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The earring was the first thing she noticed.
Tori had been drifting for what felt like a long time, somewhere in the soft middle place between awake and gone, and the only thing keeping her from sinking all the way down was the small, persistent press of metal against her cheekbone—one of the silver hoops she’d put in eighteen hours ago, before any of this, before the gowns and the speeches and the photos and the graduation party that was still, somehow, going on beneath her. She had not taken any of it off, not the earrings or the necklace or the makeup, because the moment of getting horizontal had overtaken any practical instinct she might otherwise have had to clean herself up. She could feel the weight of mascara on her lashes every time she blinked into the pillow, the sticky pull of lipstick that had long since migrated past the edges of her mouth. All of it was pressing itself slowly into her pillowcase as she breathed, slow and warm, into the cotton.
Beneath her, in the room directly under hers, the bass of whatever song someone had cued up on the speakers thudded faintly through the floor. It was a kindly muffled thud, the kind that made it through ceiling and subfloor and carpet and lost most of itself on the way, so that by the time it reached her ear it was less a song than a heartbeat—something the house was doing, not something happening to her. Tori found, in her drunken in-and-out, that she liked it. She liked the house being alive underneath her while she went horizontal in her own bed in her own room with her own face pressed into her own pillow, and she liked that the shirt currently bunched up around her ribs was not her own.
Jade’s pajama shirt was older than the both of them. It was an oversized black t-shirt she’d found thrifting with the cracked-paint album art of some band that Jade tried to explain to her on three separate occasions, and the cotton had been washed soft enough over its long life that it felt almost like flannel against Tori’s collarbones, the kind of soft that came only from years of laundromats and dryer cycles and one specific person sleeping in it night after night. It hung off her shoulder in a way that exposed a long tan stripe of skin to the cool air of the bedroom, the hem grazing the very tops of her thighs whenever she shifted, the sleeves so wide they bunched up around her biceps and slipped halfway down her arms when she let them. It smelled—Tori turned her face slightly into the collar and confirmed it for the third time that hour—like Jade. Specifically like Jade after a long day: the sharp amber note of her shampoo gone faint, the warmer underlayer of whatever lotion she put on her hands, and then the indefinable thing under that, the thing Tori had stopped trying to name a long time ago because naming it would have felt like flattening it. She just knew it was Jade, the way you know a song from its first three notes.
She’d told Jade, half-past midnight, that she was going up to change. She had meant it, technically. She had even climbed the stairs with the full intention of swapping her sparkly tank top for something less itchy on the inside of her arms and going back down, but then the bed had called her name the second she’d stepped through the doorway. There was no fighting it. She’d stripped out of her clothes, kicked them both into the corner near the closet, and dug Jade’s pajama shirt out of the overnight bag she had left propped against Tori’s vanity. She’d pulled it over her head with her bra still on, realized her mistake, reached up under it to unhook the bra and pulled it out one armhole the way every girl learns to in middle school, and dropped it on the floor too. Then she’d crawled, head faintly spinning, into the bed, and the second her cheek had touched the pillow her body had decided, with the absolute authority of a drunk eighteen-year-old, that that was the end of the night.
That had been… she didn’t know. An hour ago? An hour and a half? Time was being weird. She had heard, distantly, the song she’d put on the playlist for André start up at one point, the one that always made him do the goofy little shoulder dance, and she had smiled into her pillow about that, but she hadn’t gotten up. She had heard, much closer, someone laughing too loud in the upstairs hallway and then someone shushing them, and she’d thought drowsily that that was probably Robbie, and she still hadn’t gotten up. Once, she thought she’d heard her name being called from the bottom of the stairs in a voice that might have been Jade’s and might have been a dream, and she had turned her face the other way on the pillow and gone right back down.
She wasn’t a bad host. She just was, at this particular moment, a horizontal one.
What woke her, eventually, was the silence.
It happened all at once, the way a fan turning off in a room makes you realize the fan had been on. The bass under the floor cut, mid-song, mid-bar, and the thing it left behind was so abrupt that Tori actually frowned into her pillow. For a second she’d thought she’d gone deaf. Then the rest of the house arrived: the rattle of someone pulling open the front door, voices in the entryway saying their goodbyes too loud the way drunk people did, someone telling someone else to drive safe, the scuff of shoes on the porch, a car door, an engine, another engine, the door closing again. She listened to it from very far away, with her face still pressed sideways into the pillow and the earring still digging its tiny dent into her cheek, and she let it happen without opening her eyes.
The party, apparently, was over.
There were footsteps then—a heavy tread on the kitchen tile that, by the sound of them, had to be boots. The lights downstairs must have still been on; she could see, through the slit of her half-closed bedroom door, the faint warm rectangle of light coming up the stairs and spilling across the upstairs landing. Somebody—Jade, Tori would have bet her life on it—opened the dishwasher. Somebody else—André, it sounded like André—said something low and got laughed at for it, and Tori, eyes still closed, smiled.
She drifted then, listening only with the surface of her mind, the rest of her settled deep in the warm well of the mattress. The fridge opened and closed twice in succession, the seal pulling free and clapping shut with that soft thud only a refrigerator could make. After that came the slow, methodical work of cleanup: the crinkle and crunch of a beer can being crushed in someone’s fist, the bright tink of it landing in the recycling bin, and then another, and another, and another, with the small considered pause between each one that meant whoever was doing it was being thorough. A glass bottle was set down on the counter too hard and immediately scooted away with a softer scrape, someone catching it before it could topple. Water ran briefly in the sink, and then the wet slosh of something being poured down the drain followed it, and somewhere in the middle of all of this Tori heard Jade say something in the cadence of a question and André say something back in the cadence of a joke, and then she heard Jade laugh—not the polite, half-vacant laugh Jade did at parties for people she didn’t know how to leave a conversation with, but the real one, the one that came out of her like she was a little surprised to find it there—and Tori turned her face deeper into the pillow and let the sound settle on her chest like a small warm weight she had no intention of moving.
She loved them, she thought, drifting; she loved both of them so much that it was, on certain nights and in certain moods, a thing that bordered on embarrassing.
Eventually the kitchen sounds tapered off, and the voices got closer, moving toward the entryway, and Tori finally opened her eyes a slit. Her bed was tucked into the corner of the room and her face was angled toward the wall, the way she’d dropped after flinging herself down, which meant she was looking at her old fairy lights that had been tacked up in a lazy zigzag since middle school. They weren’t lit; she hadn’t switched them on in months. The only light in the room was the warm strip leaking under her bedroom door from the hall outside, and it slid across her ceiling in a long, butter-yellow bar.
“Okay,” Jade said, downstairs, full volume now that no one but André was around to hear her, “seriously. Text me when you get home so I know you haven’t died in a ditch somewhere.”
“You’ve grown so much, West,” André said back, drawling it out with exaggerated tenderness. “Used to be you wished all of us would die in a ditch somewhere. Now look at you. All worried.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jade said. There was a smile under it Tori could hear from upstairs through the half-closed door. “Get out of here before I put you in the ditch myself.”
“Love you too, Jade.”
“Don’t push it.”
The front door opened on the squeak of its old hinge—the one Tori’s dad had been promising to oil for a year now—and then closed again in the same breath, and the deadbolt slid into place with the small, definite thunk that Tori’s family had been using as the punctuation at the end of their nights for as long as she could remember. After that the only sounds left in the house were the clatter of ice falling into their dedicated spot in the freezer and the soft, deliberate footsteps of Jade West coming up the stairs.
Tori, lying very still, decided to play dead.
She didn’t know exactly why. There was no reason to. Jade wouldn’t be surprised to find her there; Jade had watched her disappear up the stairs hours ago and had not, by the sound of the laughing in the kitchen, been anything but amused about it. But there was something about the way Jade was moving up the hallway—slowly, carefully, the way you move when you’re trying not to wake someone—that made Tori want to be the someone Jade was being careful about. So she kept her face turned into the pillow and her breathing slow and her eyes closed, and she listened.
The bedroom door creaked, very faintly, as Jade slipped through the gap. Tori could feel the small adjustment of air as Jade widened it just enough to fit through and then eased it shut behind her with the kind of patience that you only ever extended for one specific person. The latch caught with a soft tick. Jade exhaled, audibly, like she’d finally been let off duty.
The sound that came next was the sound of Jade taking off her boots, and Tori knew that sound the way she knew her own pulse. There was the small adjustment of weight as Jade lifted one foot to her opposite knee, the soft creak of leather working against itself as her fingers found the side zipper, the slow, almost reluctant zip of the metal teeth giving way one by one, and then the muted thud of the heel as Jade lowered the boot down to the hardwood instead of letting it drop. The second one followed in the same key, the same patient three-part movement, set down beside the first with the same deliberate care. Jade had not always done it this way. Jade in their sophomore year had stomped through every room she entered as though she were personally insulted by floors, had kicked her boots off into corners, had let doors slam behind her because slamming doors had been, at the time, part of her language. This Jade—this Jade in Tori’s bedroom in the dark at two in the morning, post-party, post-graduation, post-everything—had learned somewhere along the way to be quiet on Tori’s behalf, and Tori, with her eyes still closed and her cheek still pressed warm into the pillow, listened to the sound of those two boots being set down beside each other like a pair of polite shoes outside a temple.
After the boots came the soft, unhurried sounds of Jade undressing. There was the brief metallic flutter as the buckle of her belt swung loose and grazed the floor with a tink that made Jade hiss “fuck” through her teeth. The unmistakable shushing whisper of her skirt and tights being pushed down over hips and the small grunt Jade made when she had to wriggle out of tights she’d worn too tight to begin with. The skirt and tights came off in a heap; Tori could hear the way they crumpled in on themselves rather than landed flat. Then there was the small soft sound of her tight top going up over her head—the cotton dragging against an earring, against a chin—and the matching exhale Jade always did when she got out from under a layer she hadn’t realized was holding her in. Bare feet padded the short distance between the door and the vanity and Tori felt rather than heard the moment Jade crouched down beside the duffel bag she’d left propped against the vanity earlier in the evening. The zipper sang open. The flap was pulled back. Hands began to move through fabric, and for the first ten or fifteen seconds the sound was orderly, the methodical sort of rummage that meant Jade knew exactly where the thing she was looking for was supposed to be.
Then the rummaging changed. The hands inside the bag began to move with a different energy, lifting things and setting them aside instead of brushing past them, sliding all the way to the bottom and coming up empty, and Tori, in the bed with the embroidered band logo stitched between the shoulder blades and her face buried in the pillow, felt her mouth start to twitch at the corner. The bag rustled harder. Something, a hairbrush, maybe, clattered against something else. There was a brief, beleaguered exhale, the kind Jade made when she was just barely keeping a swear in her throat, and then a low, half-spoken muttering as she started talking to the duffel bag itself. “Where the hell,” Tori heard, very faintly, and then a pause, and then, even more faintly, “I literally just—”
Tori bit down on the inside of her cheek and tried, with everything she had, to keep her face still. It was no use. The giggle was already on its way up out of her, riding the warm tide of tequila and exhaustion and the simple stupid pleasure of lying in a bed in a borrowed shirt while the borrower hunted for it three feet away, and it bubbled out of her into the cotton of the pillowcase, muffled but unmistakable, the small bright sound of being caught. The rustling at the end of the bed stopped at once. The whole room went still, and Tori kept her face turned obediently away and let the laughter shake silently out of her shoulders.
“Oh my God,” Jade said, flat. “You fucking faker.”
Tori giggled again, more freely this time, and didn’t turn over.
“I have been,” Jade said, beginning to rummage through her bag again, “tiptoeing around in here for a solid five minutes. I have been moving like a… like a ghost, Vega. I have been respectful of your supposed slumber, and you’ve been awake this whole time?”
“Mhmm,” Tori hummed into the pillow, smiling.
“You are a menace,” Jade informed her.
“Mhmm.”
“And now I can’t find my pj shirt,” Jade added, like this was the final indignity of the night.
“Mmhmmm,” Tori said again, slower this time, drawing the sound out into something that was almost a purr. She felt, beneath her cheek, the faintest scratch of cotton from the collar of the shirt in question, and she pulled in a slow breath through her nose and let her shoulders relax further into the mattress.
The silence that followed had a shape to it. Tori could feel Jade thinking, could feel the precise moment the rummaging hands stilled at the bottom of the duffel, could feel the small sigh of breath Jade let out through her nose as she connected the giggle in the bed to the absence in the bag. The seconds stretched. Tori, smiling helplessly into the pillow, did not turn over to look. She didn’t need to. She knew exactly what Jade’s face was doing right now, the slow narrowing of the eyes and the tilt of the chin, the same expression Jade made every time she’d been outwitted.
“You’re wearing it,” Jade said at last, the words flat with the effort of not laughing.
“Maybe,” Tori said, into the pillow.
“Tori.”
“Hmm?”
“Are you wearing my shirt?”
Tori hummed an affirmative noise that did not commit to any specific syllable and felt, more than saw, Jade’s silhouette come around to lean over the bed. Cool fingers found the back of her neck, brushing her hair out of the way to confirm by touch what Jade already knew—the collar of the t-shirt, the embroidered band logo at the neck. The fingers were chilled from coming up out of the air-conditioned downstairs, and Tori made a small unhappy noise at the contact and tried to wriggle her shoulder up to her ear to push the fingers off.
“What the fuck, Vega?” Jade said, but she was laughing now, the little laugh she did under her breath when she had been planning to be annoyed and had failed to commit to it. “I need that. I have had a long night. I have been crushing beer cans for forty minutes. I want to put on my shirt and go to sleep, and you stole it. You have a whole drawer.” Her hand had moved by now from the back of Tori’s neck to the side of it, the cold mostly worn off, her thumb rubbing absently at the soft hollow under Tori’s ear. “An entire drawer of your own perfectly serviceable shirts. And you took mine.”
“It smells like you,” Tori mumbled.
Jade’s thumb stopped moving. “I can’t understand you when you’re talking into the pillow.”
“It smells,” Tori said, more clearly, finally lifting her face an inch off the pillow so she could be heard, “like you. And I missed you. I wanted to be close to you.”
“You could have been close to me,” Jade said, her thumb starting again. Her voice had gone softer in a way that Tori knew she didn’t always notice she was doing. “If you’d, you know, stayed downstairs. With me. At the party that was being held in your house.”
“I needed to be horizontal. Urgently.”
Jade’s hand slid up into Tori’s hair, all five fingers spreading out across her scalp, and Tori made a small involuntary noise of approval and pushed her head back into the touch the way a cat would.
“You abandoned me too, by the way,” Tori continued.
“Excuse me?”
“You could’ve joined me up here.”
“You’re the one who left,” Jade said. “You said, and I quote, ‘I’m gonna go change real quick, I’ll be right back.’ And then you didn’t come back. I went looking for you.”
“You did?”
“At one point. Yes. I’m sure you didn’t notice, what with all the menacing you were doing up here.”
“I doubt you actually even missed me,” Tori said, and she heard, in her own voice, the small testing quality that came in when she was fishing for something.
Jade’s fingers started scratching very lightly at her scalp in a way that almost certainly was not on purpose but absolutely undid Tori a little.
“That’s not at all true,” Jade said. “I wanted to be hanging out with you.”
Tori smiled into the pillow.
“Then get in bed and hang out with me here,” she said.
“I’m naked, Vega. I need a pj shirt.”
Tori’s eyes snapped open. “You’re naked?” she said, craning her head off the pillow, twisting against the mattress to get a look over her shoulder. She got a single excellent half-second of Jade in the dimness—pale shoulder, the curve of a breast in shadow—before Jade pointedly angled her body away, laughing. “Even better. Get in. Get in right now.”
“Oh, this is,” Jade’s hand finally left Tori's hair as she straightened up, and Tori felt the loss of it like a small physical injustice. “Was this the whole plan? Was this whole thing,” she gestured, presumably, at the shirt, “was this entire little stunt just a ploy to get me naked in your bed?”
“Not at all. But I’m not, like, opposed to the way it’s working out.”
“Mmm,” Jade said. “Cute. Well, that’s not how this is gonna go.”
She moved away from the bed—Tori made a small protesting noise—and crossed the room to Tori’s dresser, where she pulled the second drawer open with practiced familiarity as she’d been finding things in Tori’s drawers for the better part of a year. There was a soft rustling, then a soft, satisfied “ah.” Jade pulled out—Tori could just barely see it in the dark—another shirt, a different one, that Jade had originally lent her on their spring break trip to Big Bear and never gotten back. Jade pulled it over her head, she’d given up on her own modesty in this bedroom some time ago, ran her fingers through her hair to push it out of her collar, and then padded back across the area rug to the bed.
“Scoot,” she said.
“I’m comfortable.”
“You’re sprawled. You’re taking up the whole bed. Scoot, Vega.”
Tori, with great reluctance, turned her face back into the pillow and sluggishly migrated approximately four inches in the direction of the wall. It was just enough room for Jade, if Jade was willing to commit to spooning her, which—judging by the way the mattress dipped and the cool sheet lifted and Jade’s whole body pressed up against her back from shoulder to thigh—Jade was.
The first thing Tori registered was Jade’s arm sliding under the hem of the t-shirt—her t-shirt, technically, currently—and splaying flat across her stomach. Jade’s fingers stretched out across the soft expanse of skin there and then settled, and the gesture had a quality to it that Tori, even in her drunk and half-dissolved state, recognized: it was a claiming. Jade always slept this way when she slept here. Hand under the shirt, palm flat on Tori’s stomach, fingers spread, mine.
The second thing Tori registered was that Jade’s legs were absolutely arctic.
“Oh my God,” Tori said, jolting forward with a yelp as one of those legs slid into the warm pocket between her own and the second one draped over her hip. “Jade. Jade, what— Your legs—”
“What about them?” Jade asked, deeply unbothered, into the back of Tori’s neck.
“You’re a corpse. You are cold-blooded. You are legitimately cold-blooded. It’s June. It’s June, Jade. How are your legs— Feel them, they’re like ice, why are you like this, this is— Get them off—”
“No,” Jade said, and tightened her arm around Tori’s middle, and hooked the icy calf more firmly over the top of Tori’s thigh, and pressed her freezing nose into the back of Tori’s neck for good measure.
Tori, betrayed, made a noise of pure outrage and tried to wriggle forward an inch. Jade, with a small contented hum, simply followed her, mapping herself back onto Tori’s spine.
“This is torture,” Tori said, into the pillow.
“This is intimacy,” Jade corrected, mouth right at the curve of Tori’s ear now, her breath warm and the rest of her so resolutely not. “And how lucky am I? My girlfriend keeps me warm at night. It’s a real perk of the relationship, actually. I think it’s in our contract.”
“I want a renegotiation.”
“Denied.”
“You’re freezing me.”
“And you,” Jade murmured into the back of her neck, “run hot, which is the only useful thing about you. So hold still.”
“Jade.”
“Mm?”
“This is legitimately torturous.”
“Oh,” Jade said, in a tone suggesting her feelings were, allegedly, hurt. “Okay. Well. If it’s torture. I’ll just—” and Tori felt, with a horror that was perhaps disproportionate to the situation, the slow and deliberate uncoiling of Jade from around her. The arm started to slide out from under the shirt. The leg lifted off her hip. The chest at her back drew away by an inch, then two. The mattress shifted with Jade rolling over, putting her own back to Tori, putting cold inches of sheet between them—
“No,” Tori said, and her hand shot out behind her and caught a fistful of Jade’s shirt before she’d even consciously decided to move. “No, no, no. I take it back. Come back. Come back here.”
Jade, who had not moved more than a couple of inches in the first place, was laughing silently into the pillow now, Tori could feel it in the shake of the mattress.
“You are so mean,” Tori complained, and she pulled, hand still fisted in the back of Jade’s shirt, until Jade allowed herself to be pulled, and she fitted Jade’s arm back across her stomach with her own hand, palm down on the back of Jade’s knuckles, and she hooked her ankle around the cold ankle behind her like she was tying it down so it couldn’t escape again. “Mean, mean, mean, mean.”
“You missed me,” she teased.
“Yeah, I did. But for, like, two seconds, Jade.”
“You missed me for two seconds,” Jade pressed her face back into the soft place behind Tori’s ear, where the small hairs grew in fine, and breathed there for a moment in a way that made Tori’s eyelids go heavy all over again. “You’re such a dork.”
“Well,” Tori said, sleepily, settling—Jade’s hand under the shirt warm now, finally, with her own body heat, the icy leg slowly thawing where it pressed against the back of her thigh, “yeah. And you’re dating me. So what does that say about you?”
“It says absolutely nothing about me,” Jade claimed.
“Oh, shut up,” Tori said, fond, and Jade, fond too, did.
The room got very quiet.
Tori had thought, briefly, that they might just sleep. The way Jade’s breathing was already settling into the slow rhythm at her back, the way her own eyelids had started to feel heavy, suggested that sleep was, for both of them, a real and imminent possibility. The fan in the corner of the room was rotating slowly, oscillating left and right, and every time it pointed their way it sent a soft draft of air across the strip of skin on her shoulder where the t-shirt collar had slid down. The earring was still digging into her cheek, but she’d stopped caring about it; the earring was a price she was apparently willing to pay.
Then she opened her mouth, because she was a little drunk and she could not, for the life of her, stop her brain from doing what it always did, which was turning every quiet moment into an opportunity.
“Hey,” she said, quietly. “Did you ever hear from your dad?”
Jade’s hand on her stomach stilled. Just for a second. Then it kept moving, thumb resuming the small arc it had been drawing across her hipbone.
“André stayed late,” Jade said.
Tori blinked into the pillow. The redirect was so clean she almost missed it. “...Jade.”
“He helped me clean up a little. We did, like… a half-assed job, honestly. We got the visible stuff. We got most of the bottles. I didn’t even look at the back porch, though.” Her thumb continued to brushed back and forth across Tori’s stomach, in the soft place above her hipbone. “I’ll help you with the rest in the morning. I told him I’d give you the half-ass warning.”
Tori was quiet for a beat, weighing it. She could feel, in the careful neutrality of Jade’s voice, the place where Jade had decided not to go, and she could feel the small steady wall Jade had set up in front of it. She let it be. She let it be because Jade was holding her, and because the night was long, and because she had learned, over three years of knowing Jade West, that you did not pry a closed door open on Jade’s behalf; you waited for her to crack it.
“You’re a good cleanup partner,” Tori told her.
“I’m a great cleanup partner.”
“Mhmm.” Tori smiled into the pillow. “I heard you tell him not to die in a ditch.”
Jade huffed a small, warm laugh against her skin. “Yeah, well, he had one beer at, like, 6pm, but I don’t trust the freeway at two in the morning, so I told him to text. We should hear from him any minute now.”
“You used to want all of us to die in a ditch.”
“He brought that up.”
“He was right to.”
“He has,” Jade said, with great dignity, “a good memory and a smug little face about it, and one day I will get my revenge.”
Tori, smiling, reached down and laced her fingers through Jade’s where they rested on her skin. She lifted Jade’s hand to her mouth, kissed the back of Jade’s knuckles once, slow, and then guided the hand back down to her belly and resumed the lacing. Jade’s breath hitched, very slightly, against the back of her neck. Tori felt that, too; she felt everything Jade did.
“I like that you guys are friends,” Tori said, after a moment.
“We’ve always been friends, Vega.”
“Mm. Not really. Not for real. You’ve been, like, friends-by-proxy. You were each other’s friend because we were in the same school and the same group and I basically forced everyone to all hang out together. But since Halloween you’ve actually been…” Tori squeezed Jade’s hand, considering. “You call him now.”
“I do not.”
“I’ve seen your phone.”
“That’s an invasion of privacy.”
“It’s literally on the kitchen counter half the time, Jade. And you call him. And he calls you. And the other day you were cackling in my living room about something he’d sent you and you didn’t even tell me what it was, you just—”
“Classified information.”
“—you just laughed and then put your phone down on the coffee table and acted like nothing had happened. I saw you. You’re his friend now. For real.”
Jade was silent for a moment, considering this accusation. The ankle hooked around hers had warmed up entirely, and the curve of her body against Tori’s back was now, finally, a single uniform temperature, which was itself a kind of small miracle.
“I’m not, like— He’s not my best friend,” she said, eventually. “I have a best friend. I’m with my best friend right now.”
“Mhmm.”
“He’s just a chill dude.”
“A chill dude,” Tori echoed, smiling. “Who you call. On the phone. With your voice.”
“What’re you trying to get at, Vega?”
“Nothing really,” Tori said, drawing little circles on the back of Jade’s hand with her thumb, very slow. “I just like that my two best friends are also friends.”
Tori thought, suddenly, of a Tuesday afternoon two months ago—André in her kitchen, slicing an apple, telling her in his casual way that he and Jade had decided she wasn’t allowed to take the bus home from her closing shifts anymore, that one of them would always come get her, and that he and Jade had a system worked out, and Tori had blinked at him and said excuse me what system, and he had said it lightly, around a mouthful of apple, like it was nothing—Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays were Jade’s days, Tuesdays and Thursdays were his, weekends they’d play it by ear. She’d protested, weakly, that she could in fact take the bus home, she was eighteen, she was an adult, and André had simply said, “Yeah, no, you don’t get a vote, this is between me and Jade,” and gone back to slicing his apple.
She’d told Cat about it later. Cat had laughed, in that delighted way she had, and said, “They have joint custody of you.”
Tori had said, half-laughing, half-uneasy, “It feels a little… managed. Right? Like a little— They’re managing me?”
And Cat had tilted her head and said, gently, “Yeah, but in a love way.”
Tori had rolled that around in her head for the rest of the afternoon and then, by the evening, had decided Cat was right and that she was okay with it. Loved, even. Loved in the way that meant chosen, accounted for, looked after by two people who were, against any odds Tori would have given on the subject in tenth grade, now pooling their resources to take care of her.
Behind her, Jade hummed. It was a quiet, agreeing sound, low in her throat, and Tori felt it more than heard it, vibrating against her shoulder blade.
Her arm tightened around Tori’s middle. The fingers under the shirt curled inward, just slightly, gathering Tori a little closer. The leg over Tori’s leg flexed and resettled. The whole of her—long, possessive, faintly minty-breathed in a way that meant she’d done at least a basic teeth-brushing in the downstairs bathroom before coming up—pressed itself a little more firmly into the line of Tori’s back, like a signature. Tori sat for a moment with the dad question still hanging in her chest where she’d put it down, and she let it stay there. She’d come back to it. Jade would let her come back to it eventually. Jade always did, in her own time.
“Oh,” Jade said, after a minute. “You missed Cat crying.”
“Cat cries every time we do anything,” Tori said into the pillow, but she was already frowning, because the way Jade had said it—too lightly, the way Jade always said serious things—had a particular quality. “What was it about this time?”
“Her brother.”
“Oh, no.”
“He texted her. From wherever he is right now. Some treatment center, I think.” Jade’s thumb had stilled on Tori’s stomach. Tori squeezed her hand. “He told her he was proud of her for graduating, and that he hoped he’d get to see her soon.”
Tori’s chest squeezed. “Oh, Cat.”
“Yeah.” Jade let out a slow breath against the back of Tori’s neck. “She came into the kitchen and just… handed me her phone. Didn’t say anything. Just handed it to me with the message open. And then sort of leaned on the counter. So I read it. And then I,” Jade made a small, embarrassed sound, like she couldn’t believe she was admitting this. “I, like, took her into the bathroom, the one off the kitchen, and I sat her on the counter, and I got a wet washcloth, and I cleaned up her mascara, and she called Sam to come pick her up. Sam was there in like ten minutes, somehow. I don’t know how Sam gets places that fast.”
“You took care of her,” Tori said, soft.
“I didn’t—”
“You did.”
“It wasn’t a big thing.”
“You took her into the bathroom and washed her face, Jade.”
“It’s just—”
“Mhmm.”
Tori brought their joined hands up to her face and pressed her lips, slowly, against the back of Jade’s middle finger, against the knuckle, against the small bump where Jade had broken it once climbing a tree in fifth grade and had it set badly, and Jade—who normally would have made a face about that—let her. She let Tori kiss her hand. She let Tori hold the kiss there, mouth pressed to skin, for longer than a second. Then Tori brought the hand back down and resettled it on her stomach and stroked the inside of Jade’s wrist with her thumb slowly.
“It didn’t ruin her night, I don’t think,” Jade said, after a moment. Her voice had gone a little gravelly. “Sam’s good for her. They’re probably crashed in bed by now. Pancakes for breakfast, the works. She’ll be okay.”
“We should call her tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“And— Oh,” Tori squeezed Jade’s hand, “we still have to find her birthday present.”
Jade groaned, very quietly, into the back of her neck. “Three weeks,” she protested. “We have three weeks.”
“Three weeks is nothing.”
“Three weeks is a long time.”
“We have had zero ideas,” Tori said. “Zero. We’ve had a running text thread for two months and it is just… it’s just us sending each other questions. It’s just question marks. It’s a graveyard of question marks. We need every minute we can get to come up with a thing and then go find the thing and then wrap the thing—”
“Oh my God.”
“—and we will not have come up with a thing if we don’t start trying—”
“Okay,” Jade groaned, the word dragged out long and pained against the back of Tori’s neck, “okay, fine, fine, we’ll think about it tomorrow, please for the love of God stop spiraling about wrapping paper in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
“You are coming dangerously close to spiraling.”
“I am being,” Tori said, with great dignity, “thorough.”
“You are being a freak.”
“I am being a good friend, Jade. I am being a thoughtful friend. Tori Vega is a thoughtful friend. The kind of friend that any person would be lucky to—”
Jade made a sound into Tori’s hair that was somewhere between a laugh and a whimper. Then, slowly, she lifted her head an inch off the pillow, gathered herself, and dropped her voice into a deeply, deeply unflattering imitation of Tori’s—an old-timey, wobbling, vaudeville sort of voice that bore no resemblance to Tori’s actual voice and was, somehow, devastatingly accurate about her energy. “My name,” she intoned, “is Tori Vega, and I love to talk about myself in the third person, and I love to—”
Tori reached behind herself, blind, and smacked the side of Jade’s thigh.
Jade yelped—a small, theatrical yelp—and laughed against the back of Tori’s shoulder, breath warm, body shaking, and Tori was laughing too now, properly laughing, the giddy kind of laughter that came at the very end of a very long day when you’d been holding yourself together with willpower and some of that willpower had finally come unzipped.
“I do not,” Tori gasped, “talk like that.”
“Oh, you so do.”
“I sound nothing like that.”
“That’s exactly how you sound.”
“Jade.”
“Vega.”
Tori, still smiling so hard her face ached, finally let her body go limp again into the mattress and felt Jade shift behind her, settling back into their previous arrangement: arm under shirt, hand on stomach, leg over thigh, chest at back. Their breathing took a minute to slow down, and Tori, listening to the quiet chuff of Jade laughing herself out against her hair, thought that this was probably the happiest she had been all day. Including the speeches. Including the cap toss. Including any of it.
“What else did I miss?” Tori asked, when she could speak again.
“Mmm.” Jade considered. “Beck pulled me out onto the back porch for a while.”
“For what?”
“To talk at me, mostly.”
“Of course he did.”
“For like… thirty minutes, probably? About that role he’s auditioning for. The Lena Lewis thing. He wanted to run his lines with me. He thinks I’m a useful person to run lines with, which… that’s a him problem.”
“You are useful to run lines with.”
“Don’t you start.”
Tori, smiling, lifted her free hand up and brought it back to bury her fingers into Jade’s hair where it was trailing over her shoulder. The ends of it were a little tangled—Jade had clearly been running her hands through it all night—and Tori worked them out gently, one strand at a time, while she talked. “Is that why you smell like cigarettes?”
“Oh, yeah. There were a few guys from Sikowitz’s class smoking with him. Sorry, I didn’t realize the smell had stuck. If it’s bad, I can shower real quick—”
Jade had already started to shift away, like she was about to actually get up and do that. Tori, with the speed of a cat catching a mouse, tightened her grip on Jade’s wrist where it lay across her stomach and pinned the entire arm in place.
“No,” she said, “don’t get up, no, it’s not bad, it’s—”
“Tori—”
“It’s barely there.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind, I—”
“I am keeping you. Right here. Where you are. With your warm front and your stupid cold feet and your stupid arm where it is, and you are not going anywhere, are we clear?”
“Crystal,” Jade said, smiling against her shoulder.
“Good,” Tori said, settling back, fingers still combing slowly through the ends of Jade’s hair. “Speaking of Sikowitz…”
“Vega…”
“Can we talk about his speech?”
Jade made a noise into her hair that was somewhere between a groan and a whimper. “No,” she said. “We absolutely cannot. I have not processed that speech. I will need at least a year, possibly the rest of my life, to process that speech. We are not going to talk about it.”
“He wore a suit.”
“Yes. I saw.”
“He wore a suit, Jade.”
“I heard you the first time. And I was there.”
“I have never,” Tori said, “in all the time I have known him, in every weird situation that I have ever had with that man, I have never seen him in a full suit. And he wore one for us. He wore a real, actual suit. With a tie. He had tied a tie.”
“I know,” Jade said, into her hair, in a voice that was suspiciously thick. “I know there was a tie, Tori. I don’t want to talk about the tie.”
“He looked so nice.”
“Stop.”
“He tried to look nice for us.”
“Tori.”
“And then he gave that speech.”
“I cannot— I refuse— Tori, listen to me, I do not have the energy right now—”
“You’re getting emotional,” Tori observed, delighted.
“I’m not getting emotional. I’m just— I genuinely have no words for that speech. Half of it was about coconuts. There was a story about a fish. It was simultaneously the most nonsensical and prophetic thing I have ever heard a human being say out loud. I cannot reconcile those two things. I will not be reconciling those two things tonight. We are not— We are not talking about it, Vega.”
Tori was grinning so hard. “He cried at the end,” she said, dreamy, “when he said ‘class dismissed.’”
“Oh my God, Tori—”
“You cried.”
“I did not cry, I had— I had something in my eye, it was an outdoor venue—”
“Jade West.”
“It was an environmental— There was pollen—”
“Liar.”
Jade went silent, defeated, and let her forehead drop into the back of Tori’s hair.
“Okay,” she said, after a long, dignified pause. “New subject. New subject right now, Vega. I am going to think about that speech on my deathbed and not before.”
“Okay,” Tori said, giggling. “Okay. New subject.”
Jade exhaled, relieved, and Tori, in the act of forgiveness, brought their joined hands up again and brushed her lips, very softly, over Jade’s knuckles. The thumb brushed back, gentle, in a small tracing pattern across Tori’s. Their breathing went slow. The fan turned in the corner.
The thing about silence, though, was that it could turn on you.
Tori had thought, lying there with Jade slowly and steadily warming against her back, that the next thing to come out of her mouth was going to be something easy. Something like an idle plan for breakfast, or a complaint about her ankle that she’d twisted on the Asphalt Cafe earlier, or a question about whether they could get away with cereal in the morning instead of going out for breakfast. Something soft.
What came out of her mouth, instead, in a small voice, into the pillow, was, “I failed my Advanced Music Theory final.”
Behind her, Jade went absolutely still. Then, slowly, carefully, she asked, “What grade did you get?”
“I can’t,”
“What grade, Tori?”
“It’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“I literally can’t say.”
“When did you find out?”
“Tuesday.”
“Tuesday.” Jade’s voice did the thing where it went sharp and then immediately reeled itself back in, the way it did when she was choosing to be careful. “You found out on Tuesday and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to ruin the week.”
“Oh, baby,” Jade said, soft, low, the endearment slipping out the way it did sometimes when she wasn’t paying attention—and this was always, always how Tori knew Jade was paying complete attention. “What did you get?”
Tori swallowed. The pillowcase, against her cheek, was suddenly a little damp.
“Forty-seven percent,” she said.
“On the final?”
“On the final.”
“And it dropped your overall—”
“It dropped me to a C-minus in the class. I’m lucky I even passed. I’m lucky I even got to walk, but I—”
The heat that had been building behind her eyes all week was, at last, finding its way to the surface in a thin sting that blurred the dim room. She had not cried about this in any of the hours or days she should have, not at home and not at school and not in front of anyone with a pulse, and now of course it was going to come out of her in the middle of the night in her own bed in Jade’s t-shirt with Jade’s hand on her stomach, the whole long day pressed up behind her eyes like water pressed against a dam that had only ever been provisional in the first place.
“Turn over,” Jade said.
“What—”
“Tori. Turn over and look at me.”
It took some doing. The arm around Tori had to lift to make room; the leg over her hip had to relocate; she had to roll, slowly, awkwardly, in the small space of the bed, until she was facing Jade. The room was dim enough that Jade was mostly the suggestion of a face—pale skin, dark hair, the gleam of one eye—and yet Tori knew her face in this dimness the way she knew her own. The arch of the brow. The exact place the cheekbone dropped into the line of the jaw. The little freckle near the corner of Jade’s mouth that Tori had kissed maybe three thousand times by this point in their relationship and would, given the chance, kiss several thousand more.
Jade reached up between them with the slow, considered movement she always used for the things she wanted to do exactly right, and her fingers found a stray piece of hair that had fallen across Tori’s forehead in the rolling-over and brushed it back with a tenderness so deliberate it was almost a question. She tucked the strand behind Tori’s ear, slow, careful with the fine hairs at the temple, and then her thumb traveled the short distance from the shell of Tori’s ear to the wet place that had appeared under Tori’s eye in the last few seconds, and stroked it once, and Tori’s chin wobbled in spite of every effort she was making to hold it still.
“Tell me what happened,” Jade said.
“I just—”
“From the start.”
So Tori told her. In a small, scratchy voice, into the small dark space between their two faces on the pillow. She told Jade about the sections she’d choked on, the questions she should have known and didn’t, the way her brain had locked up halfway through and refused to unlock. She told her about the way she had walked out of the classroom and gone to the janitor’s closet and sat on the floor for forty minutes without turning the light on, because she was so sure she had just failed something that was supposed to be a sure thing. She told her about Tuesday, opening the email. She told her about how she hadn’t told her parents. About how she hadn’t told André. About how she had not told anyone because the second she said it out loud she would have to face the next part, the part she was already facing now, with Jade’s thumb on her wet cheekbone and Jade’s eyes on her face in the dark.
“I’m going to college to study music,” she whispered. “I’m going to UCSB to study music. They accepted me into their music program. And I just… I just bombed a high school music final. I got a forty-seven percent. In a subject I’m supposed to be naturally good at.”
“Tori—”
“And maybe… Jade, maybe everyone has just been being nice to me. Maybe my mom and my dad and André and Anthony and you… maybe everybody’s just been polite for years and I’m not— I’m not actually any good. I am not actually any good, I’m— What if I get there in the fall and they all see it immediately, like in the first week, what if they all turn to each other and go, oh, this one—”
“Hey.”
“—this one is one of those, this one isn’t a real one—”
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey. Tori. Stop.”
Jade had moved her hand up. Her fingers were on the back of Tori’s neck now, threading into the small hairs at her nape, and her other hand had come up to cup Tori’s jaw, thumb still resting under the wet eye. Their faces were very close. Tori could feel Jade’s breath on her own mouth. Jade smelled, faintly, like beer and toothpaste and her own skin, all at the same time.
“Listen to me,” Jade said.
“Jade—”
“No, listen. Just— No spirals. Just look at me. Look at me, Tori. There you go. Hi.”
“Hi,” Tori whispered, wet.
“You bombed one final.”
“It was a big—”
“You bombed one final,” Jade said again, quieter, “and that is a thing that happened, and it sucks, and you’re allowed to feel like crap about it. You can feel like crap about it. Feel like crap. I’m not going to take that from you. You worked your ass off in that class and you deserved to do better, and you didn’t, and that’s… that’s allowed to suck.”
“Okay.”
“But, you are not— Tori, you are not bad at music.” Jade’s thumb brushed under her eye again, gentle. “You are not. I have heard you sing in this room. I have heard you sing in your shower. I have heard you sing on stage in front of thousands of people. I have heard you write a song from scratch on the floor of my bedroom at one in the morning, and I have heard you take a song that someone else wrote and pull it apart and put it back together better. I have heard you when you don’t know I’m listening. I am the meanest person you know about music. I am the meanest person in our entire school about music, this is an established fact, and if I thought for one second that you sucked, I would tell you. And instead I am stuck. Stuck, Vega, being the girlfriend of one of the best musicians I have ever met in my entire life.”
Tori’s eyes welled up again, but for a different reason this time. “You’re just being nice to me.”
“I never say things just to be nice,” Jade said. “I am being accurate. There’s a difference.”
“Jade.”
“One final,” Jade said. Her hand had moved into Tori’s hair now, full palm against her scalp, fingers splayed wide. “One number, on one piece of paper, in one room. There is a three-year stack of evidence that you are good at this. There is a Hollywood Arts diploma that says you are good at this. There is— I will pull up SplashFace right now, I will pull it up—”
“Don’t pull up SplashFace.”
“There are so many videos of you being good at this, Vega, don’t push me. You did not become bad. You had a bad day on a multiple-choice answer sheet. You are still you. You are still scary good. You are still—” Jade’s voice caught, just a little, “you are still the reason I started liking my music classes, by the way, because I had to start liking it just to keep up with you.”
Tori made a small wet noise into the pillow.
“Come here,” Jade said.
She buried her face in Jade’s shoulder, in the soft warm place where the t-shirt collar fell open and the skin smelled like Jade’s perfume, and she let her shoulders shake once, twice, three times, while Jade pulled her in close. Jade’s arm went around her back, hand spread wide between her shoulder blades, and the other hand stayed in her hair, the fingers tracing slow patterns across her scalp—she was always doing this, drawing things on Tori’s skin without realizing it, a habit she’d had since the first time she’d ever held Tori—and Tori, against the warm soft expanse of Jade West, finally let herself cry properly. Not a lot. Just enough. Just for a minute. Jade did not shush her. Jade did not say it was okay. Jade just held her and traced patterns on her shoulder blade, and when Tori was done—when the tightness in her chest had loosened and she’d taken in three slow shaky breaths into the cotton—Jade turned her face into Tori’s hair and pressed her mouth there, a long quiet kiss that wasn’t a kiss so much as a confirmation: I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
“You’re still you,” Jade said, into her hair.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, baby. You’re still you.”
Tori, smiling weakly into Jade’s collarbone, slid her own hand up under the hem of Jade’s shirt and pressed her palm flat against Jade’s stomach, mirroring the position they’d been in five minutes ago. The skin there was warm. Jade’s stomach moved gently in and out under her palm with each breath. Tori spread her fingers out the way Jade always did and just… held there. Held on.
Jade hummed, low, content. Her hand kept tracing patterns on Tori’s shoulder blade. After a moment, Tori realized, with a small private smile, that Jade was tracing the letter T over and over again with the very tip of her finger. Just T, again and again. As if Tori needed reminding of which body she was currently in.
They were quiet for a while.
Tori didn’t know how long. The fan turned. Jade’s chest rose and fell under her cheek. Jade’s fingers kept moving across her shoulder, and her other hand was still buried in Tori’s hair, scratching lightly. Tori could have fallen asleep there. She thought, drowsily, about doing it.
But the door Jade had closed earlier in the conversation was still standing in the middle of the room, and Tori, in the dark, with her ear over Jade’s heartbeat and her own cried-out face against Jade’s collarbone, could feel the shape of it. Jade had taken care of her. Jade had taken care of Cat. Jade had taken care of André and the kitchen and the recycling and the deadbolt, and Tori had not, in the entire course of the evening, seen anyone take care of Jade.
She slid her hand a little further up under Jade’s shirt, palm flat against her ribs, and felt the steady rise and fall there.
“Hey,” she said, quietly. “Earlier, when I asked you about your dad?”
Jade’s body tightened under her, then deliberately let go. The hand in Tori’s hair started moving slower.
“Yeah,” Jade said. Her voice was different. Not closed, not anymore. Just tired.
“Did he ever reach out?” she asked, gently.
“No,” Jade said. “No, he didn’t.”
Tori pressed her body more firmly into Jade’s. Her hand stayed on Jade’s ribs. She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just laid there and let Jade decide whether she wanted to keep going. Jade’s heart, she noticed, had picked up. A subtle increase in pace.
“I’m so sorry,” Tori said, quiet.
Jade swallowed, audibly. “I really thought he was gonna come,” she said.
Tori’s eyes burned again. She squeezed her arm tight around Jade’s middle.
“I know,” she said.
“It’s so dumb, because he never… he never shows up, Tori. He never shows up to anything, ever, and I know that, that’s not new. But I… I gave him plenty of notice. I sent him a polite message. I sent it in March. I told him the time, I told him the place, I told him he could come and not even talk to my mom if that was easier. I made it— I made it as easy for him as I could, and he didn’t even— He couldn’t even— He didn’t have the decency to send me a single message saying that he couldn’t make it. He just left it. He just— He made me wait for it. And I sat through that ceremony, in my stupid gown, and I kept— Tori, I kept looking. Like the whole time. Every time we shifted, every time someone else got their diploma, every time the speakers changed. I kept checking the seat that I had reserved for him. I kept looking. And then when they called my name and I walked up there… I looked one more time. And it was just empty.”
“Oh, Jade.”
“It’s so stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“It’s so stupid that I keep doing this.”
Tori pulled back just enough to look at her. Jade’s eyes were wet. They were always extra dark in the dim light, but right now they were glassy, and there was a single hot tear that had escaped down her temple into her hair, and Tori, without thinking about it, reached up and caught it on the pad of her thumb. She wiped it sideways into Jade’s hair. She brushed the next one as it came down. She kept her hand cupped against the side of Jade’s face, palm flat, fingers curling around the back of her ear, thumb sweeping under her eye each time, slow.
“It’s not stupid,” Tori said.
“My mom and I fought about it.”
“What? When?”
“After the ceremony. Before the reception.”
“You didn’t tell me—”
“I know. I… We ducked into the bathroom in the Black Box dressing room because the lines for the regular bathrooms were insane, and it was just me and her in there, and I… I’m an idiot, I’m such an idiot. I said something. I said, like, all casual, like I was being light about it, I said something like, ‘I noticed Dad’s not here.’ And she looked at me in the mirror and said, ‘Well. You told him not to come, Jade.’”
Tori’s stomach dropped. “Oh.”
“And I— Yeah. And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she said ‘At Christmas.’ At Christmas, Tori. When my brother begged for us to do a family Christmas, when I told everybody, I told her, I told my dad, that it was a bad idea, that it was going to blow up, and they did it anyway, because my brother is fucking nine years old and he wanted it. And then on Christmas Day, Dad and I got into it, and I… I told him I was done with him. I told him I didn’t want to see him again. I said it. I said the words. I said them in front of my mom, and my brother, and his weird new wife, and… and I said it, Tori, I said exactly that. So apparently, apparently, for the one time in his entire life, he listened. He listened to a thing I said.” Jade laughed, wet and ugly. “Apparently that was the one thing he was going to take seriously.”
“Jade, that’s not—”
“And she said— My mom, in the bathroom, she goes, ‘You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell him to disappear and then keep checking the audience for him.’ And I said… I don’t know. I said something. I think I said ‘Fuck you.’ I think I genuinely said ‘Fuck you’ to my mother in the bathroom on my graduation day. And she said— She said—” Jade’s voice broke, just briefly. “She said, ‘You don’t get to be the one who’s hurt. He’s not coming. He’s not going to come to anything ever again. And you did that.’ And then she said, ‘I’m sorry, but you did.’ And then she fixed her lipstick, in the mirror, while I was standing right there. And then she said, ‘Don’t make a scene at the reception, please,’ and she walked out.”
Tori was crying again, quietly. She hadn’t meant to. She wiped at her own face with the back of her wrist, hand still on Jade’s cheek.
“She wasn’t being fair,” Tori said.
“But Tori—”
“She wasn’t, Jade. Both of those things can be true at the same time. You can have told him you were done with him and also still want him there. People are complicated. You’re allowed to want things to be different. You’re allowed to be angry at him for not coming and you’re allowed to wish you hadn’t said what you said at Christmas. Both of those things.” Tori's hand had moved into Jade’s hair now, mirroring the way Jade had been holding her fifteen minutes ago.
“She doesn’t yell, you know,” Jade said, after a moment. Her voice had gone small. “My mom. She doesn’t yell. She never yells. She… she does this thing, this calm thing, this very-still thing, and she just lays it out, and… and I always end up the one yelling, because she won’t, and so I always end up looking like the unreasonable one. And I never win. I have never won an argument with my mother. Not once. Not even when I’m right.”
Tori didn’t answer right away. She kept her hand cupped against Jade’s face and rubbed her thumb very slowly along Jade’s cheekbone, and the small wet rush of Jade’s exhale broke against her own mouth, and Jade’s hand tightened on the back of her neck.
“I thought maybe something had happened,” Tori said, finally. “At the reception, you were so quiet. And when I asked you about it, when I came up to you at the punch bowl, you snapped at me a little, you said—”
“I know. I told you to leave me the fuck alone.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I shouldn’t have— You were just trying to—”
“Jade.”
“I’m so sorry, Tori. I really— I’m sorry. My mom gets under my skin so fast, and I just… I bite at the closest thing, and the closest thing was you. And I’m— I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” Tori said. She brought her hand down out of Jade’s hair and pressed it flat against Jade’s cheek and waited until Jade’s eyes met hers, and she said it again, slower. “I forgive you.”
Jade’s mouth wobbled. She nodded, a small, jerky nod.
“What if I really did,” she whispered. “What if I— What if that was it? What if I scared him off for good? What if he just— What if he was looking for an out and I gave him one, and he took it, and that’s it? What if I never see him again? What if he—”
“I don’t believe that,” Tori said.
“You don’t know him.”
“I don’t. But I know that he’s still your dad. And I know that if you decide, like, in three months or in six months or in a year, that you want him in your life, that you want to figure out what that looks like, I will help you. We will figure out how to send him a message. We will figure out how to ask him to coffee. We will figure out what you want to say. You do not have to do any of it tonight. You do not even have to want it tonight. But you don’t have to figure it out by yourself, and you don’t have to… Jade, you don’t have to think you blew up the only chance you ever had. Okay? Okay. Stop.”
Jade was crying properly now, without making any noise about it. Tori had seen Jade West cry maybe four times total in the entire course of their relationship; Jade was a soundless crier, the way some people were soundless laughers, and the only way Tori had ever learned to recognize it was by the small twitch at the corner of her mouth and the slow steady wetness leaking sideways into her hair from the outer corners of her eyes. Tori brushed the tears away as they came, working in patient sweeps with the side of her thumb that traveled from temple to hairline, catching each one before it could slide down into the pillow, while her other hand stayed cupped against the side of Jade’s face with a kind of steadiness she did not feel anywhere else in her body. She let Jade look at her when Jade needed to look, and she let Jade hide when Jade needed to hide, and somewhere in the middle of it Jade pressed her forehead against Tori’s and breathed out ragged into the small space between their mouths, and Tori pressed back and breathed with her, slow in and slow out, slow in and slow out, until the ragged edges of Jade’s breath had smoothed themselves down to something Tori could match.
“You didn’t blow it up,” Tori whispered. “You did not blow up your only chance. He is your dad, Jade. He will always be your dad. And if you want him, you can have him. And if you don’t, you don’t have to. And if you go back and forth about it for the next ten years, I will go back and forth with you for the next ten years. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jade said, watery.
“Okay.”
Jade closed her eyes. Tori watched her face, the long fan of her wet eyelashes against her cheek, the slow steadying of her breathing. After a while Jade’s hand, the one that had been clutching at the small of Tori’s back, slid up under the t-shirt and splayed flat between her shoulder blades, fingers wide, palm warm. Tori felt the print of all five of those fingers on her skin like Jade was leaving a hand-shaped mark there. The other hand had migrated back into her hair, working slow circles against her scalp.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Tori traced shapes along Jade’s collarbone with the very tip of one finger, slow and patient and not really thinking about what she was drawing. A house, first, the small triangle roof and the square of the body of it and the chimney, and then a tiny stick figure standing in the yard beside it, and then a sun in the upper corner with all its little rays, and then she pressed her warm palm flat over the whole drawing to wipe it away and started again, the same house, the same figure, the same sun, in the same order. It was not a thing she was doing on purpose. It was something her hand had decided to do without consulting her, the way her hand sometimes hummed along to songs she didn’t know she was humming, and Jade did not ask what it was, and Jade did not tell her to stop. Jade just laid there beneath the small repeating drawing, and let her, and breathed.
After what might have been five minutes or might have been an hour, Tori jolted, slightly.
“Wait.”
“Hmm?”
“Has André texted you yet? That he made it home?”
Jade made a small surprised sound. She had clearly forgotten about it entirely.
“Oh, shit. I— Hold on.” She pressed a quick kiss to Tori’s forehead and unwound her arm from Tori’s body—Tori made a small involuntary protesting sound—and rolled onto her back to grope for her phone on the nightstand. Tori rolled with her, refusing to be left, and ended up draped across Jade’s stomach, her cheek on Jade’s ribs, her arm across Jade’s waist. Jade laughed at her, low, and dropped her free hand back into Tori’s hair.
The phone screen lit up the room in pale blue. Jade squinted at it.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, he texted. He’s home. And he sent a link to that beach house in San Diego he was telling us about.”
“Oh, good.” Tori turned her face up to look at Jade. “Is it cute?”
Jade was thumbing through the listing. The blue light played over her face—over the wet eyelashes, over the small streaks at her temples that Tori had wiped away. “Yeah, it looks like it could be good,” she said, after a moment. “It’s three bedrooms. There’s, like, a little deck on the back. There’s a path down to the beach. It’s not, like, fancy fancy, but it looks lived in. It looks like a beach house should look, you know?”
Tori, looking up at her from Jade’s chest, thought, dumbly, that she loved her. “You’re so cute,” she said.
“Ugh, stop,” Jade groaned and she continued scrolling. “It looks like it has some openings in July.”
Tori was quiet for a beat, watching the light play over Jade’s chin. Then she said, casually, “What if we went for your birthday?”
Jade looked down at her. “What?”
“Like a friend trip. You and me and André and Cat and Beck and Robbie. We could rent the house for, like, four days and do a long weekend. I’m pretty sure your birthday is on a Friday this year.”
“Or,” Jade said, slow, considering, the screen still open in her free hand, “we could go down a couple of days early. Just us. Settle in. Have the place to ourselves for a few nights. And then everyone else can drive down. And then we have a few nights as a group.”
Tori smiled into her ribs. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do that.”
“That’s a good plan.”
“Mhmm.”
“And that way we get dibs on the best room.”
“Mhmm. I’ll let you pick this time.”
“Okay,” Jade said, and locked her phone, and dropped it back on the nightstand with a soft thud. She brought her arm back down to wrap around Tori’s shoulders, and Tori snuggled back into the warm hollow of her side, and for a little while they just lay there in the dark, and Tori did the math in her head, and the math came out: in three months, in approximately three months, this—this exact configuration, this exact body in this exact bed at this exact hour—was no longer going to be the default arrangement of her life.
Tori, in the dark, wrapped around Jade, said, “What if we get bad at this?”
There was a small silence. “At what?” Jade said.
“At… at being us. When we go to school.”
Jade’s arm tightened around her, just slightly.
Tori was glad, because if Jade had spiraled, she would have spiraled too, and that wasn’t what this was. The fear in her was quiet. It wasn’t a what if you fall out of love with me, what if I fall out of love with you, what if you meet someone in your dorm and forget about me kind of fear. It wasn’t a worst-case-scenario fear. It was smaller than that and harder to name. It was something more like I don’t know how to exist without constant access to you, I don’t know how to be myself when you’re not in the same building, I don’t know how to be a person whose girlfriend has a full life I am not in the room for.
Jade, who knew her, did not ask her to explain it. “Vega,” she said, instead.
“Jade.”
“You are going to be so sick of me.”
“Yeah?”
“You are going to be so sick of me texting you. You are going to be putting your phone face-down on the table during your study sessions because I’m going to be sending you, like, ugly photos of every guy in my film classes who’s about to mansplain Scorsese to me. I’m going to be unbearable. I’m going to be— Tori, listen to me, I’m going to be the worst long-distance girlfriend in the history of long-distance girlfriends, but only in the sense that you will hear from me too much. You will hear from me constantly. I am going to video chat you while I’m doing my laundry.”
“I would like that.”
“You think you would. By week four you’ll be like, oh my God, Jade, no, please, I have a paper, please leave me alone.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. And I'll text you the ugly photos anyway. And then we’ll have weekends. We’ll have weekends and holiday breaks. UCSB to LMU is, what, two hours?"
“In good traffic.”
“In good traffic, two hours. We can meet in the middle. That’s only an hour each. We can do a mid-weeknight dinner once a month even on the bad weeks.”
“We can.”
“And you’ll have your mom's old car. After holding me hostage for a year.”
“You like driving me around, though.”
“I do. But when you have your own car we can drive to each other any time we feel like it, do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“It’s not gonna be the same as this.”
“No,” Tori whispered.
“It’s not. It’s gonna be different. And some weeks it’s gonna be… it’s gonna be weird, and we’re gonna have to figure out new little rituals, and we’re gonna have to learn how to be people who have lives the other one isn’t always there for. And some of that is gonna kind of suck. I’m not gonna lie to you about it. Some of it is gonna kind of suck.”
“Yeah.”
“But, and you can hold me to this, Tori, I am putting it on the record; we are gonna be okay. We are gonna be okay. We have been figuring out how to be us for three fucking years, in the worst possible conditions, against significant resistance from both of our personalities, and we have only gotten better at it. There is no version of you and me where I lose interest in being us. There just isn’t. I’m not built that way about you. So if you’re asking— Tori, if you’re asking, like, fundamentally, are we gonna be okay, yes. We’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna be very, very okay.”
Tori felt the heat behind her eyes spill over again—only a little, only the small leftover remainder of crying that had not gotten itself fully out of her earlier—and she turned her face into the soft cotton at Jade’s ribs and pressed her wet cheek against the t-shirt there until the wet had nowhere left to go but into the fabric. Jade, beneath her, did not so much as pretend to mind. Jade only tightened her arms around Tori’s back, one hand stroking up and down the line of her spine in long slow passes that started at the nape of her neck and ended just above the waistband of her underwear, and waited.
“Okay,” Tori whispered.
“Okay?” Jade asked.
“Okay.”
“We’re gonna be okay.”
“We’re gonna be okay,” Tori echoed.
“And if we’re not, we’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Now come up here,” Jade said, because Tori was still draped across her stomach, and Tori obediently slithered up the bed until her face was tucked back into the warm pocket of Jade’s neck, and Jade folded both arms around her, and one leg came up to hook over Tori’s again—warm, finally, properly warm—and they fitted themselves together into the configuration they were going to fall asleep in, if they were going to fall asleep at all.
The fan turned in its slow lazy oscillation, and the freezer dropped more ice into their container that had been the soundtrack of Tori’s entire life, and somewhere on the boulevard outside a single late car passed by with the small hush of tires on warm asphalt and was gone. The earring, still pressed into Tori’s cheek the way it had been pressed into Tori’s cheek for the entire last two hours, was going to leave a small pink dent there in the morning, and Tori found, lying tangled into the long warm shape of Jade West, that she had not, in fact, ever cared less about anything in her life.
They were going to fall asleep, she thought, in this exact well of warm blanket, and the falling asleep was going to happen any second now. They were going to drift off in this good warm tangle, with the entire rest of their lives waiting patiently outside the door of this room for them to wake up and step into it whenever they were ready.
Then Tori opened her eyes, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “You know what I want?”
“Hmm?” Jade mumbled, half-asleep.
“Inside-Out Burger.”
There was a long pause. “…What?” Jade said, slowly.
“Inside-Out Burger,” Tori repeated.
“Tori. It’s three in the morning.”
“I know.”
“Tori.”
“Hear me out.”
“No,” Jade said, firmly.
“You haven’t even—” Tori started.
“No, Tori.”
“You haven’t even let me—” Tori tried again.
“No, no, no, I know what you’re gonna say,” Jade claimed.
“You don’t.”
“You’re going to say something dumb about how this is the first night of the rest of our lives or about how we’ll never get this back or something about youth, and I—”
“No, that wasn’t what I was—”
“That’s exactly what you were going to say, Vega.”
“…Maybe,” Tori admitted.
Jade groaned and pressed her face into the side of Tori’s neck. Tori, who was currently staring up at her own ceiling, did not relent.
“Tori,” Jade said, into her neck.
“What?”
“It’s three in the morning.”
Tori, with great deliberation, lifted her head—pulling herself partially out of the warm pocket of Jade’s body, much to Jade’s loud protest—and craned across Jade’s chest to peer at the digital clock on the nightstand. The numbers blared red in the dim room.
“Actually,” she reported, settling back down, “it’s three-eighteen.”
“That is so much worse.”
“That’s not worse. It’s later, which means we’re closer to morning, which means we’re practically having breakfast.”
“That is genuinely not how time works, Tori—”
“Time,” Tori said grandly, “is a construct.”
Jade made a sound like her every belief was being personally violated. “Oh, my God.”
“It is. It absolutely is.”
Jade exhaled, slow and very long, the long heavy sigh that Tori could now recognize blindfolded from across a parking lot. It was the sigh that Jade did right before she gave in to something. It was the sigh that meant Jade was aware she was about to lose, was choosing to lose, and was already a little bit annoyed at her future self for the decision.
Tori’s heart skipped. “We are never doing tonight again,” she said, gently.
“That is manipulative, Vega.”
“Maybe a little. But it’s true.”
“Tori.”
“I’m just saying. We graduated high school today. We are never going to graduate from high school ever again. There is one of these. There is exactly one of these in our entire lives. And we are awake. And there is…” Tori paused for effect, “a twenty-four-hour Inside-Out in Santa Monica.”
Jade groaned, fully and without dignity, into the pillow. “…Fine,” she said.
Tori sat bolt upright. “Jade,” she gasped.
“Let’s go,” Jade said, sitting up too, scrubbing at her face. “Let’s go right now before I change my mind.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, get up, Vega, get up before I come to my senses—”
Tori was already moving. She was out of the bed in a single fluid motion, in a way that did not match her drunken, sleepy, extremely tear-streaked state of twenty minutes ago, and she was pulling on a pair of sleep shorts she had grabbed from the floor of her closet in the same gesture, and she was tugging a hoodie off the back of her vanity chair, and she was bouncing—actually, physically, bouncing—on the balls of her feet next to the bed, while Jade, with significantly less grace, hauled herself to the edge of the mattress and sat blinking after making a deeply questionable decision and was watching it unfold in real time.
A small, strangled sound came out of Tori—high and thin, escaping past the heel of the hand she’d clapped over her own mouth a half-second too late—and she did a tiny silent jump in place beside the bed, both feet leaving the rug at once, her shoulders bunched up around her ears with the effort of containing herself.
“Oh, my God,” Jade half-laughed.
“I’m so excited,” Tori whispered through her fingers.
“You are actually deranged.”
Tori came back over to the bed and grabbed Jade’s face with both hands and kissed her, hard, on the mouth. Jade made a startled noise into it and then kissed her back, slower, hands coming up to Tori’s wrists, thumbs sliding along the insides of them. Tori pulled back an inch.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi, you maniac.”
“I love you.”
“Mmm. Get me a hoodie.”
Tori, beaming, dug a hoodie out of her own closet—one of Jade’s, naturally, that had migrated over the threshold of her bedroom door months ago and never made the journey back—and tossed it across the room. Jade caught it one-handed and pulled it over her head, and when the collar caught on her hair Tori was already crossing the rug to help, fingers slipping under the back of the hood to lift Jade’s hair free of it and let it fall down her back, smoothing the ends of it once with the flat of her palm. Jade pushed up off the edge of the mattress to stand, and the long day caught her halfway: her balance wavered for a beat, her hand shot out for Tori’s hip and found it, steadied there, splaying warm and heavy on the bone of it. She looked, Tori thought, with her eyes still pink at the corners and her own old t-shirt peeking out from under the hoodie hem, like the most beautiful woman in the entire world.
“Can we eat it on the beach?” Tori said.
“What?”
“Can we eat it on the beach? Can we go to Inside-Out and then drive over to the beach and eat it on the sand and stay until the sun comes up?”
Jade let her eyes fall closed and pulled in a breath through her nose so slow that Tori, watching the rise of her chest under the hoodie, had time to count the seconds it took her, and when she opened her eyes again she was looking at Tori with so much tired, fond, exasperated love on her face that Tori had to put a hand on the dresser to keep her balance.
“You kill me, Vega,” Jade said, soft.
“You love me.”
Jade looked at her—all of her, the tear-streaked face, the smudged makeup, the tiny pink dent in her cheek, the messy hair, the hoodie too big for her, the bare feet, the bright eyes, the absolute and utterly Tori-Vega-shaped grin that was lighting up the dim room from the inside out—and the corners of her own mouth pulled up, and her eyes went wet again, and she looked, for a second, like she could not believe her own life.
“Yeah,” Jade said. “Yeah. I really fucking love you.”
Tori’s heart—already too big for her body, already overfull, already running at the kind of capacity that a heart could only manage on the eighth of June at three-twenty in the morning—squeezed once, hard.
“I really fucking love you too,” she whispered.
Then she reached out, and Jade reached back, and their fingers laced together at the knuckles, and Tori squeezed once, and Jade squeezed back twice and they padded together, hand in hand, out of the bedroom and across the upstairs landing and down the stairs of the Vega house, past the leftover red Solo cups and the crushed beer cans and the streamers half-falling off the mantel, and out the front door, into the soft warm dark of a June morning that was, technically, already the rest of their lives.