The second I slung my arm over her shoulders, and smothered her clavicle with my meaty forearm, a shadow descended on her face. So I took my arm off, and all at once, she lit up again, like her face was a naked bulb and my arm had been a lampshade. She was talking about her opinion on something, but I wasn’t really listening. I was keeping time with the metronomic clacking of her shoes: cruel high heels, with a dagger on each foot, unrepentantly stabbing the pavement behind her with every step, each stride leaving the sidewalk to clot its wound with a scab of pigment-less chewing gum. Suddenly, she stopped.

“I’m in the mood for a cigarette,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Can I have one?”

“Sure, but if you smoke it now, I’ll never respect you.”

“Why not?”

“I’m taking a cigarette because I need a cigarette. You only want one because I’m having one. Right?”

“I guess so.” I couldn’t tell whether or not we were flirting.

“That is no way to live your life,” she said. “But, by all means, take it. There’s no doubt in my mind that before you change your pants, you’re going to want a cigarette. I tend to have that effect on people.” She perched a cigarette between her lips and lit it, summoning a tongue of flame with a switch of her thumb, challenging me as she did so with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. I held out my hand, and she coaxed another flimsy paper stick from its box and pressed it into my palm. I studied it for a moment, then dropped it into my pocket where it nestled between my cell phone and a rattling box of breath mints.

“Good boy,” she said, breathing fire. She turned away from me and walked two more clacking paces to lean on the wrought iron fence that guarded the river. In the dark, only a faint rushing sound evidenced that the river was actually moving; it looked to me like something recently dead, the meat in a cement sandwich.

“I’m going in,” she declared.

“In the river?” I said. “You’ll freeze. Besides, it’s contaminated. Thirty seconds in that water and you’ll be rendered infertile.”

She laughed. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “We both know I’m much to skinny to bear a child anyway. Watch my shoes?” She stepped out of them, scampered over the fence, and jumped down, down. She penetrated the black water feet first and it swallowed her whole, belching little ripples in polite concentric circles. Two, three, four seconds, and she resurfaced.

“Are you okay?” I shouted down to her. “I think your nose is bleeding!”

It was. Mixing with the tributaries of mascara that ran down all the way to her chin was a moustache of blood. The effect was rather frightening; she looked like a savage warrior, or a demonic circus ringmaster.

She flicked her tongue up and tasted the blood, then tried to smear it off with the back of her wrist, but only succeeded in spreading it further. She gave up the effort.

“It’s lovely!” she cried. “Whooooo!”

The current was pushing her along rapidly, and for a moment she looked rather alarmed at how far she had traveled in just a few seconds, but then the glee returned to her face and she began backstroking along with the river. Her entire body was covered by the dark of the river, save for her head and neck and whichever arm was stroking. The gauzy white sleeves of her dress clung to her arms, and from afar (a distance she was now approaching), she looked like a topsy-turvy dragonfly.

The river turned down a bend, and she disappeared from view, and soon the last strains of her laughter were gone. I looked down at her abandoned shoes, standing like dutiful soldiers bound to guard a capricious princess. I wondered momentarily whether she had been with me in the first place, or had I decided to go for a romantic moonlight stroll with a pair of shoes?

Marveling at the lengths to which she had gone to end our date, I pitched her sharp heels into the river, and reached into my pocket. She had been right; I had a distinct craving for a cigarette.