I had been driving the lovely Italian woman, Clara, to work for several months. In her mid-thirties, she had thick black hair, a flashing smile, unblemished olive skin, green eyes flecked with brown. Her English was perfect but she had that beautiful Italian way of drawing out her vowels. She was always immaculately and expensively dressed. The car-sharing arrangement had been organised through a company bulletin board. She paid for a share of the petrol and as we worked in different areas of the company, our contact was mainly limited to the rides to and from work - about 45 minutes each way, depending on the traffic.
Our conversation never seemed to drift into the personal, but she was a person of considerable intelligence, well-informed and forthright on a range of topics - social issues, relationships, religion, politics. Few issues had not been covered in the time we had spent driving together.
On this particular evening I waited for Clara as usual in the lobby. She was running late, so I took the lift down to the car park and drove up to the visitor's parking space in front of the building. We had an arrangement that I would wait fifteen minutes after our scheduled meeting time. She held an important position in the company and was often kept late in meetings or with urgent, last-minute tasks. I was flexible about the arrangement and normally waited half an hour. If she was delayed later than that, the company was usually happy to pay her taxi fare home.
I was about to leave when she came through the glass doors toward me, moving quickly and awkwardly in her heels. She tumbled into the passenger seat out of breath. Her expensive perfume filled the air, not quite masking the sharper, feminine perfume that women exude when tense.
"Sorry," she gasped. "I've been trapped in a meeting with some major clients since one. It was productive, but intense. Being the account manager I was in the middle of it. It was so full on, I didn't have the opportunity to take a break and call you to tell you not to wait. You're very sweet to have waited this long."
Sweet - a slightly personal touch that made my heart beat a little faster. I was more than a little smitten with Carla, but somehow the opportunity never arose, or I was too slow-witted to work out how to make it arise, to take our relationship beyond the purely impersonal.
Carla had settled into her seat for the drive. It was peak-hour and most of our drive was along a multilane freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic. The congestion was even worse than usual. The traffic crawled, but the air-conditioning kept the car nicely chilled. Normally, I didn't have music or the radio on. Carla was generally very talkative - I think it was her way of unwinding. Listening to her was one of my pleasures of the day - the time flew while I was with her.
But today she was quiet, and wore a slight frown. She was not relaxed. I thought back to what she had said, about not having time to take a break. Not even time for a toilet break, perhaps.
At the thought of that, my breathing became a little shallower and faster. At this point, I need to make a confession. I have a thing about women and pee - I've had it for as long as I can remember. I don't go in for self-analysis and I've never really bothered about the origins of this special interest. It's never really intruded into my sexual relationships, but it certainly dominates my fantasies, of which I have many.