67
Sasha
Lillian
So
Sasha
So?
Lillian
Um
Sasha
Um?
Lillian
You’re being no help at all
Sasha
Such accusations
Lillian
How’s the mix CD?
Sasha
I had to borrow a CD-playing stereo from my neighbors. We had an adorable interaction where I told them a friend made me a mix CD
And they were like a friend or a “friend”
At which point I just turned pink and ran, boom box on my shoulder
The CD is perfect. I’ve listened to it a thousand times
Lillian
Back up to friend or “friend”
If you want to just be friends that’s okay I swear
Like at school and Wavelength practice, I can’t tell what’s going on with you
Sasha
You said to hide it for now
Lillian
It’s been days! I can’t skulk around for days
Sasha
Good word
Lillian
I know thank you
Don’t think you can distract me with compliments
Sasha
Quinn and Cyprus have always been around. Or other people
And there is an amazing deficit of convenient closets to pull you into
Lillian
I see I see
You should have told me you were looking
I’m great at finding closets
Sasha
Sorry
I know you’ve done this before but I’m really new at it
I felt so confident at Cyprus’s place
But then I panicked after and wasn’t sure what any of it meant
Lillian
I’ll tell you
Sasha, do you want to go out with me?
Sasha
I thought I made that super clear
Lillian
You really are new at this
Sasha
So you’re asking me out?
Lillian
For fuck’s sake yes!
Sasha
I’d love to
Lillian
I’ll borrow the car and be by in ten minutes
Dress warm
Sasha
You’re asking my queer ass to choose how to present in the next ten minutes?
I am only a person, not a god
Lillian
I’m willing to debate that point
But I have to be outside by the time Lillian shows up.
She can’t come knock on the front door and have people answer it who aren’t the family I described. My downstairs neighbors are so friendly that they’re bound to mention the true nature of my living situation and blow my cover.
It’s evening, and the weather does the work of choosing my clothes.
I dress warm with all the thermal layers. At the store, I said where I was from and that I needed to not die this winter. They were more than happy to help.
I’ve got this beautiful white parka with fake fur around the hood.
Light pink lipstick that I think will look good when my face gets flushed from the cold. Which I may regret if I have to cover my face. Or if we kiss, but it’s too late to change it. Lillian’s pulling up in front of my house.
I run down the outside steps to meet her before she gets out and rings the doorbell or something disastrous like that.
This is why I’ve been a little too good at hiding things between Lillian and me since the weekend at Cyprus’s.
Putting on a show is my default.
Saying how I really feel and what I really think isn’t something I’ve ever been supposed to do, even less so now.
It’s something my heart tricks me into doing like it’s tricking me into going along with Lillian in the cold.
Some part of me keeps locking down, and I keep unlocking it and throwing away the key.
Then I find it, throw it farther out.
Hoping it will get lost forever, knowing I’ll need it back.
I just threw it again.
“You have your own entrance?”
asks Lillian as I slam the passenger door behind me, trying to keep in warmth that hasn’t built up in the car yet. The windows are frosty except for a patch where Lillian scraped the ice off.
“It used to be a walk-up. It’s great for not explaining where I’m going.”
Even my small lies stack up piece by piece, precarious.
She turns the music down even though it’s a great moment I know she loves.
Each of the escalations in intensity.
Right when it’s about to get louder, that’s usually when she turns it up.
She looks like she’s about to say something, but she starts driving instead.
One hand on the top of the steering wheel while the other spins the volume knob a notch lower so it stops on fourteen instead of sixteen.
Back up to fifteen.
That’s the one.
She skips a track, killing it right at the pinnacle.
The next song is lower and steadier.
All growl.
A block later, she turns sharply down a back alley and pulls just off to the side.
She puts the car in park, moving the gearshift hard as she undoes her seat belt.
She’s on top of me, legs spread around me, both hands behind my head and kissing me like everything hinges on it, like she’s been caged all week, like a chord that was ringing and now someone’s stomped the volume pedal down.
She’s moving against me, and my hips are rising into hers.
Everywhere, our hands, fumbling at zippers and getting our jackets undone to get closer.
Her hands are cold underneath my shirt, where I can feel every one of her rings against my skin as my hands search for the lever to push my chair back.
It moves suddenly, but she kisses me harder instead of breaking away.
All of me blends into her, and I belong here.
I make a whimper, and she responds to it by slowing down, which somehow feels like more.
She places her palm on my stomach with her fingers spread out.
She softly bites my lip when my hands settle on her hips.
She touches me like I am the exact and only thing she wants.
With her, I don’t feel like a concept or a fetish or something she’s pretending is male or female to be attracted to.
I’m met, matched.
I’m swept up in her power and hunger, and it brings out the same things in me.
They’re new in my chest and my hips and under my tongue.
They’re fascinating and igniting.
“Is this good?”
asks Lillian between deep kisses.
“This is perfect,”
I say. “For now.”
“I like both parts of that.”
Lillian’s lips and hands are noting my body. She’s paying attention, learning me and overwhelming me by touching me the exact same way again, noticing where I sigh when she traces her fingers down the side of my ribs.
She is devastating. The most beautiful and fierce, the song that comes on insisting it’s alive and carrying you with it. We aren’t sexy like a catalog, a checklist, an anatomical paint by numbers. Tired scripts entirely beside the point to me.
The point is that she’s devastating, and I’m overcome.
I used to wonder if desire had any strength in me. I thought I should desire Isabelle. I flipped around different words to describe not feeling much, tried to accept them because I truly believe them to be real and good. But they didn’t fit me.
For me, this was waiting until I found out who I was. As Alexander Ash, there was no home for these feelings, no bed for them to lie in.
As Sasha, I’d like to let these feelings burn me down.
They will, but not all at once. We read this from each other as the fire shifts to coals, something we could build back up at any moment.
By the time we stop, the car’s blowing warm air onto us. Lillian’s headband is crooked, revealing the ear piercings she likes to keep out of the cold. There’s lipstick all over her mouth that she wipes off with limited success. The pink clashes with the red bandanna tied around her neck.
She climbs back into the driver’s seat and puts the car in gear. Each of us is quiet for a moment, both of us smiling. She puts her arm on the back of my headrest to reverse out of the lane, lets her hand linger on me on the way back.
Lillian’s having trouble keeping her eyes on the road instead of me as I zip my jacket back up and flip down the mirror to fix my lipstick. It’s a mess of evidence on my face. I’m not used to thinking of these things yet. Each newly discovered aesthetic and expression creates a set of curiosities now that I allow myself to be anything that might feel right.
I turn the music back up and skip to a fast song to match the way my heart is still hammering.
“You make me feel like I’m in a storm,” I say.
“Thunder or snow?”
asks Lillian.
“I mean where everything is changing and uncertain, but I want the windows open. I want to go out and dance in it and be scattered.”
“So you don’t want to know where we’re going?”
“It’s not a principle I apply equally to all things.”
“Too late. You’ve spoken, and now you live in mystery.”
I pester her about it for the rest of the drive through the city in the early winter darkness. Look for hints, steal her headband, plant a kiss on the back of her hand that looks more like a smudge than lips. Every time I think she’s going to tell me she comes out with a different ridiculous suggestion and tries to convince me with all seriousness. Roller rink. Poetry slam. Strip club. Polo match.
“I’m just such a horse girl,”
she’s saying when we stop at a quiet community center by the river.
“Cowboy boots, stable boys, banjos … um, saddles?”
“You’re really selling this with your encyclopedic knowledge of all things equestrian.”
“Mane, hooves,”
she continues.
“Ooh, horseshoes!”
“Now you’re just picking things with the word horse in them. Where are we?”
Lillian hands me a pair of ice skates from the back seat.
“We’re on a wholesome first date.”
She’s serious, I think, but says it like she’s sarcastic, so I respond in kind.
“Everything we’ve done in this car has definitely been one hundred percent wholesome. Not a single dirty thought.”
Lillian tilts her head back and forth considering.
“Wholesome compared to some things.”
“And your thoughts?”
“Yeah, those were filthy.”
Lillian brought Jasper’s skates for me.
I tie them once, then she helps me tie them again tight enough before we go out on a long skating trail on the frozen river.
It’s clear and cold with air that feels like it’s the cleanest I’ve ever breathed.
High on the banks, the biggest, oldest houses in the city have impressive facades facing the river.
If we skated far enough, we’d arrive at Cyprus’s.
It took several attempts from Lillian to convince me that the ice is safe, winning out when she started going on about how cute it will be when we held mittens.
It is that cute.
Cute enough to venture onto the dark ice.
Love-story cute that I snapshot to keep with me for when I’m back at the Channel someday, to hold on to in a greenroom in a city I’ve never been to before.
I’m wobbling at first, but I gradually smooth out and stop windmilling my arms.
I skated once with LucSee and Augustus in northern Europe somewhere.
A photo op, but Augustus and I stayed for hours as he taught me to stop and turn and not fall on my face.
He’d be like that, suddenly patient and present.
A fragile belief would rise in me that this was his underlying nature.
But I always sent the first text and last text, and he always ended the phone calls and conversations.
He was always the one who had somewhere else to go that was more important than me.
Lillian and I glide down the river, seeing the city I chose as my home from a different angle than I knew existed.
Sometimes we clasp hands, going slowly, talking.
Or Lillian skates backwards in front of me saying she likes to be able to see my face.
She gives me tips.
Her rusted-out thrift store hockey skates leave marks on the ice for me to follow.
“You’re just showing off now,”
I say, as we round a bend in the river and she executes some backwards crossovers that are fifty-fifty sketchy and impressive.
“It’s the only way I can think to seduce you.”
She settles in beside me again, bumping up against my shoulder and nearly knocking me sprawling.
“Got to show my exceptionally pretty date how cool I am.”
“Where’d you learn?”
I look at her through the fuzzy edges of my hood.
“Was it the hockey or the figure skating?”
We both start laughing too hard to keep moving. It’s only partly about the image of Lillian participating in either of those sports.
Mostly it’s a haze of disbelief that we’re here, getting high on the warm space we create when Lillian’s face is shielded inside my hood and we kiss.
It’s me almost tumbling into the snow from Lillian’s enthusiasm and her having to catch me.
Other people skate past us as we stand on the edge of the river trail, lost in our own capsule of time.
Then we stretch it out by skating farther, knowing we’ll have to skate all the way back to the car someday.
As for her skating skills, she says she practiced because she didn’t like being bad at it. And that the cold sometimes brings balance rushing back through her. It helps kick her body into presence, remind it that it wants to be alive.
“It’s an alternative to feeling like nothing is real,”
she says.
“I get scared everyone will leave, or that they’re already gone. When it’s cold, you can’t think you’re anywhere else or worry about reality. It’s like getting slapped in the face. In a wake-up way, not a kinky way.”
“I love that those are the two options.”
“Okay, well, glad I was vulnerable with you. Never again. You’ll probably just leave.”
She grins at me, but she’s even closer to the truth than she believes she is.
“Tell me something about you I don’t know. Am I the first person you’ve dated?”