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This is the part I have to watch.

When Johnny spots Alice, head thrown back in laughter at the Speakeasy Café, with a vague sense that she’s been here before.

The rest will be educated guesses based on layers of memory.

Trust me, the details do not matter.

Johnny’s unnerved by something altogether too familiar about those pale waves tumbling down Alice’s shoulders, the angled quirk of her smile, her untamable aloofness.

And the woman beside Alice leans a bit too close, dark curly hair brushing Alice’s platinum.

She’s giggling at what Johnny assumes to be her own joke as they share an oversized, fruity-looking drink through two straws the color of Pepto-Bismol.

The drink is teal. Fuzzy shapes of red and green sink to the bottom of the glass.

Likely gummy fish. Likely old gummy fish gone hard with time.

Inside Johnny is a yawning gap; a gap that aches at the sight of her once-lover, bathing some other woman in attention that once was Johnny’s, once belonged, wholly, to her.

And yet, inside the aching, yawning pit of abandoned promises and daydreams gone stale, is the foul lingering of a sour love.

Love like the sweet burn of sugary rum.

Johnny has been here before.

She’s stood in this spot, surrounded by white patio tables, matching chairs with checkerboard cushions.

Below strung twinkle lights and within spitting distance of 4 th Street.

Where the buildings are brick, close, and uneven, clamoring onto one another like the street is a mouth of crowded, leaning teeth.

Johnny should turn and leave.

Her hips tilt with a shift of her weight, as if she’s preparing to do just that; but she can’t leave.

A memory holds her there with a force much stronger than logic.

She’s chosen one from six months ago.

Another one at the Speakeasy Café, when Alice and Johnny, strangers to lovers, became strangers again.

The café was very much the same.

It was night, though, during an unforgivingly cold winter and beneath an unusually clear sky.

Johnny had looked up at the stars.

She could see so few through the light pollution and layers of smog, and yet she knew they were there, spattered like freckles across the face of an endless expanse.

She’d thought of incendiary gasses, illuminating distant planets, even after the void had swallowed them.

They were generous, she’d thought.

It had reminded her of Alice.

“I’m going to Berlin,” Alice had said.

Johnny was back on earth, and Alice’s pale eyes were glittering, hair swept back in a braid so intricate, Johnny couldn’t figure out how her fingers weaved the pattern.

Silverware clinked on plates, and a stray cat brushed against Johnny’s leggings.

There had been too many beats of silence.

The question of how long went unasked, and the invitation to join Alice went unsaid.

Johnny’s hands folded in her lap.

“So, that’s it?” She’d nudged the cat away, its fur leaving a slick of moisture on her calf, enough to invite the evening’s chill.

Alice’s fork had twirled inside a loop of zucchini noodles, tines whining on ceramic.

“Don’t make this a thing .”

Johnny’d thought to beg, to offer to pay for her own ticket.

Hell, she’d thought to offer to pay for Alice’s ticket.

But recalled a time further back, when Alice, carrying the leftovers of a filet, had ignored a whining dog in the street, even though the vertebrae jutted up through its fur like its very bones were reaching out for help.

She’d recalled how Alice had carried the takeout box all the way home, just to drop it in the trash.

She’d recalled how Alice detested desperate things.

So, Johnny did not beg.

But she still paid the check.

* * *

And now, in an echo of then, Johnny glances to her right, to the table where it happened.

Where she’d sat, dumbfounded, bill in hand, fumbling for her wallet.

Where Alice hadn’t argued with her or reached for her credit card.

Not really.

Johnny just stands there, like a flea-bitten stray.

She looks from Alice to the other woman, that curly-haired, too-femme-for-Alice woman, and back again.

Johnny knows the singularity of Alice’s stare.

It once focused on her.

It’s not real , she wants to yell to the curly-haired woman.

But that would be crazy.

That would make Johnny the problem , just like Alice always almost said.

Just like Johnny always feared.

Johnny breathes out the words she wanted to yell.

She doesn’t see me when she turns, doesn’t remember that I’m standing here, but I see the stumble in her movement, the inertia of her foot, how it scrapes the sidewalk instead of lifting cleanly off the ground.

I’d reach for her, would wrap my fingers around her elbow to guide her away, if I could.

Alice’s little black dog is already bounding over.

I’d stop it, everything inside me screams stop it , but Lucy the English Bulldog sinks her teeth into Johnny’s ankle.

Alice calls out to the little rogue beast.

Johnny freezes in her tracks, feeling the eyes of a lost-love on her back.

She worries Alice will think she is following her.

She only stumbled across a picture Alice posted.

Not really following her.

Just curious. Curiosity is reasonable after six months of silence.

Now, rubber soles smack sidewalk, Alice is coming for the dog, and it all begins again.

No internet in Berlin?

No phones?

The familiar argument plays again in Johnny’s head, but she doesn’t even get to the good part before Lucy is pawing at her pant leg, whining.

She’s forced to scoop up the English Bulldog to keep her from darting after a passing elderly man.

He yelps, startled as Lucy growls in Johnny’s arms, snapping his direction.

The man sidesteps, and his wrinkled face finds new places to fold with his displeasure.

Johnny thinks people like Alice shouldn’t own dogs.

That dogs should be with people who can love you back.

Lucy wriggles in her hold.

Her potbelly is fat and warm and pink and bald.

She gnaws at Johnny’s thumb knuckle.

Alice must’ve bought her this godawful, bedazzled collar.

It’s no wonder she bites.

“Johnny?”

Alice is closing the distance between them, just six feet away now.

If Johnny turns around, she’ll know it’s true.

I understand why she just stands there a second.

She’s thinking, Maybe if I don’t acknowledge time, it won’t pass.

I’ll just stand here, Lucy slung across my arms, Alice remaining six feet away.

But a maroon SUV passes, a gaggle of kids screaming or laughing in the backseat.

Rubber soles bounce louder off sidewalk.

Time is passing nonetheless.

“Didn’t know you were back,” Johnny says.

A lie.

Her eyes focus on Alice’s feet first. Converses.

Beat up. Grungy. Johnny thinks she’s wearing them ironically.

Probably some sort of test, where if she were to say, Oh, I love those Converses , Alice would snicker-laugh, that ambiguous sound, indiscernible from mockery.

Johnny sets Lucy down near the Converses.

Her eyes trail up Alice’s slim legs.

Freshly shaven. A little nick of jealousy cuts like Lucy’s serpentine teeth.

Was she planning to fuck curly-hair?

Is she still?

Johnny tells herself she doesn’t care.

Ripped, cutoff denim shorts frame the place Johnny’s head has rested a hundred times.

Not rested. Flourished upon.

Nestled inside. Worked over ‘til Alice screamed to God. A white cotton crop-top reveals Alice’s navel.

She’s too old for that.

You’re too old for crop tops, Johnny wants to tell her.

That’s a Gen Z thing.

But she doesn’t.

“I got back last week.”

Johnny meets her eyes.

Clear as glass. Icy pools.

She thinks she could dive in.

Thinks she could happily freeze.

Or drown. “Great.”

“Hey.” Alice’s chin dips, she scratches the base of her skull behind her ear, light refracting off of her gold stud earrings.

“I’m glad we ran into each other.” She glances over her shoulder at curly-hair, whose stare has narrowed, then turns those glacial eyes back on Johnny.

“Yeah, I was just heading…” Down the street is a laundromat, Johnny knows that wouldn’t make sense.

Alice knows Johnny has a washer/dryer.

“I was leaving too,” Alice says.

“One sec.”

Fastening Lucy’s matching leash to that hideous collar, Alice hands the leash to Johnny and scurries back to the bar.

After summoning the bartender to bring the check, she exchanges a few words with the curly-haired woman, who, in turn, scowls in Johnny’s direction.

Johnny’s waiting on Alice again.

She wonders how this happened, Lucy happily panting at one end of the leash, her anxiously waiting at the other.

The curly-haired woman’s scowl melts away when Alice kisses her cheek, and Johnny thinks of returning the dog and making an excuse to leave.

But it’s only an exercise in thought.

Something Johnny believes she should do.

Because who would entertain the whims of a person like Alice?

A person who could just buy a ticket to Berlin?

A person who might’ve doted on Johnny for a time, but not as an equal.

Loved her like she might love a little dog.

Johnny doesn’t come up with an excuse to leave.

She’s a moon now, stuck in Alice’s gravity.

All those imagined arguments that played out so clearly while Johnny took scalding showers, the ones that ended with Alice realizing how wrong she’d been, ended with tears and apologies.

Those arguments static-out like white noise.

Johnny is trapped in orbit.

The bartender approaches the pair at the bar with a printed check.

Alice pulls a wallet from her back pocket, but the curly-haired woman shoos it away.

They exchange furtive smiles before Alice returns her attention to Johnny.

For the briefest moment, Johnny’s distracted by Lucy’s tugging at the leash, another attempt to nip a passerby.

Alice’s focus lands squarely where I stand.

She takes deliberate steps toward me, toward Johnny, toward us.

“ Don’t do this ,” I say.

But if Alice can hear me, she ignores it.

If she can see me, she pretends she doesn’t.

Alice links her arm through Johnny’s, and they set off in the direction of Alice’s new apartment, a building appropriately named The Encore.