One last stop, p.19
One Last Stop, page 19
“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.
