So, that's it. August kind of knew, but now she knows. She can't do this and have a crush on Jane at the same time.
It's fine. It's only that August used to love Say Anything before life intervened to make her hate everything, and Jane is the first person to ever make her feel all John-Cusack-and-Ione-Skye. It's not a big deal that Jane's hand is the perfect size to brace against August's waist, or that when Jane looks at her, she can't look back because her heart starts doing things so big and loud that the rest of her can barely hold the size and sound. She'll live.
The bottom line: there's no chance. Even if somehow Jane feels the same, August has a deadline. She has to help Jane figure out who she is, how she got stuck, and how to get her out.
And if she manages to pull that off, Jane's not exactly here permanently. She's not exactly here at all. And, well, August has never truly had her heart broken before, but she's pretty sure that falling in love with someone only to send them back to the 1970s would, as first heartbreaks go, win the Fuck You Up Olympics.
Anyway, she can compartmentalize. She spent her childhood getting paid in Happy Meals to break into people's personal archives and pretending that was normal. She can pretend she's never thought about Jane holding her hand in a cute East Village brownstone with a West Elm sofa and a wine fridge. This crush, she decides, is just not going to work for her.
Which means, of course, the next time August steps on the Q, Jane says, "I think I should kiss you."
It doesn't start that way. It starts with August, too busy thinking about not thinking about Jane to check the weather for the morning's freak thunderstorm, slipping in her own puddle of rainwater.
"Whoa," Jane says, catching her under the elbow before she hits the subway floor. "Who tried to drown you?"
"The fucking MTA," August says, letting Jane help her to her feet. She pushes her sopping hair out of her eyes, blinking through the raindrops on her glasses. "Twenty-minute delay on an outdoor platform. They want me dead."
August takes off her glasses and desperately checks herself for a single dry inch of fabric to wipe them on.
"Here," Jane says, pulling up the tail of her shirt. August sees the smooth skin of her stomach, hints of a secret tattoo spilling up over her waistband on one hip, and forgets to breathe. Jane takes her glasses to wipe off the lenses. "You didn't have to come today."
"I wanted to," August says. She adds quickly, "We've been making good progress."
Jane looks up, halfway grinning, and stops, August's glasses still in her hand.
"Oh, wow," she says softly.
August blinks. "What?"
"It's—without your glasses, the wet hair." She hands them back, but her eyes, distant and a little dazed, don't leave August's face. "I got a flash of something."
"A memory?"
"Sort of," Jane says. "Like a half memory. You reminded me."
"Oh," August says. "What is it?"
"A kiss," Jane says. "I don't—I can't remember exactly where I was, or who she was, but when you looked at me, I could remember the rain."
"Okay," August says. She'd take a note if her notebook wasn't completely soaked. Also if she thought she was steady enough to hold a pen. "What, uh, what else can you remember?"
Jane chews on her bottom lip. "She had long hair, like yours, but maybe blond? It's weird, like—like a movie I saw, except I know it happened to me, because I remember her wet hair stuck to the side of her neck and how I had to peel it off so I could kiss her there."
Jesus Christ.
Life-ruining descriptions of things Jane can do with her mouth aside, it does present a ... possibility. The fastest way to recover Jane's memories has been to make her smell or hear or touch something from her past.
"You know how we did the thing with the bagels," Jane says, apparently thinking the same thing, "and the music, the sensory stuff? If I—if we—can re-create how that moment felt, maybe I can remember the rest."
Jane looks around—it's a slow day for the Q, only a few people at the other end of the car.
"Do you want to—you could try, um, touching my neck?" August offers lamely, hating herself. "For, like, research."
"Maybe," Jane says. "But it was ... it was in an alley. We had ducked out of the rain into an alley, and we were laughing, and I hadn't kissed her yet, but I'd been thinking about it for weeks. So—" She turns distractedly toward the empty back wall of the car, next to the emergency exit.
"Oh." August follows, wet sneakers squelching unattractively.
Jane turns to her, drags two fingers across the back of her hand. The look on her face is intent, like she's holding the memory tight in her head, transposing it over the present. She grabs August by the wrist, backing her into the wall of the car, and, oh shit.
"She was leaning against the wall," Jane explains simply.
August feels her shoulders hit smooth metal, and in a panic, she imagines bricks scraping against her back instead, a sky instead of handrails and flickering fixtures, herself with any kind of grace to survive this.
"Okay," August says. She and Jane have been pressed closer than this during commuter rushes, but it's never, not once, felt like this. She tips her chin up. "Like this?"
"Yeah," Jane says. Her voice hushed. She must be concentrating. "Just like that."
August swallows. It's almost funny, how much she's absolutely going to die.
"And," Jane says, "I put my hand here." She leans in and braces one hand against the wall next to August's head. Her body heat crackles between them. "Like this."
"Uh-huh."
It's research. It's only research. Lie back and think of the fucking Dewey Decimal System.
"And I leaned in," Jane says. "And I—"
Her other hand ghosts over August's throat before sliding backward, her thumb grazing August's pulse, and August's eyes close on instinct. She touches August's hair with her fingertips and pulls it gently away from the side of her neck. The cool air is a shock to her skin.
"Is—is it helping?"
"Hang on," Jane says. "Can I—?"
"Yeah," August says. It doesn't matter what the question is.
Jane makes a small sound, ducks her head, and there's breath against August's bare skin, close enough to mimic the gesture but only just not making contact, which is somehow worse than a kiss would be. It's more intimate, the silent promise that she could if she wanted to, and August would let her, if they both wanted the same thing in the same way.
Jane's lips skim August's skin when she says, "Jenny."
August opens her eyes. "What?"
"Jenny," Jane says, drawing back. "Her name was Jenny. We were a block from my apartment."
"Where?"
"I can't remember," Jane says. She frowns and adds, "I think I should kiss you."
August's mind goes searingly blank.
"You—what?"
"I'm almost there," Jane says, and fuck if August can't suppress a shiver at those words in that voice from that soft mouth. "I think—"
"That if you—" August clears her throat and tries again. "You think that if you—if you kiss me—"
"I'll remember, yeah." She's looking at August with a precise kind of interest. Not like she's thinking about a kiss, but more like she's focusing hard on an objective. It happens to be a disastrously good look on her. Her jaw goes all jutty and angular, and August wants to give her anything she wants and then change her own name and skip the continent.
Jane's watching her face, tracking a raindrop that rolls from her hairline to her chin, and August knows, she knows, if she does this, she's never going to stop thinking about it for the rest of her life. You can't un-kiss the most impossible person you've ever met. She's never going to forget what that tastes like.
But Jane looks hopeful, and August wants to help. And, well. She believes in in-depth, hands-on evidence gathering. That's all.
Compartmentalize, August tells herself. For the love of God, Landry. Compartmentalize.
"Okay," August says. "It's not a bad idea."
"You sure?" Jane says gently. "You don't have to if you don't want to."
"That's not—" That's not the issue, but if Jane doesn't know that by now, she probably never will. "I don't mind."
"Okay," Jane says, visibly relieved. God, she has no idea.
"Okay," August says. "For research."
"For research," Jane agrees.
August squares her shoulders. For research.
"What should I do?"
"Can you touch me?" Jane takes one of August's hands and holds it to her chest, right below the hard line of her collarbone. "Right here?"
"Okay," August says, more of a shaky exhale than a word. "Then what?"
Jane's leaning in, taking advantage of her height to bracket August in, burning so hot that August can't make sense of the chill sweeping up her spine. So steady and beautiful and close, too close, never close enough, and August is so completely, irreversibly, spectacularly screwed.
"And," Jane says, "I kissed her."
The train plunges out of a tunnel and back into the deafening rain.
"Did she kiss you back?"
Jane's other hand finds its way to August's waist, to the place that feels designed by the profound unfairness of the universe to fit it so exactly.
"Yeah," Jane says. "Yeah, she did."
And Jane kisses her.
The truth about wanting someone to kiss you for ages is, it rarely lives up to whatever you've imagined. Real kisses are messy, awkward, too dry, too wet, imperfect. August learned years ago that movie kisses don't happen. The best you can hope for in a first kiss is to be kissed back.
But then, there's this kiss.
There's Jane's hand on her waist, and the rain rushing down onto the roof of the train, and a half-remembered moment pinned against a brick wall, and this kiss, and August couldn't have imagined it would feel like this.
Jane's mouth is soft but insistent, and August feels the press of it in her body, in a place much too close to her heart. If looking at Jane feels like flowers opening, being kissed by her feels heavier, the weight of a body that'll be gone by morning settling into bed beside her. It reminds her of being homesick for months and tasting something familiar and realizing it's even better than you remember, because it comes with the sweet gut punch of knowing and being known. It melts in her mouth like ice cream at the corner store when she was eight. It aches like a brick to the shin.
Jane kisses her and kisses her, and August has completely lost track of what this was even supposed to be about, because she's kissing Jane back, swiping her thumb into the dip of Jane's collarbone, and Jane's tongue is tracing the soft seam of her lips, and August's mouth is falling open. Jane's hand drops from the wall to brace against August's face, tangled up in her wet hair, and she's everywhere and nowhere—in her mouth, at her waist, against her hips, touching too much for August to pretend this isn't real to her but not enough to know if it's real to Jane too.