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“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.
