It looked as though it was just another one of the many necessary, but forgettable, business trips Charles had to endure as part of his position at an energy equipment engineering company.
This time, it was a 3-day energy symposium to be based at a large hotel in downtown Chicago. Charles had grown up years ago in the Windy City, although living now on the West Coast, but he remembered well the ordeal that flying into O'Hare during changeable weather afternoons in late Fall could be. He wasn't disappointed…his 767 flight from Seattle had to hold for traffic delays, then hold for gusty winds, landing almost an hour and a half late under a brooding gray sky. A long limo ride downtown in rush hour traffic at last delivered him to the hotel.
Tired and irritated, he checked in, went up to his suite and decided he'd take a long hot shower and unwind from his travels. The lights of North Michigan Avenue and the nearby Hancock Building were twinkling outside his room window as he dressed in slacks and a turtleneck and decided a drink in the dark old walnut-paneled hotel bar would be a very good thing to improve his perspective on the world.
As soon as he was seated in the soft leather chair of the bar near the fireplace, he saw her, instantly.
She was also seated alone in a leather chair about 20 feet away. Her presence and demeanor clearly stated a powerful business elegance, and that "look" that people who travel extensively for business seem to get, impossible to define but totally recognizable to another road warrior. Wearing a tailored gray wool business skirt, a navy blue silk blouse, and expensive flats, she was looking into the fireplace while sipping her glass of wine. This was not a hotel bar pickup sort of woman. She was a phenomenon…her hair, her eyes, the shape of her legs. Charles sipped his wine and sighed, but he also found himself glancing at her frequently and he thought, surreptitiously. She seemed lost in her own thoughts with the fireplace and took no notice of him at all. Or so he thought.
After a long travel day Charles decided he'd better get some dinner despite still running on West Coast time…it was two hours later here and he had a 7:30 am sign-in for the energy symposium the following morning…the start of a long day of panel discussions, presentations, yada yada yada. So he wandered into the most upscale of the hotel's restaurants, told the maitre'd he was dining alone, and was seated off at one of the tables in the back corner that are usually the fate of lone diners in a hotel restaurant. As he finished his crabmeat cocktail appetizer, he noticed the maitre'd seating a woman alone at the next ‘dinner for one' table over from his. It was her again.
Charles didn't know that the woman, whose name he would later learn was Margaret, had in fact been very aware of Charles's scrutiny in the bar, and had slipped the maitre'd a "little something" to be seated for dinner near him. She wasn't at all sure why, as the last thing she EVER did on these damn business trips that filled her year was to latch onto ‘encounters of chance' with anyone. That just wasn't her style. So why, she wondered to herself as she placed her dinner order with the waiter, did she find herself now seated next to this strange man on purpose, glancing at him over the leather-clad menu.
It had to happen sooner or later… Charles and Margaret, exactly at the same moment, glanced up from their dinners and made eye contact. It was very brief, but one of those locking of eyes things that seem to convey in a second or two many things that are powerful, and promising, and as old as time. They both quickly glanced back at their dinners, but they were affected and changed by just that quick communication of their eyes. They both had held the glance a little too long to be just casually taking note of their surroundings.
They both finished their dinners and left the restaurant, but a few minutes apart. Charles looked at his watch and it was getting on toward 9pm with an early day looming, but he decided to return to the bar again for a nightcap….perhaps an afterdinner brandy would be a good thing before he headed back to the suite. He rarely got involved with women on business trips, having survived a divorce a couple of years ago and since then mostly immersing in his career.
Although Charles always found hotels rather erotic places for the opportunities that they offered for meeting, wining, dining, and bedding willing females, he had resigned himself that this was just to be another night alone in a hotel king bed before meetings that only somewhat interested him. Settling himself back into one of the bar's leather chairs, this time at a table with two chairs, he enjoyed the fragrance of his Benedictine brandy and sighed to himself.
At that moment, he heard a woman's voice just behind his chair say, "That brandy looks like a perfect idea. Would you like to enjoy it with someone?" Oh my God. It was her.
As she seated herself with a crossing of her stockinged long legs and her brandy was placed in front of her, she said, "We were spending so much time glancing at each other all evening that it seemed foolish not to at least introduce ourselves. Are you also here for the energy conference?". That was the start of a casual conversation over a first, then a second brandy, of shared business interests, ‘who do you knows', and a bit of their personal lives in that intimacy of travelers that sometimes discloses things on ‘fast-forward'. They learned they were both unattached, both had traveled internationally, and both had various, well, unsatisfactory romantic histories. She had been a trader and investment banker in the past, he'd held various management jobs at the director or VP level. Although she was very sexual, and loved to fuck with all her heart and imagination, a series of bad situations had been the summary of her sex life for quite a few years now.
