One Last Stop, page 13
Anyway, she can compartmentalize. She spent her childhood getting paid in Happy Meals to break into people’s personal archives and pretending that was normal. She can pretend she’s never thought about Jane holding her hand in a cute East Village brownstone with a West Elm sofa and a wine fridge. This crush, she decides, is just not going to work for her.
Which means, of course, the next time August steps on the Q, Jane says, “I think I should kiss you.”
It doesn’t start that way. It starts with August, too busy thinking about not thinking about Jane to check the weather for the morning’s freak thunderstorm, slipping in her own puddle of rainwater.
“Whoa,” Jane says, catching her under the elbow before she hits the subway floor. “Who tried to drown you?”
“The fucking MTA,” August says, letting Jane help her to her feet. She pushes her sopping hair out of her eyes, blinking through the raindrops on her glasses. “Twenty-minute delay on an outdoor platform. They want me dead.”
August takes off her glasses and desperately checks herself for a single dry inch of fabric to wipe them on.
“Here,” Jane says, pulling up the tail of her shirt. August sees the smooth skin of her stomach, hints of a secret tattoo spilling up over her waistband on one hip, and forgets to breathe. Jane takes her glasses to wipe off the lenses. “You didn’t have to come today.”
“I wanted to,” August says. She adds quickly, “We’ve been making good progress.”
Jane looks up, halfway grinning, and stops, August’s glasses still in her hand.
“Oh, wow,” she says softly.
August blinks. “What?”
“It’s—without your glasses, the wet hair.” She hands them back, but her eyes, distant and a little dazed, don’t leave August’s face. “I got a flash of something.”
“A memory?”
“Sort of,” Jane says. “Like a half memory. You reminded me.”
“Oh,” August says. “What is it?”
“A kiss,” Jane says. “I don’t—I can’t remember exactly where I was, or who she was, but when you looked at me, I could remember the rain.”
“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.
“You—what?”
“I’m almost there,” Jane says, and fuck if August can’t suppress a shiver at those words in that voice from that soft mouth. “I think—”
“That if you—” August clears her throat and tries again. “You think that if you—if you kiss me—”
“I’ll remember, yeah.” She’s looking at August with a precise kind of interest. Not like she’s thinking about a kiss, but more like she’s focusing hard on an objective. It happens to be a disastrously good look on her. Her jaw goes all jutty and angular, and August wants to give her anything she wants and then change her own name and skip the continent.
Jane’s watching her face, tracking a raindrop that rolls from her hairline to her chin, and August knows, she knows, if she does this, she’s never going to stop thinking about it for the rest of her life. You can’t un-kiss the most impossible person you’ve ever met. She’s never going to forget what that tastes like.
But Jane looks hopeful, and August wants to help. And, well. She believes in in-depth, hands-on evidence gathering. That’s all.
Compartmentalize, August tells herself. For the love of God, Landry. Compartmentalize.
“Okay,” August says. “It’s not a bad idea.”
“You sure?” Jane says gently. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“That’s not—” That’s not the issue, but if Jane doesn’t know that by now, she probably never will. “I don’t mind.”
“Okay,” Jane says, visibly relieved. God, she has no idea.
“Okay,” August says. “For research.”
“For research,” Jane agrees.
August squares her shoulders. For research.
“What should I do?”
“Can you touch me?” Jane takes one of August’s hands and holds it to her chest, right below the hard line of her collarbone. “Right here?”
“Okay,” August says, more of a shaky exhale than a word. “Then what?”
Jane’s leaning in, taking advantage of her height to bracket August in, burning so hot that August can’t make sense of the chill sweeping up her spine. So steady and beautiful and close, too close, never close enough, and August is so completely, irreversibly, spectacularly screwed.
“And,” Jane says, “I kissed her.”
The train plunges out of a tunnel and back into the deafening rain.
“Did she kiss you back?”
Jane’s other hand finds its way to August’s waist, to the place that feels designed by the profound unfairness of the universe to fit it so exactly.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Yeah, she did.”
And Jane kisses her.
The truth about wanting someone to kiss you for ages is, it rarely lives up to whatever you’ve imagined. Real kisses are messy, awkward, too dry, too wet, imperfect. August learned years ago that movie kisses don’t happen. The best you can hope for in a first kiss is to be kissed back.
But then, there’s this kiss.
There’s Jane’s hand on her waist, and the rain rushing down onto the roof of the train, and a half-remembered moment pinned against a brick wall, and this kiss, and August couldn’t have imagined it would feel like this.
Jane’s mouth is soft but insistent, and August feels the press of it in her body, in a place much too close to her heart. If looking at Jane feels like flowers opening, being kissed by her feels heavier, the weight of a body that’ll be gone by morning settling into bed beside her. It reminds her of being homesick for months and tasting something familiar and realizing it’s even better than you remember, because it comes with the sweet gut punch of knowing and being known. It melts in her mouth like ice cream at the corner store when she was eight. It aches like a brick to the shin.
Jane kisses her and kisses her, and August has completely lost track of what this was even supposed to be about, because she’s kissing Jane back, swiping her thumb into the dip of Jane’s collarbone, and Jane’s tongue is tracing the soft seam of her lips, and August’s mouth is falling open. Jane’s hand drops from the wall to brace against August’s face, tangled up in her wet hair, and she’s everywhere and nowhere—in her mouth, at her waist, against her hips, touching too much for August to pretend this isn’t real to her but not enough to know if it’s real to Jane too.
And then Jane pulls back and says, “Oh, fuck.”
August has to blink five times before her eyes remember how to focus. What the fuck was she doing? Kissing her way to self-destruction, that’s what.
“What?” she asks. Her voice comes out strangled. Jane’s hand is still in her hair.
“New Orleans,” she says. “The Bywater. That’s where I was.”
“What?”
“I lived there,” she says. August is staring at her mouth, dark pink and swollen, and trying desperately to drag her brain in the opposite direction. “I lived in New Orleans. A year, at least. I had an apartment, and a roommate, and—oh, holy shit, I remember.”
“Are you sure?” August asks. “Are you sure you’re not getting it mixed up because I’m from there?”
“No,” Jane says, “no, I remember now.” She moves suddenly, the way she does when she’s feeling something big, and scoops August up in her arms and spins her around. “Oh my God, you’re fucking magic.”
August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.
They slide right back into their normal places: August perched on the edge of a seat with her notebook open to the dryest page she can find, and Jane pacing the aisle reciting everything she can recall. She talks about a burger joint in the Quarter where she worked, about Jenny (tally mark eleven), about a shotgun apartment on the second floor of an old house and a sweet-faced roommate whose name she can’t remember. August writes it all down and doesn’t think about how Jane kissed her—Jane kissed her—Jane put her hand on August’s face and kissed her, and August knows how her lips feel, and she can’t ever stop knowing, and—
“Did you get that?” Jane says, pausing her pacing, apparently completely unaffected. “The snowball place in the Marigny? You look like you spaced out for a second.”
“Oh, yeah,” August says. “Definitely got it.”
When she stumbles back into the apartment that night, Niko takes one look at her and says, “Oh, you fucked up.”
“It’s fine!” August says, shouldering past him toward the fridge.
“You are projecting so many feelings right now, I can’t believe your skin’s still on.”
“I’m repressing it!” She yanks a carton of leftover sesame chicken out and pops the top, shoveling it into her mouth cold. “Let me repress it!”
“I can see how you would think that is what you’re doing,” he says, sounding genuinely sorry for her.
7
POLICE DEPARTMENT
CITY OF NEW YORK
Filed April 17, 1992
Incident: At 1715 hours on 17 April 1992, I, Officer Jacob Haley #739, was dispatched to Times Square-42nd Street subway station. Mark Edelstein (DOB 8-7-1954) reported middle-aged white male approx. 5’9 struck him in eye with closed fist in dispute over seat on Brooklyn-bound Q train. He states man shouted anti-semitic slur at him before assault. Suspect absent from scene. Victim states another passenger, mid-twenties Asian female approx. 5’7, forced attacker off train at 49th Street Station. Passenger also absent from scene.
August’s phone chimes at six on a Thursday morning with a text from Jane.
She rolls onto her side, elbow digging into her air mattress, which has halfway deflated during the night—she needs to get a real bed. Three texts from her mom. One missed call and voicemail from Billy’s. A red bubble announcing seventeen unread messages in her school email. One notification from her bank: her account is at $23.02.
Normally, any two of those overlapping would send her into an hour-long anxiety-fueled tear of aggressive productivity until everything was squared away, even if she had to lie and cheat to do it.
Her mom’s texts say: Hey, wanted to check in on that file I sent you. and Are you screening my calls, turd? and Miss you always but especially when I have a new file shipment. You were always so much better at sorting these.
She’ll deal with it. She will. Just … tomorrow.
She opens Jane’s text.
Hey August, got a new one: a restaurant on Mott where I got dumplings. I may have gotten in a fight with a cook there. Can’t place the year. Any ideas? Thanks, Jane Su
Jane has not yet figured out she doesn’t have to include a greeting and a sign-off, and August hasn’t had the heart to correct her.
P.S. I’m still thinking about that joke you made the other day about JFK. Hilarious. You’re a genius.
August has decided, in what she believes is a show of extreme maturity and dedication to helping Jane, to pretend the kiss was completely unimportant. Did it get the information they needed? Yes. Did she lie awake that night thinking about it for three and a half hours? Yes. Did it mean anything? No. So, no, she’s not sitting around, picturing Jane dropping her jacket on August’s bedroom floor and pushing her down onto the bed, breaking the bed, putting the bed back together—God, not the stupid bed-assembly fantasy again.
No, that would be extremely impractical. And August thinks, as she spends seven of her last dollars on a container of to-go dumplings for Jane, that she’s very practical, and everything is under complete control.
“My hero,” Jane swoons when August boards the Q and hands the bag over.
She’s looking particularly bright today, soaking in the sun that pours through the windows. She told August last week how thankful she is to at least be stuck on a train that spends a lot of its route above ground, and it shows. Her skin glows a golden brown that reminds August of humid summer afternoons in the Bywater—which, August realizes, is something they’ve both felt. What are the odds?
“Anything coming back to you?” August asks, climbing into the seat next to her. She perches her sneakers on the edge, tucking her knees up to her chest.
“Gimme a second,” Jane says, chewing thoughtfully. “God, these are good.”
“Can I–?” August stomach growls to finish the sentence.
“Yeah, here,” Jane says, holding a dumpling up on the end of a plastic fork and opening her mouth, indicating August do the same. She does, and Jane shoves the entire overstuffed dumpling in and laughs as August struggles to chew, reaching over to wipe sauce off her chin. “You gotta eat it all in one.”
“You’re so mean to me,” August says when she manages to swallow.
“I’m showing you how to eat dumplings the right way!” Jane says. “I’m being so nice!”
August laughs, and— God. She has to stop picturing what they look like to every other commuter: a couple laughing over takeout, ribbing each other on the ride to Manhattan. There’s a couple down the car, a man and woman, wrapped around each other like they’re trying to fuse by osmosis, and August hates that part of her wants to be them. It’d be so easy to slide her hand into Jane’s.
Instead, she pulls a notebook from her bag and a pencil from her hair, where it’s been holding a frizzy, half-assed updo in place all morning.
“Let me know if anything comes to you,” August says, shaking her hair out. It falls down her shoulders, her back, everywhere. Jane watches her try to contend with it with a bemused expression.
“What?” Jane says vaguely.
“Like, if you remember anything.”
“Oh,” she says, blinking. “Yeah.… It was this tiny place on Mott, my favorite dumplings in the city—I went there once or twice a week, at least. I think I was in Chinatown a lot, even though I lived in Brooklyn. It was easy to just take the Q to Canal.”
“Okay,” August says, taking a note.
“But I fucked up. I slept with a cook’s ex-girlfriend, and she found out and let me have it next time I came in, and I couldn’t go back after that. But, shit, it was worth it.”
