We went to dinner on a Friday.

It was the first time she'd asked to go somewhere. Usually I suggested, or she appeared. Friday dinner was her idea.

She was in human form. Amber. Platinum hair, blue eyes, and that way of moving through a room I'd known since the first PT session and was reading differently tonight.

---

The restaurant was on 6th, Korean BBQ, a place I went every two or three weeks. Mia had my regular order memorized and had it started before I'd finished crossing the room.

Then she looked up and saw who I was with.

The order stopped mid-pen. Mia finished the first line and did not write the second. She looked at Amber, then at me, then at her notepad, and asked if we needed a minute.

We didn't need a minute.

I ordered for both of us. Mia stayed at the table a few seconds longer than the order required.

Two men at the table to our left lost the thread of their conversation. The one facing us drifted off mid-sentence and didn't notice he'd stopped. By the time the food came they'd picked it back up.

Amber was reading the menu. Nine hundred years of rooms. This was weather.

---

She was wearing a dark green top and jeans. Her tits filled the top in a way I'd been not-thinking-about since she came out of the bathroom.

She looked up and caught me.

"What," she said.

"Nothing."

She held my eyes for a beat. She knew the answer. Then she went back to the menu.

---

We ate. The marinade wasn't up to her standards. I'd been eating there nine months and had never thought about it.

"It's a standard galbi marinade," I said.

"The soy-to-sesame ratio's off."

"It's always been like this."

"That's not a defense of the ratio."

She was right about the ratio. Forty minutes in the place and she'd called it.

"Is this how it goes everywhere," I said. "You walk in and the ratios just show up."

"Not always. This one's loud about it."

"Wrong ratio."

"Missing something, more than wrong." She ate. "It's still good. The components are right. It needs more time."

Nine hundred years of eating in human spaces and an opinion on every ratio.

---

After, we walked.

Koreatown on a Friday evening. BBQ smell layered over everything, restaurant fronts lit amber, karaoke places on Vermont already going. She walked beside me without asking where we were going. Following my lead. She had opinions about every block and didn't direct.

I turned us north toward Olympic, then east.

We passed the building on Irolo with the red sign. She pulled me into the doorway. Dark alcove, set back from the sidewalk, red neon warming everything. She had my belt undone and her hand around my cock before I'd finished checking the sidewalk. She dropped to her knees and took me in her mouth — fast, wet, her throat working, her hand gripping my thigh. Thirty seconds of her mouth on my cock in a doorway on Irolo while Friday-evening traffic moved twenty feet away. She sucked me until I came in her throat, swallowed, stood up, fixed her hair.

"Better," she said.

"Good."

We kept walking.

---

She stopped at the corner of Vermont and 5th.

Four blocks from my building. You could see down Vermont toward Olympic one way and the parking structure on 4th the other. My neighborhood.

"This is your neighborhood," she said.

"Yes."

She was looking at the street the way you'd fill in a sketch. Head tilted. Friday-evening light on the platinum hair.

"You walk here."

"When I'm not on the Metro."

"In the evening."

"Sometimes." I looked at the street. "The BBQ places stay open late. There's usually enough traffic that it doesn't —" I stopped, because I'd been about to say *feel like walking alone*, which was more than I'd meant to put down.

She looked at me.

"I live alone," I said. "You get used to a neighborhood when you're in it alone. This one's fine."

She didn't say anything for a second. Then she looked back at the street with something softer than her usual register.

"It's different now," she said.

It was.

---

We went back. The lock took two tries.

She sat down on the couch and pulled me toward her and put my hand between her legs. Wet and warm. The walk had been working on her too. I got her jeans down and my mouth on her pussy and she gripped my hair and came with her thighs around my head and Koreatown Friday night outside the window.