Perfection.

Together, hand in hand, they went out to the Avenue at about a quarter to closing. Only steps up the street from Oxford's there was a doorway with a step up. She said,

"Here!"

He said,

"Fine."

They stood in the doorway which was only deep enough for them to stand facing one another in before the glass door to a small lighted foyer. He leaned his back to the stone lentil.

"Here?" he asked with a grin.

"Yes."

She looked up into his eyes. Her beautiful face was extraordinary with its smile that was at once shy and sensuous; hungry for him she was so completely eager to play. She looked up at him from such an appealingly bashful downward glance. His own look was confident and ready, looking down with his mouth curled in a grin of unhurried expectation. He was waiting for her embrace.

It was just a moment and then she leaned her whole body up against him in something like a fulsome physical sigh. Their fit was so complete. He was just that much taller than she; she was just that slight when he laid his hands over her hips and her lips came up to his. Her small hands, her slender arms hugged his, drawing their two bodies even closer into one another.

Their eyes were closed for a long moment and then again hers were laughing.

She murmured her satisfaction,

"Oh, I like that, I like that, I like that! It was as good as I thought it would be."

It had been entirely sweet and wet and dark and warm and wonderful.

He grinned possesively with his hands caressing up to her waist and down to the tops of her incredible legs, until his finger tips felt the warmth and tenderness of taut tan thighs and asked,

"Good enough to try again?"

Her eyes promised there would be many agains and she told him,

"Carla."

Her name was Carla.

"Charlie," he laughed and asked her, "How perfect is that?"

Her laugh agreed that together they were that and immediately she pressed her whole body and self tighter against him once more. Her face filled the small of his chest and shoulder, her hands found the space between his broad and bowed back and the rough texture of the stone.

"How could anything be better, Charlie?" the breathe of her words was warm through the fabric of his shirt.

Their eyes had met only moments after arriving in the bar at a little after ten.... "No one goes to Oxford's before ten," they'd been told. "Nothing much ever happens on the Avenue till after ten."....She had the most extraordinary legs - not long but shapely and firm and evenly tan below a short, flaired skirt that was gray and white plaid and pleated around; his hair was kind of crew cut but not so severe and he wore an open dress shirt with brown pin stripes over a black tee and tan trousers, no silly baseball cap or sloganed shirt.... He was already at the bar with his friends ordering their first round of drinks; she was coming in and being led by the hand to the other end of the room by her decidedly plainer looking friend when they exchanged a look in the single moment that they had before losing sight of one another in the crowd. It was a look that made certain neither would hook up with anyone else before finding one another for a second time. It was a glance that said, yes, that's it, that's what I want! coy and dazzled on the one hand and completely self-certain on the other. They continued to glimpse one another near and far through the crowd as they moved about the room and the evening wore on. Each time the look made was the same look and the same promise that, whatever else they would be experiencing over the course of the evening, they were meant to approach one another and come together.

When they did, it was a little after one. He had the most wonderful voice and opened with just the right and funny thing to say commenting on all the odd people there seemed to be about them in the crowd. She knew immediately what he meant and said she had been thinking just that same thought though they both agreed the crowd at Oxford's wasn't a half bad crowd. But, just the same, they laughed, it had its share of those who were, as they agreed to call them, undecorative people. Standing together they found these and those whose shapes and sizes, clothes, hair and skin art they found laughable. "Now, he should never come out in anything like that...!" "I would never, ever be seen ....!" All the while, their eyes were on one another, too, discovering finenesses and exchanging anticipations they didn't need to speak of. All the while she was thinking how it would be to feel her fingers not nearly reach round his arms, how her cheek might nestle beneath his wide shoulder. He was imagining the softness of her lips as his own pressed down on them, wondering how her breasts that seemed so right would feel pressed against the abs he had worked so long to harden.

And, then, just at the same moment, they both stopped trying to speak. And, their eyes, having taken one another in all over, met just as the words and music around them chorused up and out in an expanding bright burst of song.

"I can see me lovin' no body but you
For all my life..."

The song so agreed with everything they were feeling and thinking about one another that it seemed some sort of confirmation and miracle. It said to them both Yes! and Now! and it drew the smiles that had never left their lips wide and their hands together in unison.

The crowd even seemed to open for them as they made their way out to the street, toward the light outside.

"The only one for me is you,
And you for me,
So happy together,
So happy together...."

Their embrace was seamless and went on and on as song followed song from the bar mingled with talk and laughter. And, then, while they still embraced and kissed, the music ended and the talk and laughter were left alone to mingle only with the rising and falling choruses of traffic on the Avenue. The sidewalk filed and emptied with one departing crowd from the bar after another, too, as they continued to hold one another and kiss.

Everything in the night around them was wholly outside of them and their absolute pleasure in eac other.

"Chuck?"

Charlie's best pal, Chris, was the one who came closest. The others had all walked on and were gathered up the street knotted on the curb away from the dark buildings to wait while Chris lingered after Charlie.

"Godda go, pal!"

Maddy, Carla's friend, waited alone patient but abandoned leaning back against the dark glass of Oxford's front window the other side of the entry way. Her purse dangled between her legs and swung in slow time with her gaze down upon it.

Parted, even by the briefest space, Carla and Charlie felt so suddenly incomplete. For long moments they could only look at one another with sad knowledge.

But, then, their smiles returned. His was that total certainty, self-assurance; hers that sly hunger. His hand touched, grazed down her arm and over her elbow; her hand reached up and traced his shoulder.

"I have to...." they both said.

And they both laughed sadly.

"Yeah," he said.

There were backward glances after that and, each time, they found that they had both had the same urge to find one another for one more look.

Charlie's Brooks had parked in the lot behind Oxford Square, half way down to the Starbuck's end of the block beneath the low hanging branches of a tree. Maddy's car was around the corner at Lola's in Wilmer Street. Brooks drove them out on to Oxford where there was no traffic and the light at Monroe was green so they turned toward the expressway with out stopping once. Maddy turned off of Harper on to Goodman to take the two of them to her apartment over on Alexander where she was putting Carla up a few days.

The others in Brooks' car made only a little small talk at first. It wasn't until they were at the light at Canterbury that Chris, beside Brooks in the front seat, smirked,

"Leave it to you, Charlie!"

The half-hearted laughter in the car made Charlie shy and he didn't say anything in return.

The darkened and silent side streets kept Maddy silent and it wasn't until they were at Park Avenue that she commented,

"Only your first night in town...." with an implied smirk.

Carla was curled kittenishly down in the seat beside her.

"And I didn't want to come out. Thank you, thank you!"

Her friend was so clearly still entranced and had spoken so sweetly that Maddy had to feel a bit less left out.

"You two seemed to really hit it off," she said with far less irony than she might have spoken with only a moment before.

Brooks wasn't too busy taking the car up to the overpass to say with a glance into the rear view that couldn't have found Charlie in the corner of the rear seat,

"You two seemed pretty hot and heavy?"

Charlie really wasn't feeling yet like talking. He only said,

"It was hot."

Chris caught the mood his friend was in, if the others didn't.

"She looked quite the girl," he said.

Charlie found himself saying, knowing how it must sound,

"She's everything you could want."

Carla confided,

"He was just what I needed. He was perfect."

Maddy had turned down Park and into the dark of the tree lined section of the Avenue toward Rowley and Meigs and, then, Alexander. Her friend's good fortune was, again, a little wearing and she was silent.

Davlin wanted to know,

"Could I get her number?"

"No!" Charlie said, decidedly and not with any of the usual humor.

And, somehow, Chris understood then that Charlie hadn't either.

"Did you get her name?" he asked.

"Carla...." Charlie remembered.

"Carla....?" Chris said and waited but Charlie said nothing more.

Maddy, in her mood, almost said,

"Too bad you're only here a few days."

"An address?" Chris wondered, feeling he had to smile now despite himself.

When there was only a complete and total silence from the rear seat, Chris did smile, he even laughed.

"Perfect!"