One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

She wonders if things were different, if maybe they could fall into the kind of love that doesn’t need to announce itself. Something that settles into the bricks as easily as every other true thing that’s ever unfolded its legs and walked up these stairs.

“A feast,” Jane says, reaching for a packet of chips. She sounds a little dubious, a little awed. “You got me a feast.” “That’s a generous use of the word. I’m pretty sure the guy at the bodega thought I was stoned.”

They do what they’ve always done: they talk. That’s what August likes best, the way they eat up each other’s thoughts and feelings and stories just as hungrily as the bagels or dumplings or Pop-Tarts.

sinks in and rearranges in August’s brain—the borrowed kisses, the times Jane’s bit her lip or slid her hand across August’s waist or asked her to dance, all the ways she’s tried to say it without saying it. They’re both hopeless at saying it, August realizes.

She looks up at August, a strand of dark hair falling across her eyes, mouth busy, and August knows she’d tell it herself in five words: girl, tongue, subway, saw God.

It’s a blur—August doesn’t know how she senses what to do. There’s supposed to be an awkward learning curve with someone you’ve never fucked before, but there’s not. There’s this flow between them that’s never made any goddamn sense since that static shock the day they met, and it’s like she’s found her way into this girl’s jeans a thousand times, like Jane’s had her figured out for years. She thinks dazedly that maybe it’s time to start believing in something. The fucking divine construction of Jane’s fingers when they press into her, maybe—that’s a higher power for sure.

“Virginity is a social construct,” Niko says mildly, and August glares at him. He does a vague sorry-for-reading-your-mind gesture. August is going to dropkick his cactus out the window. “It’s true,” Myla says, head popping out of their bedroom, eyes wide behind her welding goggles, still wearing her satin bonnet from the night before. “The whole idea is based on cissexist and heteronormative and quite frankly colonial-ass bullshit from a time when getting a dick in you was the only definition of sex. If that’s true, me and Niko have never had sex at all.” “And we both know that’s absolutely not the case,” Niko says. “Yeah, our walls are thin and I have ears,” August says, heading toward her bedroom in search of something to tie her hair up. “What kind of safeword is ‘waffle cone,’ anyway?”

“August, we’re adults, just say you got your back blown out.”

“Can you please,” August begs. “Anyway, before, right when I said I wanted to—the train broke down. So, are you saying—?” A dirty smile dawns on Myla’s face. “Oh my God. She literally shorted out the train because she was horny,” she says, eyes sparkling with absolute awestruck admiration. “She’s an icon.” “Myla.” “She’s my hero.”

Myla swallows an enormous bite of beef. It’s not that Niko enforces a vegetarian household, it’s just that Myla enjoys meat more when Niko’s not there to look distantly sad about the environment.

“Maybe you’re meant to be. Love at first sight. It happened to me.” “I don’t accept that as a hypothesis.” “That’s because you’re a Virgo.” “I thought you said virginity was a construct.” “A Virgo, you fucking Virgo nightmare. All this, and you still don’t believe in things. Typical Virgo bullshit.” Myla puts her burger down. “But maybe there was, like, an extra spark when you met, that pulled the trigger. What do you remember about it?”

“Okay,” Jane says placidly. “But can you come down here and tell me?” “What—” August starts, before Jane grabs her and pulls her down. She thumps gently into Jane’s lap. “Oof. Hello.” Jane grins back. “Hi.” “Oh, it’s nicer down here,” August says. “Yeah, I made reservations.”

Is this what it’s always like? To want someone and know they want you back? How in the world does anyone get anything done?

“Yeah,” Jane says. Their eyes meet. God, it’s hopeless. “This whole thing we have going on is … it’s very bad for my productivity,” August says.

Caution and a knife. She used to swear by it. But this is sharper, and she doesn’t want it to stop.

Her mind is softening at the edges, sinking into the feeling of not having to be in control, letting Jane push her right to the edge of her limits.

“Uh—” August stammers, struggling to keep a blank face. Jane’s middle finger does a tight circle and August wants to push into it, press down, but she can’t move. She’s never been so thankful for people who bring Ikea furniture on the subway. “Shit.” She feels the warm burst of Jane’s quiet laugh against the side of her neck.

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.

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.

“To Niko,” Myla says, raising her shot. “Born on the Fourth of July with both fingers in the air, pissing middle America off by living their dream: looks great in jeans and has a hot girlfriend.”

He looks like he could jumpstart a jet engine with his heart.

“Wes. Wes, oh my God,” Myla says, laughing too. “I mean, yes, we’ll probably get married one day. But we would never leave you. Like we could even afford to. Like we’d even want to. Maybe one day we’ll all move out and get our own places with our own people but, like, even then. We’ll be weirdly codependent neighbors. We’ll all move into a compound. Niko was born to be a cult leader.”

“I’m just saying,” Wes says. “I’ve seen, like, ten different engagement announcements on Instagram this month, okay? I know how it goes! We all age out of our parents’ insurance, and all of a sudden your friends stop having time to hang out because they have a person and that’s their best friend now, and they have a kid, and they move to the suburbs and you never see them again because you’re a lonely old spinster—”

“Oh,” Niko says simply, “he’s freaking out because they slept together after the Easter party.” The top of Wes’s head pops up from under the table, along with one accusatory finger. “Nobody asked the fucking Long Island Medium.” Niko smiles. “Lucky guess. My third eye is closed tonight, baby. But thanks for confirming.”

She wants to keep Jane. She wants to take her home and buy her a new record collection and wake up next to her every stupid morning. She wants Jane here in full-on, split-the-pizza-bill-five-ways, new-toothbrush-holder, violate-the-terms-of-the-lease permanence.

“I’m wearing a shirt and no pants,” he says. “I’m Winnie the Pooh-ing it.”

She’s in love with Jane. Shit, no, it’s worse than that. She’s in love with Jane, and she wants Jane to stay, and what she thought was her emergency emotional escape hatch for when Jane goes merrily back to the 1970s is just a trick door into more feelings.

“I wish I were never born,” August moans into the floor. “Retweet,” Wes says solemnly.

August tries to think, but it’s hard when her brain feels like a garbage bag full of wet socks and the socks are wet because they’re soaked in grain alcohol.

“So, what you’re telling me is, you’re gonna rally a bunch of queers to save Billy’s with pancakes and a drag show?” Jane says when August catches her up. She’s sun-warmed in the window of the train. August is trying not to think, In love, in love, I’m in terrible dumbass love. “Yeah,” August says, “basically.

That feeling that she lives here, like, really lives here.

New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart. And now, she’s gonna give it something. They’re gonna give it something.

“You’re still in a fight?” Niko asks. “I’m giving her space.” August extends a dry-erase marker to Myla, who glares as she snatches it up. “She said that was what she wanted.” “Uh-huh, and this wouldn’t have anything to do with the way you reflexively ice out anyone who even appears to have rejected or wronged you?” “Don’t answer that, it’s a trap,” Wes calls from the couch. “He’s using his powers for evil.” “That wasn’t a reading,” Niko says. “It was just a read.”

“You’re…” August attempts. “I just like everything about you.” She waves her hands at the smile that appears on Jane’s face. “Stop! It’s gross! What I said is gross!”

August laughs and dodges the orange peel Jane throws at her. “Tell me something I don’t know about you, then,” she says. “Surprise me.” “Okay,” Jane says, “but you have to do one too.” “You already know more about me than most people.” “That’s a testament to you living like you’re under deep cover and can’t compromise your civilian identity, not how much you’ve told me.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I fell out of time because I never really belonged where I started and the universe

There are a thousand things August could say, a thousand things she wants to do. Sleep next to her. Buy her lunch at the jerk chicken joint across the street. Brighton Beach. Prospect Park. Kiss her with the door shut.

It should feel dirty, to be with Jane like this, here, but what’s crazy is, she finally understands it all. Love. The whole shape of it. What it means to touch someone like this and want to have a life with them at the same time.

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 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.

“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.”

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

But at least I still had this shitty, smelly, overpriced, nightmare city.” He says the last part with a smile.

Jane shifts, dropping one foot onto the floor. The sunset’s making her glow, and it spreads when she smiles softly at August, one crooked tooth up front. August loves that tooth. It feels so stupid and small to love Jane’s crooked tooth when she might be about to lose her forever.

Slowly, the Wonder Wheel slides into view in the distance. They’ve seen it a thousand times from this train, lit up on summer nights, cutting yellow and green lines through the midday sky. August told Jane once about how it stayed when half the park was swept away. She knows how Jane likes stories about surviving.

Jane’s looking at her, and she’s looking at Jane, and the sun’s going down, and the goddamn thing is that it’s right there in both of their throats, but they can’t say it. They’ve always been hopeless at saying it.

There’s so much to say, but all she has is: “I was really lonely before I met you.” Jane’s silent for a few seconds. August doesn’t look at her, but she knows how the shadows of telephone poles and rooftops slide over the high points of her cheekbones and the soft dips of her mouth. She’s memorized it. She closes her eyes and tries to picture them again, anywhere else. Jane’s hand wraps around hers. “So was I.”

“Do you need anything?” Gabe asks, hovering around Myla like an enormous gnat with a Shawn Hunter haircut. Part of the agreement with the city was that Gabe’s uncle would supervise the event, and Gabe’s uncle apparently does not give a shit, because he sent Gabe instead. They keep having to switch topics when he drifts too close, so he doesn’t figure out the whole thing is partially a cover for a time crime.

a person with a lip ring shotgunning two White Claws at once,

the queen who is sometimes Winfield takes the stage in a magenta beard and performs an elaborate socialism-themed number set to a mix of “She Works Hard For The Money” and clips from AOC speeches.