She wants to feel it all without being afraid it’ll fuck her up.

She wants Jane. She loves Jane.

And she doesn’t know how to tell Jane any of that.

 

* * *

 

It’s a week later when Gabe comes through—they secure the Control Center as a venue, and Lucie passes out personalized to-do lists like juice boxes at a little league soccer game.

“These are legit,” August says, looking hers over. “We should hang out more.”

“No, thank you,” Lucie says.

She and Niko are assigned to meet with the manager of Slinky’s to arrange the liquor, and after a back-room conversation that involves Niko promising the man a free psychic reading and his mom’s empanadillas, they return to the apartment with booze donations checked off the list.

“Have you talked to Jane yet?” Niko asks as they ascend the stairs. He doesn’t specify what they need to talk about. They both know.

“Why are you even asking me if you already know?” August counters.

Niko eyes her mildly. “Sometimes things that are supposed to happen still need to be nudged along.”

“Niko Rivera, fate’s enforcer since 1995,” August says with an eye roll.

“I like that,” Niko says. “Makes it sound like I carry a nail bat.”

As they reach the front door, it flies open, and Wes comes marching out with both arms full of bright yellow flyers.

“Whoa, where are you going?” Niko asks.

“Lucie put flyers on my to-do list,” Wes says. “Winfield just dropped them off.”

“SAVE PANCAKE BILLY’S HOUSE OF PANCAKES PANCAKEPALOOZA DRAG & ART EXTRAGANZA,” August reads out loud. “Good lord, did we let Billy name it? Nobody in his family knows how to edit.”

Wes shrugs, heading for the stairs. “All I know is I’m supposed to post them around the neighborhood.”

“Running away isn’t going to help!” Niko calls after him.

August raises an eyebrow. “Running away from what?”

As if on cue, Isaiah rounds the last corner of the stairs. He and Wes freeze, separated by ten steps.

Niko idly pulls a toothpick from his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. “From that.”

There are a few seconds of tense silence before Wes takes his flyers and his shell-shocked expression and darts down the stairs. August can hear his sneakers echoing at double-time all the way down.

Isaiah rolls his eyes. Niko and August exchange a look.

“I’ll go,” August says.

She finds Wes on the street outside of the building, cussing out a stapler as he tries to affix a flyer to a telephone pole.

“Uh-oh,” August says, drawing up to him. “Did that stapler try to get emotionally intimate with you?”

Wes glares. “You’re hilarious.”

August reaches over and pries half the flyers out of Wes’s hands. “Will you at least let me help you?”

“Fine,” he grumbles.

They set off down the block, Wes attacking electrical poles and signposts while August wedges flyers into mail slots and between the bars of windows. Winfield must have dropped off something close to five hundred, because as they work their way through Flatbush, they barely make a dent in the stacks.

After an hour, Wes turns to her and says, “I need a smoke.”

August shrugs. “Go ahead.”

“No,” he says, rolling up his leftover flyers and shoving them into the back pocket of his jeans. “I need a smoke.”

Back in their apartment, Wes leads her to the door to his bedroom and says, “If you tell Niko or Myla I let you in here, I will deny it, and I will wait months until you’re no longer expecting my retribution and give all your stuff to that guy on the second floor whose apartment smells like onions.”

August nudges Noodles away from where he’s nipping at her heels. “Noted.”

Wes swings the door open, and there’s his bedroom, exactly how Isaiah described it: nice and neat and stylish, light woods, stone gray linens, his own artwork matted and framed on the walls. He’s got the taste of someone who grew up with the finest things, and August thinks about the trust fund Myla mentioned. He pops open an ornate wooden cigar box on his nightstand and retrieves a heavy silver lighter and a joint.

August can see the benefits to Wes’s slight build when he easily hops through the open window and onto the fire escape. She’s wider in the hips and not half as graceful; by the time she meets him, she’s out of breath and he’s perched mid-roof against one of the air-conditioning units, lighting up without breaking a sweat.

August nudges next to him and turns to face the street, looking out over the lights of Brooklyn. It’s not quiet, but it’s that smooth, constant flow of noise she’s grown used to. She likes to imagine if she listened closely enough, she could hear the Q rattling down the block, carrying Jane into the night.

She has to talk to Jane. She knows she has to.

Wes passes the joint over, and she takes it, thankful for any reason to stop thinking.

“What part of New York were you born in?” she asks him.

Wes exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m from Rhode Island.”

August pauses with the joint halfway to her mouth. “Oh, I just assumed because you’re such a—”

“Dick?”

She turns her head, squinting at him. It’s gray and dim up here, shot through with orange and yellow and red from the street below. The freckles on his nose blur together.

“I was gonna say a New York purist.”

The first hit burns on the way down, catching high in her chest. She’s only done this once before—passed to her at a party, desperately trying to act like she knew what to do—but she repeats what Wes did and holds the smoke for a few long seconds before letting it out through her nose. It all seems smooth until she spends the next twenty seconds coughing into her elbow.

“I moved here when I was eighteen,” Wes says once August is done, mercifully not commenting on her inability to handle her smoke. “And my parents basically pruned me off the family tree a year later once they realized I wasn’t going back to architecture school. But at least I still had this shitty, smelly, overpriced, nightmare city.”

He says the last part with a smile.

“Yeah,” August says. “Myla and Niko kind of … alluded.”

Wes sucks on the joint, the cherry flaring. “Yeah.”

“My, um … my mom. Her parents were super rich. Lots of expectations. And they, uh, basically acted like she didn’t exist either. But my mom is pretty fucked up too.”

“How so?” Wes asks, flicking ash before passing the joint back.

August manages to hold the second hit longer. She feels it in her face, spreading across her skin, starting to soften her edges. “She told me my whole life that her family didn’t want anything to do with me, so I never really had a family. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that was all a lie, and now they’re all dead, so.”

She doesn’t mention the son they forgot or the letters they intercepted. By now, she knows she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her mom’s family, even if she had known they cared about her. But she’s Suzette Landry’s daughter, which means she’s bad at letting shit go.