Chapter 29
Bella placed a tall glass of red on the coffee table.
“I mixed it with some grapefruit juice,” she said. “Just how you like it. Psycho.”
Bella giggled at her own insult. Yasmine glanced up, and almost immediately had to look away.
It was already difficult to look at Bella on a normal day. She was like a grinning sunbeam: too bright and beautiful. It was almost eviscerating.
But Yasmine felt an entirely different pain now, something even more cutting in the soft adoration of Bella’s expression as she lowered herself next to Yasmine on the couch.
She was wearing a pair of Yasmine’s clothes that she’d abandoned at this apartment years ago—graying Harvard sweatpants and a United Nations hoodie.
“I see you found my old rags.”
Bella laughed, pulling at the fabric where the U.N. logo was. “Only you could call this a rag. Fair enough, though, I bet you have like forty of these, Ms. Queen of Earth.”
Yasmine humored her with a smile, but she didn’t really feel it.
It was odd. Those organizations used to feel like giants to her, these great big bastions of human industry, of scientific development and moral progress.
For hundreds of years, nothing had felt more important to her than access to those places, to those people.
She had spent so much of her time on Earth clawing her way to the pinnacle.
Now, as the sun streamed in through the windows and laid bare the threads, all she saw were a bunch of logos printed on pieces of cloth.
Her ambitions felt so far away, and so utterly, terrifyingly hollow.
She didn’t want to climb any more corporate mountains.
She didn’t want to sit on any more boards and make important decisions.
The only thing that mattered to her about those clothes now was the fact that Bella was wearing them. Her Bella.
Goosebumps ran up Yasmine’s arms. It had been around an hour since they got out of the shower. An hour since Yasmine had all but demanded that Bella see her… exclusively.
She wasn’t going to call it a love declaration.
Someone might, but not her. Then she’d have to throw up.
“Did you figure out the CD player?” Bella asked, letting the fabric go.
Yasmine swallowed down the eggshells in her throat. She was grateful for an opportunity to do something she was very comfortable with: complaining.
“Barely,” she said. “How is it that a CD player already feels prehistoric? I couldn’t even remember what the cables do, or where they plug in.
They all feel so big and dumb and clumsy now.
Apple has made me expect all my technology to be tiny and slim and petite.
I feel like a misogynist. All in the span of fifteen years. ”
Bella let out an easy giggle. Easy for her to produce, hard for Yasmine to hear, because it made her feel that tsunami inside all over again. Yasmine reached for the wine glass. She softened immediately when the fruit mix breached her lips.
It really was exactly how she liked it.
“God, I know,” Bella said, turning towards Yasmine so they were only inches apart.
“It used to be 500 years of the same shit. It was the most exciting thing in the world if a random guy showed up in your town spouting some batshit prophecy. It just broke up the endless monotony. And then suddenly there was the—”
“The printing press,” Yasmine snorted.
“Yes!” Bella clapped her hands down on Yasmine’s thighs. “I can’t believe I used to think it was amazing that some people owned books. Time is so strange. And so long.”
Yasmine’s throat went dry as she looked down at her lap, then back up at Bella. Bella had a nervous expression on her face when their eyes connected, her throat bobbing.
“I can’t believe you’ve been on this planet for ten human lifetimes,” she whispered. “And I only just now met you in this one.”
Yasmine inhaled sharply. Bella lifted her hand to the side of Yasmine’s face, cupping her cheek. The pads of her fingertips were cold. She’d just re-applied the cream.
Yasmine didn’t like that she felt she still had to do that.
“Bella,” Yasmine swallowed. “We should… Rebecca…”
“They won’t hurt her, not while she’s still useful. We have time.”
Before Yasmine could get another word out, Bella’s lips were sliding across hers. She straddled Yasmine on the couch, pressing her into it.
And God—Yasmine so wanted to let her.
She inhaled, pushing the other woman gently off of her. It wrenched Yasmine’s heart painfully when she saw the lost, hurt expression in Bella’s eyes.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling that was settling in her chest.
“Bella,” she said quietly. “Are you… deliberately delaying us?”
She’d thought it once earlier, just after they’d finished their shower.
They were coming down from the high, both of them panting and gripping each other like they were buoys adrift at sea, Yasmine’s forehead buried in the crook of Bella’s neck.
They stayed like that for several minutes, just catching their breath, but what had surprised Yasmine was how tightly Bella kept her pressed to her chest, not loosening the tension even a little.
Like she was scared of something.
"Delaying?" Bella repeated, eyes wide and terrified. "Why would I do that?"
Yasmine curled her fingers around Bella's arm, trying to assure her.
"I'm not accusing you of anything. I know you're not working with your family." That thought would have crossed Yasmine's mind a month ago, but not now. Bella was a good liar, but not that good. "I'm just… asking you a question."
Bella's face shuffled through a dozen different expressions: startled; scared; a brief, sad smile; before finally landing on a thin line of apathy. At least, she had been aiming for apathy, but Yasmine could feel the fear radiating off of her.
Bella's lip twitched, and she pulled away, putting space between them on the couch.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly, pulling her bare knees up to her chest and training her eyes on the CD player. "You’re right. We should watch it."
Yasmine blinked, stunned.
She hadn't expected Bella to concede that quickly. No, she was doing something different than conceding—she was receding, folding into herself like a scared child.
"Bella." Yasmine tried to warm her voice. "I really wasn't trying to hurt your feelings. I just want to understand what you’re… scared of.”
Bella winced, covering her face with her hands. “Fuck. You can feel it, can’t you?”
Yasmine gave her a sympathetic smile. “I know it must feel invasive, but I can’t just turn my powers off. You might as well be a walking mood ring around me.”
Bella let out a shaky breath into the palms of her hands.
Yasmine ached to hold her hands, but she refrained.
She was developing a real talent for refraining.
Instead, she waited, even as Bella continued to shake her head into her hands, as if she was trying to dispel her own emotions like they were some irritating curse set on her by a witch.
Finally, she let her hands fall from her face. Her eyes looked tired underneath.
"Don’t let this get to your head—but yes, you’re right,” she confessed. “But I don't want to talk about it. It wouldn’t be productive."
Yasmine, famously good at dropping a subject of conversation, nodded once, then asked, "Is it about what I said in the shower?"
Bella finally snapped her gaze toward her, and she frowned softly.
"No." She paused, looking down at the space between them on the couch, and slowly reached out to intertwine their fingers. "No," she repeated.
Outside, jackhammers loudly rattled against steel.
The Meridian Tower had been under construction for months—a nonstop plague on the Manhattan soundscape: whining cranes, endlessly screeching drills, snapping nail guns.
This apartment was only a few streets away, so you could hear the reverberations like they were operating inside of your ear drums. Yasmine's mind felt much the same.
“Okay. But, what… did you think about what I said in the shower?”
Bella gave her a sad, watery smile. She tightened her grip on Yasmine’s hand, their fingers so close they were nearly bone-to-bone.
“I thought… how nice would it be, for the first time in my life, to get what I wanted?”
All the air left Yasmine’s lungs. They were exactly the words she wanted to hear—even if they terrified her, down to the very atom, down to the damned electron—but the expression on Bella's face didn’t match her excitement. Her fear was as palpable as the July humidity. It was choking the room.
Yasmine took a risk, and tucked a hair behind Bella’s ear, holding her face tenderly.
“You deserve to get everything you want, Bella. Lord knows you’ve paid your dues.”
Bella just kept that air-tight smile on her face. Yasmine couldn’t say she was surprised, even if it punctured her heart to run against that wall again. If Yasmine knew anything about this girl, it was that no amount of knocking at the door would make her open it.
So Yasmine did what Yasmine did best.
She deflected.
"Let's just watch the footage, okay?" Yasmine said. "Then this can be over with. And we can… explore what it is you—I—we want, exactly. Whatever that is. Maybe it’s a new television. This one—" She tapped aggressively on the remote control. “Sucks.”
***
It took three CDs to find the right one—a grainy camcorder film from April 12, 1998—back when Yasmine was still sporting her baby bump.
While you couldn't see Rebecca in the film, there was no one else on Yasmine’s payroll that had the gusto to be barking at her from behind the camera.
“It’s customary to look both ways when you cross the street, Ms. Sokolov.
What sort of example are you setting for Wallace? ”
A time before Wallace. It was hard to conceive of. No one was holding a phone on the subway. Newspapers still littered the streets. When Yasmine and Rebecca waved down a taxi, it was still a yellow cab. No Uber label on the windshield.
“Take us to Ruddy Street in Allentown,” Rebecca said, handing the cabby three hundred dollars for the extended trip. “And don’t put this drive on your record.”
Allentown.
It wasn't even five seconds after that address came out of Rebecca's lips that Yasmine's heart nearly stopped beating.
She whipped around towards Bella; Bella whipped towards her.
For the first time that afternoon, there was no invisible wall sitting tenuously between them—they said the same thing in the same breath.
"Wallace."