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Kate Bishop is going to get herself together.
Right after her next drink.
She is not the type of woman who freaks out when her handsome jerk ex sends her his wedding invitation and she has nobody to go with. She's not. Kate Bishop is cool and collected, and also young and rich and hot and awesome, thank you very much, and she has the 2012 Olympic gold medal in women’s individual archery sitting at home on a shelf somewhere, waiting for a frame. And she has her shit together. She doesn't feel small and inadequate and lonely.
Or she won't, anyway, when she gets to the bottom of this pint. At that point, Kate will just be drunk. Drunk is an emotion. It's a way better emotion than whatever she's currently feeling, which is somewhere between regular-sad and sadly embarrassed about being regular-sad. If she has to have feelings, why do they have to be about something so cliché, so dull? Area Twentysomething Drinks Alone Because Her Ex Is Getting Married Next Weekend.
Kate didn't even pick a bar she likes for this. She didn't want anybody to see her. Luckily, nobody can see anybody else because this bar is so filthy that even the air in here is dusty. It's a tiny narrow place in the East Village, dark and crowded and loud. Kate is hogging a corner table all to herself, glaring at any hipster assholes who dare to suggest that her moping requires less space.
She didn't want to marry Noh-Varr—God, she's got to start thinking of him as Noah instead of some dumb nickname she once drunkenly tapped into her contacts list, they're grown-ups and he's getting married for chrissakes—so why should she care if someone else did? She's the one who dumped him. Get it together, Bishop.
But even hunched over this rickety table and four beers down, she knows what this is really about. She might have dumped him, but he didn't really want her. The wedding is a sharp reminder. It hurts, not being wanted. Kate's got a lot of experience with that.
That ugly truth necessitates a fifth beer. Kate scopes out the bar and debates her choices. Push her way to the bar and get beer faster but probably lose the table, or sit here until some server takes pity on her?
Fuck it, she wants the beer more than the moping space. And since it's honesty hour, she wouldn't mind shoving a few people out of the way, either. Everyone's wearing plaid and denim and glasses and beards. Kate's wearing purple because she always wears purple. Even the fletching on her arrows is purple. The only other bright color in the bar comes from the outfit of somebody who was feeling seriously patriotic when she got dressed this morning. The woman is wearing a blue t-shirt with a white star on the chest and a red hoodie, the hood of which is pulled up over her head. Some of her black curls are escaping captivity. Over the hoodie, she’s wearing a denim jacket with red and white stripes behind the shoulders and stars parading down the arms. The only parts of her outfit that aren’t red, white, and blue are the black shorts and the black combat boots she’s wearing.
It makes Kate smile. She appreciates the dedication to a theme.
Miss America over there has one hand on the bar, wrapped around her beer, and the other on her booty-short-clad hip. She’s facing some guy who’s trying to talk to her, and she looks so profoundly unimpressed with his existence that Kate isn’t sure why the guy hasn’t disintegrated on the spot. He just keeps talking and talking. He’s getting closer and closer to her, too, even though she obviously doesn’t want him to. What an asshole.
Kate could stand to get up in a dude’s face right about now. Yell at him for awhile. Maybe tap her finger accusingly against his chest. She’s never done that to anybody before, but maybe tonight’s the night. Maybe she’ll rescue Miss America and they’ll get out of this hellhole and go drink beer far away from all these awful dudes.
Miss America has to be cool. She just has to be. She’s trying to murder that greasy dude with her stare and she’s rocking stars and stripes in a filthy hipster bar and Kate would bet all the cash in her wallet—a crisp two hundred and fifty dollars fresh from the ATM, for the record—that drinking shitty beer on the rooftop with Miss America is five hundred times more fun than moping alone in the corner of McHipster’s Ironically Dirty Tavern.
If Kate weren’t four beers in, she might question why her fantasy friendship with this girl involves them hanging out on the rooftop of her archery coach’s apartment building in Bed-Stuy. Bed-Stuy is a long train ride at this time of night.
She might also question why this fantasy friendship has to start with Kate rescuing her brand-new friend from some asshole, instead of just a “hello” like normal people use.
But Kate is not only four beers in, she’s also marching across the room and shoving people out of the way. That asshole is going down, as soon as Kate gets there—
Miss America’s right hand uncoils from around her beer glass. It forms a fist. Her arm draws back and then snaps forward. Her fist connects with the asshole’s jaw.
Kate doesn’t even register the sound of it until the asshole is already staggering backwards and collapsing.
Lucky for her, right at the moment she makes it to the bar, a space has opened up right next to Miss America. She has to step over a guy who’s moaning on the floor to get there, but that’s no hardship.
“Nice punch,” Kate says.
Miss America smiles.
The girl is cute. Drunk, but cute. She steps right over Loki, says “Nice punch,” and looks like she wants to say something more. But then the bartender is yelling at America to get the hell out, so America shrugs and walks out the door. She doesn’t expect the girl to follow her onto the sidewalk, but once they’re outside, she sticks her hand out and it’s sort of adorable, so America takes it. The girl stares at the sudden contact between their hands, like she hadn’t really expected America to accept her handshake. America tries not to laugh at her. She lets go of her hand.
She’s about the same height as America, and about the same age too, probably, wearing jeans and a cropped purple tank top that shows off her upper arms. As slender as she is, she’s cut. Her shiny black hair is pulled back into a long ponytail. She’s still got sunglasses perched on her head, even though it’s been dark out for awhile now. She’s got two little sparkly studs in her ears, and a silver ear cuff that looks like a tiny quiver of arrows. Her cheeks are pink from alcohol. There’s something vaguely familiar about her, but America can’t place it.
“I’m Kate,” she says.
“America.”
“No way.”
America rolls her eyes. Nobody ever believes her.
“Shit, that’s—that’s amazing.”
“Thanks,” America says dryly.
There’s a moment of silence that prickles with electricity. Kate stands there, staring at America, looking like she’s waiting for something. America just lets her stare. She’s got nowhere in particular to be.
“Where did you learn to punch like that, Miss America?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry,” Kate says. “I just—wow. I was having a really bad night until you punched that guy. That was great. Punching guys is the solution to everything.”
America laughs out loud. “Alright,” she says. “I feel that.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
America raises an eyebrow. Kate’s hot, and she likes the idea of punching men, so America’s inclined to say yes, but up until a minute ago, America would have guessed Kate was straight. Kate’s blue eyes are wide, like she’s a little surprised by her own question. It’s endearing. “Sure,” America says, with a shrug.
They walk down the street until they come to a different bar. It’s got leather armchairs and cocktails made of ingredients that everybody has to secretly look up on their phone and then pretend they knew all along. Normally America wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, but Kate walks in and America ends up following. Kate’s got a cute butt.
America doesn’t know what half the shit on the menu is, but Kate’s going on about elderflower liqueur or some shit. She stops when she catches America’s eye. “Or we could order whiskey,” she says.
“Sure,” America says again. She tries not to think about how much whiskey costs at a place like this. She thinks about Kate’s little stud earrings, and how they’re probably real diamonds. Okay. So Kate is rich. America’s only ever dated girls like herself, girls who worked their way up in the world and knew their own bank accounts down to the decimal. But Kate seems alright. Kate’s buying her a drink. “You come here often, princess?”
Kate’s mouth twists, but she doesn’t say anything because the server comes to take their order. By the time that’s done, the nickname is forgotten. America doesn’t see why it should upset her. Doesn’t everybody want to be a princess? Kate’s got the hair for it. And the eyes.
“So, bad day?” America offers, trying to make up for it.
“Yeah,” Kate says. “My ex is getting married soon and I got invited to the wedding and it’s so awful and cliché to worry about not having anyone to go with, but apparently I’m awful and cliché.” She sighs. “My solution was beer. Punching somebody seemed like a good solution, too, but then you got there first.”
“You were gonna punch him?”
Kate is ridiculous. America, despite everything, is touched. The last woman that America dated said things like ‘I wish you would talk about your feelings instead of just going to the gym and punching a bag until you feel better’ and the relationship had ended pretty fast after that. America misses sleeping next to someone—and sleeping with someone, of course, she’s not a nun—but she’s not angry about it. People are different. Some people don’t think there’s any value in punching things, for instance.
“Yeah,” Kate says emphatically. “And then you were gonna say ‘nice punch’ and we were gonna drink shitty beer on the roof of my friend’s building in Brooklyn. I had it all planned out.”
“Sorry I ruined your plans, princess.” America smiles. That time, Kate doesn’t look so bothered by the nickname.
Their server shows up with glasses of whiskey, and Kate holds her up in a toast. “To punching assholes.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
The whiskey is probably good. America has no idea about the difference between bad whiskey and good whiskey. It all has the same effect. She can hold her liquor, but she sips the whiskey instead of shooting it back. Kate’s a little unsteady. Somebody has to watch out for her.
Her drunken chatter is still more charming than what most people manage when they’re sober, and America finds herself laughing at a story about some friend of Kate’s accidentally feeding expensive artisanal pizza to his dog.
“So anyway, now Lucky whines for wood-fired crust and fresh mozzarella, and Clint wouldn’t know good pizza if you literally had it delivered to his door.” Kate blinks. She glances at her watch. “Clint! Oh shit. I’m supposed to meet Clint at the range at nine tomorrow. I have to go.”
Kate shoots up and hops over the low table between their chairs with more coordination than America would have thought possible. She heads for door, and America follows, calling after her.
“Kate! Are you gonna be okay? Do you want some company on your way home?”
“Which way are you headed?”
“Brooklyn,” America says.
Kate shakes her head. “I’m going uptown. Don’t worry about me. Maybe I’ll finally get to punch a dude after all, take out all my wedding bullshit on him.”
“You’re gonna be fine,” America tells her. She genuinely believes it. Kate’s pretty and charming and can hop over tables while drunk. “Nobody will even notice if you don’t have a date to the wedding. Just dress hot.”
Kate’s mouth shifts into a lopsided frown. “I’ll notice,” she says.
“So take me,” America says, almost as surprised to find herself saying the words as Kate looks when she hears them. Doubt rolls in, but she stands her ground. What was tonight, if not a date? It was a lot more fun than some dates America has had.
“I,” Kate starts, and America braces for rejection. “Okay.”
“Sound a little more excited, why don’t you.”
“No, I’m just—are you sure you want to do this? We met like three hours ago.”
America shrugs. “It’s been a good three hours.”
“I guess it is 2014. And the wedding is only one night. It’s not like you’d have to put up with it any longer than that,” Kate says. “And it’s in the Hamptons, so it’s not that far away.”
Uh oh. America’s doubts multiply with every word out of Kate’s mouth. But she likes Kate, and she offered, and she’s not going back on it now just because the phrase the Hamptons makes her nervous as all hell. And what was all that ‘I guess it is 2014’ stuff about? America tries to push that thought aside.
Kate’s pulling her phone out of her purse. It’s purple. America is beginning to detect a theme. “Give me your number?” Kate says, and America does. “I’ll text you. The wedding is next weekend, so I’ll be in touch soon, I promise.”
That’s way sooner than America thought. Shit. She probably needs to look nice, and offer to split a tank of gas or pay for half a hotel room or something, and she really does not have the money for any of that. What is she getting herself into? Maybe she’s drunker than she thought.
“Thanks so much for this,” Kate says. “It really does make me feel better. You’re my hero.”
“Yeah,” America says uncertainly, “sure.”
“Anyway, according to my phone, there’s a train in ten minutes. Bye!”
Not even a peck on the cheek to say goodbye. Kate’s lucky her butt is cute.
Clint was supposed to meet her at the range at 9AM, which is why she’s calling his damn landline at 9:15 while squinting into the sunshine and digging through her bag to find her sunglasses. They’ve got purple frames, which might make them easy to find in anyone else’s bag. She ends up kneeling on the ground next to her bow and arrows in order to root through her purse while she listens to Clint’s phone ring in one ear.
“What the hell, Clint,” she starts, when he finally picks up. “I’m the one who was out drinking last night and yet here I am, right on time.” She slides her sunglasses on. She doesn’t have much of a headache after last night, but it’s a relief anyway.
“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles. “Power was out in the whole building this morning. Faulty electrical wiring. Had to fight the tracksuit draculas to get them to agree to do something about it.”
She sighs, feeling bad for giving him a hard time when he was trying to do the right thing. Then she hears a slurping sound through the phone and goes right back to being exasperated. “Are you drinking coffee straight out of the pot again?” It’s a pointless question. Of course he is.
“No clean mugs, Katie-kate.”
“Just get over here. Lucky could use the air.”
Kate hangs up. Clint is a total disaster of a human being, but he’s her disaster. He’s also the winningest men’s archer in Olympic history, but funny enough, that isn’t why she loves him. When she met Clint, she was a starstruck teenager with an expensive recurve and some talent but no training. Clint took the kind of interest in her that nobody else ever had. Kate guesses it’s the kind of guidance that most people get from their dads, but she wouldn’t know. Clint may be chronically late, but he always shows up. She can’t say the same of her father.
And Clint usually has a good reason for being late, whether it’s standing up to the mob assholes who own his apartment building or rescuing a dog from a car accident. That was how he ended up with Lucky, who eats more pizza than is probably healthy for a dog. But Clint takes better care of that dog than he does of himself, which he proves again this morning by showing up with a blooming black eye.
“Clint,” she says, walking closer and pushing her sunglasses up onto her head in order to examine his face. He flinches away from her touch, turning his head to the side so that she can see his hearing aid. At least he remembered to put that on today.
“Ow. Stop, it’s just a bruise. It’ll heal.”
Lucky, who has never flinched away from Kate, is much happier to be touched. He wraps himself up in the leash that Clint is holding while Kate kneels down to rub his belly. Technically no pets are allowed at the range, but nobody who works here has ever said no to Clint and Kate, and especially not to Lucky himself. Kate pauses in giving the belly rub to look back up at Clint. “The other guy looks worse, huh?”
“Guys, plural,” Clint says, not even bothering to act humble about it. In addition to winning multiple Olympic archery competitions, Clint has won his fair share of brawls, in bars and elsewhere. They don’t hand out medals and endorsement deals for those.
She decides not to scold him about it. He’s forty-four years old and he’s a grown man, even though he’s wearing sweatpants and a coffee-stained t-shirt and his hair looks like it’s never met a comb. “How are you going to appreciate my skills with one eye swollen shut?” she says.
“I always appreciate you, Katie-kate.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, but it still makes her smile. She picks up her bow and an arrow and walks over to position herself seventy meters in front of one of the targets. She can hear Clint singing “Katie, get your bow,” tunelessly behind her. She recognizes the song despite the lack of melody because it’s the one Clint always sings to himself while he watches her practice. She only figured out that it was supposed to sound like “Annie Get Your Gun” after she had been in his apartment enough times to know that he’d frayed his cassette of Squeeze’s Singles and 45s to pieces.
It’s a good day, sunny and windless, and Kate shoots well. Clint watches from behind her, petting Lucky and making the occasional suggestion about her stance or congratulating her on a well-aimed shot. He does a lot of that second one, actually. At one point, he crows “Rio 2016, Katie-kate!” and she flashes a grin over her shoulder. It never gets any less exciting, the fact that the expression going for the gold is literally applicable to her life.
She finishes up after a couple of hours and packs up her equipment, feeling good after practice like always. As she’s shouldering her bag, Clint says, “So. You said you were out drinking last night.”
“Did I?” she says, and then remembers that she did, on the phone with him. Crap.
“That’s not like you,” he observes. “Not that I’m judging. Special occasion?”
“I got invited to Noh’s wedding,” she says.
“Mmhmm,” he says. She can usually trust Clint not to be interested in this sort of thing. He’s seen a lot of guys enter and then subsequently exit Kate’s life, and he has the good sense to keep his mouth shut about it. Noh lasted longer than most, though. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she says, and it occurs to her that she is. “I’m gonna take a friend with me. I’ll be alright.”
“I’m offended that you didn’t ask me to be your fake boyfriend.”
“Yeah,” Kate says, “because showing up with a dude who’s twenty years older than me and thinks a black eye and coffee stains are the height of fashion really screams ‘success.’”
Clint puts his hand over his heart like she’s wounded him. “That’s ‘winningest Olympic archer of all time’ to you,” he says.
“Besides, you have your thing with Natasha, whatever the hell that is. I don’t want her to kill me in my sleep.”
Although, as far as ways to die go, ‘murdered by Clint’s mysterious and beautiful Russian ex-KGB maybe-girlfriend’ is actually pretty cool. Natasha probably wouldn’t murder Kate though. She would probably think the whole thing was funny. Clint’s not even very convincing as Nat’s real boyfriend or partner or whatever he is, because every time Nat’s around he always has this look on his face that shifts between bliss and suspicion that their relationship is too good to be true.
“I don’t think acting is your thing, Barton,” she tells him. “But if I need somebody to shoot the ring out of the groom’s hand at the last minute and sabotage the whole affair, I’ll call you.” She bumps her fist against his shoulder playfully. He winces. He must have a bruise there. “On your landline,” she adds.
“You know I would be there if you needed me,” he says lightly. It’s true, though. He always has been.
“Thanks,” she says. “But I’m guessing America’s a better dancer than you.”
“Your fake boyfriend’s name is America?”
“We met last night and we’re deeply in love,” Kate retorts. Clint’s question unsettles her, though. America doesn’t think they’re going on a date, right? Kate just wants to take her to the wedding as a friend. That’s a thing people do sometimes, right? They take a friend to a wedding to mask their own massive, pathetic insecurities.
Okay. When she thinks of it that way, it sounds bad.
But she’s pretty sure that she didn’t give America the impression that she was interested and that the wedding was a date. At least not like a romantic, sexual-type thing. She didn’t say anything about that, and why would America think that, unless she’s into women? But Kate’s never been into women, so how could she possibly have given that impression? All she did was ask America to come with her. As a friend. Because Kate just wants to be friends. She just wants them to be two very cool, cute girls who sometimes go out together and get drunk and laugh about all the asshole dudes they’re too good for, and if anybody bothers them then America will punch them and it will be amazing, and maybe some day they’ll stay up all night talking and watching the city lights from Clint’s rooftop, and sometimes they’ll be two very cool, cute girls who go to weddings together to dance and to prove that things are going perfectly fine and otherwise act as moral support.
That’s friendship, right?
These are totally normal, heterosexual thoughts and feelings to have about another woman. Kate knows what it feels like to be infatuated with someone and it’s not like this. When that happens, she always spends a lot of time thinking about a guy’s upper-arm strength and the size of his dick. This is not that. It’s fine. Clint is making her freak out over nothing.
“Katie-kate?”
“Shit,” she says, and then thinks shit again because she did not intend to say that out loud. “Uh,” she says. “It’s nothing. I’m just wondering if I might maybe have accidentally… misled her.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Clint says, and sometimes Kate wonders where his total confidence in her comes from.
The gym smells like sweat and metal, but America has never minded. She loves boxing too much to care. If the dozens of huge men addressing her as “baby” and “little girly” over the course of the last decade haven’t kept her out of the ring, a little fragrance isn’t going to do it.
Besides, those men had stopped talking to her like that after she took them down for the count.
And now she has Teddy, who has never once disrespected her, and who fights well for such a sweet kid. He’s a funny mixture of kindness and fists, broad shoulders and fluffy blonde bangs. He’s one of the few men in the world that America genuinely likes. It probably makes things easier that he’s gay as the day is long.
She knocks him down with a series of hooks and jabs, then steps back. She takes off her gloves and then ducks out of the ring, looking for her water bottle.
“Took longer than usual for you to beat my ass into the ground,” Teddy notes. “You distracted?”
America gulps down some water and wipes her hand across the back of her mouth. When isn’t she distracted? She comes here on the days between her twelve-hour shifts at the station to forget Loki and her family and all her money problems. She comes here to breathe smoke out of her lungs and inhale stale gym air. Everything smells better than a fire. And hitting things—and people—is cathartic.
But if she’s being honest, today the problem isn’t any of those things. It’s Kate.
Teddy gets out of the ring, still focusing those blue eyes on her. Normally she’d shrug and say a word or two and then leave. Their friendship is based entirely on a mutual love of punching and an avoidance of everyone else at the gym who is made uncomfortable by their sex and sexuality. She doesn’t ask Teddy about his feelings—his ridiculous sappy twenty-year-old feelings of storybook romance with his boyfriend Billy, whose name America never asked but learned anyway—and he accepts that she is never going to talk about hers, even though his impeccable manners prompt him to ask her anyway.
It could be the dehydration from sweat or the increased heart rate after winning a fight, but today she decides to say something.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, and his eyes widen. America ignores his expression and forges ahead. “If a guy said ‘well, I guess it is 2014’ before the two of you went out, what would you think that meant?”
Teddy—sweet, even-tempered, looking-for-the-best-in-everyone Teddy—frowns. “Nothing good.”
“Yeah,” America says. “I thought so.”
“You like this… person?”
America shrugs. “She’s hot,” she says, because it’s easier than saying she makes me laugh or I want to hold her and run my fingers through her hair or we met yesterday and I can’t stop thinking about her.
“Maybe she didn’t mean anything by it. People say tactless stuff. Or maybe she’s new to dating women and she’s trying to make herself feel better about it. Give her a chance.”
“You would say that.”
“I wasn’t finished. Be careful. Protect yourself.”
“Listen to you,” she says. She blows air through her lips and flips her bangs out of her face. “Can’t even buy beer and wiser than me.”
“Not wise enough to beat you in the ring, though.”
“Some day, chico,” she says and grins at him. The guys down at the station think she’s a bitch who never smiles, but that’s just because they never give her anything to smile about. But they respect her because she does her job right, and that’s enough for her. Teddy, on the other hand, is somebody she would drink a beer with, if only he were old enough to drink beer. Instead, she lets him try to punch her, which is as close as any man ever gets to being her friend. “You almost had me.”
“I’m just waiting for you to open your own gym,” he says. Teddy is a good boxer; he’s just not quite as brutally efficient as she is when it comes to knocking out opponents. It’s become a joke between them. “Then I’m gonna kick your ass and you’ll have to put a framed picture of me on the wall.”
She scoffs and crosses her arms over her chest. “If I ever get the money to open my own place, and you beat me, I will buy you one of those big fancy paintings with the gold frames. We’ll get somebody really famous and talented to paint it. What’s that guy’s name, the one who just auctioned his painting for a million dollars?”
“Steve Rogers?” Teddy laughs. “I think it was more like four million dollars. All for charity, too.”
“Yeah, him,” she says. “You beat me in my own gym, we’ll hire him to paint your picture. You can sit on a horse and stare into the distance, whatever it is rich people do.” She’ll have to ask Kate.
“You’d better stop raising the stakes,” he says. “You’re gonna be sorry.”
America laughs, but it’s not a happy sound. She’s about as likely to hire Steve Rogers to paint Teddy’s portrait as she is to open her own gym at this point. She thinks of the stack of bills on her kitchen counter and sighs.
“See you here this weekend?” Teddy asks. They try to box every couple of days, at least when America’s work schedule permits.
“No,” she says. They both gather up their gear and head outside, where they stand on the sidewalk just outside the door. Teddy’s bike is locked up outside. America doesn’t usually wait for him to unlock it before she takes off for the short walk back to her apartment, but Teddy is proving surprisingly insightful in this conversation. Maybe there is something to this whole ‘talking to people’ thing after all. “I’ll be in the Hamptons for a wedding.”
“Your date is a wedding in the Hamptons? Way to bury the lede, Ms. Chavez.”
Her mouth pulls to one side in a frown before she can stop it. Going to this wedding as some rich straight girl’s fake date seems less and less like a good idea. “Yeah,” she says, her voice flat. “A bunch of rich old white strangers and some girl who probably doesn’t even like me back.”
“Wow,” Teddy says, still processing all this information. He gives her a serious look. “Start with the silverware on the outside of the place setting and work your way in. And don’t punch anybody.”
Some dark-haired hipster asshole bikes down the fucking sidewalk and nearly runs her over. She steps to the side, closer to the glass door of the boxing gym, just in time. His brakes screech as he comes to a stop a few feet from them. Then he hops off his bike, turns it around, and rolls it toward the two of them. “Hey, babe.” He kisses Teddy on the cheek. “And this must be the Miss America I have heard so much about,” he says.
“How could you tell,” she deadpans. Today’s outfit is understated, at least compared to her usual style: red gym shorts, blue sports bra with white stars down the wide straps, and a white tank top that’s so worn it’s practically transparent. Billy—because that’s obviously who this kid is, and she feels a little bad for thinking of him as a hipster asshole now—blinks at her, but then one corner of her mouth lifts in a smile, and he relaxes. “Hi, Billy. Nice to meet you.” She sticks her hand out, shakes Billy’s, then glances at Teddy significantly. America has manners, when she wants to.
“I heard something about rich old white strangers and a girl? And not punching anybody?” Billy asks, and America does not roll her eyes, sigh, groan out loud, or commit even one single act of violence, because she has such good manners. She could start her own damn finishing school.
“America is going to a wedding in the Hamptons,” Teddy says.
“It’s gonna be great,” she says, with the same enthusiasm she reserves for door-to-door missionaries and telemarketers. “I’m gonna fit right in.”
“Are you kidding?” Billy says, eyes wide. He grins. “Who gives a fuck what they think? Just go drink their liquor and show them up on the dance floor.”
Funny. That’s a lot like what America said to Kate about the wedding. But Kate doesn’t need to be told how to act around rich people, because she is one. And Kate doesn’t need to worry about falling in love with somebody who doesn’t like her back. Things are different for America. Then again, maybe it’s just a lot easier to give advice than to take it.
“I think it’s the girl that’s the problem,” Teddy says. “Not the rich people.”
“I gotta go,” America says, but all she has waiting for her at home is yesterday’s Szechuan pork in the fridge and some shitty reality shows that she shouldn’t be watching. She looks at Teddy. “Text me next time you want to box.”
“Wait, wait,” Billy says. “I finally meet the famous and elusive America Chavez and she’s leaving after five minutes? Come get dinner with us. Tell us your girl problems. Plus, Teddy said the banh mi place two blocks from here is great.”
Teddy and Billy are standing so close together that they’re probably in violation of a city ordinance if not a law of physics. Teddy has one arm wrapped around Billy’s slender waist. He smiles encouragingly at her. America thinks of all the things he’s shared with her in conversation, and all the times he’s tried to get her to do something other than trade punches, and finally relents. Maybe they’re more than boxing friends after all.
She might have kicked Teddy’s ass in the ring this afternoon, but when she shrugs one shoulder at him and says “okay,” he looks at her like he just got named heavyweight champion of the world.
“What are you doing here, again?”
Kate’s outstretched hands droop, rustling the half-dozen shimmering cocktail dresses she’s holding. “I,” she says loftily, “thought I was asking a friend for help. I mean, I would have skyped or whatever, but you still don’t have internet here, which I honestly don’t understand. How do you live like this, Barton?”
He’s stretched out on the couch and he barely lifts his head from Natasha’s lap to respond to Kate. Even though Natasha’s visiting, Clint still looks like his usual mess. The bruise around his eye has faded a little, and at least he has an excuse for his bedhead. Natasha has clearly been running her fingers through his hair. Normally Kate would feel bad about interrupting their weird and mysterious bonding time, but this is kind of an emergency.
“Don’t know why you’d want advice from somebody who ‘thinks coffee stains are the height of fashion,’” Clint says.
“I’m asking her,” Kate says, although she hadn’t known Natasha would be here when she first barged in with an armful of potential wedding wear. She had wanted Clint’s opinion. He might not be able to dress himself, but he gives reliable advice on everything else—why wouldn’t he be able to help her pick a dress? Kate doesn’t usually ask him for help with this kind of stuff, because she doesn’t usually ask for anybody’s help with this kind of stuff, but today she wants a second opinion. It’s no big deal. She just has to look breathtakingly gorgeous at this wedding, that’s all.
“It’s just,” she says, “I don’t know what America will be wearing, and—,”
“Kate,” Clint interrupts, finally sitting up to look straight at her. “Are you nervous?”
“No! I’m just—she’s really cool, and she’s gonna look amazing, and—I don’t know—shut up.” Kate makes a face at him. Clint had stood on the sidelines at the 2012 Olympic finals and watched Kate shoot arrow after arrow into the center of the target with scientific accuracy and undisturbed concentration. He should know better than anyone that Kate Bishop doesn’t get nervous. She is the definition of cool and collected.
“You’re nervous,” Clint says. “And it’s not because it’s your ex’s wedding. It’s the girl.”
Kate rolls her eyes and huffs. Sometimes Clint makes her want to act nine years old and spoiled rotten. She only looks back at him when she hears Natasha say, “So?”
Natasha is sitting back with one arm stretched along the top of the couch, watching them both with amusement. Kate only realizes that she’s standing in Clint’s living room, blocking Natasha’s view of the TV and holding more dresses than a clearance rack, when Natasha levels a long, cool look at her. Her eyes are so green. God. There are too many unearthly beautiful women in Kate’s life. “What are you waiting for? Go try them on.”
Kate snaps her mouth shut, turns on her heel, and walks into Clint’s guest bedroom. It’s about the size of a postage stamp, but it’s big enough to change in. She tosses the dresses on the bed and strips. She picks a dress at random—iridescent silvery-lilac, slinky and draped—and pulls it over her head. When she walks back out into Clint’s living room, Clint has his head back in Natasha’s lap and he’s staring up at Natasha, one hand entwined in her shoulder-length red hair. Clint obviously didn’t hear Kate walk into the room, because Kate’s never seen him look like such a fucking dope before, and that’s really saying something.
“Hey,” she says loudly, and he sits right up. He doesn’t even look embarrassed that she caught him looking like the world’s biggest sap. Hard to blame him, though, since Kate could barely remember her own name the first time she met Natasha. It’s like staring into the sun.
“You look lovely,” Natasha assures her.
“Yeah,” Clint says. “And if anybody disagrees, you can shoot them. Arrow right through the eye.”
Natasha glances down at him, unimpressed. “So obvious,” she says. “My methods are far more subtle.”
Kate blinks. It’s probably a joke.
“She’s gonna love it, Katie-kate,” Clint says. “You can turn the event into a surprise double-wedding.”
“Who is this girl, anyway?” Natasha says.
“A friend,” Kate says emphatically, just as Clint grins and says, “Her name is America,” and launches into a loud and spectacularly tuneless version of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” Kate and Natasha both turn to stare at him, and then look at each other in mutual resignation.
“She wants the young American, young American, young American…”
Kate shakes her head and walks back into the bedroom. She slips out of the dress. Then there’s a knock on the door. “I swear to God, Barton, if you came over here just to sing me the rest of that song, I will use you for target practice.” Kate says it loud enough that even Clint is sure to hear it, then grabs her discarded dress and holds it over her front so she can open the door a crack.
Natasha peeks in. “Can I come in?”
Oh. Jesus. Kate wasn’t planning on being naked in front of America’s Next Top Ex-KGB Agent. But she clutches the dress to her boobs and lets Natasha in anyway. Natasha pushes the pile of dresses aside and sits down on the bed. “Clint’s a dork, and kind of an asshole sometimes,” she says, by way of explanation, like Kate wasn’t already aware. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Kate,” Natasha says, in the kind of we need to talk tone that makes Kate really, really wish she were wearing more clothes. “Do you remember when we met?”
“And I couldn’t string a sentence together in your presence? Yeah. Thank you for reminding me of that deeply embarrassing moment.”
Natasha smiles a little bit. “Sorry,” she says. “I only mention it because I didn’t know what to say, either, the first time I saw a woman and realized that I could be attracted to women as well as men.”
Kate’s mouth falls open. “What,” she says. “Oh, no, no—no, Clint is just teasing me. It’s not like that. America really is just a friend.” Heat rushes over the skin of her face. “Oh God, you just came out to me and I acted like a total dick, I’m so sorry, that’s not what I meant, I—,” Kate ducks her head and covers her face with her palm. Without both of her hands on the dress, the fabric slips and Kate inadvertently flashes Natasha. Kate’s head shoots up and she grabs at the dress again. “Oh my God, I’m a disaster.”
Natasha is unfazed. She’s not even smiling—or is she? Kate can’t look at her. “Kate,” she says again, and yeah, that’s definitely the voice of someone who’s smiling. “It’s okay.” She pauses. “I apologize for assuming. I’m turning around now if you want to get dressed.”
Kate drops the dress she’s holding and picks up the deep plum-colored stretchy one that makes her ass look fantastic. It’s a huge improvement over being naked. By the time she’s done shimmying into it and tugging it down her thighs, she can almost manage to look Natasha in the eye again. “No, don’t apologize, I’m not offended or anything. I can totally see how you might think that,” Kate says, because she has been talking about America a lot, and worrying about the wedding, and generally acting like a weirdo. “But it’s not like that. I mean, if I did like women, I’d already know, right? Who waits until they’re 26 years old to figure out their own sexuality?”
Natasha shrugs one shoulder. “People are different.”
“Are you two ever coming back?” Clint calls from the living room.
“Wardrobe malfunction,” Natasha says, loudly enough for Clint to hear through the closed door, and Kate blushes again at how accurate it is. Natasha tilts her head toward the door and looks at Kate. “That one was 32, for instance.”
“What.” Kate knows everything about Clint. Absolutely everything. She’s done his goddamn laundry. And he has never once—“Holy shit,” she breathes. “One time he got invited to this big gala fundraiser to build more schools for Deaf and hard-of-hearing kids. That artist Steve Rogers was there. Clint practically fucking swooned. Everything makes so much more sense now.”
Natasha nods.
“Oh no,” Kate says. “Why didn’t he ever tell me? Should I not know that? Does he not want me to know?”
Natasha gets up off the bed and strides out the door, leaving it open behind her. Kate follows her back into the living room. “You never told Kate you were bi,” Natasha is saying. “I thought she knew.”
“I did tell her. She knows,” Clint says. Kate looks at him from over Natasha’s shoulder. She forgets, sometimes, that Natasha is so short. Her presence is so imposing. Clint catches her eye. “I told you that, right, Katie-kate?” Kate shakes her head. “Oh. Well. I fuck dudes sometimes,” he says. “Now you know.”
“So… am I the only one here who’s straight?”
“If you say so,” Natasha says.
At the same time, Clint says, “Why’d you phrase it like a question.”
Natasha goes to sit back down on the couch with Clint, and Kate sits down in the lumpy armchair adjacent to them, her project of trying on dresses totally forgotten. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess maybe I’m not sure. I notice when women are pretty, but… everyone notices when women are pretty, right? We’re all socialized that way.”
Natasha and Clint are looking at her in a way that makes her want to squirm. Ugh. This is awful. Worse than going to Noh’s wedding without a date. Kate should have just rejected his invitation from the start. She could have gone out dancing and made out with some guy at a club as a rebound instead. It would have been so much simpler than this bullshit journey of self-discovery.
“You don’t have to be sure,” Natasha says. “Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. Maybe it’s just this one girl.”
“And Nat,” Clint teases. “And there was that one time, with Whitney Frost.”
Kate wishes she had something to throw at him. “Shut up,” she says. “I told Natasha about your brain short-circuiting in front of Steve Rogers.”
“See?” Clint says, turning to Natasha. “I was sure I had told her.”
“I can’t believe you forgot whether you came out,” Natasha says. “Only you.”
“Anyway,” Clint says. “Like I said this weekend, you’ll figure it out. Just look at you, Katie-kate. You’re perfect.”
At least this time, when Kate drops her head into her hands to cover her face, she doesn’t end up naked.
Kate picks America up in a huge old purple boat of a car, because of course she does. America chucks her bag into the backseat and slides into the front. Don’t look at Kate, she reminds herself. It’s too late to back out of this bad plan now, so she has to make the best of things. She has to get out of this without fucking things up for Kate or for herself. America can do that. She’s a grown woman in control of herself. She can be friends with another confident, charming, attractive woman.
So they’re going to be friends. That means not dwelling on how very hot—and how very straight—Kate is, which means looking at her as little as possible. Shouldn’t be too hard. It’s a beautiful sunny Saturday in August, and they’re driving out of the city, so there should be lots of other things to look at. America can look out the window and judge other people’s driving or read strange billboards or gaze into the sky without some kind of uneasy, conflicted expression crossing her face. She can also do all of those things without telegraphing you’re hot and I haven’t slept with anybody in six months to Kate and the rest of the world. She’s spending the next twenty-four hours with Kate, so she has to play off all her worries and be cool.
“Hi America!” Kate says cheerfully, swerving into the next lane and cutting someone off an instant after America has shut the door. “I’m so happy to see you, honestly, I can’t thank you enough for this. I already feel so much better about going to this fucking wedding. I know it’s weird because we don’t really know each other, but last weekend was great and I feel like we could be… friends. Yeah. Um. Friends.”
Good. They’re on the same page.
Kate brakes two inches from the next car’s bumper, and two problems with America’s strategy become clear. 1. Kate is wearing a low-cut purple halter top and no bra. (The fact that America has noticed this at all goes to show that Operation Don’t Look at Kate is already a failure.) 2. Kate is a ridiculously aggressive driver, and her breasts quiver when the car slams to a stop.
America forces herself to stare at something else. There’s a music player sitting in between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, connected to the tape deck with a wire. America picks it up. She hadn’t really noticed the music before, between Kate’s outfit and the incongruous mixture of friendly chatter and vicious driving. But the music might be the strangest thing yet.
“Bach?” she says, looking at the little rectangular screen.
“Yeah,” Kate says. “I play the cello. You can change it if you want.”
America scrolls through Kate’s library, partly out of curiosity and partly because it will keep her from staring at Kate. Kate’s music is mostly classical. America wouldn’t even know where to start. She switches to a streaming music app and puts on something from this century. Kate nods once and says nothing, but a few minutes later America catches her tapping her fingers against the steering wheel in time with the beat. Nobody can resist Santigold.
“So tell me about yourself,” Kate says. “I feel like I should know at least a little bit about you before we have to explain ourselves to any other wedding guests.”
America shoots her a skeptical look.
“Not that I’m suggesting we pretend to be something we’re not!” Kate says. “No, I swear, I’m being totally up front about this. We’re just friends. We’re not like, fake girlfriends to prove to Noh that I’m still desirable and not forever alone. Or whatever. I don’t need to be any more of a cliché.”
“I’m from Brooklyn,” America offers. “I like to hit things.”
It’s not much of a summary, but it’s better than one of my moms is sick and I spend all my money and time taking care of her and awhile back I had to borrow money from a total asshole to pay some bills and now it’s coming back to bite me in the ass and my only real friends are two dumb twenty-year-olds that I barely know and I should be worried about all of that but all I can think about is you. America’s not talkative enough to say all that, anyway.
But Kate’s smiling. “One of your best qualities,” she agrees. “All things, or mainly the faces of asshole dudes?”
America finds her own lips lifting into a smile. “They’re the most satisfying,” she says. “But I’m not picky. I box.”
“Hence the punching panache,” Kate says. “That’s cool. I’d love to know how to do that. I’d be better at taking people down from a distance, myself.”
America breaks her only rule yet again and glances across the space between them. Her brows draw together. She’s about to ask Kate what the hell she means, when suddenly things click into place. It’s the sight of Kate, with her long arms stretched gracefully toward the steering wheel and her gaze fixed on the road, that does it.
“You were in a commercial,” America blurts. “You drove a car and wore a purple mask and—and—fired a bow!” America has to stop and look Kate up and down again to make sure she’s right. But she has to be. “That’s why you look so familiar. What a fucking weird commercial. For perfume or something?”
Kate turns her head toward America. Her eyes are so blue. She looks entirely too serious. “Hit your mark. Every time,” she says, her voice pitched low and sultry. “Hawkeye, for her.”
“Oh my God.”
Kate can’t maintain her straight face any longer and she lets a little laugh slip. “For the record, I donated all the money from that ultra-embarrassing enterprise to a charity that funds girls’ sports teams, so it was for a good cause,” she says. “And how come it’s always the ridiculous commercial that makes people recognize me, and not the 2012 Olympic gold, huh?”
Kate was wearing a purple catsuit with cut-outs over her hips in the commercial, but America thinks better of bringing that up. “In archery,” she guesses. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Kate says. “I’m the best. Except for Clint, maybe, but he’s my coach and he’s retired now, so it’s me.”
“So modest.”
“It ain’t braggin’,” Kate quotes, and America can’t disagree. An Olympic gold medal speaks for itself on that count.
“It must be nice to do what you love,” America says. “I like my job, but it’s not the kind of thing you can do forever. I’m looking to get out, start my own business maybe, but—money’s been tight.” It’s more than she’s told anyone else.
“Yeah? What is it you wanna do?”
Teddy is the only one who knows so far. But Kate starred in a ridiculous commercial so she could donate money to girls’ sports teams, so maybe she’ll get it. “Start a gym,” America says. It’s still a little hard to say out loud, her dumb little dream. “Especially for women and, uh, LGBTQ people. Anybody who’s ever felt like they don’t belong at their regular gym. I’d teach people to box. Teach girls to defend themselves, maybe.”
Kate turns toward her and smiles unexpectedly wide. “That’s awesome.”
“Really?” America blurts, then immediately regrets it and backtracks: “Uh, yeah. I’m just—I need money. I’ve started scouting out spaces to rent, but—,” she stops and then shrugs. It’s hard to know what your budget is when you have no idea if you even qualify for a loan.
“Well, if you find a space that can accommodate an archery range, you let me know and then you can have an Olympian trainer on your staff. I’d love to teach girls to shoot,” Kate says, smiling again. Jesus. America forces herself to look away and then sinks down lower in her seat. Straight, she reminds herself. Straight as an arrow, she thinks, but can’t laugh at her own joke.
Their room in the little inn in East Hampton has two beds. America doesn’t comment or react, because she is not relieved by that information, and she is definitely, definitely not disappointed. She sets her bag down on the bed closer to the door, digs her clothes out, goes into the bathroom and changes. Teddy had suggested, very mildly, that she might “tone it down” when picking her outfit for the wedding. Billy had said “fuck those rich dicks, wear what you want. Be yourself.”
America had really warmed up to Billy.
But Teddy had a point and besides, America only owns one suit. Her moms had finally tied the knot a few years back, once it became legal in New York, and they made her dress up to go be their witness. Ana hadn’t even been diagnosed at that point, but Val insisted they get married “just in case,” because Val was like that. It took half an hour at the courthouse and they went out for ice cream afterward. All three of them cried, but America will never tell anybody that.
America leaves her hair loose, curling over the black suit jacket on her shoulders, and pins little blue sparkly star earrings to her ears. She gives herself a cursory glance in the mirror, shrugs at her reflection, and walks out of the bathroom.
“Oh, hey,” Kate calls from around the corner, “can you zip me up?”
America turns and is met with Kate’s naked back. Her long black hair is pushed to the side, around her neck, revealing unblemished skin from her shoulders to the dip of her spine. The dress is silky and silvery lilac, and Kate’s got her arms through the straps and is holding it up in the front. America moves closer and touches Kate’s hip. She snatches her hand back—that’s not what she meant to do. She stills her hand forcefully, then grabs the base of the zipper and holds the two edges of the fabric together. She tries not to think about how close she is to Kate, or how smooth Kate’s skin is, or how warm. The dress closes tightly over her body as America brings the zipper up. The back of the dress is low even when zipped. Kate’s shoulder blades are still bare, but she pushes her hair back and lets it fall to cover them as she steps away.
“Thanks, that’s—,” Kate is saying, but she turns around and stops. Shit. America knew she wasn’t prepared to come to this wedding. Kate’s dress moves with her. It falls diagonally across her body from one shoulder, rippling and shimmering like water. It conceals and reveals the curves of her body by mesmerizing turns.
Princess. No kidding. No wonder Kate can’t think of anything to say about America’s secondhand suit.
“Wow,” Kate says.
Wait. What?
America has to check again to be sure, but no, it’s true: Kate Bishop is staring at her. America smiles. Thank God for Val’s at-home alteration skills. The suit might be secondhand but it fits damn well.
Kate reaches forward to straighten the collar of America’s shirt. The fabric is red with thin silver thread striping it at irregular intervals. No matter what she promised Teddy, America never tones it down that much. The black suit is as close as she gets to classic and understated. Kate’s fingertips brush the hollow of America’s throat. Her hands are warm.
“Sorry,” Kate says instantly, backing away. “It wasn’t even crooked. It’s just a habit from fixing Clint’s all the time. His is always all messed up. And his suits are always wrinkled because he never pays to get them pressed, because of course he doesn’t. But yours is—yours is—,” Kate pauses, and America can’t stop smiling. Is she making Kate nervous? Is she hot enough to fluster a straight girl? “You look good.”
“You too, princess,” America says. “Now let’s go watch your ex marry a less beautiful woman.”
Kate huffs, amused. “You’ve never even seen her. He could be marrying Miss World for all you know.”
America shrugs one shoulder with a little smile on her face, not bothering to respond to that. So much for toning it down. So much for not looking at Kate. So much for not flirting with Kate. Billy told her to be herself, and her self is hella goddamn queer.
Kate blushes, which is beyond rewarding. “We can’t go yet,” she says. “I haven’t spent forty-five minutes accidentally stabbing myself in the eye with my eyeliner applicator.”
“We don’t have forty-five minutes,” America says, and then, because she has no sense of self-preservation: “Let me do it.”
Kate perches on the toilet and America leans down and draws the point of the eyeliner brush across Kate’s lash line. She works quickly. Her hands are steady, in contrast to her heart. She can feel Kate’s breath on the skin of her face. She’s never put her face this close to another woman’s face without kissing her.
By some miracle, Kate’s eyeliner wings still come out perfect and sharp.
“You’re a genius,” Kate says, examining herself in the mirror. “Now I feel ready. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
America nods. It’s uncomfortably hot in the bathroom.
The wedding is on the back lawn of the biggest house America has ever seen. The house is up on a hill overlooking the beach, and the lawn curves down the hill in a perfect rolling S-shape, unnaturally green and lined with white marble statues of angels or Greek gods. America spends most of the ceremony looking out at the ocean or wondering how much the gardeners get paid. She claps when Kate claps and stands up from her fancy white folding chair at the end to watch the bride and the groom walk down the center aisle and into the mansion.
Then there are servers wandering around with trays of tiny food on skewers—America scores two full of cherry tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella, and one with chicken—and free cocktails. Kate sucks down her dark and stormy so fast that America nudges her in the side. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m,” Kate nods, forcefully, “I’m good.”
They don’t bother to talk to anyone else at the reception, which is just fine by America. There are some boring speeches by various family members, but mostly they stand outside watching the sun set behind the house and getting drunk with the ocean breeze in their hair. Being rich must be fucking great.
Then dinner is announced and they all line up to walk into the house, past the bride and the groom who are stationed at the entrance. Kate is already looking a little pink-cheeked, fidgeting next to America in line. Her ex and his new wife are looking happy and healthy and laughing as they shake everyone’s hands. Kate’s ex—Noah Varr or whatever his name is—is a nice-looking guy, if you’re into that kind of thing, and the woman with him is lovely, but America bets neither of them has ever starred in a goofy perfume ad just to raise money for charity.
“You know he cheated on me with her?” Kate says, while they’re standing in line.
“He what?”
Kate nods. “Just once, with her—with Annie—and they were both drunk, and he told me right afterward and he felt awful about it, and—,”
“Kate.”
“Yeah, alright. It sucked.”
America doesn’t even bother to smile when they reach the front of the line. Noah looks thrilled to see Kate and he pulls her into a hug. Annie frowns at the two of them, then looks to America, obviously seeking some kind of sympathetic glance. America gives her a hard stare.
“Kate, Kate, I’m so glad you came,” Noah is saying, and Kate is nodding. “I was really looking forward to seeing you again.”
“Of course. I’m happy for both of you,” Kate says, smiling at Annie without any trace of malice. God. Kate is better than both of them. “This is America, by the way.”
Noah shakes her hand far too enthusiastically. “Wow, that’s great, it’s so nice to meet you,” he says. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for coming,” Annie echoes.
“I didn’t know you were, um—,”
America is barely paying attention. The poisonous once-over that Annie gives Kate is distracting. America glares at her. She glares at Noah, too, just to make her opinion clear. How dare these assholes treat Kate like this. America wants to punch somebody, but instead she steps closer to Kate.
She wraps an arm around Kate’s waist and draws her close.
To her credit, Kate doesn’t startle. She even leans into America a little, like she’s grateful for the support.
Fuck whatever reasonable plans they made on the drive up. America is all in. Kate is smart and fun and gorgeous and nobody should ever make her feel bad.
“Uh, yeah,” Kate is saying. “We’re—,”
“Dating,” America says brightly. “Six months now. Getting pretty serious!” She gives Kate a squeeze, and pretends not to see Kate staring at her wide-eyed.
“That’s great,” Noah says. “I’m sure Kate told you, I’m bi too.”
“She didn’t, actually,” America says. “She’s barely mentioned you at all.”
“Oh,” he responds.
“Anyway, we won’t take up any more of your time. Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. ’Til death do you part and all. Bye!” America smiles wide and then drags Kate away.
As soon as they get in the door and behind a wall, Kate rounds on her. America expects her to be shocked or angry, but instead Kate pushes her up against the wall and—doesn’t quite kiss her. She presses the tip of her nose to America’s, and then touches their foreheads together. Kate leans into her so much that America ends up supporting most of her weight. She can feel Kate’s ribs shaking with silent laughter.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“What is it, sweetie-pie?”
“That was. That was amazing. I can’t believe you just did that.” Kate stifles another laugh, then lifts her head and says “Bye!” with the same cheerful edge America put into it. Kate drops her head back down to America’s shoulder and laughs silently for another few seconds, then says, almost completely muffled: “Thank you.”
Kate is relaxed against her, happy and laughing, completely transformed from how nervous and uncertain she was five minutes ago. It’s perfect. Or it would be, if it were real.
America stares blankly above the top of Kate’s head, wishing she weren’t quite so aware of all the places that she and Kate are touching. “We’ll see how you thank me when we have to keep this charade up all night.”
They’re assigned to a table of other twenty-somethings, all of them other couples. Kate and America are the only women together, but America knows better than to assume everyone else is straight. People are probably making all kinds of assumptions about her and Kate, after all. The thought makes her frown, which is bad since Kate is right in the middle of improvising the story of how they met. Kate has lit up. Her hands are moving as she imitates shooting an arrow.
“So, anyway, I shot her mugger through the back of the knee, and she got her purse back, and that’s how we met! All because I happened to be walking home from the range that day because there was construction at my stop. For some people it’s fate, but for us, it was the MTA.”
America presses her lips together, amused at having become a damsel in distress in this story. Kate notices, and adds, “But that’s just how we met. We didn’t get together until weeks later. We saw each other in a bar—,”
“An asshole was hitting on Kate,” America cuts in. “Even though she had already said no. I punched him.”
“It was great,” Kate enthuses, grinning at America. “She swooped in and saved me. And I’m there, and I’m kinda drunk and more than a little dazzled, but all I can think to do is stick out my hand and say ‘Nice punch.’”
Kate sticks out her hand in imitation, but America catches her by the fingers, angling her hand, and then brings Kate’s knuckles to her lips for a kiss. There’s giggling at the table, and one of the men says “Smooth.” Kate catches her gaze, and they look at each other a moment too long.
Then America lets go, and they go back to inventing the story of their life together. America wouldn’t have thought she’d like improv, but Kate is clearly having so much fun that it’s hard to stop. Dinner flies by, and then the cake is cut and the bride and the groom open the dance floor. There’s a live band playing. The dinner table conversation goes quiet.
America leans toward Kate. “Hey, princess,” she says, with her lips close to Kate’s ear but her voice loud enough for the rest of the guests to hear. “They’re playing our song.”
America has no idea what song is playing—some shit from the sixties, whatever it is that white people think is classic. But Kate stands up with her and they pull each other toward the dance floor so fast that Kate nearly trips over her heels. “I think I drank too much wine at dinner,” she says, as America pulls her up.
“Lying is thirsty work.”
“Lying? Who’s lying?” Kate laughs. “I mean, not all of that was strictly factual, but—,”
“Shh,” America says. She draws Kate closer before the damn loudmouth gives up the whole game. “I liked the part about you fighting crime with a bow and arrow.”
“Me too,” Kate says. “My superhero name is obviously ‘Hawkeye.’ But the best part was you rescuing me and then me being too starstruck by your hotness to say anything but ‘nice punch.’”
America laughs. “You’d better cool it, princess. The audience can only suspend their disbelief so far.”
“Shut up and dance, Chavez.”
Kate is an endearingly terrible dancer. Much like with her dinner table improv, what she lacks in precision, she makes up for with enthusiasm. America spins her around a couple of times and gets both of her feet stepped on hard. She lets Kate go after that, but Kate stays close to her for the next few songs, swaying to some rhythm that has no relation to the music. They come back together a couple of times. America grabs one of Kate’s hands and puts her other hand on Kate’s waist and almost manages to get Kate to follow her lead, but they end up bumping into each other and laughing and breaking apart.
After they break apart the second time Kate grins at America, turns around, and backs up into her, grinding her hips against America’s. It would be sexy if it weren’t so unbearably dorky.
It’s still pretty sexy.
A slower song comes on and America takes Kate by the hand and pulls her off the dance floor. There are glass doors leading to the stone porch outside the ballroom, and as the doors swing shut behind them, the sounds of the party are muffled. The quiet out on the porch is as much of a surprise and a relief as the sudden coolness. There’s a breeze coming off the ocean.
America takes off her suit jacket and drapes it over the stone railing. She rolls up her sleeves and then reaches back and quickly braids her hair to get it off her neck. Kate is holding her bare arms close to her body, not shivering but clearly cold. America offers her discarded jacket, and Kate takes it. She puts it over her shoulders and then leans down, putting her elbows on the railing and looking out.
The ocean is shimmering black under the stars, both the water and the sky receding into the distance until they’re indistinguishable. “You can see so much more out here,” America says. “I need to get out of the city more often.”
“You like to travel?”
America shrugs. “I guess,” she says. “We used to go to Puerto Rico a lot in the summers. Val—one of my moms—has a lot of cousins there. You can see more stars there too. And the ocean.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Yeah, makes you feel all cosmic, just looking at it.”
Far down the hill, the ocean is lapping at the shore. They should leave, run back to Kate’s car and drive down to the water’s edge. They could take off their shoes and hold hands on the beach in the dark. But America doesn’t say anything. She’s only Kate’s girlfriend while they’re here at this party with everyone watching them. She leans her hip against the porch railing, her body facing Kate’s but her gaze still fixed on the ocean.
“Guess I got that wrong, at dinner,” Kate says. “I said I met your mom and dad.”
“You wouldn’t be the first person to guess that wrong.”
“Was it nice, having two moms?”
“Yeah,” America says. “But I got nothing to compare it to.”
“Well, having one dad kinda sucked,” Kate says. “I think Clint’s girlfriend parented me more in an afternoon this week than my dad did in twenty-five years.”
“Guess I was wrong about your family, too,” America says. That explains the look on Kate’s face when America told their dinner table that she had met Kate’s parents. Her expression had been stricken, but it had disappeared so quickly America hadn’t even been sure it was real.
“It’s cool that you got to meet your cousins in Puerto Rico,” Kate says. “My mom was Korean but I’ve never been there. I guess I have family there, but my dad was never close to them, and after she died, he never really wanted to talk about it. Or anything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Kate says. “If you want to say anything about ‘how come you have blue eyes if your mom was Korean,’ feel free. I’ve heard it all.”
“I wasn’t going to,” America says. She tries not to be insulted that Kate thinks she might say something like that. She reminds herself that they don’t know each other that well. “I did think you were white, though.”
“So do lots of other people,” Kate says. “My dad is. I wish I looked more like my mom.”
“Sounds like you miss her.”
Kate nods. America would hug her, if only this were real. She settles for laying a hand on Kate’s shoulder.
“Anyway,” Kate says. “Thanks for coming with me and goofing off in there with me. This was good. Way better than I thought it would be.”
“Sure,” America says. She takes her hand off Kate’s shoulder. “It was fun for me, too. I haven’t had much fun lately, except with you.”
“Been busy?”
“Yeah. Something like that. It’s been a shitty few years. Ana—my other mom—had cancer.” Even the word brings back all the hours spent lying awake worrying, all the handholding in doctors’ waiting rooms, all the trips to the pharmacy. “She’s in remission now, though.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”
You’d like her and Val, America almost says. This was easier inside, surrounded by other people. Out here when it’s just her and Kate, it feels real. America has to keep reminding herself that it’s not. “Want to go back in?” she says, hating herself a little. “Catch the last few dances?”
America is standing there, smiling at her, asking if Kate wants to dance. She’s even holding her hand out expectantly. Light from the ballroom windows and doors spills onto the darkened patio, dappling America’s curls and illuminating the open palm of her hand. She’s beautiful.
Oh God. This is it. Kate likes women. Kate likes America.
Kate takes her hand and America pulls her back into the golden light of the ballroom, so fast that America’s jacket nearly slips off Kate’s shoulders. Kate reaches up with one hand and clutches it to keep it from falling. She had nearly forgotten it. It’s warm and it smells clean. Wearing someone else’s clothes is usually strange at first—the unfamiliar cut and texture of the fabric, or the smell of different detergent—but Kate wants to wrap herself in America’s clothes and wear them forever.
America spins her around to whatever upbeat pop song is playing, and Kate responds clumsily. She’s distracted. She’s giddy. She ends up standing within the circle of America’s arms, pressed right up against her and looking up into her eyes.
Kate really, really wants to kiss America.
America only looks at her briefly. Her gaze drifts to something else, someone behind Kate, maybe. Kate waits for America to look at her again. She doesn’t want to ruin this. She won’t jump on America and slobber all over her like Lucky. She’s not trying to scare her away.
Kate glances behind her to see whatever it is that America is looking at, just in case it’s a fistfight or a spontaneous dance battle or something. Nope. Just more rich people in suits dancing stiffly. Except Noah—he always was a good dancer.
When Kate looks back, America is looking at her again. Their eyes meet and Kate doesn’t wait a second longer. She surges up on her tiptoes and kisses America. America kisses back, pulling Kate tight against her and kissing her deeply. She tastes good. Kate can hardly keep a thought in her head. Somewhere very far away, a small part of her is marveling that she’s never done this before. Never kissed anyone this gorgeous, this skillful, this delicious, this soft.
Then America breaks the kiss and pulls away, leaving Kate cold. Kate clutches at her jacket, blinking as America backs up, turns on her heel, and strides out of the ballroom. Shit. Kate runs after her. Her moment of stunned realization costs her, since America is already out of the room and down the hallway and the front doors of the house are swinging behind her.
“Wait!”
Kate catches the edge of the door just before it closes, and America pauses halfway down the porch steps and turns her head. Her eyes are huge in the moonlight.
“I thought I could do this, but—I can’t,” she says, and then runs down the stairs.
Kate follows, but has to pause on the porch to slip out of her heels, and by the time she arrives at the field next to the long driveway where all the wedding guests have parked, she sees America asking an older couple on their way out for a ride.
From the other side of the field, Kate watches America get into their car. The engine rumbles, the headlights come on, and then they’re backing out. It happens slowly. Kate could run across the field and catch them and—what? Beat on the window? Demand to know why America would rather leave the wedding with strangers than spend one more second in her presence? Have it out right then and there in front of some old Republicans? Be the crazy ex who got a pity invitation to the wedding?
Fuck. Is Kate that bad of a kisser?
God. Those people could be anyone. What if they’re dangerous? America should have at least called a cab. And what is she going to do when she gets into town? Get all her shit out of the hotel room and book it back to the city in the middle of the night?
What happened?
Kate would scream if her throat wasn’t halfway closed up. As it is, breathing is trouble enough. Her gaze follows the car’s taillights as they recede into the darkness.
Her shoes are heavy in her hand and the grass is cold against her bare feet.
Kate texts America nine times. Ten texts, that would be overboard. Kate has to hang on to her last remaining scrap of dignity. That’s why her phone is on the coffee table and she hasn’t checked it in almost twenty minutes. Because she doesn’t need to. She only sent nine texts, after all.
Most of the texts were a variation on “I’m sorry” and “please tell me what I did wrong.” Two of the nine texts were to offer America the jacket back, but apparently America would rather abandon it forever than interact with Kate again, even through a one-sentence text message. So the damn thing is just hanging in the back of the closet of Clint’s guest bedroom.
Kate grabs one of the lumpy pillows off the other end of the couch and squeezes it, drawing her knees up and pressing her face down into it. She doesn’t cry.
She also doesn’t hear Clint walk into the room.
“Not that I don’t love having you here,” he says, which is a goddamn lie because all Kate’s done for two days is sit on the couch in her pajamas, eating cereal and watching old episodes of Dog Cops with Lucky. And restrain herself from sending a tenth text. It’s stupid to do it here, in Clint’s apartment, where the electricity keeps going on the fritz. Kate’s place has perfectly functional wiring. And she has a dishwasher and cupboards full of clean dishes, instead of a pile of chipped coffee mugs in the sink. But she can’t seem to get off the couch and out the door, let alone all the way back to Manhattan. So here she is. “But, uh, if you wanted to—talk about it?”
Kate’s gaze flicks away from the TV and toward Clint for a moment. She aims a beam of pure skepticism in his direction.
He spreads his hands like yeah, I know.
“Or we could shoot things?”
She shakes her head mutely. A few more strands of her bun come down as she does. The only reason her bun even still exists is that she hasn’t washed her hair in days. She probably smells, but Clint won’t mention it and Lucky doesn’t care.
“Aw, Katie-Kate,” Clint says. He comes around to the front of the couch and sits down next to her. “I’m sorry.” Kate’s still got her knees up, and she’s facing the opposite arm of the couch, while Clint is facing forward, so his attempt to sling his arm around her shoulders and draw her into a hug is awkward to say the least.
Points for effort, or whatever.
Clint is determined and won’t let go of her, so eventually she caves. She puts the throw pillow on the floor and twists around until she can lean her head against his shoulder. He pats the greasy wreck of her hair gingerly.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he says, because that’s what people always say, because why wouldn’t she be okay. She’s Kate Bishop. She’s cool and collected, not to mention young and rich and hot and awesome.
And she just stood there while the only woman she’s ever liked ran away from her.
Christ. She doesn’t even know why America left. America didn’t say anything. What went wrong between them?
Kate tries to shake her head again, because Clint is wrong and she’s not going to be okay, but instead of a sentence, all that comes out is a sob.
“Uh,” Clint says. “Okay.”
And that would make her laugh, because Clint is terrible at this, but her laugh comes out shaky and then she’s crying for real. God. She presses her face into his shoulder and instantly soaks his t-shirt with tears.
Clint is a good friend, because he sits there and lets her cry even though he’s clearly very uncomfortable. He even squeezes her shoulders once in reassurance.
He doesn’t tell her she’s going to be okay again, though.
“Nope,” Clint says, when he comes by six hours later and Kate is still curled up on his couch. She glances away from the TV. He changed t-shirts, since she sobbed all over him earlier. Kate’s wearing the same thing, but she hasn’t changed since Sunday. “Fuck this, Hawkeye. We’re gonna go shoot things. It’s the one thing we’re good at.”
Kate tries to shoot him down by focusing all of her stupid awful feelings into one glare, like she did earlier. It doesn’t work. It’s probably because her eyes are all puffy from crying. Clint grabs the back of her t-shirt collar and pulls until she’s forced to sit up. He keeps pulling and poking and prodding until she gets all the way off the couch, and at that point Kate relents and gives up on inertia as a life strategy. She showers. She Febreezes the shit out of her clothes. It’ll have to do. They go to the range.
Kate shoots terribly—well, terribly for her, which would still qualify as world-class if anyone else were drawing the bow. Five shots in, she sighs and says, “You know what’s the fucking worst? I was so happy, Clint. I was so sure. I thought to myself: I’m hella fucking bisexual and I have a huge crush on America Chavez and it’s awesome. And it was. She’s a great—,” Kate sends an arrow so far off-target that she has to put the bow down and blink in astonishment. “I fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Clint echoes, staring at the target. “Try again.”
“Trust me, I did.”
“No, I mean with an arrow,” he says. “But yeah, sure, of course you should try again with America.”
“She won’t talk to me.”
“You apologized?”
“I don’t even know what I did wrong! But of course I apologized. I’m not an asshole. At least, not completely.”
“Maybe she needs time? I’m no good at this, Kate. Maybe you could talk to her friends? Do you know her friends? Does she have any friends? Or maybe you could make a grand gesture, like in the movies. What does she want? Does she like flowers? Is she going anywhere? Running through the airport always seems to work.”
“Go back to coaching me about archery. This is painful.”
“I already told you: try again.”
“Why do I pay you again,” Kate says, but she aims another shot. This time, it hits the target.
Maybe she should give Clint a little more credit. He might have a point.
America silences all of Teddy’s questions about last weekend’s disaster in the Hamptons with a single glare. Their boxing match is even quieter than usual. It’s longer than usual, too: America keeps missing opportunities, and Teddy lands a lot of hits.
He steps back from her without ending the fight and puts his hands up. “Hey,” he says. “I don’t want to win like this.”
She crosses her arms and looks at him.
“Whatever happened, obviously you’re upset about it,” he says. “And it’s been… what? A week? You don’t have to talk to me about it but you have to do something.”
America is doing plenty. She’s working. Work has been intense lately, like all of Brooklyn has caught on fire. Or maybe it just seems that way since she’s not really eating or sleeping. Doesn’t matter. Somebody has to put those fires out, and it might as well be her.
“Let’s quit for today,” Teddy says. “Billy’s coming by after work. You wanna get dinner or something?”
She hesitates. She doesn’t want to go home to her apartment and mope. She also doesn’t want to face Billy, who is not as easily cowed by glares and will definitely ask questions. The longer she stays with either of them, the more likely she is to talk about it.
“Please,” Teddy says. Kid’s too sweet for his own good. Nobody should have eyes that blue.
“Fine,” she says. She’ll drink a Coke and then excuse herself. She can keep it together for that, at least. If she stays any longer than that, one way or another she’ll end up breaking down and telling them the humiliating story of pretending to be a straight girl’s date and then falling for that straight girl. Even under pressure, she would try to obscure all the parts about actually, physically running away in the middle of the night—and then the subsequent week of working so hard she’s constantly cleaning soot from her fingernails. She can’t be held accountable for her actions if anybody makes a Cinderella joke. America’s feeling pretty fucking sour about princesses these days.
Besides, America had almost made it through the wedding, but fuck knows how she would have dealt with the hotel room afterward. It’s for the best that she got the hell out.
That kiss had been… God, it had felt so real. If it hadn’t been right in front of Kate’s ex and everyone else in the ballroom, America might even have believed it herself.
Even now, days later, she can’t stop thinking about it.
But she keeps it to herself. She doesn’t tell Teddy and even after Billy shows up with all his questions, she doesn’t tell him either. She doesn’t say much at all, forcing Teddy and Billy to come up with conversation topics. If she weren’t there, they’d probably be making out and not talking about anything, but they’re the dumbasses who invited her grouchy ass along.
As goofy as they are, it’s nice to have people around. America makes it through her drink and then stays for dinner. It’s dark outside by the time they’re talking about splitting the bill.
Then America’s gym bag vibrates as her phone lights up. She glances at the screen, hoping it’s not another text from Kate. It’s not, thank God. “Shit, it’s work,” she says. “Gotta go.”
Kate wakes up to Lucky barking and howling, licking her face and pawing at her through the sheets. As soon as she breathes in, she coughs.
“Fuck!”
That is smoke. That is definitely smoke.
She jumps out of bed and takes the sheets with her. She nearly trips over them.
“Shit shit shit,” Kate chants. “Clint! Clint, get up! Your apartment’s on fire!” She tries to stay low as she makes her way to Clint’s room. Lucky beats her there and starts scrabbling at the closed door with his paws. Kate follows. Smoke stings her eyes. She kicks down Clint’s door and runs over to his bed to shake him awake. He blinks awake fast. Kate stops shaking him and yells “FIRE,” since he doesn’t have his hearing aids in yet. God damn, she should have learned sign language by now. But Clint nods in understanding and leaps out of bed.
Kate is thinking four thousand things at once. Why is there a fire—where did it start—can she put it out—the fire extinguisher is in the hallway—does it even work—why does Clint live in such a shithole—fuck she needs to call the fire department—where’s Clint’s phone he doesn’t have one just a fucking stupid landline in the kitchen where the fucking enormous goddamn fucking FIRE is what the fuck Jesus fucking Christ—Kate runs back to the guest bedroom, trying to keep low and breathe as little as possible. She bumps into the couch and knocks over the coffee table.
“Kate!”
Lucky comes with her and stays there while she roots through her purse for her phone. Shit. If she lives through this she’s definitely gonna clean her purse out.
“Please don’t be dead,” she whispers, and maybe later it’ll be hilarious that she’s praying to her fucking phone battery but right now it’s just really important. Her phone has a charge and that’s all she sees before she remembers that she should be getting the fuck out of the burning apartment. Shit, shit, shit. She grabs her phone and the rest of her purse and whips around to leave the bedroom. That’s when she catches sight of the kitchen, which is really the only thing visible in the dark, smoke-filled apartment, seeing how it’s on fucking fire and all.
The kitchen, which is next to the only exit to Clint’s fourth-floor walk-up. The kitchen, which is on fire.
There’s a fire escape in Clint’s bedroom. That’s why he yelled at her when she ran out of the room. That’s why he’s still yelling. Kate dials 911 as she makes her way back to his bedroom. She coughs out Clint’s address when the dispatcher picks up, says “apartment’s on fire,” then hangs up because, like she said, the apartment’s on fire and Clint is trying to talk to her and he’s still in the goddamn apartment like a dope. Why didn’t he get himself safe already.
Why didn’t she, for that matter?
“The window is jammed!” Clint is yelling. Kate slams the bedroom door to keep some of the smoke out. Clint’s pulling at the sash, one hand on the upper rail and one on the rail near the window sill. Kate grips the rail from the other side and tries to pull the sash up with him, but it’s well and truly stuck. Painted shut, maybe? Or just shitty like the rest of this goddamn place. God, there are other tenants here. Little kids. Are they gonna be okay?
“Let’s break it,” she yells, and before she can smash the glass, there’s an explosive sound from outside the bedroom. Shit. Windows explode in fires sometimes, right? Other things probably explode too. Clint and Kate both look toward the bedroom door, then at each other.
“Lucky!”
The dog had been following her the whole time. How could she have shut him out of the bedroom? But she could have sworn he was in here. Fuck. “Break the window,” Kate says, so loud it makes her hoarse. She just points at the door to explain that she’s going to look for Lucky. Clint will get it.
Kate never expected a fire to be so loud. Everything is hissing and crackling and popping and booming. Kate opens the bedroom door, squints against the smoke, sees Lucky, surges forward, and grabs at him. There’s another bang. The front door cracks and flies off its hinges.
In the rectangle of the open doorway, limned in firelight and wreathed in smoke, stands America Chavez.
Kate passes out.
Kate wakes up coughing again, and the fire blazes back into her memory, but she opens her eyes in a hospital room. She’s in bed. There are two people staring at her. One of them is Clint.
“Did I die,” she croaks, half joking, half because America Chavez is standing over her wearing a soot-smudged white tank top and suspenders, with her head haloed in black curls. She’s smiling. Kate spent her whole life agnostic until now, but Heaven is looking good.
“Not for lack of trying,” America says, unimpressed.
“Lucky’s fine,” Clint says, answering her next question. “America said he could hang out at the fire station for the evening while we came here. He’s survived worse.” Clint grins, remembering something. “And America carried you out of the apartment in her arms. More like a sack of potatoes and less like a bride, though.”
Kate waves a hand at him dismissively, too tired to shoo him away with words. “Ruin everything,” she coughs.
“You’re okay,” Clint tells her, unfazed. “We were worried but you don’t have any internal burns from smoke inhalation. They gave you some oxygen. I think they’re gonna let you go home tomorrow, maybe even today.”
The word ‘today’ makes Kate squint at the clock on the wall. It’s almost seven AM. She’s been out all night. Also, it’s definitely not visiting hours. “What are you still doing here?”
“I told them I was family,” Clint says. It’s so true that it’s unremarkable, so it takes a few seconds for Kate to realize she’s never heard him say that before. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. Also, uh, I don’t… have anywhere else to go? My apartment’s a crime scene, and Nat’s out of town—,”
“As if you had to ask,” Kate interrupts. Her voice is a little raspy, but talking is getting easier with practice. “My apartment keys are in my purse.”
Clint makes a face. “You live in Manhattan. On the Upper West Side.” He says it in the same way he might say “you live in a haunted stump at the back of a poison swamp.”
Whatever. “Enjoy my functional electricity, asshole.”
Clint gives her a quick smile before crouching down next to the bed to look in Kate’s purse. “I said I was family in order to get in here,” he says. “You should hear what she said.” He points at America, standing on the other side of Kate’s bed, who looks like she’d like to teleport the fuck away.
But instead she visibly fights off her embarrassment and smiles sheepishly at Kate. “I said I was your girlfriend,” she says. “Figured it wasn’t the first time we’d told people that.”
“I, um—coffee—gotta go—back in a sex—sec,” Clint says, already halfway out of the room with Kate’s keys clutched in his hand.
“Go home,” Kate tells him. “Get some sleep.” He looks immensely relieved.
That leaves her alone with America and the elephant in the room. Kate has been trying to talk to America all week and now that she can, everything she had planned to say has disappeared in a puff of smoke.
“Shit,” Kate says. All her plans literally went up in flames. America looks at her, alarmed. “No, no, it’s—dumb. I just—I had all this paperwork for a small-business loan, and I was gonna give it to you.”
“I don’t want your money.”
This is not going well. “No, no, not like that. It was just—you talked about starting a business, a gym, since you didn’t like your job—although on that subject, you never actually said what you did for work. Holy shit. Uh—thanks, I guess?”
America shrugs. “Just doing my job.”
Kate stares at her. But she never really got around to her point, so she keeps going: “Anyway, I know it probably doesn’t seem like it lately, but I’m actually pretty organized and good at getting stuff done, and I thought I could help you get a loan—from the bank—and find a space to rent and get set up, if that’s what you want. But I’ll have to go back to the bank first. And, uh, I was gonna give you your jacket back, but I guess that’s not gonna happen.”
Now it’s America who’s staring. “You… really gave this some thought.”
“Well, yeah,” Kate says. She can’t decide if she’s pleased or irritated. She goes with the latter. “Still haven’t managed to figure out what I did wrong, though.”
“You really like me,” America says, not answering the question. “Not in a straight-friend kind of way.”
“Yeah I really like you,” Kate says. She sits up straight in the hospital bed. She doesn’t want to have this conversation while she’s slumped back against her pillows. “I thought that was obvious when I kissed you.”
“In front of your ex and all the guests at his wedding, where we were pretending to be a couple.”
Oh. Oh shit. “You thought I was putting on a show. Using you.”
“Weren’t you?” America puts her hands on her hips. “Faking it, I mean. Using me, pretending to be into women.”
“At first, maybe, a little—but no, God no, it was real, America. The ‘into women’ part is real. Was real the whole time. It’s new, but it’s real,” Kate says. “Although I’m obviously fucking it up.” Kate sighs. “The kiss wasn’t for show, either. It wasn’t for anybody but us. It was real.”
“Why did you wait until we were inside, in front of people?”
“I didn’t ‘wait until we were in front of people’! I didn’t even know anyone was looking at us! All I saw was you!” Kate stops to take a breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get upset. I’d really like to start over. Can we start over?”
America is still standing with her hands on her hips. “No,” she says, and Kate’s eyes sting like she’s back in the burning apartment, and then America says: “I want to pick up where we left off.”
America takes Kate’s face between her hands, smoothes her fingers into Kate’s hair, and then leans forward and kisses Kate. Her lips are soft, in contrast to the firm press of her fingers, angling Kate’s head just so. Kate parts her lips and America slips her tongue into Kate’s mouth. And then Kate coughs and America breaks away.
“You taste like a fire, princess. And not in a good way.”
Kate finishes coughing into her hand. Then she leans back against the hospital bed. “Yeah,” she rasps. “This might not have been our best idea.”
“Definitely not our worst idea, though.”
“So maybe we could try again?”
“Yeah,” America says, smiling. She takes one of Kate’s hands into her own and squeezes. “We could try again.”