I was with a Chinese girl I really wanted to sleep with. I'd met her at a club. We'd gone on some KTV dates, we walked the streets of Beijing and even had dinner together a few times. One night we were out shopping at a mall for a bit then afterwards I asked her if she liked playing pool. She did. We found a place near my apartment. It had the Chinese characters for "Pool" lit up in bright red above the main entrance. I left my bike outside and we walked in.

The space inside was absolutley gigantic. Pretty dim lit. But no pool tables. Just endless rows of computers. Must have been a over a thousand desktops. And almost all of them were being used. Many people were sleeping on office chairs. Something that had been planned for because they were wrapped in warm blankets. I stared at everything. "It's like this every day," she told me.

She grabbed my hand and walked me across the hall. She brought me into the room with the pool tables. A much smaller space. We waited at the counter for someone to come help us. We played pool for about an hour. We both didn't play very well. Even though I had no idea how, I kept trying to show her how to hold a cue stick properly the whole time. Other people there would stare at us from time to time. It's not often they get to see a Westerner.

It was about ten o'clock at night on a Monday. She had work the next day so we decided to leave. We passed the mammoth hall of gamers again and went back outside. After that night we kept seeing each other, and eventually we slept together. She started to cook dinner at my place. She called me when I was at work. She told me she loved me.

One night she took me on the back of her electric bike. I put my hands around her waist, and we scooted through some busy Chinese streets. I don't remember us every coming home that night. It was the last night I saw her.