“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.

And then Jane pulls back and says, “Oh, fuck.”

August has to blink five times before her eyes remember how to focus. What the fuck was she doing? Kissing her way to self-destruction, that’s what.

“What?” she asks. Her voice comes out strangled. Jane’s hand is still in her hair.

“New Orleans,” she says. “The Bywater. That’s where I was.”

“What?”

“I lived there,” she says. August is staring at her mouth, dark pink and swollen, and trying desperately to drag her brain in the opposite direction. “I lived in New Orleans. A year, at least. I had an apartment, and a roommate, and—oh, holy shit, I remember.”

“Are you sure?” August asks. “Are you sure you’re not getting it mixed up because I’m from there?”

“No,” Jane says, “no, I remember now.” She moves suddenly, the way she does when she’s feeling something big, and scoops August up in her arms and spins her around. “Oh my God, you’re fucking magic.”

August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.

They slide right back into their normal places: August perched on the edge of a seat with her notebook open to the dryest page she can find, and Jane pacing the aisle reciting everything she can recall. She talks about a burger joint in the Quarter where she worked, about Jenny (tally mark eleven), about a shotgun apartment on the second floor of an old house and a sweet-faced roommate whose name she can’t remember. August writes it all down and doesn’t think about how Jane kissed her—Jane kissed her—Jane put her hand on August’s face and kissed her, and August knows how her lips feel, and she can’t ever stop knowing, and—

“Did you get that?” Jane says, pausing her pacing, apparently completely unaffected. “The snowball place in the Marigny? You look like you spaced out for a second.”

“Oh, yeah,” August says. “Definitely got it.”