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She bundles her takeout back into its bag, and August stands and throws her hair over her shoulder. She can do this. Start with what you know and work from there. August knows this can work.
“So,” August says, “tell me what to do.”
A beat. Jane looks up at her, brow furrowed. Then her face smooths out, and a smile plays at the corner of her mouth, the one with the dimple.
“Okay,” she says, and she spreads her legs apart a few inches, gesturing loosely for August to sit. “Get down here.”
Shit. August supposes she did ask for it.
August settles herself on one of Jane’s thighs and tucks her legs between them, her feet skimming the floor between Jane’s sneakers. If she’s being honest, she’s imagined more than once, more than a few times, what Jane’s thighs feel like. They’re strong and firm, sturdier than they look, but August doesn’t have a chance to feel anything about it before Jane’s fingertips are nudging her chin up to look at her.
“Is this okay?” Jane asks. Her hand squeezes the curve of August’s hip, holding her in place.
August looks at her, letting her gaze drop to Jane’s lips. That’s the whole point of this. It’s mechanics. “Yeah. Is this how you remember it?”
“Kind of,” she says. And, “Pull my hair.”
For a few ringing seconds, August imagines herself melting onto the floor of the train like the ghosts of a million spilled subway slushies and dropped ice cream cones.
Completely under control.
She pushes her fingers into Jane’s short hair, scraping her nails across the scalp before she closes them on a fistful and tugs.
“Like that?”
Jane releases a short breath. “Harder.”
August does as she’s told, and Jane makes another sound, one deep in her throat, which August assumes is a good sign.
“Now…” Jane says. She’s looking at August’s mouth, eyes dark as the pit at a punk show. “When I kiss you, bite.”
And before August can ask what she means, Jane closes the space between them.
The kiss is… different this time. Hotter, somehow, even though it’s not real. It’s not real, August recites in her head as she tries to pretend there’s absolutely anything academic about the way her mouth drops open at the press of Jane’s lips, anything scientifically impartial about the way she pulls harder at Jane’s hair and sinks into it, letting Jane drink her in.
Jane’s words come back to her, syrupy sweet and slow, bite, and so she sucks Jane’s bottom lip between hers and digs her teeth in. She hears her sharp inhale, feels Jane’s hand tighten in the fabric of her shirt, and thinks of it as progress. Results. She moves the way she imagines the girl Jane remembers would have moved, tries to give her the memory with her mouth—bites harder, tugs at her lip, runs her tongue over it.
It lasts only a minute or two, but it feels like a year lost in Jane’s hair and Jane’s lips and Jane’s past, Jane’s hands fisting in her curls, Jane’s thigh warm and steady under her, Jane for hours, Jane for days. It pulls like an undertow, and the case is up on the surface, and August is trying to stay there too.
When they break apart, August’s glasses are crooked and smudged, and an old woman is staring disapprovingly at them from across the aisle.
“You got a problem?” Jane says, arm slinging protectively across August’s shoulders.
The woman says nothing and returns to her newspaper.
“Mingxia,” Jane says, turning to August. “That was her name. Mingxia. I took her back to my place in Prospect Heights on… Underhill Avenue. It was a brownstone. I had the second floor. That was the first place I lived in New York.”
August writes down the street name and the playground across the street and the nearest intersection and spends an afternoon pulling ownership records on every brownstone on the block, calling landlords until she finds the son of one who remembers a Chinese American woman renting the second floor when he was a kid.
The kiss reveals: Jane moved to New York in February 1975.
And so, it becomes another thing they do. The food and the songs and the old articles and, now, the kisses.
There are certain crucial bits of information they still don’t have—like Jane’s childhood, or her infuriatingly elusive birth certificate, or the event that got Jane stuck in the first place—but there’s no way to predict what memory might cause a chain reaction leading to something important.
The kisses are strictly for evidence gathering. August knows this. August is absolutely, 100 percent clear on this. She’s kissing Jane, but Jane is kissing Jenny, Molly, April, Niama, Maria, Beth, Mary Frances, Mingxia. It’s not about her and Jane, at all.
“Kiss me slow,” Jane says, grinning on a Tuesday afternoon, her sleeves rolled up enticingly, and it’s still not about them.
