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* * *

Over the short walk, Johnny and Alice exchange a number of phrases, most of them pleasant, none of them worth repeating.

The only words of note come when the women stand at The Encore’s outer door.

It has an iron frame.

Bars meet at neat angles, too thinly spaced for a body to slip between.

Johnny lingers on the step second from lowest. Alice’s key ring is looped around her fingers when she says the only important thing.

“I want to explain.”

Words like a barbed hook, keys like a reel.

And Johnny follows Alice through the iron door with its orderly lines, through the ordinary wooden one, and down a hallway pocked with flyers.

An HOA meeting. An estate sale.

A lost cat. The elevator buttons are yellowed with wear, linoleum floor peeling up at the edges.

Lucy grabs hold of a curling corner, exposing a new sliver of subfloor beneath.

Johnny ignores her buzzing phone, and when the elevator opens with a ding, Alice says, “Home sweet home,” an octave too chipper for the dreary hallway.

Brass numbers hang crooked on apartment 607.

With its red paint flaking, it seems lonely at the end of the hall.

If Alice has neighbors, they must be out, or quiet, or dead but undiscovered, for not a sound penetrates what must be thin walls, not a single sign of life.

“It’s private,” Alice says, fiddling with her key ring.

Johnny catches that the first key Alice tries doesn’t turn the lock, even when Alice tries to shield it with her hand after the fact.

She wonders whether that’s the curly-haired woman’s key, nestled between Alice’s and the little bronze one for the mailbox.

The door opens and inside is dingy grout, off-white tile surrounding it, formica countertops a murky shade of green, cabinets old and crumbling.

This is Alice’s home.

Through the long cut of a narrow hallway, Johnny spies a slice of the living room where a second-hand couch is draped with a long, leopard print blanket undoubtedly hiding a stain.

In spots where the sun-faded floral wallpaper has peeled back, a hairline crack stretches taut across the white of the drywall.

“Nice place,” Johnny says, feeling a twinge of satisfaction at knowing the woman who broke her heart is living in a real shithole.

Either Alice doesn’t notice the sarcasm, or she ignores it.

She’s too keen not to notice, so perhaps she really does want a clean slate, to wipe away the animosity and begin again.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks.

Or Johnny has been staring too long, and Alice is shifting the conversation through feigned politeness.

“No, thank you.” Johnny knows it’s time to look elsewhere.

She angles her body, glances outside, mimicking someone who is just another visitor, an old friend, someone laissez-faire.

The view through the window is industrial, corners of buildings visible if Johnny cranes her neck to see.

Alice tosses her keys on the countertop, the clatter sending Lucy skittering in the opposite direction, dragging her leash.

She sits lightly on the couch, tapping the jaguar blanket where it covers the cushion beside her.

“Will you sit a minute?”

Johnny takes a detour around the coffee table, unclipping Lucy’s leash and resting it atop her crate.

She tucks her bag behind the crate before sitting where Alice indicated.

Her back is too straight, knees too stiff.

She can’t remember how she used to sit around Alice.

If she could, she’d mimic that.

But she can’t remember.

So, Johnny sits rigid and awkward, all right angles like the iron door.

Alice’s fingertips graze the shaved side of Johnny’s head, a tickle that travels down Johnny’s neck and settles deep in her chest. “Your hair is short, like I like it.”

The compliment is a warm wash that tugs Johnny’s mouth into the shape of a smile, but it dies as quickly as it formed.

“Are you still at City College?” Alice asks, tucking her hands in her lap.

“No.” Johnny leans back into the cushions, a facsimile of cool even as her features stiffen.

“It didn’t work out.”

“They fired you?”

“Wasn’t a good fit.”

Alice shrugs.

“No big loss. I didn’t like the way that professor ogled your ass.”

“He did not,” Johnny says, picturing Alice watching Professor Culligan watching her, seething with jealousy as the professor sneaks a peek.

A tiny smirk dimples her cheek before she forces it away.

“He did,” Alice insists.

“I wish you would get out of academia. It’s a rhetorical circle jerk with no real-life application. You should do something with your hands. Remember when you DIY’d that bookshelf? You dragged that pallet six blocks.”

Johnny relaxes, thinking how she struggled with the unwieldy thing up three flights of stairs, how Alice noticed.

“Well, I don’t know what the training is like, but I was thinking, you’d make a great carpenter.”

“Just now you were thinking that?”

“I think about you a lot,” Alice says.

“I thought about you while I was in Berlin.”

“I thought about you too.” Johnny’s mind replays voicemails.

The calls, straight to machine, didn’t leave breadcrumbs.

But the voicemails Alice must’ve received.

Why didn’t you call?

Johnny thinks to ask.

She doesn’t ask, because she’s lovestruck, not dumb.

Johnny knows the answer: Alice didn’t want to call.

Why did you go to Berlin in the first place?

That one’s a little better, but still off.

Johnny’s asked that before, at the Speakeasy, at the white patio table, a stray cat circling under a sky full of careless stars.

Johnny wants to ask, Do you love me?

But she’d never get a straight answer.

Johnny’s phone buzzes in her pocket.

“You need to get that?” Alice asks.

Johnny checks the phone, clicks to ignore the unsaved number, then tucks it away.

“Something important?”

“No.” Johnny leans back onto the sofa, folding arms across her chest.

“You seem different,” Alice says.

Johnny wonders whether it’s different good or different bad or different enough to interest Alice .

“It’s been a while.”

“Not that long.”

“Six months,” Johnny says.

The longest crawl of days and weeks in her life.

Alice reaches for a coaster on the coffee table, adjusts its position to align with the table’s corner.

“People can change in six months.”

“Can they?”

“I think they can.”

Alice takes her time with the words, like she’s savoring the taste of them.

“I think I’ve changed.”

It’s a subtle thing, the way Alice’s thigh inches closer to Johnny’s.

The heat of her bare flesh travels through Johnny’s denim, a tiny press that says, I’m close.

I’m here.

“You’re angry with me,” Alice says, smoky in a way that sounds like, Come to bed with me.

She swipes something off the rim of Johnny’s glasses, a gesture disarmingly familiar, like a dance they’ve done a thousand times, a waltz only the two of them know.

Johnny is angry. She can’t remember a time she wasn’t angry with Alice.

But the anger seems an isolated movement among the many steps of their dance together.

Infatuation, need, and that bitter, sour love come along with the anger, taking beats in time.

“I’m sorry I left.” Alice’s fingers spider crawl over Johnny’s thigh.

She is taking the lead position.

Johnny is tempted, feeling the rush of being twirled away, spun headlong into the waltz and humming a desperate, minor key.

She steadies herself, placing her hand on the empty cushion beside her, diverting her focus to things that don’t dance, won’t sweep her away.

Things like facts and science and logic.

“I’m sorry I left you ,” Alice says, leaning closer, her stomach remaining flat even with the curve of her body.

Back, back, back up.

Running fingertips over the pilled fabric of the couch.

Away from the swirl.

Johnny will not be sucked down.

She fixates instead on Alice’s thinness.

Wonders whether it’s a matter of science: genetics and metabolization, an inherited preference for lower fat foods.

What’s the ratio of genetic code to socialization when it comes to the formulation of preference?

As long as Johnny wonders, she won't allow herself to feel.

There’s math to consider. A formula inclusive of the distance between Alice’s home relative to nearby nutritional sources and the variety of foods offered therein. Not as simple as that, there’s also the variable factor of digital access, the linkage of apps to more distant options. But those receive a negative impact component proportional to increased cost. Delivery fees. Extraneous tips.

I’m sorry I left you.

That’s not even considering the denominator of exercise, whether deliberate or coincidental. Commutes by foot or bicycle. Even walks to trains and buses and the short trek to catch an Uber can add up, calorically speaking. But Johnny leans toward a psychological cause. That Alice believes the space she’s allotted ends at the limit of her bones (aside from her breasts and ass, which society makes allowances for, provided they can be seen—not too seen, mind you—and enjoyed by the general public).

“It’s okay,” Johnny says, calmer now.

“I needed some space.”

Johnny wants to tell Alice she’s already created so much space around herself, she didn’t need to cross an ocean to make more of it. But she just says, “I know.”

“Stay for dinner.” It’s not a question, nor a demand. It’s a statement of fact and a foregone conclusion. “The Chinese place you like delivers here.”

Johnny nods. Alice dials and orders. She doesn’t need to ask any questions, and rather than feeling insulted by the presumption, Johnny’s comforted by the order’s familiar rhythm. “Crab Rangoons, a pint of wanton…” Alice speaks into the receiver.

Johnny checks her own phone, telling herself she is interested in the missed calls and is not just passing time until Alice’s attention is back on her. Her voicemail has been full for months, so she does not check it. Mostly thirty-second snippets of static. Telemarketers. Autodialers, where the system isn’t prompted by the beep, so the robot just hangs on the line.

The text messages, she sees.

Today 5:38pm

Potential spam: Call me 0-112-358-1321

Potential spam: Seriously

Potential spam: Johnny, call me.

Potential spam: JOHNNY

Johnny has no patience for distractions. She thinks I'm nobody, nothing, unimportant, and she blocks my number.

She has forgotten me and doesn’t want to be interrupted when Alice offers to show her pictures of the Berlin trip.

She wants to look carefully, at the background and foreground.

Each time Alice flips to the next, Johnny braces for an auburn-haired German woman with an easy grin of sexual satisfaction, or a Spanish tourist partially obscured by hotel-white sheets.

If she sees that, maybe Johnny will do what she planned to do.

But that never happens on , and the photos are of the usual stuff: oversized beer glasses brimming with foam and amber ale, graffiti under a bridge with a moody filter, clouds through an airplane window.

Off-center snaps of blooming flowers.

I wish I had been with you , Johnny thinks.

I could’ve photographed you beside that graffiti.

The peonies would’ve brought out your eyes.

It would’ve been better if we were together.

I wouldn’t have ended up hating you.

But she doesn’t say it.

Alice parrots a few German phrases she learned in her travels.

Her accent is bad. Johnny doesn’t have to know anything about German to know her accent is bad.

Three knocks land on the front door, and Alice hops up to answer it saying, “Must be our food.”

Johnny tries to commit the hard, German sounds to memory.

The exact shapes of their square edges.

She’d like to look them up later.

She’d like to see if any of them translate to, I love you, Johnny.

I love you and I always have, even if I don’t know how to show it.

All I ever want is you.

But the sounds get jumbled.

Mixed up with the pleasantries Alice exchanges with the delivery man, and Johnny forgets them.

“I’ll grab plates.”

Balancing the paper bag between elbow and hip, carrying a spoon and a fork and soda cans, Alice returns and sets the coffee table.

Johnny tears open the bag, placing the paper menus aside and divvying up the meals: soup for Alice, Rangoons for herself.

She grips a deep-fried triangle, grease leaking onto her thumb and forefinger.

“Who watched Lucy while you were gone?”

Alice takes her time opening the soup lid.

She presses up on the lip, freeing it one inch at a time as steam vents through the widening hole.

“My mom. I dropped her in Connecticut before I flew out.”

Alice’s mother is a selfish, waspy woman, preoccupied with country club gossip and courting a third (or was it fourth?) husband.

They’ve never gotten along.

Either Alice was eager enough to leave to face her rich-enough-for-Coach-but-not-Hermes mother, or she is lying and Lucy stayed with someone else.

Johnny eyes Lucy in her spot on the floor, as if close inspection might tell her whether Alice is being truthful.

But Lucy doesn’t say anything, she just chews a rawhide strip she dragged from under the couch.

Alice stirs the soup, churning noodles from the bottom to the surface.

“I heard Brittany is pregnant.”

“Her and the baseball guy?”

“Mark, yeah.”

“I thought they broke up,” Johnny says.

“Back together.”

Johnny rolls her eyes.

“And is she happy about it?” She can’t imagine being happy about heartburn and stretch marks and volumes of discharge.

Alice swallows a spoonful of soup.

“She's pretending to be. I think she just likes fantasizing about a different life than the one she has.”

Johnny crunches down on a Rangoon’s crispy edge. “People always think kids will solve their problems. As if taking care of some other dependent creature will unlock a portal to a world where all their problems melt away and they get a clean slate.”

“Do you think it’s possible?” Alice asks. She lets the question hang there, fishing out a slice of carrot and examining it on her spoon. “For people to start fresh?”

A waltz drums in the back of Johnny’s mind, a cadence of one-two-three, so she thinks about molecules instead. The invisible bonds between them in that slice of carrot, ionic and covalent, the only things keeping carrot from soup, soup from spoon, spoon from Alice’s hand. She thinks about the bonds between herself and Alice, how they twist and widen and shrink to form the shape of a story. “Maybe,” Johnny says. One-two-three. “But not by making a kid.”

I know , but Johnny doesn’t know, that they can’t start fresh . But they can begin again. In fact, they must.

One-two-three.

One-two-three.

Johnny forgets to blow steam off her Rangoon. She takes a bite.

* * *

When the soup is tepid and Johnny’s stomach can’t stretch the width of another single drop of greasy cream cheese, Alice clears the remnants of dinner. She dumps broth and flat soda down the drain and stows the garbage in a trashcan tucked in a cabinet tucked beneath the sink.

“I guess I should go,” Johnny says, standing in the kitchen’s entryway.

Alice pumps two squirts of lavender soap into her palm and runs the faucet. Johnny lingers. “Is that what you want to do?” she asks above the sound of rushing water.

Johnny says nothing. She doesn’t want to go.

Alice tears a length of paper towel from the nearby rack, dries her hands, and chucks it into the trash before kicking the cabinet closed. She leans back against the countertop, slanting her pelvis out and toward. Johnny thinks how easy it would be to unbutton her shorts and slide them off. “Do you want to stay?”

Johnny says nothing. One-two-three.

Alice slinks past Johnny to the bedroom and Johnny follows, watches her pluck the crop top over her head, undo the button on her denim shorts. Alice tugs Johnny’s pants down to her ankles, making it easy for Johnny to step out of them.

Johnny stays.

She grabs Alice’s hips, pressing her mouth to their hollows. Her lover arches into her, skin tasting faintly of salt; and when Johnny’s hand slides between Alice’s legs, she is greeted by a slick swell of desire. With a sharp breath, Alice yanks Johnny up, entering her in turn. With the fullness of Alice inside her, Johnny closes her eyes and exists in a universe filled to its limit by just them two. Through a tangle of sheets, Johnny feels a body beneath her that curves and has bones placed in ways familiar. A body that clenches and shudders following movements Johnny’s practiced. I could do this forever , she thinks, as Alice writhes to a climax. I want nothing else but this. Her lover cries out: ragged gasps and pleas to God and Johnny’s name on her lips. God may love you , Johnny is tempted to say, but not better than me .

They lie together, facing popcorn ceiling, Johnny studying the pattern of water stains. There is no rat-a-tat-tat of blossoming emotional fireworks, just artificial, orange street light battering its way through the curtain from the city outside.

“That was amazing,” Alice says, voice husky with shallow breath. “You were amazing.”

Johnny laces an arm over Alice’s waist and pulls her in close. Their bodies fit together, barely a seam between them. “I missed you,” Johnny whispers. “I’m sorry if I scared you away.”

Alice wraps her arms around Johnny’s arms wrapped around her. Moments of silence pass, swollen with anxiety about what might have been, anticipation of what might still be. “Let’s try again,” Alice says. “We can be better this time. Change where we need to. For each other.”

This was all she wanted, all those lonely nights. Nearly driven mad by the simple denial of having Alice nestled in her arms. “I can change,” Johnny mumbles into the space behind Alice’s ear.

“You’ve always been so special,” Alice says, then extricates herself from Johnny’s winding limbs and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

For a moment, Johnny is nearly happy. She can change. She knows she can. She would do anything for Alice, change anything, and the worst parts of her recede when her lover is near. But across a mountain range of pillows, Alice’s phone glows on the nightstand. Face down, its blue light reaches between the screen and the faux wood of the nightstand’s top. Light that signals information. A message catapulted through space, intended for Alice and Alice only. And yet, it’s just there. Words beaming into molded plastic, wasted on carved grain and imitated swirls that can’t appreciate them.

Johnny considers reaching for it, stealing those words for herself, discovering whether Alice has ensnared that woman from the Speakeasy Café; but Alice is already spitting, palming water and rinsing. So, Johnny doesn’t check the phone. She crosses the room and extends her hand, and Alice places the still-warm toothbrush in her palm, smiling. Johnny tops the bristles with wintergreen toothpaste, pretending not to notice the buzz of Alice's phone behind her.

In the mirror’s reflection, Alice’s eyes dart to the sound, then dart back. She says, “You are so, so special to me.

”

And Johnny believes she can change herself, but more importantly, change Alice.

It doesn’t matter whether that curly-haired woman is sending texts.

Johnny is the one here with Alice.

Johnny is the one sharing her toothbrush, her bed.

The only one who can fix her.