A surprise, she decides, will mend everything. It will. No lover's battle can survive the heady bomb of sexual unpredictability. What would he least expect from her? She ticks through the list: acts of compromise, a costume, gifts of planned spontaneity. She has done it, done it, done it. She has never appeared naked at his door. She parks where she shouldn't, ignoring the sign. Beneath the tan London Fog raincoat she wears glossy black pumps and nothing more. A cold drizzle flecks her bare ankles in the street and it's an alien sensation. She wonders if her hair is flattened by the damp night. She uses her own key. Climbing the 6 flight walk-up, chilled with the blowing air of the stairwell but aware of the new slick moistness between her legs that she hopes will make things right between them again. She's at the door. Ring the buzzer just once, she instructs herself. Have the coat belt already untied. She loosens it now. He will answer, sleepy, and she will flash her nakedness as a desperate offering of peace. Hard, strategical work, this is. At the door she must shift her weight; the shoes hurt without stockings. She rings the bell with her elbow, both hands ready to pull open the coat. It occurs too late that she would have looked sexier with sunglasses, with earrings. Don't ring again, she thinks but there are no footsteps the door. He sleeps heavily. One more time, then. Is it silence, or a second and unfamiliar voice she hears on the other side? She leans in, ear to the door, but nothing. Wait, a creak? A cough? The melody of a woman's yawn? She rings again but has lost focus of why she came. She lets go of the coat and pounds the door, one hard white fist and then both, the mean toe of her sore, sore shoe. At last lock turns, a deadbolt slides. Under the taut safety chain, a milky blue-eyed face peeks, disoriented -- it's a young woman, clutching his familiar paisley robe around her. Above the chain, his form now appears and fills the void in the crack of the door. There she stands, her fist frozen in mid-swing, the raincoat open and disheveled while her breasts sag passive and undignified before him. From the other side of the chain, the pair who smell of soap and hot fucking glance a just moment too long at her crotch, and in yanking the coat to cover herself she catches the sparkle of something snagged in her pubic hair; foil, a shred of wrapper from a breath mint roll that has gotten itself hideously caught there. She knows no direction to walk, nothing to say -- but there is mercy. The door closes without a word exchanged, the lock clicks, the deadbolt slides. The single bulb in the hallway is frosted and so, so dim. ~ © 2000 by Mare Freed This story was first published in ZEndZine.