Paul hated everything about Halloween but tonight he couldn't believe his luck. He'd scored at the firm's Halloween bash. At least, that was the way it looked as he held the passenger door of his Merc open, allowing the raven haired woman to settle herself into the plush leather interior of the car. He smiled in anticipation as the door closed on his potential conquest with a satisfying "clunk" of expensive German engineering.
Paul was good looking, self-confident and popular but his philandering was the subject of office legend and he knew it. His female colleagues carefully avoided his advances, unwilling to trade a night of passion for the bitchy remarks and knowing glances that would surely follow. In any case, according to office rumour, a whole night was longer than the average duration of Paul's relationships with the opposite sex. He considered himself, therefore, fortunate in the extreme to be in the position of potentially bedding the beautiful, if somewhat strange, woman now sitting in the passenger seat of his pride and joy.
It hadn't always been like this; eight years ago, the car wasn't so luxurious and there had been a wife at home, waiting for him to arrive after softening up a potential client over an Italian meal. That was on Halloween too. He remembered the restaurant with its eclectic mixture of business diners and groups of bizarrely dressed party goers, outrageously dolled up for the evening's fun. He'd been drinking that night too. It was after the meal, driving home alone that he had seen them in the headlamp's beam, a mother and daughter, waiting for a bus at the side of the road. The daughter was an attractive woman and would have been aged twenty-one or twenty- two years old at the time, he couldn't remember exactly. He remembered the screams though and the sight of the young woman thrown in the air by the impact when he lost control on the bend and his car ploughed off the road. He remembered the trial too, the words of the judge as he was sent down; five years imprisonment, for causing death while driving under the influence of alcohol. Most of all he remembered the look on her mother's face in the gallery as he was taken down, the hatred, so deep it was palpable. Six months later he read in the paper that she'd committed suicide; she had no one left, husband gone, then her only daughter taken from her. That was when Jenny told him she wouldn't be there when he came out. He hadn't contested the divorce; there would have been no real point.
These thoughts jangled painfully in Paul's mind as he walked round to the driver's door. He shivered, and jerked himself together. He'd put all that behind him now, struggled to create a new life, moved to a new town. He was a high flyer, an executive with a board level job in his sights. And anyway tonight looked like being his lucky night, maybe it would break his Halloween taboo. He switched on the CD player and the cool sounds of his favourite Miles Davis CD washed over him as he pulled out of the parking lot and swung the car onto the road, heading towards his apartment.
It had all begun not more than thirty minutes earlier when he heard the words, "You must be Paul," uttered in a husky female voice, as he picked up a drink from the bar. Turning to discover the owner of the voice, he was taken aback by the sight of the pale skinned, slim woman standing at his elbow gazing at him through large dark eyes. Her appearance was extraordinary; how could he have failed to notice her on his way to the bar. By any standard she was an extremely attractive woman and the thin white cotton dress she wore was surely out of keeping with both the season and the occasion. Without exception, the other women wore the dark colours traditionally associated with Halloween. He glanced quickly around the room, everyone appeared to be engrossed in their own conversations and nobody seemed to have noticed the pale-skinned beauty who stood at his shoulder.
His mental double-take notwithstanding, Paul's reply was instant, "I am," he said, "and if I wasn't, for someone as lovely as you I'd pretend to be." If he expected her to smile at his repartee he was disappointed; her face registered no emotion.
She simply said, "Will you buy me a drink?" and, in response to his nod added, "red wine please, I'll wait over there," pointing to a corner of the room which was, by some miracle, unoccupied. She left him to order the drinks without further comment and moved away, waiting silently a few yards distant.
As the bartender dealt with his order, Paul looked over at the woman. She looked vaguely familiar to him but he could not place her and this worried him. He prided himself on his memory for names and faces; it was one of the skills that made him the good salesman that he was. Paul's appraisal was discrete but thorough. The woman was young; he guessed that she would be in her mid to late-twenties. She was slim, with long, slightly unkempt, jet-black hair which stood in marked contrast to her pale, almost translucent skin. Her almond-shaped eyes were large and so dark that in the dim lighting of the bar they might have been black, although Paul guessed that they would prove to be dark brown in brighter illumination. The curve of her breasts swelled the flimsy material of her dress in pleasing fullness. Paul considered himself a connoisseur of the female breast and what he saw excited him. The woman clearly wore no bra and her partly erect nipples were clearly profiled through the fabric of her dress. Paul's imagination went into overdrive, he could almost feel the soft white skin of her breasts under his fingertips as his lips mentally closed over a delicate pink nipple, feeling it engorge beneath his tongue as he sucked it into his mouth. He closed his eyes; he could hear her moans, imagine the arching of her body as his hand strayed down over her belly towards the moist cleft between her legs.
He snapped out of his reverie and mentally chided himself. 'Visioning successes' was all well and good and an essential weapon in the salesman's armoury but he had hardly said two words to the woman. This particular vision was a long way from being realised and he needed to move quickly -- if the boys saw the striking woman standing there alone they would be over like wasps around a jam-jar and his best chance would be lost. He looked over at the group of laughing young men. It was odd that they hadn't already spotted the woman in white but they seemed engrossed in their conversation and she appeared somehow to have escaped their attention. Paul picked up the two large red wines he had ordered. He eyed the drinks with some concern, he was a beer-man usually and, since the accident, he had been careful to watch his alcohol consumption before driving. Ordering the same drink though was a point of contact with the woman, a shared experience which might encourage intimacy. His desire overcoming his caution he carried the drinks carefully across the room to where she stood, apparently lost in thought. Paul was acutely aware that he didn't even know her name. Well that could soon be rectified.
