Rex Collier ambled through the drunken crowd and honking horns outskirts of Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill as the Tar Heels beat the Demon Deacons 34-31 in a dramatic last-second field goal. The fifty-four degrees crisped through the cool October air.

The football game wasn’t on his mind, though. A postgame party threw down on 322 McCauley Street where a one-bedroom yellow cottage stood with a covered porch built sometime in the 1930’s.

He treaded on a gravel drive and passed a bohemian couple making out in the darkness, while Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” blasted from the backyard. It was his favorite band on the faded T-shirt he attired.

After a jock ran past him to barf, there was Francine Louis.

He stopped to behold her beauty. That dark espresso hair flapped in the wind. Her raucous laughing blended with various jokes. A longneck Bud Light bottle cradled in her hand. Even her brown eyes reflected in the bonfire where some people threw bean bags towards a cornhole.

Three short breaths, he took, before walking towards her.

“Hi, Francine,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“Sure, what?”

He pulled her alongside a decayed shed, located next to someone’s truck.

“There’s something I need to get off my chest. I know we have been friends the last two years, but my heart can’t let go of what I feel about you,” he rambled.

“What are you talking about?”

“I am falling for you Francine!”

He watched her take a sip. Then he heard her giggle.

“What’s so funny?” He asked.

“I’m sorry for finding this hilarious, but I only think of you like a little brother I never had. Let’s not complicate the way things are and keep it you know…platonic?”

“It’s not that complicated being more than friends.”

An overall-wearing redneck man named Bo Crawford turned around and blabbed, “Maybe she’s just not into you!” Rex tilted his head backwards and wrinkled his nose.

“Uh, buddy I don’t know you from Adam, but this is an ‘a’ and ‘b’ situation, so ‘c’ your way out of it,” Rex expressed.

“Grunge punks like you don’t go out with a sweet petite thing like her.”

“I didn’t know I was taking love advice from a hillbilly cupid!”

“Oh, you’re giving me a wisecrack. I’ll show you!”

Rex put up his fists to protect his face but received Bo’s punch in the gut. He bent over and coughed. It took so much of his breath away, he had to kneel.

“You don’t get it do you?” Bo asked. “You best be gone or you’re gonna get hurt twice as worse!

Rex tried to get up, but almost tripped on a bottle.

Bo shouted, “I won’t tell you again! Get the hell—”

All of a sudden, he picked it up and whacked it over Bo’s head!

He saw Bo reeled backwards and knocked over someone holding a bourbon flask and the liquid spewed into the fire. It whooshed everywhere! Everybody ran for their lives!

Finally, Rex got up and merged with the rushing crowd, he turned back to see Francine. She was nowhere in sight. Then he ran off as sirens bellowed into the night.

Louisa Smith’s head hung low after passing by a couple locked in hands on the shores of downtown Savannah, GA. The feelings of loving someone again held captive in fear after her third marriage dissolved.

In her first marriage, her husband killed in a car wreck by a 21-year-old woman who drove and texted at the same time somewhere on Highway 17. The second one was more dismal. He was shot and killed in his office on a Friday. Louisa traveled to a Mary Kay cosmetic convention in Valdosta, just three hours away.

Other peers threw accusations of murder for hire at her because he was an orthodontist, a high paying job, but she was vindicated.

Her last husband? No death surfaced this time, but he fell out of love for her. Ricardo was his name. A naïve 27-year-old man from Mexico who had nothing when he came to this country. She was 39.

One night, she attempted to close her tab at the bar in Red Lobster when she dropped the pen to sign her receipt. He picked it up and smiled. Love blossomed. They got married. She thought it was eternal bliss, but three months into the marriage, she noticed he was cold, distant even.

She tried calling him, went straight to voicemail. He went missing for weeks. A knock on her door came suddenly. On the other side was a pudgy man attired in an orange Hawaiian Polo shirt and blue jeans.

“You’ve been served,” he announced. Then he walked away.

In bold letters. Divorce. From that moment on, it dawned on her that she was a pawn for Ricardo to get a green card.

Almost 20 miles from Savannah stood Tybee Island where I was walking underneath a peach twilight. An attractive woman adorned with a tied midriff shirt and frayed denim low shorts strolled across the sand.

“Hi,” I said.

She ignored me.

My head hung low.

It felt like a little needle puncturing me inside because it riled up all the illusions of love I still own in my forties. Waves of water crashed into my ankles for a remedy.

And there was another woman.

“I don’t know who you are, but I know that look,” Louisa said.