66
Lillian
I can feel their anticipation everywhere their body touches mine, where my hand is on the back of their neck and my fingers are gripping their towel, one move from ripping it off and starting to undress them.
“Yes,”
they say. A little like a plea, almost relief.
So I pull Sasha to my mouth, push Sasha against the wall.
Every fragment of them is response and breath.
Their lips are soft.
Their sounds too, the ones that I’m too shy to let escape until I’m so overcome I can’t control it anymore.
I feel the noises against my lips, from their tongue through me.
I consume each one.
Melodies to replay alone in my bed.
To memorize note for note.
The towel’s crumpled around their feet and their hands are on my lower back, drawing me in closer even though all the ways I want to be closer are not for this room.
Not right now.
All of my desires whisper the word later in my mind.
All of this is reverberating inside me when I entangle their fingers with mine and I press the back of their hand against the wall.
“Sasha,”
I murmur through it all, their name.
“Sasha, Sasha.”
They break away, only so far that I can focus on their eyes.
“I thought …”
they say, stop.
“When did this start?”
Their mouth looks kissed in the way that brings the pink out in their lips and matches it to their flushed face.
It looks kissed in a way that will melt and sigh if I kiss it again.
Beside us, sitting on their bag, the liner notes are open to the first of two Packing Boxes songs.
A drawing of them reaching for the fire escape.
“Since then,”
I say. I touch their face, suddenly allowed to feel them react as I trace beside their eye.
“Or since you sang with me. Or since right now.”
That’s all true at once, which may make it all a lie.
“It doesn’t have to be a moment,” they say.
They take my hand and kiss the back of my fingertips, on the verge of slipping them into their mouth, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to speak.
I hear the door unlatch. It’s feels loud, triggering part of my brain I didn’t know was on edge and listening closely. I snap away from Sasha, almost slipping, portrait of suspicion, but the door closes again quickly before I can get a look at who cracked it open.
“Shit,”
I say.
“Did they see us?”
Sasha looks flustered and chagrined in the sexiest possible way.
“Does it matter if they did?” they ask.
I’m listening for the cold in their voice.
Or accusation, or doubt, or the staggering step backward that says this was a mistake.
But it’s not there.
They’re just asking. I trust them.
I tie the front of my bathrobe shut.
“The band,”
I say quickly.
“It’s the band.
When I made the big pitch for you to join, they, well, Cyprus, was worried about me liking you.
People in band sleep together, band implodes.
Not that we’re … anyway. So us, whatever this is, yeah. It’s tricky. Right?”
I’m suddenly acutely aware that Emelia’s swimsuit isn’t hanging on the hook anymore.
Did Cyprus put it away to look out for me? Or was she the one who left it there to try to bring up something inside me?
I think of her saying I’m still in love when what I really feel is something that’s fresh.
I don’t want Sasha to think I regret this.
I must look like I’m panicking.
And I am, but only because sometimes the world tilts too quickly.
I want to hold on to them and tell them I’m just dizzy.
I just moved too fast for my own good and if we weren’t here, I’d move even faster to stop the spinning.
“Just for now,”
I say.
“can we hide this?”
They pick up the CD..
“This,’ being what?” they ask.
I feel like I can see through the booklet to where it says Love, Lillian. They say it smiling, though, not afraid.
“I don’t know,”
I say.
“but I want to find out if you —”
They kiss me again, envelop me. It’s tender, like we’ve been kissing for years.
It makes me less overwhelmed.
It makes me want to cry and to build a blanket fort and to wake up beside them for the hundredth time in a row and notice their eyelashes in a way I’ve never noticed before.
“Me too,”
they say when they break away.
“Very, very much so. Now let’s get it together. I’m going to get changed and go in first. I can put on a show anytime I like.”
“An expert, I’m sure. But I’m the pro of pretending.”
“Is that so?”
They kiss my neck hard for a moment, flooding my mind with the thought of them underneath me, and I find that it is in fact a good idea if I take another minute before acting like nothing happened.
By the time I emerge, Sasha’s crouching in front of the fire with Quinn wrapping frozen pizza in tinfoil, talking about how to get a smoky flavor. Cyprus is watching something on her phone with one earbud in, leaning on the counter while a food processor full of fresh salsa churns on the counter beside her. Victoria has profoundly not gone back to studying. She opens a bag of chips and adds a few more spices to the salsa.
Cyprus slaps her hand away.
“Not all of us have your tolerance.”
“I thought you were too distracted to notice.”
“I perceive all.”
I must look desperately guilty at Cyprus’s word choice. For a second, I’m sure she was the one who opened the door. I need to figure out what this is before I let anyone know. I want her to find out from me, not from me trying to hide it.
Revealing you’ve been hiding something looks heroic compared to being caught in a lie.
“Oh, you’re done in there,”
Victoria says to me.
“I keep meaning to get my phone from the bathroom, but it was locked before.”
She gives me the world’s least subtle wink as she goes by, and I know I’m in the clear for now.
A couple hours later, I’ve figured out the way I’m actually most likely to give something away is by the sheer amount of time I spend watching Sasha. Their mouth has become somewhat more mesmerizing than before.
It’s what my focus keeps slipping back to as Cyprus rambles about the Admirer trial while we play pool. Sasha and Quinn are sitting on the other side of the basement loudly singing along to old music videos and making Wavelength spray paint stencils but mostly making a crafting mess.
I track the broad strokes of what Cyprus says, enough to mm-hmm and oh wow at the appropriate moments. A bunch of Channel musicians are now testifying on Augustus’s behalf (Cyprus thinks some of them must have been forced to) and there’s mounting pressure on the Channel to present Alexander Ash.
Cyprus’s words lull for a beat. I miss a shot while looking at Sasha’s lips, and I’m still not fully tuned in to Cyprus when she says she’s sorry Emelia didn’t stay.
“What?” I say.
Cyprus is standing close to me while she chalks her pool cue.
“Emelia was in a better space about you. She’s figuring stuff out. She felt really bad about how cold she was to you at the Pilgrim. I bet she would have stayed, except she got called in for a shift.”
Which could be real or an excuse, but Cyprus reads it honestly, adding.
“I just think it could have been fun to have her here tonight.”
She takes a perfect shot to delicately send a ball sideways into a pocket.
“Tonight was already pretty good,”
I say, focused on Sasha carefully cutting out a letter.
“It really was. But I know it still hurts.”
Cyprus understands how echoes remain in me. It’s like she can see through my backpack to the words I wrote in Emelia’s book. See how things linger even if I think they’re gone.
But Sasha glances up at me with the slightest of smirks, and I have to tear my eyes away from them. I’m sure they see me hide my smile.
“Less this evening.”
That’s true, even if she reads it wrong.
“Next time we see Emelia, will you try to talk to her? I think it’d go better.”
“I don’t know.”
“For me, Lillian.”
“I’ll try.”
Cyprus hugs me from behind while I try to take my next shot, resting her head against my back. She stays there for a while afterwards.
“I’m okay,”
I say.
“I really am doing okay. It’s your shot.”
She’s beating me three games to none. I can’t stop playing now.
“I know.”
She doesn’t let go.
“Do you think there’s a chance everything works out?”
“Like cosmically? You know I don’t.”
“No, just that each tomorrow is better. Do you ever think back to who you were and realize how far you’ve come? I know our hearts won’t stop getting broken. But maybe looking back could always be hopeful. We could be glad we found our way to where we are.”
“We could,”
I say, and Cyprus asks when I became glass-half-full. She says I’ve been replaced by a clone, but both of us are glad to see the other one seeming alright.
I fall asleep on the couch and wake up to the smells of breakfast food cooking upstairs and a warm murmuring of voices. The sort of music where every song sounds a little the same and it’s comforting. Someone covered me in a blanket, but I don’t know who. Each one of them cares enough to do it, so maybe there’s a chance everything works out.