"We’re the same then.” She looks away, and looks outside the window.
The cab stops outside a building I’ve never seen. Rhonda pays before I can, unlocks a street door, and I follow her up a narrow stair into the place where she lives.
Her apartment is smaller than I expected and more full of her than I could have guessed—a wall of records, a bass on a stand like a houseplant, a single good armchair worn into the shape of one person. There’s no guest couch here. There’s just her life, and me standing in the middle of it.
“This feels weird,” she says, filling the kettle.
“Me being here?”
“No you’re fine. I mean you in my room.” She makes two mugs—hers black, mine with milk, because somewhere in a year of texts she filed that away—and hands me one so our fingers overlap fora half-second neither of us hurries. “It’s weird, we’re talking in person and not on a phone. It’s a good weird.”
There’s nowhere to sit but the armchair and the edge of the bed, so we end up on the floor with our backs against the bed frame, shoulders not quite touching, mugs going cold on the boards.
“I was scared you wouldn’t come,” she says.
“Really? I was scared I would.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Now,” I say, “I’m just scared.”
“Me too.” And then she leans in and kisses me. It’s slow and certain, and when we come apart she keeps her forehead against mine—for about four seconds, before I pull her back in, because I’ve spent a year wanting this and I’m done being patient about it.
We don’t make it far. The kettle goes cold on the counter, forgotten. She kisses me like she’s reading me—slow, then not, learning what changes my breathing and filing it away the way she files everything about me. Her hands find the hem of my jumper and stop there, a question.
“Yes,” I say, before she can ask it aloud. “Yes. Please.”
She takes her time, and that’s the thing that undoes me—not urgency but attention, the same focus she brings to a bass line, turned entirely on me. She learns me by degrees, checking with her eyes and her hands and a low “this okay?” against my throat that I answer by pulling her closer. On the too-small bed, in a city where nobody knows my name, she takes me apart with a patience that feels like being memorised.
I’m not quiet. She taught me across a year of voice notes that words matter, that precision is a kind of respect, so I tell her what I want and she gives it to me and says my name back like it’s the only word she trusts. When it breaks over me it’s with her hand laced in mine and her mouth soft at my shoulder and my whole careful, compartmentalised life narrowed to the single fact of her.
Afterward she doesn’t let go. She pulls me back against her, her arm heavy across my waist, and presses a kiss to the top of my spine, and I feel her breathing go slow and even against my back.
Somewhere in it I remember to text Jani—staying at a friend’s, don’t wait up—and she sends a question mark, then a heart, and I turn the phone face down and don’t think about it again.
There’s one bed and no pretending otherwise, and I’m too wrung out and too happy and too thoroughly undone to make it a thing. I fall asleep before I mean to, mid-sentence, wrapped in sheets that smell like her, the most dangerous and least lonely I’ve felt in years.
CHAPTER 8
THE BLOWUP
Lena flies home Sunday morning before I’m properly awake. I feel the mattress shift and hear her moving in the dark, careful, trying not to wake me.
“I know you’re awake,” she says from the doorway, dressed, bag on her shoulder.
“I’m not.”
She laughs, crosses the room and kisses my forehead. “I have to make the nine-forty. Some of us have spreadsheets.”
“Stay, please.” I say, which is not a word I use. It surprises both of us.
“Next time.” She says it like a promise, not a brush-off. “Text me when you’re at rehearsal.” And then she’s gone, and the apartment is too quiet, and I lie in the warm dent she left.
Sandy is forty minutes late.
The studio costs four hundred dollars an hour.
Jeremy is behind his kit, practicing ghost notes. His hands move through the air first, muscle memory and deliberation, before the sticks touch anything. Ana is on the couch noodling through a chord progression. Jo is here, which counts as a tactical victory—the last three sessions she sent apologies via email from Rebecca's apartment.
