Don’t ask me why I let my ex-boyfriend in at 2:00 a.m.  I knew better.  But he woke me from a dead sleep pounding on my apartment door, yelling like Marlon Brando.  With a groan I realized that he’d used my code to get into the building.  I guess I should’ve been glad he hadn’t used the key I’d given him a long time ago and simply walked in.

Two of my neighbors—Mr. McFelty and Mrs. Bingham—had stuck their heads out in the hall bellowing for him to shut the bleep up.  He had returned with a bleepity-bleep of his own.  When the obscenities escalated to the point of insulting ancestry, I peeled my eye from the peephole that rendered Daniel Hale’s face bulbous (but still handsome, godbleepit) and unlocked the deadbolt.

"Daniel, it’s late and I have to be at the office early,” I said through a crack.  “What are you doing here?”

My neighbors shouted parting expletives and slammed their doors.

Daniel, looking lethal in a rumpled tuxedo, gave me one of those heart-bending smiles that used to make my underwear fly off.  “I was missing you, Renni.”

That’s me, Renni Greenfield, dressed in pajamas with penguins on them, my sexuality having been shelved for months.  “Daniel, you need to go home.”

“I’m drunk,” he slurred.  “You don’t want me to kill myself or someone else driving home, do you?”

“No.”

“Then let me spend the night.  I’ll crash on the couch and be gone before you wake up.  Please?”

I sighed, my resolve crumbling like the wall of a gingerbread house.  I hated Daniel for cheating on me with Leora the legs-for-days paralegal in our office, but I truly didn’t want to see his Jag accordianed into a Peachtree Street telephone pole on the morning news while Atlanta commuters honked at the delay of extracting his body.  And even though I wouldn’t have minded inheriting one or two of his big-money clients, I knew I couldn’t handle the extra workload I’d get if something happened to the cad.

So…I let him in and diverted him from my bedroom, reminding him of the way to the couch.  He pouted, but staggered toward my tiny living room, shedding clothes along the way.  By the time I fetched linens from the bathroom, he was naked and sprawled on my sofa.  Then he curled his hand around my wrist and before I knew it, I was naked, too.

I reasoned that he owed me...