She lived in an apartment that had been converted from an old store front. Next door, a martial arts studio stayed open for business, but she put blinds in the bay windows that bowed out to the sidewalk so there’d be no confusion: Nothing to buy here. Nothing to look at. Nothing to stop for.

The front room stretched forever from the door with nothing in it but a secretary’s desk and an oriental rug her father had given her. We slept together in a room further back — what would have been the office. It was empty except for the bed that she’d pushed to the wall. In the mornings I’d wake up feeling smothered and suffocated by closeness to that wall, groggy with a hang-over and listening to the boy’s Karate class being held on the other side.

HiYA!

HiYA!

HiYA!

All morning long the sound of them bled through the wood and paint into my attempts to sleep just a little more. She was rarely there in the bed when I woke. It grew to feel like I was living in an abandoned dream.