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“Yikes,” August says under her breath as she heads for the door.
She meets Myla down the block, where she’s thumbing through her phone.
“That looked like it went unexpectedly well.”
Myla smiles. “Turns out he blocked me on social media because he ‘couldn’t stand to see how I’m doing’ without him. Which, I mean, fair. A bitch is doing spectacularly.” She holds up her phone. “He already texted me.”
“What did he say about the event?”
“Oh, this is the best part. Get this: he got the job because his uncle is one of the managers, so he doesn’t think he’ll have any trouble getting them to agree to let us use the space. Good old-fashioned nepotism to the rescue.”
“Holy shit,” August says. She thinks about Niko pulling the ace of swords from his tarot deck, about all the jade he’s been hiding around the apartment lately. Maybe it’s luck, but August can’t help but feel like someone has his thumb on the scale. “So now what?”
“He’s gonna talk to his uncle and call me tomorrow. I’m gonna head to Billy’s and talk to Lucie about moving things to the new venue.”
“Cool, I’ll come with you.”
Myla puts a hand out. “Nope. You have something else you need to take care of.”
“What?”
“You need to figure out how to talk to Jane,” she says, pointing toward the Q stop down the street. “Because if we pull this off and it works, you might never see her again, and Niko says you have a lot of things left to say to each other.”
August looks at her, the summer sunset gleaming off her sunglasses and sparkling against the Manhattan sidewalk. The city moves around them like they’re pebbles in a creek bed.
“It’s—we’re gonna be fine,” August says. “She knows how I feel about her. And—and if it’s gonna end like this, there’s nothing either of us can do. There’s no point ruining whatever time we have left by being sad about it.”
Myla sighs. “Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”
She leaves her on the corner, staring at the sharp tops of buildings heavy with pink and orange light.
How does she talk to Jane? Where does she even start? How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is? How does she tell Jane that she boarded it up years ago, and that this thing—not even love, but the hope for it—has pried up nails that have nothing to do with love at all?
She’s standing on a New York sidewalk, nearly twenty-four years old, and she’s found herself back at the first version of August, the one who hoped for things. Who wanted things. Who cried to Peter Gabriel and believed in psychics. And it all started when she met Jane.
She met Jane, and now she wants a home, one she’s made for herself, one nobody can take away because it lives in her like a funny little glass terrarium filled with growing plants and shiny rocks and tiny lopsided statues, warm with penthouse views of Myla’s paint-stained hands and Niko’s sly smile and Wes’s freckly nose. She wants somewhere to belong, things that hold the shape of her body even when she’s not touching them, a place and a purpose and a happy, familiar routine. She wants to be happy. To be well.
She wants to feel it all without being afraid it’ll fuck her up.
She wants Jane. She loves Jane.
And she doesn’t know how to tell Jane any of that.
It’s a week later when Gabe comes through—they secure the Control Center as a venue, and Lucie passes out personalized to-do lists like juice boxes at a little league soccer game.
“These are legit,” August says, looking hers over. “We should hang out more.”
“No, thank you,” Lucie says.
She and Niko are assigned to meet with the manager of Slinky’s to arrange the liquor, and after a back-room conversation that involves Niko promising the man a free psychic reading and his mom’s empanadillas, they return to the apartment with booze donations checked off the list.
“Have you talked to Jane yet?” Niko asks as they ascend the stairs. He doesn’t specify what they need to talk about. They both know.
“Why are you even asking me if you already know?” August counters.
Niko eyes her mildly. “Sometimes things that are supposed to happen still need to be nudged along.”
“Niko Rivera, fate’s enforcer since 1995,” August says with an eye roll.
