The first time Jane kissed her for real, it felt like a warning. This time, it’s a promise. It’s a sigh of relief in the back of her throat. It’s a string of fate August never thought she’d believe in, pulling tight.
“You wanna give me an address or what?” the driver says from the front seat, sounding absolutely bored.
Jane laughs, wide and bright, right up against August’s mouth, and August leans back to say, “Parkside and Flatbush.”
On the curb outside the Popeyes, August drops her keys, and a moving truck trundles through a deep puddle of sludge on the street and drenches them both.
“Fuck,” August says, taking her dirty glasses off and plucking her keys out of the gutter. “I pictured this a lot more cinematic.”
She turns to Jane, dripping and soaked through and slightly blurry, covered in mud and grinning, still there. Just continuing to be there, somehow, despite every goddamn law of the universe saying she shouldn’t be.
“I don’t know,” Jane says, reaching out to thumb at the mascara raccooning under August’s eyes. “I think you look great.”
August breathes out a delirious laugh, and at the top of the stairs, she pushes Jane through the front door of the apartment.
“Shower,” August says, “I’m covered in street juice.”
“So sexy,” Jane teases, but she doesn’t argue.
They stumble toward the bathroom, leaving a trail of shoes and wet clothes. August turns on the faucet—somehow, miraculously, for the first time since she moved in, the water is hot.
Jane pins her to the bathroom sink and kisses her, and when August is finally down to only her wet bra and underwear, she opens her eyes.
She keeps having these moments, where she has to stare at Jane, like if she looks away for too long, she’ll disappear. But here she is, standing in August’s bathroom, hair damp and sticking out in every direction from where August has been tugging at it, in a black bra and briefs. There are her hipbones, and her bare thighs, and the rest of her tattoos—the animals up and down her sides.
August reaches down and trails her fingers over the snake’s tongue just below Jane’s waist. Jane shivers.
“You’re here,” August says.
“I’m here,” Jane confirms.
“What does it feel like?” August asks.
There’s a pause as Jane’s eyes sweep open and closed, her fingertips grazing over the porcelain of the sink behind August’s back.
“Permanent.” She says it like a complete sentence.
August’s hand slides up her back, to the clasp of her bra. “We need to talk about what this means.”
“Yeah,” Jane says. “I know. But I…” She leans back down, kissing the top of August’s cheekbone. She’s moving again, restless, finally let off the leash. “I can think later. Right now I just want to be here, okay?”
And August, who has spent every minute of the last few months wishing she could touch Jane one more time, says yes.
They manage to work wet underthings off wet bodies and then, in the shower, they dissolve into each other, graceless and messy. August loses track of who washes whose hair or where the suds are coming from. The whole landscape of the world becomes golden-brown skin and fluid black lines of ink and a feeling in her chest like flowers. She kisses, and Jane kisses back, again, forever.
It’s supposed to be just a shower—August swears—but everything is wet and warm and slick and it’s too easy and natural for her hand to slip down between Jane’s legs, and Jane’s pushing back into her palm, and it’s been so long. What else is she supposed to do?
“Missed you so fucking much,” August breathes out. She thinks it’s lost in the rush of the shower, but Jane hears it.
“I’m here,” Jane says, licking water from the hollow of August’s throat. August replaces her hand with her thigh, bearing down on Jane’s in return, and they move together, one of Jane’s hands on the wall for balance. Her breath hitches when she says it again: “I’m here.”
They’re kissing, and Jane’s grinding against her, and she feels herself sinking into a fog of want, molten skin, a mouth on hers. It’s too much, and it’s not enough, and then they’re stumbling out of the tub and August’s back is on the bathmat, on the bathroom floor, and Jane is kissing her like she wants to disappear into her, hands roaming.
“Hang on,” Jane says, moving to pull back. August grabs her wrist.
“Why—ah—” August gasps at the change of angle before Jane takes her fingers away completely.