I turn around, wearing this worry on my face.

“Strike,” Ian says.

He doesn’t appear fazed by the aggression of my bowl. Both the teenager behind the front desk and the bartender are gawping from afar, so it was definitely not the average strike.

On my next go, I practice restraint.

“If I didn’t know you better, I would think you started to hold back on me,” Ian says, eyeing me suspiciously as I wait for the machine to regurgitate my ball.

“No,” I say. “This is me trying my hardest.”

Trying my hardest not to reveal that I now have legit supernatural strength.

I become so focused on not putting a hole through the back of the alley, the conversation withers, and by the end of the game we’re barely talking, just taking turns bowling.

I pour myself more beer and realize I’ve finished most of this pitcher myself.

It’s not going well.

When the game is over, Ian stares at the screen and says, “Do you want to go to my place?”

He’s barely finished the sentence before I say, “Yes.”

—

Ian lives in a two-story brick building on a busy stretch of East Avenue, with restaurants and coffee shops and stores that sell shit like knit hats and greeting cards and ornaments. He pulls down a secluded driveway and parks on a patch of gravel behind the building. He opens the car door for me, which is helpful, because my hands are busy catching all this bountiful nervous sweat my body has apparently been stockpiling for the last twenty-seven years.

“This used to be a bank,” he says, letting us in through the back door.

He flips on the lights.

There’s a kitchen to the left, with stainless steel cabinets and appliances. There’s a long, counter-height wooden dining table with pipes for legs and stools underneath.

Beyond the kitchen is a living space with vaulted ceilings, wooden beams, exposed brick. Hanging Edison bulbs light the room. There are an enormous couch and a few worn leather armchairs. Many, many bookshelves, the same wood-and-pipe style as the dining table, jammed with books. There are framed pictures of album covers and concert venues. In the corner of the room is a collection of instruments, mostly guitars, a drum set, a keyboard, a bass. There’s a record player sitting beside crates and crates of records.

A flight of stairs leads up to a loft space.

I spin around to give the place another look-over. He’s got plants. They’re alive. Thriving, even.

It’s nice. Too nice.

I wasn’t expecting it to be this nice.

I don’t know what I was expecting.

He’s not concerned with me and what I’m doing. He’s cooking something. He’s got a pot of water on the stove. I come over and sit at the kitchen table. He takes out a glass, fills it with ice, then sets it down in front of me, along with a can of root beer. We both love root beer. It’s our soda of choice.