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Tara knocked on Holly’s apartment door in South Bend, Indiana, where she’d settled at least temporarily, needing a home base. She remembered the first time she’d shown up at Holly’s door, on the morning they left for Carrigan’s. That morning, she’d been so in her head she’d barely noticed anything around her.

Now she noticed everything. The little border of flowers someone had planted optimistically, despite the fact that spring was having a hard time breaking winter’s grip. The flaking paint around the door, the door number hanging slightly loose.

She bounced a little on her feet, waiting for the door to open. Worried that it wouldn’t.

Behind the door, she heard a cat yowl. Holly had a cat?

“Shoo, Carol,” Holly’s voice said. “You cannot go outside, ma’am. You moved in here, and now you live here.”

She must have looked through the peephole, because the next thing she said was “Oh!” and then she was out the door, shutting it quickly behind her.

“Sorry, if I keep the door open, my cat gets out,” she said, brushing hair out of her face.

Tara looked her over, looking beautiful in an old Black Flag shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of ratty, too big joggers that she’d rolled at the waist. The death moth tattoo on her stomach peeked out.

“Carol, huh? Keeping with the holiday naming traditions of Carrigan’s?” Tara smiled. “Or is it Carol, like, they’re lesbians, Harold?”

“Oh, well… she jumped into my car somewhere around Des Moines. I figured any cat who shows up and won’t leave is a gift from Kringle, so I named her accordingly. Although the lesbians were a deciding factor. She’s a good buddy on the road.”

They stood looking at each other for a long moment, Carol yelling from inside.

“Hey,” Tara finally said.

When she’d gotten in the car to drive out here, it had seemed obvious that she needed to come. That having apologized and said everything they should have said months ago, the only thing standing between them was distance. Now she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to get over this barrier, to go forward into whatever future they were heading toward.

“What are you doing here?” Holly asked, shoving her hands into her pockets and pulling her pants down another half inch. Tara tried not to watch the movement. This probably wasn’t the time to think lustful thoughts. “I thought we were, like, texting and taking it slow?”

“Um,” Tara said, “I wanted to ask you a question.”

“That you couldn’t ask over the phone?”

Tara grinned. “Yeah, this seemed like an in-person one.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Ask your question.”

She shook her head to clear it. “I was wondering if you’d like to go on a real date with me.”

Holly’s face lit up. “I thought you’d never ask.” She stepped forward, slipping her hand around the back of Tara’s neck and pulling her in for a kiss. They smiled against each other’s mouths; then Holly brought her body flush up against Tara’s and dragged them both back through the door.

Carol, a small, loud orange creature with no tail and hair sticking up in every direction around her body, squawked at them.

“I thought maybe we could go out on a date now,” Tara said as Holly kissed down her collarbone.

“We will,” Holly said. “But we have to work up an appetite first.”

Tara smiled. “How does this count as taking it slow?”

Holly looked up at her from where she was kissing downward. “You’re the one who showed up at my door.”

Who was Tara to argue with that kind of logic? She reached down and pulled Holly’s shirt up over her head. Tangling her hand in Holly’s curls, she thought about stopping her and taking back control, but she was committed to turning over a new leaf. And she was going to start with letting Holly give her as many orgasms as she wanted, without bossing her around even a little.

After, as they lay in a giggling, naked heap on Holly’s bed, Tara ran a hand over Holly’s tattoos.

“I’m sorry my mattress isn’t as comfortable as the one at Carrigan’s. It’s shitty, and secondhand, but it doesn’t have bedbugs,” Holly apologized.