"Of course not," he said. "But it's going to make this injunction of yours hard to understand. I'm not good at anonymous one night stands." She raised one eyebrow at him. "Earth to Perry: this wasn't anonymous, and it wasn't a one-night stand. It was an intimate, loving relationship that happened to be compressed into a single day." "Loving?" "Sure. If I'd been with you for a month or two, I would have fallen in love. You're just my type. So I think of you as someone I love. That's why I want to make sure you understand what this all means." "You're a very interesting person," he said. "I'm smart," she said, and cuddled him again. "You're smart. So be smart about this and it'll be forever sweet." She left him off at the spot where he was supposed to meet Luke and the rest of his planning team to go over schematics and theory and practice. All of these discussions could happen online -- they did, in fact -- but there was something about the face-to-face connection. The meeting ran six hours before he was finally saved by his impending flight to Nebraska. Sleepdep came down on him like a hammer as he checked in for his flight and began the ritual security-clearing buck-and-wing. He missed a cue or two and ended up getting a "detailed hand search" but even that didn't wake him up. He fell asleep in the waiting room and in the plane, in the taxi to his hotel. But when he dropped down onto his hotel bed, he couldn't sleep. The hotel was the spitting image of the one he'd left in Wisconsin, minus Hilda and the musky smell the two of them had left behind after their roll in the hay. It had been years since he'd had a regular girlfriend and he'd never missed it. There had been women, high-libido fatkins girls and random strangers, some who came back for a date or two. But no one who'd meant anything or whom he'd wanted to mean anything. The closest he'd come had been -- he sat up with a start and realized that the last woman he'd had any strong feelings for had been Suzanne Church. # Kettlewell emerged from New Work rich. He'd taken home large bonuses every year that Kodacell had experienced growth -- a better metric than turning an actual ahem profit -- and he'd invested in a diverse portfolio that had everything from soybeans to software in it, along with real estate (oops) and fine art. He believed in the New Work, believed in it with every fiber of his being, but an undiverse portfolio was flat-out irresponsible. The New Work crash had killed the net worth of a lot of irresponsible people. Living in the Caymans got boring after a year. The kids hated the international school, scuba diving amazed him by going from endlessly, meditatively fascinating to deadly dull in less than a year. He didn't want to sail. He didn't want to get drunk. He didn't want to join the creepy zillionaires on their sex tours of the Caribbean and wouldn't have even if his wife would have stood for it.