5 comments/ 14662 views/ 8 favorites A Rational Woman at Sea in a Fog By: LeeScarlet "The bad news is that you're going to prison." "What's the good news?" "There isn't any." Suzanne watched Martin's eyes turn sad. They were saddest eyes that she had ever seen in a client. And she'd seen a lot of sad eyes in the last ten years. It was right there in the defense attorney job description: look into defendants' eyes, tell the truth, and watch them grow sad. She thought that she'd become inured to clients' sadness but Martin was affecting her more deeply than most. Not because he was a young man, many of her clients were young men, nor because he had money, she accepted almost no pro bono clients, but because he looked so vulnerable. Most of her young clients were the spoiled children of wealthy parents. Martin had neither their innate self-assurance nor their unquestioned belief that they were entitled to have whatever they wished. "How long?" he asked, quietly. "That's not good news either. The SEC wants to send a message. Their offer is twenty years." She saw the blood drain from Martin's face. "I'm trying to negotiate them down to ten. They aren't budging yet, but I've got a few more cards to play." She always tried to throw her clients some bone as she ushered them out of her office but she wasn't shading the truth this time; she expected that she could move the prosecutor at least a little on the sentence recommendation. "What if I go to trial?" "Then you could get thousands of years of prison time. They're charging you with hundreds of separate counts of insider trading and they'll argue for separate sentences to be served consecutively." "If I get ten years, I'll be old when I get out." Suzanne shook her head. "You'll be thirty-three. That's not old." She refrained from pointing out that, when he was released, he would be five years younger than she was now. If she and the prosecutor split the difference between their current positions and he got fifteen years, then he would be exactly her age when he was released. "Ten years is almost half my life." "You'll have to give back the money, too." "How much?" "All of it." "I don't have all my money. I've spent quite a bit of it. Besides, I didn't make all of it by trading stocks. I got some from other parts of my business. The SEC shouldn't have any claim on that part." "They figure you owe them fifty million." "I only have thirty-four and change. It hurt when you advised me to liquidate so quickly. Selling off large blocks at once depressed the price of some of the companies that I'd invested in." "You have a couple of houses. Your cars. Your yacht. That adds up to a few million. You bought tangible assets. You didn't spend all your money on wine, women, and song." "I didn't spend any money on wine, women, and song. I've only had a couple of girlfriends in my life and none of them stayed around for long. If you don't have a woman, then there's no reason to waste money on wine and song." "No?" She was surprised. "You're a good looking guy. And you've got a lot of money. I'd have thought that the girls'd be standing in line for a date with you." He shrugged. "I was pretty busy. When I started out, I was writing code all the time. After that, I was babysitting the servers. Then, for the last couple of years, I was monitoring the online discussions to know which stocks to buy and sell. That was a lot of work. It took all my time. The last few weeks have been the first time since high school that I've been able to spend more than a couple of hours at a time doing anything besides working and sleeping. Girls don't want to hang around a guy who's hunched over a computer all the time." Suzanne knew what he was saying. Since passing the bar more than ten years ago, she had been working seventy-hour weeks, week after week, year in and year out. Every year, she told herself that her next promotion would make things easier but it never did. The firm was too big and there was too much internecine rivalry at every level. It was hard to have a love life in a rat race, even for a woman as attractive as her. She had not had a steady boyfriend in a long time. The money was great but, for the last couple of years, she had been asking herself if the cost was too high. Was any amount of money enough to compensate her for her youth? It was a rational question. The answer was that far more hotshot lawyers burned out and dropped out than made equity partner. She was one of the three lawyers in her entry year cohort who was still with the firm. Sometimes, she thought about those other dozen eager young faces that sat around the conference table during the corporate orientation meeting so long ago and wondered what most of them were doing now. She hoped that they were happy. "You should enjoy yourself as much as you can during the next few days," she said. "Once we reach an agreement on your plea, we'll schedule a court date for you to allocute before a judge as soon as possible. You'll start serving your sentence right after that." "Allocute means that I confess?" "Right." "But I still don't think that I did anything wrong. I didn't hurt anyone." "SEC regulations protect stockholders by keeping the playing field level. You tilted it in your favor when you used the information that was stored on your servers to buy stocks and sell stocks at advantageous times. You were effectively taking money from other stockholders who didn't have the same information." "I spread my trades out over as many companies as possible. I didn't trade many stocks in any one company at any one time. The other stockholders would barely notice the difference." "You took fifty million dollars away from them." "But that was from a lot of trades. I didn't take not more than a little from any one stock. Besides, the information that I was using was sitting on a web site. The corporate executives and boards of directors who were using my meeting software should have known not to discuss sensitive information on the web. Everyone knows that what goes on the web can get hacked. It happens all the time." She shook her head. "You said explicitly that your software was secure." "They had to know that nothing was secure from me. The system administrator can always see everything that anyone puts on his server. They were essentially giving me the information. How can anyone blame me for looking at stuff that was right there in front of me?" "Look, Martin. You can't say all this when you allocute to the judge. You have to say what you did and admit that you knew that it was wrong. If you try to justify it like this, he can throw out your plea deal and give you a longer sentence. You don't want to go to prison for the rest of your life. Just say that you created software for online meetings, made that software available to the management boards of major corporations for free, read the discussions about corporate plans, and then used that information to gain advantage in stock transactions. Don't say that you didn't know that it was a crime or that it was all someone else's fault. Just admit that you did something wrong." He looked at her and slowly nodded his head. "I understand. I'll say whatever you tell me to say. It doesn't matter. I'm going to prison next week and I'm not going to have a girlfriend until I'm old." "Do something fun this weekend. Do something that you'll enjoy. What do you want to do most of all?" He looked sadder than before. "All I really want is to go out on a date and I can't. I don't know any girls. You're the only woman that I've talked with in a long time." "Then ask me out." Suzanne would never know why she blurted that out. She was fifteen years older than Martin. Worse, he was her client. Any romantic involvement was a blatant conflict of interest. She could be disbarred. She never did anything on impulse, much less did anything as irrational as this. But she needed to have a little fun as badly as Martin did. Her love life was as bereft as his. She was lonely and on the verge of burning out. And she liked him. He was intelligent and vulnerable and sweet in his own way. There might have been a little guilt motivating her as well. When she had first taken his case, she had expected that he'd get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. It was just a little white-collar crime and the courts were clogged with real criminals and real victims. She'd told him that he'd probably have to return the money, get a suspended sentence, and do a little community service. She never expected that the SEC would want to throw him in jail for the rest of his life. He was only twenty-three and barely knew what the SEC was. And the prosecutor didn't have a single victim to bring to court. But there had been a bit of publicity at the outset because of the amount of money involved and publicity was always bad for a guilty client. It didn't help that so many authorities were afraid of the power of the Internet and were determined to slam anyone who seemed to benefit from the technology. So, despite her best efforts, Martin was a condemned man facing a substantial prison sentence. Martin looked at her in shock. "But you're out of my league," he said. "Look at you. You're beautiful. You wouldn't want to go out with me." "You won't know unless you ask me." She knew that he would ask. There wasn't the slightest doubt in the world about that. It didn't matter that they were different generations or came from different worlds. He needed a woman and she was making herself available. They both knew what she was saying. If he treated her reasonably, he would probably get lucky tonight. Not for certain -- nothing was ever a hundred percent certain -- but the odds were strongly stacked in his favor. She wanted it. She hadn't been laid in a long time and she liked him. There was a long pause while he mastered his shock and gathered his courage. Finally, he spoke. "Do you want to go out tonight?" His voice was shaking so much that he was almost stuttering. He was staring at her like she was the last woman on earth. "Yes," she said. "You do? Really? You'll go on a date with me?" "I'd like that." "Really?" His eyes were wide. "Where do you want to go?" "That's up to you," she said. "What do you want to do tonight?" "I don't know. I'm not good at dating." "What do you like to eat?" "Mexican food." "Then take me out for Mexican food." "Okay. What time?" "Is five-thirty good for you?" she asked. "We can beat the supper rush if we go a little early." She deserved to get out of the office on time for once in her life. Besides, this was almost a business appointment. She was scheduled to meet with the ADA at two o'clock to discuss the terms of the plea bargain. She hoped to have good news for Martin this evening. If you could call a ten-year prison sentence good news. At least it would be better news than a twenty-year sentence. "I don't have anything else planned," he said. "Do you know where Verdugo's is?" "I can find it." With that, the decision was final. They were going on a date. * * * "That was good," Suzanne said. Though the restaurant was only a few blocks from her office, she had never eaten here before because it was a small place hidden away on a small side street. "How did you find this place?" "A couple of years ago, I decided to try eating at every Mexican restaurant in the city. I liked this place the most," Martin replied. As was her habit in Mexican restaurants, Suzanne had ordered one of the house specialties rather than a standard combinacione gringo. The chili-stuffed chicken breast drizzled with mole sauce had been accompanied by a side salad with a honey and lime dressing. Both had been wonderful. But when she said that the meal was good, she was referring to the company more than the food. Martin's self-deprecating anecdotes about his early days when he was creating his startup company had been both amusing and poignant. He was definitely going to get lucky tonight. So was she. "What would you like to do now?" he asked. "I'd like to watch the sun set over the ocean," she replied. "I understand that your beach house has a terrific view." "That's more than an hour's drive from here." "The sun won't set until nine." He stared at her for a long time, trying to read her mind. She smiled. She was pretty sure that her intention was obvious. She was going to seduce him. "Okay," he said, then pulled a phone out of his pocket and began texting. That was rude. She began to wonder if he was going to get lucky after all. But he looked up and said, "My car will be here in about ten minutes. I usually use the Tesla for tooling around town, but I'd rather take the Virage for a longer drive." Suzanne understood. He had not been messaging someone that he found more interesting than her; he had been texting a valet service to get his car delivered. She was relieved. She really wanted to get lucky tonight. While they were waiting, she said, "You haven't told me how you got the idea for your conferencing software in the first place. You were still in high school when you started designing it, right? What on earth could put that ahead of chasing cheerleaders on your priority list?" "It was high school. I had about as much chance going out with a cheerleader as meeting a barbarian warrior princess. Less. I could always hope that I'd fall through a microscopic black hole and pop into an alternate universe that was overflowing with barbarian women. But, even in a bizarre alternate universe, I couldn't hope that a cheerleader would want me." He grinned. His grin was charming. "I wasn't exactly the captain of the football team. But, like every other teenage boy in the universe, I had daddy issues. In my case, my daddy had issues with business meetings. He was a middle manager in the Northwest Regional Office of the Department of Transportation. He went to meetings every day and every evening he came home and complained about them. I figured that things would be happier around the house if he didn't have such awful meetings. I listened to his complaints and started writing code." "A lot of important people use your service. How could a high school student design something like that?" Martin shrugged. "I believed what my father told me. He always said that the smartest people on his staff turned stupid as soon as they stepped into a meeting room. When he raised any subject in a meeting, everyone would make up their minds instantly, for or against, before they'd heard any discussion. Once their minds were made up, they could never change them again. I found other sites that hosted web-based meetings and told him about them. He looked at them but he wouldn't use them because they didn't solve the human problem. I figured that I had to write a program for him that was different. It had to make smart people stay smart by never giving them a chance to make up their minds about anything until they've had a chance to reason through all the discussion." The restaurant door opened and he looked around. "Great. My car's here. You don't have to listen to any more boring lecture about my daddy issues." As Suzanne followed him out of the room, she thought about his line, The smartest people turn stupid as soon as they step into a meeting room. That rang true. When she was younger, she had spent a lot of time in meetings and had seen many smart people turn stupid. This afternoon had been no different. The prosecutor's mind was already made up. Martin's plea bargain had to include a twenty-year prison sentence. Her attempt to reason with him had fallen on deaf ears. She had no hope that she'd be able to get him to reduce the sentence even to fifteen years. She was going to have to tell Martin soon. But not tonight. Tonight she wanted him to be as happy as he could be. He deserved that much. "I like the pearly color," she said as she stepped out of the restaurant. "It's called silver blonde," he said. "My Ferrari's red. I think an Aston Martin should look more elegant." "This is an Aston Martin?" "Virage. Twelve cylinder coupe. It's got forty eight--" He interrupted himself and laughed. "You don't want to hear all engineering specs, do you?" "I want to ride up to your beach house," she said, wrapping her hands around his upper arm and brushing her head against his shoulder. She was not short but he was taller than her. She liked that, too. "Right," he said. "We want to get there before sunset. Don't worry. The Virage can do it. It's got forty-eight valves." He laughed at himself for not being able to resist throwing in a little technical trivia. "That's a lot of valves." He opened the passenger door for her. She settled into the tan leather seat. "Ooh. This is nice. Comfortable." He smiled. "We may as well enjoy it while we can. I won't have it much longer." She had no answer for that. Despite his love for the big engine, he drove up the coast at a comfortable speed. When he came up behind slower cars, he never rode the other driver's bumper, but purred behind at a careful distance. Patience is a trait that she appreciated in drivers. The common stereotype was that technical geeks were seldom so considerate of other people. She was happy to abandon that prejudice. After they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, she said, "You're dating the cheerleader tonight, you know." "Really?" "Really. I was on the cheer squad for two years in high school." "I never would have guessed that." He glanced across at her. "I mean, you're certainly beautiful enough. But you're a lawyer. At a major law firm. A high achiever." It was her turn to laugh. "Not all cheerleaders are bimbos, you know." He flushed red and kept his eyes on the road. She reached across the console and stroked his head. "Tonight, I'm not your lawyer. Tonight, I'm the cheerleader that you're dating. When I was in high school, I always hoped that one of the smart guys would ask me out but they never did. And the captain of the football team was a bimbo. Going out with you is as much my fantasy as it is yours." She was telling lies. The captain of the varsity football team at her high school was an honor student with a three point eight GPA. And she could have dated almost any honor student that she wanted. But tonight the truth was not important. Being Martin's fantasy was. And his fantasy was finding a desirable woman who secretly dreamed of dating a man like him. Every man harbored some version of a dating-an-un-datable-woman fantasy. Her fantasy was that she was still young. Being his cheerleader helped her to pretend that she wasn't Martin's senior by fifteen years. As long as he didn't expect her to turn any cartwheels, this would be a win-win deal. He smiled and leaned his head against her hand for a minute. Unlike plea-bargaining, love can be a positive sum game. * * * "Inside or outside?" Martin's house had what is known in real estate parlance as a "whitewater ocean view", meaning that it was positioned on a bluff that overlooked a rugged section of coastline. There was no hope of swimming in the surf that crashed and roared around the boulders at the base of the cliff, but that was fine with Suzanne. She would rather watch the dramatic, primal spectacle than paddle around a sandy beach. There were benches on the lawn between the house and the precipice, positioned to make the most of the spectacular view. "Outside," she said. "We can go inside when it gets cool later." "Make yourself at home," he said. "I'll be back in a moment." She settled on a bench while he busied himself inside the house. The setting sun backlit the breaking swells with rich, red fire. The water crashed so violently against the rock that the fine spray looked like smoke. A Rational Woman at Sea in a Fog Suzanne had been raised in Minnesota. She had never seen an ocean until she moved to Berkley to attend university. She had been awed by her first contact with the ocean. What she had seen in movies had not prepared her for the bass roar in her ears and salt tang in her nose. To her regret, though she had lived in San Francisco, surrounded by salt water, for almost two decades, she seldom saw the ocean, except as a glimmer of blue on the horizon from her office window or from her car when cresting a hill downtown. Seeing the raw power of the Pacific pounding against the shore a few dozen yards away struck awe in her. "Wine?" Martin was carrying an uncorked bottle of red and two glasses. "Sure." "This comes from a little winery north of Sonoma," he said. "I'm no connoisseur, but people who know told me that it's is a good one so I bought a few cases. When you have a wine cellar, you have to put something in it." She took a sip. It was as good as claimed. Nicely fruity, not too oaky, smooth but with a gentle tang of sharp, citrusy aftertaste. "This is lovely," she said. He looked across the water at the setting sun. "I like it here. I didn't get out much before. But now, with all my troubles, I haven't been spending all my time on the computer, so but I've been staying here a lot more. Mostly, thinking about my future." He looked at the raging water. "Even with the recession and all the real estate tanked, this place'll bring the SEC a few million." He drained his wine glass in a gulp. She took his hand and raised it to her cheek. "No more about that. Tonight, I don't understand anything about business or the law. I'm just your cheerleader." "Your word is my command," he said. "We don't need any words at all," she replied and turned her lips to him. He turned toward her but paused. To complete the kiss, she had to put her hand behind his neck and pull him the last few inches. Once their lips touched, he forgot his reticence and cooperated fully. He was surprisingly good at kissing. His lips were soft and smooth, his mouth slightly open and relaxed. She made it clear that she wanted more than brushing lips and he accommodated. She felt the tentative touch of his tongue against her mouth. She opened her lips wider and slid her own tongue forward to meet his. After a couple of minutes, she realized that he was stalled at the kissing stage. Unless she moved him forward, kissing was all she would get. She was calling herself a cheerleader, and now he was acting like the shy high school nerd. Without breaking contact, she took his hand and placed it on her chest. She liked having a man touch her breasts. It was not so much the physical sensation as the feeling that she was being appreciated as a woman. She returned the favor by rubbing her hand over his chest. After a minute, she unbuttoned his shirt -- she was surprisingly dexterous at unbuttoning a man's shirt with one hand, considering that it had been a while since she had done it -- and slipped inside to slide her palm against his skin. He took a deep breath when she began to massage his nipples in small circles with two fingers. Taking her cue from that, she pulled his shirt open and lowered her head to lick and suck his chest, brushing her lips across his smooth skin from one nipple to the other and back again. He moaned and grabbed the edge of the bench with both hands. The house sat on a dozen acres of private property. She was sure that there was no one within a half mile who could see them. She stood before him and unbuttoned her red satin blouse, then tossed it on the bench. His eyes were wide with wonder. On the way back from her meeting with the prosecutor, she had slipped into Victoria's Secret and bought a red lace bra. She reached behind her back and unhooked her bra, but left it hanging in place, still covering her breasts. Every man loves to see a woman strip for him. She put her hands to the cups and lowered them slowly, arching her back and thrusting her chest toward him, teasing him with the promise of what she was about to reveal. Her breasts were round and full. In her opinion, they were her best feature. Though she was keenly aware that they now rested a little lower on her chest than they had in her cheerleading days, they were still a credit to female beauty. Martin's gasp was audible over the surf. Hearing it brought a flush of pleasure to her. She stepped forward and bent down to press her left breast to his face. When the nipple touched his lips, he opened his mouth to suck it. She enjoyed the gentle tingle that perfused her torso when a man stimulated her nipples but she loved, far more, the look of joy in the man's eyes when she gave herself to him. Martin's eyes rolled upward to gaze blankly at the base of her neck while his entire mind was focused on what his lips and hands were feeling. His face was copper in the dying fire of the setting sun. The picture was perfect. She kneeled on the bench, straddling him, grabbed the back for stability, and let him play with her breasts for as long as he wanted. It was a long time. In her position, straddling his lap, she could feel the strength of his desire pressing upward through his jeans and her panties, against her own sex. She wanted to give herself pleasure by rubbing against that protuberance but dared not for fear of making him climax too soon. Instead, she concentrated on his face and her breasts and reveled in the joy of the moment. When she judged that he had sated himself, she pulled away and stepped back off the bench. As she stood, she took his hand and pulled him up with her. She hugged him hard, bare chest to bare breasts, and whispered, "Undress yourself." He kicked off his cross trainers and slipped his jeans and underwear away in a moment. He wore no socks. She took a moment to appreciate his slim figure before she stepped back and slipped her charcoal skirt to her feet and stepped out of it, revealing black stay-up stockings and red lace bikini panties that matched the discarded bra. When she eschewed pantyhose for this evening, she had almost bought a black garter belt but demurred in the end. She worried that it would be too tacky. Stay-ups with a wide lacey band around her thigh seemed to be a good compromise. The expression on Martin's face confirmed that she had made the right decision. The crotch of her panties was dripping. Martin was visibly ready and she could wait no longer. She slipped her panties off, leaving her shoes and stockings in place, and drew him down to the ground on top of her. When she spread her legs wide, she did not need to guide him inside; she was completely open to him. In their frenzied coupling, he did not last long. But she came first, so great was her need. He rested on top of her while the last edge of the sun slipped below the horizon. Though some inches taller than her, he did not seem to weigh much more. She could easily bear his weight, even when she was lying on firm ground. This, also, made her aware of his youth. When their breathing relaxed to a more normal rhythm, she said, "You're a wonderful lover." He kissed her cheek and pushed himself off. "I'd like to be better for you." "I can't imagine how anyone could." She stroked his chest and they said no more while they lay on the grass, listening to the surf and watching the light fade from the sky. The air was damp and the night began to chill. The grass felt dewy. After a time, she said, "It's time to go inside." He kissed her and helped her to her feet. "I'd like a shower," she said. "I think I have grass stuck to my back." "Can you stay the night?" he asked. "You can stay in the guest room if you want your own bed." "Would you mind if I slept in your bed?" she asked. "I'd like that." He hugged her close. * * * There was no food in the house -- Martin usually ate out -- but he served coffee in a glass conservatory on the east side of the main floor, a place that he called the morning room. Suzanne assumed that it was called the morning room because it caught the sun in the morning but lost it to the shadow of the second floor shortly after noon. "Good coffee," she said. "I'm going to miss my coffee machines," he replied. "I'll probably end up drinking a lot of instant coffee for the next year or so." Or twenty, she thought, reminded that she had not yet told him about the prosecutor's intransigence over his sentence. She would be almost sixty years old by the time he got out of prison. It was deliciously naughty for a thirty-eight-year-old woman to seduce a twenty-three-year-old man but she could not imagine herself as a sixty-year-old trying to show a forty-five-year-old ex-con a good time. Maybe she would feel differently in twenty years, but, today, she expected that this weekend would be the only time in her life when she would be making love to Martin. "I want you to make love to me again," she said. "Okay," Martin replied, looking at her over the rim of the cup as he took another sip. "I mean, I want to feel you inside me right now." He put his cup on the coffee table. "Here? In the morning room?" "Right here, right now." He looked around the room. The floor was a mosaic of bright Mexican ceramic tiles. It was furnished with wrought iron chairs and tables. It was comfortable for sitting, but there was no comfortable place to lie down. She did not wait for him to raise an objection, but stood and dropped her plush avocado robe to the floor. She walked naked to him and reached into the folds of his robe to feel him. He was already hard and, after a moment of firm massage, became rigid in her hands. She pulled him to his feet, then turned, spread her legs and bent to grab the end of the heavy coffee table with one hand. "Do me like this," she said, reaching between her legs to spread herself open for him. He obliged. When he was thrusting deep into her, she kept her hand between her legs, first feeling him slide back and forth past her fingers and then massaging herself to a fast climax, synchronizing the rhythm of her self-stimulation to his increasing tempo. He groaned while she screamed with pleasure. When he withdrew, she sank to her knees on the cool tiles and rested her head on the glass coffee table. He sank to his knees beside her and rested his head on her back. "Thank-you," he said. She laughed softly and replied, "You're welcome, but I didn't do that for you. I did it for myself. I should be thanking you." "You're welcome, too," he said. After a minute, her knees began to ache a little. "I don't think our coffee is cold, yet." He raised his head from her back and said, "No." She stood, slipped the robe back on, and sat back down in her chair. After quietly enjoying basking in the sun for a few minutes, she asked, "Do you have plans for the day?" "Nothing that can't be changed," he said. "I have to go into the office and get some work done, but I can be finished in three or four hours." "By three?" he asked. "I can be ready by two." "Would you like to spend the evening on the yacht?" "I'd love it." She paused. "The evening or the night?" "As long as you like." "I'll pack an overnight bag." "That would be terrific." She hoped that meant that she'd get laid at least twice more, maybe even three times, before she had to drop the bad news about his plea bargain on him. * * * Though she'd been living by the ocean for almost twenty years, she'd never sailed on it. She'd had to drop into a boutique near her office and get some advice about what to wear. Apparently the size and mode of propulsion of the yacht made a difference. Some yachts were big enough to merit evening wear, others demanded salt-water friendly fabrics. She had written a description of Martin's yacht as part of the inventory of his tangible assets, but could not remember anything except the estimated value. Nothing else had been meaningful to her work. She told the clerk that the only thing that she knew about the yacht was that it was worth nine hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. The clerk raised an eyebrow but did not comment on the kind of woman who would know the exact price of the boat that she would be cruising on, but nothing else. Suzanne could see the clerk bite back a barbed comment and struggle to restrict her suggestions to clothing choices. Armed with two new trim pants and blouse combinations and a conservative one-piece bathing suit in her overnight bag, Suzanne met Martin outside her office. Today he was driving a little, ice-blue sports car. "Is the car running?" she asked as he pulled away from the curb. He laughed. "It's electric. No exploding gasoline in the engine. Just the quiet hum of an electric motor." "This is really nice." "This is the future. I'm going to miss this car." She knew that cars officially became antiques when they're twenty years old. This car would be an antique by the time Martin got out of prison. By that time, everyone might be driving electric cars. He steered toward the Golden Gate. "I'm moored in Sausalito." The drive was quiet in every way than one. She and Martin had little to say as they crossed the bridge. She didn't ask him to put any music on and he didn't offer. Each of them had a lot to think about. Martin's boat wasn't the biggest in the marina, but it was in the top quartile. As he pulled away from the mooring under power, she was struck by the peculiar paradox that a big boat was still a small space for two people to occupy. No matter how big the vessel, everything inside had to designed to be as compact and efficient as possible. No boat had even a single cubic inch to waste. The cumulative amount of planning required to outfit a boat was incredible. In the bay, he asked her to help raise the sails. "Normally a boat like this would have a couple of crew members aboard," he said as they both manned a winch, "but I've had this outfitted so that it can be sailed solo. It takes a lot longer to raise the canvas and I can only trim one sail at a time, but it works out fine. She wasn't designed for racing." "You've sailed this boat by yourself a lot?" She was surprised at his comfort in handling the craft. She had the impression that he had spent most of his short adult life sitting in front of a computer. "Yeah," he said, understanding what motivated her question. "Wireless is wonderful. I spent a lot of time floating out of sight of land, monitoring my servers from the cockpit. The computer in there meets navy specs. Salt spray rolls right off it." Which explained why he had the boat outfitted to be handled solo. What friend would want to be stuck on something this size for hours while the only other person aboard was glued to a computer for the entire trip? "I've never been on a boat before," she said. "The trick is to stay topside and keep watching the shore until you habituate to the motion. If you do get seasick, don't worry. It's normal. Just heave over the lee side." He pointed to the lower side of the tilted deck. "The mistake that most people make is trying to fight the motion by looking at something on the boat. Or worse, going below decks. That just confuses your vestibular system. You have to let the fishy parts of your brain see that you really are moving so that it doesn't think that all the motion you feel is from some poison that you ate." He sounded like he had given this speech too many times before, but she understood what he was saying. She was not susceptible to motion sickness but, to be safe, she followed his instructions and kept watching the bridge as they sailed toward it. It soon filled her entire visual field. The Golden Gate looks big enough when one drives across it, but one has to sail under it to appreciate how long and high it really is. It took a while to pass through the Golden Gate Strait and reach the open ocean. Sailing vessels, even with a good steady breeze, are a slow way to travel. Suzanne was standing next to Martin in the cockpit, appreciating the leisurely pace when he said, "Boy, we're really moving. We're riding the ebb tide out. When the tide falls, the bay tries to empty itself into the ocean and the water really rushes through here." She laughed as she forced herself to re-calibrate her internal speedometer. If this was really fast, then how slowly did a boat this size usually sail? She asked. "About three miles an hour on average. About the same speed as a horse and carriage." "Oh." She looked around. If she turned her face to the wind and watched the water spraying off the prow, she felt like they were racing along. But if she watched the shoreline and looked at other boats in the distance, she felt like they were crawling. "To get back by ten tonight, we can only go about eighteen miles, total. Not more than nine miles away." "Do you have to get back tonight," she asked. "I've got nothing planned," he said. "Can we stay out overnight?" "I'd like that." "As long as I can get back to the office by six tomorrow night, so I can spend a few hours preparing for the rest of the week, I'll be good." He looked around. "This weather's going to hold for the next forty-eight hours. We can make the Farallones tonight." "What's that?" His indulgent smile annoyed her. She was too old to be indulged by a man this young. "You've lived in San Francisco for how long?" he said. "And you've never noticed the islands out on the horizon on a clear day?" "I've never been on an island, even on a lake." "Sorry, you can't set foot on these islands, either. They're an ecological preserve. But we can moor there. There's plenty to see. Thousands of birds. Seals. Sharks eating the seals. Whales." "I don't think I want to see a shark eating anything." "Don't worry. If we sink, the sharks might eat me, but they'll leave you alone." "Why?" "You're a lawyer. They'll extend professional courtesy." He laughed. She groaned. She'd heard that joke before and silently berated herself for walking right into it. Then she smiled. Martin looked happy on his boat and she liked seeing him happy. He would have little enough to be happy about after this weekend. Little enough for the next twenty years. Eighteen if he earns the full amount of time off for good behavior. But he had not hope of an early release on parole. He was charged with a federal crime and the federal justice system offers no parole. "Can we make love when we get to the islands?" He smiled. "I'd like that very much. I've never made love on this boat before." "Then I'll be happy to help your boat lose its virginity." * * * She loved seeing the sun set over the water. Even more than when they'd watched a humpbacked whale breach off their starboard side and that had been amazing. To her surprise, he had given her the helm earlier while he went below to fix supper. Smoked salmon and cream cheese on bagels. With capers and red onion. Daniel's Cafe couldn't have done it better. It was well after dark by the time they reached the islands and Martin dropped anchor. It took him a while to rig an extra line and float so that he could work the anchor free if it caught on a rock on the bottom. She would have never known what he was doing if he had not been explaining every step. He seemed to like explaining things to her. She did not mind listening. "You know a lot about this," she said. "It's in my blood. My parents were avid sailors. We spent most of our summer vacations on Puget Sound. Great sailing up there. I've been doing this for most of my life. I started serving as crew for my father when I was in grade school." Which meant that he'd been sailing for about as many years as Suzanne had been studying law. A Rational Woman at Sea in a Fog Knowing that he was an avid sailor made him seem like less of a geek. Until she remembered the waterproof computer that he kept in the cockpit near the helm. Apparently a young man could be a geek and a sailor at the same time. A geek and a sailor and a lover. As soon as the anchor was set, she dragged him below deck. "The Captain's Quarters are straight ahead," he said. "It's...efficient," she said when she stepped through the door. "It's extravagant for a sailboat. This is a seventy-two foot luxury sailing yacht. You should see how we slept in my parents' thirty-two. We've got three self-contained suites. We can fit eight in reasonable comfort if the crew gives up their bunks and fits out the benches in the galley for sleeping." "You don't have a crew." "It's not common to sail a vessel this large solo. I'm not saying that I'm setting any records or anything. It's done often enough if the vessel is outfitted properly. But it's much more common to bring along at least one experienced crew member." "Instead, you brought me." "I'd rather be here with you than anyone else." She kissed him for a long soft moment, then whispered, "I'm going to make sure of that." She undressed him before she undressed herself. He watched her with rapt attention while she took off her clothes. She was wearing nothing exotic under the white slacks and blue-striped top, just cotton panties, but he ogled her like she was a Victoria's Secret Angel. She liked that. She pushed the spread and top sheet to the floor -- clearing the decks for action, she thought -- and then laid back and spread her legs. She didn't need any more foreplay. The whole day had been foreplay for her. For Martin, too. He was ready to board her. He knelt between her thighs and easily slipped inside when he lay down on top of her. The boat at anchor was rocked by the slow steady swells of the open ocean. Martin rocked deep into her with the same excruciatingly slow tantric rhythm, letting the ocean do the lovemaking for both of them. It was a sophisticated approach for a man his age and Suzanne was both surprised and impressed. Unlike their previous frenzied couplings, they lay in union for a long, long time, luxuriating in each other's company, neither wanting to come to the end soon. But the end had to come eventually. Suzanne felt his breathing quicken against her chest, then felt him pulse deep inside her belly. When he groaned softly, she grabbed him about the hips and pulled him hard into her. When he finished and was draped, limp, across her, he said, "Was that all right?" "That was perfect." "But you didn't..." He paused. "Do you want--" She kissed him to interrupt him, then pulled back and said, "No, I don't want anything different. That was perfect. A woman isn't the same as a man. She doesn't always want to come. Sometimes, she's happier to enjoy the intimacy of the whole experience." He was quiet for a minute, then said, "It that's okay with you." He sounded doubtful. "Believe it," she said. "That was perfect for me." * * * "It's foggy." Martin shrugged. "San Francisco is famous for being foggy." "I can barely see the other end of the boat. Can we get back in this?" "No problem. We've got state-of-the-art radar. It'll see a rock or another vessel miles away. We'll pull anchor in an hour to get you back by six." "That'll be fine." "If you want to go back." "Sorry, I can't stay out any longer. I've got to prepare for a deposition tomorrow morning and have to present a couple of pre-trial motions for another case on Tuesday." "I don't mean for one more day. I mean for longer. A lot longer." He looked into the fog. "It would take about two thousand hours to sail from here to the South Seas. Close to three months. I've got enough food, water, and fuel aboard for two people to do it without a problem." Her heart jumped in alarm. "You can't do that. You're on bail. You can't leave the state." "That's what the judge said but there's nothing out here that can stop me." "You don't have a passport. You had to surrender it as a condition of your bail." "I don't need a passport to leave the country, just to get back in. If I leave, I'm never coming back." "What about getting into another country? You need a passport for that." "There's a lot of countries that will let you in for a little bribe. In fact, they'll make you a citizen and give you a passport for a little more money." "You don't have money. The court ordered the bank to freeze all your accounts when you were arrested." "Maybe I didn't tell them about a couple of my offshore accounts. Maybe I have another twenty million that they don't know about. And maybe I have another couple of million dollars in Canadian gold Maple Leaf coins hidden aboard right now." "You couldn't have that much on board." "At eighteen hundred dollars an ounce, your weight in gold is worth about four million dollars. But gold is real heavy. A hundred and thirty pounds fits in a tenth of a cubic foot. It doesn't take much space at all." "I'm an officer of the court," she said. "If you tell me that you're going to violate your bail, I'm obligated to report it." "I'm just speaking hypothetically," he said. "Just dreaming about the South Seas. There's nothing illegal about dreaming." "Okay," she said. "Okay. But I'm advising you, in the strongest terms possible, to obey the conditions of your bail and report to your trial. If you violate your bail, they will put you in jail until your trial starts. Worse, when you do go to trial, revoked bail will make it look like you deserve the maximum sentence." She was worried. She had argued for the least restrictive possible conditions of bail. Surrender his passport, freeze his accounts, and weekly reporting. No electronic monitoring or daily reporting. The judge had agreed because, at that time, everyone had expected that Martin would be facing a relatively light sentence. He had taken a lot of money illegally but there were no victims clamoring for justice. Even the prosecutor had not argued much about bail. She suspected that the SEC had only started putting pressure on the prosecutor to demand a significant prison sentence some time after bail had been granted. Probably some middle manager woke up in the middle of the night and decided to see if he could use the case to make a name for himself. When bail conditions had been set, no one thought to seize his yacht because no one had guessed that a geek like him would be qualified to sail thousands of miles solo. If he set out across the Pacific, it would be a week before anyone but her would notice. Especially if she told the prosecutor that Martin was still thinking about the plea offer. He'd be hundreds of miles out to sea before anyone came looking for him. "I'll make breakfast," he said, seeming eager to drop the subject of jumping bail. "How do you feel about bacon and eggs?" He smiled. "I'm not a great cook, but I can do all right with the basics." "I'm not much of a cook, either," she said. "I'm happy with basic food." "Is scrambled all right?" "Fine." The food was as basic as promised -- a slice of buttered toast, three rashers of crisp bacon, and a scoop of scrambled eggs -- but the sea air and rolling deck made her pallet more acute. She took the time to savor every bite and could not remember enjoying a breakfast so much since she was a child. "That was delicious." "Real eggs and fresh bacon," he said. "A week out, it would be egg beaters and frozen pre-cooked bacon. That's almost as good, but not quite the same." Another reminder that he was stocked and ready to sail away. "No sense wasting daylight," he said. "We better pull anchor. The breeze is light so we won't be moving too fast. But don't worry. If we fall behind schedule, I'll fire up the diesel and get us home on time." They motored away from the island before setting the sails. "I could have sailed away from the anchorage easily enough," he said, "but it's safer to motor off. No sense taking the one in a thousand risk of a freak gust putting us on a rock." For a man who had been playing so fast and loose with the law, Suzanne found it amusing that he was so risk averse on the water. Amusing but reassuring. In a few minutes, they were deep into the fog and she was completely disoriented. She felt like they were bobbing in place up and down on the swells. She looked back at the wake to reassure herself that they were really moving. She joined him in the cockpit and looked out through the glass into the fog. The instruments meant nothing to her. She could only take his word that they were sailing toward San Francisco. If he turned the boat seaward and began sailing away to the far side of the world, she wouldn't know until sundown. She wouldn't be able to do anything about it for the next three months. She studied the instruments more carefully. "Is this the compass?" she asked, pointing toward a dial. "Right." "Does it say that we're going south?" Toward Mexico. "Isn't San Francisco to the East?" "That's right. We have an offshore breeze so we have to tack south for a while to beat against it. The wind will help drive the fog away. I expect that we'll see sunshine before long." His explanation sounded legitimate but what did she know? He knew what she was thinking and looked at her with a disarming smile. "Don't worry. As much as I'd love for you to stay with me, I'm taking you back like I promised. I might be a desperado but I'm no kidnapper." "The thought never crossed my mind." "Mine, neither," he said. They were both lying. After a few minutes, he said, "But my offer remains open. If you decide to change your mind, the South Seas are waiting for us. It'll be spring when we arrive down there. You can enjoy summer all over again. San Francisco is cold and dreary in the winter." "San Francisco is cold and dreary in the summer," she replied. "Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. He was from Missouri, but I had the same feeling coming from Minnesota." "Really? I thought that it was cold up in the Midwest." "It's really bitter in the winter but the summers are warm and dry. Or, at least, warmer and drier than here." "I guess I'll never see summer in Minnesota." "If you jump bail, there's a lot of things that you'll never see." "If I go to prison, there's a lot more things that I'm going to miss. Like the next ten years." She was reminded that he was still remembering her promise that she would be able to bargain the prosecutor down from a twenty-year sentence. That wasn't happening. She could wait until tomorrow to give him the bad news. If she sailed into the sunset with him today, she would never have to tell him of her failure in the plea negotiations. She dreaded that conversation. It was almost enough to tip the balance. She looked at him for a long moment and thought about what it would be like to spend the next few decades with him. It would be pretty good. The more time she spent with him, the more she appreciated him. He was more mature and thoughtful than the picture painted by her geek stereotype. Then she thought about what she would have to give up. Her friends. But she had no time for real friends. Most of her social life consisted of lunch with her colleagues every week or so. Her family. But they were all in Minnesota and she had been years since she had been able to take a vacation to go back there. She was lucky if one of them came out to San Francisco every few months. And when they did, she begrudged the few hours that she had to spend away from work playing host. But she had money saved. She could fly them to Tahiti to visit with them. Mostly, she'd be giving up her job. Her job was a lot to give up. She had studied so hard to be a great lawyer: to be at the top of her class; to pass the bar on her first writing. She had worked so hard to get ahead in the firm. She was on the short list for the next non-equity partnership. But her career was tied to California. She was not a member of the bar anywhere else. She could not take a job anywhere else. If she could not practice law, what else could she do? What else had she ever done? Nothing. She had no other skills. To give up the law was to give up her life. She couldn't imagine doing that for any man. After another hour, it looked like the fog was thinning. She could see a ghostly yellow circle where the sun was struggling to shine through. She was chilled despite the wet weather gear that Martin had loaned her this morning. She grabbed him and hugged him close. Her rubber coat rubbed against his with little squeaks. "Am I distracting you?" "It's no problem," he said. "Nothing happens fast out here. The radar will sound an alarm if it finds anything is closing on us. That's how I sail solo in the night. I rely on the radar to wake me if I need to avoid another vessel. Computers have made radar a lot smarter. That and GPS have made navigation a no brainer." After a minute, he said, "Hang on, we're going to come about." She hung on to him as the boat shifted and tilted under her feet. The rigging creaked and the sails snapped from one side to the other overhead. "See," he said, pointing to a screen. "That's the coast line. We're heading almost straight toward the Golden Gate now. We'll hold this course for the rest of the trip. If you take the helm, I'll go up and trim the canvas. Just keep the compass needle as steady as you can." He could have held the course by locking the helm -- that's what he'd do if he were solo -- but he turned it over to her instead so that she'd get a feel for the boat. After he left the cockpit, she never took her eyes from the compass and radar screen. The compass needle strayed by a degree so she pulled the wheel over. The needle swung back slowly, then kept swinging. She was pointed far off course in the other direction before she once more over-reacted and yawed back across the heading on another wrong bearing. It took another three lesser corrections before she finally managed to hold steady on course again. Martin was smiling when he entered the cockpit again. "That was good," he said. "Still holding course." "It's trickier than it looks. It seemed easier yesterday." "We were on a different reach yesterday. The boat's a lot more responsive on this tack. It won't take you long to learn to keep a steady hand on the helm on any tack, though. Just remember that it's not like steering a car. Boats don't react instantly so you have to anticipate what they're going to do before they start doing it. It just takes a little practice." "You can take the helm back now." "No hurry," he said. "You can hold the course for a while if you like. There're a few things that I should be doing below. A sailing vessel takes a fair amount of maintenance." She kept the boat on course for another hour. They soon left the fog and sailed into sunlight. The swells were gentle, the breeze steady, and the air as clear as crystal. The perfect summer weather made it easy for her to imagine that she was sailing over tropical seas with not a care in the world, her time her own for once in her life. It was a terrific dream, but it was not reality. To fight the lure of the fantasy, she turned her thoughts toward storms and pirates and tropical diseases. And she found romance in those adventures as well. She imagined herself braced against the helm in a typhoon, outrunning vicious pirates, desperate to bring her ailing lover to port where she could nurse him back to health and gain his eternal devotion. Even that sounded wonderful. She cursed herself for having a too vivid imagination. Then she laughed at herself. In her entire life, no one had ever accused her of having an imagination. No one had ever accused her of being irresponsible. No one had ever accused her of making a bad decision. It was about time. She watched the compass as she pulled the helm further and further to starboard. The boat heeled over as it came around. The canvas snapped as the wind caught the lee side and the booms swung across the deck. As she pointed the bow back toward the fog bank, there was a shout from below. Martin's footsteps pounded up the galley stairs. "What's going on?" he said. "What happened?" "We're setting about," she said. "Plot a course to the tropics." "You mean it?" he asked, pulling her into an embrace. "Damn me, but I do," she said and pulled his head down into a long, deep kiss.