“And then wh-what?” August asks, wincing at the way her voice goes shaky. “If we figure out what happened and how to fix it, what happens when we do? She goes back to the ’70s? She stays here? She … she’s gone?”

“I don’t know. But…”

August puts down her French fry. She’s lost her appetite. “But what?”

“Well, she said it’s only felt like a few months for her, until now? I think she’s gotten anchored here and now. And from what you’ve told me, this is the first time that’s happened.”

“So, we might be her only chance? Okay,” August says. She folds her arms across her chest and tucks her chin down, jaw set. “No matter what, we try.”

 

* * *

 

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—?”