Fullepub 
Chapter 9
9
August writes and Jane talks and—wedged between half-asleep rastas and mothers of three—they rebuild a whole life from the beginning. And more than ever, more than when she asked Jane out, more than the first time they kissed, August wishes Jane could leave the goddamn subway.
“Barbara,” Jane says. “I was two when my sister Barbara was born. Betty came the next year. My parents gave me the only Chinese name because I was the oldest, but they didn’t want any trouble for my sisters. They always told me, ‘Biyu, look after the girls.’ And I left them. That’s … fuck. I forgot how that felt. I left them.”
She swallows, and they both wait for her voice to even out before she explains that she left when she was eighteen.
“My—my parents—they wanted me to take over the restaurant. My dad taught me to cook, and I loved it, but I didn’t want to be tied down. I mean, I was sneaking out at night to see girls, and my parents wanted me to care about balancing the books. I—I don’t even think I fully knew I was gay yet? I was just different, and my dad and I would fight, and my mom would cry, and I felt like shit all the time. I couldn’t make them happy. I thought running away would be better than letting them down.”
Leaving, she says, was the hardest thing she ever did. Her family had been in San Francisco for generations. It never felt like the right choice. But it felt like the only choice.
“Summer ’71, I was eighteen, and this band—some no-name band, total proto-punk trash playing the absolute worst shit—asked my dad if they could play at the restaurant. And he let them. And I fell in love—with the music, the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves. I went upstairs, cut off all my hair, and packed my backpack.”
In the van, they asked her name, and she said, “Biyu.”
“It was LA first,” she goes on. “Three months working for a fishmonger because my uncle back home owned a fish market—that’s this tattoo, right here.” She points to the anchor. Her first one. “I had a friend who’d moved there, so he put me up, then he took a job in Pittsburgh and I left. That was when I started hitching rides wherever people were going and seeing how I liked it. I did Cleveland for a couple of weeks, that was a nightmare. Des Moines, Philly, Houston. And in ’72, I ended up in New Orleans.”
She remembers stray details about every city she passed through. An apartment with bars on the windows. Reciting her parents’ phone number to the rafters of an attic in the Houston Heights, wondering if she should call. Almost breaking her arm at a Vietnam protest in Philadelphia.
New Orleans is blurry, but August thinks that’s because it meant more. For Jane, the most important memories are either razor-sharp Technicolor or pixelated and muted, like they’re too much to hold in her head. She remembers two years, an apartment with a sweet-faced roommate whose name still won’t come, a basket of clothes in the kitchen between their rooms that they’d both pull from.
She remembers meeting other lesbians in grungy bars—she learned to cook burgers and fries in the kitchen of one called Drunk Jane’s. The girls spent her first month watching her across the bar, daring one another to talk to her, until one asked her on a date and confessed they’d been calling her Drunk Jane because no one had the nerve to ask her name. Every lesbian in the neighborhood had a nickname—Birdy, Noochie, T-Bev, Natty Light, a million hilarious names born from a million messy stories. She used to joke they sounded like a band of pirates. She considered herself lucky, really, that the name that stuck on her was Drunk Jane, and that over the months it became one word. Jane.
New Orleans was the first place she felt at home since the Bay, but the specifics are hard, and the reason she left is gone.
Something happened there, something that sent her running again. The first time someone asked her name afterward—a bus driver in Biloxi—she swallowed and gave her nickname, because it was the one thing from that part of her life she chose to keep: Jane. It stuck.
After New Orleans, a year of hitchhiking from city to city on the East Coast, falling halfway in love with a girl in every one and then cutting and running. She says she loved every girl like summer: bright and warm and fleeting, never too deep because she’d be gone soon.
“There were people in the punk scene and the anti-war crowd who hated gays, and people in the lesbian crowd who hated Asians,” Jane explains. “Some of the girls wanted me to wear a dress like it’d make straight people take us seriously. Everywhere I went, someone loved me. But everywhere I went, someone hated me. And then there were other girls who were like me, who … I don’t know, they were stronger than me, or more patient. They’d stay and build bridges. Or at least try. I wasn’t a builder. I wasn’t a leader. I was a fighter. I cooked people dinner. I took them to the hospital. I stitched them up. But I only stayed long enough to take the good, and I always left when the bad got bad.”
(Jane says she’s not a hero. August disagrees, but she doesn’t want to interrupt, so she puts a pin in it for later.)
She read about San Francisco, about the movements happening there, about Asian lesbians riding on the backs of cable cars just to show the city they existed, about leather bars on Fulton Street and basement meetings in Castro, but she couldn’t go back.
She didn’t stop until New York.
Back in New Orleans, her friends would talk about a butch they used to know named Stormé, who’d moved to New York and patrolled outside lesbian bars with a bat, who threw a punch at cops outside the Stonewall Inn and instigated a riot back in ’69. That sounded like the kind of person she wanted to know and the kind of fight she wanted to be in. So she went to New York.
She remembers finding friends in a different Chinatown, in Greenwich Village, in Prospect Heights, in Flatbush. She remembers curling up on twin mattresses with girls who were working nights to save up for the big operation, pushing their curls behind their ears and cooking them congee for breakfast. She remembers fights in the streets, raids on bars, the police dragging her out in cuffs for wearing men’s jeans, spitting blood on the floor of a packed cell. It was early—too early for anyone to have any idea what was happening—but she remembers friends getting sick, taking a guy from the floor above to the hospital in the back of a cab and being told she wasn’t allowed to see him, and later, watching his boyfriend get told the same thing. Sterile whites, skinny ankles, hunched in waiting room chairs with bruises from cops still mottling her skin.
(August goes home and does her own research later: nobody was calling it AIDS until ’81, but it was there, creeping silently through New York.)
But she also remembers bright lights on her face at clubs full of feathers and thrift store evening gowns and glittering turbans perched atop ginger wigs, bare shoulders smudged with lipstick, bottom shelf gin. She lists off the names of guys with heavy eyeliner who threw punches at CBGB and recites the summer ’75 concert calendar, which she’d pinned to her bedroom wall. She remembers getting in a fight with her upstairs neighbor, before he got sick, and settling it over a pack of cigarettes and a game of bridge, laughing until they cried. She remembers steaming dumplings in a kitchen the size of a closet and inviting a small crowd of girls from Chinatown to eat around her coffee table and talk about things they were just beginning to suspect about themselves. She remembers Billy’s, jabbing an elbow into Jerry’s ribs at the grill, hot sauce and syrup dribbling down her wrists as she bit into her sandwich and declared it the best idea she ever had, the exact look on Jerry’s face when he tasted it and agreed.
She remembers the phone, always the phone looking back at her, always the same nine digits repeating in her head. Her parents. She knew she should call. She wanted to. She never did.
August can see it pull at her—around her eyes, her mouth. Sometimes she laughs, remembering making herself sick on too much fried chicken from the shop down the block and her mom mumbling “yeet hay” at her disapprovingly even as she patted her forehead and brought her chrysanthemum tea. Sometimes she stares at the ceiling when she talks about her sisters and the way they used to whisper to one another in their room at night, giggling into the darkness. She’s found and lost everything, all in the span of a few hours.
It all makes sense, though. It fills in most of the gaps in August’s research—the lack of official documents using her name, the confusing timelines, the impossibility of pinning down exactly where Jane was for most of the ’70s. And it makes sense of Jane too. She ran away because she didn’t think she could make her family happy, and she never went back because she thought she did them a favor. She kept running, because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like. That, especially, August can understand.
It’s hard, to picture Jane’s life forty-five years ago and understand how close it feels for her—a matter of months, she said once. It’s always soaked in sepia for August, grainy and worn at the edges. But Jane tells it in full color, and August sees it in her eyes, in the shake of her hands. She wants to go back. To her, it’s only a short summer away.
But how New York ended for Jane is still missing. She took the Q to and from her apartment often, but she can’t remember how she ended up stuck there.
“That’s okay,” August says. She leans her shoulder into Jane’s. Jane leans back, and August pushes away the knowledge that she kissed her a few hours ago, lets it be buried under everything else. Jane watches another station slide away with a soft expression on her face, freedom unreachable on the other side of a sliding door. “That’s what I’m here for.”
When August clocks in at Billy’s on Thursday afternoon, Lucie is on the phone, staring blankly at a Mets clipping on the wall.
“We can only sell three,” she says in a monotone, sounding absolutely bored. “$100 each, $250 for the set. It’s a historic New York landmark. No, not on the registry.” A pause. “I see.” A much longer pause. “Yes, thank you. I invite you to eat a dick. Goodbye.”
She slams down the phone hard enough that the coffee in the pot behind the counter trembles.
“Who was that?” August asks.
“Billy wants to raise money to buy the building by selling things we can spare,” Lucie explains tersely. “Put some of the barstools on Craigslist. People are cheap. And idiots. Cheap idiots.”
She storms off into the kitchen, and August can hear her swearing up a storm in Czech. She thinks of the jar of onion and honey and the way Lucie concealed a smile under the streetlights, and she turns to Winfield, who’s puttering around the counter.
“There’s more to it than she lets on,” August says, “isn’t there?”
Winfield sighs, throwing a towel over his shoulder.
“You know, I’m from Brooklyn,” he says after a pause. “Seems like nobody who lives here is from here, but I am—grew up in East Flatbush, big-ass Jamaican family. But Lucie—she emigrated when she was seventeen, was on her own longer. Came here hungry one night and couldn’t pay the bill, and Billy came out the back and offered her a job instead.”
He hops up onto the bar, narrowly avoiding putting his ass in a pecan pie.
“I’d just started working here the year before. I was only a kid. She was only a kid. She was so skinny, mean as shit, dishwater blond, learning English on the job, and she started telling people what to do, and then one day she showed up with red hair and black nails like she had some kinda Wonder Woman level up. This place made her who she is. It’s the first home she ever had. Shit, I had a home, and even I feel that sometimes.”
“There’s gotta be a way we can save Billy’s,” August says.
Winfield shrugs. “That’s Brooklyn, man. Places get bought up and shut down all the time.”
She glances over her shoulder through the kitchen window, to where Jerry is busy with an omelette. She asked him a week ago if he remembers the person who came up with the Su Special. He doesn’t.
August passes her shift thinking about Jane and ghosts, things that disappear from the city but can’t ever really be erased. That afternoon, August finds her on the Q, sitting cross-legged across three seats.
“Mmm,” Jane hums when August sits down next to her. “You smell good.”
August pulls a face. “I smell like the inside of a deep fryer.”
“Yeah, like I said.” She buries her nose in August’s shoulder, inhaling the greasy ghost of Billy’s. August’s face flashes warm. “You smell good.”
“You’re weird.”
“Maybe,” Jane says, drawing back. “Maybe I just miss Billy’s. It smells exactly the same. It’s nice to know some things’ll never change.”
God, it sucks. Places like Billy’s, they’re never just places. They’re homes, central points of memories, first loves. To Jane, it’s as much of an anchor as the one on her bicep.
“Jane, I, uh,” August starts. “I have to tell you something.”
And she breaks the news.
Jane leans forward, elbows on her knees, tonguing her bottom lip. “God, I—I never imagined it’d ever not be there, not even now.”
“I know.”
“Maybe…” she says, turning to August, “maybe if you get me back to where I’m supposed to be, I could do something. Maybe I could fix this.”
“I mean, maybe. I don’t really know how any of this works. Myla’s pretty sure whatever’s happening now is happening because whatever happened in the past is already done.”
Jane frowns, deflating slightly. “I think I understood some of those words. So, you’re saying … if there’s anything I could do about it, it’d already be done.”
“Maybe,” August says. “But we don’t know.”
There’s long beat of quiet, and Jane says, “Have you … have you ever found anything about me now? Like, if I make it back, and I stay there … there should be another me out there, right? Back on the right track? All old and wise and shit?”
August folds her hands in her lap, looking down at Jane’s red sneakers. She’s been wondering when Jane would ask this; it’s something that’s bugged August since the beginning.
“No,” she admits. “I’m sure she’s out there, but I haven’t found her yet.”
Jane sighs. “Damn.”
“Hey.” She looks up, attempting a small smile. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We don’t know that things can’t change. Maybe they can. Or maybe you’ll change your name again, and that’s why I can’t find you.”
“Yeah,” Jane says, quiet and heavy. “Maybe.”
August feels it hanging around Jane, the same thing that pulled at her the other morning as she told her stories.
“Anything you want to talk about?” August asks.
Jane releases a long breath and closes her eyes. “I just … miss it.”
“Billy’s?”
“Yeah, but also … life,” she says. She folds her arms and shifts, sliding down until she’s lying across the bench, her head on August’s lap. “My dim sum place. The cat in my bodega. Banging on the ceiling because the neighbor was practicing his trombone too loud, you know? Dumb shit. I miss figuring out scams with my friends. Having a beer. Going to the movies. Dumb, small life things.”
“Yeah,” August says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. “I know what you mean.”
“It just—it sucks.” Jane’s eyes are closed, her face turned up toward August, mouth soft, jaw clenched. August wants to smooth her thumb across her strong, straight brows and pull the tension out of her, but she settles for pushing a hand into her hair. Jane leans into the touch. “I can remember it now, how I felt my whole life—I wanted to go places, see the world. Always hated staying in one place for too long. Fuckin’ ironic, huh?”
She falls silent, tracing her fingertips over her side, where a tattoo is peeking around the hem of her T-shirt.
August wishes she were better at this. She’s great at taking notes and picking apart facts, but she’s never been good at navigating the rivers of feelings that run beneath. Jane’s cheekbone is pressed into the knob of her knee through her jeans, and August wants to touch it, hold her closer, make it better, but she doesn’t know how.
“If it helps…” August says finally. Jane’s hair is sleek and thick between her fingers, and she shivers when August scratches her scalp. “I’ve never found anywhere I wanted to stay either, until now. And I still feel trapped sometimes, in my head. Like, even when I’m with my friends, and I’m having fun, and I’m doing all the dumb, small life things, sometimes it still feels like something’s wrong. Like something’s wrong with me. Even people who aren’t stuck on a train feel that way. Which I realize sounds … bleak. But what I’ve figured out is, I’m never as alone as I think I am.”
Jane’s quiet, considering. “That does help,” she says.
“Cool,” August says. She bumps her knee gently, nudging Jane’s head. “You said you missed going to the movies, right?”
Jane opens her eyes finally, looking up into August’s. “Yeah.”
“Okay, so, my favorite movie of all time,” August says, fishing her phone out. “It’s from the ’80s. It’s called Say Anything. How ’bout this—we listen to the soundtrack, and I’ll tell you about it, and it’ll be almost as good.”
August extends an earbud to her. She eyes it.
“Myla did say you should be teaching me this stuff.”
“She’s a smart woman,” August says. “Come on.”
Jane takes it, and August cues up the music. August tells her about Lloyd and Diane and the party and the keys, the dinner, the diatribes about capitalism and the back seat of the car. She talks about the boom box and the pen and the payphone. She talks about the plane at the end, about how Diane says nobody believes it’ll work out, how Lloyd says that every success story starts out that way too.
Jane hums and taps the toe of her sneaker, and August keeps touching her hair, and she tries to make her feelings small and quiet enough to focus on getting it right, the quote about not knowing what you’re supposed to be doing or who you’re supposed to be when everyone else around you seems so sure: I don’t know, but I know that I don’t know. That one feels important.
It’s embarrassing to the August who likes to play tough, for this stupid movie to mean so much to her, but “In Your Eyes” comes on, and Jane breathes out like she’s been punched in the gut. She gets it.
August doesn’t want to think about kissing Jane when the music fades out or when the doors slide open at Parkside Ave. or when she tucks her apron under her arm and waves good night. But she does, and she does, and she does.
When she gets home, Myla’s sprawled out on the couch and Niko is puttering around the kitchen, finishing up the last few days’ worth of dishes.
“We decided to finish a season of Lost,” Niko says as he towels off a cereal bowl. “I can’t believe they moved the island. I am, as Isaiah would say, gooped.”
“Yeah, wait until you get to the part with Claire’s creepy Blair Witch baby.”
“Don’t spoil him!” Myla says. She’s cradling an enormous bag of jelly beans like it’s a baby. August thinks she might be stoned.
“He’s literally a psychic.”
“Still.”
August holds up her hands in surrender.
“How’s our girl tonight?” Niko asks.
“She’s all right,” August tells him. “Kinda sad. It’s hard on her, being stuck down there.”
“I didn’t mean Jane,” he says. “I meant you.”
“Oh,” August says. “I’m … I’m okay.”
Niko narrows his eyes. “You’re not. But you don’t have to talk about it.”
“I just…” August paces over to one of the Eames chairs and drops into it bonelessly. “Ugh.”
“What’s wrong, little swamp frog?” Myla says, shoving a handful of jelly beans into her mouth.
August buries her face in her hands. “How do you know if a girl likes you?”
“Oh, this again,” Myla says. “I already told you.”
August groans. “It’s just … it’s all gotten so complicated, and I never know what’s real and what’s not and what’s because she needs somebody and what’s because I need somebody, and it’s—ugh. It’s just ugh.”
“You have to actually say something to her, August.”
“But what if she doesn’t feel the same? We’re stuck with each other. I’m the only one who can help her. I’ll make the whole thing weird, and she’ll end up hating me because it’s always awkward, and I can’t do that to either of us.”
“Okay, but—”
“But what if she does like me, and she goes back to the ’70s and I never see her again and I could have told her and I didn’t? And she never knows? If someone felt this way about me, I’d want to know. So does she deserve to know? Or—”
Myla starts laughing.
August pulls her face out of her hands. “What are you laughing about?”
Myla burrows the side of her face into the armrest, still giggling. A few jelly beans spill onto the floor. “It’s just that, you’re in love with a ghost from the 1970s who lives on the subway, and it’s still the exact same as always.”
“She’s not a ghost, and I’m not in love with her,” August says with an eye roll. Then, “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Myla says, “you have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead. Except she’s already dead.” She laughs. “That’s wild, bruh.”
Niko drifts into the room, setting a few handleless teacups and a teapot down on the steamer trunk with a tinkling of chipped porcelain.
“Myla, Jane is our friend,” he says. “You have to stop making jokes about her being dead. It would be cooler if she was, though.”
August groans. “Y’all.”
“Sorry.” Myla sighs, accepting a teacup. “Just text her like, ‘Hey Jane, you got a rockin’ bod, would love to consensually smash. XOXO, August.’”
“Sounds exactly like something I would say.”
Myla laughs. “Well, say it in an August way.”
August exhales. “It’s the worst possible timing, though. She just remembered who she is. And it hasn’t exactly been easy on her.”
“There’s no good timing in this situation,” Myla says.
“Maybe no good timing means there’s no bad timing either,” Niko says simply. “And maybe you can make her happy while she’s here. Maybe it’s selfish to keep that from her. Maybe it’s selfish to keep it from you.”
An hour goes by, and Myla falls asleep on the couch while Niko’s cleaning up the tea. August watches him gently tug the bag of jelly beans out of her arms and wonders if he’s going to wake her and move her to their room. It feels strange and private to watch indecision flicker across his face when she’s used to his certain, confident lines, but eventually it softens into something quiet and fond.
He pulls a blanket off the back of the couch and spreads it over her, taking special care to tuck it around her shoulders and feet. He brushes her hair off her forehead and ghosts the faintest of unintrusive kisses over it.
He switches off the lamp, and when he turns toward their room, August sees the soft melt of his smile, the gentle crease at one side of his mouth, a secret thing. They’ll sleep separately tonight, and somehow this hurts her heart more, the easy tether between them that doesn’t need a constant touch. The assurance that the other person is right there in your orbit, always, waiting to be tugged back in. Niko and Myla could be on opposite sides of an ocean and they’d breathe in sync.
A phantom feeling burns into the back of her throat, like at Isaiah’s party, on the walk to the station: of what it would be like to have someone bite down a smile when they point and say, “Yeah, her. She’s mine.” To live alongside someone, to kiss and be kissed, to be wanted.
“Night,” Niko says.
“Night,” August says, her voice thick in her ears.
That night in her room, Jane’s there. She smiles warm and slow, until it’s so big it scrunches her nose up. She leans against the window and talks about the people she met on the train that day. She stands in her socks at the foot of the bed and says she’s not going anywhere. She touches the pad of her thumb to a freckle on August’s shoulder and looks at her like she’s something to look at. Like she doesn’t ever want to stop looking.
August rolls onto her back and levels her palms against the mattress, and Jane’s on either side of her hips, knees digging into the sheets. In the dark, it’s harder to stop herself from painting soft oranges filtered in from the street. She can see them threaded into Jane’s hair, tucked behind her ears, brushed along the gentle cant of her jaw. There she is. This girl, and a want so bad, it burrows into August’s bones until they feel like they’ll crack.
She wonders if things were different, if maybe they could fall into the kind of love that doesn’t need to announce itself. Something that settles into the bricks as easily as every other true thing that’s ever unfolded its legs and walked up these stairs.
Her phone buzzes from within the sheets.
Radio, it says. Hope you’re not asleep yet.
August pulls up the station, and the next song comes up. By request. “In Your Eyes.”
The moonlight moves, a cool slash across the foot of the bed, and August squeezes her eyes shut. There’s no point to it, loving a girl who can’t touch the ground. August knows this.
But to kiss and be kissed. To be wanted. That’s a different thing from love. And maybe, maybe if she tried, they could have something. Not everything, but something.
August has a plan.
Myla told her to say it in an August way. The August way is having a plan.
It’s contingent on a few things. It has to be the right day and time. But she’s ridden the Q from one end to the other enough to have the data she needs, carefully tallied in the back of a notebook right below all of Jane’s girls.
Definitely not during peak work commute hours, or midnight, which brings a rush of people getting off hospital night shifts, or weekends when shitfaced commuters will be barfing along the line. The slowest time, when the train is most likely to be almost completely empty, is 3:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
So she gathers up what she needs and stuffs it into the reusable grocery bags Niko’s guilted her into using religiously. She sets her alarm for 2:00 a.m. to give herself time to tame her hair and apply a lipstick that won’t smudge. It takes twenty minutes to figure out what to wear—she ends up with a button-down tucked into a skirt, a pair of gray thigh-high socks she bought last month, her ankle boots with heels. She tugs on the socks in the mirror, fussing over the fit, but there’s no time to second-guess. She has a train to catch.
She sits on the bench and waits. And waits some more. Jane will be on whichever train she gets on, and she wants it to be a good one. A new one, with shiny seats and pretty lights that count down the stops—and an empty car. She’s trying to make the subway romantic. She needs all the help she can get.
Finally, a train with a well-maintained, cool blue interior pulls up, and August gathers her bags and stands at the yellow line like a nervous teenager picking up their prom date. (She assumes. She never went to prom.)
The doors open.
Jane is in the far corner of the train, sprawled on her back, jacket bunched up under her head, tape player balanced on her stomach, eyes closed, one foot tapping along to the beat. Her mouth is quirked up in the corner like she’s really enjoying it, the lines of her loose and languid and overflowing. August’s heart goes unforgivably soft in her chest.
That’s her girl.
Jane is, at the moment, blissfully unaware of her surroundings, and August can’t resist. She edges up to her silently, leans close to her ear, and says, “Hey, Subway Girl.”
Jane yelps, flails sideways, and punches August in the nose.
“Agh, what the fuck, Jane?” August yells, dropping her bags to clutch her face. “Are you Jason Bourne?”
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” Jane yells back, pulling herself upright. “I don’t know who Jason Bourne is.”
August pulls one hand away from her nose to examine it: no blood, at least. Off to an auspicious start. “He’s an action movie character, a secret agent who had his memories erased and finds out he’s a badass because he knows how to, like, shoot people and do computer stuff he can’t remember learning.” She thinks about it for a second. “Hang on. Maybe you are Jason Bourne.”
“I’m sorry,” Jane says, but she’s laughing. She leans forward, tugging August’s hands down. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” August tells her. Her eyes are watering, but it really doesn’t hurt much. It was more of a glancing, half-asleep blow than the riot girl punch she knows Jane is capable of.
“What are you even doing here?” Jane asks. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Exactly,” August says. She scoops her bags up and deposits them on the seat next to Jane, yanking out the first item: a blanket. She throws it down over the bench. “We almost never get to hang out just the two of us.”
“So we’re … having a sleepover?”
“No, we’re having food,” August says. Her face feels hot and red, and not because it was recently punched, so she focuses on unpacking. A bottle of wine. A corkscrew. Two plastic cups. “All the stuff you want to try. I thought we could do, like, a taste test.”
August pulls out one of Myla’s cutting boards next, scorched on one side from a saucepan. Then the Takis, the sweet creole onion Zapp’s, box after box of Pop-Tarts. Five different flavors.
“A feast,” Jane says, reaching for a packet of chips. She sounds a little dubious, a little awed. “You got me a feast.”
“That’s a generous use of the word. I’m pretty sure the guy at the bodega thought I was stoned.”
August finally looks up to find Jane turning the Takis over in her hands like she’s not sure what to do with them.
“I brought this too,” August says, pulling a cassette tape out of her pocket. It took her three different thrift stores, but it finally turned up: the Chi-Lites’ greatest hits. She holds it out to Jane, who blinks at her a few times before popping open the deck on her cassette player and sliding the tape in.
“This is … nice,” Jane says. “Like I’m a normal person. That’s nice.”
“You are a normal person,” August says, sitting on the other side of their makeshift junk food charcuterie board. “Under un-normal circumstances.”
“Pretty sure the word for that is abnormal.”
“Hush and open the wine,” August says, handing the bottle over.
She does, and then she rips the bag of Takis open with her teeth, and August’s brain rapidly runs through a whole 3D View-Master reel of other things she’d like Jane to do with her teeth, but that is getting ahead of herself. She doesn’t even know if Jane wants to do anything with her teeth. This isn’t even about that. This is about making Jane happy. It’s about trying.
They eat, and they toast their little plastic cups of wine, and Jane ranks the Pop-Tart flavors from worst to best, with the sweetest (strawberry milkshake) predictably at the top. The Chi-Lites croon, and they go round and round the city in their well-traveled loop. August can’t believe how comfortable this has gotten. She can almost forget where they are.
August thinks, all things considered, for a 3:00 a.m. date on the subway with a girl untethered from reality, it’s going pretty well. They do what they’ve always done: they talk. That’s what August likes best, the way they eat up each other’s thoughts and feelings and stories just as hungrily as the bagels or dumplings or Pop-Tarts. Jane tells August about the time she kicked in a door to rescue a distressed child that turned out to be an especially vocal house cat, August tells Jane about how her mom led a bartender on for two months so she could access the bar employment records. They laugh. August wants. It’s good.
“I think this wine is actually doing something,” Jane says, inspecting her plastic cup. She keeps peering at August over her chips for a second too long, and there’s a faint flush over the top of her cheeks. Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page. Right now, the warm shadows of her eyes look like a heavy downstroke. The jut of her chin is a careful flick of the wrist.
“Yeah?” August says. She’s comparing Jane to a Van Gogh in her head, so obviously the wine is working on her. “That’s new for you, huh? Being able to get drunk?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Huh. How ’bout that?”
The cassette runs out, and the rush and rattle of the train feels too quiet stretched out between them.
This is it, August thinks.
“Flip the tape,” she says, and she pushes herself to her feet.
“Where’re you going?” Jane asks.
“We’re about to be on the bridge,” August says. “We cross this bridge every single day, and we never enjoy the view.”
She turns to look at Jane, who’s sitting on their blanket, watching August with careful eyes. August wants to say something lovely and profound and sexy and cool, something that’ll make Jane want her just as much, but when she opens her mouth, all that comes out is, “Come here.”
Jane stands, and August hovers on the edge of the moment and tries to imagine what they look like, watching each other from ten feet apart on a speeding train, the Statue of Liberty gliding past over her shoulder, the Brooklyn Bridge, the glittering skyline and its shivering reflection on the water, the lights flickering over them through the beams of the bridge. John Cusack and Ione Skye could never.
And then, Jane looks August straight on, folds her arms across her chest, and says, “What the fuck, August?”
August mentally flips through the plan for tonight—nope, definitely not part of it.
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Jane says. She paces toward August, sneakers thumping hard on the floor of the car. She’s pissed off. Brow furrowed, eyes vivid and angry. August scrambles to figure out how she screwed this up so fast.
“You—you can’t do what?”
“August,” she says, and she’s right in front of her. “Is this a date? Am I on a date right now?”
Fuck. August leans against the door, equivocating. “Do you want it to be a date?”
“No,” Jane says, “you tell me, because I have been putting every move I know on you for months and I can’t figure you out, and you kept saying you were only kissing me for research, and then you stopped kissing me, but then you kissed me again, and you’re standing there looking like that in fucking thigh highs and bringing me wine and making me feel things I didn’t even know I could remember how to feel, and I’m going out of my goddamn mind—”
“Wait.” August holds both hands up. Jane’s breaths are coming high and short, and August suddenly feels close to hysterical. “You like me?”
Jane’s hands clench into fists. “Are you kidding me?”
“But I asked you on a date!”
“When?”
“That time I asked you out to drinks!”
“That was a date?”
“I—but—and you—all those other girls you told me about, you were always—you just went for it, I thought if you wanted me like that, you would have gone for it by now—”
“Yeah,” Jane says flatly, “but none of those girls were you.”
August stares.
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, August, what do you think I mean?” Jane says, voice cracking, arms thrown out at her sides. “None of them were you. Not a single one of them was this girl who dropped out of the fucking future to save me with her ridiculous hair and her pretty hands and her big, sexy brain, okay, is that what you want me to say? Because it’s the truth. Everything else about my life is fucked, so, can you—can you please just tell me, am I on a fucking date right now?”
She makes a helpless gesture, and August is breathless at the pure frustration in it, the way it looks so broken in, like Jane’s been living with it for months. And her hands are shaking. She’s nervous. August makes her nervous.
It sinks in and rearranges in August’s brain—the borrowed kisses, the times Jane’s bit her lip or slid her hand across August’s waist or asked her to dance, all the ways she’s tried to say it without saying it. They’re both hopeless at saying it, August realizes.
So August opens her mouth and says, “It was never just research.”
“Of course it fucking wasn’t,” Jane says, and she hauls August in by the sway of her waist and finally, finally kisses her.
It starts hard, but quickly dissolves into something softer. Tentative. Gentler than August expected, gentler than she’s been in any of the stories she’s told August. It’s nice. It’s sweet. It’s what August has been waiting for, a soft slide of lips, the loose presence of her mouth, but August breaks off.
“What are you doing?” August asks.
Jane stares back, gaze flickering between her eyes and mouth. “I’m kissing you.”
“Yeah,” August says, “but that’s not how you kiss.”
“It is sometimes.”
“Not when you really want something.”
“Look, I—this isn’t fair,” Jane says, and the fluorescents illuminate the blush on her cheeks. August has to bite down a smile. “You know how I like to be kissed, but I don’t know what you like. You’ve—you’ve been pretending. You have a head start.”
“Jane,” August says. “Any way you want to kiss me is the way I wanna be kissed, okay?”
A pause.
“Oh,” Jane says. She studies August’s face, and August can practically see that confidence meter of hers filling up, right to Smug Bastard, where it usually sits. August would roll her eyes if it weren’t so endearing. “It’s like that?”
“Shut up and kiss me,” August says. “Like you mean it.”
“Here?” She leans up and teases at the hinge of August’s jaw.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh, here?” Another kiss, her earlobe this time.
“Don’t make me—”
Before August can get the threat out, Jane twists her around, backing her into the doors of the train. She pins August at the hips, shoulders braced against hers, hand wrapped around her racing pulse at the wrist, and August can feel Jane like lightning in her veins. Her knees part on an answering instinct, and Jane doesn’t waste time getting a leg between them, leaning in so August’s own weight grinds her down into Jane’s thigh.
“So pretty for me,” she murmurs into the corner of August’s mouth when she gasps, and they’re kissing again.
Jane Su kisses like she talks—with leisure and indulgent confidence, like she’s got all the time in the world and she knows exactly what she wants to do with it. Like a girl who’s never been unsure of a single thing in her life.
She kisses like she wants you to picture what else she could do given the chance: the swing of her hips if you passed her on the street, every beer bottle she’s ever had her mouth around. Like she wants you to know, down to your guts, the sound her boots make on the concrete floor of a punk show, the split lips and the way her skin smells sweet at the end of the night, all the things she’s capable of. She kisses like she’s making a reputation.
And August … August cheats.
Because she does have a head start. She spent weeks learning what Jane likes. So she grabs at her hair and tugs, nips at her bottom lip, tilts her chin up and bares her neck for Jane’s lips, just to hear the soft little moans that fall out of her mouth, high on the feeling of giving Jane exactly what she wants. It’s better than any of their first kisses, any memory, red hot and real under her hands. The city glides past through the window, framing them in, and August’s skin is on fire. Her skin is on fire, and Jane’s dragging her fingers through the embers.
“These fuckin’ thigh highs,” Jane mutters. Her hand grazes over the top of one, short fingernails skimming the place where elastic cuts into August’s thigh. She was nervous when she put them on, afraid of looking like she was trying too hard, worried about the way they dig into her soft fat. “What the fuck, August?”
“What—ah—about them?”
“They’re criminal, that’s what,” Jane says, pressing her thumb hard enough into the flesh there that August hisses, knowing it’ll leave a mark.
Jane snaps the elastic over the same spot, and the sharp pain goes straight through her and out her mouth in a breathless “fuck.”
“August,” Jane says. She dips into her shoulder, nosing at her collarbone through her shirt, and August’s brain slowly surfaces. “August, what do you want?”
“I wanna … kiss you.”
“You are kissing me,” Jane says. “What else do you want?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s not embarrassing.”
“It is when you’ve never done it before,” August blurts out, and Jane stills.
“Is that it?” she says. “You’ve never had sex with a girl before?”
August feels her face flush. “I’ve never had sex with anyone before.”
“Oh,” Jane says. “Oh.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s—”
“It’s okay,” Jane says easily. “I don’t care. I mean—I care, it just doesn’t bother me.” She traces a thumb up the inside of August’s thigh, and her mouth melts into a loose smirk when August gasps quietly. “But you have to tell me what you want.”
August watches Jane lick her bottom lip, and a thousand images flash through her mind so fast, she feels like she might black out—Jane’s short hair between her fingers, her teeth digging into the ink lines on Jane’s bicep, wet fingers, wet mouths, wet everywhere, Jane’s low voice pitched up an octave, Jane’s eyes burning up at her from the end of the bed, the insides of Jane’s knees, miles of skin shining with sweat and the light through her bedroom window. She wants Jane’s hands fisted in her bed sheets. She wants the impossible.
“I want you to touch me,” she finally makes herself say. “But we can’t.”
And the train stops. The lights go off.
For a second, August thinks she did black out, until her eyes pick out the shape of Jane squinting back at her in the dark.
“Shit,” August says. “Did it just—?”
“Yeah.”
August blinks, waiting for her vision to adjust. She’s suddenly painfully aware of herself, of Jane’s fingers wrapped around her wrist. “Emergency lights?”
Jane closes her eyes, mouthing along as she counts the seconds in her head. She opens them.
“I don’t think they’re coming on.”
August looks at her. Jane looks back.
“So we’re … trapped on a dark train,” August says.
“Yeah.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“With no chance for anyone else to get on.”
“Correct.”
“On the bridge,” August says, more slowly. “Where no one can see us.”
She shifts, adjusting her weight on Jane’s thigh, and closes her mouth on the sound that tries to slip out at the friction.
“August.”
“No, you’re right,” August says, moving to slide Jane’s hand off her, “it’s a bad idea—”
Jane’s grip tightens.
“That is literally the opposite of what I was about to say.”
August blinks once, twice. “Really?”
“I mean … what if it’s the only chance we get?”
“Yeah,” August agrees. It really is a good point, pragmatically. They have finite resources of time and privacy. Also, August will die if Jane doesn’t touch her within the next thirty seconds. Which is another logistical consideration. “You—yeah.”
“Yeah? You sure?”
“Yeah. Yes. Please.”
It happens fast—August inhales, exhales, and suddenly Jane’s jacket is gone, thrown blindly at the nearest seat, and they’re kissing, hands everywhere, messy and wet and full of small sounds. August’s hair keeps getting in the way, and when she breaks off to rip a ponytail holder off her wrist and haphazardly pull it back, Jane’s at her neck, tongue soothing over every spot she introduces her teeth to. Everything goes fuzzy, and August realizes Jane has taken her glasses off and chucked them in the direction of her jacket.
Somehow the buttons of August’s shirt are undone, and she can’t think about anything but wanting more, wanting skin on skin. She wants to rip their clothes off, use her teeth and her fingernails if she has to, and can’t—not here, not the way she wants. Still, she slides her fingertips under the waistband of Jane’s jeans, catches the hem of her T-shirt, and she waits half a second for Jane to stop kissing her and nod before she’s untucking and pushing it up, and oh God, there she is, this is happening.
In the moonlight, Jane’s body is kinetic. She shivers and tenses and relaxes under August’s hands, a nipped-in waist and sharp hip bones, a simple black bra, gentle ridges of ribs, tattoos winding up and down her skin like spilled ink. And August—August has never gotten this far before, not really, but something takes over, and she’s dropping a kiss on Jane’s sternum, and she’s pressing her open mouth to the swell just above the cup of her bra, the devastating give of it. Every part of Jane is spartan, practical, made into what it is by years of survival, and yet, somehow, it gives. She always gives.
It occurs to August that Jane is thinner than her, and maybe she should care that her own hips are wider and her stomach is softer, but Jane’s hands are on her, pushing her shirt open, everywhere she’s afraid to be touched—the shape of her waist, the dimples of her thighs, the fullness of her chest. And Jane groans and says, for the third time of the night, “What the fuck, August?”
August has to choke down a sigh to say, “What?”
“Look at you,” she says, dragging her thumbs out from the center of August’s stomach to her hips, skimming over the waistband of her skirt. She leans in and tucks her face under August’s collar, bites her shoulder, presses a kiss there, then pulls back and just looks at her. Looks at her like she doesn’t ever want to stop looking. “You’re like—like a fucking painting or something stupid like that, what the fuck. You just walk around like this all the time.”
“I—” August’s mouth tries to form several words, maybe even some that make sense, but Jane’s hands are spanning her waist, brushing the delicate lace edges of her bra, and her mouth is trailing lower, and all that comes out is, “I didn’t know. You—I didn’t know you thought that.”
Jane’s eyes flash up to her, glinting wicked in the low light.
“You have no fuckin’ idea, girl,” Jane says, and then she’s pushing the lace out of the way.
There are hands, and mouths, and fingertips, and tongues, and a sound coming out of August somewhere between a hiss and a sigh, and there’s Jane’s breath hot on her skin. There are, objectively, a lot of things going on, August understands vaguely, but all she can think is want—how much, how hard, how deep she’s been wanting it, Jane’s been wanting it, all of it held between Jane’s lips now, pressing and blooming through her, so keen that it hurts. Jane bites down, and August sucks in a breath through her teeth.
The hand on August’s thigh is inching up her skirt, fabric gathering at Jane’s wrist. When Jane leans into August’s ear, the cotton of Jane’s bra is against her, the insistent heat of her body, the unbearable slide of skin against hers.
“I wanna go down on you,” Jane murmurs. “Is that cool?”
August’s eyes snap open.
“Wha-what the fuck kind of question is that?”
Jane’s head drops back with a bark of laughter, eyes shut and lips swollen, the line of her throat obscene and gorgeous.
“I need a yes or no.”
“Yes, okay, Jesus.”
“They call me Jane, actually,” Jane says, and August rolls her eyes as Jane sinks down to one knee.
“That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard,” August says, fighting to keep her breath steady as Jane tugs on the top of one of her thigh highs with her teeth. The elastic snaps back, and Jane grins against the inside of August’s thigh at the little yelp it earns her. “Did that shit really work on girls in the ’70s?”
“It seems,” Jane says, kissing her way up, and August knows her hand is shaking when she pushes it into the hair at the crown of Jane’s head, but she’ll be goddamned if she’ll act like it, “to be working just fine now.”
“I don’t know.” Jane’s fingers catch on the waistband of August’s underwear. August stares across the car at a Brooklinen ad, of all ridiculous things, because if she confronts the reality of Jane kneeling between her legs and tugging her underwear down her thighs, she’s going to have a full-scale mental collapse. “Don’t get too cocky.”
“You might wanna use the door,” Jane says, “for balance.”
“Why?”
“Because in a minute you’re not gonna be able to feel your legs,” Jane says, and when August finally looks down at her, mouth open in shock, she’s smiling innocently. She pushes the hem of August’s skirt up and says, “Hold this for me, yeah? I’m busy.”
“Absolutely fuck you.” August laughs, and she does as she’s asked.
Truthfully: Jane has never once made a promise she couldn’t back up.
August turns her head to the side, trying to ground herself to the sturdiness of the door against her back, the way her shirt bunches up between her shoulder blades when she shivers, how her breath clouds the glass in a steady, too-fast rhythm. Through the glass, the city is shining—the bridges and buildings, the carousel on the edge of the water, the pinpricks of boats in the distance, and she’s trying to take stock of it all, of how it feels to have someone so impossibly close to her for the first time. She can’t believe she gets to have all this, this view and this girl on her knees.
August has stepped inside a million other moments with Jane and a million other girls, but nobody else can have this one.
If this were one of Jane’s memories, she can almost imagine how Jane would tell it: a girl with long hair twisted up messily, her shirt thrown open, moonlight turning the lace on her chest to gossamer, her mouth slipping open around a broken sound, underwear around her knees and looking absolutely wrecked. She looks up at August, a strand of dark hair falling across her eyes, mouth busy, and August knows she’d tell it herself in five words: girl, tongue, subway, saw God.
August never knew—she never worked it out in her head, exactly, what would qualify as sex with someone who has the same type of body as hers, no matter how much she wanted it, pictured it with one hand beneath the sheets. She didn’t think she’d know, since she’s never done any of it, where the line is. But this, this—Jane’s mouth on her, wet fingers, every hum and hitch of Jane’s breath getting her off as much as a touch, the give and take of how good it feels to make someone else feel good—is sex. It’s sex, and August is drowning in it. She wants more. She wants to fill her lungs up.
“Jane,” she says, and it comes out weak from the back of her throat. Her knuckles are white in Jane’s hair, so she makes herself relax them, drags her fingers down to Jane’s sharp cheekbone. “Jane.”
“Hm?”
“Fuck, I—come back,” she grinds out. “Up here. Please.”
When August pulls her into another kiss, she can taste herself on Jane’s tongue, and that, more than anything, the fierce wave of possessiveness it pulls over her, is what has her fumbling at the fastenings of Jane’s jeans.
It’s a blur—August doesn’t know how she senses what to do. There’s supposed to be an awkward learning curve with someone you’ve never fucked before, but there’s not. There’s this flow between them that’s never made any goddamn sense since that static shock the day they met, and it’s like she’s found her way into this girl’s jeans a thousand times, like Jane’s had her figured out for years. She thinks dazedly that maybe it’s time to start believing in something. The fucking divine construction of Jane’s fingers when they press into her, maybe—that’s a higher power for sure.
It’s over in a gasp, a trip over some edge August doesn’t see until they’re suddenly there, an open-mouthed kiss that’s more a hot exchange of breath than anything else, teeth and skin, a low swear. Jane slumps forward, her shoulder digging into August’s chest, one hand still tucked neatly beneath the lace of August’s bra, and August feels alive. She feels present, somehow, here. Exactly, really here. She smears a messy kiss across the top of Jane’s cheek and feels like Jane is the first thing she’s ever touched in her life.
“You were right,” August says.
“About what?”
“I can’t feel my legs.”
Jane laughs, and the lights come back on.
Jane moves first, picking her head up to glare at the lights. And it’s so ridiculous, so funny and unbelievable and Jane, perturbed at the world for daring to defy her instead of the other way around, that August has to laugh.
“Get your hand off my boob. We’re in public,” she says as the train eases back into motion.
“Shut the fuck up,” Jane snorts, and she stumbles back half a step to let August button her shirt. She watches August shimmy her underwear back up her thighs with devilish interest, looking pleased with herself, and August would blush if she weren’t already pink from everything else.
Jane buttons her jeans and tucks her shirt in and disentangles August’s glasses from her jacket, and then she’s crowding back into August’s space, gently sliding her glasses on.
“I can’t believe you threw them,” August says. “They could have fallen on the floor and picked up a bacterial infection. You could have given me conjunctivitis.”
“Mmm, yeah, say more big words.”
“It’s not sexy!” August says, even as her smile gets so big it hurts, even as she lets Jane press her into the door. “I could have lost an eye!”
“I was in a hurry,” Jane says. “I haven’t gotten laid in forty-five years.”
“Technicality,” August says.
“Let me have this,” Jane says, trailing her smiling mouth over August’s pulse.
“Okay.” August laughs, and she does.
They kiss again, and again, melting kisses that barely hold the weight of what just happened, and August keeps waiting. August keeps waiting for one of them to say something that will change everything, but they don’t. They just kiss until they pull into a station in Brooklyn, and a bleary commuter climbs on with a coffee and an unamused expression, and Jane muffles a laugh in her neck.
It’s good, August thinks, that they don’t say anything. Jane loves like summer for a reason—she doesn’t stick around. August knows it. Jane knows it. There’s nothing either of them can do about it.
It’s enough, August decides. To have her like this, here, for now. Time, place, person.
