The phone rings, and you avoid answering it. It’s late. 10PM is late for you. You’re already been in bed, in your pajama bottoms. By the sixth ring, the caller gives up. It’s over, so you think, but within seconds it rings again. You opt to pick it up this time. 

This better be good.

“Hello, Kris?”

You smile. You know the voice. An image swirls through your mind as you listen to Ann’s voice. Telling you she’s just blowing back into town after a long interstate drive. Saying she just took a trip down South. Claiming she wanted to be back where it was warm– back where a girl could get her accent back. The rednecks didn’t matter, she just wanted to be home for a while.

“Sorry I woke you, but I never tossed your number. I’m dying to see you.”

“Where are you?” 

“At a diner.” 

As her fetching sort of magnolia drawl registers, you get a familiar sinking feeling.

“Why don’t you come here?” you venture, knowing beforehand that this was a nonstarter  –  your relationship, if there’s ever such an entity, always has to be on her turf. “…It’s better you come here. I mean I want to talk. I don’t want to start anything, right away. I just want to see you.”

“I’m at the Flameburger. I won’t keep you up late.”

You frown and whine, “You know me. I already think it’s late.” 

“Well, then I won’t keep you up much later then.” You promise you will be there in fifteen minutes; it’s ten minutes away.

You throw on a T-shirt and some clunky shoes, and you wrap yourself up in a bulky black overcoat. Outside, the icy wind whips back your hair around so angrily as you make your way down the road but all of a sudden, you stop. You stand still.

You can’t do it.

You can’t make yourself go there and say, “Really, really…” and you smile as she lifts the coffee cup to your lips and she talks about the sweetness of Raleigh. You can’t smile and you can’t order a hamburger and laugh and pick up the check because she says, “No, no, I’ll cover it” and you say, “Well, okay,” smiling and springing for the tip.

You remember the last time you saw her she was with another girl buying cards at the only openly gay women’s bookstore in town. When you saw her with the girl, your smile went away, emptiness filled you. 

It’s only a matter of time. The lesbian population in Madison is so incestuous, relationships and marriage and contort. You’d see the two over and over again, not only at your bookstore but at your dance club and your part of the park. No one belongs to anyone, and now she wants to talk and have coffee at the Flameburger.

You can’t do it. Not again.

You walk back to your apartment. Because you are now against it. The wind is kind. You wonder if Eliana would have employed the old standbys: … I knew it wouldn’t last between her and me… I didn’t love her … I only love… That would be nice to hear in a born-again Southern accent, even nicer to believe as you re-enter your apartment, alone.