn't quite it; she had known him for years, if only slightly, and she could well have gotten reports on him from her boyfriends -- or her girlfriends. And in truth he did not plan on trying for more than a goodnight kiss from her, though anything beyond it would be fine, of course.
So they left not long afterward, Ken following Danita's car in his. He had never known where she lived, but he found that it was almost in easy walking distance of his place. She waited by her car until he had parked and walked to her, and he thought to himself that she looked cool and attractive as she stood there alone in the spring night.