Just be cool!

Jessica took a quick, deep breath and steadied herself. She picked up a bar-napkin and placed it on one of the empty barstools beside her, and sat on it. She felt the thin square napkin stick to her slick pussy lips instantly but pretended not to care. She crossed her legs as elegantly as she could and straightened her back as much as she could, tilting her head back in a way she hoped would look sophisticated and not stuffy or haughty.

The woman middle-aged woman in the yellow dress approached her and placed on hand on the bar-stool beside Jessica. "Is this seat taken?" she all but purred at the younger woman, her voice deep and sultry; a burnt, breathy voice of a casual smoker who's been "quitting" for twenty years.

"It's yours, if you want it," Jessica said, holding up the brandy glass of cognac in her right hand and proffering it the woman's direction. "Thank you for the drink," she said, lowering her chin to look up at the woman through half closed eyes. What was she doing? Flirting right before her first date with the person she'd been chatting with for weeks now, it was like she was trying to sabotage herself! She took another long, deep breath through her nose. Think of something else to say, Jessica berated herself. "So, what are you reading?"

The woman was sitting next to Jessica and placing her book and her glass of wine on the table beside her. She was wearing long yellow gloves and had white wedge-heeled strappy shoe. Her earrings with large gold hoops. "A Canticle for Leibowitz," she said as she held up the well-worn, weather-beaten cover for Jessica to see. "Do you know it?"

Jessica's façade of refinement shattered and she laughed out loud, giving a little short at the end of it. She put a hand to her chest above her breasts. "Are you kidding?! I love Golden Era sci-fi!"

The woman had a hand over her face and...

Jessica leaned against the bar, lowering her head and looking up at the woman and craning her neck to see what she was hiding, a frown? A look of shock? "What?" she said.

"I'm sorry, you're laugh is adorable!" Holding her hand away from her mouth she had a smile that one might make at a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. "That little snort at the end!" she whispered and tried to make a squee noise, though, her voice being as deep as it was, it came out as more of a breathy humming sound.

Jessica blushed a deep crimson and took a swallow of her cognac. It burned through her mouth and throat and down into the pit of her tummy.

"Also," the woman said. "Some might consider the Golden Age, or 'Golden Era', as you say, to have ended by 1946."

"Ah!" Jessica sat up straight, holding up a single finger in the "Ah-hah!" gesture, what her friends called the activation of her "nerd mode" or her "Um, Actually...!" gesture. "But Campbell, didn't give up the reigns of Analog until his **** in 1971, and the New Wave isn't considered to have started until at least the 1960s."

"I've always considered late 1950s post-apocalyptica to be a more New Wave than Golden Age phenomena. But it's certainly a... mm... grey area." She took a small, dainty sip of her wine, put the glass back on the bar, and held out the hand to Jessica. "I'm Marie, by the by."

"Jessica," she introduced herself in kind, reach out to shake Marie's hand, only to have it intercepted and turned by Marie and pulled toward Marie's dark red painted lips.

"Charmed," she breathed before kissing the back of Jessica's hand, leaving a dark red lipstick print on the younger woman's skin.

Jessica began breathing harder, her brain seemed to be caught in a loop, and she was blinking rapidly.

"Tell me, Jessica," Marie said, still holding onto Jessica's hand and rubbing Jessica's wrist with her thumb. "Do you often come into expensive restaurants, completely naked, and ask women what they are reading?"

"I...heh..." Jessica.exe has stopped working. Please close the program and try again. Oh shit, say something not stupid, Jessica! she thought to herself, floundering for words.