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“Okay,” August says. She’d take a note if her notebook wasn’t completely soaked. Also if she thought she was steady enough to hold a pen. “What, uh, what else can you remember?”
Jane chews on her bottom lip. “She had long hair, like yours, but maybe blond? It’s weird, like—like a movie I saw, except I know it happened to me, because I remember her wet hair stuck to the side of her neck and how I had to peel it off so I could kiss her there.”
Jesus Christ.
Life-ruining descriptions of things Jane can do with her mouth aside, it does present a… possibility. The fastest way to recover Jane’s memories has been to make her smell or hear or touch something from her past.
“You know how we did the thing with the bagels,” Jane says, apparently thinking the same thing, “and the music, the sensory stuff? If I—if we—can re-create how that moment felt, maybe I can remember the rest.”
Jane looks around—it’s a slow day for the Q, only a few people at the other end of the car.
“Do you want to—you could try, um, touching my neck?” August offers lamely, hating herself. “For, like, research.”
“Maybe,” Jane says. “But it was… it was in an alley. We had ducked out of the rain into an alley, and we were laughing, and I hadn’t kissed her yet, but I’d been thinking about it for weeks. So—” She turns distractedly toward the empty back wall of the car, next to the emergency exit.
“Oh.” August follows, wet sneakers squelching unattractively.
Jane turns to her, drags two fingers across the back of her hand. The look on her face is intent, like she’s holding the memory tight in her head, transposing it over the present. She grabs August by the wrist, backing her into the wall of the car, and, oh shit.
“She was leaning against the wall,” Jane explains simply.
August feels her shoulders hit smooth metal, and in a panic, she imagines bricks scraping against her back instead, a sky instead of handrails and flickering fixtures, herself with any kind of grace to survive this.
“Okay,” August says. She and Jane have been pressed closer than this during commuter rushes, but it’s never, not once, felt like this. She tips her chin up. “Like this?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. Her voice hushed. She must be concentrating. “Just like that.”
August swallows. It’s almost funny, how much she’s absolutely going to die.
“And,” Jane says, “I put my hand here.” She leans in and braces one hand against the wall next to August’s head. Her body heat crackles between them. “Like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
It’s research. It’s only research. Lie back and think of the fucking Dewey Decimal System.
“And I leaned in,” Jane says. “And I—”
Her other hand ghosts over August’s throat before sliding backward, her thumb grazing August’s pulse, and August’s eyes close on instinct. She touches August’s hair with her fingertips and pulls it gently away from the side of her neck. The cool air is a shock to her skin.
“Is—is it helping?”
“Hang on,” Jane says. “Can I—?”
“Yeah,” August says. It doesn’t matter what the question is.
Jane makes a small sound, ducks her head, and there’s breath against August’s bare skin, close enough to mimic the gesture but only just not making contact, which is somehow worse than a kiss would be. It’s more intimate, the silent promise that she could if she wanted to, and August would let her, if they both wanted the same thing in the same way.
Jane’s lips skim August’s skin when she says, “Jenny.”
August opens her eyes. “What?”
“Jenny,” Jane says, drawing back. “Her name was Jenny. We were a block from my apartment.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember,” Jane says. She frowns and adds, “I think I should kiss you.”
August’s mind goes searingly blank.
