It was a mundane event: Jarrod had a dentist appointment that day. "A cleaning," the hygienist said, "just a routine tartar cleaning and you're outa here." His conquest of Christmas Jones notwithstanding, the appointment, months in the making and six weeks to reschedule, needed to be done. His PalmPilot reminded him, beeping plaintively in its cradle.

"Jarrod, you really should muzzle that thing. Just for a second I was thinking it was my on-duty pager. Do something with that, okay?" Her response to the alarm was very different from the morning, Jarrod noted. She would have been caustically strident, cutting and given Jarrod a run for his blood pressure. This was a thoughtful Jones, an almost human person.

"Yah, I gotta run. I'll see you... tomorrow, right, Doctor?"

"No, Doctor Merither, tomorrow is Saturday. You can hope, but, no. My laundry is calling out to me." A pause. "Nice thought, though."

'Oops,' Jarrod thought, 'can't confuse the real with the surreal, here.' "Right. Monday it is..." Jarrod packed up his open files and put them in their office safe, then turned to survey his desk. "Okay, I'll see you around." He popped open the door and slipped out into the open bullpen, dropping off his completed reports with the file clerk as he smilingly went down through the security gates to the elevator. He had a mouth, then a house to clean by this evening. He didn't see Christmas roll her chair over to his computer, before his screen saver locked down his computer.

The cleaning went moderately well: Jarrod left the office a little numb in his left cheek from a small filling, and an otherwise clean bill of health from the dentist. He shopped, dropped off and picked up laundry, and came home, where he did major damage to the 'single male in a pigpen' stereotype and cleaned an already tidy house until it bore an almost unnatural resemblance to something out of Homes and Gardens. Then another once-over for the 'play room,' as he called it, to ready it for the evening's activities. He was checking his watch as it got darker, and knocked off his chores around six and sat in his unlit living room, watching the early evening news and sipping a beer, waiting.

Christmas knocked off work late, and worried, and headed to the gym for her daily workout. Today she had dedicated for aerobics and upper body strength training. It didn't go well; Christmas kept finding herself fixating on some of the men in the gym, comparing them with... Jarrod? Weird. The third time that happened Christmas set the weights up ten pounds and poured on the sweat to work the thought out of her head.

Toweling off from the shower afterwards, her mind kept coming back to Jarrod, conjuring images of him in a track suit. It was getting scary; and she grit her teeth, knowing why, and praying she could defeat the infernal mechanism Jarrod had set into her. On the way home, she stopped off at the drugstore to pick up some cold syrup. When she got home she locked the door, took the phone off the hook, drank a triple dose of the stuff along with two glasses of wine, and went to bed, trying to avoid the images flashing inside her closed eyelids.

Jarrod kept looking at his watch, puzzled. She was set to come over two hours ago, and now it was nine o'clock. He scratched his head, then went to the Internet and tried pulling down her name. No phone number listed in her employee record. And directory assistance was equally unhelpful. At eleven he turned in, puzzled and starting to get a bit nervous.