Dawn is just starting to seep into the sky as Kelly wearily turns the key into her door. The hallway smells like laundry. She goes off to wash the fluid of strangers from her body while I change out of my work clothes and pet her attention starved cat. I imagine it must be a bit of a sacred ritual, the cleansing. There are no photos of her family in her apartment. There are many black and white photos with matching frames that express trend rather than vision. It almost seems like a designed set. She has a copy of Mystic Pizza on DVD. Nonetheless, it is the apartment of an adult.

Free from the suffocating leather dress, her hair still stringy and wet, coltish legs now sheathed in denim, we drive to the third shift bar, basking in the dead lights of the buzzing but dormant commercial district, where we join an odd gathering of cops, working girls, factory workers, war veterans and insomniacs. We sit in the corner and our ice sloshes around the rocks glasses like barely perceptible piano tinkling.

“I always wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo,” she says, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.

“Why’s that?”

“Sounds like a nice place…when I was younger my class went to the Cleveland Zoo, and when I asked the teacher what the best zoo was, he said San Diego.”

“Ever been to California?”

“No. Vegas once,” she says biting her pinkie nail in contemplation. “But we all need that place…we’ve never been but know we want to be there.”

“Only place I want to be is places I’ve already been…places I can no longer be.”

We finish our drinks far too fast. The ice has barely melted. I rise to get another round but she grabs my wrist. Fleetwood Mac plays on the jukebox.

“I’ve got it…I had a good night.” She says it without bravado, or shame or monotony. It just hangs in the air. It’s accepted.

I know she had a good night, because I was there. Or near there. Sitting in the hotel bar, or listening to the classic rock station in the car, while she had her good night.

Her hair has started to dry, flourishing into a marble-like swirl of its two-tones. She could pass for twenty-five, claims she is twenty-nine, and is probably thirty or thirty-one. Here at the bar her make-up is subtle. At work, it’s rather garish, not exactly tacky, but a mask of sorts. As she slides into the booth, she squeezes the lime into my drink and drops the remnants of the rind into the glass. I note that the bartender and two others are looking at me.

The color has washed from the film of my life. It’s an indie film, a rerun from the 70s’, anything but real.

“What do you think of Fleetwood Mac?” I ask, as if I expect to learn something important from the answer. Call it a stereotype or just a personal generalization, but I find that if a woman has some deep admiration for Stevie Nicks, they are more likely than not batshit crazy.

“I adore Stevie Nicks,” she says, sipping from her glass. I like batshit crazy. “You?”

“I dig ‘em.”

“Yeah, they’re good,” she says for no reason whatsoever, and we fall into a brief silence where we stare at each other, not dotingly or longingly or nervously. We just stare. It’s accepted.

It’s light out when Kelly wearily turns her key into the door once again. We each have a Bartles & Jaymes Pina Colada from the fridge and play with the cat for a minute before we sulk off to the bedroom, where we whisper languidly and fall asleep.