...At least the sodas had caffeine in them, thought Samir. In her foolish enthusiasm, Laura had forgotten the coffee in the living room. And she had diverted the topic of conversation away from her disastrous date. Now they were on her bed—king size, for she loved to sprawl and watch television with him—eating guacamole and salty tortilla chips. He couldn’t say he was unhappy with the way her evening had concluded. Plus he’d managed a nap, and an erotic fantasy or two.

After the monotonous show ended—an episode he’d seen at least thirty times over the past forty years—Laura resumed her surfing and ran across the one show that never failed to delight her: I Dream of Jeannie.

Samir groaned. “Laura, please. Anything else. Anything! A game of chess. Or I will grant you a wish.”

Laura grinned at him, crunching chips and guacamole. She had a blob on her cheek and it distracted him. She was too attractive in the cocktail dress, with her legs bare and folded like a little girl’s. “Nope. It’s my favorite show. You know it is.”

“It is filled with inaccuracies.”

“That’s why I like it so much! We know everything they’ve got wrong.”

Samir sighed. The show was stupid and pointless. If he weren’t so hungry, he would nap again. Instead he chewed, while Laura laughed.

“Why don’t you have a bottle, Samir?” she asked, when the scantily clothed female genie on the television smoked herself into her bottle and was corked.

It had taken Laura a long time to get around to asking that question. Her mother had asked it immediately, and most designees of the past had wondered why he had no lamp.

Laura turned around on the bed to look at him, dropping a fair-sized splat of guacamole on his belly. “Whoops.” She bent and slurped it into her mouth.

Samir’s entire body went rigid at the touch of her lips on his skin. She was thorough, too—her tongue sweeping every molecule of avocado away. He willed his manhood to remain quiescent and soft, but it had, as always, a one-track mind of its own.

“It’s…uh, not that sort of binding.” He could not speak coherently with her mouth on his skin and her hair brushing his belly and groin. And there was still a smear of guacamole on her cheek. He forced himself to continue speaking. “It is far worse than being imprisoned, to have almost complete free will and yet be so constrained.”

He hadn’t meant to reveal this most bitter thought, the one thing that stained his love for Laura, but his brain was not his own at the moment. His hand lifted, his index finger reached out, and she raised her head and looked at him, licking her lips, a growing understanding—mixed with sympathy and sadness—in her eyes.

It was fated.

He sat up slowly, as did she, and, when his mouth touched her cheek to rid her at last of the guacamole, her eyes closed. Samir felt her turning her head so her mouth brushed over his lips. Brushed past. Halted. And returned, so light a touch he might have imagined it, except for the heat swarming over his skin, and her breath against his mouth. Every impulse was to grab her, press her into the bed, thrust his tongue into her mouth, strip those silky blue panties from her and satisfy the vastness of his hunger this instant. But all those taunts about the feckless, unskilled boys of her youth rang in his head. He could not afford to become one of them.