“No?” Sasha asked. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Can’t even give me a chance?” Sasha asked.
“I know your type.”
“Well, I don’t,” Daphne said, eyes bouncing between them like a ping-pong ball. “What is happening right now?”
“Your friend,” Sasha said, setting Daphne’s martini in front of her, then resting her elbows on the bar and steepling her fingers, “is turning me down.”
Friend.
Daphne rolled the word around in her brain, tried to focus on the matter at hand. “She is?”
“I am,” April said. “And so are you if you know what’s good for you.”
“I think we’ve established I definitely don’t know what’s good for me,” Daphne said.
April sipped her drink. “Let’s not add insult to injury, then.”
Sasha presented her palms. “Fine, fine. I get it. Just looking for some summer fun, that’s all.”
“And we look like fun?” Daphne asked. She still wasn’t completely sure what was going on—was Sasha asking April out, orDaphne? Or both of them? Maybe neither, but her face heated again anyway. To be fair, she blushed when someone smiled at her on the subway, so that wasn’t saying much.
“You sure do…” Sasha trailed off, expression expectant as she waited for her name.
“Daphne,” she said, then very nearly giggled at the way Sasha smiled at her. It wasn’t that she was turned on or even tempted—Sasha was justcharming, and Daphne had never fared very well around hot and charming people, as her recent history testified.
“Daphne,” Sasha said, then winked. “Lovely name.”
“Oh my god,” April said.
Daphne did giggle then, covering her tomato-hued face with her napkin, which made both Sasha and April laugh out loud.
“I’m sorry,” Daphne said. “I’m so new at this.”
“New?” Sasha asked. “Are you a baby gay?”
“Um, sort of?” Daphne said. “I just got out of something serious, and before that…”
“Before that?” Sasha asked.
Daphne slurped at her martini and glanced at April, who simply lifted her brows. “Before that, I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family with my preacher father and Sunday school–teaching mother, both of whom believed, along with most of my town, that being queer was a one-way ticket to hell. I’d never so much as held a girl’s hand before college, where I kissed exactly three people and couldn’t move past first base until I fell in love with someone I suspect might actually be evil.”
Daphne’s face grew even hotter, and she grabbed her martini again, taking a big, salty gulp.
“Well, shit,” Sasha said.
“Exactly that,” April said, though her voice was softer than Sasha’s. Daphne glanced at her, but the eye contact with her ex’s exat that moment was a bit too much, so she stared down at the olives floating in her foggy drink.
“So…you’ve slept with…” Sasha started, a baffled expression on her face.
“One person, yes,” Daphne said, eyes still on her glass.
Sasha nodded, her mouth pursed. “That’s…that’s…wow.”
“Spoken like a true fuckboi,” April said. “She doesn’t have to have notches on her bedpost to have a fulfilling queer experience. Ace people exist. So do monogamous people who fell in love with their person when they were, like, seventeen.”
