It’s embarrassing to the August who likes to play tough, for this stupid movie to mean so much to her, but “In Your Eyes” comes on, and Jane breathes out like she’s been punched in the gut. She gets it.

August doesn’t want to think about kissing Jane when the music fades out or when the doors slide open at Parkside Ave. or when she tucks her apron under her arm and waves good night. But she does, and she does, and she does.

When she gets home, Myla’s sprawled out on the couch and Niko is puttering around the kitchen, finishing up the last few days’ worth of dishes.

“We decided to finish a season of Lost,” Niko says as he towels off a cereal bowl. “I can’t believe they moved the island. I am, as Isaiah would say, gooped.”

“Yeah, wait until you get to the part with Claire’s creepy Blair Witch baby.”

“Don’t spoil him!” Myla says. She’s cradling an enormous bag of jelly beans like it’s a baby. August thinks she might be stoned.

“He’s literally a psychic.”

“Still.”

August holds up her hands in surrender.

“How’s our girl tonight?” Niko asks.

“She’s all right,” August tells him. “Kinda sad. It’s hard on her, being stuck down there.”

“I didn’t mean Jane,” he says. “I meant you.”

“Oh,” August says. “I’m … I’m okay.”

Niko narrows his eyes. “You’re not. But you don’t have to talk about it.”

“I just…” August paces over to one of the Eames chairs and drops into it bonelessly. “Ugh.”

“What’s wrong, little swamp frog?” Myla says, shoving a handful of jelly beans into her mouth.

August buries her face in her hands. “How do you know if a girl likes you?”

“Oh, this again,” Myla says. “I already told you.”

August groans. “It’s just … it’s all gotten so complicated, and I never know what’s real and what’s not and what’s because she needs somebody and what’s because I need somebody, and it’s—ugh. It’s just ugh.”

“You have to actually say something to her, August.”

“But what if she doesn’t feel the same? We’re stuck with each other. I’m the only one who can help her. I’ll make the whole thing weird, and she’ll end up hating me because it’s always awkward, and I can’t do that to either of us.”

“Okay, but—”

“But what if she does like me, and she goes back to the ’70s and I never see her again and I could have told her and I didn’t? And she never knows? If someone felt this way about me, I’d want to know. So does she deserve to know? Or—”

Myla starts laughing.

August pulls her face out of her hands. “What are you laughing about?”

Myla burrows the side of her face into the armrest, still giggling. A few jelly beans spill onto the floor. “It’s just that, you’re in love with a ghost from the 1970s who lives on the subway, and it’s still the exact same as always.”

“She’s not a ghost, and I’m not in love with her,” August says with an eye roll. Then, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Myla says, “you have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead. Except she’s already dead.” She laughs. “That’s wild, bruh.”

Niko drifts into the room, setting a few handleless teacups and a teapot down on the steamer trunk with a tinkling of chipped porcelain.

“Myla, Jane is our friend,” he says. “You have to stop making jokes about her being dead. It would be cooler if she was, though.”

August groans. “Y’all.”

“Sorry.” Myla sighs, accepting a teacup. “Just text her like, ‘Hey Jane, you got a rockin’ bod, would love to consensually smash. XOXO, August.’”

“Sounds exactly like something I would say.”

Myla laughs. “Well, say it in an August way.”

August exhales. “It’s the worst possible timing, though. She just remembered who she is. And it hasn’t exactly been easy on her.”

“There’s no good timing in this situation,” Myla says.

“Maybe no good timing means there’s no bad timing either,” Niko says simply. “And maybe you can make her happy while she’s here. Maybe it’s selfish to keep that from her. Maybe it’s selfish to keep it from you.”

An hour goes by, and Myla falls asleep on the couch while Niko’s cleaning up the tea. August watches him gently tug the bag of jelly beans out of her arms and wonders if he’s going to wake her and move her to their room. It feels strange and private to watch indecision flicker across his face when she’s used to his certain, confident lines, but eventually it softens into something quiet and fond.

He pulls a blanket off the back of the couch and spreads it over her, taking special care to tuck it around her shoulders and feet. He brushes her hair off her forehead and ghosts the faintest of unintrusive kisses over it.

He switches off the lamp, and when he turns toward their room, August sees the soft melt of his smile, the gentle crease at one side of his mouth, a secret thing. They’ll sleep separately tonight, and somehow this hurts her heart more, the easy tether between them that doesn’t need a constant touch. The assurance that the other person is right there in your orbit, always, waiting to be tugged back in. Niko and Myla could be on opposite sides of an ocean and they’d breathe in sync.

A phantom feeling burns into the back of her throat, like at Isaiah’s party, on the walk to the station: of what it would be like to have someone bite down a smile when they point and say, “Yeah, her. She’s mine.” To live alongside someone, to kiss and be kissed, to be wanted.

“Night,” Niko says.

“Night,” August says, her voice thick in her ears.

That night in her room, Jane’s there. She smiles warm and slow, until it’s so big it scrunches her nose up. She leans against the window and talks about the people she met on the train that day. She stands in her socks at the foot of the bed and says she’s not going anywhere. She touches the pad of her thumb to a freckle on August’s shoulder and looks at her like she’s something to look at. Like she doesn’t ever want to stop looking.

August rolls onto her back and levels her palms against the mattress, and Jane’s on either side of her hips, knees digging into the sheets. In the dark, it’s harder to stop herself from painting soft oranges filtered in from the street. She can see them threaded into Jane’s hair, tucked behind her ears, brushed along the gentle cant of her jaw. There she is. This girl, and a want so bad, it burrows into August’s bones until they feel like they’ll crack.