They had arranged the appointment a week ago. It was to be a perfectly innocent and professional eight-o'clock breakfast meeting, a chance for two of the firm's newest lawyers to get to know each other a little better before spending all day Saturday in a dreary seminar on intellectual property rights
That's what they had told themselves all week, each of them trying to fend off that nag of a conscience that kept warning them that this was something more, something more dangerous. Eva had still been telling herself that very thing all morning, even as she ran her six miles and took her morning shower. For some odd reason, though, she had somehow neglected to mention the meeting to her husband.
At the little downtown cafe where they had agreed to meet, the dark, handsome son of Tucson's largest liquor distributor — we'll call him David — ordered coffee and a bagel. His tablemate, the daughter of one of the city's most prominent Mormon families, a woman who for these purposes shall be known as Eva, ordered an orange juice and a fruit plate. No coffee for her
Conversation at the cafe was awkward at first. Staring across the table, David found himself a little tongue-tied, which was very much out of character. It was just a little disconcerting -- at the office, he had never seen Eva with her blonde hair falling in loose, curly ringlets around her face. At the office she always kept it pulled back into a ponytail. And maybe it was the lighting, but until that morning he also hadn't noticed the light, charming freckling across her skin. Finally, Eva rescued him by steering the conversation to their firm's partners and internal politics. David had been hired almost a year earlier, and he was relieved to discover that when Eva had questions, he had answers. He was struck again, as he had been in their office conversations, by how quickly she grasped what he was trying to say, and how smart she made him feel.
Soon, the conversation turned more personal. Eva started talking about how much she missed competitive running since graduating from BYU, where she ran the 400 meters and had barely missed making the 2004 Olympic team. Now four years past undergrad, she still kept in shape by running in 10Ks and other amateur events, but it wasn't the same, she told David. She missed the elite competition, the thrill of running against the best. On the track and at school, she had always been someone who wanted to test her limits, who wanted to see what she was capable of doing. Her friends in law school used to tease her about wanting to be the next Sandra Day O'Connor, the Supreme Court justice from Arizona "Well, maybe you can take that aggression out in the courtroom," David joked, flashing a smile.
During his two years of marriage, he had not found it difficult to remain faithful. But now, sipping his second cup of coffee, he realized how much he was drawn to this beautiful, smart young woman. Her lean runner's frame had filled out nicely in the years without competitive training, a fact that for some reason was even more apparent today than usual. And her blue eyes and blonde hair, the way her lips pursed as she listened ... well, it didn't do her justice to call her the most beautiful lawyer in Tucson, although that was already her reputation among the bar.
If Eva was also drawn to David, it wasn't because of anything unique about him because, well, in truth there wasn't much to make him unique. He was a type, a type of Arizona good ol' boy that had piqued her interest since girlhood. In high school, a couple of the popular, party-hearty boys had summoned the courage to ask her out, but they had always run afoul of her father's two rules of dating:
Rule One: Any boy who wanted to date one of his daughters had to be brought to the house for an inspection.
Rule Two: Never bring a non-Mormon boy home for inspection.
Back then her social life had revolved around the church, around social events organized for others like herself. She had gotten married young ... well, not young by LDS standards, maybe, but young. She had wed just the second boy she had dated, exchanging vows at the Temple in Mesa the summer after her sophomore year of college. And after she got accepted to law school at Yale, her husband Stephen had even accompanied her to New Haven and found work as an LDS youth counselor in the local stake. So Eva understood, at least in a vague way, that she still had a lot of ... questions, not just about men in general but about herself.
From her wooden, stiff-backed chair, Eva could glance over David's shoulder and see a clock on the cafe wall, one of those kitschy little cactus clocks sold in every souvenir shop and tourist trap in the Southwest. The continuing ed seminar, at a hotel ballroom a couple of blocks down the street, was scheduled to start at nine. But at 8:45, as David was telling her about the new black pickup truck he had driven off the dealership lot a week earlier, she listened and smiled to herself at the little boy's enthusiasm in his voice and she said nothing about the time.
At 8:55, as she talked about her own excitement at finally beginning her career in the law and her hopes to specialize in international business, she still pretended not to register the passing of time, even though her eyes kept glancing at that clock,
At 9:05, after watching the minute hand finally slide past the 12 and onto the next hour, the tension of pretending was suddenly replaced by the tension of knowing. Whatever the day held for her, she realized, it would be spent somewhere other than at a stuffy hotel conference room. She also realized that she had somehow known that all along.
David, too, had sensed the passing of time. But he was enjoying Eva's company too much to care. He felt himself on a roll, and he certainly wasn't going to be the one who broke the spell. As long as she was willing to sit there with him, warming him with her smile and presence and stirring his thoughts in unprofessional directions, well, he wasn't a big enough fool to remind her they had somewhere else to be.
Finally, by 9:30, the obvious had become impossible for either of them to deny any longer. David gestured for the check, then, with a strange gurgle in his voice, he offered a suggestion he knew would never be accepted.
"I guess we're blowing off class, huh? You want to go for a ride in that truck? It's parked right outside."
She smiled and nodded. "Whatever you have in mind," she said.
"Whatever I have in mind?" he thought to himself, panicking, as they pushed away their chairs on the noisy wooden floor and rose to leave. "I have nothing in mind! What do we do now? I can't believe this."
As they headed for the door, he touched her for the first time, an innocuous gentleman's guide to the elbow that she graciously accepted. And by the time they reached the truck, a plan of sorts had begun to formulate:
Goal One, he needed to get her alone, and there was no place short of a hotel room that offered privacy on a Saturday morning. But there was also no way in hell he was going to try to pull that one off with a woman like this. It was time to get creative.
"Hey, I've been meaning to take the truck up into the mountains, just to see how she handles in four-wheel drive," he said once they were both strapped in. "Do you mind coming along? I'd have to stop and pick up some things, but I know a couple of places with great views down near the border. We could be back to your car by mid-afternoon, no problem, right on schedule."
"That sounds great," she said. "I haven't been down there since I was a kid. We used to camp there with my family all the time."
So an hour later, after stopping to pick up bottled water, a six-pack of beer, some ice and a cheap Styrofoam ice chest, David was nervously negotiating a backwoods road in the Coronado National Forest, where he and his buddies used to party in high school.
