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dressed in a simple white tank top and khaki shorts, an ensemble that made her look very...damn, and here I thought her best color was clear. Maybe David was right. Maybe the visualization was better than the visual. Or maybe three years of circumstantial celibacy were finally taking their toll on me.
    No, that was too easy an answer. I was pretty sure these feelings, though not altogether deep, were quite specific to Deb. I suppose I should also mention in my own defense that the sexiest woman I’d ever known (you know, the A-cup) was fourteen years older than me, not younger. Is this what happens to us as we inch toward middle age? Was I headed toward an obligatory crisis, where I’d suddenly get the urge to change my hair, grow a beard, buy a fancier car, or have meaningless carnal relations with a well-endowed collegian? This may not have been the best day to turn thirty-five.
    Deb didn’t acknowledge me, even as I stood next to her, following her gaze across the water. From her vantage, stretching out to sea, it was all nature. No signs or logos. No wheelchair ramps or drinking fountains. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was intentional on her part or unconsciously symbolic.
    I took a deep breath. “Deb—”
    “Fuck you.”
    Okay. New approach. I let a few seconds pass. “Look, I wanted everyone to come away from this happy. You guys got an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii. Fairmont got cheap advertising. The press got good filler. And millions of men and women will get a nice little story to distract them from their mundane lives. And if you want more honesty, yes, this will be a nice shot in the arm for my career. The bottom line is that everybody benefits from this.”
    “Except the monk seal.”
    I sighed. “Deb, the world isn’t that simple. Trust me. There are—”
    “Don’t give me that paternalistic bullshit! You—”
    “There are twelve sides to every story. And a million layers to every side. So tell me, how much truth do you want? How much are you prepared to deal with? Some of it, or all of it?”
    “All of it! But I doubt you’re capable of—”
    “You don’t know what I’m capable of. And you’d be surprised at some of the things I know. In my job you have to learn the facts in order to distort them. I’ll start with the easy one. You know what happened to the monk seals when the big construction barges showed up three years ago? They left. That’s it. They swam off to Kure Atoll, a bunch of uninhabited, Navy-owned islands a hundred miles to the northwest. They have just as much privacy and protection as they ever did. The U.S. government made sure of that before they leased Keoki. But that’s old news. That’s the happy layer. Do you want to go deeper?”
    She kept her hot glare forward.
    “The deeper truth is that the Hawaiian monk seal is going to be extinct within thirty years, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Okay, no. If we got rid of the tuna nets that sometimes snag them, they’d probably die off in forty years. We might be able to buy an other five if we killed off all the tiger sharks in the area, but that creates its own issues. And it’s still futile. You know why? Because the monk seal’s number one enemy is the monk seal. Surprise! They may look cute, but they’re one of the most sexually malevolent species on the face of the planet.”
    That earned me a quick, distrustful glower.
    “During sex,” I explained, “the males bite. I’m not talking about love nibbles, I mean they chomp their honeys hard. Often fatally. This has led to a serious skew in the guy/girl ratio, worse than any technical college. But instead of being wooed, the few females left can look forward to a short life of perpetual gang bangs. Oh yes. These monks do that. It’s called mobbing. And when there aren’t enough women around for the old screw-and-chew, the men move on to the girls. Then the boys. Then each other. This isn’t Sammy the Seal you’re crying over.