I smiled so hard it hurt my face. I sang so loud. Felt like dancing in the thunderstorm.

When I entered my subdivision and turned on Oakwood Trace, my smile vanished, all hints of ecstasy were replaced by fear and disbelief. It was near the hour of sunrise and Logan was waiting for me to come home. He had found out where I lived. His Range Rover was parked in the middle of the slender cul-de-sac that led to my townhome. My weary eyes went to my mangled dress, a dress that was dripping wet, draining over my leather seats, creating a puddle between my legs, cool water keeping my yoni calm.

I sped by his Range Rover, hoped he didn't see me, hoped he had fallen asleep waiting for me, tried to speed away, then his headlights came on. His engine started. He was awake. I wanted to turn around and leave my complex, figure out what to do, but he'd seen me before I could escape him.

I hit the button on my car's built-in garage remote, made the garage door go up.

The rain was coming down hard, water dripping from my hair, across my face, down over my wet dress. Logan trailed me down into the cul-de-sac and parked outside my garage, his radio up loud, the type of thing that was embarrassing in a white middle-class neighborhood-unless somebody white and middle-class was making the noise. It was the blues. Slow and sexy, Bobby Blue Bland sang a woeful song, "Memphis Monday Morning," talking about the summer rain coming down, he keeps reaching for his baby, but his baby's no longer around, left him without giving a warning, and now he was going crazy because his baby was nowhere to be found. The engine and the music died. Logan got out of his Range Rover and walked toward me, his face down low and umbrella up high.

Love was mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder romanticized.

He said, "Somebody has had a long night."

"How do you know where I live?"

"Internet. Pulled up info on your property."

I wanted to scream, wanted to release vulgarities, but I looked at the townhomes inside this peaceful community, my neighbors' units only feet away. I refused to become that kind of neighbor. What the fuck are you doing at my home? came out as a frustrated "Thought you went back to Memphis."

"What happened to your dress?" His eyes were all over me, inspecting me, the look of a man who wanted to sniff a woman's pan ties to confirm his insecurities. "It's torn. Your knee is bleeding. Your makeup...it's messed up. What the hell happened? Why are you wet from head to toe? Your shoes are wet and scratched up. Where are you coming from at the crack of dawn looking beat-up like that?"

He looked at me as if he knew, as if he had seen what had happened to my dress.

I snapped, "How did...how did you get my information from the Internet?"

A half smile and an I'm-smarter-than-you-think wink was his answer. It didn't matter. It didn't fucking matter.

I pulled my damp hair away from my face, a face that had to look like I had been through both heaven and hell, and evaluated my dress. My dress now nothing more than rags, unfit for the homeless to wear.

My flesh smelled like two men, two lovers. Tongue prints and fingerprints were all over my skin.

"Logan, this is not appropriate."

"You're soaking wet. Your dress...what happened?"

"Getting my information...showing up like this..."

"What happened to your knee?"

Logan's reaction to what he saw was extreme, as if he thought I had been in a car accident, or mugged. He was rushing toward me but I put both hands up, palms out, telling him to keep away.

"Don't worry about my knee."

"Something bad happen? Somebody do something to you?"

My irritation intensified. "Why are you here? Why?"

"I want it to go back to being the way it was before."

"It won't go back, Logan." I pulled at my hair. "You can't put toothpaste back inside the tube."

He frowned. "Then I guess I have to do this."

Logan scowled and reached inside his pocket. He was about to take something out.

A gun. A knife. I didn't know what he had hidden.

My insides jumped. Fear assaulted me.

Logan was about to kill me in my driveway.

But when he reached inside his pocket he took out a small, velvet box.

I asked, "What is that?"

He opened the box and as the skies rumbled and rain fell, my eyes witnessed the most beautiful engagement ring I had ever seen, the kind that would normally make a woman shiver with delight.

He said, "Diamond and sapphire."

"Where did that come from?"

"I brought it with me. I didn't...things didn't go so well between us at Wal-Mart. I prayed. Asked God what to do about this thing I have for you. It's heavy on my heart. I've been downhearted ever since you left. Had to come back. I couldn't go back with this in my pocket. I couldn't go back without knowing I had made things right between us. Nia, I came down here in the rain to ask you to be my wife."

The skies flashed and roared as I stared at the stunning ring. Platinum. Art deco. At least two carats. The type of ring that would capture a jewelry whore. I looked at it without touching, afraid that touching it would imply commitment. This was painful. I wanted to lie to him, wanted to save his feelings, wanted to do what needed to be done to keep this volatile situation stable. But I couldn't lie.

He said, "It cost twenty grand."

I shook my head. "I can't accept that."

"Did you hear me? This is a twenty-thousand-dollar ring."

"I can't accept that."

"The rest of my family will be in Memphis next weekend. I've told them all about you."

"I can't accept that."

"My great-grandmother will be there. She's about to turn ninety. She's old and sick. This reunion is for her. Her way of saying good-bye to everybody. Wear the ring. We can make the announcement if you want to. Come up. It would be important to me. If you'd think about it."

"No. I'm telling you no. Don't you hear what I'm saying?"

"Why not?"

He wanted justification, my rejection requiring explanation. But there were no words to make him understand what he refused to understand, not when all that mattered was him getting his way.

I said, "Didn't you hear what I told you before?"

Rain fell between us.

He repeated, "What do you need? What can I do to make this work between us?"

"Logan...if you're not happy before you get married, getting married will not make you happy. I'm talking two-people happiness. Both parties have to be happy. If one is unhappy, then the marriage is unwell. Unhappiness infects, spreads, and kills. We are so not on the same page. And you know that."

Thunder boomed. Rain came down so hard it was impossible to see more than a few feet beyond my townhome. We were incarcerated by precipitation. I felt like a prisoner.

We had two distinct views of what we were doing. For me, knowing him had been a brief part of a long journey, this part of my journey now over. To him this journey between us was only beginning, and from the look in his eyes, based on his determination to win me over, I was his final destination. In my world he had been but a brief layover.

He asked, "How did you get soaking wet?"

"Wait here."

My heels clicked over concrete as I hurried to the back of my garage, went near the water heater. I picked up the cardboard box that had LOGAN written across the top. I carried that cheap box to him.

I put the box down between us. My eyes went to him.

I said, "Good-bye."

He shook his head. "No."

"Please...just say good-bye and-"

He pulled me to him, forced his tongue inside my mouth. He held me with passion, his tongue tasting like cinnamon gum. He breathed heavily, savored me. I didn't stop him from kissing me. I let him taste me, my tongue not helping, but not hindering. His dick was getting hard. My body was rejecting him and his penis was becoming engorged with desire. He groaned like his erection was so hard it hurt. My tongue had given him priapism while his kiss diminished my urges to ever have sex again. When he was done, he let me go. He smiled as if that kiss should have modified my religion. Like he had seen one Cary Grant movie too many. When the kiss was over, Logan smiled and extended the ring again.

In his eyes I was a woman. And to a man, a woman must have a man, or she's not fully a woman, she has no value on her own, only has value when she is with someone designed to lead her. And in his mind, because he is financially capable and popular in the 901 area code, he was the ultimate man.

This was very sad.

He wanted love. I wanted fun. He had fallen. I had walked away.

I had desired what he couldn't give me.

Too bad people didn't fall in love at the same pace, at the same time, for the same reasons, and too bad those emotions didn't move simultaneously. But each act of madness moved at its own pace, one not dependent on the pace of anyone else. It wasn't like tandem skydiving, where you were connected as you fell, where you were forced to fall at the same rate and use the same parachute. Falling in love was a solo act. I knew that, had learned that the hard way. You just jumped and hoped your parachute opened. Sometimes you looked up and saw you were falling by yourself, the object of your desire still on the plane, not interested in jumping, watching you descend into that scary place alone.

I had done that years ago, jumped and found myself falling, the man I loved still on that plane.

In this case Logan had looked down and seen I had never left the ground. Logan had fallen from the ionosphere while I hadn't considered leaving the ground, jumping the last thing on my mind.

He wanted more than I was willing to give.

I stared at the ring Logan had offered. I saw it for what it really was, saw its truth.

That ring he had wasn't a ring; it was handcuffs for a criminal.

He wanted to tame me, tame my desires, visions of a barefoot and pregnant wife dancing in his head. That would never happen. He wanted me forever when I'd only been willing to give myself to him when my needs had become unbearable. Even when we were together he never possessed me more than a few hours at a time, never twenty-four-seven. He didn't want more than I was capable of giving, just more than I was capable of giving him. I felt like a man, my energy so masculine, so curt and cold at this moment.

He said, "I love you."

"You hear me?" My tone remained rational. "I don't feel that way. I'm not emotionally receptive to you. You don't turn me on. And the longer we have this conversation, the more you turn me off."

"But can you love me? Eventually? Can you?"

I shook my head, rubbed my temples. Frustration rose, strangled sanity and logic.

I wished he hadn't come to Atlanta. I wished he would stop watering dead flowers.

Being nice wasn't working. I had to be brutal. I had to become a mean bitch and be honest.

I said, "I just had sex with someone."

"I knew it." His tone blackened. "One of the guys you were with in Memphis lives here, right?"

"Someone I met today."

"You're lying. Please tell me you're lying."

"I'm serious. I was out running, met these brothers. We hooked up to night."

"Why?"

"Don't ask me that."

He snapped, "Why?"

"Because I wanted to."

Truth flowed from me like I had autism, incapable of lying.

Then I was afraid. But I told myself I could be strong and do this.

I could be honest. I wasn't being brutal. Only being honest. Had to be honest. Because for some people the soft breakup didn't work. Some people only understood the hard breakup. Logan was six-four. Played football at U of M during his college days. I didn't want to provoke a man his size, didn't want to insult his brain and irritate his brawn, because at moments like this a woman realized how much bigger a man was than she was, how much stronger the masculine creatures had been built, developed fear because those muscles that used to protect her could now become weapons of instant destruction.

But I needed this over. I wanted to get away from this pain.

Thunder. Lightning. Rain.

All of it seemed so different when I was at the W. At the W it was stimulating.

Now it all seemed unfriendly, so deadly. This was horrifying.

He asked, "Why, Nia? Why would you go to somebody else?"

"This isn't about you. I sought plea sure. None of that had anything to do with you. This is who I am right now. This is who I am. Let me be me."

He put the ring back in his pocket. "I'll give you some time."

"I'm not asking you for time. This shit is over. I'm demanding my freedom."

He leaned against his damp SUV, his umbrella over his head, his box at his feet, that box getting soaked. He looked like he had been punched in the throat. His face, he looked nauseated. He looked like he wanted me to come put my arms around him. He looked like he wanted to strangle me.