The silence was starting to get uncomfortable. She turned onto a little side street and I followed her.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” she said when we were halfway down the block.

“I wanted to say — ” I started, then trailed off again.

I looked at her desperately for some sign. There was that same tentative expression, but now it was like a blank wall. She avoided eye contact.

The silence stretched out. We both kept walking.

“I just wanted to see you again,” I said.

“For sure,” Violet said.

After another long pause, Violet said: “Okay, I’ll say this. When you said you wanted to talk I sort of assumed the worst, you know?”

“What?”

“You know,” she said uneasily. “We were both pretty fucked up that night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No, it’s not that.”

“I was worried I had hurt you,” Violet said. “I felt weird about it.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” I said.

“Okay,” Violet said. “Good.”

We were standing in front of the bar again, after barely fifteen minutes. A few small groups of people were sitting on the benches the bar had installed on the sidewalk, smoking and drinking and talking. She stopped walking.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not sure what it is you want from me.”

“That was the first time I’d had sex with anyone since transitioning,” I blurted out.

“That’s intense,” she said.

I was staring desperately at her face for some sign of what to do next. She was looking at me with an expression of pity, but when she spoke her voice was like iron.

“Okay. Hmm. Where I’m at on this is, if that’s what you wanted to talk about, I feel sort of disrespected by the way you’ve approached me with this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I get it, I represent something to you. But I wasn’t doing you a favor.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“That makes me feel kind of bad. Like, I’m not a real person to you, I’m an experience. I’m a means to an end.” She said all of this like she was already tired of saying it.

“No, it’s not like that,” I said.

She sighed. “What’s it like, then? What do you think I can do for you? Can you please just say one definitive thing?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she said.

“I just wanted to see you again,” I said. “I hoped we could date, or something.”

“Okay,” she said. “I mean, look. I’m not upset with you, I’m just — if it’s gonna be like this, I can’t.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“We’ll see each other again. Just — it can’t be like this.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’ll see you around, Leo.”

“See you.”

♒

I barely remember getting home after that.