“I think this wine is actually doing something,” Jane says, inspecting her plastic cup. She keeps peering at August over her chips for a second too long, and there’s a faint flush over the top of her cheeks. Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page. Right now, the warm shadows of her eyes look like a heavy downstroke. The jut of her chin is a careful flick of the wrist.
“Yeah?” August says. She’s comparing Jane to a Van Gogh in her head, so obviously the wine is working on her. “That’s new for you, huh? Being able to get drunk?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Huh. How ’bout that?”
The cassette runs out, and the rush and rattle of the train feels too quiet stretched out between them.
This is it, August thinks.
“Flip the tape,” she says, and she pushes herself to her feet.
“Where’re you going?” Jane asks.
“We’re about to be on the bridge,” August says. “We cross this bridge every single day, and we never enjoy the view.”
She turns to look at Jane, who’s sitting on their blanket, watching August with careful eyes. August wants to say something lovely and profound and sexy and cool, something that’ll make Jane want her just as much, but when she opens her mouth, all that comes out is, “Come here.”
Jane stands, and August hovers on the edge of the moment and tries to imagine what they look like, watching each other from ten feet apart on a speeding train, the Statue of Liberty gliding past over her shoulder, the Brooklyn Bridge, the glittering skyline and its shivering reflection on the water, the lights flickering over them through the beams of the bridge. John Cusack and Ione Skye could never.
And then, Jane looks August straight on, folds her arms across her chest, and says, “What the fuck, August?”
August mentally flips through the plan for tonight—nope, definitely not part of it.
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Jane says. She paces toward August, sneakers thumping hard on the floor of the car. She’s pissed off. Brow furrowed, eyes vivid and angry. August scrambles to figure out how she screwed this up so fast.
“You—you can’t do what?”
“August,” she says, and she’s right in front of her. “Is this a date? Am I on a date right now?”
Fuck. August leans against the door, equivocating. “Do you want it to be a date?”
“No,” Jane says, “you tell me, because I have been putting every move I know on you for months and I can’t figure you out, and you kept saying you were only kissing me for research, and then you stopped kissing me, but then you kissed me again, and you’re standing there looking like that in fucking thigh highs and bringing me wine and making me feel things I didn’t even know I could remember how to feel, and I’m going out of my goddamn mind—”
“Wait.” August holds both hands up. Jane’s breaths are coming high and short, and August suddenly feels close to hysterical. “You like me?”
Jane’s hands clench into fists. “Are you kidding me?”
“But I asked you on a date!”
“When?”
“That time I asked you out to drinks!”
“That was a date?”
“I—but—and you—all those other girls you told me about, you were always—you just went for it, I thought if you wanted me like that, you would have gone for it by now—”
“Yeah,” Jane says flatly, “but none of those girls were you.”
August stares.
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, August, what do you think I mean?” Jane says, voice cracking, arms thrown out at her sides. “None of them were you. Not a single one of them was this girl who dropped out of the fucking future to save me with her ridiculous hair and her pretty hands and her big, sexy brain, okay, is that what you want me to say? Because it’s the truth. Everything else about my life is fucked, so, can you—can you please just tell me, am I on a fucking date right now?”
She makes a helpless gesture, and August is breathless at the pure frustration in it, the way it looks so broken in, like Jane’s been living with it for months. And her hands are shaking. She’s nervous. August makes her nervous.
It sinks in and rearranges in August’s brain—the borrowed kisses, the times Jane’s bit her lip or slid her hand across August’s waist or asked her to dance, all the ways she’s tried to say it without saying it. They’re both hopeless at saying it, August realizes.
So August opens her mouth and says, “It was never just research.”
“Of course it fucking wasn’t,” Jane says, and she hauls August in by the sway of her waist and finally, finally kisses her.
It starts hard, but quickly dissolves into something softer. Tentative. Gentler than August expected, gentler than she’s been in any of the stories she’s told August. It’s nice. It’s sweet. It’s what August has been waiting for, a soft slide of lips, the loose presence of her mouth, but August breaks off.
“What are you doing?” August asks.
Jane stares back, gaze flickering between her eyes and mouth. “I’m kissing you.”
“Yeah,” August says, “but that’s not how you kiss.”
“It is sometimes.”
“Not when you really want something.”
“Look, I—this isn’t fair,” Jane says, and the fluorescents illuminate the blush on her cheeks. August has to bite down a smile. “You know how I like to be kissed, but I don’t know what you like. You’ve—you’ve been pretending. You have a head start.”
“Jane,” August says. “Any way you want to kiss me is the way I wanna be kissed, okay?”
A pause.
“Oh,” Jane says. She studies August’s face, and August can practically see that confidence meter of hers filling up, right to Smug Bastard, where it usually sits. August would roll her eyes if it weren’t so endearing. “It’s like that?”
“Shut up and kiss me,” August says. “Like you mean it.”
“Here?” She leans up and teases at the hinge of August’s jaw.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh, here?” Another kiss, her earlobe this time.
“Don’t make me—”
Before August can get the threat out, Jane twists her around, backing her into the doors of the train. She pins August at the hips, shoulders braced against hers, hand wrapped around her racing pulse at the wrist, and August can feel Jane like lightning in her veins. Her knees part on an answering instinct, and Jane doesn’t waste time getting a leg between them, leaning in so August’s own weight grinds her down into Jane’s thigh.
“So pretty for me,” she murmurs into the corner of August’s mouth when she gasps, and they’re kissing again.
Jane Su kisses like she talks—with leisure and indulgent confidence, like she’s got all the time in the world and she knows exactly what she wants to do with it. Like a girl who’s never been unsure of a single thing in her life.
She kisses like she wants you to picture what else she could do given the chance: the swing of her hips if you passed her on the street, every beer bottle she’s ever had her mouth around. Like she wants you to know, down to your guts, the sound her boots make on the concrete floor of a punk show, the split lips and the way her skin smells sweet at the end of the night, all the things she’s capable of. She kisses like she’s making a reputation.