So that’s how things will be, August deduces as she walks home, goodbye kiss lingering on her lips. She works the case, and Jane kisses her, and they talk about the first thing but not the second.

Sometimes it feels like there are three Augusts—one born hopeful, one who learned how to pick locks, and one who moved to New York alone—all sticking out knife blades and tripping one another to get to the front of the line. But every time the doors open and she spots Jane at the far end of the car, listening to music that shouldn’t even be playing, she knows it doesn’t make a difference. Every possible version of August is completely stupid for this girl, no matter the deadline. She’ll take what she can get and figure out the rest.

She gets to be an adult who has sex, sex with Jane, and Jane gets to feel something that’s not boredom or waiting, and it’s fun. It’s good, so good that August’s mouth will start watering in the middle of a graveyard shift at Billy’s just thinking about it. Jane seems happier, which was the point, she reminds herself.

They’re friends. Cross-timeline friends with semi-public benefits, because they’re attracted to each other and lonely and there, and August has learned to like feeling a little reckless. She never thought she was meant for any kind of danger until she met Jane.

Not that she’s meant for Jane.

She tells herself very seriously that if anyone is meant for anything, it’s Jane meant for the ’70s. That’s the job. That’s the case.

That’s all.

* * *

August starts a sex notebook.

It’s not that they’re having that much sex. When one person lives on the subway and the other is busting their ass to get them off the subway, there are only so many opportunities.

But she’s used to taking notes on Jane, and, well, it never hurts to have a reference guide. So, she starts a notebook to catalogue everything she discovers that Jane likes.

She starts with the things she already knew. Hair pulling (giving and receiving), August writes at the top of the first page. Below it, lip biting, followed by thigh highs, and, leaving marks. She pauses, sucks on the end of her pen, and adds, semi-public sex* and notes at the bottom of the page, *unsure if always into this or simply making best of situation.

She keeps it in her bag alongside the other notebooks for geographic locations (the green one), biographical anecdotes (blue), and dates and figures (red), and she updates it meticulously. If she doesn’t have it on her, she’ll write on her hand, which is how she ends up having to explain to Winfield in the middle of a shift why she has the words neck biting scrawled from her first to third knuckles.

Sometimes she adds things that aren’t sex but turn Jane on anyway. Long hair makes the list the third time she catches Jane watching her tie her hair up. One afternoon, she goes on a five-minute tangent about UV light and document facsimiles only to find Jane staring at her with her mouth halfway open and her tongue resting wetly between her teeth, and she pulls out the notebook and writes, niche technical expertise + competence.

Most of the items, though, are pretty straightforward. She boards the Q in the middle of the night wearing a pair of fishnets to test a theory, and when she stumbles off an hour later kiss-drunk with the thin strings of nylon ripped in two places, she adds, lingerie.

“We’d meet at Max’s,” Jane’s saying over the phone as August stuffs a load of darks in the coin-operated washer. They’ve been embroiled in a conversation for a day and a half about how they would have met if August had lived in Jane’s 1970s New York. August keeps insisting they’d have a longstanding feud over the library’s last copy of The Second Sex. Jane disagrees.

“You think I’d be at one of your satanic punk shows?” August asks, closing the door and sitting on a dryer.

“Yeah, you’d wander in all lost and confused. Short skirt, long hair, hugging the wall, and I’d come stumbling out of the pit with a bloody nose, see you, and that’d be it.”

August huffs a laugh, but she can picture it: Jane swaggering out of the crush of bodies like a shooting star, snarling and wiping blood on the back of her hand, eyes rimmed with kohl and the collar of her shirt smeared with someone else’s lipstick.

“What’d be your line?” she asks.

Jane makes a considering noise. “Keep it simple. Ask you for a smoke.”

“But you don’t smoke,” August points out.

“And you don’t have a smoke,” Jane says. “I never thought you would. But I had to get real close for you to hear me over the music, and now you’re looking at me, and when I kiss you, it tastes a little like blood.”

“Uh-huh,” August says, heat flaring up the back of her neck. She crosses her legs, squeezing her thighs together. “Keep talking.”

By the time the buzzer announces the end of the wash cycle, Jane’s described in quiet detail just how she’d get August into the bathroom at Max’s, the black leather dog collar she used to wear at shows, and the way she’d let August slip her fingers under it when she got on her knees. August pulls her skirt back down, takes the notebook out, and writes, blood & bruises. Then light bondage. She goes back up several lines and underlines semi-public sex.

June moves through New York like one of Miss Ivy’s hot flashes, steaming up windows and slowing traffic to a tempermental crawl. It’s a decidedly unsexy time, and yet—

“I can’t believe you don’t sweat,” August says, neck-deep in a heatwave at one in the morning, her hands braced against the wall of an empty train car. Jane kisses her hair, slips her thumb under the hem of August’s Billy’s T-shirt. “I’m out here dying, and you look like something out of a movie.”

Jane laughs and swipes her tongue against the side of August’s neck. “It tastes nice on you, though.”

“You know, if you’re going to go around being a whole metaphysical anomaly, you should have, like, control over your magical powers.” She opens her eyes as Jane turns her around and pulls her in. “You should be able to stop the train whenever you want. Or conjure things. Like a couch. That would be nice.”

“Are you saying subway seats aren’t good enough for you?” Jane teases. “This is my house.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. I really love what you’ve done with the place. And the view, well.” She looks at Jane’s kiss-swollen lips. Outside the window: nothing but brown tunnel walls. “You can’t beat it.”

“Hmm,” Jane says. “Nice try.”

She stomps home forty-five sweaty, delirious minutes later, Jane still laughing in her ear, and she whips her shorts across her bedroom and furiously adds to the list, orgasm denial.

(Jane makes it up to her eventually.)

August guesses it’s predictable that this is how a person like her would handle entry into the mythical ranks of sex-havers—itemized lists, shorthand, the occasional unhelpful diagram. But it’s not her usual compulsive need to organize. It’s the way Jane kisses her like she’s trying to know everything about her, the revelation of what her own body can do, the way Jane’s willing to work for it in five stolen minutes between stops. August wants to give that back to her, and the August way is having a plan of exactly how.