She's not a classically beautiful woman, but she cuts a striking figure in perfectly tailored suits and practical shoes. Six-three just in flats, Mother Nature equipped her to do on her own what most women need high heels to do. A girl raised on the Sound, soothed to sleep by the waves in the distance, she came of age on the banks of the Raritan, grew up on far distant shores, and finally came into her own on a narrow island between the Hudson and East Rivers; there's something gentle and timeless in her hazel eyes that reminds you of the waters that shaped her.

Now the woman is back where the girl was born, on the Sound with her team from the banks of the Raritan, and you can't take your eyes off her. Blonde hair loose to her shoulders, utter confidence in her bearing- this is the woman you've waited for her to be for all your life, or maybe it's all her life. You know you can't have her now, but you can wait a couple of hours.

She meets you after the game, wearing a less than perfect smile. "I think Vivian was angrier with the lead here than she was with the deficit against LSU. She loves what they've done, but they're wearing on her patience."

And as much as you tell her that you care about her more than the game, the game is all she worries about. When you reach for her hand, she thinks of reach-in fouls; when you take her to what passes for home, she accuses you of stealing homecourt advantage; when you strip her of her perfect clothes, she sees hands stripping the ball away. Your tongue, your hands, parting her lips, penetrating her body, only cause her to envision parting the double-team and penetrating the paint.

You need human warmth, not this analytical coldness and certainly not the knife-blade cold of the Northeast. You need passion, intensity, someone to care about you, so you pack your bags and head south and west.

She's still built of smooth planes and corded muscle tight against her bones. None of her is excess, although on her nothing would be excess. "Nice to see you again," she says, and her voice still carries a sweet Southern lilt, a drawl that makes you think of the slow fall of magnolia petals and the gentle wave of a lacy parasol. "Been a long time since you've come home to me, sugar."

She's just joshing you, though, because she knows she hasn't come home in a long time either, has hardly had time to unpack a suitcase let alone settle down again. It doesn't matter that she carries her hometown in her voice. There's something in her blood that demands that she return home every so often, like a salmon trying to spawn, like a homing pigeon circling its loft. All the Southern girls you've ever known are like that; even though they talk about how grateful they are to be out of one-stoplight-two-street towns, they go back at the first chance they get, back to the families that didn't know what to do with them when they were young and still don't seem to know what to make of them now that they've grown into tall, strong women. It's an instinct that makes no sense to you, the eternal traveler. You have no roots, and you wouldn't know what to do with them if you did have them.

Already the itch is starting on the bottoms of your feet. You need to go somewhere- where, you don't yet know, but you can't stay still. But you've just arrived, you can't leave now, so you quench another thirst when you drink from her mouth. She whispers to you after you pull away sated, her words weighted so heavily with sweetness that you lick your lips expecting sugar and honey there. She draws you close to her as if she were baiting a trap, and you gladly let her ensnare you, anything to keep you from leaving as immediately as your wanderer's yen would have you go.

But the South is too slow for you, too personal where your East Coast girl was too distant. There's a happy medium out there somewhere, and you have to find it. You leave a note on the nightstand and slip out with the velvet night.

Given a different personality, maybe a girl with plains-colored hair and pale eyes and plain features who came from a Midwestern small town would have faded into the background, since it was so obviously her destiny. Given a different personality and the lack of a textbook jump shot, maybe she would have devoted herself to becoming as marriageable as possible, learning to cook and clean and smile blankly.

But she is who she is, and she's spent her life going from place to place as the ball bounces; she's spent it hoisting jumpers and cleaning the defensive glass, not ironing jumpers and washing windows. Her eyes burn with a clear, steady fire; she would never have been satisfied as a housewife, or any sort of married woman, because monogamy would have meant subjugating herself to her partner, both of you can feel it in your bones. The relationship you have with her satisfies both of you, because it allows you to wander and allows her to remain unencumbered, and at the same time you have each other whenever one of you wants or needs.

This is one of those times. You've been looking for the median between the fast-moving East Coast woman of winter and the syrup-slow Southerner you left behind you. Maybe your balance lies in the middle, somewhere on the plains that infinitely roll out in the distance, somewhere in the long arms of a woman who only figured out that she could never leave home the first time that she left it- the first time and one of only a handful of such times, and those only in the service of her country's athletic honor.

She kisses you gently, letting you decide when it's time to go deeper, and when to go deeper again, answering you as you seek more and more of her mouth. She holds firm as you melt against her, whispers sweet nothings in your ear when the taste of her becomes too much for you to stand and you absolutely have to pull out of the kiss. She knows how to treat you right, what words and touches can drive you crazy without the need for her body; there are times when sex isn't the answer, and she knows those times better than anyone else.

Except you recognize the feeling in your stomach, and you realize that just this once she miscalculated. If you don't leave now, it'll only end badly. She doesn't recognize what you need, and you don't need what she can give.

She's a little dynamo, and if you ever said that to her face she'd kill you, shoot you in cold blood with as little thought as it would take to flip a light switch. She doesn't suffer fools easily or well, so you know to watch your step around her.

Oh, but is she ever worth it. There's something about her smile and the innocence of her features that provides an enticing contrast with the hardness of her face and the steel in her eyes. Every time you lay eyes on her, you think that she's a sweet little girl, young enough that she should still be wearing blue jeans and tight tee shirts, headphones on her ears and bubble gum cracking in her mouth. But when she comes up against you and kisses you so fiercely, you know that she's all woman, even if her mouth is full of the wholesome taste of Bazooka. When she speaks, you hear her maturity, but she doesn't speak very often, especially not when she's knocking you out with her kisses. She knows exactly what effect she has on you, and uses it to her advantage when she wants something from you, and even though you know exactly what she's doing you let her do it.

She treats love the same way she treats everything else- as a hunt, as a competition, as a way for her to prove that she's better than anyone else. She stalks her prey, marking them carefully, biding her time until she can make her move. Although she's not ordinarily a patient person, in this she can wait endlessly. She's a creature of the wild as much as she is of the big city that she now calls home; both of you know that where you're born leaves its mark on your personality, and there's some stone in her from her home state's most famous landmark, some of that watchfulness, some of that attraction to fame. When she's ready, and only when she's ready, she pounces, teeth bared, tongue lashing out to lick her lips, and she bores her prey into the ground, using her mouth forcefully to render her quarry unable to resist.

The heat of her body against yours is almost too much to bear, because it seeps into you through your chest and your stomach and touches off a flurry of sensation. She thrusts her tongue into your mouth, her hips into yours, demanding and receiving everything that you have to give, until even the lust is emptied out of you. Even then she needs more, and when you can't give her that, she pushes you away, a push so strong that it propels you halfway across the country.

Broad hands with expert fingers are running up and down your body, gently, firmly, very insistently circling closer to your breasts and the space between your thighs; she knows that your body is curiously logical about its erotic zones, that you really do get more and more sensitive as you get closer to the sex parts. She knows this better than anyone and she takes full advantage of it. She loves to make you gasp out loud, waits for that moment when you can't take any more without overloading and you start screaming her name.

Her lips touch your lips, and you tremble with anticipation. She rewards you with the slow, rhythmic motion of her tongue, bringing your body into the steady rocking motion of hers until both of you are joined as one tangled knot of nakedness, her arm somewhere around where your leg should be, your foot tucked into the curve of her shoulder. It's always like this; it feels like it should be awkward and forced, but it's instead the most natural thing in the world, so perfect that you wonder what it is you're looking for when you leave her.

She bears a goddess's name, and she wears it well, though not completely appropriately. She's no aloof virgin of the night, but she'll be the first to tell you that she loves the idea of a bevy of beauties hanging on her every word. She has the majestic profile and sense of presence that you would expect of an Olympian. She's human enough for you, though, and going much further along this train of thought is going to drive you crazy. Instead, you clasp her close to you, running your finger along the generous contours of her tanned face, combing carefully through her sun-streaked silky hair, tracing the curved line of her shoulder and the play of her muscles as she reaches for your hand. There's a smile on her face, the million-watt grin that she turns on everyone, public and private alike. She doesn't believe in layering herself- what you see is what you get, no matter who you are. That's part of why you love her more fiercely than anyone you've ever known.

That's also why, when the dawn gives you light to pick your way out, you run away, because you can't let yourself betray her by staying, because if you stay everyone will know.

She's not a typical beauty, but once you've found her beauty you can't understand why other people don't see it. Maybe it's in the naivete that she really shouldn't have at twenty-four. Maybe it's in her sense of humor and devil-may-care attitude towards everything. What she brings to your love and your life is joy unfettered and unbound, an exuberance that not even your Olympian goddess matches. There's nothing she does without either a brilliant smile or an intense glare; in either case, she throws herself completely into whatever she does.

It seems appropriate that her long hair is the brilliant blonde of high noon, as if she had reached into the sky and brought down sunbeams to fasten to her scalp, the better to match her blinding smile and radiant presence. She glows with health and vitality, even as her wounded body endlessly frustrates her. It's nothing major, nothing that will keep her from the northward migration she and so many of her countrywomen take part in when the leaves start to turn. She goes where the life is, so when things start to die in her homeland she travels to a place where time goes in reverse, where the flowers are just coming out of their buds and leaves are shyly revealing themselves to be green. It's a cycle of denial, an endless quest for life.

You feed off her endless energy, and sometimes you think that you could attach wires to her and use her as an environmentally sound source of energy for the whole world. But you know your plan will fail simply because it depends on tying her to one thing, and for a woman who commits to nothing for more than a few months, that's anathema. No matter how much she likes or loves you, she'd never consent to bonds. She needs to be free to run around as she pleases.

So you try to enjoy what you have of her, the bit of attention she can pay you between one thing and another, but it grates on your nerves. It's bad enough that you're out of place, basking in spring warmth when your mind is telling you that it ought to be autumn and slowly cooling. It's like walking a tightrope while blindfolded and drunk; it's like trying to keep your balance after three rides on a roller coaster. If you were constantly with her, if she were distracting you every hour of every day the way she distracts you some hours of most days, you could handle it, but when she's not with you the oddness weighs more and more heavily on you until you've had more than enough.

Of all the lovers you've had, she's the shyest, the most subtle, and the most desperate, casting lovelorn glances at you in the stands as she waits for the ball to come to her hands, longing looks that by right should have brought up the temperature in this freezing gym by several degrees, and those in Celsius. She never says anything aloud; discretion's been drummed into her after years of having to hide in plain sight because no one ever wanted to admit the truth to themselves about their precious babies. It's part of the paradox that she's become ever since she came to America. The nickname given to her means sunny, and yet she's a raven-haired beauty with dark eyes. She isn't American by birth, but there are times when she seems to understand what America is about better than the people who were born there. She seems demure and innocent, yet she's as mischievous as the rest of her more ebullient former teammates, and from what little she's said of her college days, the taunts of her classmates left their scars on her psyche.

She meets you right after the game, not even bothering to change; the heat from her overworked body is more than enough to make up for the lack of heat in the gym. "Spasebo," she mutters, momentarily unaware that she's slipped into her native tongue until you gently remind her what language she needs to speak with you. Her rueful smile is enough to make you wish she made mistakes like that more often. "Thank you for coming here for me. I appreciated it very much."

You don't have the heart to tell her that you came more for yourself than fo rher; you came becaues you needed her, not because she needed you. The fact that the need was mutual is a happy coincidence at best. It makes her feel good to think that you flew across the world for her; it's better that she doesn't know that you only came for yourself. Instead you hold her close, running fingers through her damp black hair and kissing the words away from her lips. That's all you can do here, exercising the caution that years of hiding has drummed into her so that she can't do anything else.

It's one of the few things that drives you crazy about her, the fact that she can't truly be herself even in her homeland. She doesn't hold back from you, but she holds back from herself, and in some ways that's even more offensive. You quickly realize that coming here was a big mistake, and you rectify it the next morning at the nearest airport. You have to go home, and home is just one spot on the map.

She kisses your fears and worries and anguish away the second she lays eyes on you, instinctively knowing that you need her touch and her presence more than anything else. The moonlight in her black-black hair sets off the radiant glow of her pale skin to a T, and you marvel again at the way nature put together such a beautiful contrast of darkness and light, of the exotic sharpness of her features to her ultra-feminine personality. This is the balance you've been looking for ever since you first left.

You still don't know why you budged from her side in the first place, unless it was simply because you couldn't take the stormclouds that hung over her adopted city any longer. Maybe there is such a thing as too much of a good thing; maybe you needed to get out of whack before you could come home to her, so that you could fully appreciate everything she was to you, the combination of strength and softness that reduces you to tears, the mixture of joy and frustration-spawned wisdom that keeps you thinking. You don't know what possessed you then, only that she's finally freed herself from the obligations that kept her in the Northwest and that you know that you need her more than anyone you've ever known.

If she's bitter about taking the summer off, if she resents thirteen rejections, she doesn't say a word to you about it, because she knows that you don't want to hear about it and you know that it hurts her to think about it. You don't want that for her, because you love her, even if you choose a funny way to show it. She understands. She's good at understanding you. It's a skill that few have mastered, and she's one of the select few.

She makes wild, passionate love, steady as the waves against the shore. She makes love with an honesty that shames you; she knows all your guilty pleasures, and even if she doesn't share them she indulges them in you. Only California girls have ever found all of your spots, your dirty little secret places that make you die a little bit every time they're touched. She always takes the lead, charging in proudly and fiercely because she doesn't want to chance missing anything; she's the type of woman who will live life to the fullest up to the day that she dies, whether it happens naturally in old age or because she makes one little mistake while she's mountain climbing or whitewater rafting. But it quickly becomes mutual passion, because you can't keep your hands from her firm, toned body too long without not being human. She draws you closer, or maybe you draw her closer, but it doesn't really matter because the only thing that matters is that you're together, close enough to hear each other's heart beating faster and faster and faster, so close that the sweat pouring from both your body and hers is enough to bind you skin to skin for all eternity, and you honestly wouldn't mind that at this point because all that matters in your life is her and all that matters in her life is you. Love, passion, lust, overtake you in waves, blurring your senses so that she's the only thing you can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, sapping your energy so that all you can finally do is lie in her arms and gently twist around to stroke her hair. There's nowhere you'd rather be than here, no one you'd rather be with than her.

You've loved many women in your life, spent a lot of time with women of all stripes, all sizes, all colors, all makes and models, but you've come to the conclusion that your Northern California girl is the best that you've ever known, because she combines everything you've ever loved about every woman in one package, like a greatest hits album of your love life. She undoubtedly has style and flair; she's a champion kisser, although you don't know what division; she has a joie de vivre that makes every day worth living; she has a reticence about her sometimes that you long to pry open. All that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes, the souvenirs of a meeting between two different lands. She keeps you off-balance enough so that you're always thinking, but she's comfortable enough that you know what you're coming home to when you come home to her. She's a precious commodity, a one-of-a-kind woman, and she's your rare and cherished gift.