”She opened the glove box of her car and took out a black card, handed to me and said, “Sure. This is my card, call me after 7 pm, we will continu....”I took the card, went back inside and put the card in my bag.In the evening I texted her on whatsapp and said hi. She replied after a while and we started talking.I asked her about the morning thing. She told me that her husband had started drinking too much and he would abuse her and would not come home for days. I felt pity on her. But, what. Her skin is more like scales and a glossy red. Throughout the red are swirls of black that could almost be tribal tattoos. She has freaky backwards knees and clawed, three-toed feet. Her hands are similar, with three talons for fingers. Her face is human enough, eyes, slits for a nose, slightly budging mouth with large but normal looking teeth. I think shes smiling at me, but Im not sure. Her ears are almost nonexistent. They are more like holes in her head. Instead of hair, she has a hundred. Sex trumps food always. Except when Eric is in charge, I guess.Somehow Eric had made that low-caloric stuff palatable.We ate. We talked.Eric wanted to know all about how I had been treated the previous fouryears. And he was most empathetic. Which would have earned him more"access" to my body had there been more than the 100 percent I alreadydecided he could have.The neat freak even insisted that we do the dishes before we retired toour evening's diversions.But then we were ready."Your place. The Army guy was interested in me too, so it was easy to maintain a conversation while he did his job.The tests of the radar's software passed fine, and the software specialist doing that then moved across to the bug-detecting computer that I was most interested in.I asked him, "You know about this system too? I thought they'd have different specialists." The software on this thing is simple."Software is obviously a good job for a lazy person because the Engineer only had to connect his laptop.