I love you, she thinks. I love you. Please stay. I don’t know what I’ll do if you leave.

She thinks it, but she doesn’t say it. That wouldn’t be fair to either of them.

14

 

   new york > brooklyn > community > missed connections

 

* * *

 

Posted October 12, 2004

Woman with red Converse on the Q (Brooklyn)

Apologies if this isn’t the right place for this, but I’m not sure where else to post. Not looking for a romantic connection. I was riding the Q with my son on Wednesday evening when a short-haired mid-twenties woman approached us and offered my son a pin from her jacket. It was a 70s-era gay pride pin, clearly a well-loved antique. My son is 15 and hasn’t had the easiest time at school since coming out earlier this year. Her act of kindness made his whole week. If you’re her, or you think you might know her, please let me know. I’d love to thank her.

In the end, it takes exactly one phone call for Gabe to agree to meet Myla for coffee.

“What can I say?” Myla says, pulling on an extremely flimsy top. “I’m the one who got away.”

“I’m going with you,” August tells her. She slings her bag over her shoulder, double-checking the pocketknife and mace. “This could be a ploy to get you alone so he can exact a bloody revenge.”

“Okay, Dateline, reel it in,” Myla says, shaking her hair out. “Love the instinctive mistrust of cis straight white men, but Gabe is harmless. He’s just boring. Like, really boring, but thinks he’s really interesting.”

“How did he get a job at Delilah’s?”

“He’s from one of those New York families, so his dad’s the landlord. He’s very straight.”

“And you dated him because…?”

“Look,” Myla says, “we all make mistakes when we’re young. Mine just happens to be six-foot-three and look exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio.”

“Revenant or Inception?”

“You really got me fucked up if you think I’d settle for anything less than Romeo + Juliet.”

“Damn, okay, I guess I get it.” August shrugs. “But I’m still going with you.”

Gabe lives in Manhattan, so they take the Q over the river, Jane wedged between them as they catch her up the latest status of the plan.

“I have to say, I’m impressed,” she says, throwing her arm over August’s shoulders. “This is definitely the most organized crime I’ve ever been involved in.”

“When are you going to tell me about all the other crimes?” August says.

“I have told you. They were mostly vandalism. Squatting. Disrupting the peace. The occasional breaking and entering. Maybe some light petty theft. One incident of arson, but I was wearing a mask, so nobody could prove it was me.”

“Those are some of the sexiest crimes,” August points out. “For people who are into crimes. Very Bender from The Breakfast Club.”

“That’s—” Myla starts.

“I know,” Jane says. “August told me about The Breakfast Club.”

Myla nods, mollified.

August forces Myla to let her go into the coffee shop a minute ahead to maintain cover, so she’s perched at the bar with an iced coffee when Myla enters. She tries to case out which of the twenty-something guys with black coffees and dogeared moleskines could be Gabe, until one with floppy hair and a pointy chin waves Myla over. He’s got a flannel tied around his waist and a faded Pickle Rick button on his messenger bag. August cannot imagine what he and Myla ever had in common. He looks almost pathetically happy to see her.

August sits back and sips her coffee and swipes through the substation homework she gave herself this week. She’s narrowed down which substation they need access to, so now it’s just about making sure they can get into the control room. Myla will take care of the rest.

Myla and Gabe wrap up after an hour, and she hugs him goodbye and throws him a call me! gesture before easing out the door. August hangs back for a minute, watching him stare after her. He looks like he might cry.

“Yikes,” August says under her breath as she heads for the door.

She meets Myla down the block, where she’s thumbing through her phone.

“That looked like it went unexpectedly well.”

Myla smiles. “Turns out he blocked me on social media because he ‘couldn’t stand to see how I’m doing’ without him. Which, I mean, fair. A bitch is doing spectacularly.” She holds up her phone. “He already texted me.”

“What did he say about the event?”

“Oh, this is the best part. Get this: he got the job because his uncle is one of the managers, so he doesn’t think he’ll have any trouble getting them to agree to let us use the space. Good old-fashioned nepotism to the rescue.”

“Holy shit,” August says. She thinks about Niko pulling the ace of swords from his tarot deck, about all the jade he’s been hiding around the apartment lately. Maybe it’s luck, but August can’t help but feel like someone has his thumb on the scale. “So now what?”

“He’s gonna talk to his uncle and call me tomorrow. I’m gonna head to Billy’s and talk to Lucie about moving things to the new venue.”

“Cool, I’ll come with you.”

Myla puts a hand out. “Nope. You have something else you need to take care of.”

“What?”

“You need to figure out how to talk to Jane,” she says, pointing toward the Q stop down the street. “Because if we pull this off and it works, you might never see her again, and Niko says you have a lot of things left to say to each other.”

August looks at her, the summer sunset gleaming off her sunglasses and sparkling against the Manhattan sidewalk. The city moves around them like they’re pebbles in a creek bed.

“It’s—we’re gonna be fine,” August says. “She knows how I feel about her. And—and if it’s gonna end like this, there’s nothing either of us can do. There’s no point ruining whatever time we have left by being sad about it.”

Myla sighs. “Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”

She leaves her on the corner, staring at the sharp tops of buildings heavy with pink and orange light.

How does she talk to Jane? Where does she even start? How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is? How does she tell Jane that she boarded it up years ago, and that this thing—not even love, but the hope for it—has pried up nails that have nothing to do with love at all?

She’s standing on a New York sidewalk, nearly twenty-four years old, and she’s found herself back at the first version of August, the one who hoped for things. Who wanted things. Who cried to Peter Gabriel and believed in psychics. And it all started when she met Jane.

She met Jane, and now she wants a home, one she’s made for herself, one nobody can take away because it lives in her like a funny little glass terrarium filled with growing plants and shiny rocks and tiny lopsided statues, warm with penthouse views of Myla’s paint-stained hands and Niko’s sly smile and Wes’s freckly nose. She wants somewhere to belong, things that hold the shape of her body even when she’s not touching them, a place and a purpose and a happy, familiar routine. She wants to be happy. To be well.