The insistence of his gaze unsettled her, stirred something within her. The dark stranger in the almond-green polo shirt two aisles away on the crowded plane that transported her weary body towards healing sun and meditation in Morocco, his eyes filled with golden speckles. Yet this was not a singles’ vacation. Her husband was omnipresent beside her, reminding her to hold on to her wine glass in sudden turbulence (it would be quite unfortunate if her alcoholism stained his impeccably cut and pressed pants…) She obstinately read her book, the words slipping before her eyes and sliding away without ever being able to take hold in her mind. She tried as she always did to ignore l’échappatoire, the emergency exit that the handsome stranger seemed to be offering her in his eyes. In silent musing, she toyed with the idea that, far more than her mind, it was the eyes that carried her sexual energy. Not in what she saw through her own but in the way a man looked at her.

At the luggage carousel in Marrakech, she idly contemplated the odds of her bags ever coming out of the little trap, down the slide towards her. She imagined hundreds of toddlers wearing Persol sunglasses, safely secured in car seats bouncing along waiting to be claimed. She laughed to herself at the idea of a misplaced charter voyage of miniature goats coming down the slide, each one with long bangs and short little horns. A larger, matronly goat wearing comfortable shoes would lead them along, easily recognizable because of her big orange parasol, her head like the fist of an angry child and her school teacher tone of voice.

He was on the other side of the luggage carousel, directly in front of her. His heavy gaze on her felt like a confident hand thrust up under her skirt and forced into her panties. The idea of his hand touching her there procured in her the sweetest sensation. She wanted to be alone, to think of his beautiful lips grazing her entrejambe, lightly at first like a swimmer testing the water before diving in. She wanted to offer herself the luxury of imagining his hardness penetrating her gingerly at first, a gesture of infinite kindness. She knew that she would not be able to stop herself from groping his ass. There would be such urgency as she pulled him farther into the core of her. Right there in the airport she suddenly felt acutely aware of her own empty spaces. Her body seemed to clench involuntarily…she felt as if she was somehow testing her own emptiness, her need to be filled.

“That’s your suitcase, non?” her husband’s familiar voice pulled her back to where she had come from.