Discreet apocalypse: bits of avoidance/abstention

He thought about the time when he had slept with them. Both were pretty. One was the daughter of a preacher, and a philosopher at that. The other was a doctor, a cellist with a slow, husky voice. He thought about how he pulled off that one; not how he ended up in bed with them, but more how he actually avoided sex with them.
One of them was a stronger temptation. The other, of course. It always had to be. At some point, he thought he was not going to do it.

Once again, he was falling short of doing the deed, and was blurring the lines between the failure to go all the way and his sempiternal penchant for incompletion. He kissed her goodnight, got off the cab and simply walked home, drunk and dissatisfied.