Bed and Breakfast

He sits alone in his room at a B&B, one of those restored Victorian homes in a rundown Milwaukee neighborhood, wondering what she’s going to be like. He’d read her blog for months, seen dozens of pictures her, her daughter, her friends. But what’s it really going to be like to see her for the first time the next morning, hug her like seeing an old friend he’d never met.

Outside the window, the base beat of music plays from the rundown apartment across the driveway. He turns up the air conditioner so the drone will drown out the noises from outside. Her turns up the Spanish music playing on the clock radio, a very small sound from across the room. He types in her web address, opens her blog, reads over all of her old entries like tracing the different patterns of moles across her body or the lines of her palm, trying to memorize her.

And what has happened to his Pharmacist? Their relationship had been downgraded to “friends”, and he wondered if you can really be friends after having dated, even if it worked out for Seinfeld and Elaine. He wondered if friends can still make out from time to time. He wondered if she was reading his thoughts across a computer screen in another city three hundred miles away, and if she was hurt knowing with what anticipation he waited for morning.