When my friend Steph calls me after my shift on Thursday and asks if I want to go to Jay’s Bar in Long Beach, I say yes right away. Steph is my only lesbian friend, and I like her because she is pretty and has slept with a lot of men, like me. Luckily, we aren’t each other’s types at all. We kind of look alike—blond hair, blue eyes, nice rack—and we both tend to go for brunettes. I haven’t seen her in a while because she has a serious girlfriend who isn’t exactly a fan of mine, but on the phone Steph says she’s dying for a night out.

“Beth is okay with it?” I ask.

“I didn’t tell her I’m going with you,” she says, then cackles. “I’m getting dinner with my cousin in Huntington Beach.” She winks.

“You’re bad!” I say, and I feel delighted, like a teen again, sneaking out to get drunk off Purple Passions in someone’s basement.

“I know,” she says.

Steph picks me up fifteen minutes later in her white pickup truck. She’s blasting Journey out the window, and I feel like it is summer and we are going to a party in a backyard with a pool.

“Hi, doll,” I say. She wraps me in a big hug that feels more familial than anything I’ve experienced in a while. I’ve known Steph since we were in high school, when we were both cheerleaders, the two most popular girls in the school. We would steal her dad’s Chevy and drive to the beach with water bottles filled with cheap vodka. Boys adored us, and we could get them to do whatever we wanted.

We started dating women at around the same time too, in our mid-twenties. I met my first girlfriend, Jen, because she worked at my kid’s school. Soon after Jen and I hooked up, Steph confessed to me that she’d “experimented” a few times. And once she saw how in love Jen and I were—and in the beginning, we were disgustingly in love—she said she wanted to try more than experimenting. Jen had this whole crew of lesbian friends who partied hard, and Steph and I fit right in. Steph was dating one of Jen’s friends before long. Things got complicated when Jen and I fell out, but that was a long time ago.

“You look thin,” Steph tells me inside her truck. She always says this, mostly because she knows it’s what I want to hear. But it is also possible that I have lost some weight. I haven’t had much of an appetite since Tara broke up with me. Mostly I’ve been drinking and smoking and working. “Numbing out,” as my son says.