Chapter 1: never before (and ever since)
Summary:
For Nymphia and Jane, the summer of 1988 wasn’t just a summer. It was a lifetime, the kind that they’re still trying to make sense of. Even now.
Chapter Text
This is what Nymphia knows for sure:
There was her life before Jane: the whirlwind of her youth, the careless days of her and Xunami and Dawn. The days when the world felt wide and expansive, the days when Jupiter Beach was untouchable in that it was theirs and theirs alone. The days when she was something like well-adjusted, when she was still bright-eyed and naive and reckless in a tentative sort of way, when she was risqué and not full-on self destructive. The days when it was easier to be unafraid, the days when she had it all figured out, the days before she knew what she knows now.
There’s her life after Jane: the aftershock that toppled everything. The still-settling dust kicked up by Jane’s storm that killed everything that could’ve grown for years to come, that Nymphia still chokes on from time to time. The home she built on barren land, land ever-pulsing with Jane’s presence and ever-haunted by her absence. Surviving the sort of heartbreak you have to measure in half-lives. The path she carved through the wasteland, the home she rebuilt from the wreckage, the parts of herself she managed to salvage. The seeds of hope she sewed into fruitless ground, the things that grew out of it anyways. The beauty of what she’s found there, the safety she cultivated with her own bare, trembling hands.
These are the things Nymphia knows for sure. It’s the middle part she’s still trying to make sense of. It’s not that she doesn’t remember it, because she does. Every detail. The unexpected overwhelm, the sudden rise, the glittering peak, and the nuclear fallout that made Jupiter Beach radioactive. The haze, the clamor, the white hot fever of it all. The impossibility of it. The reality.
The summer of 1988. Jupiter Beach, early June through late August. The blip that has dwarfed the still-widening expanse of her years, those few precious, fleeting months when Jane was her life.
More than once, Nymphia has wondered whether it all could’ve been a dream. It could’ve been all in her head, because nothing remained afterwards, nothing but the way it made Nymphia feel. The only way Nymphia knows that it really happened is because the dream didn’t end when she died. She didn’t wake up. She stayed in it.
It was the cruel, reigning lesson of her young adulthood - that some pains never pass, they just come to ache in different ways.
It’s been years now since Jane disappeared into a puff of perfumed smoke. Everyone moved on, and, gradually, Nymphia did too. She talked about it until no one wanted to listen anymore, because they all knew the story, and there’s only so much that good people, even the best of them, can do about the unfortunate things that happen to their friends. And so they ran out of words, and Nymphia pretended she didn’t need to talk about it anymore, tried to convince herself as she convinced them. For a long while she thought she could, that she would someday be able to walk without feeling the weight of Jane pressing against her. So far it hasn’t happened. She’s just learned to carry it without breaking.
She hasn’t told the story in a while. The bodies - who she was before this, who Jane was, who Jane probably still is - are buried in shallow graves. Digging them up is easy, it’s the putting them back that’s hard. Nymphia hasn’t gone to the trouble of excavating them for anyone but herself in quite some time. The Nymphia that survived Jane has become quiet because of it, more careful with her emotions, more wary of where she lets them. That’s why she won't admit it - that she’d still like to talk about it. That talking about it is the only way she can make sense of it, that she never stopped needing to. It’s hard to say exactly when it began, but if she let herself tell you, Nymphia would say that it went something like this.
June 1988, Jupiter Beach
“Alright,” Xunami decides. She nods towards somewhere beyond the host stand and it’s discreet, a subtle dip of her chin virtually undetectable to anyone around them. There’s a mischievous flicker to her eye that’s almost masked by her poker face. Almost, but not quite. You can’t hide something like Xunami’s penchant for pretty girls. “Two o’clock,” she says under her breath. “In the green dress.”
Careful not to move her head, Nymphia follows Xunami’s gaze across the room. It’s four thirty on the dot, and the restaurant is filling up. The first of the Jupiter Beach vacationers are trickling in through the door, talking of their boating trips and business back home and which son is going to which college. The usual. There are some old faces - the families that have been coming to Jupiter Beach for generations, renting out cottages along the coastline long before Nymphia or Xunami were born, coming back each summer for another dose of escape. There are fresh faces too - the newly wealthy, the honeymooners, the freshly initiated in-laws and girlfriends and business partners. Whether it’s their first Jupiter Beach summer or their fortieth, all the vacationers have something in common. They’ve all packed their cars, driven out from their cushy inner-city apartments or cookie-cutter suburban homes to come here, to relish in the sense of escape that only a place like Jupiter Beach can provide. To find, somewhere along the lazy sweep of the New England coastline, the sort of privacy that they aren’t afforded in their everyday; to get a taste of the quiet lives that they think year-rounders, like Nymphia and Xunami, must live. They’re half right, because Jupiter Beach really is a quiet sort of paradise, a town like a held breath in the chest of the East Coast, a gentle murmur in contrast to the cacophony of the rest of the world.
But they’re still wrong, because they don’t know the other half of it - the half that's hidden in plain sight. This part right here.
Nymphia scans the crowd and spots her - the girl in the green dress. She’s a bright spot amidst a table of largely dimmed stars - a handful of grandparents, a middle-aged man whose whiskey has flushed his cheeks. The girl sticks out amidst them - a glossy sort of gorgeous. Nymphia rolls her eyes, because she’s so Xunami’s type. Still, she has to admit, Xunami has a point. The girl’s dark hair is cut short, stopping just beneath her chin.
It’s not nearly enough to draw a conclusion from, but it’s a start. Nymphia eyes the woman for a moment, because she knows what’ll happen if she does. She learned it long ago - that if you look at someone long enough, they’ll start to reveal themselves. It wasn’t until later that Nymphia realized not everyone looked as closely as she does - that this, the picking up on the things most people overlook, is her gift. So, she watches green dress. The haircut is a part of it, but there’s something more. Nymphia thinks it might be the way that she holds herself, shoulders high and her elbows on the table, like her mind is only half-occupied by what's right in front of her. She’s politely bored, she’s there but also elsewhere, waiting for some unidentified thing that will really bring her to life. It’s something that feels familiar to Nymphia, something she has seen on herself.
“She might be,” Nymphia finally concedes.
“Might be?” Xunami snorts. “She sticks out like a sore thumb. Like a sore, sore fucking thumb.”
Nymphia hums, unconvinced. They watch green dress grab for her drink and spot it at the same time - the gloss of her long, French manicure around her wine glass. “Shit,” Xunami clicks her teeth. “Maybe not.”
“Not completely damning,” Nymphia shrugs, trying to say it as nonchalantly as possible. “Nails come off. You can work around them.”
“Oh?” Xunami elbows her, and Nymphia grins, trying to stifle her laugh as Xunami grills her. “And exactly whose nails have you been working around, hmm?”
Nymphia is saved from recounting that particular story when a guest breezes in through the door; he’s clean, handsome, wearing a freshly pressed shirt and offering a polite nod towards the host stand before crossing the dining room. He comes up behind the girl in the green dress, squeezes her shoulders as he greets the rest of the dinner party, then leans down to kiss her. All at once she comes to life, because this is what she was waiting for. When her left hand flies up to his in an absent-minded display of affection, a diamond glitters from her ring finger.
Nymphia sucks air through her teeth, almost disappointed to have let such a beautiful facade distract her from the details. She should know better.
“Maybe you were right about the nails after all.”
“Eh,” Xunami shrugs, “There’s still a chance.”
Nymphia whips her head around, raises her eyebrows at Xunami’s insistence. “She’s married, ‘Nami. To a man.”
“You never know,” Xunami shrugs, raises her eyebrows, face lit from within by her unending knack for getting up to no good. “Sometimes there’s more to these married women than you’d think.”
“Right,” Nymphia scoffs, because Xunami is so full of shit and only so scandalous, not nearly enough to know the ins and outs of women married to men. “And how, pray tell, would you know that?”
Xunami winks, and then it’s Nymphia’s turn to elbow her in the ribs. Xunami’s swatting her away and swearing she would never break up such a marriage when the door opens again.
Another wave of Jupiter Beach-ers sweep through the door. A family, all done up in their dinner attire. There’s a middle-aged woman, tight faced and hair immaculately teased; she’s a little too obviously uptight to take your breath away, but undeniably beautiful underneath it all. Beside her is a young man. He’s tall, handsome in an obvious way that Nymphia can recognize but doesn’t fully understand. The girl on his arm is equally, obviously gorgeous, though her beauty comes much easier to Nymphia. She’s impossibly thin and impeccably dressed, and the ends of her auburn hair curl into glossy flips against her collarbones. She leans against her beau, gazes up at him lovingly and her side profile is enviable - perfect long lashes, perfect pink lips. The boy smiles and taps the end of her perfect button nose with one finger. Gross, Nymphia thinks to herself, but with a slight twinge of jealousy.
The heavy door slams shut as the last of the party trails in behind them with a huff - a young woman in a navy blue cocktail dress. She’s pretty, curvy in an unmissable way that is no doubt making Xunami twist her mouth to keep it from becoming a smirk. Nymphia doesn’t even look in her direction, lest they both start laughing. The woman’s hand floats up to primp her hair - honey-blonde and curly and piled high on her head - and jewelry, the kind that’s too nice to buy for yourself, glitters at her wrist. Her nails (because Nymphia is paying attention this time) are long and blood-red, but her left hand ring finger is decidedly bare. Her lips are painted red, pouty and deliciously displeased, and her downturned eyes are emphasized by long, dark lashes. The girl is gorgeous in an indisputable sort of way, her beauty backed up by the long line of blonde bombshells she’s surely descended from, but it’s the look on her face that is really setting her apart from the pack. Her gaze is sharp and bothered, eyelids heavy with disdain towards something Nymphia can’t quite pinpoint.
If this was a great love story, the kind deep-rooted in destiny and fate and cosmic alignments, Nymphia might tell you that this was the moment she knew her life would be irreversibly changed. But this isn’t a great love story, and there was nothing particularly special about her entrance. It was one of those deceptively understated moments that you don't know will haunt you forever - simple, until everything that happens afterwards.
The truth is, Nymphia had already written the whole group off as another band of Jupiter Beach-goers; she didn’t pay that much attention to the girl. Not when her mother fussed over the outdoor table they’d reserved, not when they’d insisted on moving indoors and to a table in Nymphia’s section, because it was all so typical. Entitled, difficult guests were a dime a dozen, so Nymphia wasn’t phased. Not when Xunami handed her a stack of menus, her eyes glittering ‘good luck, babe’, and resigned Nymphia to her fate. She’s still not paying attention when she ushers the party of four across the dining room, smiling brightly, stepping aside graciously and gesturing for them to take their seats.
As she does, someone purposefully brushes past her; long, blood-red nails at her forearm, fingertips momentarily ghosting over the place where the sleeve of Nymphia’s button-up gives way to her skin. Nymphia looks up and is staring at the last of the party to arrive - the daughter - and, okay, maybe she’s paying attention now. Up close, because she’s mere inches away, she’s a curious blend of softness and severity. She’s all strong cheekbones and smooth, pale skin. Her eyes are steel gray and shining, softened only by a strange twinge Nymphia can’t quite place - sympathy, maybe. Her red lips are pulled into a strange little smile, like it’s supposed to be a joke, but when she speaks it's all too serious.
“Sorry in advance,” she says, her tone just a touch too quiet, too intimate for speaking with a stranger. She holds her gaze for just a second too long, and then she sweeps past, and only when she’s gone does Nymphia realize she’s not breathing.
In retrospect, Nymphia really should have known.
-
“What a fucking nightmare,” Nymphia groans. She holds the cigarette between her teeth, taking a long drag as her hands move to undo the top buttons on her blouse. Xunami just cackles, snatches the carton of cigarettes from Nymphia’s lap and swipes one for herself with long, elegant fingers. She tilts the packet towards Dawn, who shakes her head and looks vaguely disgusted.
They’re out back, sitting on the stone steps that lead out from to the kitchen and down to the street behind the restaurant. Dinner service has long since ended - the clamor of the kitchen has faded into the cleanup, the dining room has been swept, the silverware rolled and the tables reset for another day. From out here they can look across the street and out to Lake Jupiter, the crescent moon shining silver on the crest of every ripple conjured up by the gentle July breeze. Come morning the town will be turned over to the vacationers, but for now, they have been sent to their hotel rooms and beach homes, and Jupiter Beach once more belongs to the locals, if only for a few precious hours.
“Who was?” Dawn asks, scrunching up her nose as Xunami lights up beside her. She’s still dressed for work even though she must’ve been relieved of front desk duty hours ago - a neat pink cardigan delicately embroidered with daisies, a tight skirt and crisp, white tennis shoes. Even with the puff of permed, red curls, she stands a few inches shorter than Xunami.
“I mean, I guess it wasn’t that bad.” Nymphia says, ever-optimistic, ever too kind to people when she doesn’t need to be. She pulls at the pin in her hair and sets it free from the painfully tight bun that’s giving her a headache, letting it tumble down her back in long, midnight waves. “Just this one table, really.”
“Oh,” Xunami’s voice is thick with sarcasm from where she slouches against the garden wall, long-limbed and easily, effortlessly attractive. It’s been a few hours since they’d last been able to debrief, swept up in the mad dash of the dinner service, but a girl like this one wouldn’t escape Xunami’s memory. “I know exactly who you’re talking about.”
“Who?” Dawn’s red curls bounce as she looks back and forth between Xunami and Nymphia. “Who are we talking about?”
“This family in my section tonight. I think they’re new,” Nymphia exhales, taps the cigarette and watches the ashes flutter to the ground. “I’ve never seen them around.”
“Definitely new,” Xunami hums around her cigarette, its ember a bobbing glow from between her teeth. “I would remember if I’d seen her before. The girl.”
“Ugh,” Dawn fans Xunami’s smoke away from her face. She’s perpetually one step behind and painfully endearing. “Who?”
“The daughter,” Xunami says, her voice low and playful. “Tall, blonde,” she gestures over her own chest, “big ti-”
“Xunami,” Nymphia chides, buries her face in her palm.
“Oh?” Dawn’s head turns, eyes dazzling, and Xunami and Nymphia share a smile, because Dawn is far too sweet and far too desperate for her own good. “Do tell.”
“Yes, Nymphia. Do tell,” Xunami echoes, a smirk playing at her lips.
And so Nymphia recounts it all: The blonde girl’s strange warning. The table’s neediness - the mother’s insistence on nothing being good enough, her snapping fingers, the bottles of champagne, the steaks sent back. The son and the deliriously happy girl on his arm. The daughter’s silent snickering at all of it. Her eyes flashing up at Nymphia time and time again.
“Sorry in advance…” Dawn repeats, brow furrowed as she tries to work it out, as Nymphia tries to do the same. “So, she feels bad?”
“She must’ve,” Nymphia digs in her pocket. “Because she left this.”
She pulls it from her waistband - the crisp fifty dollar bill she’d found as she cleared the table, tucked under champagne flute ringed with red lipstick.
“Shut up,” Xunami gasps, shoots forward, eyes sparkling. “Nymphia!”
“Yeah,” Nymphia shakes her head, tucks the bill back into her pocket. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, what a tease,” Xunami leans back against the wall, lips curling back around her cigarette. “Dawn, are they staying at the inn?”
Dawn thinks for a moment, shakes her head. “No, but mama mentioned a family that’s renting out the McGavern estate. They paid for the whole summer, can you believe that?”
“The McGavern? For the whole summer?” Xunami raises her eyebrows. “Oh, that’s gotta be them. They’ve got money.”
“They’re from Boston, I think,” Dawn says, dazzled, because she was born and raised here, hasn’t strayed from Jupiter Beach for longer than two weeks in her whole lifetime. “They caused quite a stir over parking, I guess. All arrived in separate cars, said there will be more in the coming weeks. The McGaverns don’t know where to put them!”
“Oh shit, hear that?” Xunami laughs her gorgeous laugh - low, full, refreshingly unaffected. The kind that makes Nymphia feel better about everything, like nothing could ever be that bad if Xunami can find a way to laugh at it. “More on the way. Looks like you’ll have your hands full, Nymphia.”
Nymphia rolls her eyes, reaches for another cigarette at the mere thought of dealing with more of these people.
“Not that you won’t have your hands full already,” Xunami adds, eyes low and devious. “Y’know, with that girl. And her big-”
“Xunami,” Nymphia stands and starts to pounce at her. “I swear to God-”
Xunami shrieks and dodges Nymphia’s playful punches, ducks her head down and stumbles on the uneven ground, and Dawn actually snorts, and then they’re all laughing, collapsing into one another with giddy, glorious laughter that echoes off the land and pierces through the atmosphere. They’re high on this - the sheer joy of being together, of being completely uncontained in the way that only best friends are.
Everything is about them again, and the events of the night of fading forgivingly into nothingness, until:
“Oh shit,” Xunami words are short gasps between laughs. “Don’t look now.”
Dawn’s head pops up from where Xunami has her in a headlock, so immediate and animated that Nymphia has to wipe the hysterical tears from her eyes before she can see clearly. She’s still laughing as she looks past the red convertible pulled over at the curb, looks out over Lake Jupiter and down the length of the pier, and suddenly she’s not laughing anymore, because there’s a woman walking out to the very end; thin, blonde, tall, but dwarfed by the landscape that envelops her.
“Wait. Who-”
The woman is far away, but as she curls her hands around the lighter Nymphia can see it - the moment that she’s briefly illuminated by the spark at the end of her cigarette. Red lips, long lashes, honey blonde curls whipping around her face.
“Oh,” Dawn connects the dots and sounds immediately spellbound. “Oh.”
“Isn’t she just delicious?” Xunami muses to herself, because Dawn isn’t the only one. Nymphia’s stomach churns for some reason.
It's the girl from before, no doubt, but there’s something different about seeing her now, separated from the pack of lions she was so recently surrounded by. There’s something signaled by her solitude, something in the way she’s escaping into the dead of night, smoking quietly and staring up at the sky.
Nymphia watches as the girl at the end of the pier brings the cigarette to her lips and unconsciously does the same; all at once she realizes she’s something more than herself, that she’s turned into a strange mirror of someone she doesn’t know.
“Don’t you just want to figure her out?” Xunami says, and Nymphia realizes another thing - that she’s already trying to.
-
And so this is how it starts: Nymphia observing a stranger from a comfortable distance and picking up the subtleties.
Most often it’s at the restaurant, when the girl is precisely where she’s supposed to be and surrounded on all sides. She’s usually sat at the end of the table, beside the boy who has the same slope to his nose as she does and directly across from her mother like her younger, stranger reflection. They’re similar in some obvious ways, different in others that don’t make sense to Nymphia yet. On one hand she’s every bit the socialite - impossibly gorgeous, speaking like she has something important to say, eyes sparkling with champagne and a self assurance Nymphia can’t quite decipher whether or not is deserved. She’s mostly this - searingly well-spoken and sardonic, scoffing to herself like something is secretly hilarious, like she knows something that none of her companions do, like she’s making a fool of them in ways they couldn’t begin to understand - but sometimes, she’s something else entirely. She goes completely quiet, her mouth drawing as flat as a line, eyes darting as though trying to pin something down or pull it apart, making some sort of determination and her place in relation to it. She’s either sharp-tongued or silent, with virtually nothing in-between. She’s almost like all of the girls Nymphia has waited on before, but with one key difference: She’s unfortunately, furiously fascinating.
It’s almost a week before she finally catches the girl’s name. Nymphia hadn’t really wanted to know, hadn’t bothered trying to find out, because she knows that something strange happens once you know a person’s name. They become more difficult to separate from yourself, harder to keep safe a distance from. Once named, there’s a semi-permanence to someone, an unspoken commitment that’s been made. A promise to remember, a promise to share some part of yourself with someone else, no matter how small. Nymphia had been putting it off, but to no avail. It was inevitable in a place like Jupiter Beach - whether or not she wanted to, she was bound to find out.
It’s Sunday brunch service, and Nymphia is refilling water glasses at the table when it happens. The auburn-haired girlfriend is on the arm of the brother, bright-eyed and beaming as she chatters on.
“I was on the phone with the people from the botanical gardens this morning,” she glances up at her fiancé and looks so unfathomably in love that it makes Nymphia’s her heart ache in her chest. She averts her gaze elsewhere, settles briefly on the blonde girl at the end of the table. She’s decidedly silent today, eyes far off while the other woman chatters on. “We’ve set a date. October 18th. They tell us the aster should be in full bloom by then, so I’ve settled on purple for the bridesmaids. They’re sending samples-”
“Jane, darling,” the mother says suddenly towards the other side of the table, her words a sharp and serrated hiss that nearly makes Nymphia jump. “Don’t do that.”
Nymphia’s eyes flicker back to the other side of the table. The girl - Jane - has her hand at her mouth, chewing absent-mindedly at the edge of a blood-red nail. Her eyes are elsewhere before snapping back into place. She lowers her hand and as she does, just for a moment, her gaze meets Nymphia’s, a flash of something hard to understand there, then disappearing.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, sitting up straight. “Gigi, you said you picked purple? If you put me in an ugly dress I am literally never going to forgive you. They take pictures of these things, you know…”
When Nymphia ghosts away from the table and glides down the hallway, she rolls the name around in her mouth. Jane. She whispers it to herself, feels the weight of it on her tongue, repeats it like a mantra. Jane, Jane, Jane…
As far as names go, Nymphia thinks that it's sort of a blank slate. The sort of simple, unassuming name that almost anything can be attached to. A name that lends itself to the imagination, a name that allows anything to be projected upon it.
It’s a strange thing - that first moment when you finally have a name for something that you know is going to be a part of your story, when you have a name for the one thing you’ve wanted for all of your life. Like peeking into your future and knowing what, or who, is about to happen to you. Of course, Nymphia had no idea then. Not the slightest.
-
The first week of the summer slips into the second. For girls like Nymphia and Xunami and Dawn - girls who are used to making their own excitement, girls who are used to being the excitement in a town that remains largely the same - there’s something thrilling about it:
Jupiter Beach swells to capacity, as it does every year, with visitors migrating up the East coast in their Corvettes or RVs or wood-paneled station wagons. They filter in through town, filing into the cottages that dot the coastline, the cabins among the trees, the rooms at Dawn’s family’s inn or the bed and breakfast up the road. Every morning they emerge from their retreats, finding their way up from the outskirts and into the quaint heart of Jupiter Beach, filling its small maze of streets to the brim. All at once there are lines at the ice cream shop and the bowling alley, long-legged girls at lunch counters and fresh, pretty faces in the reflections of gift shop windows, and the first few weeks of summer seem ripe with possibility.
A town like this lends itself to imagining. For a group of queer girls tucked into a small town on the rural East Coast, the arrival of hundreds of newcomers is the event that the rest of the year is spent dreaming about. Here’s the fantasy: an impossibly gorgeous stranger sweeps into town and falls impossibly in love with a small town girl. They say a series of impossible things, save each other from whatever they need saving from, and ride off into an impossibly perfect sunset.
Maybe it’s a stupid dream, and maybe Nymphia is a stupid dreamer.
Her reality is closer to this:
The days are hot and heavy, each one busier than the one before, and Nymphia settles into all of it - the bustle of the restaurant, the long sweep of the hours spent waiting on tables, the rush and subsequent exhaustion of customer service. She’s saved only by this - the snickering at the host stand with Xunami, the debriefing with Dawn at the end of their shifts, sharing cigarettes and spiked sodas out back, mulling over their shared, silly, stupid dreams. The trio is restless in the way that small town girls often are, relishing in their escapes into one another and whatever another night might hold, united by their shared taste for getting up to no good in a town that, aside from rare excitements, remains largely quiet. There will always be this - the worldly demands, the harsh reality of waiting on others to make a living - and there will always be Xunami and Dawn and Nymphia, spinning something out of nothing at all.
And, of course, there’s Jane.
Once Nymphia knows her name, it seems like she’s everywhere. At first she’s only at the restaurant, sat at the table night after night with her perfect posture and her hand perpetually curled around a chilled glass of white wine. And then she’s elsewhere - slipping into the corner store after lunch and emerging with a bottle of Coke and a pack of cigarettes. Window shopping with the pretty strawberry blonde on her brother’s arm, emerging from stores with bags full of beautiful clothes and pink tissue paper. Every day she’s this, surrounded on all sides and sparkling under an imaginary spotlight, but also:
“She’s out there almost every night, y’know,” Xunami says one afternoon. They’re in her bedroom above the restaurant and she’s sitting in her open window, ashing her cigarette and gazing out over her perfect view of the pier across the street. “I got home late last night and-”
“Oh?” Nymphia starts, even though she knows the answer to the question she’s about to ask. This is what she does with a friend as prone to scandal as Xunami - berate her for it. “Home late from where?”
Dawn’s ooooh is incendiary, and Xunami rolls her eyes, flashes that wide, smitten smile she’s been wearing ever since she’d cozied up to the pretty bartender at the only gay bar for miles - The Violet, just on the outskirts of town.
“Anyways,” Xunami avoids the subject. They’ll get to it later. “I got home late last night and heard that convertible outside my window. That thing is loud as shit, you’d think with all that money she might be able to put a new muffler on it or something… but there she was, walking down the pier all by her lonesome.”
“She’s so mysterious,” Dawn sighs, staring off for a moment before she claps both hands over her mouth, because she definitely wasn’t supposed to say that out loud. Xunami and Nymphia meet eyes, and immediately burst out laughing.
“You’re hopeless, babe,” Xunami floats the cigarette to her mouth. “Hopeless.”
“Whatever,” Dawn scoffs, tries not to look too stung. “What do you think about her?”
At the sudden silence Nymphia looks up from the thought she was momentarily lost in - the image of Jane smoking all alone at the end of the dock - and finds Dawn looking expectantly at her.
“Who, me?”
“Yeah, what do you think?” Xunami nudges her with her foot. “You interact with her more than any of us.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nymphia clicks her teeth, shakes her head. It’s not just that she doesn’t know, because she really doesn't know what to make of someone so far removed from her walk of life, but it’s also that she’s not sure where to start.
“So secretive, Nymphie girl,” Xunami smiles, like she sees right through Nymphia’s surface, probably because she can. Dawn and Xunami are two of the people privy to the fact that Nymphia notices everything, but often says very little about it. She surprises people in that way, pays much closer attention than they think she does, but her friends know her well enough to know that she’s always got something she’s holding back. That she’s too full of life not to have insight on the lives of others.
Nymphia thinks to herself as she swipes the cigarette from Xunami’s hand, inhales, leans forward to blow the smoke out the window.
“Dunno,” Nymphia tries to put it into words. “She’s so…”
She’s about to take another drag when there’s the telltale sound of footsteps in the hall. “Shit,” Xunami scrambles to stub out the cigarette on the windowsill just as her mother arrives at the other side of the door. Nymphia can’t understand her Spanish, but knows without a doubt that she’s telling off Xunami for the smell of smoke, or for the side work she slacked on to get out early last night, or both.
“Meet later?” Nymphia says as they’re being shooed down the stairs and Xunami is being beckoned back to the family restaurant.
“I might be late,” Xunami says with a wink. “But I’ll be there.”
-
As they stroll down the sunlit streets of Jupiter Beach, Dawn interlinks arms with Nymphia and leans her head on her shoulder. She doesn’t have to say that she’s been left a bit dejected by Xunami’s newfound love affair, Nymphia sort of just knows. It’s not just that she’s observant, although she is, or that she cares deeply for her friends, which they all know she does. It’s also that Nymphia is well familiarized with loneliness, has soaked in it long enough to recognize what it looks like - longing stares, longer sighs. Longing, longing, longing.
“C’mon,” she kisses Dawn’s head, because tending to someone else's dreams is sometimes easier than tending to your own. “Let's get ice cream. I hear there’s a new girl working the stand this summer…”
-
The sun has long since set, and Nymphia and Dawn are already a few drinks deep when Xunami comes running down the length of the pier later that night.
“Sorry, sorry!” Xunami pants, smiling, because she’s not sorry at all.
“And what do you have to say for yourself?” Nymphia jeers. She’s tipsy, definitely closer to drunk than Dawn, who is still too new to troublemaking to sip so eagerly. For Nymphia, the warmth of the liquor in her plastic cup is a welcome relief after a long week, a moment of peace before the stretch of summer that stands before her.
“I was busy,” Xunami grins, wide and mischievous. Dawn and Nymphia both gasp when she tugs at the collar of her shirt with one finger, revealing a neck full of fresh hickeys.
“You dog,” Dawn shrieks, and Nymphia snorts at the sheer innocence of it.
“So she bites,” Nymphia winks, tips the last of her drink into her mouth. “What’s her name again? Miracle?”
“Mirage,” Xunami says, draws the name out like it’s an enchantment in itself, her tone dreamy and dazed. Nymphia fakes a gagging sound and Dawn groans.
“She’s something,” Xunami gets momentarily lost in a recent memory, then reaches for the handle of liquor at Nymphia’s feet. “Hold on, let me catch up.”
“I’ve never even gotten a hickey,” Dawn wails as Xunami drinks straight from the bottle.
“Never?” Xunami gasps, mouth puckering at the taste of alcohol. “Tequila, Nymph? This is so unlike you.”
“Gotta spice it up somehow” Nymphia shrugs. “Not all of us are getting free drinks from affectionate bartenders.”
“It’s so unfair,” Dawn whines, still devastated, still completely one-track minded.
Xunami smirks back at Nymphia. “Not all of us are getting thoroughly tipped by big city girls. You’re so buying our drinks for the rest of the summer.”
“Do you think I, like, radiate never-gotten-a-hickey energy?” Dawn babbles on, borderline distraught. “Do you think everyone knows?”
“You’ve got that innocent thing going for you,” Xunami offers, though it’s not quite the consolation she thinks it is.
“Oh my god,” Dawn wails, burying her face in her hands. “That’s even worse! How will I know how to give someone a hickey if I haven’t even gotten one? Will I even be capable?”
Nymphia groans. It’s partly because she feels bad. Dawn doesn’t seek out scandal in the way that Xunami does, or welcome it when it falls in her lap like Nymphia. Dawn is shy, sensitive, doubts herself all too much in the way that girls are when they’re still discovering themselves. It’s also because Nymphia is tired of hearing her whine about it, so she obliges. “I’ll give you a hickey if it makes you happy.”
“Really?” Dawn emerges from behind her hands, a little too delighted, her squeal echoing off the landscape and eclipsing the sounds in the distance - a pop song, a passing car.
“My god,” Xunami rolls her eyes. “You guys are so gay.”
“Come here,” Nymphia leans over, gently tilts Dawn’s head to the side and exposes the white of her neck. She feels Dawn giggling, and suddenly gasping as Nymphia makes contact with the tender skin of her throat. Dawn sort of shrieks, which makes Xunami cackle, and then all of a sudden she screams.
“Holy shit!”
Nymphia feels Dawn’s sharp inhale, and all at once she goes rigid under her mouth. She’s frantically pawing at Nymphia’s leg, and Nymphia is laughing when she removes herself from Dawn’s neck to see what all the fuss is about, and then she almost has a fucking heart attack, because there’s a fourth person standing on the dock. Her heart sinks as the figure comes into view, because it’s not just anyone.
It’s Jane.
She stands a few feet away from them in a tight skirt and heeled boots that cut off halfway up the curve of her calf. She’s not dressed for the chill at the end of the dock, and has her bare arms crossed to keep warm. She’s got a cigarette in one hand, a glittering bracelet on each wrist, and this confused look on her face, probably because she wasn’t expecting to stumble across this particular scene on one of her nightly jaunts down the pier.
“Jesus Christ,” Xunami claps her hand over her heart, because it must be midnight or later, and no one else is ever out here this late. “You fucking scared me.”
Dawn goes wide-eyed and wordless, radiating fear. Nymphia’s lips are wet, and she wipes at them with the back of her hand. She braces herself, because this - the posh inner city girl stumbling across a circle of lesbians - could go a few ways:
Jane could scream, hurl a barrage of slurs as she goes running for the nearest police station to personally advocate for the re-criminalization of same-sex activity in the state of Maine. She could go totally ballistic, drown them one by one in Lake Jupiter and leave their bodies to be discovered by the 5am fishermen. She could scoff, call them dykes and saunter off in languid, mean-girl fashion like so many local girls have done - too lazy to think of a more creative insult. She could be politely hateful, promising she’ll pray for them at Sunday mass; Nymphia doesn’t think she seems the type, but she’s been surprised before.
She could do any of these things, and Nymphia half-expects her to, but instead:
“Sorry,” Jane blinks. Her eyes flicker over the trio like she’s not sure where it’s safe to look, holding herself like she’s intruding on a personal conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear and trying to make a quick exit. She raises her unlit cigarette with a bejeweled hand. “Um. Do any of you have a light?”
“Uh,” Nymphia glances over at Xunami, whose hand is firmly clamped over her mouth, and pats at the back pocket of her shorts for a lighter. “Yeah. Here.”
Nymphia stands and extends the lighter towards Jane, whose lips press together as she nods a monotone, “thanks.”
The awkward silence that follows is accompanied only by the lapping of the lake against the pier and the scrape of the flint spinning under Jane’s thumb. She cups one hand around the end to shield the flame from the breeze, and her face is briefly aglow in the fiery light - long lashes that cast shadows across her cheeks, frowning as she concentrates on the cigarette. From here Nymphia can see the goosebumps on her forearms, can smell her perfume as the breeze carries it towards her - something heavy and expensive, overpowered by the scent of smoke soon afterwards. She takes a good, long drag as the cigarette finally catches, her shoulders rising and falling weightily, like she’s shedding something she’s been carrying all day.
She has the very end of the lighter pinched between two fingers when she deposits it into Nymphia’s open palm, like she’s being careful not to touch her, and Nymphia feels almost stung by the distance. She looks up to find Jane looking right at her and feels briefly impaled, skewered by the sudden stone-blue of her eyes so solidly upon her.
Nymphia tries to decode the look in her eyes. It’s not the look of disgust she’d been anticipating, nor the hard gleam of hatred she’s seen from so many before. It’s not the glassy curve of pity that's held in her stare, nor the unmistakable flare of anger. It’s a look Nymphia is unfamiliar with, one she hasn’t seen before on Jane, or on anyone for that matter. She tries to make sense of it in those few, fleeting seconds, but Jane doesn’t give her the chance.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Jane’s glance shifts towards Xunami, whose hand is curled over her lips and surely concealing a smirk, then to Dawn, who is open-mouthed and completely petrified. Her eyes land on Nymphia once more, and there’s that piercing, unnamable feeling. “See you around,” she says with the same strangely intimate softness of her first words to Nymphia. Then she lifts the cigarette to her lips and turns away.
They watch wordlessly as Jane smokes her way up the pier and climbs into the red convertible pulled over at the side of the road. She starts the car, and there’s the far off hum of a pop song as the radio comes to life, and then she pulls off into the night.
Even once she’s nothing more than a faint rumble and a flash of headlights in the distance, it takes a while before any of them can find the words.
-
Nymphia is still trying to make sense of the look in Jane’s eyes the next day. She tries to catch her stare for the hour and a half that she’s at the restaurant with her family for dinner, but this proves a fruitless attempt for two reasons:
The first is that the Jane who sits at the dinner table, all red lipstick and eye rolls and politely brash commentary, is hardly the same Jane who smokes at the end of the dock - soundless and solitary and shivering from the cold.
The second reason is that Jane doesn’t even look at her. Not when she sits, not when she orders, not when she slides a 20 under the stem of her wine glass. Not once.
-
Jane’s sudden appearance is still the topic of conversation when they’re at The Violet two nights later. Nymphia is nursing a gin and tonic, Dawn is at the barstool beside her, and Xunami is as close as she can get to Mirage without actually climbing across the counter.
“Maybe she was embarrassed,” Mirage shrugs. Heavy liner elongates her doe-eyes, framed by thinly tweezed brows. A headband, matched perfectly to the pattern of her shirt, pushes back her long brunette waves. She’s impossibly thin and devastatingly gorgeous, and should be sort of terrifying to look at, except she radiates this tangible sweetness that makes it difficult not to fall in love with her. Nymphia can’t blame Xunami for looking so lovestruck, but she wishes she could, because it’s disgustingly, nauseatingly enviable.
“She’s embarrassed?” Dawn shrieks, a bit drunker than she was two nights ago. She’s got her red curls pulled up with a scrunchie, and a striped turtleneck pulled high over Nymphia’s hickey. It was barely visible two nights ago, and must be virtually nonexistent now. She’s overcompensating, and Nymphia feels a little guilty. “I’m embarrassed! What if she tells my parents!”
“Oh my god. She’s not going to tell your fucking parents,” Xunami rolls her eyes. “If anything is gonna tell your parents, it’ll be that fucking turtleneck.”
“It’s work-appropriate!” Dawn protests, arms flailing.
“It’s June!”
“Alright,” Mirage waves a dismissive hand towards Xunami, which has her back on her barstool in half a second. She turns to Dawn with kinder, sweeter eyes.
“Honestly, babe, if she was going to be a bigot she probably would’ve done it by now. People that are full of hate aren’t afraid to show it.”
“They’re right, Dawn,” Nymphia pats her knee. It’s been a while since her years in the closet, but she remembers how this feels - the white hot fear of being found out. She wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone. “I don’t think she’ll tell.”
“How do you know, though?” Dawn wails. “You can’t know that.”
“I don’t,” Nymphia shrugs, then thinks back to the look in Jane’s eyes. “It’s just a feeling I have about her.”
Dawn frowns, brings her straw to her lips. “Whaddya mean?”
“You never did tell us the other day,” Xunami elbows her. “What you think about her. Jane.”
Nymphia thinks for a long moment, twirls the straw in her drink. For whatever reason, she’s been coy about this particular character study. It’s hardly the first time she’s zeroed in on a particular guest, tried to figure them out and created rich fantasies to fill in the blanks. Still, there’s something perplexing about Jane. She shouldn’t be nearly as interesting as she is, someone who is so obviously in one pocket of the world, but there’s something slightly amiss about her. She’s caught glimpses of it over the last three weeks - that something that’s bent out of shape inside of Jane - but every time she’s thought she’s close to identifying it, Jane snaps back into place. Straightens up, sips her wine, says something sardonic at the dinner table. And then it's gone again.
Nymphia has come back to the same scene again and again: Jane in the darkness at the end of the dock, smoke streaming from her mouth, head tilted up towards the sky. Every time Xunami and Dawn mull over it, Nymphia wonders why they don’t see it - that happy girls, even the ones who drive red convertibles and sip champagne and throw money around like it’ll never run out - don’t stare at the sky like Jane does.
Right then and there, Nymphia draws a conclusion. “I think there’s something sad about her.”
“Sad?” Xunami knits her brows together, confused.
“Yeah,” Nymphia nods. “All alone every night, even though she’s got all that family at home. Out at the pier, even though she’s staying at the nicest spot in town...” She looks up for reassurance, finds Mirage chewing at the inside of her cheek. “Don’t you think it's weird?”
Xunami scoffs. “What does a girl like that have to be sad about?”
Mirage’s eyes narrow, and she leans in on her elbows from the other side of the bar. “A girl like what, hmm?”
“Baby,” Xunami smiles, closes in on Mirage with this half-suave, half-smitten stare. “She’s got nothing on you.”
Mirage flutters her lashes, and Xunami bites at the air like she’s going to positively devour her, and Dawn and Nymphia groan in unison, because they know how this goes. There’s no getting through to Xunami once she’s so thoroughly focused on flirtation, and there’s no flirtee she’s been more thoroughly focused on than Mirage.
It’s a first for her, and for her friends, who never thought they’d see someone capture Xunami’s attention for more than a few months. Nymphia is secretly delighted to see it, and even more secretly simmering with something a little too close to jealousy.
“Disgusting,” Dawn scrunches up her nose. Nymphia hears the thing that she doesn’t say - I want it.
“Hey. Your time will come,” Nymphia reaches over to muss Dawn’s mop of red curls. “I know it.”
“Yeah,” Dawn says through a long sigh, her elbows on the counter and her chin in the palms of her hands. Then she looks over to Nymphia.
“Yours will too,” Dawn says, then more softly. “You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
“Shut up,” Nymphia pouts, caught off guard by Dawn’s sudden sensitivity, eyes all at once a bit watery. She takes just a moment to feel it - the warm flood of friendship that fills her heart, warms that spot inside of her that aches from some unknown cold. And then she brushes it away, because she doesn’t need to think too hard about herself. Not now.
Instead Nymphia nudges Dawn with her foot, nods towards Xunami and Mirage, redirects her attention towards something more hopeful. “Tell them about the ice cream girl.”
“Oh!” Dawn perks up, raps her knuckles against the counter for Xunami and Mirage’s attention. “Guys! There’s a new girl working at the ice cream stand this summer.”
“Oh shit,” Xunamii raises her eyebrows, looks impressed. “Did you talk to her?”
Dawn blinks. “Well, no.”
Xunami scoffs and Mirage swats at her with a dish towel.
Dawn rolls her eyes, a little deterred, but continues anyways. Nymphia loves her for it.
“Her name tag said Amanda...”
-
And just when the excitement starts to fade, just when Nymphia is struck by the realization that everyone else is already enveloped in their own affairs, that this season will only be so different from the last, that the promise of each summer is largely empty, there’s this:
It’s her day off. Xunami is stuck at the restaurant, and Dawn is on front desk duty until the late afternoon, and Nymphia is left to fill the long hours of the day all on her own. She’s up early, because she usually is, and is riding her two-speed along the overlook. She has her sketchbook in her messenger bag and no specific destination in mind, plans to bike until she’s too tired to go on and draw whatever she finds there - the lighthouse overlooking the marina, the covered bridge across the mouth of Lake Jupiter, the kids selling lemonade at the end of their driveways. She sets out as if she’s going to find something new and miraculous, but there’s not a part of Jupiter Beach that she hasn’t seen.
Nymphia isn’t complaining, though, because there’s something about this that doesn’t get old. She pedals along the tree-lined streets of inner Jupiter Beach and up the gradual slope of the winding roads hugging the edge of the coastline. Up there, everything opens up. The trees to Nymphia’s right give way to the horizon, the cliffside overlooking Lake Jupiter. It’s a breathtaking expanse - the pine trees, the glittering of the sun on the water, the rise of mountains in the distance.
Nymphia is rounding the curve of the road to the overlook - a little patch of grass along the cliffside, worn down by decades of drivers who’ve parked their cars to catch a glimpse of another perfect Jupiter Beach sunset. All at once she slows, because there, along the pass that she knows like the back of her hand, is something unexpected:
A red convertible, pulled a little haphazardly off the side of the road.
Nymphia’s foot skims the gravel as she comes to a full stop, because there’s something even more out of place about this scene. It’s not just that the driver isn’t in the car, or that it’s mid-morning and the sunrise has long since come and gone; It’s also that it’s Jane.
The blonde sits in the dirt with her knees to her chest and her back against the driver’s side door, not even looking at the view that stretches out behind her. She’s wearing dark wash denim shorts, a matching jacket over a white t-shirt, and brown leather boots that cut off at the calf. There’s a cigarette smoking in her hand, and she puffs a blonde curl out of her face as Nymphia stares.
Maybe it’s because Nymphia is concerned at this moment, or maybe it’s because she’s concerned about Jane in general - maybe it's because she senses that there’s something amiss about this scene, just like she senses that there’s something amiss inside of Jane. Maybe its just because she’s a decent fucking person. Whatever the reason, Jane’s eyes are on her, and something compels Nymphia to ask, “Are you okay?”
Jane just looks back at her. “Fine,” she says, unmoving, except where she lifts the cigarette to her lips. “How’re you?”
“M’alright,” Nymphia responds a little robotically, and immediately feels the presence of something that they’re glossing over. She’s not sure what she was expecting, but somehow it wasn’t this - Jane’s complete nonchalance in the middle of nowhere. “Um. Do you need help?”
And Jane actually fucking blinks, brow furrowed like she doesn’t know why Nymphia would ask.
“Oh,” Jane smiles to herself, remembering. “I’m out of gas.”
It’s the sort of predicament that typically calls for mild panic - a city girl stranded on a small town cliffside before ten in the morning. You’d think she’d have jumped to her feet the moment Nymphia rounded the corner on her bicycle, waving her arms to flag the other girl down.
As Nymphia approaches, Jane looks all too unaffected by the situation she’s found herself in. She puffs lazily at her cigarette, scoffs at her lap as though asking for help had somehow slipped her mind.
“There’s a gas station maybe half a mile up the road,” Nymphia nods over her shoulder, thinking it best to send Jane back on her way before her mother assembles what she can only assume would be the largest manhunt in recorded history. “I can be back in ten minutes or so with a gas can-”
“Can I come with you?” Jane interrupts.
Nymphia just blinks, because from all of the various calculations she’s done to try to predict Jane’s next move, never once had she considered this to be a possible outcome. She thinks back to all the inputs, all the accumulated instances that have left Nymphia certain of her place on the outskirts of Jane’s life - the fifty she’d slid her to make up for her family’s troubles, her wordless confusion towards Nymphia’s lips on Dawn’s neck, her fingers as far as possible from Nymphia’s palm as she returned her lighter, her complete avoidance of Nymphia the next day - and tries to figure out where she went wrong, what detail she missed that might’ve indicated that she’d end up here: standing over her bike and staring down at a Jane who’d forgotten to ask for help, but sure as hell just asked to go with her to the fucking gas station.
“I mean. I’ve been sitting here for a while,” Jane says through smoke. It hangs, shifts in the sunlight like the setting to a strange dream. “Could use a change of scenery.”
Nymphia pauses, because there are several questions she could ask. For now, she settles on, “What about your car?”
It sounds a bit more like an excuse than Nymphia intends it to, and she feels momentarily worried that Jane will take it as a rejection. Then again, she feels worried that she won’t, because Nymphia has no fucking idea what to do if Jane was undeterred at the thought of leaving her luxury car unattended in the middle of nowhere for a short period of time, if she was to shrug like she does now and say something like:
“If someone steals it, it’ll be easy to find. In a town like this, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Nymphia blinks again. “Yeah, okay.”
“Cool,” Jane ashes her cigarette on the ground. She stands up and brushes off the back of her shorts, leans into the convertible to grab a handbag from the passenger’s seat - brown, leather, perfectly matched to her boots. She swings it over her shoulder and strides towards Nymphia, a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun.
“It’s Nymphia, right?” Jane asks, her gaze sharp and piercing even under the shadow of her hand. And then she’s looking at Nymphia, really looking at her, for the first time since the night on the dock.
Nymphia feels momentarily stunned, because she wasn’t sure she’d ever see her eyes again after Jane had so thoroughly committed to not making eye contact with Nymphia just a few days ago.
“Yeah,” Nymphia says coolly, even though she’s scrambling, trying to seize as much information from Jane’s stare in the few, fleeting seconds that she has access to it.
“I’m Jane.”
Nymphia resists the urge to say I know.
She sort of forgets to say anything, because she’s trying to figure out exactly what it is about the intensity of Jane’s eyes that is so completely incomprehensible.
And then Jane tilts her head, because Nymphia is hesitating, and that endlessly perplexing stare that Nymphia has been working on understanding turns into something like amusement, which is somehow even more confusing, and then Jane nods up the hill.
“Let’s go.”
-
Nymphia thinks about offering Jane a ride - perching her on the front of her bike, or on the back axles - and biking them both up the dirt road, but decides against it. Jane isn’t wearing the right shoes for that, and Nymphia really doesn’t want to be held responsible should she go tumbling down the hill. That’s a lawsuit Nymphia wouldn’t survive. Secondly, such a setup would require closeness, and that worries Nymphia. Standing as close to Jane as she is right now, even just being alone with her, already feels like a breach of some code, the crossing of some line that is poorly defined but is definitely there.
They may be briefly in the same town, but there’s still several degrees of separation between them. Nymphia may not know all the details, but she knows enough. Jane comes from a distinct walk of life, and has surely navigated her version of the world entirely differently than how Nymphia has navigated her own. They might have been brought together, but by two very opposite fates - Jane has, to some degree, chosen to be in Jupiter Beach. Nymphia is here out of necessity. There’s a strange feeling that none of this should be happening, that their lives shouldn’t be overlapping in the way that they currently are.
And so Nymphia walks her bike up the road, and Jane walks quietly beside her. Nymphia glances over to her right and is struck by the realization that this is the closest she’s ever been to Jane, aside from setting a dinner plate down from behind her shoulder, or handing her a lighter amidst awkward silence. Both instances contain their own kinds of distance - the server versus the served. The borrower versus the borrowed from, Jane’s fingers pinched at the end of the lighter, as far as possible from Nymphia’s palm.
With most of Nymphia’s interactions with Jane at the restaurant, there’s a protocol, the well-understood role of the waiter and the waited upon, but there’s no protocol for this - the two of them walking side by side, accompanied by an entourage of curiosities.
Nymphia looks over at Jane now, arrestingly real and mind-numbingly close, and tries to fill the silence that floats between them, tries to solve one of many mysteries.
“How long were you sitting there?”
Jane’s eyes narrow as she thinks. “Two, three hours?”
“Really?”
”Yeah, give or take,” Jane says, glances at Nymphia with a look that feels almost accusatory. “Why?”
It’s the most they’ve ever spoken, the closest they’ve ever come to the boundary between them. Every move is amplified, angular, too abrupt. All at once it feels like they’re on opposite sides of an electric fence, trying to speak through it without getting singed.
“I mean. That’s a long time,” Nymphia withdraws, stares at her shoes. She thinks of the moment she rounded the corner, the moment she spotted Jane sitting in the dirt, all too content to be on her own. “You didn’t look like you’d been there that long.”
Jane scoffs a little, looks like she’s trying to figure out if it’s supposed to be a compliment. “What does that mean?”
“It’s just that you didn’t try to flag me down,” Nymphia glances over, and finds Jane looking at her attentively, expectantly, like she’s eager to test Nymphia’s image of her against her own. It’s intense, a little intimidating. Nymphia goes on anyways. “You didn’t wave or anything.”
“No,” Jane says, smiles at some private revelation that Nymphia can’t comprehend. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Would you have just….” Nymphia floats a hand out in front of her, “let me go by?”
It’s supposed to be a joke, free and light, but Jane doesn’t seem to take it as one.
“Yeah,” Jane imagines, her eyes up to the sky as she nods. “I probably would’ve.”
“Right,” Nymphia scoffs, because it’s impossible to fathom - this supposed socialite letting passerby after passerby sail past her. “So, what, you would’ve been content to be stranded for several more hours?”
“Hey, maybe I wasn’t ready to go home yet,” Jane says, and Nymphia gets the feeling that that was supposed to be funny, but it comes out a touch too revealing for Nymphia to know how to respond. Jane seems to notice her slip-up, tries to bury it. “Besides. Someone else would’ve come by eventually.”
She glances over at Nymphia, offers a smile that feels a bit like a distraction, “Maybe I would’ve flagged you down when you came back.”
“Maybe I would’ve gone home a different way,” Nymphia counters.
Jane deflates just a bit. It’s slight, minuscule, virtually undetectable, but Nymphia notices.
“Maybe you would’ve,” Jane drops her eyes.
They’re both quiet for a moment, birdsong in the air and a hum of guilt in Nymphia’s throat.
“Someone else would’ve come along,” Nymphia reasons. It feels like an offering as it leaves her lips, like she’s making up for it - the slight tinge of disappointment coloring Jane’s gaze.
“Someone else probably would’ve,” Jane sighs dreamily, theatrically. “Some big, strong guy just dying to help out a pretty girl like me.”
Nymphia pffts, because it’s such an out of place fantasy, such an unwarranted inclusion. There’s something about it that makes her gut twist into a knot, something so off about Jane joking about being saved by some impossible man, and something even stranger about Nymphia being the one who rolled along instead.
She puffs air between her lips, looks around for anything to distract her. The gas station signage looms at the edge of the horizon, a flashbulb-lined pillar in an otherwise empty stretch of dry land.
“How’d you run out of gas anyways?” Nymphia asks.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Jane sighs. “So I went out.”
“What'd you do? Drive all night?”
“Yeah, actually,” Jane says, looking a little impressed with herself. “Something like that. Made it two towns over, caught the sunrise someplace that starts with an R. Ridley? Radley?”
“Rangeley?” Nymphia says, unable to hide her surprise so quickly. “That’s, like, miles from here.”
“Yeah, well,” Jane crosses her arms. “I like to drive.”
“Okay,” Nymphia’s brows knit together. “But like. For hours?”
“Jesus,” Jane rolls her eyes. “You sound like my mother.”
Nymphia scoffs, a bit insulted to be compared to the sort of person she serves five nights a week for so much as showing concern. “Whatever. Forget I asked.”
They go quiet again, nothing but the crunch of gravel underfoot to distract from the way that Jane chews at her cheek, looks like she’s considering apologizing as they cross the road to the gas station at the crest of the hill.
Jane doesn’t apologize, and Nymphia doesn’t expect her to, because they’re still not speaking when they procure a gas can from a cashier whose eyes linger a little too long on their necklines.
“Think you girls can figure that out all by yourself?” the cashier says with an unwelcome wink. It’s some greasy guy Nymphia went to high school with, undoubtedly destined to be a gas station attendant for the rest of his miserable existence.
“Fuck you, Sal,” Nymphia rolls her eyes, pushes away from the counter.
He makes some predictably disgusting retort, actually whistles as they turn away, and Nymphia flips him the bird as she pushes through the door. Jane laughs under her breath.
“I fucking hate men,” Nymphia grumbles as they make their way to the nearest pump, crouching in the dirt to fill the gas can.
Jane snickers from somewhere overhead, and Nymphia is reminded of the thing that looms unspoken in the air between them: that the last time they had seen each other, really seen each other, it had been with Nymphia’s mouth at Dawn’s neck.
Nymphia feels Jane’s eyes on her, and somehow knows that she’s thinking of the same instance she is. The uneasy feeling that floods her is not because Nymphia is ashamed, because she isn’t. It’s because she assumes Jane is assuming to know anything about her - that she stumbled across a sliver of Nymphia in the real world and has used it to color her character entirely, that she’s interpreting Nymphia through the lens of a few, fleeting seconds from several nights ago. That Jane may presume to know what she is or isn’t - some small town dyke who hates men because she isn’t attracted to them, who kisses her friends because there’s no one else.
Nymphia doesn’t bring it up, because she doesn’t feel the need to explain this, to explain herself to anyone, least of all to someone she knows as little as Jane. Jane, however, is seemingly undeterred, because:
“So,” she starts, arms crossed over her chest. “Do you make a habit out of that?”
Nymphia doesn’t look up. “Out of what?” she replies flatly.
“Out of kissing your girlfriends.”
Nymphia glances up. Jane didn’t sound shaky when she said it, but as she stares down at Nymphia it’s with a hint of uncertainty playing at her features. For the first time today, Jane doesn’t seem so stoic.
“Sometimes,” Nymphia shrugs, looks down. “Yeah.”
When she looks up again, Jane’s face has gone a bit blank. Like she wasn’t expecting Nymphia to be so straightforward, so unabashed. Like Nymphia had just poked a hole in her well-thought plans.
“Is that a problem?” Nymphia ventures.
Jane thinks for a minute, seems to disappear somewhere inside of herself.
“No,” she says softly, kicking at the dirt with the toe of her boot. “No, I guess not.”
Neither of them say anything for a while. Nymphia screws the cap on the gas can and shuffles it into Jane’s hands. She dusts herself off, grabs her bike from where it’s leaned against the gas pump.
“So is that what you do for fun around here?” Jane questions once they’re on the road again. Apparently, she’s still thinking about it. “Just get drunk at the pier?”
Nymphia scoffs, because it feels so assumptive, so belittling.
“What do you do for fun at home?” she bites back. “Just go shopping on daddy’s credit card?”
Jane raises her eyebrows, looks almost taken aback.
“Can you talk to me like that?”
“I'm off duty,” Nymphia replies coolly.
“Riiiight,” Jane draws out the word. “Like you were off duty the other night.”
Nymphia rolls her eyes. “We do other stuff too,” she says. “Go rollerskating. Go to the arcade….”
She isn’t sure why she starts to list what she does with Dawn and Xunami as they make their way down hill, other than she feels compelled somehow, like she has something to prove.
“We cliff dive sometimes,” Nymphia smiles at a memory: her and Xunami leaping off the edge with their bare feet, Dawn shrieking from somewhere above them as they hurtle towards the water’s surface.
“Cliff diving?” Jane echoes.
“Yeah,” Nymphia smiles. “And we go skinny dipping.”
“Skinny dipping?” Jane echoes once more, and there’s a gleam in her eye that Nymphia hasn’t seen yet - an interested, tempted sparkle. “What are you, some kind of thrill seeker?”
“Yeah,” Nymphia chuckles to herself. She would never define herself as such, but as she thinks it over, she thinks that’s exactly what she and her friends do - find ways to make the mundane exciting. “I guess so.”
“That’s cool,” Jane smiles another smile, this time a little less to herself. “I mean, you sound fun. You and your friends.”
Nymphia looks at Jane now, her side profile against a backdrop of trees, and thinks that she’s never seen her from this particular angle. She stares at the ground, or at the clouds rolling overhead, and feels looser, freer somehow. More tangible.
“So what do you do for fun?” Nymphia asks. “Other than drive until you’re out of gas?”
“Shop,” Jane reminds her. “On daddy’s credit card.”
“Right, of course,” Nymphia jests, finds her way around the electric fence. “How could I forget?”
Jane laughs and it’s real, a breathy sound that escapes from somewhere inside of her - not just floating on the surface.
“Well,” she sighs. “Geeg and I - that’s my brother’s fiancée, Gigi - we go to this jazz bar in the city.”
“Jazz?” It sounds so foreign to Nymphia, probably because she’s only heard jazz on television or on one of her mother’s records. Something that old people appreciate, not fashionable upper-echelon girls who could probably score tickets to any show in town.
“Yeah,” Jane smiles. “It’s really an excuse to dress up and drink Manhattans, but it's nice.”
Nymphia can picture it now - Jane and Gigi at a table with a tiny lamp in a dimly lit bar, wearing black velvet and knocking their cocktail glasses together, slipping out after the set to smoke cigarettes on a rainy city street. It makes Nymphia want to dig up some dusty vinyl from the record store, take it home and mine the music for what Jane hears in it.
“I play tennis,” Jane goes on. Nymphia spots the red convertible at the bottom of the road all too soon, because the walk downhill is much faster than the walk up, and she finds herself wishing it would last longer, because she’s starting to enjoy hearing Jane talk. “I used to dance too,” Jane rambles. “But not anymore. Too competitive. And I only compete if I know I can win.”
“And you drive,” Nymphia says as they approach Jane’s car. “You drive until you’re out of gas.”
“I don’t just drive,” Jane says with a wink. “I drive fast.”
“Bit of a thrill seeker yourself, huh?” Nymphia says, watches Jane’s nails as she unscrews the gas cap. Diamonds glitter at her wrist.
“There’s nothing like hitting a hundred in this thing,” Jane smiles, lost in some far off memory of escaping the city as she fills the tank of her convertible. Nymphia remembers the image of Jane walking up from the pier, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting off into the night. She imagines her driving past the docks, past the McGavern estate and into the darkness, a pair of headlights cresting the cliffs of the overlook as she winds her way out of town.
“I bet,” Nymphia says, squeezing the handlebars of her bike.
“I appreciate this, by the way,” Jane says as she empties the gas can, screws the cap back on and tosses it into the backseat. She glances over at Nymphia with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “However could I begin to thank you for your kindness?”
“If you hand me a twenty right now, I swear to God-” Nymphia starts, then stops, because there’s that laugh again from Jane. Breathy, real, escaping.
“You’re welcome, though,” Nymphia says through her smile, wanting more than anything to make Jane laugh again. “Should I come back at the same time tomorrow? Will you be stranded again?”
“No,” Jane shakes her head, smiles. “No, I’ll be good. Geeg wants to talk bridesmaids dresses and you know those things are ugly as sin. You’ll probably see us at lunch tomorrow. ”
Nymphia nods. She thinks of the day that will follow this one, when things go back to the way they always are. When she’s in her button up and her hair is in a tight bun, and Jane is sipping wine at the end of the dinner table. Maybe looking at her, maybe not.
“Alright, well,” Nymphia starts. “I’ll see you then, I guess.”
She gets a few steps away, and then:
“Hey, wait!”
Nymphia glances back over at Jane and goes a little breathless. Her eyes glitter, a little too intense, and there’s that smile - that achingly real smile that Nymphia’s never seen until today. And then she does it, makes an offer Nymphia can’t refuse:
“Do you wanna go for a ride?”
And, well. How do you say no to something like that?
-
Nymphia is in the passenger seat. Her bike is somewhere behind her, because Jane insisted she didn’t care about the dirt from her tires getting on the expensive leather upholstery, and Jane is revving the engine. She looks over at Nymphia with this unbridled excitement, and Nymphia doesn’t think she’s ever heard anything more wonderful than the sound of this car.
She looks over, and there’s something even more wonderful beside her. Jane, this Jane.
She’s without her red lipstick, and her makeup is a little worse for wear, and for the first time Nymphia is struck by how pretty she is. It’s not exactly a revelation, because Jane is obviously gorgeous, but she’s beautiful in a layered sense. There’s the instantly recognizable signifiers of conventional beauty - the slope of her nose, the fullness of her lips, the length of her eyelashes - but the more you look, the more you begin to appreciate her beauty for what it really is: the undertones of her complexion, the texture of her skin. The downturned corners of her mouth, the sharp angles of her features, the soft swell of her cheeks, the glitter of her canines when she smiles like this - a little wild, less inhibited.
She reaches in the inside pocket of her denim jacket and whips out a lollipop, tiny cherries printed on the plastic wrap.
“What the fuck,” Nymphia laughs, because does she just keep these things on her all the time?
“I stole it,” Jane pops the candy in her mouth, the stick bobbing between her lips as she speaks. “From Sal.”
“From the gas station?” Nymphia leans forward. “No shit, I didn’t even see you.”
Jane shrugs. “He was being a dick. He deserved it.”
She puts the car in drive and looks over at Nymphia, eyes flashing. “Let's show him we can figure out a gas can just fine.”
And then they take off. The car rocks as Jane maneuvers out of the overlook, then flies forward. The wind whips through Nymphia’s bangs and she laughs uncontrollably as she’s flung against the seat, hand flying to grip at something, anything. The half mile they just walked flies by in half a minute, and as they crest the hill, Jane’s foot is heavy on the gas.
“Hey, find us some music,” she nods towards the radio. “I want this fucker to hear us go by.”
Nymphia reaches over to fiddle with the radio, and Jane rips the lollipop from her mouth as they speed past the gas station.
“Hey, Sal,” she screams over the side of the car. “Fuck you!”
Nymphia cackles, screams a fuck you, Sal! towards the gas station as it dwindles in the distance, fades into nothingness.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Nymphia yells over the whirr of it all, flipping through the static of stations too far off to reach the remoteness of Jupiter Beach, and then something comes through, something good.
The Velvet Underground. Lou Reed singing Sweet Jane.
“Fuck, keep it on,” Jane reaches to crank the volume up. “I love this song!”
Nymphia scoffs. “Of course you love this song.”
“No, like, I love this song,” Jane says. Then she proves it, sings along like she’s done it a hundred times before.
But anyone who ever had a heart she scream-sings. Oh, they wouldn’t go around and break it!
Nymphia is positively giddy, absolutely alive with feeling, because she loves this song too. She loves how the landscape she knows like the back of her hand is melting around her into a beautiful blur of color, how she’s never seen it like this. She loves that, for the first time, she’s seeing it through someone else’s eyes. And not just anyone, but someone unexpected, someone she never could’ve seen coming.
It’s something straight out of a silly, stupid dream, and Nymphia is a silly, stupid dreamer.
And anyone who ever played a part she joins in, matches Jane’s growling imitation of Lou Reed’s rasp. Oh, they wouldn't turn around and hate it!
Jane’s fingers tap at the steering wheel as Lou Reed repeats over and over, Sweet Jane, Sweet Jane, Sweet Jane….
She tucks the lollipop between her teeth and nods her head to the beat, curls bouncing, a mesmerizing mix of elegance and grit. Nymphia feels herself grinning, feels herself looking for a bit longer than she probably should, and presumably so does Jane, because she looks over at Nymphia.
“What?” she beams, and Nymphia thinks of a few answers at once.
I didn’t think you were this beautiful to me is one of them, but more on that later.
-
Chapter 2: ‘till the gravity’s too much
Notes:
ok guys, fair warning that we are really in it now!!! this is the longest chapter of anything i’ve ever written and i am SO DELIGHTED to finally share it with you!!! buckle ur seatbelts, we are going for a ride!!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Nymphia is in the most beautiful sort of pain.
Her cheeks are sore from smiling. Her belly aches from laughing. Her throat is scratchy from screaming, and her hair is wind-whipped and messy, and it’s the most alive she’s felt for as far back as she can remember.
She could try to compare it to something, but it’s hard. It’s almost like the time she and Dawn went sledding last winter, when the whole town was covered in more snow than could be moved and they’d trekked out to the hill behind the high school. There was a thin layer of ice atop the snow that sent them speeding down the slope faster than either had intended, and Dawn was shrieking from somewhere behind Nymphia, and then they hit a rock. They both had gone flying. Nymphia was still laughing when she was launched midair, too exhilarated to be scared. It didn’t matter that she was freezing, or that she was hurtling towards the ground, because just for a moment she was completely weightless, suspended mid-air in a landscape of bright white.
This - driving with Jane - is almost like that, because Nymphia is free-falling, floating in this liminal space between everything she’s ever known and everything she knows will be. It’s almost like the time she went sledding with Dawn, but it’s so much better, because it's more than a few mere milliseconds that she’s soaring through the air.
It's nearly an hour of perfect, uninterrupted escapism - Jane whipping hard and fast around hairpin turns, Nymphia clinging to the side of the car for dear life and shrieking with delight - before they coast into the edge of town. As they ride along the water, it crosses Nymphia’s mind that this is where this really began - the long stretch of road alongside Lake Jupiter, the docks reaching out across it.
Nymphia glances over at Jane - the reality of a girl whom, up until now, she had only guessed at - and realizes that the world is already a little different than the last time she was here.
It’s only been an hour of this, but there’s something inside of Nymphia that rushes to frame her whole life in terms of then versus now. She remembers her disenchanted bike ride up the hill, convinced that the summer would be the same as any other, completely unaware of what she would find around the bend. She’s not sure exactly when everything changed - whether it was at this exact moment, or when Jane invited her for a drive, or from the very first time she laid eyes on Jane this morning - all she knows is that everything feels different now. Even if this is the only memorable thing that happens to Nymphia for the rest of the season, at least she’ll have been surprised just once.
Jane looks over to the passenger’s seat, and it's a little bit electric. She’s grinning, but it’s not just that; her eyes are smiling too when she asks, “Whaddya think?”
“You were right,” Nymphia admits freely, one hand in her messy hair. “There’s nothing like it.”
“I know,” Jane turns, beaming, and Nymphia is caught off guard for what feels like the hundredth time this afternoon. Her grin is toothier than Nymphia has ever seen it, and it softens her somehow, dulls the sharp edges of her features just enough to make them look touchable. There’s this strange kick of want in Nymphia’s gut when Jane stares back at her, eyes lingering for a moment, and says, “I don’t get to do this enough.”
Nymphia blinks, momentarily stunned, because she doesn’t get to do this enough - stare at Jane so freely, so openly. “No?”
“No,” Jane smiles and looks away. Immediately Nymphia wants her eyes back on her, even if it meant she’d drive them right off the road. She hates herself for coming to this so quickly - having insane, insatiable death wishes over the slightest attention she gets from a stranger. It’s far too much and far too soon. She tries desperately to reel herself back in, to gather up her careful threads of composure that seem to unwind every time Jane so much as looks over at her from the driver’s seat.
“I get too busy, and the city is so crowded. Too much traffic. Unless it's, like, midnight, I never get to-” Jane’s eyes flicker towards the clock on the dashboard. “Shit.”
“What?” Nymphia says, surprised at her own concern, a little distressed at the dissolving of this daydream they’re living in.
“I gotta get back,” Jane groans, sounding actually disappointed.
And just like that, the spell - this beautiful moment - is nearly broken. The awareness of time acts like a fine-toothed comb, pulling the gorgeous mess of this unexpected escapade unwillingly into place, slotting it so certainly against the rest of everything else. All at once Nymphia is aware that this is destined to be a highlight amidst an otherwise mundane week - all of her days before, all of the days that she expects to unfold unsurprisingly afterwards, and the ephemeral bright spot nestled between them.
“My mom is dragging us to this winery this afternoon,” Jane slides one hand up the back of her neck as if to soothe herself, tending to the place where tension has somehow already started to gather. “It’s some place fifteen minutes from where we’re staying. We’re doing dinner out there too, with Geeg and everyone, and one of her friends from the city is coming down for the weekend, and…”
Jane goes on about the afternoon that’s been planned for her, and Nymphia can practically see the weight falling back into her face. Her brows knit tighter together, her mouth twists as she talks, her eyes searing and squinted ever so slightly with annoyance, or maybe something stronger. Maybe even anger.
Nymphia watches as Jane seems to grow heavier, weighed down from the inside out. The cloud that rolls over her could be mistaken for anxiety, or exhaustion, or any number of the usual ailments that befall twenty-somethings on a daily basis, but Nymphia knows it isn’t. She can feel the energy emanating from Jane grow sharper, can feel her go guarded again, already on the defense against some nameless threat.
Nymphia knows there’s only a few more seconds that they’ll have like this. She can feel the magic running out, enchanted sand slipping to the bottom of an hourglass. She desperately tries to gather it, if only for a moment longer.
“Oh, c’mon,” she jeers, trying to will the weight from Jane’s face. “It can’t be that bad.”
Jane sours, bitterly pushing back against Nymphia’s outward tendency towards optimism. “You’d be surprised at what some people can ruin.”
Nymphia’s eyes narrow, not entirely sympathetic to Jane’s woe-is-me as she sits in the lap of luxury. She knows what’s at the heart of this moment - escape - and she knows that means there’s something worth fleeing from at home. She knows Jane is running, but still. She’s doing it in a luxury convertible. Things could be worse.
“I know exactly what people can ruin. I’m a waitress in a fucking resort town,” Nymphia rolls her eyes. “Don’t act like drinking wine all afternoon is such a terrible way to spend the day.”
Jane scoffs, starts on what is surely some explanation as to why her life is so hard, then glances over at Nymphia, who stares back with one eyebrow raised, and stops. All at once her face brightens gloriously, a glimpse of the sun through wind-whipped clouds, all smile lines and starry eyes that send something in Nymphia soaring once more.
“No, yeah,” Jane backpedals, mouth splitting into this shit-eating grin. “It’s pretty great.” Nymphia swats at her, because, yeah, of course it is.
“It’s a shame, though,” Jane starts, her tone so exaggerated, so performative, except there’s a shyness in how she looks away, a sliver of uncertainty that keeps her from looking at Nymphia when she says to her: “Because I’m having so much fun.”
It’s such an abrupt attempt at seriousness, such a paradoxical display of silliness and sincerity, that Nymphia hardly knows what to do, except to laugh and throw it right back at Jane.
“Don’t get enough of that, do you?” Nymphia teases, although she’s not entirely joking. She can’t shake the feeling that there’s something so off about this - Jane, so physically affected at the mere thought of returning home, driving all night just to avoid it.
“No,” Jane shakes her head. “Not nearly enough.”
Nymphia hums, wind ripping through her hair. “I’d hate to put an end to it.”
“I think that’s exactly what I’m doing, sweetheart.”
Nymphia’s heart hums in her throat. She swallows it whole.
“S’alright. I should check in with my friends anyways,” Nymphia eases herself back into reality, downplaying her disappointment as much as possible. “You can let me out here.”
“What, here?” Jane questions, nose crinkling. They’re on the street beside the docks, barreling past the stretch of back entrances and alleyways to their left. It’s not much to look at, a far cry from the shop-lined streets of inner Jupiter Beach, the striped awnings and string lights and storefronts designed to catch the eyes of tourists. This is the underbelly, the other half of it.
“Yeah,” Nymphia points at the restaurant speedily approaching ahead. The steps that lead up to the kitchen, Xunami’s checkered curtains billowing out of her open bedroom window above. “Right there.”
Jane is muttering some snide remark about the unsightliness of their surroundings and Nymphia is rolling her eyes and starting on a snarky reply, swept up so easily in the rhythm of their conversation that she forgets she has somewhere to be, almost letting the destination pass her by. “Here, here!” she shrieks over the sound of the radio.
Jane brings the car to a screeching halt. It’s not too hard, not quite as bad as the time Nymphia fell from the sled and the frozen ground ripped the air right out of her lungs, but it's enough to send her back flying against the convertible’s leather upholstery. Jane reaches over, reduces the blaring John Waite song to a mere hum.
“Sorry, uh. To dump you in an alley,” Jane jokes her way through the apology, her eyes not quite meeting Nymphia’s. She’s digging through her purse for what Nymphia already knows will be a cigarette, searching for her next fix, a small symbol of rebellion before she returns to life as she knows it. “Seems rude of me, somehow.”
“It’s fine, really. The restaurant is right up there, I should go see if Xunami needs me,” Nymphia says, knowing damn well that her mother runs that kitchen like the navy, and that she’ll be nothing more than a distraction to Xunami’s side work.
“Right,” Jane says quietly. She fishes a cigarette from the carton and tosses her purse carelessly to the backseat. “Well,” she looks over and tucks the cigarette between her teeth. She’s stupidly, scarily gorgeous and somehow still sheepish when she mutters, “Thanks.”
“Thanks for getting stranded,” Nymphia eyes Jane as she sparks up, thinks about leaning in to shield her lighter from the breeze but doesn't. “This was fun.”
Jane puffs, blows smoke out of her mouth, eyes flickering over Nymphia’s face.
“Yeah?” Jane asks, and there’s that look that Nymphia doesn’t know what to make of - searching, somehow.
Nymphia doesn’t try to hide her grin. “Yeah.”
Jane is smoking, but Nymphia gets the feeling that her mouth, if it wasn’t occupied, would be pulled into a smile. “You’re easy to have fun with.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nymphia quips, reaching for the handle and stepping out of the car.
“Whatever makes you happy,” Jane waves a hand, apparently unwilling to admit so easily to something like a flattering remark. Nymphia will take what she can get.
And then Nymphia is hoisting her bike out of the backseat and walking it over to the other side of the street. She stops at the bottom of the steps, turns and waves a goodbye, feeling all at once like a housewife waving a white handkerchief from the shore as her husband sets off to sea.
And just when she thinks she’s got a hold on herself, wrapped the entirety of her desire back around its spool, Jane holds her cigarette between her teeth as she puts the car in drive, brings two fingers to her forehead and floats them forward in a mock-salute.
“See you around, Nymphia,” Jane calls. And then she steps on the gas and sails off into the blue, all her brilliance reducing to a blip of red, a pop song fading in the distance, and Nymphia can’t help it - unraveling of her soul, the stretching of her very self, an invisible string rolling out after Jane.
-
Nymphia bounds up the stone steps to the back of the restaurant, propelled by a burst of giddy energy, and, finding it locked, pounds against the door to the kitchen. She’s looking over her shoulder, staring after the flash of red turning out of sight, when the door rips open in front of her.
Xunami is on the other side in denim cutoffs and an enormous t-shirt, her dark hair pulled back. She’s clearly expecting a disgruntled deliveryman and not an overjoyed Nymphia to be standing at her doorstep.
“Jesus,” Xunami rolls her eyes. “What? We aren’t even open yet.”
“‘Nami,” Nymphia says through what she realizes is a smile. “You’ll never believe what just happened.”
-
“Nymphia,” Xunami repeats, mouth agape. “Nymphia!”
She’s shucking oysters on one side of the kitchen. Nymphia sits on the countertop across from her, hands clasped over her mouth, because she can’t believe it either. Her head is still spinning as she tries to trace the threads of fate that brought her here; how exactly she ended up in the passenger's seat of Jane’s red convertible, speeding past the gas station and cussing at Sal.
“I know,” Nymphia gushes, although it comes out like a whisper, like a secret. “I know.”
“My god. The plot thickens,” Xunami shakes her head, drops an oyster into a waiting pot of saltwater. “We have to tell-”
“We have to tell Dawn,” Nymphia finishes Xunami’s sentence, hands dropping to either side of the counter as if to ground her, to stop herself from spinning out. “I know.”
“And you have to tell it to her exactly like you told me, like I know nothing about it,” Xunami says. “You know she’ll be disappointed if she finds out I knew before she did.”
Nymphia nods, because she does know - Dawn is always wounded to be the last to know, perpetually terrified that she’s missing out on something, even if it’s nothing at all. Nymphia doesn’t mind that she’ll have to say it all again. She loves Dawn. Besides, this is a memory she wouldn’t mind reliving. She thinks she could do it for a few lifetimes.
-
“Nymphia,” Dawn exclaims, jaw dropped when Nymphia has finished telling the story. “Nymphia!”
It’s almost word for word what she relayed to Xunami nearly an hour ago, and Xunami is playing her part well. She gasps when Nymphia describes the moment she discovered Jane sitting in the dirt of the overlook, leans in when she details Jane’s outfit as if she hadn’t asked for the specifics already. Nymphia goes over it all - Jane’s unyielding responses to Nymphia’s conversation starters, her snickering and scoffing and general strangeness. She’s just getting to the part where Jane stood over her at the gas pump, arms crossed as she’d brought up the incident at the end of the dock.
“So, wait,” Dawn interrupts. She’s retired the turtleneck she’d been wearing since their night at the pier, but she’s got her hair down, pooling around her neck as if there’s any semblance of a hickey left to hide. “Do you think she told anyone? About that night, I mean.”
Nymphia thinks back to the moment Jane stood above her, asking whether she made a habit out of kissing her girlfriends. She’d offered the question breezily, asking like she already knew what the answer would be. Like she thought it would be silly, somehow. Like she thought asking would give her the upper hand, that she’d have Nymphia cornered, a butterfly pinned to the velvet of a display case. And still, despite a flawless delivery, she did it all with a flicker of uncertainty.
Nymphia shakes her head. “I don't think she told anyone.”
“No?” Dawn asks, looking a little too relieved. She clutches a stuffed bunny to her chest - white, worn, well-loved, and releases a sigh Nymphia is pretty sure she’s been holding since Jane had caught them at the end of the pier.
“No. It felt like she was trying to figure out how to bring it up to me, I can’t imagine that she’d be able to bring it up to anyone else,” Nymphia continues, brow furrowing. “It was kinda weird, actually. When she did ask me about it.”
Nymphia goes back to the moment she’d answered Jane, the moment the self assurance slipped from her face. Jane had appeared confounded by Nymphia’s straightforwardness, at her easy ownership of this part of herself. She’d gone quiet when Nymphia countered her, receded into some closed off, inaccessible corner of herself to mull over the question Nymphia had asked her - is that a problem?
Nymphia remembers the moment when she finally resurfaced with a response: a meek, quiet, “No.”
“I think she thought I would be embarrassed, or something,” Nymphia looks up. “I don’t think she knew what to do when I just… addressed it normally.”
Dawn sits, puzzled, her features pinching together as she tries to make sense of it. Nymphia knows what that feels like.
“Who knows, Dawnie,” Xunami nudges the redhead, her eyes flashing deviously. “Maybe Jane liked it.”
Dawn gasps, “no”, and whips her head back towards Nymphia. “There’s no chance, right, Nymphia? There’s no way she liked it, right?”
“I mean,” Nymphia sighs, crossing her arms. “I don’t think she hated it. She didn’t, like, freak out on me or anything.”
“Oh my god,” Dawn’s arms fly out, scrambling to cling to Xunami’s outstretched legs. “Oh my god. What if she liked it?”
Nymphia marvels at Dawn’s innocence, her willingness to believe in anything at all. She admires that about Dawn, and wants that sort of faith for herself. People leave most of that behind in childhood, because maintaining belief in impossible things is hard work, more than the adult mind is willing to muster after surviving the inevitable letdowns of adolescence. Nymphia would like to think that some of it survives, that everyone has one or two impossibilities they choose to believe in: God, angels, miracles. The chance that someone will love them despite all their flaws. That hope for a time when they’ll have that one thing they so desperately want. The faith that, somehow, everything will end up alright.
“Jeez, I think you want her to like it,” Xunami teases. “Got a little crush, do you?”
“No, what? No,” Dawn sputters, cheeks flushing red. “Shut up. Oh my god. No.”
“Oh, come on” Xunami groans. “I mean, don’t we all have a thing for her? I’m not the only one, am I? Soul or no soul, the girl is hot. We can all admit that.”
Something in Nymphia sings. It’s a familiar tune, the same internal monologue she’d had when she’d looked at Jane and thought I didn’t think you were this beautiful to me. She must’ve realized Jane was attractive at the same instance everybody did - from the first moment she saw her, the same instance that everybody who ever looks at Jane probably does. She must’ve known it then, but it hadn’t struck her down until that moment in the car when she’d looked over and saw Jane happy. Nymphia wonders how many people get to see Jane like that, how many people know how pretty she really is.
“I literally don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dawn tucks her hair behind her ears with both hands, palms brushing against her reddened cheeks.
Nymphia winces imagining what it would be like to have Dawn and Jane in the same room. With Dawn’s tendency towards flustering easily and Jane’s casual cruelty, she could see that going south very quickly.
“No offense, Dawnie,” Nymphia says, politely precursors the shutting down of that dream. It's for the best. “But I think she’d eat you alive.”
“God, Nymphia,” Xunami scoffs. “Don’t get her hopes up.”
“I hate you,” Dawn chucks her stuffed bunny at Xunami’s head. “I hate you.”
“Love you too,” Xunami smiles.
“Nymphia,” Dawn redirects the attention away from her blushing. “What happened next?”
Nymphia recounts the rest of the story: The breaking of the ice on the walk back down the road, the unexpected joyride in the red convertible, Jane’s petty lollipop crimes and screaming over the side of the car. Dawn shudders when Nymphia recalls the hand of the speedometer pushing past eighty, her hands flying to her mouth when Nymphia remembers the last bit - Jane’s half-serious I’m having so much fun.
She leaves out a few minor details, like the part where Jane called her sweetheart. Things that would beg further questions with answers Nymphia doesn’t have yet.
“But, like,” Dawn twists a red curl around her finger. “All of this. What does it mean?”
It’s an innocent, honest question. It’s still one Nymphia was hoping to avoid.
The truth is, it's too soon to tell what any of it means. In her heart, she knows what the whole thing chalks up to - mere chance. It’s not every day she gets to stumble across something as special as this, and she knows it's unlikely to happen again. She’ll take what she can get from situations that fall into her lap, won’t do herself the disservice of asking more of them, but it’s hard to stop the desire that blossoms somewhere inside of her. Desire for something, though Nymphia doesn’t quite know what yet.
“Honestly, I’m not sure if it means anything,” Nymphia shrugs her shoulders, shrugs back her hopes, too. “I think it just… happened.”
Xunami crosses her arms and leans back against the headboard. The bedspread is pink and frilly and quintessentially Dawn, and Xunami looks a little out of place against the good-girl stylings. There’s a curve of chaos to her brow, the kind that has convinced Nymphia into carrying out half a dozen bad ideas, a persuasive gleam in her eye when she asks:
“Do you think you’ll see her again?”
Nymphia sighs, because this is the part she hasn’t gotten to yet - the effect that today’s events will have on the future. She knows better than to make something out of what is hardly anything at all, and has been burnt more than once by the flames of desire for things she cannot so easily have. She holds onto hope, because she has to, but doesn’t dare let herself lean in too close to be left disappointed.
“I don’t know,” Nymphia shakes her head, shuts out the dwelling on possibility that she knows she’ll inevitably circle back to later. “I doubt it.”
Xunami hums, almost unconvinced. Nymphia knows she’s being spared an interrogation. Xunami knows Nymphia too well not to know she’s thinking about it, that she has been for a while now.
Nymphia has done plenty of wondering about Jane, has done her best to dissect her from a distance, but all of her observations pale in comparison to the real thing, because she’s so much more up close. She would like to think that she’s satisfied with what she got today, the slivers of light that were shed upon Jane’s character, but it’s what’s been illuminated - the restless, wild Jane that lies just beneath the perfectly poised surface, the thrill-seeking, speeding, smiling-around-her-cigarette Jane - that makes Nymphia want to see more. She would like to think that she can restrain herself from wanting to get closer, to settle for the semblances of answers she got, but there’s a leap in her chest as she thinks it over that threatens otherwise. A careless leap, not looking at where she might land.
“Do you want to see her again?” Dawn leans in, wide-eyed. “I mean, I think I would want to. Right?”
“I don’t know, Dawn,” Nymphia says, smothering the last ember of desire that burns in her throat. “Honestly, it’s like she’s from another planet. I don’t think I’m in a position to want anything from her.”
The sentiment hangs in the air like smoke, stinging as they blink it out of their eyes. It’s a harsh reality, the sort that they usually try to ignore during their times together, and Nymphia knows she’s already given Jane more time than she should.
“What I do know is that I have this fucking song stuck in my head,” Nymphia stands. “Do either of you have The Velvet Underground? On vinyl? CD? Anything?”
“I don’t,” Dawn says, although she doesn’t have to. Her cassette collection is alphabetized, mostly pop, and includes lots of Phil Collins. Nymphia resists the urge to roll her eyes.
“Oh!” Xunami exclaims. “The Velvet Underground? That's the rock band that’s like. Poetic?”
Nymphia picks her head up from where it hangs dejectedly over Dawn’s cassettes.
“Yes?”
“Right,” Xunami waxes, eyes flashing. “All confessional and shit? They’re, like, too cool to have a real radio hit?”
“Yes!”
“Yeah, then fuck no, I don’t have it.” Xunami’s face flatlines, then explodes into that beautiful, low laugh of hers.
Nymphia rolls her eyes. “You’re the fucking worst, do you know that?”
“I know, I know,” Xunami sighs, pats the spot on the bed beside her and opens her arms for Nymphia to crash into. “Okay. So. Who wants to hear about my night with Mirage?”
The trio falls back into their usual rhythm - Dawn whines, Nymphia alternates between silence and silliness, and Xunami cackles at all of it. It’s a familiar relief, a pattern that they fall into again and again, and it’s everything it always is. It’s almost enough to fill the ache in Nymphia’s chest, almost enough to keep her from wondering. Almost.
When Nymphia finally departs Dawn’s house, the sun distant and casting a dusty-purple glow over Jupiter Beach, she hums to herself, fingers drumming the beat of Sweet Jane on the handlebars of her bike.
-
Nymphia is in her button-up and serving apron the next afternoon, and, as promised, Jane and Gigi are tucked into a table in the corner. Gigi is spreading an array of fabric swatches out over the tablecloth - starchy lilac taffetas and iridescent satins in four shades of purple. Jane is in a checkered minidress and looks positively disgruntled as Gigi holds squares of violet and plum against her collarbone, cooing at the colors.
Jane’s eyes flash with relief, or maybe something closer to excitement, when Nymphia arrives at the table. Gigi squeals when Nymphia sets down the bottle of Pinot Grigio in a bucket of ice. She didn’t even have to order that, Nymphia just knew it was coming. She’s good at predicting people, it makes her a better waitress.
“Hi,” Jane smiles, coy and quick, answering the question that’s been sitting idly in the back of Nymphia’s mind all morning - what Jane might do when she saw her next.
She’d boiled it down to the two most likely options. One - Jane could act indifferent to the thrill of yesterday, accomplish this through awkward silences or flat out ignoring Nymphia all together, or one of a dozen other icy approaches carrying different degrees of hurtfulness. Or, option two - whether they could, by the grace of some god, pick up where they left off when Jane dropped her off outside Xunami’s door.
“Hi,” Nymphia smiles back. She’s pleasantly surprised that it’s looking closer to the second option.
“Geeg, you remember Nymphia, don’t you?” Jane glances over at the strawberry blonde. She’s got a fabulous outfit on and a patterned ascot around her neck, looking every bit like one of the paper dolls Nymphia used to play with as a child.
“She’s the one who saved me yesterday,” Jane tells Gigi, and actually winks up at Nymphia.
“Oh!” Gigi’s face breaks into a smile. Her lips glisten with a rosy lipstick, and her hair cascades in beautiful, blown-out waves over her shoulders. Nymphia can imagine her in front of the bathroom mirror at five in the morning, starting on a long and elaborate beauty routine.
“I hear you’re quite the hero, Nymphia,” Gigi flashes a megawatt smile, the sort that makes you feel special just to see it. . “Our Janey was lucky you came along yesterday.”
Jane’s eyes flash up at Nymphia after she’s finished rolling her eyes at the nickname.
“Think you can save me from…” Jane gestures wildly over the table. “This?”
“This is all beyond me,” Nymphia hovers a humble hand over her chest. She’s good at this - playing the part, letting the audience eat her up. She smiles over at Jane. “I think you’re on your own with this one.”
“Oh, but wouldn’t she look so stunning in this violet?” Gigi gushes, holding a swathe of satin up to Jane’s skin, whose eyes are flashing help me. “Isn’t this her color?”
Jane sighs, rolls her eyes with resignation and flits a manicured hand under her chin. Nymphia smiles, because there’s something so charming about this - Jane, who looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, but is here anyway, because she probably adores Gigi, even if she’s reducing her to a dress-up doll in this particular moment.
“See how it turns blue where it hits the light?” Gigi gushes over the satin, over Jane. “See how it brings out her eyes?”
Nymphia relishes herself in the rare invitation to look at Jane for as long as she wants to. She’s gotta admit - Gigi has a point. The satin, shining shades of cerulean and indigo, looks sort of breathtaking against Jane’s pale skin. Nymphia tries to imagine her dressed in the fabric, transformed into something ruffled and obnoxiously fashionable. She pictures Jane all done up - blonde curls pinned in an updo, her lips glossed and lashes darkened.
“I do,” Nymphia smiles. She might just be playing along, or she might just be telling the truth. “Beautiful.”
Jane plays at being flustered. Or plays up being flustered. It’s hard to say. Nymphia doesn’t let herself linger on it.
“I think so too,” Gigi hums, clearly pleased with herself. “This is the one.”
The rest of lunch goes off without a hitch. It’s a casual affair, much more so than when all of the family gets together, and, for Nymphia, it’s a welcome relief. The girls sip their wine, laugh louder and longer as the hour passes. Gigi waves her fabric swatches through the air, holds a square of silk against Nymphia’s skin when she drops off the check, tells Nymphia she was made to wear lilac while Jane rolls her eyes.
“Leave the poor girl out of it, Geeg,” Jane groans. Gigi just hushes her and smiles up at Nymphia.
“Don’t listen to her. We can’t all roll out of bed and throw on…” Gigi waves one dismissive hand in Jane’s general direction, “...whatever and look as good as Jane does.”
Jane scoffs at the backhanded compliment, and Nymphia tries and fails to imagine a world in which Gigi isn’t effortlessly gorgeous. She’s clean and bright and shiny, a particular breed of beautiful that differs greatly from Jane’s - more severe, steely, piercing.
“Keep this, darling, will you?” Gigi places the swatch of lavender satin into Nymphia’s palm and closes her fingers around it. “It’s all wrong for me, but you should have a dress made out of it. Several, even! I know a good tailor back in the city…”
Gigi babbles on and Nymphia just nods animatedly, trying her best to keep up, and shooting a glance at Jane when she inevitably gets lost. To her delight, Jane is already looking at her, eyebrows raised in this look that says see what I have to deal with?
“Which reminds me-” Gigi turns towards Jane suddenly, eyes dazzling. “I’ve got to call him back. He sent over sketches for my gown and they’re all wrong…”
Gigi trails off again, then looks up at Nymphia, eyes sparkling with disbelief when she whispers,
“I’m getting married.”
Nymphia can’t help but blink back at the girl’s sheer dreaminess, at how marvelously lit from within she is, at how untouchable she is in her own perfect corner of the universe.
Nymphia offers her congratulations. It’s sincere; she’s somehow happy for this perfect stranger who is all too out of touch and still completely charming.
“Thank you,” Gigi smiles graciously, then whips back towards Jane in a flash of strawberry blonde. “Come back with me, Janey, we have to go over the length, oh, and the shoes! And then there’s the flower arrangements, of course…”
“Joy,” Jane deadpans, her eyes flaring.
Gigi stuffs the array of fabric swatches into an obnoxiously large designer handbag and sweeps out of the restaurant in a highly-fashionable blur, calling her thank you to Nymphia over her shoulder and motioning for Jane to follow.
At her absence, Jane slumps forward, her elbows on the table, and rubs her eyes with the palms of her hands. “God,” a sigh escapes her, and Nymphia doesn’t quite understand why, because, despite all of it being so laughably decadent, there’s something about the two of them gathering around Gigi’s loved-up delusions that seems sort of nice.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jane says, seeming to note Nymphia’s confusion. She produces a wad of cash from somewhere inside her purse, enough to cover lunch and then some, and lays it over the bill like it’s nothing at all. “I’m happy for her and everything. It’s just all this wedding talk.”
“I get it,” Nymphia finds herself trying to soothe Jane’s subtle distress. It’s something that she does naturally - try to console others, even if it’s at her own expense, even if she isn’t sure how.
“It’s enviable,” Nymphia continues, suddenly feeling a bit embarrassed. “I’d imagine it gets tiring.”
“Something like that,” Jane chews at her cheek. Her eyes dart up. “When do you get off?”
“Why?” Nymphia asks, caught a little off guard by Jane’s eagerness. “Will you need rescuing?”
“I might need a drink. Or two,” Jane smiles. “If you’re interested.”
Apparently, Nymphia is interested, because she finds herself telling Jane she gets out around five o’clock.
“I’ll probably be out back,” she nods her head in the general direction of the kitchen. “Where you dropped me off yesterday.”
“Okay,” Jane stands, one corner of her mouth pulled up ever so slightly. “I’ll look for you.”
-
It’s closer to five-thirty when Nymphia finally emerges from the back of the restaurant. It’s partly because restaurant work is unpredictable, but it’s mostly because she takes her time. She finishes her side work slowly, keeps her hands moving and her mind occupied. She tries not to think about it, the soft burn of nerves in her belly every time she remembers what might be waiting for her at the end of her shift.
She leaves without telling Xunami where exactly she’s going, because she isn’t sure it - Jane - is going to happen. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to set an expectation that would leave either of them disappointed. Maybe she wasn’t ready for anyone to know. Maybe it was too soon to be seeing Jane again, and maybe Nymphia knows that, even if she doesn't know what any of it means.
It doesn’t matter now though, because when Nymphia bursts through the door, there’s a red convertible across the street. Jane sits in the driver’s seat, smoking to the sound of the radio as Nymphia descends the staircase.
“Took you long enough,” she mutters as Nymphia walks around the car.
Nymphia pauses mid-reach for the door handle, caught off guard by Jane’s poor excuse for a greeting. She didn’t know what she was expecting.
“You didn’t have to wait,” she says flatly. She’s tired, too tired to deal with more unnecessary bullshit than she already does at work.
“I’ve got nothing better to do,” Jane shrugs, red nails pressing against her lips as she smokes.
Nymphia sucks air through her teeth. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special, don’t you?”
Jane chuckles, goes a bit coy. “Sorry,” she says, eyes flickering over Nymphia as she hesitates from the other side of the car. “Are you gonna get in or not?”
Nymphia rolls her eyes, but reaches for the door just the same.
“Those are from the winery,” Jane nods at the two bottles of wine that Nymphia shuffles out of the passenger’s seat. “We went a little crazy and got a case. Need to get rid of it somehow.”
“Lucky me,” Nymphia shuts the door. She’s a bit stung to think she could be little more than an excuse to offload an oversupply of alcohol, a little elated to think she could be someone worth waiting for. “Alright. Where to?”
“You tell me,” Jane says after a long puff on her cigarette. “We’re in your universe.”
It’s a simple statement, in it a minor submission, a soft relinquishing of control. Nymphia thinks back to her recent revelation - that Jane is from an entirely different planet - and suddenly sees it differently. Jane, for all her otherworldliness, is still out of her element in a strange new land, all alone, except for this: the two of them, side by side, somehow.
And so Nymphia looks back at Jane, all at once feeling like her hands are the very hands of fate. Jane looks at her with this expression, a strange blend of expectancy and expecting nothing at all, and Nymphia wonders where to take a girl like Jane, what part of her world she’s ready to show her.
“Okay,” Nymphia decides. “Turn left.”
-
After driving the familiar route along the water, the pavement gives way to dirt roads, and Nymphia tells Jane to pull over. They get out and walk the slow, grassy slope down to the mouth of Lake Jupiter, a covered bridge extending across it, and stop to sit where the land meets the water in tall reeds and willow trees. From here they can see the town of Jupiter Beach in the distance, an amalgamation of flagpoles at the end of docks and cottages tucked into the coastline. It’s a little off the beaten path, a place not entirely sacred, but sacred to Nymphia all the same.
It’s a place she’s been coming to since she was a teenager, ever-restless and seeking out spaces unseen by the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors and most people she knew. It’s the place where she got high for the first time, passing a joint back and forth with Xunami until they were paranoid and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, a place where she’s watched endless sunsets and waded into the water. It’s always felt a little magical to her, and it still is, but in Jane’s presence she’s suddenly imagining it through her eyes, wondering how it must look to her.
Nymphia tugs her jacket tighter around herself, and the teal of Jane’s nylon windbreaker slips down one shoulder as she twists the top off a bottle of wine. She wastes no time in putting the bottle directly to her lips and taking a long chug.
“You weren’t kidding about needing a drink,” Nymphia says as Jane hands the bottle off to her.
“No,” Jane says, wiping a thumb over her wet lips. “Not at all. I fucking earned this listening to Geeg talk fucking wedding dresses all afternoon. I love her, but God.”
“She seems nice,” Nymphia says, bringing the bottle to her mouth and tilting her head back. The wine is crisp on her tongue. It’s a step up from the cheap liquor she gets at the corner store or the gin and tonics she nurses at the bar, the sort of delicacy she doesn’t afford herself so often.
“She is nice,” Jane smiles. “Like. Freakishly nice. And so happy. It makes me feel bad for getting so irritated with her sometimes.”
Nymphia hums, because she thinks she can understand. She’s reminded of the first twinges of jealousy she started swallowing when Xunami started sneaking around with Mirage, the sinking feeling it summoned from somewhere deep inside her. Nymphia thinks the feeling had always been there, lying dormant inside her, but something about seeing it happen to someone else, her best friend find something she hadn’t, brought it up to the surface - the knowledge that she was well loved and surrounded by the best friends anyone could ever have, and still, somehow, felt lonely.
“I get it,” Nymphia takes a swig. “I think sometimes the people we surround ourselves with have a way of making us realize what we’re unhappy about.”
The nylon of Jane’s jacket crinkles as she stiffens. All at once, Nymphia is reminded that they’re still on opposite sides of an electric fence, making their way to each other across an active minefield, and it seems like she’s just stumbled into a tripwire.
“I’m not unhappy,” Jane says, her voice low and steady, a quick strike. Her gaze goes a little menacing, eyes glinting like sharpened steel, ready to slice through whatever crosses their path, no matter how unassuming, how non-threatening.
It’s an unwarranted reaction to what was supposed to be a reassuring sentiment, a swatting away of a comforting hand. Nymphia holds Jane’s stare, undeserving of such defenses and determined not to back down.
“No one said you were, Jane.”
Nymphia holds out the bottle, thinking Jane needs it more than she does. A peace offering. Jane just blinks.
“I- sorry,” Jane swipes the bottle and stops to sigh, does it like she’s been forgetting to breathe for the entirety of the afternoon. “All this wedding shit has me on edge, I guess.”
“S’okay,” Nymphia shrugs. She so desperately wants to get past this part - the dancing around each other, the missteps and misfires that lead to strained apologies and things left unsaid. She wonders if they’ll even get that far.
Jane glances at her, opens her mouth, then closes it around whatever she was about to say.
“You can talk about it, y’know,” Nymphia says tentatively. “I’m not, like. Going to tell someone.”
There’s a moment where Jane hesitates, and Nymphia really thinks she’s going to change the subject. And then she gives in.
“It’s just. It’s so much bullshit, you know?” Jane fires off, unloads like she’s been holding it in for ages, like there’s no one else she could say this to. “Not even them, just, like. The formality of it. The spectacle.” She glances over, sees Nymphia listening intently, then continues. “I bet you see a lot of that, working at the restaurant and everything. People’s bullshit.”
It’s an unexpected sentiment coming from someone who is no doubt thoroughly embroiled in said bullshit. Jane must’ve been raised on it, learned it as a way of life, mastered its traditions and tendencies and surely has benefitted from all of it.
“Yeah, I do,” Nymphia sighs. She has so many stories - couples openly arguing at the dinner table, men dining with their wives and children one night and their mistresses the next, groups of cliquey women who shit-talk their friends as soon as they slip off to the bathroom.
“Do you think it’s bullshit though?” Nymphia questions, thinking of Gigi staring up at her fiancé, so obviously, wildly in love, so thrilled with the planning of her wedding. “With Gigi?”
“No,” Jane shakes her head. “No, I think they’re the real thing. I’m glad it’s Geeg. I was happy when my brother started seeing her. She’s, like, way cooler than any of his other girlfriends.”
She tells the whole story - the string of beautiful girls her brother dated before, vaguely nice but mostly obnoxious. How he brightened once he met Gigi. How he brought her over and the whole family fell in love with her. At the end Jane reaches for the wine. Nymphia watches as her eyes squeeze shut, her lips curling around the rim of the bottle, then she averts her eyes.
“How long have they been together?” Nymphia asks, curls a blade of grass between her fingertips.
Jane pouts as she thinks it over. “Like three, four years?”
“Jesus.”
Jane nods, smiles a bit. “I know.”
Nymphia puffs through her nose, rips a handful of grass from the ground. “I can’t even imagine what that's like.”
“What?” Jane questions. “Dating someone for that long?”
“Dating a man.”
Jane hesitates, and Nymphia can feel her gaze on her. “You’ve never…”
“God, no,” Nymphia snorts, her nose turning up at the mere thought. “I mean, some kid kissed me in middle school and I ran away screaming. I don’t think that counts.”
Jane goes quiet for a moment, and Nymphia feels that strange unspoken thing floating between them - the night at the docks, her lips at Dawn’s neck, Jane’s wide-eyed look.
“So…” Jane trails off. “You’re…”
“Gay,” Nymphia finds the word that seems too hard for Jane to say. “Yeah.”
It stopped being hard for Nymphia to say years ago, but there’s always this - the momentary hesitation from someone else, the knowledge that anyone, no matter how sweet, can become something worse when confronted with something they may not understand. Something as simple as a girl who likes other girls.
It’s silent for just a touch too long, so Nymphia glances over at Jane. “You’re not gonna hate crime me, are you?”
Jane snorts. “No. Did you think I would?”
Nymphia shrugs. “You never know. People surprise you sometimes.”
“I’m not the violent type,” Jane smiles, and Nymphia feels a little safer now that she’s poking fun at it.
“My friend from the other night, Dawn,” Nymphia says, unfurling a petal of her personal life out towards Jane. “She was worried you might say something. About what you saw.”
“No,” Jane smiles, shaking her head at her lap. “No, I didn’t say anything.”
“I didn’t think you would,” Nymphia reaches for the bottle. “She’s just scared. She’s not out to her parents, y’know? She was worried it would get back to them somehow.”
Jane chews on her cheek. The water laps at the edge of the lake.
“That must be weird,” she says finally. “Not being able to, like. Go out with someone. Publicly or whatever.”
Nymphia sighs, because it is weird. She’s been out for a few years now, but even so, this is small-town, rural Maine. Being out isn’t much better than being in the closet. In some ways, it's worse. Even if they’re out, women don’t walk hand in hand very often. They aren’t afforded the same freedoms as straight couples - the luxury of casual dates in the public eye, figuring each other out without the added risk of being found out by the wrong person.
“What do you even do?” Jane wonders out loud. “I mean, you don’t go on dates, right? Like, out to dinner?”
“No, not really. But everything is a date with a woman,” Nymphia smiles, getting lost in memories. “I mean, everything. Sitting in the grass. Reading. Listening to music. Even just, like. Looking at each other.” She goes soft when she says it, the part that makes it all worthwhile - “They make everything feel like something.”
She looks up from her musing and finds Jane looking back at her through this absent-minded sort of smile, her face warmed by Nymphia’s glow.
“Sounds nice,” Jane says softly. Then, a bit less dreamily: “Men make a lot of things feel like nothing, I think.”
Nymphia turns this over in her mind, thinking she would agree. When it comes to men, she’s never seen the appeal. She struggles to understand it in the first place. Still, it seems a strange omission coming from Jane, who surely leads the kind of life you read about in glossy magazines - the kind where women marry their high school sweethearts and have half a dozen children and make the love last. Surely there’s something that makes some men worth loving. Otherwise, why would anyone bother trying?
“What’s it like?” Nymphia wonders out loud, glances over at Jane. “Being with a guy?”
“Well,” Jane hums amusedly, stares out over the lake with the open bottle in her lap. “They’re…overconfident. And they’re not confident at all. It’s weird. Men are weird.”
She pauses for a moment, looks over to see if Nymphia is still listening, sees that she is, then continues.
“But they take you out. The movies, mini golf, whatever. Nothing super creative,” she says wistfully. “The dinners are great, the drinks are amazing. The sex is…”
She trails off, one hand circling in the air as she searches for the word.
“Bad?” Nymphia offers.
Jane laughs. Sort of. “It’s hit or miss,” she says, taking a swig from the bottle.
Nymphia waits for Jane to elaborate, to give her something a little less depressing than a complete and utter lack of satisfaction, but she doesn’t. She just drinks. There’s something a little sad about it, and Nymphia finds herself doing it again - giving consolations she isn’t certain of for the mere sake of consoling.
“I’m sure it's different with each guy,” she says quietly, fiddling with the shoelaces of her yellow converse.
“I mean, yeah. To a degree,” Jane thinks, brow creasing. “But you can generalize men, I think. You can sum them up.”
“Oh,” Nymphia says. It’s not quite the reassurance she’d been hoping for. It goes quiet as Jane tilts her head back, swallows a mouthful of summer wine, lips leaving the rim of the bottle with a slick pop.
She slips in a question as she passes the wine back to Nymphia:
“What's it like with a woman?”
It crosses Nymphia’s mind as she presses her lips to the cool glass of the bottle - that it’s the same place where Jane’s lips were just moments ago. That they’re sharing more than the same space; they’re sharing stories and insights and the same fucking bottle of wine. The strangeness of the situation floods her, the unshakable feeling that this shouldn’t be happening, and the warmth of the wine burns it away.
Nymphia wipes her lips, glances over at Jane. “You really wanna know?”
“Yeah,” Jane’s eyes dart away from Nymphia’s mouth. “I mean, I’d imagine it's better. In a lot of ways.”
“I mean. I’d think so,” Nymphia presses an emphatic hand against her chest. “But I don’t think you can sum women up in the same way. They’re all so different. Emotionally complex.”
“Okay,” Jane says. She stares across the water, gently bites at the corner of her thumb. She doesn’t so much as look at Nymphia when she asks,
“So what would it be like with you?”
Nymphia’s heart skips a beat. It takes everything in her not to spit out her mouthful of wine, because there’s that thread of desire Nymphia has wound so carefully inside of herself, and Jane has one unknowing hand at the end of it, and she’s threatening to pull.
“Is this theoretical?” Nymphia asks. She would be impressed with herself for sounding so composed, except she’s too focused on the part of her that’s disgustingly, nauseatingly eager to mistake this for anything else than what it is - an innocent question born from mere curiosity. Still, logic can’t override the strange sense of anticipation prickling at Nymphia’s insides, this hot coil of feeling she’s bound up inside of herself and begs to be let go.
Jane turns, meets Nymphia with a sideways glance. “Purely.”
The whole thing falls into a rhythm that Nymphia thinks she knows. The steps of a dance, two people skirting around their very souls, brushing close like they really want to know what would happen if they were to collide. No, Nymphia thinks to herself, because it isn’t that. It’s mere conversation masquerading as something more, teetering on the edge of flirtation, but certainly, absolutely not that.
“I could give you the names of a few girls around here,” Nymphia says, winding herself back around her spool. “I’m sure they’d give me glowing reviews.”
Jane’s laugh is a little puff of air as she steals the bottle back from Nymphia’s hands. There’s that strange tone again, Jane’s masterful mix of joking and completely serious: “I bet they would.”
Nymphia scoffs, forces her heart down from her throat and back where it’s supposed to be - tucked safely between her ribs. She stares out across the water, glittering and gold under the setting sun, and imagines herself stretching out over it, reaching towards some invisible, unknowable thing on the other side.
Jane sits quietly beside her, arms tucked around her knees, the half-full bottle of wine dangling from one hand.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” Jane says softly into the atmosphere. At first she’s looking at the landscape, and then she’s looking at Nymphia, who wonders if it's an understatement.
“Yeah,” Nymphia says. She knows it’s nothing, but she lets herself imagine it's something anyways. “It is.”
-
They never get to the second bottle of wine, but Nymphia doesn’t mind. She’s already buzzing, already drunk on something much simpler than liquor.
-
It’s not until the next night that it finally comes up. They’re at The Violet, halfway through their second round of drinks, and Nymphia still doesn’t know what to make of it - the strange overturning of her heart every time she lets herself linger on the events of the night before. She’s not planning on bringing it up, because she doesn’t know how to talk about it in a way that doesn’t sound like everything she knows it wasn’t. She’s not planning to even try, except:
“Nymph, where were you last night?” Dawn asks. They’ve already exhausted all their usual topics - town gossip, the girl at the ice cream stand (who Dawn still hasn’t talked to), the latest A-ha album - although Nymphia has hardly been paying attention.
“Yeah, where were you? I called your place, like, fifty times,” Dawn laments. “I was bored out of my skull! You didn’t pick up and Xunami was…” She sheepishly glances over to the other side of the bar where Mirage is running around. “Here, probably.”
“Hey, I’m sorry babe,” Nymphia pouts. She winces at the hot sting of guilt that creeps up inside of her, distressed at the thought of hurting Dawn, no matter how unintentionally she might have done it. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.”
“S’okay,” Dawn gives Nymphia’s hand a reassuring pat. Her eyes are glittering, because this is her favorite part - when she gets to live vicariously through her friends. “You better have a good excuse, though.”
“Yeah, where were you, Nymphia?” Xunami jeers, pinching her straw between her fingertips and narrowing her eyes like she already has an idea. Nymphia feels a little too transparent. “Because I know you weren’t with me.”
Nymphia hesitates, feeling the weight of a whole day’s worth of mulling on her lips.
“I was with Jane last night,” she finally confesses, hating how horrifically significant it sounds.
Dawn makes this dramatic gasp, her hands flying up to cover her mouth, and Xunami slams her drink down on the bartop. Nymphia hurries to settle their excitement, or maybe it’s her own heart that she’s trying to quell.
“It wasn’t a big deal, I swear,” Nymphia holds her hands up, defending against the onslaught of questions she knows will be hurled at her. “She was in my section yesterday and asked what time I got off of work, and-”
“I knew it, I knew there was something up with you last night,” Xunami jabs a finger in the air. “You didn’t even ask me to do anything after work, which was weird, because, y’know, you always want to hang out with me...”
“I was not being weird,” Nymphia groans. “I just- I wasn’t sure if she’d turn up, so I didn’t want to make a whole thing out of it-”
“But she did, didn’t she?” Xunami interrupts, eyebrows high and eyes alive with interest. “She did show up.”
Nymphia scoffs, hangs her head and stares at the ice dissolving in her drink. “Yeah,” she admits. “Yeah, she did.”
Xunami trills with excitement, stamps her feet against the barstool, and Nymphia knows it’s all out of her control now. Already it's something bigger, taking on a new meaning now that she’d told her friends about it. Xunami and Dawn reach out to each other, fingertips flitting together behind Nymphia’s back as they squeal.
“Alright, don’t get ahead of yourselves,” Nymphia buries her head in her hands. “I swear it wasn’t as exciting as you think it is.”
“Don’t care,” Xunami talks over her. “What happened?”
“Yeah!” Dawn echoes, clapping excitedly. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Nymphia says, making it sound as close to the truth as she possibly can. “She picked me up and we went to the bridge-”
“You went to the bridge?” Xunami interrupts once again. “Our bridge?”
“Oh my god,” Dawn wails, bringing a hand to her forehead like she could faint at any moment. “We’ve been replaced.”
“You’re right,” Xunami gasps. “We so have…”
“Oh, please,” Nymphia scoffs, because the whole thing is so preposterous. No one could ever be what her friends are - insane, annoying, insatiable. Completely adoring, endlessly understanding, faithfully forgiving. “You have not been replaced.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” Xunami teases. It’s an empty threat, because she knows it just as well as Nymphia does - no one could ever be what they are to each other. She sips at her drink, eyes alight with eager excitement. “What happened next?”
“Nothing,” Nymphia shrugs, dropping her eyes back to her drink and fidgeting with the plastic straw. “We just… talked.”
“Okay. About what?”
“God, I don’t know,” Nymphia sighs. It’s not true. She does know. She’s been replaying it ever since it happened. “We talked about Gigi’s wedding. Gigi, she’s the one with the-”
“That’s the other hot one, right? Leggy and chipper and always wearing those short little…” Xunami interrupts again, trails off at Nymphia’s astounded expression. “Sorry. Continue.”
“....Right,” Nymphia blinks, shaking off Xunami’s insatiability. “So. We talked about that. Jane is all stressed out about the wedding for some reason.”
“Wait, why is Jane stressed out?” Dawn quips from Nymphia’s right. “That’s a little weird, right? I mean, it isn’t her wedding.”
“I don’t think it’s this wedding necessarily,” Nymphia furrows her brow. “I think it’s more what it means. Like, she hates the convention of it. I don’t know, there’s something about it that I understood,” Nymphia trails off, because it sounds a bit like a confession, and she’s making a revelation as the words leave her lips: beyond all odds, she thinks that there’s something aligned in her in Jane, something she thinks she does understand about her, even if it isn’t everything.
“Anyways,” Nymphia shakes herself back into the present moment. “We talked about that, and then we talked about you, Dawn-”
“Me?” Dawn squeaks, straightening up and pointing unsurely at herself, as though Nymphia must have meant anyone else.
“Yeah. You,” Nymphia smiles, endlessly endeared by Dawn’s innocence. “She said she didn’t tell anyone. About the hickey and everything.”
“Oh, thank God,” Dawn claps a relieved hand over her heart and leans forward over the bar, collapsing as a week-long weight is finally lifted from her shoulders.
“Okay,” Xunami rolls her eyes. “So what else? Get to the good stuff.”
“Well,” Nymphia sighs, eyes towards the ceiling as she recalls the conversation for what feels like the two hundredth time. “Then we talked about boys-”
“Boys?” Xunami and Dawn say in unison. They wear matching looks - half disbelief, half disgust.
“What’s this about boys?” Mirage says, sweeping in from the other side of the bar with a rack of freshly washed glasses.
“Nymphie here was talking with that girl, Jane, last night,” Xunami fills her in. “About boys.”
Mirage looks over at Nymphia, nose crinkled up, looking vaguely disappointed. “Nymph, babe. You know I adore you. But you’ve never been less relatable to me than you are at this moment.”
“Oh my god, hold on,” Nymphia waves away all further commentary. “She was talking about how weird it must be to be in the closet, which, like, true. So I asked what it was like to be with a guy-”
“Oh, let me guess,” Xunami chimes in once more, eyes already rolling at what she’s assuming comes next. “She probably started gushing, right? About how dreamy they are?”
Nymphia lets out this chuckle that sounds a little sad, because she almost wishes that’s what Jane had done - that she’d said something that made sense, something that made it all seem worthwhile and not so completely miserable.
“No,” she shakes her head, drops her eyes once more. “No, she made it sound kinda depressing, honestly.”
When she glances up, something in Mirage’s gaze has changed. There’s a sliver of recognition, a memory that she’s replaying only for herself, a twist to her lips as she chews at the inside of her cheek.
At everyone’s urging, Nymphia goes to tell the rest of the story, except she’s getting to the weird part, the part that she’s still turning over in her mind, trying to reduce the magnitude of it to the mere nothingness that she knows it was. She tries to bury it beneath unnecessary details, tries to delay what she knows is coming next.
“So then,” she tries to be subtle, to slip it into the conversation as inconspicuously as Jane did. “She asked me what it’s like to be with a woman.”
Dawn yelps, Mirage’s polishing rag stops along the rim of a martini glass, and Xunami’s jaw might as well have actually hit the floor.
“Wait, wait. I’m sorry,” Xunami sputters through the mouthful of rum and coke she’d swallowed a bit too quickly. “She asked you what?”
“Oh my god,” Dawn clutches at the counter for dear life and shoots forward, red curls bouncing around her face. “What did you say?”
“The truth, I guess,” Nymphia sighs. “I said it was hard to sum up what it’s like, y’know? How do you begin to describe something like that?”
Mirage hums, and Nymphia knows she understands. She’s always liked Mirage for this reason - her capacity for compassion. She’s observant, much like Nymphia is. She’s gotten to see a lot of people up close and personal, their souls split open under the spell of cheap liquor. If Nymphia knows anything at all, it’s something that Mirage has probably already figured out.
As she thinks on it, it seems Mirage is holding Nymphia’s story up against some of her own. “How did she take that?” she asks, cross-referencing, like a clinician checking a patient for symptoms.
Nymphia thinks back to Jane’s silence, her thumbnail in her mouth, her insistence on looking anywhere but at Nymphia.
“I don’t know if it was the answer she was looking for,” she mumbles into her gin and tonic.
“Okay,” Mirage says, a quizzical arch to one eyebrow. “Elaborate.”
“Well,” Nymphia says softly, trying to make it sound small. “Then she asked what it would be like to be with me.”
Dawn claps a hand over her mouth with a resounding smack. A puff of disbelief leaves Mirage’s lips.
“Holy shit,” Xunami says, leaping to her feet. She walks in a tiny circle around her barstool, one hand at her hairline as if she’s just made a breakthrough. “That is the gayest thing I’ve ever fucking heard.”
“It is not,” Nymphia says defensively. “It was a follow-up question, that’s literally it.”
“Oh, come on,” Xunami lets her hand smack against her thigh and tilts her head towards Mirage. “She’s talking about how shitty it is to date guys, and then asks what it's like to be with a woman? No, sorry - what it's like to be with you.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Nymphia shakes her head and doesn’t look at Xunami at all. “It wasn’t about me. She was just trying to understand what I meant.”
Nymphia isn’t just saying that, she really believes it. Sure, there’s a part of her that wonders what made Jane phrase it in that particular fashion, whether there was any thought behind it at all, any thoughts that were pointed towards her, but that thought is so completely overridden by what she knows to be true: that the world is bigger than just Nymphia, that it looks different to Jane, that she’s grasping at any semblance of sense she can make of it.
“C’mon, baby,” Xunami looks over at Mirage. “Back me up on this.”
Nymphia glances across the bar, telepathically begs her to shut Xunami down.
“I’m sorry, Nymphia,” Mirage says sympathetically, her dark eyes sparkling with pity. “But she’s right.”
Nymphia groans, crosses her arms against the countertop and buries her head there, because none of this is helpful in the slightest. It goes against everything she knows to be true, undermines all of the work she’s done to keep herself thinking rationally about Jane and everything that comes with her: the walls she’s built up and the times she lets Nymphia peer inside. The way she looks at Nymphia sometimes, that lilt in her eyes that she can’t seem to make sense of. Their banter, the gradual lowering of each other’s defenses, the rhythm that they fall into so easily once they do. Nymphia so desperately needs it to be nothing, lest she does something truly insane, like let herself give in to the pull of gravity that seems to draw her right towards Jane.
“Mirage,” Nymphia hears Dawn squeak from somewhere over her right shoulder. “Do you think that, like, Jane could be pretty gay?”
Nymphia peers up.
“I don’t know her, babe. It’s hard to say,” Mirage says, twisting her mouth with thought. “I think girls get curious. You see it all the time. They’re disenchanted with their usual flings and want to try out something new. Sometimes it’s just that.” She pauses, sighs deep, then starts again. “But, sometimes…”
“Sometimes they’re just gay,” Xunami finishes her sentence.
“Yeah,” Mirage glances down at Nymphia and slots a polished glass into place. “Sometimes they are.”
Nymphia is a smart girl. It’s not like it hasn’t crossed her mind. She’d be lying to herself if she thought there wasn’t something buried deep inside of Jane that would explain several of her unwarranted discontentments. Of course it had crossed her mind that there was something wholly, undeniably queer about Jane that was just as wonderfully, beautifully queer about Nymphia. She’d considered it, and then she’d shoved it down, tucked it right beside the hot coal of desire that she’d made certain to smother.
She feels Xunami’s hand on her back as she leans in over her. “You wanna know what I think, Nymphie girl?”
“No,” Nymphia buries her face further in her forearms, hoping desperately that Xunami will leave it at that. That she’ll let Nymphia make it small again. “I don’t think I do.”
Xunami, of course, doesn’t afford Nymphia such relief.
“I think she wants you.”
Somehow, it’s so much worse than what Nymphia was anticipating. In fact, it’s probably the worst thing Xunami could have said. It’s one thing to wonder if Jane is curious, a question Nymphia has already sequestered to the back of her mind, something she’ll only let herself think about when she’s indulging in impossible fantasy. To think that Jane could be the least bit gay is one thing, but to think that she could be gay for Nymphia is entirely another. It’s a selfish, hedonistic thought that Nymphia banishes from her mind, lest she might allow herself to go down two irreversible paths: lest she might allow herself to wonder if Jane wants her, lest she might allow herself to wonder whether she wants Jane, too.
Nymphia had tried to make it mean nothing. She really had.
-
Over the next few days, Nymphia stays busy.
She comes to work early and stays late, loses herself in the welcome distraction of customer service. She picks up an extra shift here and there, and attaches herself to Dawn or Xunami’s side as soon as she’s off of work. She stays at their houses until they’re half asleep and kicking her out, or until the sun rises and the movie from the night before has turned to static while they slept. And then she bikes home, cleans her apartment from top to bottom, then takes herself on aimless trips around town. Maybe she’s trying to keep her mind occupied, maybe she’s trying to find her way back to the one thing she’s convinced herself she wants to avoid.
She takes herself to the record store one afternoon, and comes up empty handed on her search for the Velvet Underground. The clerk laughs when she inquires and says he’ll have to special order it, says it's funny, because she’s the third person to request that particular record this week. As she thumbs through the used vinyl, Nymphia wonders who else in this town has such excellent taste.
For no reason in particular, Nymphia winds up with a dusty jazz record. She brings it home and spins it as she rolls a joint, the smoke hanging low in the mid-afternoon sunlight that streams through her windows. She doodles absent-mindedly in her journal, rough sketches of elegant hands around cocktail glasses and evening gowns slipping off of shoulders. Only when the record stops does Nymphia realize what she’s drawn: an idealized, fantastical, completely impossible version of Jane. Her face from several angles, recreated through some mindless memory.
Nymphia looks at what she’s made and feels like she’s been invaded, like Jane, or the idea of her, has seeped into her very being, and is escaping from somewhere inside of her.
If she needed any more reason to believe she was off the deep end, this was it.
And so she stays busier. She calls her mother on the phone, starts another book she’ll never finish, and bakes a loaf of banana bread that isn’t quite right, then a second, which is perfect. She takes herself out of the house, goes for long walks around the neighborhood she knows like the back of her hand, and goes to the grocery store for nothing in particular.
In the way that all unignorable things find their way to someone who is trying to avoid them, Nymphia bumps into Jane on one of these trips.
She’s got her headphones on and an Aimee Mann cassette in her Walkman, and is generally not paying attention to her surroundings as she glides through the front door and nearly walks right into her - Jane, wearing faded blue Levi’s and red lipstick, a paper bag of groceries held on one hip.
Nymphia can avoid her feelings all she wants, shove them into the most unreachable parts of herself, but she can’t avoid this - the way her cheeks flush whether or not she wants them to.
“God, you’re everywhere,” Jane sneers, not sounding nearly as displeased as she should given the sentiment. “Are you stalking me or something?”
“It’s my hometown,” Nymphia says as she slips her headphones around her neck. “I’d say you’re the one following me.”
“Is that so?” Jane retorts, but it’s not hostile. It’s fun. Nymphia’s eyes flicker over Jane’s face as it breaks into a smile, the golden curls escaping her bandana and tickling her cheeks, the unforgiving glitter that creeps into her eyes.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says, shuffling out of the way of a passerby, standing off to the side with Nymphia, who follows her without thinking about it, a strange osmosis. “I drove past the docks last night,” Jane says, the tone of her voice so sarcastic and playful that it goes right back to being serious. “Thought you might be there, but you weren't. Obviously.”
Something inside of Nymphia leaps without permission, a jumper that can’t be talked down.
“I was at Dawn’s,” Nymphia feels compelled to explain. “Movie night.”
“Movie night,” Jane echoes, her eyes narrowing. “What is that, some kind of code word? An excuse for your indecencies?”
“You’re deranged,” Nymphia rolls her eyes. “She’s my best friend, that’s it.”
“Right,” Jane plays at being completely unconvinced. “Is that where you’ll be tonight? With your friends?”
“No,” Nymphia says. “No, Dawn has some family thing going on, and Xunami…” She trails off, doesn’t risk mentioning Xunami’s Mirage-oriented extracurriculars lest Jane finds a way to use that against her, too. “She’s occupied.”
Jane hums, eyes going a little devious. “So you’re available,” she nods. “Tonight, I mean.”
“Maybe,” Nymphia fronts, because her only plans for the evening include a joint and the television. “Why?” she crosses her arms. “Will you be needing a distraction after whatever it is you’re doing with your family?”
“You’ve got me all figured out, huh?” Jane smirks, an entertained glow about her, a playful twinkle in her eye.
I wish, Nymphia thinks. Instead, she shrugs. “Just a guess.”
“How does nine o’clock sound?” Jane shuffles her groceries to the other hip, keys dangling from her fingertips. “Wanna meet at the bridge?”
Before Nymphia can even think about stopping herself, she’s nodding yes, because maybe all that she’s wanted since the last time she saw her was to get Jane alone again.
-
The phone rings just once before Dawn picks up.
“Sunrise Inn, Dawn speaking!” she chirps from the other end. “How can I help you?”
“I’m just calling to let you know that I won’t be around tonight,” Nymphia doesn’t bother introducing herself. “So don’t be upset if I don’t pick up later.”
There’s a short gasp on the other line.
“Don’t tell me that you’re seeing you-know-who.” Dawn whispers that last part, as if anyone could possibly be listening.
Nymphia twists the telephone cord around her pointer finger. “All I’m saying is you should make other plans tonight.”
“God, I hate you,” Dawn groans. “What am I supposed to do with myself? Watch Xunami and Mirage make out with each other all night?”
“I mean, you could,” Nymphia sighs, recalling Xunami’s shameless hands wandering down the small of Mirage’s back after last call, leaving Dawn and Nymphia to clink their plastic cups together and down the last of their drinks. “They’d probably be into that.”
“Gross, Nymphia,” Dawn whines, and Nymphia can practically see her sticking her tongue out. “Have fun later, okay?”
“Thanks, babe,” Nymphia says, feeling the swell of nerves in her stomach. “I’ll try.”
“Oh, and call me when you’re home!” Dawn tacks on. “I want to hear everything!”
“I’ll call you,” Nymphia assures. “But no promises on anything interesting, okay?”
“Sure,” Dawn says. “Whatever you say.”
-
Nymphia’s mind and body are two separate entities when she bikes to the bridge at dusk. Her brain is a mass of exposed nerves she has to trick into keeping quiet, but her legs seem to move all on their own. Her feet pushing on the pedals might as well be an unconscious function, like the firing of her neurons or the beating of her heart. Along the way she manages to lose herself in the mindless motion of her body, allowing herself to be drawn like a magnet across town, but the anxiety bubbles up in her throat as she rounds the bend and comes across what awaits her - a red convertible pulled over in the tall grass, a blonde woman leaned against the driver’s side door, silhouetted against the last of the setting sun.
All at once, all of those things Nymphia had managed to make small seem to swell inside of her. There’s this strange, guttural sense that she’s about to breathe life into them, that, no matter how hard she may try, she’ll never be able to shrink them down to their original size should she do it - follow the unfurled thread of her desire to its very end.
And then Nymphia pulls up wordlessly beside Jane’s car, her tires crunching softly against the gravel, and when Jane turns to look at her Nymphia knows she doesn’t stand a chance, because she’s so cool, so collected, like the love interest from one of the music videos Nymphia watches on MTV - the cinematic turn of her head, lips parted ever so slightly.
“Hi,” Jane says. She’s the image of an all-American dream, all blonde curls and blue eyes. She should be on a yacht somewhere, or gracing a silver screen, or the face of some fashion campaign chock-full of American flag-emblazoned sweaters and golden retrievers and handsome, beautiful people smiling down at you from a billboard as if to say even you could have it all! She should be at any of those places, but instead she’s here; standing outside of her car, waiting for Nymphia.
“Hi,” Nymphia hovers over her bike, completely frozen, a deer paralyzed in the gorgeous, dangerous glow of headlights on the highway.
Jane leans across the driver’s seat, skirt riding high over the back of her thighs. She returns with a bottle of wine in her hand, the one they hadn’t gotten to the other night, and the tight knot of disbelief tightens in Nymphia’s belly, because they’re on the brink of another night she’ll have to explain away for weeks on end, and she can’t shake the feeling that none of this should have been allowed to happen.
And then they’re walking down to their spot beneath the bridge, and Jane is twisting the top off the bottle of white wine, and Nymphia isn’t so nervous anymore, because they fall into this disjointed rhythm that is starting to feel something like routine:
Nymphia arrives tense, and Jane somehow arrives even tenser. There’s tightness to her shoulders, held high for some omnipresent, illusory spectator. Nymphia asks her about her night, and Jane huffs her way through some dismissive summary that doesn’t seem to make her feel any better. Nymphia makes room for her to talk, reminds her that she can, and Jane relents, starting on a long spiel: her mother had insisted on doing dinner at home, which had turned into long hours of ordering the family around the kitchen, declaring assigned seats at the dinner table and complaining about the lack of help she’d received after insisting on doing everything herself. Nymphia, somehow, finds herself feeling a little sympathetic towards Jane - confined to her family’s conventions even on her summer vacation.
Jane, despite the rigidity that seems bred into her, eases over the course of the conversation. Every word, every mouthful of wine, every laugh elicited from Nymphia’s snide commentary seems to loosen her. She finishes her rant with a long sigh and glances over at Nymphia, looking a little surprised to have gone for as long as she did.
“Sorry,” Jane laughs at herself, eyes flaring with a twinge of hatred. “That was a lot.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Nymphia shrugs. “I don’t mind.”
“You’re a good listener,” Jane says, her eyes sparkling with a strange gratitude. “You’re easy to talk to, I mean. I bet your friends appreciate that.”
“I’d hope so,” Nymphia passes the wine to Jane. “I think they know they can tell me anything.”
Jane hums, pressing the bottle to her lips. “Do you feel seen by them?”
“Yeah,” Nymphia nods, thinking for a moment. “For the most part.”
Jane cocks an eyebrow, catching Nymphia’s hesitation. “For the most part?”
Nymphia shrugs. “There’s a corner.”
“A corner?”
“A corner,” Nymphia laughs, digs the toe of her Converse into the dirt. “A dark, shadowy corner that no one seems to fit into.”
“I get that,” Jane says, and Nymphia feels like she actually does. There’s a momentary silence, and Nymphia fills it with a far-reaching thought - that maybe, just maybe, Jane is just as utterly, horrifically lonely as Nymphia is. She’s already pushing the possibility away, and then Jane laughs and says, “I’ve got a whole fucking house.”
Nymphia looks over and wonders what sorts of shadows lurk in the hallways of Jane’s heart, what sort of secrets she has stored away where no one should ever hope to find them. She doesn’t have much time to think about it, because Jane glances up and looks at Nymphia in a way that no one has ever looked at her before. Eyes soft and starry, wearing this overwhelming eagerness that emanates across her face. It’s a look that Nymphia can’t possibly make sense of, because no one has ever looked at her like this before; It’s more than the sparkle in her friend’s eyes after she makes them laugh, and it’s softer than the lusty-eyed girls who have leaned in to kiss her in the back of the bar. It's close, but it’s not quite any of those looks. It’s something else entirely.
“I’d like to be in your corner,” Jane says softly, tilting her head, her eyes flickering over Nymphia’s face. “Tell me about your day.”
She might as well have spoken the secret password to Nymphia’s heart.
And so Nymphia tells her, recalls every little detail like it’s anything particularly meaningful, and Jane marvels at the simplicity of it in her own sarcastic sort of way.
They continue like this, passing the bottle back and forth, talking about everything and nothing, as they watch the town of Jupiter Beach twinkle in the distance - headlights along the streets, lamps in the windows of far off houses.
“Is this fun for you?” Jane asks later on. “I mean, shouldn’t you be off doing something completely reckless? Like jumping off a cliff or doing Jägerbombs? Whatever it is that you and your friends do?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Nymphia says, her smile giving her away. “But, since you asked, I’m bored out of my fucking mind.”
Her sarcasm is painfully obvious, because this might be the most fun she’s had in years. Hanging out with Jane isn’t quite an outlet, it’s closer to being electrified. Nymphia looks at her and feels almost charged. Energy pulses out from her core, tries to escape from her fingertips, giving her strange, uncontrollable urges to flex her empty hands, to close them around something, anything.
“Sorry,” Jane rolls her eyes. “I’ll up the ante next time.”
Next time.
“I mean, really,” Nymphia stands, suddenly restless. “Here I was thinking you were some sort of speed-racer…”
Jane looks after Nymphia as she bounds towards the bridge, propelled by a burst of energy. One hand curls around the streetlamp as swings herself around it with all the grace of a dancer, head tilted back, hair streaming out behind her.
Jane blinks, wide-eyed. “What are you doing?”
Nymphia completes her pirouette around the lamppost. “Having fun,” she calls over her shoulder, a flick of dark hair catching in her mouth.
Nymphia twirls towards the bridge, races to the edge and places both palms on the railing. She pushes up and off the ground, hoisting herself onto the narrow rail, one hand on an overhead beam to steady herself as she stands.
“What the fuck?” Jane calls from the grass.
Nymphia teeters for a moment, finds her center of gravity, then slowly lowers her arms, stretching them out on either side of her. “Look!” she calls out. “No hands!”
“Oh my god,” Jane is standing now, a hint of nervousness underscoring the usual flatness of her voice. “Get down.”
And then Nymphia is walking the length of the railing, taking slow, careful steps across the mouth of Lake Jupiter like an aerialist conquering a great expanse. Her face breaks into a grin, and adrenaline flows down to her fingertips. She nearly loses her balance somewhere in the middle, hears Jane’s sharp gasp as she wobbles on the thin rail, steadies herself, and drops back to the safety of the bridge in a fit of laughter.
She laughs all the way back to Jane, actually bows before she plops down in the grass again.
“Do you have some sort of death wish?” Jane chides. Her knee knocks against Nymphia’s as she drops to the ground beside her, and Nymphia already feels the energy accumulating in her fingertips again. “If you fell in, I wouldn’t have come to save you, y’know.”
“Oh, please. It’s Lake Jupiter, not Niagara fucking Falls,” Nymphia reaches for the bottle of wine. “I would’ve lived.”
Jane just stares back at her, dazzled. “You’re fucking crazy, do you know that?”
Nymphia looks back at Jane and finds a few more things that are beautiful about her - the way the corners of her mouth rise high over her teeth. The way her gray eyes glitter dark blue, like moonlight on the water.
“Yeah,” Nymphia says through the kick of want in her chest. “I think I’ve lost my mind.”
-
Nervousness and excitement feel very similar, Nymphia’s mother told her once. She was thirteen and freshly confronted by the anxiety she would become familiar with over the arc of her adolescence. You’re not nervous, you’re excited she would repeat to Nymphia over and over, until she almost believed it.
Nymphia didn’t really understand it until now, because the hot hum of anticipation in her chest everytime she sees Jane stops feeling like anxiety, and starts feeling like a thrill.
Nymphia starts looking forward to this: Bumping into Jane anywhere, everywhere. With her family at dinner, rolling her eyes at her mother’s demands or Gigi’s delightful toasts at the table, making a snide remark at either one and glancing up at Nymphia as if for reassurance, sometimes with a knowing wink. The times when Jane brushes past her in the hallway, or in the doorway of the corner store, and asks Nymphia if she’s free later. It doesn’t matter what time Jane suggests, because Nymphia always says yes. It doesn’t matter what Jane wants to do, whether they end up hitting a hundred in her car or sitting at the end of the dock, because Nymphia’s favorite part is always this - talking with Jane, listening to her like she deserves to be listened to, earning glimpses into the shut-tight corners of her mind, Jane listening just the same, staring back at Nymphia with this wondered, breathless expression that makes her head swim.
Back when Nymphia had been looking at Jane from a safe distance, it was easier to write her off as another girl in the perfectly-preened pack, but the closer that Nymphia gets, the more she thinks they could have in common. With every excursion they make to escape the rest of the town, Nymphia thinks that Jane might hate all the same things she does. Jane embodies all the best parts of her upbringing - the decadence, the comfort, the joyrides - but she’s so unexpectedly restless, so refreshingly real beneath it all. Nymphia finds herself a bit addicted to the thrill of discovering Jane, of venturing out night after night to uncover another component of her personality.
So they sit at the covered bridge, or sit on the hood of Jane’s car at the overlook, and then Nymphia shows her places increasingly sacred to her. The hill behind the high school, where Nymphia pulls out her yearbook and points out every girl who so much as sneered at her when she’d come out, and Jane finds something rude to say about every one of them. The playground in the park where they sit on the swings, and Nymphia recounts meeting Dawn for the first time, and Jane digs a cigarette out of her purse and asks Nymphia for a light.
“For someone who smokes so much, you think you’d keep these things on you,” Nymphia says as she fishes a lighter out of her back pocket.
Jane shrugs. “Maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to see you.”
Two days later they’re cruising around in Jane’s car, and Jane forgets a lighter again, except Nymphia doesn’t have one this time, and they have to drive all the way back from where they’d ended up at the edge of town, and they tumble into the nearest gas station in fits of laughter. Jane offers Nymphia a cigarette and she smokes it eagerly, taking in the taste of the American Spirit like it’s a taste of Jane herself. She feels high when she gets home, and can hardly will herself to sleep.
Nymphia takes herself to the antique store the next day. She’s there for the act of looking more than anything else, spends long hours flipping through old books and faded photographs of people she’ll never know, picking up weird prints to hang on her wall, and another random jazz record she tucks under her arm and takes to the counter. She’s going to cash out when she spots it - a chrome lighter shining up from the inside of a display case, a pattern of swirling petals etched into the silver.
Nymphia never lets herself linger on the things behind glass, the kind you have to ask someone to unlock before you can buy them, but she points the lighter out to the shopkeep, gets it wrapped in tissue paper and takes it home.
Nymphia makes up half a dozen excuses for the purchase. The lighter was only expensive, and Jane had more than financed it with the money she’d been sliding in Nymphia’s direction since the start of the summer. Besides, Nymphia probably owed her for all the wine she’d drank and miles they’d driven at Jane’s expense. Maybe it was a consolation prize, something to keep Jane company while she escaped for her nightly smokes away from everything else. Maybe it had just made Nymphia think of her. Maybe she thought it would look nice in Jane’s hands.
Later that night they’re at the overlook, sitting on the hood of Jane’s car and watching the last of the sunset. Jane is particularly cheerful this evening. Her chunky sweater is slipping over her shoulder, and she can’t stop laughing at the story Nymphia is telling - it’s the one where she and Xunami got caught toilet-papering a particularly heinous ex-fling’s front lawn, and they’d went tearing down the street, and Xunami had sprained her ankle halfway down the block, and Nymphia had to piggy-back her the rest of the way home.
Jane laughs through the whole thing, and Nymphia loves the sound of it, loves how it makes her feel when Jane catches her breath long enough to mumble, “you’re so cool.” All it takes is those few, fleeting words for Nymphia to make sense of herself, to take this image reflected in Jane’s eyes and make it fit.
“Got you something,” Nymphia says suddenly. She’d debated on whether or not she should bring it, and then whether she should bother taking it out of her bag at all, but she finds herself holding out the parcel of tissue paper wrapped in red ribbon, and, like so many other things, it’s out of her hands now.
Jane scoffs as she takes the gift, gets halfway through some careless quip as she unearths the lighter from its wrapping, and all at once she goes a bit quiet.
Jane’s mouth hovers open, and there’s enough space for any arrangement of words between them, but she hesitates, shakes her head like she doesn’t know where to land. She looks over at Nymphia and it’s with utter sincerity, a stark contradiction to the sarcasm she defaults back to.
“Is this because of what I said last time? About looking for an excuse to hang out with you?” Jane teases. “Because if you’re getting sick of me, you could’ve just said-”
“Shut up,” Nymphia smiles, cutting Jane off before she can diminish any more of her sincerity behind silliness. “C’mon. Try it out.”
Wordlessly, Jane fumbles for her purse and pulls a cigarette from the pack. She tucks it between her teeth, takes a tentative glance towards Nymphia. Nymphia might not have noticed this a few weeks earlier, but she notices it now - the subtle shake to Jane’s hand as it curls around the lighter, the crease between her slightly downturned brows, like she’s nervous.
“Here,” Nymphia says, and goes to steady Jane’s hands.
When she leans in, Jane startles just a bit, like she wasn’t expecting Nymphia to make it into her atmosphere. There’s a short gasp around her cigarette, a widening of the white space around blown-out pupils, and she draws back by a few barely perceptible centimeters. She blinks the surprise from her eyes, and Nymphia pretends not to notice as she spins the flint beneath her thumb.
They both go still. Jane’s eyes find Nymphia’s. The flame catches at the end of the cigarette, and the space between them feels on fire too.
“Don’t lose this one, ‘kay?” Nymphia says a little too softly, too breathlessly, because all the air has been completely consumed by an invisible blaze.
-
They’re sitting at the bridge some nights later, this space that Nymphia knows by heart now starting to feel like something else entirely. Nymphia whips out her sketchbook and starts to outline the edge of the lake, a frog on a lilypad, a boat at the end of a far-off dock. Jane peers over her shoulder. Nymphia thinks of the sketches she’d made some weeks ago, images of Jane she’d so unconsciously conjured, now tucked into the safety of her nightstand.
“Where’d you learn to draw like that?” Jane asks. It’s not an outright compliment, but Nymphia knows that it’s meant as one anyways. She’d like to think she’s started to make sense of it - this secondary, secret language that Jane speaks.
“I’m mostly self taught,” Nymphia muses as she drags the pencil across the paper. “We had some art classes at school, but nothing serious.”
“You should go study art,” Jane leans back on her palms. “Move to some big city somewhere.”
“That’s the dream,” Nymphia sighs, brushing eraser shavings off the page. “I’m saving up for school. And for applications. I’d have to make a portfolio, though, and I don’t know the first thing about that.” She turns her head. “Did you go to school?”
“Yeah,” Jane nods, one long leg crossing over the other. “Got my degree last year.”
“In what?”
“Business,” Jane scoffs. “If you can believe that. It was my dad’s idea, mostly. Not sure it means very much. At the very least, I’ll be a secretary for the rest of my miserable life.”
“You’re smart,” Nymphia says. She doesn’t need to see Jane’s grades to know it’s true. She’s seen how quick she is, how she talks about things. That’s evidence enough. “I’m sure you could do a lot more than that.”
“I know. Don’t think I’ll have to, though,” Jane says, rooting through her purse. “My boyfriend is taking over his father’s company next year. That means big money.” She places a cigarette between her teeth and leans back on her hands. “Might take some shitty front desk job, but all I’ll have to do is sit around and look pretty.”
Nymphia misses a beat, stuck on the first part of Jane’s sentence. “Your boyfriend?”
Jane glances away for a moment, then back again, like she’s missing something obvious. “Yeah?”
Nymphia blinks, combing through a montage of memorized conversations in a matter of seconds and coming up empty. “You never mentioned your boyfriend.”
Jane scoffs, tosses her head. “I must’ve mentioned him at some point.”
“No,” Nymphia thinks back, brow furrowed. “No, you didn’t.”
“Oh,” Jane says. “Well, I have one.”
Nymphia isn’t sure why she’s so surprised. It makes perfect sense. This gorgeous girl, all of the gorgeous people surrounding her, and all of her gorgeous toys. She’d be incomplete without some gorgeous lover to reflect her sparkle back at her, some counterpart to complete her image, to slot so gorgeously beside her. Nymphia wants to let it go, knows she should let it go, but can’t, because:
“How come he never came up?” She questions. “I asked you what you do for fun, and you didn’t even mention him.”
“I mean,” Jane scoffs. “He does me for fun.”
She says it in this tone that Nymphia is starting to hate - the one that says this is supposed to be funny, laugh! Whatever follows is never funny at all. This time, it makes Nymphia sick, because she hates the way Jane frames it - like she’s nothing but a mere bystander to something as sacred as the handing over of her body to someone else. Like she’s hardly a participant.
Nymphia wonders how Jane picked up this particular delivery, wonders if it works on anyone. It must, because she says it like she’s said it before, like it's a well-rehearsed routine. She imagines Jane with a small circle of inner-city girls, “friends” who may or may not give a fuck about her, people who would hear her talk like this and find it humorous, relatable somehow, so desperate for permission to make light of their complete and utter dissatisfaction with their partners that they’re willing to do this - come at it sideways, laugh at it like it’s funny.
Judging by the dejected look on Jane’s face, she must have been expecting Nymphia to laugh at this too, but she doesn’t. Jane winces and turns her gaze back towards the lake.
“How long have you been together?” Nymphia asks through her unease, thinking that there’s no way something serious could go unspoken between them for so long. To her utter dismay:
“Two years,” Jane chews on her cheek. “Three in October.”
Nymphia says nothing, because of all of the sense she’d started to make of Jane, this erases half of it.
“He’s been in the city tying up loose ends at work,” Jane says. She slips the silver lighter out of her pocket, the pad of her thumb grazing over the etching. “But he’s coming up this weekend. Staying for the rest of the summer.”
Questions flood Nymphia’s mind like surging white rapids. A few cruel wonderments rise to the surface: whether Jane confides in her boyfriend like she does in Nymphia, whether she’s been his stand-in while he’s been elsewhere, whether all of these nights they’ve spent together have been a mere distraction from his absence, whether Nymphia will see much of Jane after her other half arrives on the weekend.
They’re selfish worries, ones that cater to the side of Nymphia’s mind that entertains foolish delusions - like any of this meaning anything at all. She resigns herself to worry about them later, when she’s alone in her room and staring up at her bedroom ceiling, feeling guilty for expecting anything from something so unexpected. What comes in the summer is never to stay, Nymphia knows that by now. If nothing else, this was enough.
Looking back at it all now, Nymphia knows she was already in over her head, but she hadn’t known it then. Not until it was ripped away from her.
-
It’s Saturday night dinner service when the fifth member of the family finally makes his appearance.
Nymphia is idling at the host stand with Xunami. They’re playing their usual game - Xunami is betting her bar tab that the posh blonde sitting in the corner will make an appearance at The Violet before the summer is up, and Nymphia is taking her up on that, because there’s no way, and then the front door opens. Jane’s mother, predictably and politely impolite, marches over to their usual table without so much as a greeting. Gigi and Jane’s brother float in as one unit, hand-in-hand except for where Gigi flashes a smile and offers Nymphia a fluttering wave.
And then, trailing behind them, there’s someone new.
A tall, chestnut-haired man in a striped shirt and an impeccably tailored sport coat. He’s handsome in the way that a movie star is, his masculine features softened by a lingering boyishness, and bears the sort of smile that could sell expensive life insurance policies or multi-million dollar homes. It could work on anyone, but it doesn’t catch Nymphia’s eye, because she’s too busy looking at the girl under his arm. Jane pressed against his side, one hand on his chest, smiling up at him even in her heels. She doesn’t so much as look in Nymphia’s direction as they pass by.
“Okay,” Xunami stares after them. “Who the fuck is that?”
“That’s the boyfriend,” Nymphia replies with a measured evenness. She watches the couple wind their way to the table, watches Jane laugh as he pushes her chair in, watches him sit and throw an effortless arm around her shoulder like he’s been waiting all summer to sit beside her again.
“The boyfriend,” Xunami echoes. Nymphia doesn’t notice how Xunami scans her face. She gets stuck on the way the man’s hand caresses Jane’s bicep. “Are you okay with that?”
Nymphia turns, blankly staring back at Xunami’s mildly concerned expression. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Okay, so maybe there are several reasons why Nymphia might not, theoretically, be okay with it. The most pressing reason is that Jane had handled the whole thing so weirdly, or that she’d hardly handled it at all. That for all the time Jane must’ve spent with her boyfriend, for the long weeks of June she must’ve spent missing him, she had so little to show for it. Their short conversation on the subject had sunk something in Nymphia, and sat oddly in the pit of her stomach like a shipwreck angled against the ocean floor. The second, more selfish reason why she might not be okay with it is because she had started to like hanging out with Jane, perhaps a little too much. Nymphia likes how it feels to have a part of Jane all to herself, and maybe, foolishly, she had started to want to lay claim to more of her. This was a reason Nymphia had already written off as illegitimate and unfounded.
Maybe the real reasons why she might not be okay with it come to her during dinner service.
The boyfriend is nice; warm, polite, respectful, only a little arrogant. There’s no reason for concern, except that he’s so touchy with Jane in a way that makes Nymphia taste bile. In the two hours that Nymphia spends waiting on them, he maintains physical contact with Jane for most of it - an arm around the back of her chair, fingertips grazing her shoulder blade, a hand on her thigh between courses. Nymphia has hardly touched Jane, nothing more than the knocking of their knees together some forty-eight hours ago, but the mere sight of his hands on her summons a reflex in Nymphia - the urge to reach out and touch Jane, to brush the stray curls from the nape of her neck, to smooth the strap of her dress against her collarbone.
The other reason why Nymphia might not be okay with it is that Jane doesn’t acknowledge her aside from this - Nymphia approaches the dinner table with her usual greeting, and Jane is laughing under her boyfriend’s arm, and then she looks up at Nymphia and her smile falters. She gets caught for a moment, eyes Nymphia a bit incredulously, and then looks away.
Jane looks at Nymphia just once after that - a fleeting glance over her shoulder when she walks out the door. Otherwise, she doesn’t look at Nymphia at all.
-
There’s no explaining away the small hole in Nymphia’s heart - a mass of tissue held together by a thread that’s been pulled loose.
What at first felt like a minor tear seems to widen with every passing day, the raw edges of Nymphia’s composure splitting farther apart with every opportunity Jane has to acknowledge her but doesn’t.
She sees her a handful of times: At the dinner table, where everyone addresses her except for Jane, whose eyes are conveniently elsewhere whenever Nymphia comes around. In the grocery store where she passes Jane and Gigi at the end of the aisle. Gigi calls out Nymphia’s name and she swears she sees Jane wince. Gigi holds Nymphia there with some yappy niceties Nymphia doesn’t really listen to, because she’s too busy noticing how Jane crosses her arms, purses her lips in a pitiful excuse for a smile, and doesn’t say anything at all. In line at the ice cream stand, where Dawn is too distracted by the cute blonde taking orders in the window to notice what Nymphia does: Jane and her boyfriend walking back to his car, Jane spotting Nymphia from across the lot and tucking her face into his shoulder.
It’s been nearly a week of this.
Nymphia had been prepared for some level of discomfort. For the steady stream of their interactions to dwindle as the summer passed and Jane fell back into life as she knew it. Nymphia hadn’t been prepared for the hard stop. Maybe it was naive of her, but she hadn’t expected the boyfriend’s arrival to upend everything this much. All of the time she and Jane had spent together had been done in this alternate universe, a space entirely removed from the rest of the world. Nothing could touch them when they were together. Now, it feels like nothing could bring them back.
It’s another dinner service, and Nymphia tries not to pay attention to the way Jane’s eyes glaze over when the conversation shifts to her boyfriend’s business plans come the new year. Her mother asks some intrusively insensitive questions about his salary, and Nymphia waits for Jane to scoff, but she just stays silent, an absent, artificial smile at her lips. It’s the sort of surface-level conversation that Jane would have shared secret glances with Nymphia over not long ago, but Jane doesn’t even seem to register Nymphia’s presence now. Even Gigi, who hardly knows Nymphia at all, makes an effort: she compliments Nymphia’s french braid, praises her for remembering her drink order (an Aperol spritz with appetizers, a glass of Pinot Grigio with entrees), thanks Nymphia profusely every time she so much as refills her water glass. Jane, who has shared wine and cigarettes and secrets with Nymphia, who has seen her high school yearbook photos and the inside of her sketchbook and the way she looks when she laughs hard, can’t even spare her a hello.
Nymphia is winding down the back hallway of the restaurant and finds herself face to face with Jane as she emerges from the bathroom. Jane goes a bit rigid in the doorway, side-steps Nymphia and presses herself against the wall like she’s trying to dissolve into it.
“Hi,” Nymphia says. It’s the closest she’s come to being alone with Jane in days, and the reality of her washes over Nymphia with the same, head-spinning rush. She looks so real up close, where Nymphia can see the blue of her eyes against soft gray eyeshadow, the chip in the red nail polish on her right thumb.
“Hey,” Jane replies flatly, a slight shake to her head like she’s bothered.
All of a sudden, none of Nymphia’s words feel like they could possibly be the right ones. “Is everything okay?” she ventures softly, a question that wouldn’t have felt so out of place a week ago, but now feels like she’s encroaching upon some boundary that had gone up unannounced.
Jane shifts her weight from one foot to the other, a hand curling around the back of her neck. “Fine.”
“Okay,” Nymphia says, because it isn’t fine at all. She knows Jane well enough to know that. “Do you want to smoke about it or something? Later, I mean?”
“I don’t know, Nymphia,” Jane sighs, tucking one blonde curl behind her ear. “Maybe.”
Nymphia tries to be bright enough for the both of them, to thaw the stubborn chill that freezes over everything floating between her and Jane.
“I’ll be out back after my shift,” Nymphia says gently, trying to make herself inviting enough for Jane to fall back into. “If you need to talk.”
Jane just blinks, shoulders high and tense. “I’ll see how I feel.”
Nymphia utters some reply, tries to offer a smile, but Jane is already turning away, one hand absentmindedly fiddling with her earring as she disappears down the hall all too quickly.
-
The buzz and whirr of dinner service fades into the deepening night, and Nymphia finds herself sitting on the stone steps behind the restaurant. She half-heartedly listens to Dawn and Xunami’s debrief - the disgruntled gentleman who’d caused a scene over a glass of Glenfiddich, the pretty blonde who Xunami insists makes eyes at her far too much to be straight, and more of the usual.
Nymphia doesn’t mean to miss out on so much of the conversation. She tries to keep up, really, she does, but she turns towards the street everytime she hears a car driving along the docks, wondering whether Jane will have found it in herself to confide in Nymphia once more.
It’s nearly an hour before Xunami and Dawn get restless.
“Nymph,” Xunami repeats, finally snapping Nymphia out of her stupor. “Are you coming?”
Nymphia frowns, searches through the scraps of conversation she’d managed to pick up on whilst her mind was elsewhere - something about karaoke at The Violet.
“You guys go ahead,” Nymphia waves them off with a lit cigarette in one hand. “I’ll probably catch up with you in a bit.”
“Are you sure?” Xunami frowns, and Dawn goes wide-eyed with worry. “We don’t have to go out. We can marathon MacGyver and point out all the plot holes instead. I’ll even paint your nails and everything.”
“No, you should go,” Nymphia forces a smile. “I just want to be alone for a minute, if that’s okay.”
They both try to convince her, and, failing, finally relent. Dawn presses a kiss to the top of Nymphia’s head with a dramatic mwah.
“We’ll have a drink waiting for you, okay?” Xunami hangs back, arms crossed. “Promise you’ll try to make it?” She tries to soften her concern with a classically-Xunami quip. “I don’t know if I can handle Dawn’s George Michael impression without you.”
Nymphia’s laugh is a gentle puff of air, not quite the full laugh her friends are hoping for. “Yeah, I promise. Say hi to Mirage for me, will you?”
Nymphia sits on the steps for another hour after Dawn and Xunami finally leave, casting concerned looks over their shoulders. Nymphia smokes cigarette after cigarette as the sun sinks into the skyline, wondering what is so wrong that Jane has decided she can’t talk to Nymphia about it. She smokes until her throat goes dry and the warmth of the evening sun has long since dissipated into the chill of another summer night. Only when she’s smoked the last cigarette in the pack, only when she has nothing left to offer Jane of herself, does Nymphia finally stand.
-
Nymphia only makes it a few steps towards the back of the bar before a hand shoots out from a booth somewhere to her left.
“There she is!”
There’s a hard yank at Nymphia’s forearm as she’s pulled into the booth and sent tumbling into Xunami’s waiting arms, practically landing in her lap. She squeals as Xunami envelops her in a bear hug, one hand reaching up to ruffle her hair.
“Gross,” Nymphia struggles against Xunami’s affections. “Get off me!”
“We missed you!” Dawn paws at Nymphia’s hand from the other side of the booth. “Karaoke isn’t the same without your heckling.”
Nymphia shrieks as Xunami makes kissing noises at her ear, desperately looking over at Dawn for rescue. “If I say I missed you too, will she stop?”
Dawn just shrugs. “It might help?”
“You have to mean it,” Xunami tickles at Nymphia’s sides.
“I mean it, I mean it!” Nymphia writhes away from Xunami’s hands, laughing as the girl lets her go. “I’m sorry I took so long,” Nymphia finally cracks a smile, because in the few seconds it took for her to be tackled by her friends she almost managed to forget the events, or lack thereof, that had left her so dejected when she’d walked through the door. Nymphia playfully shoves Xunami back into the corner of the booth like she has cooties, and smooths her thoroughly-mussed hair. “What’d I miss?”
Xunami folds her arms and nods across the table towards Dawn. “I’ve been trying to get this one to get up and sing for the past forty-five minutes.”
Dawn, almost offended, splays out her hands. “I’m not going up there alone!”
“She’s insistent on doing a duet,” Xunami rolls her eyes like it’s a lost cause, and it makes Nymphia feel a little better, because of all the things they could be worried about, somehow they’ve settled on this - arguing over who is going to join Dawn onstage for a pitiful rendition of whatever pop song she inevitably selects. Xunami’s excuse: she’s not getting anywhere near a microphone while Mirage is in earshot.
“Aw,” Nymphia coos, shimmies closer to Xunami. “Does she make you nervous, Xuxu?”
“Me? Nervous?” Xunami pffts. “No way. Mirage hears me sing enough, and I’m not talking about karaoke.”
Nymphia and Dawn crinkle their noses up at the same time.
“Anyways,” Xunami says, already counting herself out of this one. “I think you need to take one for the team, Nymphia.”
Nymphia scoffs. “I’m not nearly drunk enough for that.”
“Pleeeeease?” Dawn elongates the word, hands clasped together as she begs. “You can pick the song, whatever you want!”
Nymphia musters a smile. To be honest, she doesn’t feel like singing, and isn’t sure she can spare the energy it takes to act unaffected. She can already feel the sinking feeling finding its way back to her. “Maybe in a little bit, okay?”
Xunami eyes Nymphia, catches the way she deflates, if only slightly. She’s well attuned to Nymphia’s subtleties. “Dawnie,” she smiles. “How about you get Nymphia a drink? Put it on my tab, alright?”
“Ugh,” Dawn groans, sinks deeper into the booth and crosses her arms petulantly. “Why do I have to do it?”
Xunami stares back at her with a look that means several things at once, then nods towards Nymphia. “The sooner this one gets drunk, the sooner we can convince her to sing with you.”
Dawn seems to make several realizations simultaneously, and in an instant she’s sliding from the booth. Nymphia smiles as she watches Dawn scurry towards the bar in her striped polo and mini skirt, red curls bouncing.
And then it’s just Nymphia and Xunami, shoulder to shoulder against the cracking vinyl of the booth. It’s not exactly silence that floats between them, the air punctuated by a mediocre Fleetwood Mac cover from some barstool regular, but it might as well be. Nymphia can feel herself grow thin under the gaze of someone who knows her well enough to hear the things she isn’t saying, to guess at the one thing she hasn’t brought up.
“Alright, what’s going on?” Xunami cracks down. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, m’okay,” Nymphia pursues her lips into a half-hearted smile, hoping it’s anywhere near convincing enough for her oldest friend to fall for. She already knows it won’t work, but she tries anyway.
“I just needed to decompress after dinner service,” Nymphia picks at her cuticles. “That’s all.”
“Hey.” Nymphia feels Xunami’s hand on her forearm, glancing up to find her looking unusually serious. “Did she do something?”
Nymphia blinks. “Who?”
“Nymphia,” Xunami tilts her head, almost disappointed that Nymphia would think she could keep her out. “C’mon.”
Nymphia sighs. She doesn’t have to say more, because Xunami is Xunami, and that means she already knows.
“You were out with her every other night. And then he shows up, and you’re moping around all day,” Xunami says. She immediately moves to lighten the mood, rare that she can let something remain so completely serious for so long. “I can put two and two together, you know,” she teases. “It’s four, bitch.”
Nymphia cracks a smile at Xunami’s stupidity, and Xunami looks satisfied to see a glimmer of her friend resurfacing. “So,” Xunami leans back. “What’d she do?”
Nymphia sighs. “She didn’t do anything. That’s the problem.”
“You didn’t know about him, did you?”
“Kinda. She told me just before he got here.” Nymphia frowns as she thinks it over, then leans forward over the table, caught on the details. “But he didn’t come up once before that. Isn’t that weird?”
“Yeah, it is weird,” Xunami sympathizes, brows knitting together. “And now that he’s here?”
Nymphia chews on her cheek, drops her head and carves her fingernail into the peeling paint on the table. “Now she’s flat out ignoring me, ‘Nami.”
“What a bitch,” Xunami scowls. “She doesn’t know who she’s messing with. I mean, really, I can spit in every meal she gets for the rest of the summer. Who does she think she is? The queen of fucking Sheba?”
“That’s the thing. She isn’t like that-” Nymphia starts towards Jane’s defense, and then she stops, because maybe, despite everything she thought she knew, she still doesn’t know Jane at all. It’s impossible to fathom getting to the bottom of someone in a few mere weeks, but Nymphia has been foolish enough to think she was starting to make out the shadowy masses that lay at the ocean floor. She hadn’t felt it until now - the weight of all the water on top of her.
“At least, I thought she wasn’t,” Nymphia’s brow furrows. “We were getting close, Xunami. I knew she’d be preoccupied with him and everything, but…” she trails off, not sure how to deliver the enormity of her disappointment.
“It’s okay to be upset about it, y’know. I would be too,” Xunami rests her chin in the palm of her hand, gazes off towards the bar, then back to Nymphia. “You tend to keep these things to yourself, and that’s okay. I just want you to know that you can talk to us about it, alright?”
“I know,” Nymphia says meekly, hanging her head. “Thanks, ‘Nami.”
Xunami goes quiet for a moment, observes the slumping of Nymphia’s shoulders, the way she carves her fingernail into the peeling paint of the table.
“You really like her, don’t you?” Xunami says softly.
“I like being around her, yeah.” Nymphia says, and it’s the closest she’s let herself come to admitting the extent of her feelings towards Jane. “I don’t know what it means, exactly,” she says, at last letting herself look Xunami in the eyes.
“I guess I just didn’t want it to end.”
-
Dawn returns not long after, touting a trio of plastic cups overflowing with cheap liquor. By the way Dawn passes over the cocktail with a sympathetic little smile, Nymphia knows she must’ve worried her friends. She can imagine Dawn and Xunami discussing her silence on the walk to the bar, trying to come up with ways to cheer her up. Nymphia feels a little guilty.
And then she goes for her drink and smiles, because there’s two extra lime wedges on the rim, because Dawn cares enough to remember how Nymphia likes her gin and tonics. And then Nymphia thinks that maybe, just maybe, it isn’t so bad that she might not ever get Jane to herself again. At the very least, it leaves her more time to do this - be with her best friends.
“Hey, Dawnie,” Nymphia sips at her drink. “How about that song?”
Dawn perks up. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Xunami smiles, proud. “Let's do it.”
Dawn raises her eyebrows, blinking a few times. “Even with Mirage here?”
“If it means you’ll stop whining,” Xunami says with a smirk. Nymphia knows what she really means is I’ll do anything if it means you two are smiling. “Besides, can’t risk her thinking I’m boring, can I?”
“You could never be boring,” Nymphia wraps an arm around Xunami. “You’re with us.”
Dawn cheers, and Xunami rolls her eyes, and they all knock their cups together before taking long, celebratory mouthfuls of their drinks.
And so they got on stage. Nymphia and Xunami share one microphone, echoing after Dawn as she wails the words to Holding Out for a Hero into the other. She really gets into it, karate-kicking to the punch of each chorus while Nymphia and Xunami point, trying to keep from laughing. They’re not performing for the crowd, or anyone for that matter. Like everything they do when they’re together, this is just for them. For now, that’s all that matters.
-
Nymphia is resolved to get through dinner service in one piece.
She’s spent more than enough time feeling sorry for herself. If Jane won’t give her anything, then Nymphia will return the favor, and she won’t allow herself to fall into the trap of feeling weird about it, at least not while she’s on the clock. She’ll get through tonight even if it kills her, and then she can reunite with her friends at the end of it. Smoke a joint, let her feelings float off of her like mist.
And so she greets the table as she usually does, makes small talk with Gigi as she passes out dinner plates, meets every one of the table’s demands without so much as casting a second look towards Jane. She charms all of her customers that night, even the difficult ones, and every time she falters, starts to feel the least bit stressed about any of it, she pulls a silly face as she passes Xunami at the host stand, and thinks she can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
She’s preemptively proud of herself as she’s clearing the dinner table, and then Gigi clinks her spoon against her champagne flute.
“I’d like to make a toast,” Gigi beams. “Thank you for welcoming me into your family, and for being so excited for us,” she glances over at her fiancé, eyes wide with adoration. “I couldn’t ask for better.”
Then, she looks towards Jane.
“And to the other happy couple,” Gigi raises her glass. “May you continue to bring each other joy. May you find yourselves as happy as we are, and may we find ourselves toasting to you next year.”
There’s a delighted murmur, the twinkling sound of crystal clinking together, and the table goes golden with glasses of bubbles illuminated by candlelight. Nymphia is stepping back, just turning away from the table, and then she feels it - the unmistakable, piercing awareness of someone’s gaze upon her.
Nymphia looks and freezes mid-step.
Jane is wearing this strappy black velvet dress, and her curls are pinned high on her head. Delicate tendrils frame her face, and her boyfriend’s arm frames her shoulders, and she’s not just looking at Nymphia. She’s staring directly at her.
Everyone around her brings their glasses to their mouths, tilting their heads back and drinking to Jane’s happiness, and Jane just sits motionless, champagne flute held in one rigid hand, and she has this cold, hard grimace on her face. It’s a haunting expression, like she’s screaming, except it’s completely silent and spoken only with her eyes, and only Nymphia can hear it. Everything stops for the two of them, and the rest of the room continues to spin.
Jane’s eyes are fixed on Nymphia’s, almost pleading for something, though Nymphia doesn’t know what. Only when everyone around her lowers their drinks does Jane finally bring the champagne flute to her lips, screws her eyes shut and downs the entire glass in one horrific swallow.
Even when she finally walks away and enters the sweltering heat of the kitchen, Nymphia is chilled to the bone.
-
It’s been a few hours now, and Nymphia still can’t seem to get warm.
Usually she feels better after talking with her friends, but despite Dawn’s kind-hearted consolations and Xunami’s name-calling, Nymphia can’t seem to shake the sense of dread that burns in her chest every time she remembers the desperation in Jane’s eyes.
The lake has gone cool where Nymphia dangles her feet off the edge of the pier. They’ve already shared their nightly cigarette, Dawn has already retreated back home for the night, and Nymphia knows she’s already kept Xunami too long. She keeps checking her watch.
“Are you sure you’ll be alright?” Xunami asks. She’s offered to bail on Mirage three times already, but Nymphia won’t have it. She knows Xunami’s done all she can, and that there’s nothing left to do but sit with her feelings until they’re gone forever.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Nymphia insists with a small smile, the best she can offer. “Go see your girl. I’m gonna head home soon, anyways.”
“Okay,” Xunami says a bit reluctantly, searching Nymphia’s face for any reservations. “Promise me you’ll call the bar if you need anything at all? I’m serious, Nymphia, I’ll be there.”
“I know. I will,” Nymphia nudges her with her knee. “Thanks, ‘Nami.”
And so Xunami stands, ruffling Nymphia’s hair with a final “be good” and walks off into the night.
Nymphia sits, staring at the long shadow of herself cast over the surface of the lake. The water ripples beneath her dark silhouette, and her mind moves in the same slow, sweeping stretches over the memory: Jane, eyes searing with pain.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there for, only that none of it makes sense the longer she mulls over it, and that the town of Jupiter Beach has gone quiet around her. It’s almost entirely silent, except for this:
The familiar purr of an engine from the street behind her. The slamming shut of a car door. The fated, frantic footsteps of someone walking down the length of the pier, stopping just a few paces away, then pushing forward.
Nymphia doesn’t need to turn around to know who it is. She can tell by the way the whole atmosphere seems to turn static.
“Hey.”
Nymphia looks over her shoulder. Jane’s hair is still impeccably coiffed, and her lashes are still dark with mascara, but she’s changed into an enormous cream crewneck and denim cutoffs. She stands above Nymphia, arms crossed around her torso. When she speaks her voice is thin, almost hoarse.
“Can we talk?”
“Oh,” Nymphia scoffs. Her words are soft licks of fire. “Now you want to talk?”
Jane inhales sharply, stumbling in the face of Nymphia’s newfound hostility. “Listen, Nymphia-”
“You had every fucking opportunity to tell me what was up,” Nymphia interrupts. She doesn’t mean to go so angry. It’s just that she’d finally managed to pull herself out of a spiral, made it through an entire night without worrying, and Jane has somehow managed to upend all of her progress with one look. She’s reassembled the scattered shards of herself only to be cracked open again, and she’s unable to hold back her frustration now that it’s been set free.
Jane drops her head. “I know.”
“I asked you.”
“I know you did.”
“I waited out back for an hour the other night,” Nymphia flings one arm out towards the street, hating how absurd it sounds now. “I waited, and you didn’t show.”
Jane winces. “I’m sorry.”
“Right,” Nymphia scoffs. It’s not that she doesn’t believe it, it’s that it isn’t anywhere near enough. “You’re sorry.”
Jane sighs, defeated. “Listen, I completely understand if you don't want to-”
“No, you wanna talk, right?” Nymphia says, a sharp bite to her voice. “So let’s fucking hear it.”
Nymphia has seen slivers of Jane once she’s been confronted. She’s seen her stick to her guns at the dinner table, incapable of backing down from an argument even when she’s not entirely right. She’s seen the way she’s unable to hold back once she gets going, the way she unloads once Nymphia gives her the space to do so. She’s half-expecting Jane to unleash hell, to bite back at Nymphia in a defensive frenzy, but instead:
“I-” Jane starts, and there’s this horrible wavering to her voice that freezes everything inside of Nymphia, making her feel almost guilty for being so rightfully frustrated. “Can I sit? I want to explain it to you if you’ll let me, okay? I just-” she tucks her hair behind her ears, hands flaring out at either side of her face. “God, I really need a fucking cigarette.”
Nymphia sighs, buries her face in her hands, because all she’s wanted for days is for Jane to sit next to her and tell her something, anything, give her some minute semblance for Nymphia to go off of. The moment has finally come, and Nymphia thinks it could be the last thing she needs, and still there’s this - a part of her that can’t turn Jane away.
“Alright,” Nymphia relents, faces away from Jane and looks out over the water. “Sit.”
Jane drops to the edge of the dock beside her, sits criss-cross applesauce and looks so unbelievably small. She fumbles in her pocket, draws out a packet of cigarettes and the chrome lighter Nymphia had given her before all of this had happened. A relic that feels almost ancient, shining even in the dark. They go silent as Jane sparks her cigarette, exhaling a stream of smoke that goes floating into the sky, then allowing one twisted laugh past her lips.
“What?”
“He hates that I smoke these, y’know,” Jane raises her cigarette, tucked between two fingers. Nymphia doesn’t respond, doesn’t even look over, because the last thing she wants to hear about is him.
“Sorry,” Jane winces, like she knows it was the wrong thing to say. “I had a whole speech prepared. I ran it, like, fifty times in my head. It’s just a lot harder to say it now.”
“Okay, well can you try?” Nymphia sighs impatiently. “Because I’m tired of this, Jane. I’m tired of trying to read your mind.”
Jane sighs, wraps her arms around herself, cradling an invisible wound.
“I didn’t mean to shut you out, Nymphia,” she says, one hand holding the smoking cigarette away from the sleeve of her sweater. “Really. It wasn’t, like, intentional or anything.”
“It felt pretty intentional from where I was standing,” Nymphia says incredulously. “I mean, I get it. You’re preoccupied now. That’s fine. I wasn’t expecting you to drop everything to hang out with me. I just didn’t expect you to be so cold.”
“I never wanted to stop seeing you,” Jane says towards her lap, toying with her bracelet. “Really, that was the last thing I wanted.”
“Okay,” Nymphia snips, raises her hands and lets them fall against her thighs with a frustrated smack. “So what gives, Jane?”
Jane’s face twists, pained. Nymphia sighs, exhausted by her own anger. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to see past the red, to find what’s at the root of it.
“You don’t owe me your time,” Nymphia says, eyes still shut. “It’s just that he comes around and suddenly you’re acting like you don’t even know me.” She opens her eyes, peers at the girl sitting wordlessly beside her. “I don’t know, Jane. It just fucking hurts.”
“I didn’t mean to do that to you, Nymphia.” Jane finally says, unable to make eye contact as she strains to get the apology past her lips. “I’m sorry, I really am.”
Nymphia drops her head, twists her shoelace between her fingers and mumbles, “I guess I just don’t get why it would affect us so much.”
“I didn’t think it would,” Jane shrugs, cigarette hovering near her mouth. “I didn’t think it would feel so weird.”
“Weird how?” Nymphia’s brows knit together as she tries to untangle what Jane means, her words oddly jumbled and all too vague. “Weird with us?”
“No,” Jane shakes her head. “Weird with him.”
A sharp pang of fear. “You guys aren’t fighting, are you? He’s being nice to you?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s good. We’re good. I mean, I don’t think it’s him,” Jane frowns. “I think it’s me.”
“Okay,” Nymphia says, because that is somehow more concerning. “What’s going on with you?”
“God,” Jane laughs this weird, twisted laugh of pity. “Where do I fucking start?”
Nymphia waits. Part of her wants to press down on Jane, ask pointed questions and pull the answers out of her. The other half of her doesn’t want to be responsible for it - the very uncorking of whatever it is that Jane’s had bottled up for so long. So she stays silent, leaves it in Jane’s hands, resigns herself to follow her lead.
“Everyone tells me I’m lucky, y’know?” Jane continues after a while. “Because he’s nice, and he’s rich, and he’s, y’know, handsome or whatever. And I think he really cares about me. I know I got lucky with him.”
Jane trails off. Nymphia guesses at what comes next. “But?”
“But sometimes I look at him and think, is this all there is?” Jane grinds the last ember of her cigarette into nothingness. Then she tilts her head back, raises her voice with this gut-wrenching, scorned scrape of a cry. “I get lucky, and this is all I get?”
It’s profoundly sad - Jane, staring up at the sky, like she’s willing the heavens to open up and answer her. It’s a cloudy night, and the stars are so thoroughly blotted out, and the moon struggles to pierce through the blackness.
“I’m sorry,” Nymphia hears herself say softly. It’s something she didn’t know she felt for Jane until now.
She thinks Jane is going to stop there, leaving them at the edge of this gaping canyon of her own misery, and she’s going to let her, because Nymphia doesn’t have the energy to coax her off the edge. She doesn’t know how. It’s all up to Jane - whether she walks away, or whether she leaps and leaves Nymphia to watch her get enveloped by the darkness.
“There are times where I look at him and I feel happy, or almost happy,” Jane starts, a tentative step. “And then I look at you…”
Jane catches herself, like she’s at a precipice and just barely keeping herself from jumping. “I look at you and I don’t know what to do with it.”
Nymphia’s mouth goes dry. “With what?”
“Fuck,” Jane groans, burying her face in her hands, floundering against her own fear.
It’s strange to see her so distressed. Whether she’s pissed off or wild and reckless, there’s always an insistence about her, something that stands up straight in spite of whatever she’s up against. Now she’s crumpling under her own weight before Nymphia’s eyes.
“Okay, I told myself I’d drive by, right?” Jane emerges from behind her hands, rubs her palms absentmindedly against her thighs. “If you weren’t here, then I would leave you alone. Let you get on with your fucking life. But if you were here, then I would have to tell you everything.”
“Well,” Nymphia says quietly. “I’m here.”
“Yeah,” Jane says, sealing her own fate. “You are.”
“Okay,” Nymphia says, heart pounding. “So tell me.”
Jane looks over at Nymphia, opens her mouth to speak, but her breath catches when she lands on her. There’s this frantic shake to her head, this hoarse, desperate little whine that escapes her, because she’s rehearsed this conversation a few dozen times in her head, but it’s impossible to say it now. Her brows are downturned with this heartbreaking desperation and Nymphia looks back at her, begs her to be brave. And then Jane takes a shaky breath, and Nymphia feels like she’s so close to finding it out - what exactly that look in Jane’s eye has been all along.
Jane draws closer and it’s like she’s about to tell Nymphia a secret, except she doesn’t speak when her lips part, she just leans in and-
Oh, Nymphia thinks, because Jane is kissing her.
Oh, because it all makes sense now.
-
Notes:
as always, thank you so much for being here :”) if you have ever supported this fic, it truly means the world to me. you can find me on tumblr @ mappingthesky, come yap with me!!!!
love u guys <3 until next time!!!
Chapter 3: where the spirit meets the bones
Summary:
neither of them really know what jane wants, only that she keeps asking for it, and nymphia can’t seem to say no to her
Notes:
shoutout to the anon who suggested a roller skating scene. i hope this suffices <3
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jane is kissing Nymphia.
It’s not like any first kiss Nymphia has ever had; the fumbling, tentative kind, one mouth awkward with unknowingness as it tries to figure out the other, desperate to overcome the learning curve. Most first kisses feel something like that, but not this one.
Jane is kissing Nymphia, and it’s with the kind of deep, moving immediacy that stops time. It’s a kiss like something remembered, a kiss that beckons muscle memories back from another lifetime. It’s a kiss that answers so many questions, solves so many mysteries at once, a kiss like a hundred miraculous revelations.
It’s a confession of a kiss, and there’s a moment when Jane draws back ever so slightly, because this is the outpouring of everything that’s ever gone unspoken between them, and she’s giving Nymphia a chance to turn her away, a chance to be horrified at what she’s revealing.
But Nymphia isn’t horrified. She’s exhilarated, intoxicated by the feeling of Jane’s hair brushing against her cheek, her hand coming up to cup her face, and Nymphia doesn’t even think about kissing Jane back because she’s already doing it. She’s already moved to meet Jane in the middle, her mouth has already opened to take her in.
Nymphia is kissing Jane, and she hadn’t known how bad she’d wanted it, needed it, until now. How long have I wanted you? Nymphia thinks. How long have I denied myself this?
Nothing has ever made Nymphia feel more real, more aware of her own life than Jane’s lips. Every sense is heightened, every nerve ending operating at its highest capacity, finely attuned to everything that Jane is against her - warm, soft and impassioned. Nymphia can taste her chapstick, and there’s a hint of smoke too, because Jane just had a cigarette, even though she’d said that her boyfriend hates when she-
“Jane,” Nymphia breaks the kiss, the sound half a whimper and half a whisper. Her chest is rising hard and fast, because she’d been too wrapped up in Jane to remember about breathing. She’s trying to catch her breath, and not kissing Jane should solve that problem, except just looking at Jane is leaving Nymphia just as breathless.
Jane is a little flushed and her lips are freshly wet, and she looks so irresistible, so tempting that Nymphia has a hard time turning her away. Nymphia doesn’t remember doing it, but she’s clenching a fistful of Jane’s sweater in her hand. She’s still holding Jane there when she chokes out we can’t, the words getting caught in the dry hollow of her throat.
“I know,” Jane says. She’s panting and her lashes are fanning flames in her eyes, which are already back on Nymphia’s mouth. “I know.”
It should end there. It should, except Jane’s hand is still at Nymphia’s face, fingertips lost in her hairline, and Nymphia’s still clutching the front of Jane’s sweater because she wants this. God, she wants this. She’s touching Jane, just touching her, and it’s the answer to every cell in her body that’s been screaming for days on end.
And so she hovers there, not quite kissing Jane and nowhere near letting her go. Would it be so wrong to just hold each other like this? To cling to each other desperately without crossing the line of each other's lips?
“We can talk about it,” Jane says, still so close to Nymphia. She can practically feel her words when she speaks.
“Tomorrow, or whenever you want. We’ll talk about it, I promise, just-” Jane swallows, a desperate lilt to her voice. “Please, can we not talk about it right now?”
Jane doesn’t have to elaborate. Nymphia immediately understands what she means. It’s the lawlessness that permeates every one of their encounters, that unshakable feeling that their lives never should have intersected to begin with, but they have, and nothing can change that now. It’s this world that they’ve been building, this place that they go to together where they can say anything, where they can look at each other as long as they want and there are no repercussions. The place where no one watches. The place where no one can tell them that it’s wrong.
Nymphia looks back at Jane, and the sigh that escapes her is an immediate surrender. It doesn’t matter what logic she tries to employ; the enormity of her desire overrides everything else. There are a hundred heavy things she could be feeling, but all she can feel is Jane. There’s nothing Nymphia can do to stop herself from getting so blissfully lost in her. She’s powerless against this energy that expands between the two of them, this all-consuming, blinding light that outshines everything else.
It should end there, except Nymphia thinks she finally knows what that look in Jane’s eye has been all along. Maybe, just maybe, the reason why no one has ever looked at Nymphia the way Jane does is because no one has ever wanted Nymphia quite as badly as this. No one has ever needed her more.
Nymphia nods, because she doesn’t want it to end either. Not so soon.
“Another time,” she whispers, because Jane’s hand is already at her face, and Nymphia’s hand is already balled around her sweater, and she’s already leaning in to kiss Jane again, because it could never be enough just to hold her. It could never quell what calls.
-
If you wanted a simple answer, Nymphia could tell you that it started then, that everything began the moment that Jane kissed her in the dark at the end of the dock. She could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be true, because this isn’t a simple story, and there are no simple answers. A more honest answer would be that it began long before their lips ever met; perhaps when Jane’s knee had knocked against Nymphia’s for the first time, or from the moment she’d walked through the door in that first week of June, or maybe it began even before then.
Maybe it began when all things did, in some grand cosmic birth beyond space and time when all the strings of fate were first wound. It began when the threads of Nymphia’s soul were first made and tied to Jane.
That’s the most honest answer. It began then.
-
When it’s all over, when Jane has gone sheepish and tucked her hair behind her ear and turned her smiling face and swollen lips away from her, Nymphia knows she should be feeling something else: guilt or panic or anything other than the hot shards of light that explode from her heart.
She’s walking Jane to her car, and she’s waiting for the sinking feeling to swallow her whole. And then Jane slips behind the steering wheel, and her eyes go gray and glittery beneath the yellow glow of the streetlamp, and there’s no time to feel anything remotely heavy, because Nymphia thinks this is the first time she’s ever seen Jane look hopeful.
“Can I see you tomorrow?” Jane whispers, and nothing has ever made her feel more special than this - Jane asking for more of her.
“Yeah,” Nymphia says, already nodding, already in over her head. “Tomorrow.”
And then Jane is reaching up, and Nymphia is leaning over the side of the car, and she’s kissing her again. And when Jane finally drives off, Nymphia stands in the street, watching as Jane’s headlights turn to pinpricks of light against the darkened landscape, and she thinks it’s about to hit her - the full, devastating, bone-crushing weight of what just happened. She waits to be knocked to her knees, struck down by some divine retribution for every sin she’s committed.
She waits, but there’s no arc of light that splits the sky apart on its way to take her down. There’s no flood, no burst of flame, no stray bolts of lightning. There’s only this - the brightening of her heart, the skyward ascent of her soul, the confetti that falls as she crosses her own lines. Nymphia knows that tomorrow there will be time for dread, but for now she’s got a chance at a few, short hours of complete and utter elation, and she’ll take them, even if it’s only for tonight.
And so she spins in delirious, delighted circles beneath the streetlamp, laughing this breathy, disbelieving laugh, and the moths are twisting towards the light above her, and Nymphia spins until she’s so dizzy she can barely tell the sky from the earth, the faithful stars from the asphalt that threatens to split beneath her feet.
-
The morning sun shines bright behind the red of Nymphia’s eyelids. It beams through her window, falling in an oblong, warming rectangle over her face. It spreads over her gently, and Nymphia is vaguely aware of her body, the softness of the sheets that envelop her, the reignited embers of her heart.
It all comes back to her like a dream, but clearer, because it really happened. Because it really happened.
Nymphia sits up in bed, a disbelieving hand flying to her mouth, and laughs this gentle, private laugh to herself, because it should’ve been a dream, but she knows it wasn’t, because she’s grazing her lips with her fingertips, and it's impossible, but she swears there’s something different about her mouth now that Jane’s kissed it.
Everything is a little different now, softened by this dreamy glow that blurs every edge. It’s like Nymphia took a tab of acid, and kissing Jane had sent her to this glittering peak, and she was too high to fall asleep easily, and she’s floating softly back to Earth some odd hours later, vision still blurry with infatuation, all the stars behind her eyes with trailing, ever-bright tails.
Jane is a high that Nymphia is still coming down from when mid-afternoon rolls around. She’s the trill in Nymphia’s chest when she pulls her hair up in the mirror and catches sight of herself. She’s this quiet surge of confidence when Nymphia gets dressed. She’s the song stuck in Nymphia’s head when she’s stepping out of her apartment to meet Dawn and Xunami for coffee, she’s the warmth in her face even beneath an unusually cloudy sky.
Jane is the smile that Nymphia has to subdue when she’s walking down Jupiter Beach’s sunlit Main Street, because it feels like she has this secret. She’s passing all of these people - complete strangers, families she’s known for half of her life and everything in between - and Nymphia is reveling in the private knowledge that none of them have; that Jane kissed her last night, that she’d done it because she wanted to, maybe even because she needed to. Nymphia almost pities the people that brush past her, because they have no idea just how good the world can be. How could they? They have no idea that Nymphia has been picked by this impossibly gorgeous, privately tortured stranger who’s decided she’s her own personal brand of desirable. They haven’t met Jane, and even if they have, they haven’t met the real Jane, the one that only Nymphia knows, the one that drives out in the middle of the night just to kiss Nymphia. Nymphia feels like a treasure that’s hidden in plain sight, a jewel whose glitter goes unnoticed by all but one. If only they knew, Nymphia thinks to herself.
These are insane thoughts, the kind thought by someone who has utterly and completely lost their mind, and normally Nymphia would reel them in, but she doesn’t. She’s indulging herself in them, because for the first time they aren’t completely unfounded. She’s not projecting some groundless fantasy onto Jane. This time she has proof, tangible evidence that’s ingrained onto her lips.
Maybe the real reason why Nymphia is letting herself get so thoroughly lost in love-drunk fantasies is because she can see the diner at the end of the street, the diner that she and Dawn and Xunami have been coming to ever since they’d found the safety of each other in high school all those years ago, and she knows she’s about to sober up. She’s been relishing in the private paradise of her own head all morning, this prism of perfection that Jane has found her way into, and in half a block she’ll be shining the lightrays of reality through it.
She thinks she knows what’ll happen next: she’ll be squished beside Dawn, who will chatter on about the girl who puts rainbow sprinkles on her ice cream, and sat across from Xunami, who’ll ramble about Mirage, and this time Nymphia will have something just as good to tell them. She’ll have the story about her and Jane at the end of the dock, Jane and her lips and that hopeful glimmer in her eye just before she kissed Nymphia goodnight.
And so Nymphia slides into the booth, savoring daydreams of Jane as she stirs cream and sugar into her coffee. It’s a strange, new sort of happiness for Nymphia. For so long, all of her joys have been between the three of them - her and Dawn and Xunami nursing their heartaches with cheap beer and double dog dares and pinky promises to be best friends forever. That was always enough, or close to it, and then she’d met Jane. Somewhere along the way she became this glossy sheen to Nymphia’s days, the color bursting around each setting sun, stars that emerge each night and reveal new constellations that Nymphia charts with care.
So there’s an absent-minded smile on Nymphia’s lips as Dawn and Xunami chatter on, because she has a happiness that's all her own. It feels like an unspeakable dream has come to pass, slotting some secretly missing component into place and completing Nymphia. She may be sitting in the diner, but she’s somewhere else entirely, this daydream she gets to live inside of.
“You’re awfully smiley this morning,” Xunami eyes her suspiciously over her coffee mug. “What gives?”
Nymphia glances up. Maybe she’s relishing in the rarity of knowing something no one else does yet, because she finds herself saying, “Just happy to see you guys.”
“Right,” Xunami rolls her eyes. “You didn’t seem so happy when I left you at the pier last night. What changed?”
Xunami’s words are a softly thrown stone, sending a ripple of worry out across Nymphia. It’s a reminder that the night before had veered dangerously close to catastrophic, when Jane’s silent scream of a stare pierced through every protective barrier Nymphia had built against her. Nymphia had almost forgotten how utterly dismantled she was when Xunami had left her sitting alone at the end of the dock. The memory reads like an unheeded warning, and Nymphia has to remind herself that it was before Jane had kissed her, before she’d put all of her cruelty into crushingly clear context.
Dawn knowingly hums around a mouthful of hot chocolate. There’s a dollop of whipped cream at the end of her nose. “Did it have something to do with-” and then she silently mouths the name that Nymphia’s been repeating in her mind all morning, like it’s already a secret that someone might overhear and take away from them. Jane. A name that is fragile, meant to be handled carefully.
“Sorta,” Nymphia says. The memory of last night is still warm from where she’s been turning it over in her mind and is about to spill forth so easily, because this is what they do - things happen, and they tell each other about every head-spinning detail, and it all makes sense afterwards. “She apologized, actually.”
“Really?” Xunami says, a disbelieving curve to the middle of the word. “She doesn’t seem the type. What was that like?”
Nymphia inhales and it’s like she’s bracing for impact. It shouldn’t feel that way. She’s sandwiched between two people who love her most in this world, and she knows she can tell them anything. This is exactly what her friends would love to hear about, the sort of fluttering, giddy excitement they’ve been wishing on Nymphia for years now. She’s finally found it all on her own, and there’s nothing Nymphia wants to do but gush about it like a silly, love-struck teenager. It’s what she’s going to do, except she’s running through the story in her head just before she goes to tell it, and it sounds different this time.
This time, the story doesn’t sound like a good one. It’s warped, sordid, and no matter how she rearranges the words in her head, Nymphia can’t make it sound like the same story she’d been telling herself. It doesn’t sound light or hopeful or fun, or even remotely like it could end well, because this thing that has been making Nymphia feel so light is deceptively weighty.
Here’s what Nymphia had been conveniently forgetting: all this excitement boils down to is a few kisses in the dark at the end of the pier. Desperate kisses. Kisses from a confused girl. Kisses from a girl who has a boyfriend. Kisses from a girl who is just miserable enough to think that Nymphia is the answer.
And the story isn’t just that Jane had kissed Nymphia in the dark at the end of the dock against all rhyme or reason or rationale. The story is also that Nymphia had kissed Jane back, that she’d liked it, that she wants to do it again.
The beautiful, cloudy dream that Nymphia has done the disservice of suspending herself inside of grows thin, and she falls right through it, plummeting the rest of the way down from her high.
All at once, Nymphia knows that this isn’t the sort of thing you talk about. This isn’t the silly, light-hearted gossip she can share with her friends. It’s not even the type of serious confession they could appreciate her for trusting them with, pat her hand and move on. This is concerning. This is a horror story waiting to happen. Nymphia could tell them, but Dawn and Xunami would look at her with worry in their eyes, and they’d warn her to be careful, and if it went on too long they’d plan an intervention and cart her off somewhere to heal, and they wouldn’t be doing it because they hate her, they’d be doing it because they love her, because they can’t watch Nymphia go on like this - dutifully bound to a sinking ship, swearing on her life that it’ll resurface.
So, no, this isn’t the sort of thing you tell your friends over breakfast. All at once, Nymphia knows that this is a secret.
She drops her head, spinning her spoon in her coffee.
“It was complicated.”
It’s not a lie. Not even a little bit. It’s the truth, or a vague shadow of the truth that veils the huge, dark mass in the middle of it, but it is not a lie. Nymphia is not a liar.
“Okay,” Dawn says, the excited glitter in her eyes contorting into confusion. “And that’s a good thing?”
She’s clean and pretty and wearing pink lipstick and Nymphia suddenly feels too tainted to be sitting next to her.
“I don’t know,” Nymphia leans away from Dawn. “I haven’t decided yet.”
It doesn’t matter what sly, sideways way Xunami tries to pull the information out of her, or how innocently Dawn asks. Nymphia twists away from any further questions and the smile on her face goes back to feeling forced.
She’s sipping coffee and laughing when she’s supposed to, but in her head she’s trying to smooth out the newly mangled wreck of the night before, trying to salvage it, trying to make it as shiny and new as it had felt just minutes ago. She turns it every which way, but she can’t seem to make Jane slot into her life the way she so desperately wants her to. She could, but she’d be cutting out a few pivotal parts - Jane’s mother, Jane’s money, Jane’s inability to say the word ‘gay’, Jane’s boyfriend - and even then, even with those jagged edges sanded down, Nymphia would still be cramming Jane into a space where she doesn’t fit.
Jane won’t fit, because of the very way Nymphia has shaped herself into someone she’s proud of. Nymphia has clawed her way out of closets and generational curses. She’s a true friend, and a loving daughter, and a reliably decent person. She’s cemented pillars of honesty and pride for herself to stand upon. All that work, and at the first sign of high tide she finds herself being swept into a moral gray-area, finds that the stone-certainty of her values are so shamefully sandy.
All at once Nymphia can see how fragile it all is, how flimsy. How easily all of her hard work can be undone. How powerless she is against her own heart.
The conversation falls away from her. Dawn is lamenting her inability to talk to Amanda, and Xunami is declaring that this is the week she finally makes a move, and Nymphia is half-heartedly agreeing, because these are the kind of loves that friends encourage each other to go after. The innocent ones. The loves that don’t involve other people’s boyfriends and secrets and closets and unforgivingly-crossed stars.
Nymphia watches her friends lean over the table in laughter, Xunami’s hands clasped around Dawn’s as she delivers a pep-talk, and knows that she’s strayed too far into a space she doesn’t want her friends to see her in. It’s more than the misplacing of her own heart, it’s the misplacing of her morals, too. Nymphia may be wild and risky and endlessly seeking her next thrill, but she isn’t a cheat, and she isn’t a conniving, adulterous person who allows wanting to override reason.
Nymphia listens and she knows that she has to do an impossible thing - take that long thread of desire that she has so tirelessly traced, and sever herself from the person she’s found at the other end.
How do you justify a thing like that - the murder of such a miraculous twist of fate?
-
When Nymphia was a junior in high school, she’d fallen hard for a girl on the track team.
She was freshly sixteen then, and only just understanding what it meant that she had pictures of female athletes taped to the inside of her locker and didn’t want to go to homecoming with any of the boys in her homeroom.
Anetra was everything.
She was the fastest on the track team, and the only girl who took taekwondo lessons at the studio thirty minutes outside of town, and she was a senior, and she was gorgeous. Nymphia could sit on the bleachers and watch Anetra run for hours; admiring the hard slope of her nose, the black whip of her hair streaming out behind her, the sweaty sheen of her collarbones when she’d cross the finish line, chest heaving.
Nymphia liked that Anetra double-knotted her running shoes. She liked that Anetra called her ‘kid’ even though she was only a year older than Nymphia, and she liked that Anetra could roll her eyes at the bratty girls who had boyfriends on the football team and thought that made them hot shit, and Nymphia liked that Anetra could run circles around all of them. Anetra was more of a force than she was a human being; she was raw energy that just so happened to take the shape of a seventeen year old girl, a superhero who could outrun anyone, overpower anything with the sheer force of her mind.
For whatever reason, Anetra had taken a shine to Nymphia that fall. They’d do their warmups together, and Anetra would tell Nymphia she needed to hold her stretches for longer, and Nymphia would whine and say that it was uncomfortable, and Anetra would reply, “that means it’s working.” Anetra would refill both of their water bottles and remind Nymphia to hydrate after practice, and she’d meet Nymphia for runs around the track before first period.
Anetra made Nymphia feel special. More than that, she made her feel feelings. Nymphia spent a lot more time thinking about her than she’d readily admit back then, idolized her a bit more intensely than she’d known what to do with. By the time that Nymphia had figured out what it meant, that she wanted Anetra in the way that the cheerleaders wanted pretty boys in varsity jackets, Anetra was off to college. She’d gotten an athletic scholarship to a school on the West Coast, had won a rare ticket out of Jupiter Beach that most of their peers could only dream about.
Selfishly, and for reasons that she only really unpacked once Anetra had shipped off to California, Nymphia had wanted her to stay. But Anetra graduated, and Nymphia hugged her in her cap and gown and hadn’t wanted to let go, and Anetra wrote something stupid in her yearbook, and Nymphia sobbed on her bedroom floor for half of the summer.
It took a while, but Nymphia got over it. She found other daydreams to fixate upon, and started hanging out with Xunami, who had pictures of popstars lining the inside of her locker, and stopped running.
It was winter break of Nymphia’s senior year when Anetra came home for Christmas. They’d bumped into each other at the corner store, and Anetra had offered to buy Nymphia coffee, and they’d found themselves tucked into a booth at the diner as the New England snow fell in thick, heavy flakes outside the window.
“You’d like California,” she’d said to Nymphia. “The people are different there.”
“I bet I would,” Nymphia replied. She trusted Anetra like that. There was a time when she would’ve followed her anywhere.
There was something different about Anetra now. She had put red streaks in her dark hair, and she was somehow even more beautiful than Nymphia remembered, but it wasn’t just that. She seemed braver, too.
She told Nymphia all about her life, and Nymphia marveled at how wonderfully roomy it sounded. Anetra rambled about her dorm, the disco that she and her roommate snuck into on the weekends, and the girls on the college track team who were even better than she was. Impossible, Nymphia thought.
“I met someone,” Anetra said with a smitten, unashamed curve playing on her lips. “Her name is Marcia.”
Marcia.
The name rolled over Nymphia in an all-affirming wave. She’d always thought that there was something more integral to her and Anetra’s connection than healthy adrenaline and a mutual hatred for mean girls. Anetra liked women, liked them in the same way Nymphia liked them, in the same way Nymphia had liked her. Even bigger than that, Anetra liked women and was openly telling her about it and looked happy.
“I didn’t know,” Nymphia said later on. She didn’t specify what she meant, but she didn’t have to. It was the thing that had been lingering between them all last fall, the thing they were finally getting around to long after the opportunity had passed them by.
“Didn’t tell anyone back then,” Anetra shrugged. “If you’d have asked, I would’ve told you.”
Nymphia’s hands curled around her coffee mug. “I had a crush on you, y’know.”
Anetra’s smile was almost two years in the making, albeit a little too late. “I liked you too, Nymphia.”
Nymphia finally looked up. “You did?”
“Of course,” Anetra smiled. “Why else do you think I was waking up at the ass crack of dawn to run with you before school?”
“Dunno,” Nymphia shrugged, laughing, because it had seemed so inconceivable then and so obvious now.
“You could’ve told me,” Anetra had said softly.
“I was too scared,” Nymphia had said, suddenly unable to meet Anetra’s eyes. “I guess I still am. You’re the only person who knows.”
Anetra gave her a sympathetic smile.
“I know it's hard in a place like this. It’s hard anywhere, I think,” she frowned. “I was scared out of my mind to admit it to someone, but it’s so worth it, Nymphia.”
“Yeah?” Nymphia lifted her head, hopeful.
“Yeah,” Anetra smiled, eyes lingering on Nymphia’s only a little regretfully. “I wish I’d done it sooner.”
Nymphia flushed red and hadn’t known what to say. She felt two steps behind Anetra in a lot of ways - still in high school, still closeted, still fumbling with her feelings. She’d made peace with the fact that she couldn’t have Anetra, but she still sort of wanted to be her.
When their coffees had gone cold, Anetra hugged Nymphia goodbye under the falling snow. She pressed against her like the back cover of a book, the final page in this chapter of Nymphia’s life.
“The world is right there waiting for you, Nymph,” Anetra had said against her hair. “You just have to meet it halfway.”
Christmas passed, and then New Year’s, and then Nymphia went back to school and came out. She’d seen what she’d let slip her by when she was too scared to admit that she wanted it, and she would be damned if she closed herself off any longer. It didn’t matter if she got funny looks from the girls she’d used to run with, or if she skipped homecoming. Those were minor losses. She gained so much more.
Nymphia chose movie nights with Xunami over stuffy school dances with boys in starched suits. Nymphia snuck Dawn out of her bedroom window on weekends and got curious looks from girls who she thought might be different in the same way she was. These were things she didn’t have when she was hiding in plain sight. She liked how they felt, and didn't want to go back to life before them.
The next Christmas, Anetra brought Marcia back to Jupiter Beach. She was blonde and pretty and posh and reminded Nymphia a little bit of the cheerleaders in high school, except she was nice, and she had something much better than a boyfriend in a varsity jacket. She had Anetra.
When Anetra had spotted her from across the street and waved with one arm slung around Marcia’s shoulder, Nymphia had smiled and waved back. She may not have had Anetra, but she had something just as good. Maybe for the first time, she had herself. It didn’t matter who didn’t like it, because Anetra was right - this was so worth it. Nymphia knew what it felt like now, and she swore to herself she would never hide in plain sight again. Not for anything. Not for anyone.
It really seemed that simple then.
-
Nymphia is sitting at the covered bridge. The sun is setting over Lake Jupiter, and she’s done her best to put out the raging fire that’s been warming her chest since last night. She’s smothered it, doused it in the cool waters of reality, and resignation wafts like thick, black smoke that signals the start and end of everything that could’ve been.
Nymphia had spent the afternoon strengthening her resolve. She recalled every promise she’d ever made to herself after coming out, every commitment she’d made to openness, reminding herself that there was nothing worth sacrificing her personal progress over. She has to remind herself of these things in order to make what she’s about to do sound at all like the right decision.
Jane crept up on Nymphia so unassumingly. Somewhere along the way, pouring into Jane started to feel like pouring into herself. Now that she’s faced with removing herself from her, Nymphia doesn’t know where to begin, where to cut, what lines will leave the both of them largely intact. Every time she thinks she’s got it down to a science, she’s reminded exactly who she’s dealing with, and the urge to keep herself so increasingly tethered to Jane is unforgivably overwhelming.
Jane’s headlights appear at the edge of the water all too soon, and then she’s walking up the bridge and Nymphia wants to say slow down, wants to take this image of Jane walking towards her and play it on an infinite loop, because Jane hasn’t yet arrived beside her, and what Nymphia knows must come next hasn’t happened yet.
“Hi,” Jane says as she approaches. She’s wearing an uncharacteristically timid little smile, and she’s got a varsity v-neck sweater over a denim mini skirt, and Nymphia’s gut twists into hot knots.
“Hi,” Nymphia says, choking on her own tongue. “Wanna sit?”
Jane blinks, because it’s such an unsettling mix of assertive and softness. It feels like such a set up, and Jane sighs, because if she was holding out any hopes for how this conversation might go, they’ve already been dashed. Still, she drops to the deck beside Nymphia.
Nymphia glances over as Jane settles in and wishes she wasn’t so beautiful. Her hair is spilling out over her shoulders in white-gold curls, and her eyes go crystal blue in the light, and she’s got some color in her cheeks like she’d spent all day in the sun. Nymphia buries her hands in the pockets of her hoodie just to keep from touching her - a privilege so recently earned and so suddenly forbidden.
There’s a tentative silence, like neither of them are sure how to go about this. How do you carry on after such a confession? How do you begin, knowing what happens next is about to cement it?
“How was your day?” Jane says nonchalantly, like she’s trying to draw this out as long as possible, delay what she probably already knows is coming.
Nymphia wants nothing more to answer her, to fall into what’s become routine - to take the weight out of their days by talking about it, to inch closer together over the course of a conversation. Still, she knows she can’t surrender to her desire to go about this like it’s okay, lest she should start to believe it.
“Listen, Jane,” Nymphia drops her head. She can’t look at Jane when she says it. She doesn’t need any more reason to give in. “I don’t know how you’re feeling about last night, but-”
“God,” Jane scoffs, and it’s such a distraction, such a side-stepping of everything Nymphia knows she doesn’t want to address. “So serious.”
“Sorry, I just-” Nymphia shudders at Jane’s voice, stung by its shrillness. “I think we need to talk.”
“You sound like me, you know,” Jane says, eyes flaring, laughing this short, pained laugh like she’s forcing it to sound funny. It doesn’t work. “This is the part where you let me down easy, right?”
Nymphia winces. “Jane.”
“Usually I’m on the other end of these things,” Jane rattles on. “Usually I’m the one telling some freak that they made me feel weird and it’s time to fuck off.”
Nymphia imagines Jane on the other end of unwanted affections from the sort of guys no doubt try to schmooze her at wine mixers or charity auctions or cocktail parties. Smart, clean, successful men willing to do whatever it takes to take her home, make her the standout trophy on their shelf of achievements. She imagines Jane turning all of them away, crinkling her nose at their attempts to woo her, unattracted to their desperation and aloofness and maleness. Nymphia wants to say this is nothing like that and you know it, because Nymphia isn’t anything like the men she imagines Jane has shooed away before. She doesn’t want to add Jane to her collection of beautiful things. She doesn’t want to conquer her, make her her own, build her a place to sit pretty inside of. She wants her in the most innocent way, wants to listen to her, wants to understand the depths of Jane in the way others could only guess at. She wants Jane to have everything she’s ever wanted, and if she’d allow her, Nymphia wants to be the one to give it to her. If only she could.
“You didn’t make me feel weird,” Nymphia says softly, and it’s nowhere close to what she really means, but it’s enough to silence Jane, to stop her self-defending flow of commentary. Nymphia finds it in herself to look up, and Jane is staring back at her, hanging on to every word with such uncertainty, with such obviously wavering hope.
“It’s not that at all,” Nymphia continues, a hot welt of guilt preemptively swelling inside of her. “But I think we both know that we can’t do this.”
“Mhm,” Jane hums, and she’s not meeting Nymphia’s eyes anymore. She just nods at her lap so immediately, as if to cover up all of the things that could show if she just hesitated - shame, disappointment, dejection.
“I think we both know that can’t happen again,” Nymphia reiterates through a shaky breath, and then she’s running through the bullet points she’d made in her head of all the reasons why. She’s sticking to her carefully considered script, because god knows what would happen should she stray and find herself saying the things she really wants to say. Insane, selfish, insatiable things like I didn’t kiss you right the first time, let me try it again. I’ve almost forgotten how your lips feel on mine. Remind me, I beg of you.
“...I think it’s for the best,” Nymphia finishes, except she’s looking at Jane and the sentiment feels so blatantly untrue.
Jane sits across from her, and all Nymphia can see is how trapped she is, how securely and unforgivingly she’s chained to the circumstances of her life. Nymphia knows how hard it must’ve been for Jane to summon the courage to kiss her, and how quickly she’s being sent back to where she’d started. She doesn’t want that for Jane, doesn’t want to be the one to send her back to an inner house so thoroughly enshrouded in shadow. Nymphia looks at Jane, and she knows none of this is for the better.
“Right,” Jane sets her teeth, something in her jawline flexing. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know, Jane,” Nymphia chokes just a bit, because there’s no script for this part. She’s improvising, and badly. Every argument feels weak, crumbly, wrong. “It’s just so complicated, there are so many reasons why-”
“Of course it’s fucking complicated,” Jane spits into Nymphia’s sentence. “Don’t you think I know that?”
Nymphia recoils at the sudden shift in Jane’s energy. First so evasive, and then so quietly ashamed, and now so hostile, like a caged animal being poked through the bars, claws colliding with steel. It’s almost impossible to believe that this is the same Jane who had stared up at Nymphia last night, eyes shining and sanguine as she’d whispered can I see you tomorrow?
“I live like this, Nymphia,” Jane’s voice wavers, and Nymphia’s heart breaks for her. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s not good for me either,” Nymphia shakes her head, clinging to the last shreds of her resolve. “I can’t take a step backwards. I owe that to myself, Jane. I can’t get involved in whatever this is and go back to hiding-”
Jane’s head snaps up, and Nymphia immediately feels like she’s made a critical misstep, like she’s given Jane just enough leverage to take her down.
“Have you told anyone?” Jane says plainly. Her eyes are an angry blaze.
Nymphia tries to pinpoint just what it is that is so fucking searing about Jane’s gaze. She’s reminded of a deep-sea creature she’d first heard of when she was stoned out of her mind in Xunami’s room, the both of them completely transfixed by some ocean special on TV. One of the exotic ones, weird and colorful in an obviously poisonous way, something that completely mesmerizes its prey before it stuns it and eats it whole.
Nymphia decides on this: Jane does her making sense of things right out in the open, dissects you up front and personal and makes no attempt to hide it. It’s intense, and it’s unforgiving, and this time it’s aimed so directly at Nymphia.
Jane’s eyes narrow, like she’s already pinpointed several weak spots in the time it’s taken Nymphia to recover from the shock of her stare, entry points through which she can completely and utterly dismantle her.
It’s the moment that the tamed, trusting thing remembers what it once did to survive.
“Did you tell your friends about that lighter you gave me?” Jane says, and her voice is low and venomous. “Did you tell them that you kissed me back?”
“No,” Nymphia says, mouth dry, stumbling through the space between them that has so quickly become a battleground. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“So you’re hiding. You’re hiding in that dark, shadowy corner, aren’t you?” Jane sneers, and it’s an attack, a deadly strike. “Don’t act so high and mighty, Nymphia.”
“Stop it,” Nymphia winces, already wounded. “Don’t be like that.”
“You’re not that different from me, you know,” Jane leans in, every word infused with toxins. “Can’t tell your little friends that you got off on kissing me, can you? What would they think about that?”
Every word finds its mark, hitting like daggers in Nymphia’s heart. The pain is enormous, immobilizing. There’s blood pooling at Nymphia’s feet, but it doesn’t distract her from who is reflected in it - Jane, mirrored in her own mercilessness. Nymphia might be scared, but she isn’t spineless. She isn’t so easily killed. She knows how to draw poison out of a wound, knows when she needs to spit it back.
“Maybe I hide my feelings,” Nymphia utters, low and surly. “But at least I don’t hide who I am.”
It’s enough to burn Jane, enough to finally make her pull back from Nymphia, but it doesn’t feel like relief. The distance that multiplies between them feels insurmountable, the pain that swallows the seeds of hope so recently sewn feels so irreversible. Jane’s eyes glitter like fresh wounds, and Nymphia feels just as bloodied.
“Whatever,” Jane grimaces, getting to her feet. “Have a nice life, Nymphia.”
Nymphia’s mouth ghosts open as Jane flees the scene. There are no words to reverse this - the wreck that’s disfigured them both. It’s no use trying. Even if she found a way to salvage this, even if they returned to the safety they’d so recently found, it would be fruitless. They may be in each other’s arms, but they’d still be stumbling through an active minefield, a war waged to tear them apart.
There’s no chance for loves like this one. They’re killed off before they’re strong enough to withstand the circumstances that created them.
-
Nymphia doesn’t let herself cry until Jane has already sped off in a cloud of dust kicked up by her spinning tires. She won’t give Jane the satisfaction.
Even when she’s alone, Nymphia feels ashamed of the hot tears sliding down her cheeks. She’d done the good thing, the right thing. She’d figured there would be some sense of satisfaction to follow the scraping clean of her soul, that it would be rewarding somehow, but it doesn’t feel like that at all. She’s sitting alone and sobbing into her hands. It feels like she’s been completely marred anyway.
-
The sun rises into Nymphia’s apartment.
It washes her bedroom with the same golden glow as it had the day before, that morning when she’d woken to a room warmed by rays of possibility, gentle reminders that she was real, that Jane was, and so were the impossible things that had come to pass between them. The sun seemed to testify that her waking hours could be better than her dreams, because everything she’d ever wondered at was more than mere imagination.
Today, the sunrise is a taunt.
It beams through the blocky tile of Nymphia’s bathroom window, splintering into oddly-angled beams, each one a cruel joke, an unrelenting reminder that the world hasn’t stopped for her.
There’s a sharp pang in her chest when she goes to put her hair up and catches sight of herself in the mirror. She washes her face, does her makeup and hates it, scrubs her skin clean and tries again. She goes to get dressed and is thankful for her all-black work wear, because she knows what would happen if she didn’t have it - she’d try on half a dozen shirts and dresses and long skirts, leaving them in an exasperated heap on the floor when none of them were quite right. Still, it doesn’t make much of a difference. She’s exhausted before she makes it to breakfast.
Nymphia knows she shouldn’t see Jane in all of these instances, but she does anyway. She pulls her hair up and wonders whether Jane likes it this way, or if she likes it better when it’s long and streaming down Nymphia’s shoulders. She fucks up her eyeliner and wonders whether Jane’s noticed that she’s been wearing it to work. She fumbles with the buttons on her work shirt and wonders if Jane likes her in black, or the purple of her favorite hoodie, or the faded gray of the t-shirt she’d worn on that first joyride around Lake Jupiter. She laces up her shoes and wonders if Jane’s noticed that she’d worn the same beat up yellow Converse every time they’d hung out.
She supposes that these things don’t matter very much anymore, and tries to stomach her toast.
-
Nymphia almost calls out of work, feigns some summer fever so she can shut the blinds and stew in her own sadness, but it’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining, and there’s a whole world out there, a world that is much bigger than Jane, and Nymphia has to meet it halfway. She’d promised herself that much.
In reward for her efforts, the universe grants Nymphia a few saving graces.
First, she’s spared an interrogation upon her arrival to work, because Xunami is unusually quiet from the other side of the host stand.
“I don’t think I’m gonna make it,” Xunami whispers direly. She’s clutching a mug of black coffee and looks like she might hurl into the wastebasket.
“Rough morning?” Nymphia raises an eyebrow. At least she’s not the only one.
“Mirage drank me under the table last night,” Xunami says, looking queasy at the mere mention of alcohol. She glances over, brow furrowing when she finds Nymphia looking just as nauseated. “What’s your excuse?”
Nymphia stares back at Xunami, but she hears Jane’s voice in her head. Can’t tell your little friends that you got off on kissing me, can you? She feels a soft sting of guilt for everything she swallows: that she’d started to like Jane in a way that was confusing for her, in a way that meant she’d bought her a gift and kissed her back and cried into her hands when they’d hurt each other.
“Just one of those days,” Nymphia says, because she likes Jane enough to do this for her - keep her secrets, even when she’s keeping her out. She wonders if Xunami can see the stubborn traces of Jane that she can’t forsake, the whispers of still wanting her somewhere in her eyes.
Maybe Xunami is going easy on her, or maybe she’s just too hungover to notice what Nymphia is leaving out, because all she does is hum.
“Something’s in the air today,” she says and sips her coffee. “I swear.”
“Yeah,” Nymphia says meekly. “Something must be.”
The restaurant swells with the first of the Saturday morning brunch crowd. Nymphia doesn’t mind. She’s eager to lose herself in the mindless refilling of mimosas, the small talk with regulars. Seat, serve, clear, repeat.
She hasn’t quite sorted out what she’s going to do should Jane appear at the restaurant today, and she’s trying to figure out how to get out of her usual serving section without raising any suspicion, but she doesn’t quite get the chance. It’s nine-thirty on the dot when Jane’s brother holds the door open, and Gigi comes floating in, impossibly polished and perpetually punctual.
Gigi is modelesque as ever in a cream blazer and mini skirt, and Nymphia is preparing for the gut-punch of who she thinks is going to be on her heels, but no one walks in behind them. It’s just Gigi and her fiancé, hand-in-hand as they make their way over to Nymphia.
“Hi gorgeous,” Gigi smiles, and Nymphia can’t help but feel undeserving.
Nymphia has wondered if Gigi’s had any inkling of what’s gone on between her and Jane, but this isn’t the greeting of someone who knows. Gigi’s looking at her with the same sparkling kindness she’s always offered Nymphia, and she’s wondering how she would treat her if she did know; would she call Nymphia out for corrupting her perfectly conventional soon-to-be sister in law? Would she ice her out altogether? Or would she stare at Nymphia with sad eyes, pitying her for falling for someone she couldn’t possibly have? She tries to imagine Gigi showing any semblance of cruelty, and shudders at the thought.
“Just us today,” Gigi smiles, and it’s the second saving grace to Nymphia’s Sunday. “Someone wouldn’t get out of bed this morning. You wouldn’t want her here anyways, darling, trust me. She can be such a grump when she wakes up…”
Nymphia winces and leads them over to their table. Jane’s brother is mumbling some she’s always been that way, even when we were little, and Nymphia is tuning it out, because she doesn’t need to imagine a young Jane shoving her kid brother off of her bed, or what Jane is like on any morning, or what exactly it is that’s made her so resolved to sleep in on this one.
Despite the world imploding unbeknownst around them, Gigi and her fiancé are as loved-up as ever. They hold absent-minded hands across the table while they drink coffee, and Nymphia is smiling before she can stop herself, because it’s exactly the sort of unnecessary sweetness that Jane would shoot her a secret glare over. Xunami gags at the gesture from the host stand, and Nymphia convinces herself that it’s just as good.
-
Brunch passes over the span of a few mind-numbing hours. Nymphia gets through it without breaking down, Xunami gets through it without throwing up, and then they’re sitting out back like they always do. Nymphia is counting her tips, and Xunami is wincing at the sun.
“Is it always this bright?” she shields her eyes. “I don’t think it’s ever been this bright, like, ever.”
“I think you’re just hungover,” Nymphia says, but, really, she’s wondering the same thing. Today, Nymphia hates the sun for shining. She wishes it was cloudy, gloomy enough to excuse her feeling as miserable as she does, a day that allows her to sit inside and sulk over every misstep that has led her to this moment, this heavy-laden guilt.
“I think you’re right,” Xunami rubs her temples. “Usually I’d ask to bum a cig, but I think it might make me puke to be honest with you. Had too many last night. Just tastes like regret.”
Nymphia starts for the pack at the bottom of her purse. Then she remembers the smoke still on Jane’s tongue when she’d kissed her at the end of the dock.
Suddenly, she thinks she’s going to be sick too.
-
You often don’t know how thoroughly entwined you are with someone until you go about untangling yourself from them. Nymphia is learning that the hard way.
It’s only been a few days since she and Jane had swapped words laced with poison at the covered bridge, and the ever-widening expanse between them has given Nymphia just enough room to catch her breath. Sure, the pain in Jane’s eyes as she’d had her venom spit back at her may be playing on a constant loop in Nymphia’s mind, but it’s not reason enough to make the world stop turning. Nymphia has already resolved to wrap that spool of desire back around herself. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfurled at her feet, or that the end is frayed. She has to do it anyway.
She’s gone back to her regular routine: waking up early, going to work, meeting up with Xunami to prank-call Dawn while she’s on front desk duty, meeting up with Dawn to pregame putting up with Mirage and Xunami’s bar antics. The usual.
There’s only a few minor changes. Almost insignificant, really. Nymphia takes longer showers now, turns water so hot that she can’t tell whether she’s crying or if it’s just scalding. She’s swapped her jazz records for Madonna or Kate Bush, and they haven’t quite made her feel better yet, but she thinks they might someday. She still bikes around town, just not past the covered bridge or the overlook or the docks behind Xunami’s house.
It should be impossible for Nymphia to have associated this many things with her so soon, but this is Jane, and this is the ever-stagnant Jupiter Beach, and these are the perfect components for Nymphia to lose her fucking mind.
The truth is that every morning Nymphia wakes up at the bottom of an insurmountable hill. Somehow, against all odds, she has to reach the summit. So she claws her way up, pulls her own weight with her bare hands, and she’s proud of herself when she reaches the peak. Really, she is. It's just that she looks down and her hands are full of rock and earth, all these things she’d picked up on the ascent and can’t put down. Fistfuls of things she wants to tell Jane about.
She wants to tell her about the way Gigi and Jane’s brother sit next to each other, like they can’t bear to be on opposite sides of the table for an hour and a half. She wants Jane to roll her eyes at it, call it disgusting and mean that it’s adorable. She wants to tell Jane about the boy with a skateboard who asked for her number at the corner store. She wants to hear Jane laugh about the way he blinked when Nymphia said he wasn’t her type. She wants to tell Jane about the song Nymphia heard at the bar, the one she thinks she would like, the one she wants to hear her sing along to.
They’re such inane, force-of-habit thoughts that had been formed in a matter of weeks, and Nymphia shudders to think just how far ahead of herself she’d gotten; all the way to the possibility that Jane could slot into that empty space in her life between Dawn and Xunami. Even still, she wants to tell Jane about this, now: Dawn and the stream of anxious musings from her mouth, so terrified at the prospect of asking Amanda out.
They get in line and Dawn goes completely, uncharacteristically silent. Nymphia follows her gaze to the cute blonde leaning out of the ice cream window. She’s got a wide smile beneath the bright orange brim of her cone-emblazoned work hat, and there are hot pink streaks at the end of her short ponytail (which impresses Nymphia just a bit - where does one even find hot pink hair dye in Jupiter Beach?) Amanda pops in and out of the window, enthusiastically taking orders and returning moments later bearing sundaes heaping with whipped cream and maraschino cherries. Nymphia looks back to Dawn, who’s all doe eyes and ringlet curls and looks so nervous that Nymphia’s heart aches for her.
She wonders if Jane was this nervous when she’d driven out to the docks a few nights ago, resolving to kiss Nymphia or forsake her forever. She wonders if she regrets it now. She wonders if she wishes Nymphia hadn’t been there, so unknowingly waiting for Jane to happen upon her.
The line moves forward, and Dawn glances over at Nymphia. She’s got this adorable purple vest and olive green shorts on, and keeps tightening her ponytail. “Walk me though it one more time?” she squeaks, sounding completely unsure of herself.
Nymphia looks at Dawn, shivering in the first unforgiving June heatwave, and feels guilty that she’d let anyone distract her from this. It doesn’t matter that Jane had looked a lot like she’d needed Nymphia then. It doesn’t matter whether or not Jane still needs her now, because Dawn needs her more.
“Okay,” Nymphia hones in. “We go up to order. You say hi and ask her what she’s up to later, and then you invite her to free-skate tonight.”
“Right,” Dawn nods, chewing nervously on her bottom lip. “But what if she’s busy? What if she, like, hates roller skating? What if she had a life altering roller skating incident in the sixth grade and is offended that I’d even ask?”
“I don’t think that’s the case, Dawnie,” Nymphia smooths back a stray curl that’s escaped Dawn’s ponytail. “The worst she can do is say no, right?”
Actually, the worst she can do is have a boyfriend and kiss you anyway, Nymphia thinks, but that’s not gonna happen to Dawn. Those sorts of heartaches are reserved just for her. Nymphia wouldn’t allow them on anyone else.
“Right,” Dawn says, then furrows her brow. “And what do I do if she does say no?”
The line moves forward again, and there’s a moment where the both of them hesitate, a little nervous to take the next step. Nymphia is pretty sure that life goes on when you let someone go. She hasn’t quite gotten to that part yet, but, for Dawn’s sake, she can make herself believe it. Just for her, Nymphia musters the most optimistic smile she can manage.
“Then we go home,” she squeezes Dawn’s hand. “And we’ll make you a drink and we’ll go to free skate anyway, alright? And we can make fun of Mirage and Xunami until you feel better. Does that sound okay?”
“Yeah,” Dawn says, one side of her mouth pulling into a half-hearted smile. “Sounds pretty good to me.”
They’re next in line, and Nymphia can see Amanda zipping around on the other side of the window. The nametag on her work shirt is plastered with stickers - a neon smiley face, a spaceship and a shooting star with a rainbow tail - and her nails are painted bright green. She’s this wonderfully vivid technicolor mess, a Lisa Frank amalgamation in the flesh.
“Next!” Amanda calls from the window. She’s a bit frazzled, or maybe she just looks that way, but she brightens as soon as Nymphia and Dawn step up to the window.
“Oh, hi!” Amanda’s gaze goes straight to Dawn, and Nymphia might as well not even be there. “I love your vest. Where did you find it?”
“Thanks! I, um,” Dawn stammers, stares down at her outfit like it’ll help her. “I got it at a rummage sale at the church actually, which isn’t, like, super cool, but, y’know, sometimes-”
“It’s so cool,” Amanda exclaims, face splitting into a toothy grin. “I thrift, like, everything I wear. It’s so much more fun than regular shopping. You never know what you’re gonna get, and you know no one else will have the same thing as you. Plus it’s cheaper. Which church was it? Are these rummage sales a regular thing? Be honest, am I going to have to fistfight someone’s grandma for the good stuff? Or is it a tame crowd? Do I have to pray the rosary beforehand?”
Nymphia blinks, almost taken aback by how freakishly perfect this is. At the very least, Amanda is a perfect match for Dawn’s mouth. She might give the redhead a run for her money.
“Sorry. Boss always says he doesn’t pay me for yapping. What a fucking dick,” Amanda stops herself a few spiraling sentences later. “Strawberry soft-serve with rainbow sprinkles, right?”
“Yeah,” Dawn chokes out. “That’s right.”
“You’re good,” Nymphia quips, a little impressed. “Do you remember all your customers’ orders?”
Amanda glances over, remembering for the first time that Nymphia is there, then beams. “Only my favorites.”
Dawn flushes hot pink. It’s the perfect opportunity, and Nymphia kicks Dawn where Amanda can’t see.
“Hey!” Dawn yelps, blinking profusely, voice high and shrill. “Um. What’re you doing later?”
“Nothing, probably,” Amanda groans. “I just moved in with my Aunt. She likes to watch westerns, y’know, and hey! I love a cowboy hat as much as the next girl, but I don’t think I can stomach another one of those movies, honestly. I would hang out with my friends, except I don’t have many yet. My coworker keeps asking me out and like, no offense, but ew. And I’m so out of his league anyway. I’m probably gonna clean my room, or pretend to clean my room and paint my nails instead. Whatever happens happens, honestly.”
Dawn’s mouth drops open, because this is the part where she asks Amanda out, but no words come out. She just stares, floundering. It’s not entirely her fault. Amanda doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for responses.
“It’s free-skate at the roller rink tonight,” Nymphia comes to Dawn’s rescue. “Definitely beats Westerns or whatever.”
“Fun!” Amanda smiles at Nymphia, then looks to Dawn. “Are you going?”
“Y-yeah!” Dawn stammers. “Nymphia and Xunami and Mirage are gonna come too, um, but I’m for sure gonna go-”
“Okay,” Amanda cuts in with a toothy grin. “Then I’ll be there.”
Dawn takes this surprised little inhale, and everything about her seems to brighten. She’s telling Amanda to meet them at eight, and Amanda is scooping ice cream and rambling about nothing in particular, and Dawn is laughing only a little too hard at the end of every sentence.
Nymphia watches, smiling soft and proud. She’s flooded by this strange sense of relief, and realizes a few things at once: Maybe Dawn needed Nymphia at this moment, but maybe Nymphia needed her just as badly. She needed this to work out for both of their sakes, because she really needed to see it for herself - tangible evidence that there’s love accessible to girls born and raised in Jupiter Beach. That it’s possible to find it. That all hope isn’t lost.
Someone behind them mutters under their breath that this is taking too long, and Nymphia glares over her shoulder, because no one is allowed to ruin this moment. Not for Dawn. Not for Nymphia, either.
“Oh my god,” Dawn whisper-screams when she finally walks away, soft serve threatening to melt over her hands. “I did it.”
“Fuck yeah you did,” Nymphia musses her hair, beaming all the same. “I knew you could!”
“Not without you,” Dawn says through her smile, eyes sparkling over at Nymphia.
“Nonsense,” Nymphia kisses her cheek. “All you needed was a lil’ push.”
“I can’t believe she said yes.” A disbelieving hand flies to Dawn’s forehead. “Did you see it? Do you think she likes me?”
“Trust me,” Nymphia winks. “You’ve got nothing to worry about with this one.”
Dawn yammers on all the way home and up the stairs to her bedroom, where she tears through her wardrobe and overthinks what to wear. Nymphia doesn’t interrupt her once, just sits back and soaks in the sweetness of it, because she knows this is how it’s supposed to be - pure, innocent, unpolluted adoration. She revels in it like it’s her own, wonders what it feels like.
She thinks she might’ve known, if only for a fleeting moment.
-
Nymphia loves this part - when the sun sinks into Lake Jupiter, a dark purple dusk settles over the town, and everything that hides from the sun emerges into the safety of the night.
They’re standing outside of the roller rink at 7:45 because Dawn insisted that they arrive early, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. The people are already streaming down from the top of the hill and tumbling through the doors in droves of neon and glitter and tightly laced high tops. There’s something quietly thrilling about this, something that feels so much like life that Nymphia can almost forget the halting of her world on its axis.
Sure, Nymphia is worn thin. She patched the threadbare, Jane-shaped spot in her heart with sweetness and forced outings under the sun. She may be sewn together by a few failing threads, but they’ll hold for now. She can feel the warmth of the rest of the world, can get a contact high just from being close to it. For tonight, Nymphia thinks that can be enough.
Beside her, Dawn cranes her neck looking for Amanda. She’s wearing shiny disco shorts over polka dot tights, a stack of rubbery bangles on each wrist, and her eyelids are sparkling with silver glitter that Nymphia had brushed on an hour earlier, whispering you’ve got this all the while. She’s eclectic and adorable, the sort of stylish that she saves for nights spent away from her parent’s eyes, and Nymphia will kill Amanda with her bare hands if she lets her down in the least.
It’s Xunami and Mirage who arrive first. Xunami’s got an enormous striped shirt unbuttoned over her gym shorts and tank top, looking so tomboy beside Mirage’s high-femme fantasy. She’s a vision in an electric green mini dress and platform sneakers that bring her right up to Xunami’s height. “Dawn,” Mirage chirps, dazzling and warm. “You look good!”
“She cleans up nice,” Xunami agrees, proud, one arm slung over Mirage’s shoulder. “Hey, where’s the other one?”
“She’s coming,” Dawn says quickly, then frowns. She crosses her arms, crumples in on herself ever so slightly. “At least she said she was.”
“Oh, she’ll be here,” Nymphia squeezes Dawn’s shoulder, turning proudly to Xunami and Mirage. “Trust me, Amanda was all eyes for this one earlier.”
“Atta girl,” Xunami grins, ruffling Dawn’s mop of curls. “I knew you had it in you.”
Mirage eyes Dawn carefully. “Nervous?” She says with an empathetic tilt of her head. She produces a flask from somewhere inside her fanny pack and holds it out towards Dawn. “A little liquid courage. You’ve earned it, babe.”
Dawn’s mouth twists as she thinks for a moment. “Alright,” she obliges. “Just a sip.”
Everyone cheers as Dawn tilts her head back and winces at the sting of straight liquor, and the ache in Nymphia’s heart is the closest it’s been to numb in the past three days.
It’s a few minutes past eight that Amanda comes running down the hill, holding her hot pink skates over her head.
“Sorry I’m late!” she exclaims, out of breath by the time she makes it over to the group. There’s no proper greeting, just some long-winded explanation that involves an incident with a flat iron and what was almost a house fire. It’s painfully endearing. Amanda’s short hair ends in hot-pink flips over the collar of her denim jacket, and Dawn looks like she could spontaneously combust at any second. Amanda goes straight for a bone-crushing hug, and Dawn practically does explode.
“Oh my god,” Amanda pulls away. “This is the first time you’re seeing my legs, isn’t it? Y’know, because I’m usually just a head on the other side of a window? They’re nice legs, don’t you think? Grew them myself. Sorry, I make bad jokes when I’m nervous. I guess I make bad jokes all the time…whatever, I think I’m funny! My god, you look adorable. I could literally eat you with a spoon. Is your hair naturally this curly? You’re so lucky…”
Amanda’s got one of Dawn’s curls in a gentle spiral around her pointer finger, and Dawn looks positively spellbound, a cat melting into an inviting palm. More than that, Amanda and Dawn have already melted into their own private universe. It takes a while for Dawn to realize that the rest of the world still exists, and then she’s introducing Amanda to the group, and Amanda is gushing over their outfits in extraordinary detail. Xunami shoots Nymphia a wide-eyed look somewhere in the middle of it, a wary what have we done?
Nymphia shrugs and takes a swig from Mirage’s flask, because it’s been hours of Dawn’s deliriously happy chattering, and she doesn’t think it’s going to end anytime soon. Still, she isn’t complaining. Amanda is pretty much everything Nymphia could ever want for Dawn. The evidence is right there, in Amanda’s mindless chatter and deep smile lines, like she’s eternally sunny. If it wasn’t so fucking adorable that they’d found each other so easily, Nymphia thinks she’d be seething with jealousy. She might be anyway, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re pushing through the double doors of the roller rink, and it’s exactly the kind of distraction she needs.
It’s a sort of dreamscape - curved counters in front of a full bar and concession stand, shelves full of rollerskates behind the front desk, benches with oodles of people double-knotting their laces and pulling up their leg warmers. The rink at the middle is illuminated under black lights and the spinning glitter of a disco ball. The whole thing is such a fever dream, something straight out of the quintessential American summer.
Amanda is characteristically mid-sentence when the first notes of Rio blare over the soundsystem. Dawn and Amanda gasp in perfect unison, and it’s almost too cartoonish to handle.
“Shut up,” Amanda whips around. “You listen to Duran Duran?”
“Oh,” Dawn says with this obscenely sarcastic obviousness. “I love Duran Duran.”
“You’re everything to me,” Amanda says. Then she’s grabbing Dawn’s hand and pulling her to her feet. “C’mon, we have to go dance about this. Or roll about it? Is it still dancing if you’re wearing roller skates? Dunno, who cares!”
The remaining three watch from the sidelines as Dawn is led away by Amanda, casting an impossibly wide grin over her shoulder.
“God, they’re a match made in fucking heaven,” Xunami groans as the rest of the group roll their way to the rink. “What are we gonna do with them?”
“I think it’s sweet,” Mirage smiles at the sight of Amanda leading a wobbly Dawn in slow laps. She glances over at Xunami. “Can you spin me in circles now?”
“Baby,” Xunami smiles, smug and smitten. “I’ll spin you any way you want.”
Nymphia rolls her eyes. She’s staring on a retort when Xunami’s gaze gets caught on something behind her. Nymphia glances over her shoulder and immediately wishes she didn’t, because there are two girls lacing up their skates at the center of the room.
Gigi is in a little polka-dot playsuit, looking every bit like the love interest in a music video for some yearny ballad about an it-girl the lead singer is doomed to pine over for the rest of eternity. She throws her head back in this glossy blonde wave of laughter because Jane is sitting next to her and saying something apparently hilarious. Jane. Jane wearing these light wash denim jeans and tight off-the-shoulder top, and Nymphia feels like she needs to sit down. She’s got this sarcastic grimace on her face like she’s just made fun of someone, and it’s a joke Nymphia desperately wants to be in on.
“What?” Mirage asks, a whirl of deep brunette waves around her face. “What are we looking at?”
“See the blonde on the bench at 11 o’clock?” Xunami says with a subtle tilt of her head. “That’s Jane.”
“Jane,” Mirage repeats, then looks to Nymphia. “Your Jane?”
“Just Jane,” Nymphia mutters.
It’s not possible that Jane can hear her, but Nymphia could swear she does, because Jane glances up just then. Her eyes lock with Nymphia’s, and the world might as well end right now. Jane freezes, looks like she’s caught on barbed wire. The hole that Nymphia’s patched up inside herself springs several leaks at once.
“God, she is pretty,” Mirage frowns. “I think I get it now.”
Nymphia hums a little too quickly. “We’re gonna miss the song.”
She doesn’t wait for a reply, just pushes past her friends. Mirage casts a lingering look after her, then glances over at Xunami like she’s expecting an explanation.
“Don’t ask me,” Xunami says, looking uncomfortably lost. “I have no fucking clue.”
Mirage looks once more in Jane’s direction and finds her staring after Nymphia, this thousand-yard look of hurt on her face. Gigi nudges at her and that look dissolves in an instant, but it doesn’t matter. Mirage has gathered everything she needs to know.
-
Everything is fine. Everything is perfect, even.
Dawn and Amanda have hit it off. They’re gliding hand-in-hand around the rink, neither of them particularly coordinated. They’re oblivious to everyone who has to skate around them while they’re screaming about a song, or when Amanda stops to say bend your knees, there you go! Dawn flies into a wall or goes tumbling to the ground anyway, and over and over Amanda just smiles this wide, toothy smile and helps her to her feet.
Mirage is a fucking natural. She’s whizzing around the rink with all the elegance of an Olympic figure skater, and Xunami’s stopped trying to keep up with her. She’s coasting alongside Nymphia, making snide remarks about Dawn’s clumsiness and stumbling over her own feet just the same.
Perfect pop songs are playing back-to-back while the rink fills up with beautiful people, and it should be enough to distract Nymphia from the one girl gliding amidst them. It should be, but it isn’t.
Gigi and Jane are the center of everything. They laugh through their laps around the rink, and people float out of their path as though innately aware of their otherworldliness. It’s one of several universally understood truths, like gravity or electromagnetism; Gigi and Jane are the sort of exceptionally beautiful, blissfully unaffected people that can’t be interfered with, the kind that Jupiter Beach is graced with once every few summers. Their orbiting around the roller rink is like a celestial event, the closest that the Sun and Moon will ever be to the Earth for the next hundred years. The sort of thing people only ever catch glimpses of through decidedly terrestrial telescopes.
They are the shining stars of the night, and Nymphia feels blinded.
She’s squinting through their solar flares, dropping her head every time Jane ghosts past her, scared that just a glimpse of her will do irreversible damage. Nymphia had stared right at her once, and nothing has been the same since. Even when she closes her eyes, Jane is there, stubborn floaters that cloud her vision.
Still, you can’t quite look away from something like Jane.
She’s a shooting star that races Gigi across the length of the floor, or goes shrieking across the sky when Gigi is skating backwards and dragging Jane along with her. And every time Nymphia’s instinctual gazing after Jane aligns so unfavorably with Jane’s happening upon her, there’s this flicker in the blonde’s eye that trigger’s Nymphia’s fight or flight - the look of a domesticated creature remembering its wildness.
That rush of relief Nymphia had felt for Dawn and Amanda sours into something like rage, jealous that they have stumbled into the first fluorescent stages of falling in love so easily. Nymphia can’t seem to find her place here, or anywhere for that matter. She’s angry that she’s spent all of Jane’s absence trying not to wonder where she was, and she’s angry that she’s reappeared in a place that gives Nymphia no choice but to orbit around her. She’s angry that the whole thing turns her into the worst version of herself; the Nymphia that doesn’t tell her friends what's going on, the Nymphia who recedes into darkened corners of herself, the Nymphia who Jane might have been right about after all.
Nymphia can’t stop her shuddering each time Jane eyes her from the other side of the room. She’s not being subtle, and Xunami’s mouth is opening to ask her what the fuck is going on, and then the first notes of Tainted Love emanate across the floor.
“Nymph-”
“I love this song,” Nymphia cuts Xunami off. “Don’t you love this song?”
“Yeah, but-”
Xunami is cut off when Dawn and Amanda fling themselves in front of them, practically falling over their feet. Dawn is reaching out to take Nymphia’s hands, screaming dance with me, and Nymphia is swept out of her sinking ship.
She lets Dawn drag her towards the center of the floor, shrieking as she’s spun in wide circles. The room dissolves into flashes of color and squares of light, and all that Nymphia knows is Dawn’s outstretched hands holding on to hers. That is until Dawn lets go, and Nymphia goes spinning out of orbit.
She’s flung across the slick floor. She’s shooting out at the speed of light, and then there’s a sickening rip as her right foot catches on something and tears itself away. Nymphia’s on her back in an instant, breathless and vaguely aware of the shooting pain in her elbow. She winces when she leans up on her palms, and her friends are crowding her almost immediately, but she isn’t looking at the hands they offer to help her up. She can barely see through the stars spinning across her vision, but she can make this out just fine:
Jane, flat on her ass and reaching for her shin.
All at once there’s a mild pandemonium. A collective murmur rises from the closest spectators, and Gigi is gliding over and reaching for Jane.
“Oh, Janey. Let me-“ Gigi starts, and then she goes concerningly pale. “You’re bleeding.”
Everything in Nymphia goes cold. It’s not just because there’s a streak of crimson that’s starting to seep through the knee of Jane’s blue jeans. Jane isn’t paying much attention to that. It’s really the way that she’s looking at Nymphia.
Jane has this dreadful grimace, this recognition of something you cannot ignore. All it takes is one look for Nymphia to know that Jane is in the same sort of soul-splitting, deep blue bruise of agony she’s in.
The moment, whatever it is, gets lost in the cacophony. Gigi is mumbling something about the blood, eyelashes fluttering, looking every bit like she’s about to join them in falling to the ground, and there’s a small crowd of people gathering around them. Someone’s got a first aid kit, and some guy is trying to help Jane up, and she’s smacking his hand away and growling don’t fucking touch me.
Someone’s got their hand on Nymphia’s shoulder and is asking if she’s okay, but she isn’t listening. She’s too busy watching Jane’s eyes dart around the room, frantic and afraid, looking for something and coming up empty. Nymphia is waiting for the moment that someone comes to Jane’s rescue, a silver screen starlet whisked away from tabloid reporters and flashbulbs. Someone should be there, except there’s no leading man on a white horse to sweep her to safety. Even Gigi, the closest Jane’s got to a best friend, is looking all too unequipped to help her. Sure, there’s people who want to help, but, really, there’s no one at all. No one who can make it past Jane’s defenses. Nymphia watches her, all snarls and crimson nails and bared teeth, and can’t see anything but the panic underneath - desperate, like a wild animal too cornered to cry for help.
Nymphia doesn’t hear the voice that’s asking her if she’s okay. She’s already working her skates off, already getting to her feet. She’s already brushing bystanders away, already hearing her own voice say:
“I’ve got her.”
Nymphia hardly registers the voice as her own. By the look on Jane’s face, she doesn’t either. She glances up through her curls and Nymphia can see the moment her breath hitches, this panicked recognition alight behind her eyes.
There’s no time to linger on what it means. Nymphia needs to get her out of here.
“Can you stand up?” Nymphia says.
Jane pauses just long enough for Nymphia to think she might refuse her help, gnash her teeth and claw her hand away. And then Jane’s lips ghost shut, and there's this strange and reluctant acquiescence hardening her features.
And then Jane reaches up and takes Nymphia’s outstretched hand.
Jane gets up in a flash of blonde curls and pale limbs, hissing when she bends her knee. There’s this moment where all Nymphia knows is the warmth of Jane’s palm in hers, the weight where she leans into her. Everything comes back. And then the rest of the world does, too.
The music seems louder than it had before, and the lights are spinning in their eyes, and there are so many people. Nymphia is pushing through bodies, waving them off with her free hand and impatient glares. She’s leading Jane off of the rink and over
to the locker room. She’s lost track of her friends, because all she can pay attention to are these sharp little whines that catch in the back of Jane’s throat when she bends her bloodied knee, and it’s like she’s trying to swallow the sound. She’s clutching Nymphia so tightly her fingers almost touch on either side of her forearm, and Nymphia definitely hasn’t thought this through, and she has no idea what she’s going to to when she actually has Jane alone-
“Oh my god,” Dawn trills, tottering behind them. “I am so sorry.”
Nymphia winces, because she can feel Jane tensing against her, and she thinks she knows exactly how this is going to play out.
“Don’t be sorry.” Nymphia tries to say it softly, but her jaw is clenched as she bee-lines for the locker room. It’s a gentle, considerately sent message, but it’s a message nonetheless. Dawn doesn’t seem to get it.
“No it’s not, I’m such a klutz, my hand just slipped and…” Dawn pales, wide-eyed at the blood seeping through Jane’s jeans. “Ohmygod, are you okay?”
Like a cartoon, Amanda magically appears from somewhere behind them. Nymphia can practically hear Jane grinding her teeth as they round the corner with Dawn and Amanda on their heels.
“How bad is it?” Amanda asks, well-intended and all too soon. “God, you don’t need an ambulance, do you?”
“We’re good, thanks,” Jane says, her tone ice cold. Nymphia eases her onto a bench and shoots her a warning glance on the way down.
“I have first-aid training!” Dawn chatters her way into dangerous territory. Nymphia thinks she knows what’ll happen next, and she’s eye to eye with Jane, willing her to let it go. “Well, actually, I’m a Red-Cross-Certified babysitter, I don’t know if that counts, but I can-”
Jane doesn’t even give her the courtesy of finishing her sentence.
“I think you’ve done enough,” she snaps, viperine.
Silence.
Dawn looks like she’s been slapped across the face. She’s bright red and shellshocked, mouth frozen mid-word. Amanda looks at her, then looks at Jane like she’s vowing to hate her forever. Nymphia just turns towards Jane, horrified beyond measure.
All at once, everything splits open.
“What the fuck is your problem?” Amanda explodes. She steps towards Jane, and Nymphia thinks she’s going to have to patch the both of them up after this.
“What’s my problem?” Jane fires back, looking all too entertained. She starts for her feet, actually smiling at the opportunity. “Okay. Let me start with your-”
“Jane,” Nymphia hisses and shoves her back down to the bench. Jane huffs through her teeth, puffing a blonde curl out of her face.
Dawn is still staring open-mouthed at Jane, her lips starting at the shapes of words but not quite landing on any in particular. Nymphia gently takes her by the shoulders.
“This isn’t your fault, alright? I’m going to deal with this. I’ll meet you in a few minutes, I promise,” Nymphia says, as reassuring as possible. She turns to Amanda and god - if looks could kill, Jane wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Go check on Gigi, will you?” Nymphia urges, trying to get something, anything past Amanda’s fury. “I think she might need some water. Please, Amanda.”
Dawn’s eyes are alight with panic when Amanda finally concedes. She turns her away with an arm over her shoulder and one deathly glare over her shoulder. Nymphia sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and trying to figure out what the fuck just happened to the last decent night she’s had in recent memory.
“God, who’s the new girl?” Jane scoffs, voice bitter and branding. “What a fucking freak. I don’t care if the little one is your friend, if I need stitches I’m sending the bill straight to-”
“Don’t you ever fucking snap at my friends like that,” Nymphia whips around. “Do you hear me?”
Jane scoffs, bitter and deflective. “All I’m saying is that she’s badly coordinated-”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Nymphia bites. “She didn’t do this to you. I did. If you’re going to be mad at anyone, be mad at me.”
Jane opens her mouth at that, but Nymphia doesn’t give her the chance.
“I was going to offer to look at your leg,” Nymphia says, already turning away because she can’t really stand the sight of Jane right now. “But I think I’d better find someone else who can put up with your bullshit, Jane.”
“No, I-” Jane huffs, thin and frustrated. “No one else.”
There’s this hair-raising desperation to Jane’s voice, and Nymphia so desperately wants to be immune to it. She winces at the sound and how instantly it pierces straight through to that tender spot at her center. She should go running, should leave Jane to clean up her mess all alone, and she’s already halfway towards the door until:
“I want you to look at it,” Jane says from behind her, soft and defeated and ashamed. “Please.”
Nymphia pauses, closing her eyes and inhaling deep. She hears the rest of the world from around the corner - the music, the people, a telephone ringing. She imagines that everything is righting itself out there, that everyone is picking up where they’d left off and carrying on. There might be a universe where Nymphia joins them, a universe in which Nymphia leaves Jane to bleed alone on a bench in a locker room.
There might be a universe in which Nymphia leaves Jane behind, but it isn’t this one.
Silently, she crosses the room and crouches to the floor in front of Jane, thinking all the while of the delicate balance they’d found themselves suspended in for the first four weeks of the summer. It feels so unstable now, the scales so permanently tipped out of their favor. Of all the mess they’ve managed to make out of such a miraculous thing, it’s this - the red spot blooming from the knee of Jane’s blue jeans - that seems to be the only thing Nymphia knows how to clean up.
So she reaches for the cuff of Jane’s blue jeans. She pauses, fingers hovering. “Can I roll this up?”
Jane just nods, her eyes wide and her shoulders low.
Nymphia fumbles with the fabric. Neither of them break the silence for a moment.
“M’sorry,” Jane finally mumbles. It’s less than a whisper, barely audible, hardly a word at all.
“They were just trying to help,” Nymphia shakes her head, disappointed in Jane. She watches her hands moving gingerly up Jane’s calf and feels a bit disappointed in herself too. She grinds her teeth together, tries to make herself incrementally smaller.
Jane winces, fabric sticking to the wound. She doesn’t say anything more, and Nymphia wonders what exactly Jane had been apologizing for: what she’d said to Dawn, or what she’d said to Nymphia some nights ago, or something else entirely. Nymphia doesn’t think it matters anymore, she’s too angry to care.
Nymphia sucks air through her teeth when she uncovers the gash on Jane’s shin.
An angry slash, cold and cruel. It cuts right across the smooth porcelain of Jane’s skin, and it cuts right through Nymphia’s anger, too.
“Got you good, didn’t I?” Nymphia murmurs.
Jane goes quiet for a long moment.
Nymphia glances up, finding herself here again - at Jane’s altar, nursing her wounds and saying things that are so softhearted, caring for her like she’s done it all her life, like she knows there’s no one else who could do the job right. Like she knows there’s no one else.
“Where is he tonight?” Nymphia asks evenly. “Too cool for free skate?”
She doesn’t have to elaborate. There’s no other man she’d be asking about. She isn’t sure why she’s asking - whether she’s punishing Jane or whether she’s punishing herself.
“I don’t have to do everything with him, do I?” Jane says before Nymphia’s even finished asking the question. Her eyes squeeze shut immediately after, as though she knows she’s probably blown the whole thing already. It’s a few more seconds before she exhales, eyes still shut, Nymphia’s hands still moving over her, and eases into the silence again.
“He doesn’t like these sorts of things,” Jane says, eyes still shut.
“What sorts of things?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Jane says. “Fun things.”
“Must be hard for you,” Nymphia hums. She wants so badly for it to come off sarcastic, but it’s underscored with this unmistakable sympathy.
Jane shrugs. “Sometimes I don’t let myself do fun things either.”
Nymphia thinks of all the times she’d half-expected to run into Jane over the past few days and hadn’t. She imagines her shut up in the house instead, a self-imposed purgatory.
“It’s ironic that this happened, actually,” Jane smiles at her lap. “It feels like this is the first time I’ve done anything in days. I’ve been clawing at the fucking walls to be honest with you. I told Gigi I needed to get out, y’know? I haven’t been able to catch my breath since-”
She stops herself in the middle of her self-revealing sentence. Nymphia knows where it would’ve gone. She knows the ever-widening expanse between her and Jane has been like a punctured lung, unable to inflate on its own. For days it’s felt like she’s gasping for air, and by the way Jane can’t manage to finish her sentence, Nymphia thinks Jane is just as oxygen deprived.
“I’m sorry,” Jane apologizes for the second time; stronger, more sincere than the first. “For all those things I said the other night.”
Nymphia fumbles through the first aid kit.
“I was just hurt,” Jane says.
“I know,” Nymphia rips open an alcohol wipe. “It's fine.”
“I shouldn't have come after you like that.”
“S’alright, Jane,” Nymphia says. “This might hurt, okay?”
Jane hisses when Nymphia wipes around the edge of the wound. “Sorry,” Nymphia says with every gentle dab. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Jane just looks down at her, silently endeared through her own pain, because here Nymphia is, mending her wounds, apologizing for hurting her as she undoes the hurting thing, even when Jane’s done so much worse than mar her body.
“Can I see you again?”
Nymphia scoffs, goes for a pack of gauze. “Jane.”
“It’s so fucking exhausting staying away from you, Nymphia.”
Jane says it so plainly, so blatantly, and it’s like another wound has been ripped open. A fleshy mass in the middle of Jane’s chest, raw and wet and infected. Nymphia is so caught off guard by the gore of it, the viscerality.
“It’s too hard. Keep coming up with things I want to tell you about.” Jane says. She glances down and watches Nymphia press gauze against the bleeding. She hopes it never stops, hopes that Nymphia keeps one hand on her for the rest of time.
“Sometimes I just get so angry, and I’ll catch myself thinking that it’ll be okay because I can see you later,” Jane goes on, sounding so increasingly strung out, the words getting smaller in her mouth. “I hate this. I hate not talking to you.”
Nymphia looks up, locks eyes with Jane, and it’s like she can feel her fucking heartbeat against her hand. She goes to shove the feeling away, but all at once it feels pointless. She’s been swallowing her words for three days now, and she doesn’t think she can stomach any more. Besides, Jane might be the only person in the world who might actually understand them.
“There’s not a moment that I’m not thinking about you,” Nymphia says, and it feels like the sort of confession most people relinquish to darkened booths in churches with their faces hidden behind screens. Nymphia does it here - in the back room of the roller rink, face to face with Jane. “I don’t want it to be like this. You know I don’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be, does it?” Jane says. “Can’t we just see each other again?”
“I don’t know, Jane,” Nymphia sighs. She drops one bloodied swathe of gauze to the ground and goes for another. “Maybe with rules.”
“Rules?” Jane snorts. “You fucking hate rules.”
“I know I do,” Nymphia rolls her eyes. “But your life has a lot of them.”
“Right,” Jane toes the ground with her good leg. “Look how well that’s working out for me.”
Nymphia presses a fresh dressing to Jane’s shin, her fingertips just grazing the back of her calf. It’s only a brush, but it’s enough to remind her how close she is, enough to resuscitate the throbbing thing that pulses beneath everything else.
Nymphia goes quiet, asks anyway. “Do you love him?”
“Sometimes I think I could,” Jane chews on her cheek. “But I think if I loved him properly then I wouldn’t be thinking about kissing you and stuff.”
Just an utterance of the kiss from Jane’s lips gives air to this thing Nymphia has been trying to suffocate. This single-minded thing that she’s shamed into silence, the thing Jane had permissed to speak freely, and now repeats over and over Jane, Jane, Jane. Nymphia can’t get it to shut up, can’t bury it where she won’t hear it echoing.
“I don’t know if it’s that simple,” Nymphia shakes her head. “I can’t be your experiment. I’m not your little foray into women. Or feelings. I’m not the answer to some question you have-”
“I know you aren’t,” Jane cuts in with this unfathomably sincere whisper, like she can’t bear to listen to Nymphia explain any of it away, diminishing it to the nothingness she thinks it must be. “Don’t you think I know you aren’t? Do you think I’d kiss you and not know what it meant?”
“How could you possibly know?” Nymphia scoffs, hating how automatic it is, how instantaneously she goes to deny herself any chance of Jane happening to her.
“Because I like you, Nymphia,” Jane says, voice fluttering and afraid, this exhilarated little rush in the middle. “I like you so much.”
Nymphia’s head snaps up.
“Don’t say that,” she whispers. Quietly, only to herself, don’t do this to me.
“I do, though. I've liked you since you started making fun of me on the walk back to my car, remember?" Jane smiles at the memory, her teeth glittering under the fluorescents. “Since you flipped off that guy in the gas station.”
“Jane,” Nymphia pleads. It’s a pitiful, half-hearted attempt. She silently begs that Jane doesn’t heed it.
“When did you start liking me?” Jane asks.
“Jane.”
“You do like me, don’t you?”
Nymphia looks up at Jane from the floor, mouth hovering open, because there’s no word big or dangerous enough for what she feels for her.
Jane’s hair is haloed in the overhead lights, and she’s staring down at Nymphia with these desperately tender eyes, and Nymphia can hardly stand the enormity of it. It’s the biggest feeling she’s ever had, this chest-splitting ardor that splits every seam, undoes every self-restricting stitch.
“Since the car ride,” Nymphia hears herself saying, the words pulled from her by some strange magic. “Since Sweet Jane.”
“I knew I liked you then,” Nymphia whispers, because for all the feelings she’s felt and feigned for Jane, she hasn’t done what she really wants with them - admit them, offer them, even if they can’t be accepted.
Jane is pressing down on her gauze while Nymphia tapes around the edges, and their fingers keep brushing. Nymphia wants to take Jane’s hand, kiss the pad of each finger and linger on the swell of each knuckle. She wants to kiss the tender center of her hands and absolve her of every hurt she’s ever held, every tear she’s ever cried into her palms.
“Y’know all that stuff we said about hiding?” Jane swallows, and her fingers are ghosting over Nymphia’s knuckles, like she could take her hand at any moment. “I don’t wanna hide from you. It feels like you’re the only one who’s ever found me.”
Nymphia’s eyes are wet with tears and threatening to spill over for several reasons at once: she’s never hated herself for wanting something so bad, and she’s never wanted something as much as she wants Jane. Nymphia always had this unmatched capacity for adoration, the likes of which has never quite been returned to her in full. The thing that's getting her right now is that somewhere behind the stone-blue of Jane’s irises, beyond the fear and the facade, she swears she can recognize that thing she’s only ever seen in herself - Jane’s heart coming out of its hiding place, surfacing just behind her eyes.
“You don’t have to hide,” Nymphia whispers. “Not from me.”
“No?” Jane says, and there’s that smile - that tiny, relief of a smile.
“No,” Nymphia shakes her head.
Jane is reaching down to trace her jawline and Nymphia swears she could lean up to kiss her now, thinks she might, but she wants one more moment of this - one more moment of Jane looking like she’s gotten everything she wanted. All the rest, all the broken pieces are forgotten.
-
It’s only moments later that they hear footsteps.
Jane withdraws her hand like she’s touched something hot. Nymphia misses the feeling of her immediately and fumbles things back into the first aid kit.
Gigi rounds the corner with one hand shielding her eyes. “Are you decent?”
Nymphia turns, wipes the tears from her bottom eyelashes. “All cleaned up!” she calls back, her voice this put-on, uneven artifice.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Gigi sighs, hand falling away from her face in a near-theatrical display of relief. She’s rushing over in an instant, one pitying, perfectly-manicured hand flying to Jane’s shoulder. “You poor thing,” she clicks her tongue, and Nymphia almost laughs at the sympathy.
“Geeg,” Jane rolls her eyes, but otherwise accepts the consolation.
“I promised your mother that I’d get you home in one piece,” Gigi pouts at the bandaging on Jane’s leg. “Now look what’s happened!”
Jane cracks a smile at that. Maybe it’s the melodramatics. Maybe it’s that she’s managed to preemptively piss off her mother. She’s smiling - that’s all that matters to Nymphia.
“Whaddya think, doc?” Jane nods down at Nymphia. “Will I ever walk again?”
Nymphia blinks, because she isn’t as used to this as Jane is - the snapping back into place, slipping into the role she’s supposed to play. She’s still a little alarmed at their proximity, still caught on the way Jane’s smile reaches her eyes, still lingering in the last private moment they’d shared.
“You’ll be just fine,” Nymphia chokes out, mustering a dazed smile. She’s still crouched on the floor, a little too stunned to move and not sure where she’d go if she did. Better to stay still, lest she should stand and give in to the magnetism that’s drawing her back to Jane.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t more useful back there, you know I’m no good with…” Gigi goes on, lashes fluttering when she catches sight of the bloodied gauze on the tile floor. All the color that’s managed to return to her face flickers ever so slightly. “Messes.”
“S’alright, Geeg.” Jane gingerly tugs the leg of her jeans over the bandage. She catches Nymphia’s eyes on the way down, some secret message glittering there. “I’m in good hands.”
Nymphia’s heart leaps, a little thrilled and a little afraid, because it all seems so obvious, so close to flirtation - all their adoration out in the open, so thinly veiled under the guise of a budding friendship, so close to the truth.
“Oh, Nymphia,” Gigi coos, hands clasped together. She leans down and presses a kiss to the top of Nymphia’s head. “You’re a saint.”
And, well. Maybe it isn’t so close to the truth after all.
-
“And your friends!” Gigi exclaims at the other end of a long-winded sentence. Nymphia can’t quite remember where it had started. “What angels. I mean, really, just so wonderful.”
“Right,” Jane rolls her eyes as they round the corner. “Angels.”
“Especially that little redheaded one. I told her I didn’t need looking after, but she was insistent. What a sweetheart,” Gigi chatters on. She pauses, frowns. “Although you didn’t seem to make a great impression, Janey.”
Jane glances across the room to where Nymphia’s friends are huddled around a high top. A frazzled looking Dawn is tucked under Xunami’s arm, and Amanda, like she already has a sixth sense for smelling out her sworn enemy, turns her head to scowl at Jane.
“Yeesh,” Jane grits her teeth.
“You might consider apologizing,” Gigi says pointedly. Jane grimaces.
Nymphia glances over at her friends. Immediately she knows it’s a lost cause. Amanda is muttering something under her breath, and Dawn looks entirely shell-shocked. Mirage’s mouth puckers when she catches Nymphia’s stare, and she leans over to whisper something in Xunami’s ear.
“Um,” Nymphia frowns as Xunami slashes over her neck in a frantic don’t even think about it. “It might be better if you let the dust settle, actually.”
“Shame,” Jane says, voice dripping sarcasm. “I was just about to stick them with the dry cleaning bill. These jeans are Ralph Lauren, you know.”
Gigi rolls her eyes, insists that a little hydrogen peroxide should do the trick and that there might be some back at the house, which Nymphia interprets as her extremely polite way of saying we really should be going now. Even in her annoyance, Gigi is something like an angel, all etiquette and charm. Nymphia has to wave away another handful of her thank you’s, feeling wholly undeserving.
Just before Gigi rushes her out of the room, Jane turns. She’s got her fingertips at Nymphia’s wrist, and her whole body floats up to the feather-light touch.
“Tomorrow?” Jane asks. Casual, like it isn’t the walking back of every hurtful word they’d exchanged just days prior, like the two of them returning to their time alone together isn’t the ultimate risk.
“You can fill me in on everything I missed,” Jane says, eyes flashing the tiniest rays of hope.
Gigi is smiling politely behind Jane like this is all so absolutely charming and not in the least bit catastrophic, and Nymphia can’t believe they’re getting away with this.
“Yeah,” Nymphia nods, body electrified and adrenal. “Tomorrow.”
Blink and you’d miss it, this tiny, excited little inhale that Jane takes, the light of something to look forward to returning to her eyes. For Nymphia, that makes it all worth it.
-
When Nymphia finally reunites with her friends, she has to put out a few small fires.
Dawn is looking positively dejected. Xunami’s got a protective arm around her, and Mirage is smoothing down her curly hair, and Amanda’s got her arms crossed, mouth running one fiery statement after another. They’re supposed to be reassuring, but Nymphia thinks they might just be making things worse.
Nymphia has to reassure Dawn several times that she wasn’t seriously injured in the fall, several more times that the whole thing isn’t her fault. Even then, Dawn asks about Jane.
“Who cares?” Amanda groans from beside her. Nymphia winces.
“Jane’s gonna live,” she says, feeling almost guilty for it, like she’d made some grave error in patching her up. She might’ve been tending to Jane’s wounds, but it feels like she’s got the blood of Dawn’s perfect night on her hands.
“I’m sorry she snapped at you,” Nymphia says towards Dawn, head still hanging low. Nymphia knows what it’s like to be at the other end of Jane’s sharp tongue. She’s spent days recovering from it. “I chewed her out for it, I promise you.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re actually friends with her, Nymphia,” Amanda huffs, arms crossed over her chest. “You’re, like, way too nice to keep such poor company.”
Nymphia bites her tongue to hold back a new reflex - the urge to defend Jane, even when she doesn’t deserve it. Somehow, it feels like she’d be defending herself too.
She can feel three sets of eyes on her - Amanda and Xunami’s imploring stares, like they need Nymphia to spell it out for them but don’t know how to ask. Mirage, innately aware of something Nymphia doesn’t have a name for yet. Nymphia ignores all of it. She just crouches down in front of Dawn, tries to find a way through to her.
“Hey. Don’t let Jane ruin your night, alright?” Nymphia squeezes her hand. “You’ve got a cute girl who looks like she wants to skate with you.”
Amanda perks up at that. “If we tried, I think we could take out the rest of the skaters. Like bowling pins.”
She shoots Nymphia this little smile, and it feels like they’re on the same side again, and Nymphia desperately tries not to think about when exactly she’d crossed over enemy lines. She just smiles back and turns her attention to Dawn. “Can’t leave Amanda hanging, can you?”
Finally, somewhere beneath her red curls, there’s a hint of a smile on Dawn’s face.
“That would be pretty rude of me, wouldn’t it?”
“Extremely,” Amanda says. “Come skate with me, or else I’m gonna have to go slash Jane’s tires.”
“She sounds serious, Dawn,” Xunami nods, an encouraging pat on Dawn’s back. “You’d better go. I’m not bailing Amanda out of jail.”
Dawn really doesn’t need that much convincing. It’s not long before she gets to her feet and rolls back towards the rink hand-in-hand with Amanda. Only a few people make attempts to stay out of their path. Otherwise, the earlier events are almost forgotten. Nymphia smiles after them, thinking that she’s managed to undo every damage that’s been done, that maybe this makes up for-
“You okay?”
Nymphia turns and finds Xunami staring back. At her.
“Yeah,” Nymphia frowns. All at once she can feel the forgotten pain radiating up her right arm. In all the commotion, all the putting other people back together, she seems to have forgotten about herself. She mumbles something about icing her elbow later.
Xunami raises one unconvinced eyebrow, like she knows there’s something amiss, something Nymphia keeps managing to leave out.
“She didn’t chew you out too, did she?”
It’s not a terrible guess, but it’s still so far from what really happened that Nymphia feels horrifically, utterly guilty. She knows she’s been given too much grace, that she’d been entrusted to tell her friends if anything monumental was happening to her. Xunami has let so much slide, and now she’s just bore witness to the sort of celestial collision that alters the very air itself, and now here’s Nymphia, saying nothing about it.
“If Jane gave you shit for this, Nymphia, I swear to god, I really will slash her tires,” Xunami threatens while Mirage clicks her tongue. “You know I’d do it better than Amanda would. I’d be real discreet about it-”
“She didn’t!” Nymphia interjects. It comes out much more concerned than she expected, and Xunami looks a little alarmed. Nymphia goes to elaborate, but doesn’t know how. Every word seems to lead inevitably to the secret heart of what just happened - Jane split wide open, impossible words pouring forth, her hand brushing Nymphia’s, who had wanted to kiss her so badly she couldn’t breathe.
Xunami has this searching expression on her face, and it takes a moment for Nymphia to realize that she’s trying to make sense of her. With that, Nymphia feels more lost than she has in a while. She feels like she needs to jump up, wave her arms over her head and scream I’m right here, I’m right in front of you, I’m the same as I ever was except for this one, life-altering thing.
“I can’t keep up with you two,” Xunami shakes her head. Her tone is light, but it lands like a knife for Nymphia. “It was weird watching it. For a second, I wasn’t sure if Jane was gonna let you help her.”
From just beside Xunami, Mirage’s hazel eyes flicker over Nymphia. It shouldn’t be unnerving, and it definitely isn’t intended to be. It’s just that it seems like she already knows everything when she looks at Nymphia and says,
“Of course she did.”
-
South of Jupiter Beach, past the street-swallowing trees and the few acres of veritable soil that have long since been divided between family farms, you’d come across what Nymphia affectionately refers to as ‘Nowhere Land’.
Nowhere Land is the space between Jupiter Beach and the interstate, where Nymphia’s hometown gives itself away to nothingness before it becomes the next town over, before that becomes the rest of the world. It makes this transformation over several tree-lined miles, the grassland uninterrupted save for a few stray houses, grazing deer, the occasional collapsed barn. It’s a place that feels entirely liminal, untouched, the sort that most people pass through on their way to somewhere else. It’s rarely ever anyone’s destination. Rarely.
“Are you a serial killer?” Jane asks when Nymphia directs her off the main road, pointing after the faint whispers of tire tracks that cut across the grass. Jane’s car rocks the whole way down the path, through a gap in the treeline, and comes upon one of Nymphia’s favorite places in the world.
It’s a humble spot, little more than a quaint cabin visited by game hunters come September, and left largely abandoned for the rest of the year. The land is wildly overgrown, a dense meadow of whispering grasses and wildflowers and tall pines that stretch towards the sky. It’s not so much about the scenery or what lies within the four walls of the cabin; it’s more so that it all exists on the fringes of everything else. The rest of the world could change, but this place would probably always stay the same.
Nymphia doesn’t know why she’d brought Jane here. All she knows is that she’d gotten in Jane’s car, took one look at her - crisp white shirt, cherry red lips, lashes so long they cast shadows over the swell of her cheeks - and knew she didn’t stand a chance. She could feel the last shreds of her self restraint crumble into nothingness, dissolving into the warmth of her want. She looked at Jane and knew that none of it would matter; not the strength of her resolve or the rules she set or the promises she made to herself. She’d had one taste of Jane, that meant she’d give in to her every time.
And so Nymphia finds herself bringing Jane to the very edge of her universe. Jane either has a death wish or a large amount of trust in Nymphia, because she pulls over and parks in the grass where Nymphia says she should.
“No, really, are you gonna murder me now?” Jane asks when she’s following Nymphia out into the open meadow. Nymphia bounds out across the grass, propelled by the sort of last-ditch mania she imagines befell Bonnie and Clyde on their final ride - doomed and delighted.
“Yeah,” Nymphia laughs over her shoulder, walking backwards to look at Jane, dark hair flying around her shoulders. “Didn’t work the first time I tried.”
She might be talking about the cut on Jane’s shin. She might be talking about the time she’d tried to cut Jane out of her life. Either way:
“You failed,” Jane says, stopping just a step behind her. “Miserably.”
“I know,” Nymphia sighs, a strange thrill in admitting defeat. She drops to her knees in the grass. Jane stands above her, amused and crossing her arms.
Emboldened by their solitude and the burning knowledge that any of her feeble attempts at self-restraint would prove pointless, Nymphia reaches out and traces the cut up Jane’s shin, covered now by fresher, flimsier bandages. She could’ve covered it, worn those tall boots she’s so fond of. For whatever reason, she hasn’t. Jane bears the mark of Nymphia crashing into her. Nymphia hopes there’s a scar.
“How is it?” Nymphia asks, hearing her own voice go where Jane’s often does - that tone that’s just a touch too intimate. She thinks it must be automatic, a side-effect of their alchemy. She’s not immune to it either.
Involuntarily, Jane’s lips part at Nymphia’s touch. “It’s alright.”
Nymphia can’t help but smile. Maybe it’s that she’s never felt quite as powerful as she does now - touching someone, seeing so clearly what it does. Maybe it’s that Jane is so decidedly stoic, even in the middle of nowhere. She’s almost statuesque where she stands over Nymphia, all long limbs and contrapposto. Nymphia looks at her and is reminded of some marble state from Ancient Rome or Renaissance Italy, thinks of Michelangelo setting David free from stone, thinks that she’s on the brink of carving Jane out just the same.
“Are you just gonna stand there?” Nymphia tilts her head trying to tempt her from her imaginary pedestal. It’s the sort of shameless coquettishness that she forgets she’s capable of, that becomes involuntary in moments like this, unlocked by some secret, unspoken code.
“What are you gonna do about it?” Jane narrows her eyes like she’s on to Nymphia. “Take out my other knee?”
Nymphia floats a mock punch to Jane’s kneecap, fingers curling out from a fist with a slow-mo boom. Jane rolls her eyes and flops down in the grass anyways.
“Do you do this to all your women?” Jane says on her way down, laying flat on her back beside Nymphia. “Completely incapacitate them?”
“Maybe,” Nymphia says. “Do you do this to all of yours?”
“All my other women…” Jane scoffs, closes her eyes and lets the sun fall upon her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nymphia peers over. Jane’s blonde curls are strewn all around her, threads of spun gold caught on the tall grass. She’s so beautiful she’s almost holy, some vision straight from Eden, and Nymphia can’t help but feel like she’s bearing witness to something she shouldn’t be allowed to see.
To Nymphia, looking at Jane feels like that time she’d gone cliff diving; the same rush of adrenaline, the same tangible pull of gravity. All at once, Nymphia knows why she’s brought Jane here. It’s the only place that’s as private as the both of them need it to be, the only place where she can take inventory. She’s going to throw herself into Jane, and she needs to know what lies at the bottom.
“I’m not the first girl, am I?” Nymphia ventures.
Jane says nothing for a while, barely even moves, like if she’s still enough she might get out of answering the question. Her profile is silhouetted against the tall grass and all at once she becomes the tragic beauty from a Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia floating down the river.
“I guess not,” Jane says quietly, as if to keep someone in the past from overhearing, still afraid to be caught. “But in most ways, yeah, you are. The first in a long time.”
Nymphia’s gut churns at the sentiment - that there was ever anyone before her, that she could still be the first, somehow.
“How long ago?”
“I was thirteen,” Jane murmurs, eyes shutting tighter, forcing the memories back. “A girl I used to dance with.”
“You’ve known since then?” Nymphia asks, surprised at that sort of awareness so early on. She’s almost jealous until Jane turns and squints through the sun, one hand casting a shadow over her eyes.
“Known what?” Jane asks like she really doesn’t have a clue.
All it takes is one, indicative tilt of Nymphia’s head. Jane’s face contorts, this hard and afraid abhorrence flooding behind her eyes.
“I’m not, like, gay, or-” Jane starts, so immediate, so reflexive. The word catches in her mouth and she stops, squeezes her eyes shut. Nymphia imagines how many times she’s made this argument, imagines the word getting larger in Jane’s mouth with every denial, harder to swallow without choking.
Nymphia would be affected by the hard-wired hostility of it all, but none of it is directed at her, or anyone for that matter. As Jane goes to deny it, all of her animosity is aimed right at herself. It’s almost painful to watch.
“You don’t have to hide from me,” Nymphia says slowly, eyes low, ready to retreat at the first sign of uproar. “I already found you. Remember?”
Jane winces behind closed eyes, submerged in some private conversation with herself. Even here, even in the complete safety that is created in their company, it takes her a while to work up to the words.
“I don’t know what I am,” Jane says. Her voice is gravelly, scraping against the very deepest part of herself and dredging up whatever has sunken to the bottom. “I wondered once.”
There’s more there, some long and troubled history Jane doesn’t quite get to detailing. Nymphia doesn’t need her to.
Nymphia knows it's the same inkling feeling she’d spent most of her adolescence shoving away, the sort of common curiosity most girls seemed to pass through unchanged. The knowledge that knocks the wind out of you one day when you’re thirteen and realize that it isn’t some fleeting confusion - it’s who you are. Nymphia looks at Jane and remembers herself sitting across from Anetra in the diner, seventeen and still afraid to confess the full extent of herself to anyone.
“You don’t have to know right now,” Nymphia says gently, almost sorry for pushing Jane so hard. Jane just shakes her head impatiently, like she wants to get there faster.
“I just know how I feel about you, alright?” Jane says. It comes out unfathomably sincere, this desperate plea. She finally opens her eyes and they’re this solemn shade of stone blue, almost gray with tears. “Is that enough?”
There are so many things Nymphia wants to know, needs to know - stories about a thirteen year old Jane in some East Coast dance studio, whatever tight-lipped thing went down there and left her shuddered up until now, what exactly has hammered this sort of resistance into her - but for now, Nymphia stares at the Jane who is breaking herself apart in a bid for belief.
“Yeah,” Nymphia chokes out. “Yeah, it’s enough.”
Jane exhales this long sigh of frustration, like the few words she’s managed have completely exhausted her, and falls back against the grass, her eyes fluttering shut once again.
Nymphia looks at her through the tall grass and wonders where she goes when she falls quiet like this, what memories she’s playing back, whether she’s thinking of anything at all. There’s this tiny movement behind her eyes, like she’s dreaming, like she’s speed-running a whole lifetime, combing it for some long-lost artifact.
“How did you know?” Jane says suddenly, eyes still closed.
It’s a long story. Nymphia doesn’t mind telling it.
She recounts the times she’d been caught staring in class, the secret hearts she’d drawn around the faces of women in magazines, the first time she’d seen two women kiss in a movie, how she played that part over and over and forgot to rewind the tape before returning it, how she spent the next week terrified someone would trace it back to her. The boy who kissed her in middle school, the one she’d run away from screaming and wiping her mouth. She tells Jane about Anetra, how she used to french-braid Nymphia’s hair before track meets and Nymphia would keep it in for days, how she let her hair grow longer so Anetra would spend a few more seconds on it. How she’s spent a whole school year pining after her, and a whole summer letting her go. She tells Jane about her mother, how she’d thought she’d still love her when she came out, and how she was lucky enough to be right about that one.
Nymphia has told these stories before. Still, when she glances over and sees Jane taking it in, Nymphia can’t help but feel like all of it means something now. The other girl is on her side now, one hand tucked under her cheek and staring over at Nymphia with the sort of attentiveness that she didn’t think existed in relation to her. Mostly she’s wide-eyed and curious, quiet except for a few breathy laughs, a soft smile, a hum or two.
“You’re lucky,” Jane says at the end of it all. She’s got this odd little smile - happy for Nymphia, sad for herself. Nymphia can see a few different reasons for the sentiment flashing behind Jane’s eyes, but the one she lands on first is, “You never had to deal with boys.”
Nymphia doesn‘t dare say a word. For all that flair for figuring people out, she doesn’t want to have to do that now. She so desperately wants to see the real Jane, doesn’t want to have to break her to get there, doesn’t want to pry her apart. She doesn’t have to. Given the space to grow, Jane cracks herself open, every noxious thing that’s ever seeped to the center flowing freely.
“There were so many of them, Nymphia,” Jane says. It’s whisper-soft and tortured, like every one of them had brutalized her in one way or another. “So many. And none of them ever seemed to fit.”
“What about him?” Nymphia asks, thinking of that traditionally gorgeous boy who offers Jane these traditional attempts at romance. She knows how the story goes, but she almost wishes that Jane will tell a different ending, that all of her effort will have somehow been worth it.
“He comes close,” Jane says, her mouth the ghost of a possible smile, a sort of grief lingering there. “He does. I think he struggles with the family stuff too. But he handles it better than I do. He’s built for it. And I make it easier for him, I think,” Jane frowns. “But I’m not sure that he makes it easier for me.”
The whole sentiment is cloaked in this elongated misery, this equation Jane is trying to solve, but can’t, because it shouldn’t be an equation to begin with. It’s so exhausting, so clearly fruitless. “Why bother?” Nymphia wonders out loud.
“Never really felt like I had another option,” Jane shrugs. “I thought if I did what I was supposed to do, then it would just…happen. I would love him. I guess I’m still waiting.”
It’s so profoundly sad. Jane looks a little more lost with every word, like she’s realizing the extent of her situation for the first time as she says it out loud. Like these are things she really, truly believed might save her despite never seeing any evidence, no testimony to make the torture bearable, come to find it was all for nothing.
With a weak smile, Jane glances over. “Not great, huh?”
It’s terrible. Nymphia can hardly bear the thought of Jane chaining herself to the sort of unfulfillment that passes for a decent life, contorting into a tiny box and thinking it’s comfortable. Nymphia wants to reach out and touch, give Jane something to make up for all those years of yearning, a place to put the weight down.
“I’m pretty sure it gets better” Nymphia murmurs, her hand floating towards Jane’s all on its own.
“Yeah,” Jane’s eyes fall over Nymphia, and somehow, beyond any measure of possibility, there’s that look again - hopeful and reverent when she says, “probably.”
Nymphia’s heart nearly stops. She’d convinced herself she’d never see this look again, but it isn’t just that. It’s also that it it’s also that it happens here and now, among these sky-scraping pines and the forget-me-nots, where Jane has let slip a whole lifetime of unhappiness, and all it takes is this - one look at Nymphia - and, despite all that time spent so utterly lost, there’s something coming home behind her eyes.
This is the sort of spark that stood no chance against the circumstances of their lives, born from elements that never should’ve brushed together, should’ve been smothered, but here it is - rare and glowing and alive in the space between them. You don’t let a thing like that go to waste.
So Nymphia cups Jane’s face, a palm protecting a flame, and watches her eyes go wild. There’s this mutual understanding that encompasses them just then, this sense of inevitability, this knowledge that nothing has been or ever will be this. One touch, and Nymphia can see the quiet surge inside of Jane, some revelation being made.
“You asked me once what it felt like being with a man,” Jane says, all whispers and watchful eyes. “With him it feels like I’m doing something well. Like it’s a game, and I’m making all the right moves, and even if it’s not fun at least I can tell myself that I’m winning.”
It’s the sort of earned intimacy that takes Nymphia’s breath away. All at once she can see her - Jane, the real Jane, the truest one she’s met, the bravest. Nymphia nods, her thumb brushing soft across Jane’s cheek, almost permissive. All it takes it one heartening little touch for Jane to soften, all that stoicism just dissolving, nothing left between them.
“You know what it feels like with you?” Jane says in this voice like a dam breaking, this cracking little whisper, punctuated by this tiny, breathy laugh of disbelief. “It’s like realizing it was never a competition to begin with.”
In some ways it’s a simple statement. Really, it’s the single most special moment in Nymphia’s life thus far, near-spiritual in how it moves her, so profound it overpowers her. It’s the impossible sort of thing Nymphia never imagined she’d hear about herself, nonetheless from someone who she so badly wants to break free, and it suggests that several other impossible things could be true: that maybe Nymphia isn’t about to commit some egregious sin, that maybe this isn’t the sort of star-crossed affair that could only end in disaster. Maybe, just maybe, Nymphia is leading Jane away from a lion’s den, directing her to the sort of safety she’s always needed and never known. Maybe this isn’t some cosmic mistake after all. Maybe it was always supposed to be this way.
Amidst all of these possibilities, against all of the inconveniences, all of the harsh realities, Nymphia knows one shining truth - Jane needs her. That justifies all the rest: every line she’s about to cross, every rule she’s about to break, every risk she’s about to take.
Nymphia presses her forehead against Jane’s. She’s cradling her face with a tenderness she didn’t know she was capable of, and there’s this breathlessness between them at the contact, this shared little sigh of relief when they stop trying to resist the magnetism. Nymphia can feel Jane’s eyelashes flutter against her skin, her hand flying up to Nymphia’s hair as though to keep her there forever, scared she’ll pull away.
“You’re not gonna set any rules now, are you?” Jane asks with a voice so delicate that Nymphia chokes out this gobsmacked little laugh and presses a kiss against Jane’s cheek - a promise to stay.
“No rules,” Nymphia says, so flooded with adoration she goes a little teary. Jane is already angled towards her, lips already open. “Never been any good at them,” Nymphia mumbles against her mouth, and then there’s no more room for words.
Jane kisses Nymphia back like she’s been waiting her whole life for this. It isn’t far from the truth.
-
Nymphia doesn’t know guilt. Not yet.
It’s two nights later and she’s pressed against a lamppost, thinking that she’ll never get tired of laying eyes on Jane. She watches her cross through the dark to get to her, an enormous leather coat thrown over her shoulders, just barely longer than the hem of her dress, and the last puff of her cigarette streaming from her open lips. The street lamp casts a perfect ring of light onto the pavement below, and when Jane reaches the precipice she drops her cigarette, grinds it to ash with the heel of her leather boots, and smiles the rest of the way to Nymphia.
“Hi,” Jane says, a little coy, a little unwilling to give herself away, even now. It doesn’t matter. That twinkle in her eye says it all.
“You started without me,” Nymphia nods towards the pack of cigarettes in Jane’s hand, like she actually cares at all about smoking. It’s always just an excuse to get closer to her. Nymphia can admit that now.
“Sorry,” Jane smiles, slides a smoke from the pack and tucks it between her teeth. “Long day.”
Nymphia’s eyes narrow, searching Jane’s face for any evidence of emotional distress as she lights her cigarette. Jane glances up, chuffs a little at Nymphia’s pout.
“Nothing bad, promise,” Jane holds the cigarette out to Nymphia, face going soft and smitten. “Doesn’t matter now.”
“If you say so,” Nymphia says, swiping the cigarette from Jane’s hand. There’s already a ring of lipstick on one end. Nymphia presses it to her own lips and counts it as a kiss.
“What’s this?” Jane says when Nymphia turns and the bruise at her elbow is visible at the edge of her t-shirt.
“Oh,” Nymphia says, twisting her arm to look for herself. “It’s from roller skating.”
The deep purple goes grayish under the yellow of the streetlight, the blood pooling into some vaguely geographic shape, a little world of hurt beneath her skin.
Jane frowns and reaches out to trace the edge of the bruise, careful not to press down. “Does it hurt?”
“Not bad,” Nymphia shrugs, inhales against her cigarette and passes it back to Jane. “Didn’t even notice it until after you’d gone home.”
Jane goes a bit quiet after that, but takes Nymphia’s hand and follows her down the length of the dock just the same. Later, when they’re on their backs at the end of the pier and Nymphia is pointing out the Big Dipper, she glances over and finds Jane still frowning at the dark spot blooming out from her elbow.
“I didn’t even ask if you were hurt, did I?” Jane asks, soft and a little ashamed. “After you fell.”
Nymphia smiles, staring at Jane and forgetting all about the stars. “You were the one bleeding, remember?”
Jane hums, looks a little troubled, and then she’s bringing her hand towards her mouth. She presses her pointer and middle finger against her lips, and softly touches them to the dark spot blooming out from Nymphia’s elbow.
It’s not much, just this tiny display of tenderness, but Nymphia feels like she could cry. It isn’t the sort of place people kiss, and Jane is barely even kissing it, and it’s still the most moved Nymphia’s felt in years, the most innocent, well-intended touch she’s ever received. No one has been close in the way that Jane is, intimate with these random little parts of Nymphia that anyone else would overlook.
“Better?” Jane asks. Her fingers linger, her hand wrapping slowly around the curve of Nymphia’s forearm. Nymphia nods, everything inside of her aflutter at the feeling of Jane on her.
Nymphia smiles, and only then does Jane let herself smile too. She looks at Nymphia with this heart-stopping enormity, this wondered look of awe, and Nymphia thinks that maybe, just maybe, this is what she’s spent her whole life waiting for.
Jane’s eyes are sparkling with this secret smittenness that only Nymphia gets to know, soft and serene when she whispers, “I missed you, y’know.”
She could be talking about the twenty-four hours since she’d last stolen away with Nymphia. She could be talking about the last twenty-five years of her life. Both are too long for their liking.
“Missed you too,” Nymphia grins. Then she rolls off her back and right on top of Jane, who lets out this giddy little yelp just before Nymphia kisses her on the mouth, long and deep and with a lifetime’s worth of adoration.
Nymphia kisses Jane to give her everything she’d missed, everything she deserves. It doesn’t matter that they’re in the dark at the edge of the world, or what it took to get there. Nymphia can feel Jane smiling against her lips. Nothing else matters.
For the rest of the time that they spent there, pressed together at the end of the dock, tearing their eyes from one another only to look at the stars, everything else disappears. They’re creating a space all their own, changing the very atmosphere around them, giving it life, breathing it into each other’s waiting mouths.
And when they do manage to pull themselves apart, get to their feet and walk up from the water, something from the world they’ve created together carries over into the real one. Just for a moment they’re still untouchable.
They get halfway up the dock before the spell is broken.
Nymphia is freshly flushed, and Jane is drawing back from pressing a quick kiss to her cheek when she freezes, eyes catching on something up ahead. Nymphia follows her gaze and finds the same thing she does. The world they’d left behind was almost entirely dark, Jupiter Beach at half-past midnight, quiet and forgiving and laid to rest for a while. Now, there’s a light on in Xunami’s bedroom window.
The kitchen door is propped open, and a soft light spills down the stone steps at the edge of the street. Xunami sits at the very bottom, a forgotten cigarette smoking away in her hand, staring straight at them.
Nymphia can make out the look on her face from here - taken aback and somehow not surprised at all - and knows that there’s no way out of this one.
Jane’s breath hitches. There’s this little string of obscenities that flutter past her lips, because her hand is still in Nymphia’s, and it’s not the light of day or in the eyes of someone that would sooner see them dead than happy with one another, but they’ve been seen just the same. It’s all too soon, something neither of them are prepared for.
“It’s okay,” Nymphia says automatically, not entirely sure if she believes it herself. “It’s my friend. It’s Xunami.”
Jane looks over with a tangible dread that makes Nymphia’s stomach hurt. The fear that flashes behind the stone blue of Jane’s irises is from another time, leftover from some ten-odd years ago, a whisper of something that went wrong and never would be righted. The fear that it’s happening again. All at once everything feels so fragile, fine china in Nymph’s fumbling hands.
“Let me talk to her,” Nymphia says as evenly as she can, sounding much more certain than she is for Jane’s sake. “You go home. Let me take care of this.”
Jane casts this long look, like she’s trying to figure out how much faith she can put in this situation, and Nymphia holds her breath. She thinks Jane trusts her enough to let her do this, but there’s a moment that she wonders whether they’re going to repeat the cycle: fall apart at the first sign of trouble and fall back together when being apart is too unbearable. Nymphia wonders how many cycles she could survive, how much blood and bruise she could endure.
“Yeah,” Jane says finally, nodding at the ground, suddenly unable to meet Nymphia’s eyes. ‘Yeah, alright.”
Nymphia musters the most reassuring smile she can manage, but Jane’s hand is already slipping away. The blonde casts this stony, unsure glance towards Xunami, who floats Jane a completely apathetic little wave, and Jane walks off into the night, one hand curling around the back of her neck.
Xunami eyes Jane down the street, this openly unimpressed look on her face. Nymphia knows that look - it’s the one right before Xunami says something snide and completely spot-on, not so much cruel as it is completely accurate, the sort of thing that would usually send Nymphia into hysterics - and briefly forgets the circumstances, thinks just for a moment that this is going to go like all their conversations do.
Then Xunami’s gaze snaps back to Nymphia, and she knows this won’t be like any of their regular conversations at all. How could it be?
“Hey,” Xunami starts. “What the fuck was that?”
It’s not hostile, nowhere close to the anger that Nymphia was expecting. Still, it’s more direct than she can manage. Nymphia stares at her shoes. “You saw that, huh?”
“You kissing Jane? Uh, yeah,” Xunami scoffs, impatient, unwilling to let anything else slide. “I saw that. What the fuck is going on?”
Nymphia takes a tentative glance up. Somehow, she’s surprised to see Xunami looking the same as she always has; tall and lanky, an oversized button-up slipping off one smooth shoulder, dark, tight waves spilling out of a loose ponytail. Nymphia had almost expected her to look different. She feels so far removed from whatever her life had been weeks, days, mere hours earlier. She wouldn’t be surprised if everything had changed unannounced to her.
“I don’t know, ‘Nami,” Nymphia whispers, dropping her head to hide a smile. “I don’t know what it is.”
Xunami just stares back, almost uneasy as her eyes flicker between Nymphia’s poorly hidden grin and her nervously fidgeting hands. When she finally asks she does it slowly, carefully, almost afraid to know the answer.
“Was that the first time it happened?”
Nymphia says nothing.
She waits for Xunami’s gorgeous laugh, the one that makes everything okay, the one that says she understands, that this is the sort of thing girls like them go through together, and that means they’re going to make it out alive. She waits, but Xunami’s face just darkens.
“Oh, Nymphia.”
Nymphia winces, because she can’t remember ever hearing Xunami sound so grave.
This is Xunami, wild and passionate and mischievous, the girl who has talked Nymphia into a thousand bad decisions with encouraging smiles and winks and gentle nudges forward. Xunami and her tendency towards scandal, all those whirlwind affairs with pretty girls who passed through town, blissfully unattached until she met Mirage, whose never-ending stories make her the most exciting person to settle down in Jupiter Beach in recent memory. Xunami, who has cheered Nymphia on through every whisper of romance she’s chased, held her through every heartbreak, cursed out anyone who’d wronged her and professed that Nymphia would find better. Nymphia looks at her and misses her desperately, wants to confide in her best friend and know that she hasn’t made herself into someone Xunami can’t recognize.
Xunami sighs hard, returns her cigarette to her mouth and pats the spot on the stoop beside her. “C’mon,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
Nymphia trudges over and drops into her place beside Xunami, buries her face in her hands, and then she’s recounting all of it - Jane shutting her out, Jane coming to her completely distressed after a week of silence, Jane kissing her at the end of the dock. Nymphia shutting it down, swearing to herself it could never happen again.
It’s so twisted, so completely corrupt, but when she gets to the end - that catastrophic crash-landing at the roller rink, all those confessions, all those impossible words, Jane turning gold against the grass, kissing her then, kissing her every night since then - Nymphia is smiling again. She thought she’d known the full extent of her joy, but she discovers another small ecstasy in talking about it. She wishes she had more story to tell, wants to go on about Jane forever, can’t believe she was able to keep quiet for so long. Her face is still hidden behind her hands, but she thinks Xunami could hear her smile just the same, could hear the newfound beat of her heart behind every word.
“I know it’s crazy,” Nymphia says, hushed, words like stolen treasures in her mouth, scared to set them free. “But I think I really like her.”
She feels wholly insane, almost doesn’t care until she glances over and sees the look on Xunami’s face - alarmed, hurt, worried.
Xunami chews nervously on one bottom lip. “Does she still have that boyfriend?”
That wipes the smile off Nymphia’s face easily. She stares down at her shadow, longer than she is, and nods. From her left, Xunami takes a sharp inhale, tries to take in the information in a way that doesn’t hurt either of them.
“You don’t hate me, do you?” Nymphia whispers, not daring to look over at Xunami. “Or think I’m a terrible person or something?”
“Nymph,” Xunami clicks her tongue and reaches a gentle hand towards Nymphia’s shoulder, because some things never change. “Look at me. You’re my best friend. I could never hate you.”
It’s rare that Xunami is this concentrated sort of serious, not cut at all with sarcasm or silliness. For some reason it has a direct effect on Nymphia’s tear ducts, and when her eyes start to well up it’s the outpouring of every emotion she hasn’t had the chance to process yet - the heartache, the sky-scraping exhilaration, the whiplash from all of it.
“Sorry,” Nymphia sputters. All of it catches up to her in hot tears and these desperate little sounds are not quite laughs or cries but some horribly strung out in-between. “I’m sorry-”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Nymph,” Xunami says, a little frantic as she goes to comfort Nymphia and finds that she doesn’t quite know how. “I’m not judging you, okay? I just-”
For a moment there’s nothing but Nymphia’s overflow of emotions, tiny sobs that she tries to lighten with laughter, not quite managing to succeed. She almost manages to convince herself that she can regain control of the conversation, claw her way back to composure and turn this into the moment it could be - the moment that makes Xunami understand - and then Nymphia glances over.
Xunami is looking over at her, face warped with concern, unmistakably on her side and still failing to find the words that would make this right. It’s the look in her eyes that really strikes Nymphia down - pity.
“I just think you’re really in it now,” Xunami whispers.
That thing Nymphia had been so afraid of when she’d walked Jane back to her car a mere week ago - the moment she’d be hit by the full, devastating, bone-crushing weight of what is happening between them - that hits her now. She’d almost thought she’d escaped it.
-
Notes:
thank you for your patience with this one :”) if you have ever left kudos or a kind comment or talked fic with me, please know you r so deeply appreciated and that i keep your words with me as i write!! its my greatest joy to create this story, i rly cannot wait to hear what you think :)
until next time friends <3 find me on tumblr @mappingthesky
Chapter 4: somewhere (hold my hand and i’ll take you there)
Summary:
for better or for worse, jane is a risk that nymphia can’t keep herself from taking. she’d really like to think that it’s for the better.
Notes:
4 months to the day since my last update….. we r so fucking back baby!! i know it’s been a long time, i sincerely hope that this chapter is worth the wait.
thank you for the patience/ flattery you have extended to this fic. i owe especially enormous thank you’s to sapphire_to_the_rain , tropicalpanda (even tho she may never read this fic), almostsweetmusic and purehoneys for listening to my jupiter beach rambles & being such inspirations in their own right!! i am so thankful to call each of you my friends :”) shoutout also to the L word from which i have shamelessly stolen a bit of dialogue from for this chapter. the ancient texts must be repeated.
without further ado, it is my great honor to welcome you back to jupiter beach <3
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Crying is good for you. Nymphia has always believed this.
She’s never withheld her emotions in the way some people do - holding them in at their own expense, collecting their feelings like grains of sand until they’re pressurized, until they’ve become shards of glass against their bare palms, until they’re bloody and explosive, sharp-edged and slicing through whoever is unfortunate enough to be near them.
Nymphia is considerate with her feelings, wary of burdening other people with them, but not too proud to pretend she’s above emotion. She can’t help it either way; she’s always had more heart than she’s known what to do with. Besides, crying is a reminder that she’s alive, that she’s more than flesh and blood and bone, that she’s really living. Crying is how she processes, how she knows something means anything at all.
Nymphia tears up at the sappy notes her friends write on the inside of birthday cards. She’ll cry at sad movies, and sometimes at the happy ones too. She cries when the right song plays at exactly the right moment, and the world goes so briefly beautiful that she can’t help but tear up at the feeling. Nymphia cried when she came out to her mom, and when she saw the AIDS memorial quilt stretched out across the National Mall on television, and when she stumbled into the Violet and found herself in a room full of queer people for the very first time. She’s shed tears at every major milestone: when she graduated high school, the thing she’d considered impossible in the bleakest moments of her teenage years; she cried after she had sex for the first time, not because it was bad, but just because it happened; and Nymphia cries now, in the midst of her first life-altering fuckup.
Once Nymphia starts crying, she can’t find it in herself to stop. Every emotion she’s shoved down for the sake of saving Jane, of sparing her friends, of surviving herself comes out in these sharp, violent sobs on Xunami’s stoop.
“Christ,” Xunami says after a particularly rough sob wracks Nymphia’s body, nervously extending one hand to the small of her back. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
This - Xunami still being Xunami despite Nymphia’s divergence - almost manages to make Nymphia feel better. It would, except Xunami’s voice is still laced with this unmistakably out-at-sea desperation as she searches for words she doesn’t have yet, words that might not exist at all. There’s no antidote for these things, nothing to be done.
So Nymphia cries, and Xunami rubs comforting circles against her shoulder until she finally runs empty. They sit there on the stoop and the world feels all too quiet, too still, not even a breeze to clear the heavy air. Nymphia sighs, puffy-eyed and exhausted, finding there’s something strangely soothing about having nothing left to purge.
When Nymphia looks over, Xunami is assessing her with careful, nervous eyes. There’s a moment where her mouth ghosts open, and the air between her lips almost becomes words. Maybe she’s scared to send Nymphia spiraling. Maybe she decides it isn’t worth saying. Either way, Xunami doesn’t ask and Nymphia isn’t sure she wants to know.
“It’s late,” Xunami says instead, standing up in the dim light. “Let’s get you home.”
“You don’t need to-”
“I’m not leaving you here like this.” Xunami’s voice is softly stern, and Nymphia knows better than to argue. Xunami is a real friend. That means she’s on Nymphia’s side, even when she’s unmistakably, horrifically in the wrong.
So Xunami walks Nymphia all the way to her apartment. There’s nothing but the pounding in Nymphia’s head to distract from the silence hanging between them. It’s an anticipatory silence; exactly what comes next neither of them could say, only that it’s coming, only that something has been set in motion that cannot be undone. For now, there’s nothing to do but lie in wait together. So they walk those winding blocks through Jupiter Beach, up those creaking steps to Nymphia’s front door. Xunami may not know where they’re going, but when she squeezes Nymphia’s hand, she knows what the next step is.
“So,” Xunami says in Nymphia’s doorway. “Who’s going to tell Dawn?”
-
“It’s perfect.” Dawn’s got her hands clasped together as she stares up through the ceiling and into space, the light in her eyes heart-shaped and glimmering. “She’s absolutely perfect.”
Nymphia musters a weak smile. Dawn’s ramblings about Amanda are heart-warming, really, but they do nothing for the anxious knot in her belly. She picks nervously at the ruffles on Dawn’s pink bedding and tries to savor what could be the last few seconds of their friendship before Nymphia blows it up. At least Dawn is in a good mood.
“And she’s so funny,” Dawn says dreamily. “I mean, really, I’ve never laughed so much in my life. I was really torn up about the whole incident at free-skate, y’know, but she makes me feel so much better about it. She keeps saying she’s going to poison Jane via ice cream and exact her revenge, which I’m pretty sure is just a joke, but…”
Nymphia makes this little choking sound at Jane’s name. Her heart sinks right through her and burns a hole through the floor, because any hopes she had for how this might go are thoroughly dashed. It wasn’t enough for Nymphia to become entangled with the most unavailable woman ever to pass through Jupiter Beach; Jane had to make herself Amanda’s sworn enemy also.
“God, listen to me, I’m a lunatic!” Dawn chuckles, shaking her head at herself and sending her red curls flying. “I’m sorry, Nymphie. What was it that you wanted to tell me?”
She looks over, and Nymphia’s mouth falls open. Dawn’s face is warm and open and lovely, all blue eyes and pink cheeks and pale skin. She’s utterly cherubic, and somehow completely terrifying to Nymphia at this moment.
“Um,” Nymphia clears her throat, drops her head and fiddles with Dawn’s ridiculous comforter. “It’s about Jane, actually.”
“Oh god,” Dawn gasps, eyes lighting up with alarm. “She isn’t gonna sue, is she? Of course she is. I bet her dad is, like, a big time lawyer or something. I bet her mom is a lawyer, too. I bet she’s descended from a long, long lineage of top notch lawyers-”
“No, no,” Nymphia shakes her head, briefly wondering if a lawsuit could possibly be any worse than her current predicament. “Nothing like that.”
Dawn whistles this completely dramatic phew and wipes a hand across her forehead. “Alright,” she says, dropping to sit criss-cross applesauce on the carpet. “What’s going on with Jane?”
“Um. Jane and I-” Nymphia starts, realizing quickly that there’s no good way to end that sentence. “We’ve been-” No. “Things have been happening-” Absolutely not. “I-” Makes it sound like it’s Nymphia’s fault. “She-” Makes it sound like it’s Jane’s fault.
Dawn gawks from the floor, eyes widening with every failed attempt at an explanation. “You’re making me nervous, Nymphia.”
“I’m sorry,” Nymphia laughs, thin and threatening to turn to tears. “I’m not trying to. I just don’t know how to say it.”
Dawn chews at her cheek. She’s got an old crooner record on, the kind with songs about beautiful girls and butterflies in stomachs and wedding bands. The needle skips when Dawn looks at Nymphia.
“We were at The Violet that one night, and Xunami said that she thought Jane wanted you,” Dawn says cautiously. “Was she right?”
Nymphia laughs this odd, sputtering little laugh, her eyes already welling up without her permission. She laughs because she still can’t believe it’s true, and because she can’t shake the feeling that she shouldn’t say it out loud. It seems she doesn’t have to, because Dawn takes a deep breath and says,
“You want her too, don’t you?”
Nymphia looks up, almost paralyzed at hearing it from someone else’s mouth, anywhere other than her own head. “How did you know?”
“Remember when that kid pushed me off the swingset?” Dawn says, smiling the same lopsided little smile she’s had since Nymphia met her in the third grade. “You ran right over, Nymph. You ran right over, called that guy an idiot and helped me up. I cried the whole time and you didn’t even care. Do you remember that?”
Nymphia nods, tears openly streaming down her cheeks. She’s cried more in the last week than she has in months and doesn’t know what to make of that at the moment.
“You’ve always been protective like that with people you care about; Me, ‘Nami, whoever,” Dawn smiles for a moment, like she’s proud somehow. “I saw the way you moved for Jane when she fell. I guess I knew that meant you cared…” Dawn goes on, and that light in her eyes flickers just a bit. “I just didn’t know how much you cared.”
“I do,” Nymphia says, wiping at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. It’s no use. More tears take their place: tears for her morals, tears for Jane shut up in a beach bungalow half a mile from here, tears for Dawn, who has to hear that her best friend is falling for someone who probably would’ve bullied the shit out of her in high school. “I didn’t want to, but I do.”
Dawn eyes the silver-wet streaks down Nymphia’s face, evidence of an unforgiving truth, and says softly, like she’s sorry, “I don’t think we have any control over who we care for.”
Nymphia doesn’t know what to say to that; the sort of statement that frames her as an innocent bystander, like she hasn’t walked this path willingly. It’s more sympathy than she thinks she deserves, especially from the girl whom Jane had been so unforgivingly impatient with mere days ago.
Dawn drops her eyes, pinches the fibers of her carpet between her fingers. “Does Jane know how you feel?”
“You could say that,” Nymphia says, this ironic little scoff in the middle. “Um. She kissed me. She kissed me and I kissed her back. And then we kissed again and we keep kissing and…” Nymphia trails off. “Xunami saw us last night. At the pier.”
Nymphia trails off, glances up and finds Dawn’s eyes curved with the same pitying concern that Xunami had the night before. She’s starting to hate this look, and the ripple of nerves it sends washing over her.
“Is Xunami worried?” Dawn asks, and it sounds like she’s trying to play it cool, hoping that this is one of the antics only she objects to, like there’s some chance that this is only out of line in her universe.
Nymphia nods and more tears escape her, because of course Xunami is worried. Anyone who cares about her or has any semblance of consciousness would be worried. For so long she’s been the levelheaded middle between Xunami’s mischievous tendencies and Dawn’s timorous nature. Now, she’s officially the girl her friends should be worried about. It’s a badge that pierces her right through the heart.
Even though her blurry vision Nymphia can make out the panic on Dawn’s face. “What are you going to do?” Dawn whispers. It’s the sort of question she’s always asking Nymphia and Xunami, except there’s no right answer this time.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to stop it,” Nymphia admits defeat, and there it is again - that smile she can’t seem to suppress, the strange and twisted joy she feels at being so in over her head. Relief at the bottom of the ocean. “I don’t think I want to stop it.”
Dawn chews at her cheek. A third and final truth occurs to Nymphia then, floating in the heavy silence - that she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. She’s already lost to a power greater than herself, possessed by it, doing its bidding and calling it reverence. There’s something demonic about it, something divine.
“You know we’ve been hoping you’d find someone, Nymph. Really, you deserve that,” Dawn says, and Nymphia can see Dawn wanting, trying to be happy for her. She can also see how much of a stretch it is, how far she’d be pushing herself across the line. “I want you to be happy, it’s just-“
“I know,” Nymphia says, choking as every one of her dreams crumbles to dust. “It’s all wrong.”
Dawn watches Nymphia try and fail to swallow more tears. There’s a flash of something complicated behind Dawn’s eyes, and then:
“Not all of it.”
Nymphia’s head snaps up.
“I mean, there must be good parts, right?” Dawn supposes, not quite looking at Nymphia. “Otherwise why would you do it?”
There’s a barely perceptible flush to her cheeks, and Nymphia is reminded of a conversation they’d had a few weeks ago: the one where Dawn, knowing nothing of Jane except her image at the end of the dock and the myths they made of her life, had denied harboring a minor crush on her.
Quietly, almost afraid to wonder out loud, Dawn picks at the carpet. “What is she like?”
“Dawn,” Nymphia shakes her head, because it’s such an overextension on Dawn’s part, such an unnecessary pain to be put through.
“No, I mean, how she was at the rink…” Dawn’s cheeks redden and Nymphia imagines how much it must’ve hurt when Jane had lashed out at her. Even with Amanda at her side, Nymphia knows it must’ve hit some almost-forgotten sensitivity, extinguished some imaginary flame.
Dawn eyes Nymphia nervously. “She isn’t like that all the time, is she?”
The truth is, Nymphia doesn’t know what Jane is like all of the time. She doesn’t know what she’s like when she’s with him, or when she’s alone in her room, or who she becomes when she’s not with Nymphia. She barely knows the Jane that she observes from afar, the one who sits up straight at dinner tables and drinks champagne with her pinky floating away from the glass.
The Jane that Nymphia knows is the one she sees now, when a series of memories flicker behind her eyes:
Jane in the driver’s seat with that gorgeous, toothy grin and wind in her curls, escaping and split open for only Nymphia to see. Jane, a secret romantic, who once recalled her brother’s open affections with Gigi and defined them as ‘the real thing’. The Jane who just wants to be listened to, the one who sinks into the grass beside Nymphia and talks for hours. Jane, all tenderness as she presses a kiss to Nymphia’s bruising. Jane, completely captivated by Nymphia, sitting on the hood of her car and whispering you’re so cool.
“No,” says Nymphia, spellbound past the point of concealment. “No, she’s so much more than that.”
Dawn’s mouth, a thin, worried line, curves for the first time into a hint of a smile. “You’re the best of us, Nymphie. I think she’d have to be.”
Nymphia’s teary eyes turn everything to soft stars, the lights in Dawn’s bedroom stretching longer and going blurry at the edges. There’s a wave of exhaustion that ripples through her, something rigid around the shape of this secret finally splitting open.
“You listen to me talk about Amanda,” Dawn says softly, scooting closer to Nymphia like they’re children sharing secrets, kids playing pretend. “Do you want to talk about Jane like that?”
Nymphia’s breath catches in her throat. There’s something precious about the offer, something sacred and sparkling that she can’t help but covet. It’s the sort of opportunity she’d wasted when she had the chance, too caught up in denying her feelings for Jane to talk about them while she could. Now they’re something like contraband. Nymphia knows she won’t get this chance very often. Not for a long while. Maybe not ever. She chews on her bottom lip and looks over at Dawn in a silent plea for permission. Dawn just nods.
So Nymphia talks about Jane. She’s nervous, and at first she’s talking about inane, surface-level details like Jane’s eye-rolling and tight skirts and sarcastic quips. These are the sorts of things you’d see from a distance, the kind that Xunami would point out from across the room and speculate about. Safe details. Gradually, Nymphia gets to the real thing: Jane is not a morning person. Jane curls a hand around the back of her neck when she’s nervous. Jane wears expensive perfume and smokes American spirits. Jane drives like a goddamn maniac and listens to music that’s older than she is.
Suddenly, these details aren’t just about Jane. Suddenly, Nympha is remembering one twilight drive back towards Jupiter Beach; Jane had reached over to turn the radio up, mumbling something about her father when Nymphia had asked how she knew about Van Morrison, then sang along with one hand on the wheel and eyes flickering over towards Nymphia. You, my brown-eyed girl.
Somewhere along the way, Dawn and Nymphia forget the circumstances. It’s hardly a fairytale, but for a moment it feels just as fair, transformed by two hopeless romantics eager to suspend reality for just one night. Dawn listens intently, and when Nymphia is all out of stories and expecting the spell to end, this soft little smile settles on Dawn’s face.
“Do you want to sleep over tonight?”
It’s not approval. It’s nowhere near it, and Nymphia knows that. Maybe it’s empathy, maybe it’s willful ignorance, maybe it’s the grace that Xunami knows better than to allow Nymphia. Whatever it is, Nymphia needs it desperately.
And so the dream lasts a little longer. Nymphia falls asleep, snug beside Dawn and freshly expunged of secrets. She’s soothed by the strange feeling of being reunited with something she thought she’d lost, that she’s still that well-intended child who ran across the playground to dust someone off, not caring about the boys who got in her way. As she falls asleep, Nymphia wonders if there isn’t an innocence at the heart of this twisted thing.
-
When Nymphia wakes, June has become July.
The sun is already high by the time she bounds down Dawn’s front steps, and it beats unforgivingly against her back on the bike ride home. When she peels off her tank top her shoulders have already gone pink with over-exposure, tender where she pulls on her button-up.
It’s hardly been twelve hours since she’d fallen asleep in Dawn’s bed, held in the palm of some softer, more sympathetic dimension, but already the world feels less forgiving. The air is too heavy to breathe, and Jupiter Beach feels all too populous. The restaurant is bustling when Nymphia pushes through the front doors. Even more daunting, Xunami stares at Nymphia from the other side of the counter. She’s got her chin in the palm of her hand, expectant, like she’s been waiting all morning to ask,
“How’d it go?”
“Good morning to you too,” Nymphia huffs, preemptively exhausted as she tosses her bag behind the host stand.
“It’s after twelve, I believe that makes it the afternoon,” Xunami quips, relentless. Nymphia rolls her eyes where Xunami can’t see. “No really, how’d Dawn take it? Am I going to have a friend group after this or do I need to stage an intervention to get you two on speaking terms again?”
“We’re fine,” Nymphia sets her teeth and flips her hair over, gathering it into a messy top knot and standing straight again. “She was…weirdly understanding.”
“She was understanding?” Xunami raises one unconvinced eyebrow. “Dawn? The same Dawn who, like, hoards wedding magazines and cuts the relationship column out of Cosmo ‘cuz she’s saving it for…” Xunami curls her fingers into air quotes, “future reference?”
Nymphia winces, because it so clearly isn’t the reaction Xunami had been hoping for. She supposes she couldn’t blame Xunami if she’d been secretly wishing the conversation had soured, that Dawn got hysterical and scared some sense into Nymphia. It still hurts, still scrapes against this tender spot in Nymphia’s heart, still activates some long-forgotten walls.
“It’s not like I got her seal of approval,” Nymphia stabs a bobby pin through her bun. “I just think she’s just more of a romantic than you are.”
“Fucking delusional is what she is,” Xunami snaps. It would come off mean if Xunami didn’t sound so completely distressed, her voice thin and desperate. “Nymphia. You know this is a terrible fucking idea-”
“Yeah, I got that,” Nymphia cuts in. Maybe it sounds a little mean. Maybe she’s just scared shitless.
Either way, they know they can’t talk about this here, because the door swings open and Nymphia’s morning gets a little worse.
In walks the full entourage, near-nuclear, almost archetypal. Gigi floats past, light and breezy even in the sweltering heat, strawberry blonde and bouncing beside her fiancé, perfect in every way. Jane’s mother, almost uncomfortably stiff in the midst of her summer vacation, halfway through some lecture that the rest of the party nod their heads at. Nymphia wonders when was the last time she smiled.
Jane’s boyfriend is just behind her, all-American and completely unaffected. He’s wearing expensive summer linens and has one arm carelessly slung around Jane’s shoulders, like it’s the easiest thing in the world to hold on to her, like he doesn’t even have to think about it. Nymphia feels jealousy like never before, boring through her like sulfuric acid.
Jane has her arms crossed and mumbles something about the heat as she passes by, her eyes darting in what Nymphia knows is a concerted effort to look anywhere except at Xunami. Jane drops her chin and Nymphia swears she can see her flush, almost embarrassed. Xunami scoffs under her breath, unimpressed.
The two of them stare after the party in silence, watching as they take their places, skirting around each other in a well-rehearsed routine. There’s all of them slotting so seamlessly together, and then there’s Jane.
Jane, all busty in a little red dress with a sweetheart neckline, made from some satiny fabric that must be completely suffocating. Her blonde curls are gathered high on her head, escaping around her face in white-gold ringlets, and there’s a sheen to her collarbones that makes something in Nymphia go fuzzy.
She looks so gorgeous, and so obviously pained. He says something to her, leans in like he’s trying to make her laugh and Jane just winces.
“Y’know,” Xunami says, angling closer, her tone an achingly familiar playfulness that Nymphia hadn’t known she’d missed until right now. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’d joke about doing.”
All of a sudden it becomes one of their usual games. Jane becomes a stranger again, some completely untouchable woman seen from a safe distance. Stunning beyond words and only so satisfied, with just enough visible edge to signal that there’s something amiss, just enough for two dreamers to attach anything onto.
“This is the part where I’d tell you to sneak her out of that house and make her forget all about him,” Xunami says, almost smiling because it sounds so simple. She glances nervously to her right. “That only works because it’s a joke, Nymphia. You know that, don’t you?”
Nymphia nods, voice small, unable to tear her eyes away from the table, unable to tear herself away from her own fate. “I know.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re actually going to do this.”
Nymphia is staring right to the reality of the situation: Jane sat at a table of upper-echelon socialites, stars in their own microcosm of the universe, people that make six to seven figures a year and live in posh Boston brownstones and marry more of the same. Nymphia stares at the beautiful boy who sits beside her, well-bred and able to offer her everything, the sort of man Jane’s been destined to end up with since before she was born. Nymphia stares at the mother that will make certain it happens, the one who probably has a ring set aside, some family heirloom that says this is how it’s supposed to be. These are realities, cold and menacing and solid as stone.
And then there’s this - the moment that Jane and Nymphia lock eyes from across the room, completely coincidental, just two magnets finding their way back together. Before either of them can remember to look away, there’s this imperceptible brightening between them, this tiny little smile pulling at Jane’s lips completely involuntarily and in spite of every circumstance that should crush it.
This - the chemistry that counters everything else - that’s real too.
Quietly, Nymphia murmurs, “I think I already am, ‘Nami.”
-
A few hours later, Nymphia doesn’t think twice about it.
There’s a familiar tug at her heart, the sort she’d spent all summer fighting off, but she gives into it freely now. It’s all too easy to surrender herself to the magnetism. She knows who she’ll find at the other end.
She follows that thread of desire right down the steps of the restaurant in the late-afternoon, two blocks down the cobblestone Main Street and around the back of the record shop. She doesn’t hesitate at the dull ache in her calves from a long shift on her feet, or the throb behind her eyes from a lack of sleep. It’s only when she gets there, only when she’s standing alone at the edge of the alleyway that she starts to worry.
The sun goes golden as Nymphia considers whether she’s fucking up her life beyond recognition, kept waiting long enough to start hearing Xunami’s softly delivered disappointment echoing around her skull. She’s half-wondering if it isn’t too late to walk back towards the sunlit Main Street and reclaim her dignity when Jane rounds the corner.
Jane, improbably and unfortunately endearing. Jane in her cutoffs and her popped collar, Jane pushing her sunglasses into her blonde curls and saying something stupid.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
Jane. The one that forms fissures in every one of Nymphia’s reasons why. All it takes is this, and Nymphia wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.
Jane pulls a cigarette out of her purse because this has become their ruse - happening upon each other, sharing a smoke, swapping secret messages and continuing on like the very air hasn’t been electrified. It’s casual, and it’s almost convincing, but Jane only hides her nerves so well. Today she crosses her arms, eyes darting widely, and Nymphia knows she’s on edge.
There’s something charming about it: Jane, a surreal sort of gorgeous, all misty eyes and red lips and pinup model proportions, still so utterly and completely awkward. Nymphia thinks it would be sweet if it wasn’t so horrifically sad, if she didn’t know the gravity of the situation and just how thoroughly crushed Jane has been beneath the weight of it.
Jane slips the lighter that Nymphia had given her out of her front pocket and goes to spark her cigarette, but her hands don’t make it to her mouth. It’s too hot to smoke, but it isn’t just that. Jane falters, her thumb swiping gently over the etching in the chrome like a worry stone.
“How’re things?” Jane asks, eyes to the ground and visibly uncomfortable. It could be about anything, but Nymphia immediately knows what she means: Xunami on the stoop, a witness to their own private universe, the power to upend Jane’s whole life in her hands.
Jane fidgets with the lighter and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She can’t seem to stay still, can’t keep herself from chewing on her bottom lip or tucking a stray curl behind her ear or rolling the hem of her shorts between her fingertips. Nymphia knows that fear comes in many forms. Sometimes, it looks like screaming and crying. Sometimes, fear looks like this.
“Everything is alright,” Nymphia says, suddenly less nervous. There’s something about seeing Jane afraid that summons a secret courage Nymphia didn’t know she had. She says it and really thinks it’s true, thinks that she can make it so. Being brave has always been something she’s done for herself. Suddenly, she finds herself being brave for Jane.
“Your friend,” Jane spins the flint on the lighter, a flame sparking over and over again, dying in her hands. “She isn’t going to…”
Nymphia shakes her head. “She’s not going to say anything.”
Jane glances up, so clearly and innately uncertain. “Are you sure about-”
“My friends aren’t in the business of outing people,” Nymphia says without hesitation, her voice firm. Nymphia and her friends have survived Jupiter Beach together. She may not have their seal of approval, and maybe she doesn’t deserve it, but they all know what happens to people who get found out at the wrong place and the wrong time. They know better than to throw anyone to the wolves.
Jane searches Nymphia’s face for a moment, mouth twisting to one side. She finally nods, but there’s a weightiness that remains, something that stays rigid beneath the fabric of her shirt.
Nymphia can see it so clearly - the pose Jane has held long enough to forget naturality, the tension that has calcified around her, becoming this second skin that she’s so thoroughly encased it. There’s something soft and gentle beneath it, buried so deep she thinks Jane’s almost forgotten that it still lives inside of her. Nymphia has seen it surface, has coaxed it up and out of Jane in private meadows and under the guise of darkness. It’s the best of her, Nymphia’s favorite part so far, and Jane keeps it guarded. Xunami caught a glimpse of it, seen its shadow walking along the dock, and just the feeling of her eyes has sent Jane receding into shadows. It’s instinctual, and it breaks Nymphia’s heart.
“You don’t know Xunami. I understand if you don’t trust her,” Nymphia tilts her head, voice growing softer. “But you trust me, don’t you?”
Jane lets out a puff of laughter, looking up and searching Nymphia’s expression like she half expects it to be a joke. There’s this curious little curve to her stare, this marveling that takes Nymphia’s breath away. It’s just a look, but it feels like Jane is touching her, like looking in her eyes takes her right to her skin, right up against her soul.
“Look at what we’re doing, Nymphia,” Jane says and there’s something terrified in her eyes, something thrilling, something utterly and completely alive. “I think I’d have to trust you.”
Nymphia knows Jane means it, because she follows Nymphia down the alleyway as the sun melts into the skyline. She knows she means it, because Jane presses against her in the darkness, collapses into her like a respite, falls into her like the weary fall into sleep. She can feel Jane soften, can feel the nerves sliding off of her, and Nymphia knows how much she needs this. She wants to soothe Jane, first with her words and then with her bare hands, wants to know the smoothness of her skin and the curve of her neck. She wants nothing at all in between them, wants to rub the tension from her shoulders and feel Jane settle beneath her, wants to lure that soft-bellied thing to a place where it can stay.
And then Nymphia thinks maybe she needs this too, because the angling of Jane’s mouth against hers - slack, needy, aching - feels like the affirmation she hadn’t known she’d been asking for, like the assertion of something ungovernable and all-consuming.
Jane is there, and Nymphia knows that it doesn’t matter what either of them say, who swears they’re going to stop, whose advice they’d try to follow. They’d end up here anyways, pulled together and pressed against the brick, mouth against waiting mouth.
-
The fourth of July finds Jupiter Beach in full swing.
Throngs of people fill the flag-lined streets, the sun shining through the canopy of red white and blue banners strewn overhead. The beach fronts are dotted with striped umbrellas and red coolers, the boardwalks brimming with children waving dripping popsicles. It’s the sort of thing that appeals to tourists, almost Rockwellian in its quintessential Americana. For virtually everyone else, it’s a nightmare.
The restaurant is slammed almost immediately upon opening. Nymphia is overwhelmed by families of screaming children and bleary-eyed housewives and husbands a little too eager to get day-drunk. The AC rattles at full volume and still Nymphia flushes pink, her bangs sticking to the side of her face with sweat.
Gradually, the sun meanders across the sky, and the people meander to their way to their barbecues, to boats at the ends of docks or campsites along the coast. By the time Nymphia finally trails Xunami out of work with a wad of cash tips in her back pocket, hard-earned and almost worth it, there are already fireworks twinkling against the still-blue sky, sailboats stationed in the center of Lake Jupiter.
Nymphia trails Xunami up the stairs to her bedroom, where they peel off their work clothes and change into fresh t-shirts. Between their post-work debrief there’s this unusual, stilted silence that Nymphia doesn’t know what to do with. She’d like to attribute it to exhaustion, because they are worn out, but that doesn’t explain the tension, the discomfort that underscores their usual conversations. Nymphia can’t help but feel like it’s her fault.
She does her best to lighten the mood: she rolls the pregame joint and passes it off to Xunami, makes stupid jokes while they smoke out of her bedroom window. She finally gets Xunami laughing when they race each other on their bikes along the coastline, shrieking as they swerve away from potholes in the cracking pavement. The golden hour paints the surface of Lake Jupiter a beautiful blood-orange, and there’s people crammed around picnic tables when they whip past the park, and everything feels almost normal again.
Nymphia’s in the lead when they pull up to the intersection, panting as she looks over her shoulder. “You’re going easy on me!”
“Never!” Xunami jeers, flying up beside Nymphia. That effortlessly gorgeous grin warms her face, faltering only as a car pulls up at the red light.
A familiar red convertible, music blaring. Jane in the driver’s seat, white shirt slipping off one tanned shoulder, the red string of a bikini in a sloppy knot at her neck. She’s got these old Hollywood sunglasses at the end of her nose and a cigarette floating between two perfectly manicured fingers, the sun glinting off of her jewelry as she takes a long, slow drag. Nymphia can’t see her eyes, but she can feel them, can feel the air go electric with knowingness. Gigi is in the passenger’s seat, laughing her way through some long-winded story and gasping when a Madonna song comes on over the radio. She doesn’t notice Nymphia, doesn’t even get the chance, because the light turns green and Jane floors it through the intersection.
She roars out of sight, reducing herself to little more than a red blip on the horizon, and Nymphia is left hovering over her bike, staring off after her with a pounding heart and more feeling than she can afford to have.
It’s a while before Nymphia can register anything else, and when she finally looks to her right that gorgeous grin has slid right off Xunami’s face. She just stares after Jane, something in her jaw clenching.
Nymphia waits for her to deliver some unapproving blow, some unforgivingly precise criticism, but Xunami says nothing at all. She just looks at Nymphia and forces something back, musters a smile like it actually hurts. Somehow, that’s so much worse.
“C’mon,” Xunami pushes off the pavement, all long legs and things left unsaid. “It’ll get dark soon.”
-
Xunami beats Nymphia to the campsite. It’s not even close.
Nymphia can’t contend with the added weight to everything they do together, the strange and unfamiliar silences that punctuate their conversations now, the ones that always end with the mention of Jane and fear flickering over Xunami’s face. Nymphia pedals and feels like she’s pushing against so much more than pavement. She doesn’t have the heart to try and beat Xunami at anything, not when she’s inadvertently challenging her in much more complicated ways.
So Nymphia falls behind, letting the distance between herself and Xunami’s two-speed grow wider. Time and time again Xunami glances over her shoulder, trails the sole of her sneaker against the asphalt and slows down, calling out stay close, okay?
The two of them ride down the twilight road, the sound of things imploding against the sky in the distance. They veer off at a faded signpost that points them towards Jupiter Beach Campgrounds, a rocky path through tall trees and mossy earth and long-forgotten footpaths.
Nymphia swears she hears Xunami exhale a sigh of relief when they spot Mirage’s truck at the mouth of the campsite. It’s an ancient pickup that’s seen some hundred thousand miles and a few paint jobs. There’s a sizable dent to the front bumper where the blue paint is chipping away, a cherry red peeking out from underneath it.
Mirage is rooting around in the truck bed, and turns with a smile at the sound of their tires in the dirt. She’s wearing a miniscule pair of dolphin shorts, two dark braids flopping against her back as she jumps to the ground, and Xunami all but tosses her bike aside to get to her.
Nymphia is struck by the immediacy between the two, something that’s blossomed tenfold since she’d last seen them together. Xunami wraps herself around Mirage and something barely perceptible passes between them: Mirage mumbles something against Xunami’s ear, Xunami nods, and Mirage holds her a little tighter, some sort of affirmation there. Xunami lingers in her hold for just a moment too long, and Nymphia wonders if she’s the reason why.
-
Nymphia is sitting by the fire and trying to remember what having a good time is supposed to feel like.
Mirage has the radio cranked up to full volume. An overzealous radio DJ announces the next song, some Journey tune that crackles over the airwaves and gets Mirage to her feet. Logs snap in the roaring fire, sending sparks spiraling towards the sky and casting flickering light over the trunks of the surrounding trees. Distant fireworks echo overhead in bursts of emerald green and gold that fizzle out above the treeline. Xunami whistles as Mirage swings her hips to the song, Dawn shrieks when the sparkler in her hands burns down to the bottom, and Amanda throws her head back in wild, shrieking laughter.
All these sounds, but all Nymphia can hear is what everyone isn’t saying.
It’s something in the way that Dawn has been directing their conversations; her eyes wide and a little too knowing, interjecting whenever Amanda rambles too close to anything resembling roller skates or boyfriends or secrets. It’s the way that Xunami’s head snaps up when Nymphia cracks open a third beer, like Nymphia’s drinking is now something to be worried about, the numbing of some previously overlooked pain. It’s the way that Mirage is starting to feel like a mediator, subtly squeezing Xunami’s arm as if to say not here, not now and shooting Nymphia sympathetic smiles. It’s the sort of concern that only comes from people that care about you, Nymphia knows that, but it stings nonetheless.
Even under the open sky and from opposite sides of the campfire, Nymphia can feel the worry radiating off of Xunami. She feels noxious, polluting the air that everyone breathes. She hates that keeping her distance feels like doing Xunami a favor, and she hates that she feels safer with more space between them.
Conversation swells all around her, and there’s some chant on the air, but Nymphia isn’t listening. As she averts her eyes and thumbs the tab on her beer can, all she knows is the burning feeling of Xunami’s stare and the memory of the last time she felt alive - in the alleyway, where she could feel Jane’s hipbones press against her own, where she could hear the blood rushing in her ears and her heart beating out of her chest.
It’s a sharp gasp that takes Nymphia out of the memory.
Nymphia looks up and spots Mirage with one hand clamped over her mouth. She follows her wide-eyed stare where Dawn stands in a striped dress, red curls pulled back with a scrunchie. She’s got one hand folded against Amanda’s, and her sneakers are creased where she’s leaning up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to the blonde girl’s mouth.
A beat of stunned silence befalls the group, and then Nymphia hears herself say, “Finally.”
Several laughs follow, Dawn pulls away from Amanda with one hand over her mouth, tipsy laughter bubbling out from behind her palm, and Nymphia feels a little less lost. Nymphia’s gaze instinctively gravitates to Xunami, who turns to look at her with the same wide-eyed disbelief, and matching smiles cross their faces.
Mirage’s beam lights up the dark as she raises her beer in an impromptu toast.
“Welcome to the family,” she says with a wink towards Amanda, who fans her face and feigns fainting on the spot. Dawn bounces on her feet, blushing and bright.
“It’s a little too soon for that, isn’t it?” Xunami smiles over at Amanda, eyes narrowing playfully. “I don’t think we’ve grilled you nearly enough.”
“God,” Mirage rolls her eyes. “We’ll need more liquor for this.” Her fingertips linger at Xunami’s forearm as she presses a kiss to the girl’s cheek, then hops to her feet, excitedly clapping as she races for the cooler they’d left a few yards off, braids bouncing against her back.
In her absence, Xunami crosses one long leg over the other, folds her hands beneath her chin and leans forward to interrogate Amanda. “What are your intentions with our Dawn?”
It’s a wonderfully ridiculous scene: Xunami doubling down on Amanda, Dawn jumping into a lengthy plea for Amanda to be spared, and Amanda insisting that won’t be necessary. It’s the sort of well-intended chaos that Nymphia has so desperately been needing, and she can’t help but laugh at all of it.
“Oh, please.” Amanda falls so easily into the group’s banter. She’s such a natural, such a perfect addition, and there’s something Xunami-esque about the way Amanda rolls her eyes and says, “If you’re going to ask anyone’s intentions, you should be asking-”
Amanda catches herself, but it’s too late. Dawn’s eyes go horrifically wide and right to Nymphia.
Everyone falls silent. The song on the radio fades out, warping into the next announcement. A firework screams on its way through the sky, explodes and echoes across the landscape. A long snaps in the fire.
“Shit,” Amanda mumbles under her breath, quieter than Nymphia’s ever seen her, and a heaviness cloaks the campground, suffocating and severe.
Amanda won’t meet her eyes, Dawn can’t look away, and Nymphia isn’t sure which is worse. Nymphia stares back at the redhead and tries to swallow the lump of panic that rises in her throat. “You told her?”
Dawn winces, wraps her arms around herself like she’s somehow gone cold. “I’m sorry.”
There’s something about Dawn’s expression that makes Nymphia feel bad for asking. She looks so unsure, so afraid as she stumbles through an elongated apology, and Nymphia can’t help but wonder just how unpredictable she’s become in the eyes of her friends.
“No, I-,” Nymphia interjects, squeezes her eyes shut and waves the rest of Dawn’s apology away. She isn’t angry, not at anyone else, anyway. She couldn’t be even if she wanted to. This is her mess. She should’ve seen this coming, should’ve known that secrets are bound to spill over. “It’s okay,” Nymphia says, pursing her lips together in an attempt at a smile. “You were all going to find out anyway, right?”
She glances around the fire and knows the night has been effectively ruined. Xunami’s face darkens for the second time today, and Nymphia feels too exhausted to will it to brighten again. She isn’t sure she’d be capable anyway. Dawn drops her head and Amanda just keeps looking back and forth between them, tongue at the inside of her cheek, something straining to be set free.
“Listen,” Amanda says finally, stepping closer to Nymphia. “I know we don’t know each other that well, but I don’t plan on airing out the details of your personal life to anyone else.”
Nymphia nods, relief washing over her all too soon. “I’d appreciate that-”
“But, for the record,” Amanda interjects, and there’s something personal aflame in her eyes. “You could do so much better. I mean, seriously, why her?”
Nymphia blinks, taken aback. Amanda is emboldened in a way that Nymphia doesn’t know what to do with and nearly envies. She opens her mouth to respond, trying to pinpoint in an impossible instant just what it is about Jane that has her crossing every line she’s ever set for herself, but before she gets the chance:
“Because she’s a risk.”
The voice comes from Xunami, stone-faced at the edge of the fire.
The heaviness of the scene is punctuated only by the sound of Mirage’s footsteps. She emerges from the darkness, enthused and carrying another round of drinks, her face falling when she finds the gathering has soured. She approaches tentatively, like some sort of doe, soft-eyed and all knowing.
“It’s a thrill, right?” Xunami goes on, not looking up, flames reflected in her eyes. She snaps a twig between her long fingers and tosses the segments into the fire. “Like gambling.” Snap. “Like jumping off a cliff.” Snap.
Her words reverberate through Nymphia, striking some low and unforgiving chord, triggering some chemical reaction. She’s brought back to that alleyway, the adrenaline rush of the moment that Jane went slack against her, the wet of her mouth and the barely contained hunger escaping through her hands. The memory makes Nymphia weak, an uncontrollable heat rippling through her.
Xunami shrugs to herself. “Why else do people have affairs?”
Affair.
The word is a damning stake through Nymphia’s heart - sharp as a blade and ice cold. A breeze floats through the trees, the first she can remember in days, and sends goosebumps up the back of her arms. Mirage’s mouth twists and there’s something soft in her that goes solid, some almost forgotten reflex that reactivates.
“It’s human nature. We all want what we can't have,” Xunami says, and Nymphia hates when she gets like this: short, stern, serious. They don’t fight, but when they do it’s about stupid shit; the cigarette burn Nymphia left on her futon, restaurant misfires, whose turn it is to buy drinks at the bar. This time it feels all too deserved, and Nymphia knows the conversation she’s been trying to outrun since she’d been seen with Jane at the end of the dock has finally caught up with her.
Xunami looks up to deliver the final blow, her stare like an arrow that pierces Nymphia right between the eyes.
“You know you can’t have her, Nymphia.”
Something inside of Nymphia bends so far it threatens to shatter. She stares back at Xunami and feels almost eviscerated, like some vital organ has been taken out and put back in the wrong place. There’s something gut-wrenching about it, the way they are veering so close to causing irreparable damage, careening towards catastrophe.
“Nymph,” Mirage says softly, passing the bottles off to Xunami and tilting her head over her shoulder. “Help me with the truck, will you?”
Nymphia nods wordlessly. She’s determined not to cry when she stands, determined not to pity herself for the mess she’s so willingly made of her life. Still, as she trails Mirage away from the campfire, her eyes sting as Xunami’s words wash over her in waves.
Every thrill she’s ever sought alongside Jane floods Nymphia at once: every ride they’ve ever taken, every swig of the bottle, every kiss they’ve chanced in alleyways and meadows and shadows. There’s something irrefutable there, some strange science Nymphia can’t deny, because this thing with Jane, some indeterminable amount of it is adrenal. As she comes to the clearing where Mirage’s truck is parked, she can't deny this either - the possibility that all it amounts to is a chemical reaction, some compound that is bound to run out.
The thought crashes down on her with enough force to level a city, utterly dismantle that world she’d built for her and Jane out of dust and dreams. Everything she once took as fact - her friendships with Dawn and Xunami, the woman she’s spent years making of herself, the feeling that there might be something real about this life she’s betting on Jane - all feel so futile, so false.
Nymphia stumbles as they approach Mirage’s truck, nauseated. She lays one hand against the side, like she’ll collapse without something real to touch. Mirage just eyes her as she reaches through the passenger side window and pulls a baggie from the glovebox, then sits criss-cross applesauce on the lowered tailgate. Nymphia obeys mindlessly when Mirage gestures for her to sit, lost and in need of direction.
“Here.” Mirage drops a bag of weed and rolling papers in Nymphia’s lap.
Nymphia scoffs, because it’s less of a task and more of an excuse to get her out of Xunami’s line of fire. Either way, she’s grateful.
“Thanks,” Nymphia mumbles, fumbling lazily through the bag.
“Don’t mention it,” Mirage smiles. Her eyes catch on Nymphia’s trembling hands and flicker to her face, pinpointing the root of her pain with laser-soft precision. “She’s just worried about you, y’know. She loves you to pieces.”
Nymphia doesn’t know what to say to that. She loves Xunami; just the thought of their friendship and all the years they’ve put into it is enough to have a smile pulling at her face, even as she sits here assessing the damage their bond has endured.
It’s almost frightening how innately Mirage seems to know which part of the interaction with Xunami has Nymphia twisted into knots - reading her pain like it’s her own.
“She’s been trying to understand,” Mirage says softly, one hand flying up to smooth Nymphia’s hair with this feather-light touch, soft and comforting and a little supernatural. “Adrenaline makes sense to Xunami,” she goes on, a familiarized little smile playing upon her lips and vanishing again. “It’s what she knows. She wants to figure out how you got somewhere that scares her, and the thrill of it is the first place her mind goes.”
This is the part where Nymphia’s eyes get teary, where the ground beneath her feet gapes open and threatens to take her down. It’s a fear so large it threatens to overwhelm her, consume her whole - that this is all a joyride to her, that this is all a joyride to Jane, that all of its vibrance is a short-lived high, a spark that is about to extinguish itself. A hologram Nymphia is about to put her hand through.
“Maybe the thrill is a part of it,” Mirage says, like she can read Nymphia’s mind and then some. “But you don’t really want a scandal, do you?”
Nymphia looks over, floored. She’s met by Mirage’s gaze, piercing and exacting and somehow still so soft.
“You’re not like Xunami,” Mirage says with a smile, a knowing tilt of her head. “Or Dawn. They’re so forthright about what they want in one way or another. Xunami wants passion, and Dawn…” Mirage chuckles to herself. “Dawn wants a fairytale. Something tells me she’s going to get it.”
Nymphia cracks a smile at that one. She’s always felt like the central point between two friends on opposite ends of the personality spectrum. She’s delighted that Xunami has met her match with Mirage, that she’s so completely spellbound by someone just as exciting as she is. She’s so relieved that Dawn seems to be falling into the romance she deserves, the kind that has her making the first moves and planting the first kisses. All that joy for her friends flares inside of her, bold and proud, and Mirage just watches, face warmed by Nymphia’s glow, and then she pauses, narrows in on exactly what it is about Nymphia that sets her apart.
“You always seem so content to be on your own,” Mirage tilts her head. “But that’s not true, is it?”
Nymphia scoffs like she’s going to deny it, but doesnt. It would be pointless. She doesn’t stand a chance against Mirage.
“Is it that obvious?” Nymphia averts her eyes and runs her tongue across the rolling paper, trying to hide the color she can feel flooding her cheeks.
Mirage smiles, because how could she not tell?
“You have a big heart, Nymph. Women with big hearts don’t want to be alone.”
Nymphia looks up and finds Mirage’s hazel eyes looking right through her, something mystic and miraculous going on behind them.
“Love,” Mirage says softly, a knowing smile gracing her lips. “That’s what you really want.”
And, well. Love blows affair right out of the water.
Nymphia swallows, flustered, her heart skipping several beats at once. “Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
“Sure,” Mirage shrugs her shoulders, a dusting of freckles there like fallen stars. “But you really want it, don’t you?”
Nymphia doesn’t answer, but there’s a hum from this long-empty spot inside of her, so loud she wonders if Mirage can hear it. It comes from the part of her that ached the entirety of the time she spent alongside Anetra, and flared up when Xunami started staying at the bar until last call for more time with Mirage, and the part that has gone so inconveniently quiet ever since she met Jane.
“What I mean is that you can get a thrill from anyone,” Mirage goes on, plucking the joint from Nymphia’s fingertips. “It’s love that makes people do crazy things.”
“Crazy.” Nymphia echoes the word, lost to that space where she and Jane melt together at the edge of the world, thinking of all the things she’d do to get there.
“I don’t think you are, by the way.” Mirage sparks the joint and takes a long exhale, rings in an array of colorful stones glittering at her fingers. “I think you mean well. That girl is lucky to have someone like you on her side.”
Nymphia considers this as Mirage smokes, a thick plume of blue-gray smoke unfolding from her mouth like a curtain. She ponders whether Mirage sees the whole thing more clearly than she does, if there’s any merit to the implication that Nymphia might be playing a pivotal role in Jane’s becoming. It’s the sort of sentiment that shakes things into perspective, so, by the time Mirage is offering Nymphia the joint and promising to get Xunami off her back for the rest of the night:
“No, no,” Nymphia waves the joint away. “I, um. There’s somewhere I think I need to be.”
Mirage hums, a knowing smile playing at her lips. “Thought you might say that.”
“Say goodnight to the girls for me, will you?” Nymphia asks. Mirage just nods, returning the joint to her lips and pulling. The ember glows like amber, crackling against the sounds of the night.
And then Nymphia is sliding down from the truck bed and retrieving her bike from where she’d leaned it against a tree,
“Nymphia!” Mirage calls suddenly. The brunette is leaning forward on her palms when Nymphia turns to look, long legs dangling from the truck bed and not quite reaching the ground.
“Just promise me you’ll be careful, alright?” Mirage says, the advice for once more personal than mystical. “Look before you fall.”
Mirage looks a little different then. The end of her braids are starting to curl up in little crescent moons against her chest, and she’s a little less intimidating, a little closer to a friend than an oracle. Nymphia nods, lips pressing into a thin smile.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re really good for Xunami,” Nymphia says, smiling over at Mirage. “It’s not about adrenaline with you. Not for her.”
Mirage smiles, a smitten twinkle in her eye.
“I know.”
-
The McGavern estate is a sprawling cottage along Lake Jupiter’s southern coastline.
Nymphia can spot it from half a mile out. The house glows invitingly from its place along the crescent moon shoreline, all fresh white paint and golden light glowing from the inside of every window. A well-worn fence wraps around the manicured grounds, lush flower beds that the owners spend all spring hunched over, and streetlamps line the dock sweeping out over the private beach.
Nymphia is pulled there by the same gravitational force that drew her to the alleyway just the day before, where she’d ignored all her aches and anxieties, overpowered by the possibility of Jane. It’s the same unfurling thread of desire she’d tried to sever, the one that had her on her back in the grass beside Jane just the same. It’s the same stubborn magnetism she’s been resisting since the start of the summer.
As she coasts along the pavement, much smoother in this part of town, Nymphia knows all of the things she’s leaving behind in search of answers - her morals, her life, her best friend’s face warping with concern as she rode off into the dark. Nymphia is frightened at how easily she can recite the list, at how quickly she’s committed it to memory over the course of a few weeks. She still turns into the driveway anyway.
Her bike rocks across the brick, right past the red convertible and the array of luxury vehicles that surround it, feeling all too out of place in her own hometown. Nymphia wonders which car is his and where he’s taken Jane in it, whether she drives it sometimes, whether she sings along to the radio when she’s with him, whether he’s ever pulled her into the backseat and slid his hand up her skirt. The thought makes Nymphia nauseous.
She doesn’t have a plan, not even a semblance of one as she slows a few yards from the front porch. She feels almost Shakespearean, some Romeo traipsing over enemy lines to toss rocks up a balcony. The house is aglow but quiet, gauzy curtains drawn in most of the windows, and a light on the second floor goes out as she comes to a stop. It’s just a few moments later that the screen door swings open.
Jane steps out, pulling a men’s dress shirt over a slinky little sleep top. She bounds across the porch barefoot, blonde curls bouncing against her shoulders and an unlit cigarette bobbing between her teeth.
Nymphia watches, transfixed as Jane moves only by her own momentum. There’s a slight urgency to her step, not quite fleeing but not quite relaxed, like she’s been waiting all day for this - a moment all her own. Jane tilts her head from side to side, stretching out some incurable tension, and lifts the hair from the back of her neck. There’s a moment where the breeze hits her bare skin and Jane’s eyelashes flutter shut, and Nymphia swears she can see the exact moment that Jane settles into herself. She can’t help but feel like she’s bearing witness to something sacred. Then Jane turns, reaching into the front pocket of her shirt, and freezes when she spots Nymphia in her periphery.
Nymphia expects her to jump, scream, do anything resembling being scared. It’s much more subtle than that.
Just for a moment Jane tenses. It’s a near-microscopic change, like one lens sliding over top of another, some view going in and out of focus. There’s something practiced about it, some informed part of her that goes into autopilot when she encounters an audience. It doesn’t quite make it, because there’s a strange sparkle of recognition in Jane’s eyes, and she softens.
“Oh,” Jane says. Her tone is soft, relieved, pleasantly surprised. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Nymphia says, breathless, and not just from her bike ride. Every time she’s with Jane is like getting caught on her all over again, stuck on the tilt of her head or the movement of her eyes or the shape of her lips.
Jane smiles, pulling the cigarette from her mouth with elegant fingers, glancing through the screen door and then back to Nymphia. “You’re at my house.”
“Yeah. Um.” Nymphia has to remember the right words, the ones will get them alone together. “Thought you might want a smoke.”
Jane beams, one side of her mouth higher than the other.
“You and your perfect timing.”
-
Jane is on the back of Nymphia’s bike, and Nymphia is trying to pay attention to what she’s saying. Really, she is. It’s just that Jane is on the back of Nymphia’s bike, so paying attention is a little hard.
Jane is recounting her afternoon: She’d spent it on a boat her family had chartered, complete with caviar and champagne and cannonballs into Lake Jupiter. She’d actually enjoyed it, those parts where she drank herself silly and soaked up the sunshine and submerged herself in the cool water. She tells Nymphia how much she likes the feeling of being underwater, how the world goes comfortably fuzzy and distant and everything, even her limbs, move in slow motion. She tells Nymphia how she’d gone under for so long that she’d started to see stars and then resurfaced, laughing, almost alive at feeling so close to death.
“Gigi was there when I came up, looking at me like I was crazy. She said she’d thought I was drowning,” Jane says from over Nymphia’s shoulder. “I told her maybe I was, that maybe I wanted to,” Jane scoffs to herself. “She told me that wasn’t funny.”
It had stopped being fun sometime after that. Jane had gritted her teeth and beared the rest of the night, all the way until she was following her boyfriend as he stumbled drunkenly up the stairs and pulled her into bed. Jane hadn’t detailed what had happened next, only that she’d waited until he’d fallen asleep, then snuck away for her cigarette.
Jane finishes the story with a sigh, and Nymphia is trying to think of what she should say to something like that, but she can’t think over the hammering of her heart in her ears, because Jane presses her cheek against Nymphia’s shoulder blade. Jane’s face is still warm from her day under the sun, and Nymphia can feel the heat radiating off of her, and when her arms snake around Nymphia’s waist she isn’t sure how she’s still upright and pedaling.
It’s the sort of thing they really shouldn’t risk, but it’s the dead of night and everyone is either asleep or piss drunk or has their eyes to the sky.
More than that, Nymphia can’t find it in herself to care; not when a shower of red sparks burst above the water and she can feel Jane gasp against her. Nymphia gets lost in the parting of Jane’s lips, the feeling of her hair against Nymphia’s back as she turns her head, the involuntary tightening of her arms around Nymphia’s waist.
Nymphia is so high off of this - Jane on her, Jane excited - never wants it to end.
Nymphia slows, the sole of her sneaker grazing the asphalt. She takes one look at Jane, fireworks reflected in her eyes, and thinks she would do anything to keep her aglow like this, that she would harness the stars and bring them down for her.
Nymphia can’t quite do that, but she thinks she can do something just as good.
“Do you wanna see them up close?”
-
It’s not long before Nymphia’s stashing her bike behind the boathouse at the edge of Lake Jupiter and tearing off through the grass, Jane’s.
The moon shines soft and strange over the shoreline and the lighthouse looms overhead, sending out beams of light that pierce through the dark. The burst of bottle rockets echo off of the town around them, and Nymphia can hear Jane laughing wildly behind her as she beelines for the lighthouse.
“You’re not serious,” Jane says when Nymphia reaches for the ladder, stiffening almost imperceptibly. “Don’t people, like, live in these things?”
“It’s automated,” Nymphia scoffs as she works the chain fastened around the ladder guard. She’d discovered a loose link last summer, and she manages to slip it free as Jane rattles off a list of excuses from somewhere behind her. The chain goes slack and Jane abruptly quiets, her mouth twisting up anxiously. Nymphia watches as her eyes scale the length of the lighthouse, all white-washed brick and rust.
Nymphia raises an eyebrow. “Are you scared?”
It’s not so much a taunt as it is a genuine question, an offer to draw back before they’re somewhere they can’t return from. It’s a move Nymphia keeps making when it comes to Jane, enough times to lose count, and, just like all those other times before, there’s this determined flash behind Jane’s eyes that outshines the fear and the misfortune.
“No,” Jane shakes her head, canines glinting in the moonlight when she smiles, so devilish it goes right back to being angelic. “After you.”
Nymphia can’t keep from pressing her lips to Jane’s right there, in the grass and the rubble at the base of the watchtower. There’s something hungry in the kiss, in the way that Jane takes a fistful of Nymphia’s hair, in the way that Nymphia has to stop herself from sinking her teeth into Jane’s bottom lip and never letting it go. It’s so tempting that it terrifies her, a possibility so enormous that she turns and commits to the climb, beckoning Jane to follow.
For a full minute it’s just this - Nymphia pulling herself up, one hand over the other, the dull thud of her sneakers against the metal rungs. Jane’s quietly anxious hums echo from somewhere beneath her, a little afraid after all, but ascending just the same.
“C’mon,” Nymphia calls above all the noise around them - the bombs going off in the distance, the wind that threatens to rip them from the ramparts. “You’re almost there.”
The breeze greets them before the view does. Up here the air feels more breathable, a break from the heat the whole town has been hostage to for days on end. It encourages them up the last of the ladder, picking up their hair and throwing it around their faces as they step up into the deck and press themselves together in laughter, chests heaving, backs flush against the brick wall lest they should be swept up by some stray gust stronger than fate.
Up here, the whole sky opens up for them. A railing encloses the perimeter of the platform and beyond that, the world. They’re so close to the water that they can’t see the ground beneath them; there’s only the lake, like a jet black mirror, and the sky, teeming with fire and stars.
They’re still panting from the climb, and their lips are gravitating together when a string of sparks burst overhead. Their image reflects in the rippled water, echoes off the mountains, and the whole landscape seems to come alive in glorious technicolor - everything going bright and reflective and full of wonder.
There’s no time to be afraid when the thrill is this tangible. It’s the breathlessness behind Nymphia’s lips. It’s the moment that Jane’s hand comes up to clutch her forearm absent-mindedly and for so much more than stability, an excited trill at her lips.
It’s the rush of adrenaline that floods Nymphia, same as it always does when she’s with Jane, except this time it hits some newfound nerve. This time it brings her right back to the campfire, right back to Xunami’s face between flickering flames.
Because she’s a risk.
Nymphia’s head swims. The world alternates between darkness and jewel tones in rapid, strobe-light succession, and Nymphia wonders whether this is what her life has become - deceptively luminous moments that distract her from the fact that she is still wholly, completely in the dark.
There’s a lull between fireworks, the smell of sulfur in the air, and Nymphia glances over beside her. Jane is little more than a silhouette against the night, and Nymphia thinks that maybe this is how she’s always seen her - all vague and unknown, except for those rare moments where she’s fully illuminated, all too fleeting and all too far between.
You know you can’t have her, Nymphia.
A flare bursts overhead, then another, and then dozens in rapid succession, spreading themselves out like fiery forget-me-nots and chrysanthemums. It’s the grand finale, a garden of flame, and when Nymphia glances at Jane now - eyes dazzling, face lit by a dozen colors at once, lips parted with awe - everything about her is almost crystal clear.
It knocks the wind right out of Nymphia, more than any fireworks display, any height, any thrill ever could. All night, all summer has felt like this - catching glimpses of Jane in the dark, committing fleeting visions to memory lest Nymphia should never see them again, hoping beyond belief to hold Jane in the light long enough to be fully illuminated. Every now and then she finds herself staring at the full picture, the heart-stopping reality. It never ceases to completely and utterly overpower her.
“I hated fireworks when I was a kid. I’d run away screaming,” Jane admits with a carelessness that feels earned, something like a giggle escaping her as she stares up at the sky with a smile, completely oblivious to Nymphia’s wonderment. “Funny how that works, isn’t it?”
Maybe Jane is a risk. Maybe she’s the love of Nymphia’s fucking life. Maybe two things can be true at once. All Nymphia really knows when she’s looking at Jane is that she doesn’t want more glimpses between shadows. She wants Jane like she has her now - fully illuminated and for all of time.
Like all perfect moments, it seems over too soon.
The last of the fireworks fall from their arc across the heavens, burning out above the water in a final stream of fading glitter, and when Nymphia closes her eyes it’s with the image of Jane at the back of her eyelids.
The sky darkens for the last time, the quiet punctuated only by softly lapping water and cicada song, and Nymphia knows the night has stretched itself long enough for her. She knows the rush has come and gone, and soon it will be time to descend the ladder and return to life thoroughly grounded, but before then-
“This is real for you, isn’t it?” Nymphia hears herself ask. Her head rests easily on Jane’s shoulder, and Jane’s head is coming to rest atop her own with this impossible, miraculous softness. “I mean, what are we doing?”
“Dunno,” Jane shrugs, her shoulder rising and falling softly beneath Nymphia’s temple. “I’ve never done this before. Have you?”
“What, gotten with someone who's in a relationship?” Nymphia scoffs and immediately regrets it. The comment comes out heavier than she’d hoped, more incriminating, and she peers nervously over at Jane in her feeble attempt to soften the unexpected blow. “No, I’ve never done this before.”
Jane purses her lips and stares out at the sky, so recently filled with fantastic flame and now holding nothing but ghostly smoke, the phantom of a blazing fire. There’s no mistaking her hesitation: it’s a terrible thing that they’re doing, and still-
“Feels like the only honest thing I’ve never done,” Jane says softly. She looks at Nymphia through her dark lashes and whispers, even in their isolation, “I’ve never felt like this.”
Nymphia swallows. “About a woman?”
Jane shakes her head. “About anyone.”
Fireworks go off somewhere inside of Nymphia, and just for a moment she wonders if Jane will go running.
She doesn’t.
Jane just closes her eyes, lingers in Nymphia’s hold like she wants it to last forever, like she’s savoring it for when she’s gone.
Right then and there, Nymphia knows the ending she wants. The one branch of fate that stretches out and away from all this mess - the one where she walks Jane away from the burning building of her life. The one where she saves her. The one where she gets to hold her hand in the light of day. The one where she gets to take her home.
-
Nymphia is not avoiding Xunami.
She’s not. It’s just that it’s barely been a day since Nymphia had stumbled away from the campfire with tears in her eyes and Xunami’s words echoing around her head, and, even with her certainty in Jane, she still isn’t certain what to say to Xunami. She was hoping for a little more time to figure out a nice way to say thanks for your concern, but I’m going to do that absolutely insane thing you’re advising me not to do anyway. You wouldn’t understand.
Then Xunami is there, rounding the corner with her walkman and her high tops and drumming a fresh pack of rolling papers against the palm of her hand. Nymphia drops her head, stares at the ground like it’ll render her invisible, like there’s some chance her best friend of nearly a decade wouldn’t recognize her anywhere.
Of course, that doesn’t work on Xunami. She pauses a few feet away from Nymphia and slips her headphones around her neck.
“Hey,” Xunami says, lips pressed together in a weak attempt at a smile and looking more tired than Nymphia can ever remember seeing her.
Whatever mumbly response Nymphia was going to lead with dies in her mouth. They’ve pulled their fair share of all-nighters, but none that have left Xunami with under-eye circles quite like these.
“You alright?” Nymphia asks, a little scared to hear the answer.
“I’ve been better,” Xunami scoffs, but the laugh of it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’m exhausted, to be honest with you.”
“Yeah,” Nymphia says, and there’s a memory flashing behind her eyes - her and Jane on the front porch of the McGavern at 1 AM, Nymphia wondering out loud whether Jane’s mother would get pissed at her for sneaking in so late. Oh, she’ll ream me for it, Jane had smiled. But it’s worth it. You’re worth it. Somehow, that had made it all worth it for Nymphia, too.
The memory ends in a smile on her lips. “Late night.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get much sleep,” Xunami says, pulling her glossy ponytail over her shoulder and rolling the ends of her hair between her fingertips. “Not with Dawn calling me at 3 AM wondering if you’d ever forgive her for ratting you out to Amanda.”
“Dawn,” Nymphia clicks her tongue, rolls her eyes a little. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I told her that’s what you’d say” Xunami says, that gorgeous smile shining through even now. She glances up nervously. “I was up feeling guilty about what I’d said to you, too.”
“You don’t have to feel guilty,” Nymphia chews on her cheek. “I know you’re looking out for me.” “Yeah, but, I mean,” Xunami shakes her head. “I could’ve phrased it better, I guess.”
Xunami’s hands are deep in the pockets of a dark green letterman jacket that had once belonged to the running back of their highschool football team. He’d tried to ask her out, only to turn around and call her a dyke when she’d refused him. Well, yeah, she’d responded. Not two minutes later she’d stolen the jacket straight out of his locker. It was one of Nymphia’s favorite memories from senior year.
Nymphia knows then that it wouldn’t matter if they hated each other’s guts - she thinks they’d always find their way back to one another. They aren’t blameless anymore, and they’re up against much bigger things than football players, but the sides are still the same. It’s them against the world. That much will always be true.
“It’s alright,” Nymphia smiles, because it really is. “Don’t sweat it.”
Xunami nods and eyes Nymphia carefully. With the initial shock of happening upon each other out of the way, it’s apparent how odd of a place this is for Nymphia to be. Even in a town like Jupiter Beach, there are better places to kill time than back alleys.
Xunami’s eyes flicker up, dark and dissecting. “You’re waiting for her, aren’t you?”
Nymphia would like to think Xunami draws this conclusion purely because she knows her so well, but it’s not just that. It’s also that there’s a certain amount of waiting that is inherent to small town living. You don’t take on more of it unless you really think it’s worth it.
“Yeah, I am,” Nymphia says softly. “I know that’s not what you want to hear.”
“Listen, it’s not like I don’t want you to get involved in some crazy, mind-altering romance, Nymphia, okay?” Xunami says and sounds frustrated, less with Nymphia and more with herself, or something Nymphia can’t quite put her finger on. “This is me we’re talking about. I live for that shit.”
“I know you do,” Nymphia laughs at the sheer exhaustiveness of it all, hands flying up on their own accord. “I mean, I figured you’d be the one egging me on, y’know? Instead I have Dawn on my side.”
“A few months ago I probably would’ve been egging you on, Nymph, really. It’s just…” Xunami glances over her shoulder. She’s always on the lookout for something as of late, though Nymphia doesn’t quite know what. “It’s just that I’ve heard enough of Mirage’s stories, things that make me nervous.”
Nymphia’s brows knit tight together. “What kind of things are we talking about?”
Xunami sighs and glances over her shoulder again before stepping closer, away from some stubborn ghost.
“Do you know how Mirage ended up in Jupiter Beach?”
Nymphia shakes her head, stomach already churning. She’s heard vague allusions to Mirage’s life before it had become Xunami and weekends at The Violet, a time almost exclusively referred to as back when I was on the road. Nymphia hadn’t thought too much into it, but she supposes that if that road trip had begun well, she probably would’ve heard about it by now.
“She was in Vegas for a few years,” Xunami begins. “She got a steady job at some club out there. Bartending, serving, whatever. Anyway, there was this girl she got attached to. I guess it got pretty serious, they talked about moving to California together and opening a bar or something.” Xunami’s jaw clenches. “Well, it turned out the girl had a husband. An important husband, with ties to all the wrong people. When he found out what had been going on he went after Mirage, and I mean hard. He threatened to turn her into the sheriff. He got her fired from her job. He had guys break into her apartment and trash it. They took everything, Nymphia. He drove her right out the fucking state.”
“Jesus,” Nymphia whispers and realizes she isn’t breathing. It’s the sort of horror story that puts things into perspective, a cruel reminder of just how horrible the world can be to girls like her. She thinks about Mirage, a few years younger and speeding away from the town she’d called home with tears in her eyes.
Almost selfishly, Nymphia wonders about the other woman - whether she’d tried to stop her husband, whether she could’ve if she’d wanted to, where she is now. Nymphia tries to picture what she looks like, but just ends up imagining dirty blonde curls and steel blue eyes and a perpetually twisted mouth. There are no thoughts that don’t end in Jane.
“I don’t mean to get so protective, okay? I know you can handle yourself, Nymph. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” Xunami trails off, something wilting around her eyes. “But so does Mirage. If this could happen to her…”
“It could happen to anyone,” Nymphia finishes Xunami’s sentence. She shudders to think of Mirage speeding across state lines in the dead of night, so small in the driver’s seat of her pickup.
“If this was a one-time thing, well, that might be a little different…” Xunami rambles on. Nymphia listens half-heartedly, caught somewhere between the image of Mirage, all alone in a seedy hotel room with no money and no one to fall back on, and the image of Jane confined to a different sort of desperation, pacing some cushy inner-city apartment with a screaming baby on her hip and a sparkling ring on her finger, sullen and insatiable.
“...But I know you, Nymphia. I know you don’t want a one time thing, which would be fine, y’know, if it wasn’t her…”
Nymphia chews on her cheek. She might’ve finally made some sense of Jane, but she doesn’t know how to make her understandable to someone else, least of all to Xunami, who is too rightfully terrified to take Nymphia for her word. Why should she? She doesn’t see the Jane that Nymphia does, the one that is clawing out of her skin for the moment that she’s alone in the moonlight, cigarette at her lips and wind in her hair, the Jane that goes silly and almost soft under Nymphia’s fingertips. That’s the Jane that Nymphia gets, but only in secret spaces, ones at the very edge of Nymphia’s life. Nymphia doesn’t want to span the distance anymore.
“I want you to meet her.”
“Woah,” Xunami pulls back dumbfounded, trying to laugh and failing miserably. “Okay, I think you’re missing my point-”
“I know you can’t understand this now,” Nymphia says, sounding absolutely like she’s lost her mind and incapable of anything else. “But I trust her, Xunami.”
“I know you do,” Xunami says with a well-hidden wince, the words fateful in her mouth. “What about all those people around her, Nymphia? You can’t trust them. You can’t know what they’ll do if they figure out what’s going on.”
“You’re right. I don’t trust them at all,” Nymphia takes a deep breath. “That’s why I’ve got to get her out.”
Xunami sighs, sharp and defeated, her dark eyes fluttering shut. “Nymphia…”
“She’s miserable, Xunami,” Nymphia pleads. “She’s been with a man who she doesn’t even love for years because she never knew there was another option. That’s not a life. She can’t live like that.”
“Believe me, I’m sympathetic,” Xunami huffs, that signature sarcasm creeping into her tone. “No one should have to spend life with a man, in love with him or not-”
“I’m serious,” Nymphia cuts in, not quite biting but not quite tame. “I know you think it’s a terrible idea, and you have every right to, but I can’t sit back and watch her throw her life away. I care about her too much not to try.”
Xunami shakes her head, her mouth a woeful line on her face, and Nymphia knows she’s worn the girl thin. She’s tried to redirect Nymphia towards reason from every which way, burning through every tool in her arsenal, and this is her final, most truthful attempt.
“Mirage was alone, Nymphia,” Xunami says. There’s no humor to dilute her words, no anger to mask it. Fear, pure and unbridled, flashes behind her eyes. “If something like that ever happened to you, I swear to God-”
“If something happened to me, I wouldn’t be alone,” Nymphia says, straight like liquor and solid as stone. There are few things she truly knows in this life, but she knows this. “I have you. I have Dawn, and my mother, and everyone else who’s ever been on my side. It would be terrible, but I would be okay, ‘Nami.”
They’re not alone now, Nymphia knows by the way Xunami’s eyes catch somewhere over her shoulder. When she turns, Jane is at the end of the block, arms crossed and momentarily stunned at the sight of them, like she knows she’s arriving at the end of a conversation she shouldn’t hear.
Seeing her through Xunami’s eyes, Jane suddenly seems so meek to Nymphia. She watches Jane sigh, a reluctant shudder rippling through her body, visible from half a block away. For so long she’s seemed larger than life, this momentous force Nymphia’s been trying to figure out; From here Jane looks frail, feeble, a facade that’s one strong breeze from falling in on itself. Nymphia wonders what happens when a girl like that gets found out.
She decides that Jane wouldn’t end up like Mirage did - drifting through different cities until one stuck, working odd jobs and pinching pennies. Jane would have a Boston brownstone and a dining room table set for dinner and a doting husband who’d make certain she’d never fall into sordid love affairs with confused women. She’d have a life, Nymphia thinks, but it would always be a lie. Jane might have a place to go, but she’d never really be at home. She’d eat, and still she’d hunger. She might have him, but Nymphia thinks she would always be alone.
“She needs people, Xu,” Nymphia says softly as she waves to Jane, clearly terrified but approaching anyway. “People like us. Otherwise, she doesn’t stand a chance.”
Xunami doesn’t say a word when Nymphia whirls around to face her, just keeps her eyes trained on Jane as she approaches over Nymphia’s shoulder.
“Just think about it, okay?” Nymphia says, reaching out to gently squeeze her best friend’s forearm. She offers an unreturned goodbye and turns on her heel, walking the rest of the way to meet Jane in the middle of the block. Jane’s got her arms crossed and is looking somewhere, anywhere but in Xunami’s direction, like so much as making eye contact would expose her.
Nymphia can’t get to her fast enough. Even when she’s standing right in front of her, she can barely resist the urge to wrap her arms around Jane.
“Hi, baby.”
Nymphia says it softly, so only they can hear. It still feels enormous. She hasn’t even considered the word until it’s already slipped past her lips instinctually, some unconscious effort to soothe Jane - so clearly and painfully anxious.
There’s a moment that the blonde’s lips part, a tiny shock that wipes her face clean. Nymphia doesn’t know whether she should apologize or do it over and over again. She doesn’t quite get the chance to decide, because Xunami’s voice rings out from the other end of the block.
“Jane!”
Nymphia has a perfect view of it - the moment that the soft glow of surprise in Jane’s eyes goes static, widening at the sound of her name in Xunami’s mouth.
Xunami stares from a few paces back, arms crossed in front of her, blatantly sizing Jane up, and still-
“We’re going to The Violet this Sunday,” Xunami says. There’s a flash of uncertainty in her eyes, but her voice is solid. “You can come. If you want.”
Jane’s mouth ghosts open, but there’s no words, not even an attempt at them. She couldn’t respond, not now, even if she knew what she wanted to say. It’s a vocabulary she doesn’t have yet, a language she doesn’t speak.
Xunami’s eyes flicker to Nymphia’s from halfway down the block. She offers a barely perceptible nod, slips on her headphones and saunters out of sight.
-
“What the fuck was that,” Jane hisses under her breath once Xunami has vanished.
Nymphia blinks towards the end of the block, a little stunned. By the time she opens her mouth to respond Jane has already taken off down the street, a fire to her stride. Nymphia has to jog a few steps just to keep up with her.
“Oh, um,” Nymphia stammers, trailing Jane as she tears down the alleyway. “She invited you to The Violet. That's our bar if you know w-”
“Yeah, I got that,” Jane huffs, rooting through her bag and not making eye contact. “But what’s her angle? She’s been giving me dirty fucking looks for weeks and now this?”
“There’s no angle,” Nymphia rolls her eyes at the assumption. “I told her I thought you two should meet. Really meet.”
Jane’s head snaps up. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
Nymphia sighs, already exhausted. “Because I think it might be good for you.”
“Oh,” Jane snorts, short and spiteful. “So now you know what’s good for me?”
Nymphia doesn’t even argue, just tilts her head, clearly disappointed. “I thought we were past this bullshit.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jane groans, her back against the wall, blonde curls catching on the brick as she slides to the ground. There’s a pause as she lights her cigarette and takes a long drag, her shoulders rising high and finally falling. “We are past it, okay?” She mumbles, keeping her eyes shut. Nymphia gets the feeling it’s more of a reminder for Jane than it is for herself. “We’re past it.”
Nymphia leans on the wall opposite her, crossing one leg over the other and burying the toe of her Converse in the gravel. “It’s just a night out,” she reasons, although they both know that isn’t entirely true. “If you hate it, we’ll bail. I’ll walk you home myself.”
Jane considers this. There’s another long pause, another plume of smoke unfurling from her lips.
“Dunno,” Jane finally says, eyes still not meeting Nymphia’s. “Not sure I can pull it off.”
“You pull it off often enough,” Nymphia mutters and drops to the ground, thinking of all those long nights she and Jane had spent together. “Where does your family think you are when you’re with me, anyway?”
“They know we’re… friendly,” Jane shrugs. “Sometimes I tell them I’m with you, sometimes I don’t. It’s not exactly unlike me to disappear for a few hours. They’re used to it.”
“My friends aren’t used to it, y’know,” Nymphia reaches over and plucks the cigarette right from Jane’s mouth. “I don’t like keeping you from them.”
“Yeah, well,” Jane scoffs, raking a hand through her hair. “I don’t think your friends are the biggest fans of me, so.”
Nymphia gathers it’s supposed to come off unaffected, but the words are a touch too bitter in Jane’s mouth. She doesn’t look at Nymphia when she says it, but Nymphia thinks she’d see some remorse in Jane’s eyes if she did.
There was a time not too long ago when Nymphia had imagined Jane as a socialite surrounded at all times by an upper-echelon posse, all primped and permed within an inch of their lives. Now, Nymphia wonders what Jane has for friends back home. She isn’t sure they’d last long against Jane’s abrasiveness, or how long it’d be before they noticed the inconsistencies. Now, Nymphia thinks that, really, Jane is a just a girl who wants to be liked.
“I think they’d like you if you gave each other a chance,” Nymphia says. Jane just scoffs and digs through her purse, no doubt looking for another cigarette to hide behind. “Besides,” Nymphia goes on, “I don’t want the only place I kiss you to be in the dark. Or in alleyways. Or in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
Jane shakes her head, but when her eyes rake over Nymphia it’s with this intensity that makes her stomach drop, the sort of mounting tension that every one of their kisses has started to end in.
“You could always take me back to your place,” Jane says cooly. It doesn’t sound like a joke, and Nymphia doesn’t really think it was intended to be one.
Nymphia narrows her eyes. She’s thought about it, of course she’s thought about it, but something’s always held her back from letting Jane anywhere near her apartment. Maybe it’s that her place is a measly one-bedroom above a local real estate office with sun-faded listings for log cabins taped in the windows. She isn’t sure, but she has a good feeling that isn’t the sort of place a girl like Jane is used to. Maybe it’s her apartment, or maybe it’s that once Nymphia has Jane in her room, whatever happens there is something they could never come back from.
Jane takes in Nymphia’s pause and turns away. “Didn’t think so,” she mumbles, vaguely wounded. Nymphia can’t imagine her advances get turned down very often.
“Look,” Nymphia says, inching closer. “I’d like you to try this with me, but I won’t push you into anything you don’t wanna do.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Jane taps her cigarette, letting the ashes tumble down. “I’m sure you’re right, that it’d be good for me or whatever. It’d probably be great. It’s just-“
“It’s just what?”
Jane shakes her head, this sort of unspeakability about her.
“You’re so free, Nymphia,” Jane utters softly. “I don’t know if I’m like that.”
Jane looks away, almost ashamed, and Nymphia studies her carefully. For all the summer sun Jane is still so pale, pale enough that Nymphia can see her veins in some places, those whispers of blue that fan out across her chest and whisper beneath the thin skin of her wrists. There’s something shimmery about them, like koi in a fish pond, glimmering beneath the veil of water, some vibrant life trapped on the other side.
“I think that you are so many things you don’t know yet,” Nymphia whispers, smiling, her mouth hot and full of stars. “And I think that you should come with me.”
With that Jane looks up, looks at Nymphia with the same searing intensity that she always does. The look that says you see me in a way that no one else has.
Nymphia knows that these are the sorts of things Jane will have to discover for herself, but it doesn’t stop her from fantasizing. She wants to know all that Jane is, wants to dig those veins of precious silver and gold from where she’s buried them beneath her skin, wants all that and then some.
“So,” Nymphia licks her lips. “Sunday?”
Entranced, Jane finally nods.
“Okay. Sunday.”
-
Sunday comes as it usually does - much slower than Nymphia would like.
The days between are brutally hot and unbearably long. The sun moves lazily across the sky, drenching all of Jupiter Beach in a syrupy haze. It clings stubbornly to the skyline well past eight o’clock, when the burnt sienna sunset finally gives way to an indigo sky pin pricked with stars.
The evening brings relief, and it brings Nymphia right to the edge of town. She idles at a grassy knoll not far from her apartment, beneath a sun-faded billboard for some romance flick she’ll never see. She’d told Jane to meet her here, and falls into the usual routine of waiting for her - wondering whether she’s pushing Jane too far, too fast.
Of course, this all dissolves as soon as Jane arrives. Not just because it’s Jane, although it is that, but because Jane is wearing heels.
They’re these completely ridiculous little polka dot platforms that fasten around the skinny of her ankles, and they are so completely, unbelievably sexy. Jane is the spitting image of an illustration someone would have tacked to their wall, the spitting image of a pinup girl in her dark wash denim shorts. She’s absolutely out of place, but perfectly so, because she’s walking towards Nymphia.
“What?” Jane snaps as Nymphia cracks a smile. “God, what?”
Nymphia really shouldn’t laugh, but she can’t resist.
“You’re such a city girl, you know that?”
“Fuck off,” Jane rolls her eyes, which only makes Nymphia laugh harder. For all her stone-faced vitriol, Jane falls in on herself without much resistance.
“You know this is a dive bar right?” Nymphia grins, “And we’re walking?”
“I’ll turn around right now. I’m so serious, Nymphia.”
“No, no,” Nymphia coos, drawing closer in the cloak of darkness, because she’d never let Jane get away that easily. She wants desperately to pepper Jane with kisses while she teases her into oblivion and brings her back again. The night brings cover, but not nearly enough, and Jane’s anxiety is glaringly obvious, so Nymphia settles for this:
“I’m just giving you shit,” Nymphia tilts her head, tongue catching between her teeth. “You look gorgeous. I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. Will you come with me now?”
Jane does what she always does when she’s blushing - drops her head, glances over her shoulder, wrings one nervous hand around the back of her neck - and looks up again.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Yeah, alright.”
-
On the walk, Nymphia does most of the talking.
She’s telling inane stories from her nights out, memories that are a bit fuzzy at the edges and usually followed by mild hangovers. They’re only a little embarrassing, just enough to keep Jane chuffing.
Nymphia is telling a good one, a really good one about Xunami stumbling home after last call and promptly passing out, upon which Nymphia and Dawn had taken the opportunity to Sharpie a moustache on her upper lip. They’d almost let her go to work like that the next morning, but they’d burst into fits of laughter before she’d made it out the door.
When Jane doesn’t laugh, Nymphia looks over. The blonde is still walking alongside her, but she is somewhere else entirely. She’s occupied behind the eyes, and there’s the faintest trace of a frown upon her features.
Gently, Nymphia nudges Jane, finding her a touch too rigid beneath the point of her elbow. “Nervous?”
Jane’s laugh is this sharp, ironic huff that is just short of admittance, but almost certainly translates to that’s an understatement. She’s got her arms crossed in front of her like she has to hold herself together, like she’d crumple without the extra reinforcement.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Nymphia leans closer, her voice this dramatic little whisper that has Jane’s eyes sparkling with interest. She always seems so taken with Nymphia’s admissions, which is perhaps why Nymphia feels “I’m scared every day.”
“You don’t look it,” Jane says, smiling when Nymphia rolls her eyes, watching her all the way through. And then she does it - makes the sudden transition to complete sincerity that never fails to catch Nymphia off guard:
“I think you might be the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
Nymphia just laughs, because she hadn’t felt brave the first time she’d stepped into The Violet. She was twenty then and on Xunami’s arm, who could smooth talk the both of them into anything. In some ways it had felt like a momentous occasion, the decisive moment in her small-town dykehood when she’d adopted the sort of openness from which life really begins.
In other ways it was an average night, the first of many she’d have at The Violet; a few drinks, a lap around the dancefloor. There was nothing life changing, except for this: she’d joined the ranks of freaks and weirdos who felt out of place on their own, but alright as long as they were all together. In that, it was everything.
The Violet looms unassumingly up ahead - a shabby little brick building, light spilling out from behind the blinds, the flickering purple neon of the sign that has seen better days. There’s a few cars pulled up out front, a few smokers laughing just outside the door.
She’s about to remind Jane that they can go home whenever she wants, just say the word, and then she looks over sees Jane do it:
She closes her eyes and takes a stabilizing breath, one that seems to reach some secret resolve inside of her, and after which she seems to transform completely. By the time she exhales there’s something galvanized about her, some thrashing thing that has gone totally still. She opens her eyes and slips behind a stone face, opens them and becomes the Jane that Nymphia had first imagined she was - bold, unaffected, burning. There’s something masterful about it, something that treads the fine line between beauty and brutality.
Then Jane nods, and Nymphia reaches for the door.
-
Nymphia should’ve known this would be awkward. It still takes her by surprise just how awkward it is.
The Violet isn’t much to begin with: a glorified hole in the wall with checkerboard floors and a jukebox, colored string lights draped messily above the bar, vinyl stools in desperate need of reupholstering. This place was never much for atmosphere, but that’s not what brings people in.
It’s the people that really make this place: the kids who’d sat silently in the back rows of Nymphia’s high school courses and ended up here; the blue collar workers who don’t acknowledge each other on the job but melt into each other in the shadowy corners behind the jukebox; the long-time waitress at the diner and her ‘roommate’ who Nymphia had heard whispers about since the seventh grade; the people who drive in from two towns over just to find a place where they belong.
And then, of course, there’s Nymphia’s friends, turning their heads with different degrees of horror when she walks through the front door with Jane in tow.
There’s Amanda, who is instantly scowling. She’s got a denim jacket and one arm snaked around Dawn’s waist, like she’s prepared to envelop the redhead should Jane so much as squint at her. There’s Dawn, who is trying desperately not to be fearful and failing miserably, her eyes widening like waxing moons. Nymphia can see her swallow when she raises her arm in a weak wave. And then there’s Xunami, who takes a resigned sigh at the sight of them and throws back a shot of something clear, her eyes screwing shut.
If Jane is nervous now, it doesn’t show. She seems virtually untouchable, even when Amanda purses her lips into a sarcastic excuse for a smile. Dawn swats at her and Nymphia swears she can hear Amanda mumble, I’ll play nice if she does.
With a deep breath that attempts to outdo her discouragement, Nymphia leads Jane over the bar. She reintroduces Jane to her friends like she needs any introduction, like anyone could possibly forget the first impression she’d made upon all of them. Mirage flits around from the other side of the bar, keeping tabs on the uncomfortable silence no one seems willing to break. Someone shoots pool from across the room, the clunk of billiard balls echoing like shattered ice. Nymphia finds Xunami’s eyes and shoots her a silent plea.
Xunami sighs quietly. “Jane,” she says finally and looks Jane up and down, searching her with all the tact of someone who is speaking and yet has nothing at all to say. “You came.”
“Guess I did, didn’t I?” Jane says flatly. Nymphia takes this sharp inhale and Jane scrambles for something nicer to say. “Um. You invited me.”
Xunami nods, eyebrows high and unimpressed, pressing her mouth into a thin line.
“Christ,” Mirage winces at the interaction from behind the bar. “Alright, the first drink is on me.” She glares at Xunami, who gestures helplessly, and busies herself with pouring liquor.
Innately attuned to Amanda’s eyes boring holes through her skull, Jane turns. “Amanda,” she nods curtly.
“Jane,” Amanda says, eyes simmering, and Nymphia already knows that these two are a lost cause. “How’s the leg?”
“Fine,” Jane’s eyes narrow. She bites her tongue, no doubt stopping something spiteful from being set free. “Thanks.”
Amanda hums, not so politely disappointed. “Shame.”
Nymphia’s eyes flit desperately from Xunami, who flares her eyes in a don’t look at me sort of expression, and then to Mirage, who shoots her a sympathetic, though understandably weak, smile.
“So, Jane,” Dawn squeaks, her voice painfully uneven and shaking. She’s standing laughably far away from Jane, like her very presence will offend the blonde, and she speaks to the ground like she’d be turned to stone should they make eye contact. It’s painful to watch, and still Nymphia has to commend her for trying. “I’m, um. I’m so sorry about-”
“Don’t be sorry,” Jane cuts in, and Nymphia knows it’s her own way of showing mercy. It still comes off more commanding than forgiving. “We got off on the wrong foot, don’t you think?”
Dawn opens her mouth and Nymphia swears she can see her life flashing behind her eyes. Hardly anything comes out aside from a pitiful little squeak.
Jane smiles, almost entertained, her teeth sharp and shining in her mouth. Her eyes flicker over the space Dawn has left between them. “I don’t bite, y’know.”
“Oh,” Dawn sputters, laughing uncomfortably. “Right, of course. I know that, of course I know that, um. I’m so silly sometimes…”
Jane watches her with this devious little sparkle in her eye that scares Nymphia half to death, and she swears the whole room is holding its breath, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. Dawn chatters nervously at the ground and the very moment that she finally finds it in herself to peer up at Jane, the blonde moves in.
Jane leans forward and gnashes her teeth in a mock-bite that ends in a sickening click. Dawn screams.
Half the heads in the bar turn to look as the redhead jumps half a foot from the ground, and, fuck, if it isn’t the funniest thing Nymphia has ever seen.
She can’t stop herself from laughing as she reaches for Jane, and Xunami is howling in spite of herself. Amanda is positively fuming, which, unfortunately for her, only makes the whole thing funnier.
Dawn blinks and laughs uncomfortably, clutching at her chest like her heart is actually about to beat its way out of her ribcage. Jane just smiles, looking a little too pleased with herself as everyone around her dissolves into laughter.
“Welcome to The Violet, Jane,” Mirage smiles, sliding her a cup of something strong and fruity. “I think you’re going to do just fine here.”
-
If there was anything in the world that could’ve brought Xunami and Jane together, Nymphia should’ve guessed it would be giving Dawn grief.
“She almost broke her ankle the first time she hopped a fence, y’know,” Xunami leans over to Jane, and it’s as close to a peace offering as Nymphia thinks Jane is going to get tonight. “We were cutting class, almost got away with it until she demanded that we bring her back to the school nurse. I was like, Dawn, what part of skipping school don’t you get?”
“What would you have me do?” Dawn wails from the other side of Jane. “Go to the hospital? How would I explain that to my mother!”
Mirage’s eyes connect with Nymphia’s, and she shoots her a reassuring wink. Glitter sparkles at the inner corners of her brown eyes. Nymphia thinks she might as well have a halo.
“You did better than me,” Jane smiles towards Dawn, much softer now. “First time I cut class I got caught by the vice principal. She dragged me to her office and threatened to suspend me. I smoked a cigarette in her office while she called my mom, she came back and I told her she might as well make it an expulsion.”
Xunami raises her eyebrows. “Did they?”
Jane sips at her drink, shakes her head. “No. It’s harder than you think to get kicked out of a prep school. They really want to turn you into a success story. Had months of detention, though.”
“You’re from Boston, right?” Mirage asks, wiping a cloth across the countertop. “I passed through a few years ago. I worked around Roxbury for a couple of months, do you know the area?”
“Can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time in the East End,” Jane says, though she doesn’t really have to. Her pinky is up as she stirs the straw in her drink, like she’s still drinking cocktails in a fancy Beacon Hill cocktail bar. “Where’re you from?”
“I’m from a lot of places,” Mirage smiles, outshining her personal history. “I was born in Arizona. Lived there until I was seventeen. Never really liked it much, to be honest with you.”
“God, that’s a long way,” Jane looks a little surprised. Nymphia notices Xunami eyeing Mirage carefully, ready to redirect the conversation at the first sign of hesitation.
“Not far enough,” Mirage amidst freely, her smile slightly sullen. “I didn’t exactly fit in well with my family. Figured I might do better somewhere else.”
“So. You just… left?” Jane blinks, like it’s the first time the possibility had ever crossed her mind. She watches Mirage carefully, some cogs spinning behind her eyes.
“Pretty much,” Mirage shakes her head at her past self. “Thought I’d do better in the big city, so I took a bus to Vegas. I did alright for a while, saved up enough to get a truck. Well, some people didn’t seem to think I fit in so good, so I left there, too. Had to put the whole country between us.”
Jane listens quietly, eyes wide, a little paralyzed. “Sounds tough,” she chokes out, her voice wavering and guttural, coming from somewhere close to her heart.
“It was,” Mirage shrugs, glancing over at Xunami and smiling. “But I’d do it all again.”
Mirage reaches over and lays her hand on Xunami’s, her thumb sweeping gently across the other girl’s skin, letting herself get lost there for a few moments. Nymphia watches Jane watch them, this momentary shock crossing her face at the two women’s open affections. Nymphia wonders if she’s ever seen such a thing, if she’s ever been allowed to look.
Across the room, Amanda has stolen Dawn away. She’s standing behind the shorter girl and angling her over the pool table, cheering encouragingly when Dawn manages to sink a ball in the far pocket. Dawn looks positively delighted, all of her recent worries dissolving against the sweetness Amanda seems to save just for her.
With that, Nymphia gets to her feet, her fingertips dragging gently across Jane’s shoulders.
“Where do you think you’re taking me, hmm?”
Nymphia hums as she pulls Jane to her feet. “I want you to come dance with me.”
Jane chuffs just a bit, actually looks over her shoulder like there’ll be someone there to tell her off.
“No one’s going to yell at you, y’know,” Nymphia says softly. “It’s safe here.”
Jane feigns like it’s a foolish thing to have to say, but Nymphia knows she needs the reminder. Even with her years out of the closet, Nymphia still fights the instinct to shrink herself down around strangers. It takes years to forget the fear that’s been hammered into you. She knows this well enough.
Maybe she’s a little less afraid, or maybe she’s just tipsy, but Jane lets Nymphia lead her to the dance floor just the same. It’s a sparse crowd, a few couples swaying gently to the selections on the jukebox, and in a far corner Nymphia gently guides Jane’s hands around her neck.
For a while, Jane’s eyes dart around the room. She’s stiff where Nymphia’s palms come to rest against the slope of her hips, and Nymphia says nothing about the way Jane’s hands shake against her.
Gradually, Jane relaxes. Her wrists drape at the nape of Nymphia’s neck, and Nymphia can’t get over the way it feels to hold her like this, to have her body beneath her very own hands. “Not so bad, is it?” Nymphia asks with a smile.
“The bar?” Jane asks, eyes decidedly bluer beneath the lights of the dancefloor. “Or the dancing?”
“Both, I guess.”
Jane sways for a moment. “It’s been a long time since I danced with a girl,” she says finally, her voice small and far away.
“The one you told me about, right?” Nymphia ventures tentatively, careful not to scare Jane somewhere she won’t come back from. “At the dance studio?”
Jane nods, smile lines gently warming her face. Nymphia can’t help but wonder about those and how they could’ve possibly come to be: whether there was a time when Jane really smiled enough to warrant them, or if she’d forced the expression enough times to permanently engrain them there - a testament to the effort it’s taken to save face.
“I was an alright dancer back then, but her…” Jane says, shaking her head to herself. “God, she was amazing. She just had it, y’know what I mean?”
Nymphia nods, watching as Jane spills forth. It’s rare that she’s this enthused on her own, Nymphia wouldn’t dare interrupt it.
“We were inseparable for the longest time,” Jane continues. “People thought it was strange, I never really understood why. I just idolized her. I wanted to do everything with her. I wanted to take her with me everywhere, talk about her all the time…” Jane shakes her lead, lost in the memory. “Anyway, she got all the good solos, and the duets with the boys. Seemed like everyone wanted those duets. I couldn’t have cared less, but I’d help her practice sometimes, run the numbers with her. There was this one night she was practicing a spin and I was holding her and I kept thinking how nice it felt to touch her, y’know? To have my hand on her waist while she’s spinning there. Well, I was holding her through a dip like the boys would do, and when she came up I just kissed her. I didn’t even think about it or anything. It just felt like the natural thing to do.”
A smile graces Nymphia’s lips. She thinks she knows how the story ends, but just for a moment it doesn’t matter. Just for a moment the inevitability of disaster is overridden by what drove the whole thing to begin with - the easy, innocent way in which two people come to adore each other.
“Well, she went home and told her parents about it. Or told someone who told her parents about it, and they called my mom trying to get to the bottom of it,” Jane says, and that far-off smile has faded from her face. “My mom told them they had it backwards - that she’d forced herself on me. She said it just like that, too, like it was some kind of attack.”
Nymphia’s heart breaks to think of it - a thirteen year old Jane, an innocent kiss turned into some kind of scandal. Jane’s mother hadn’t just denounced the kiss - she’d criminalized it, and she’d made Jane’s best friend the scapegoat. She might’ve been talking about the other girl, but they both knew she was really talking about Jane.
“I’m so sorry,” Nymphia whispers through the storm brewing in her throat - the heat of rage and the chill of pity.
“S’ok,” Jane shrugs, even though it clearly is not. The weight of it still sags her shoulders as it has for over a decade. “There was just a moment where I really thought my mom would defend me, y’know? I thought she’d protect me.”
For a long while neither of them says anything, for what can be said against such harsh realities? Amidst the silence Nymphia finds herself wondering about the other dancer, lost to time and dance troupes on the other side of the globe. She finds herself wondering about the other women of the world a lot recently - Jane and her ballerina, Mirage and her married woman back in Vegas. Nymphia supposes she’s one of those other women now, too.
“What happened to the other girl?” Nymphia chokes out, the words a crackling whisper, her voice the sound of a mirror shattering.
“Well, her parents didn’t believe my mother for a second. Don’t think anyone did, to be honest with you,” Jane scoffs, dropping her head like she’s embarrassed even now. “They pulled her out of the studio that week. She kept dancing, made it all the way to the Moscow Ballet, but I never saw her again.”
“You never tried to reach out? Nothing?”
“Fuck, no,” Jane jeers, like it’s that simple, like she’d never spent long nights tracing the numbers on the telephone deciding whether or not to dial. “It was made very clear to me that I’d crossed a line that you do not cross.”
Jane sways and her eyes have gone glassy, and her mouth is split into this uninhibited grin that Nymphia’s never seen on her, and it’s like she’s surfacing, like Nymphia’s never seen her so clearly until right this moment.
“Y’know what my mama said?” The edges of Jane’s words are rounded, slightly slurred, and there’s a strand of hair caught in her eyelashes and Nymphia goes to brush it away. One touch isn’t enough - she needs to cup her face, cradle her and keep her safe.
“We all have feelings for our girlfriends,” Jane recounts. “We just don’t act on them.”
Nymphia winces. All of it seems to make such perfect sense. Jane’s mother, warped in her own way, warping Jane just the same, dooming her to the same emotional destitution.
“Isn’t that fucked up? Isn’t that such a horrible existence?” Jane says like she isn’t talking about herself, like it’s someone else’s gossip and she’s a mere bystander, like it isn't her own soul she’s scrutinizing. “Always wanting something you can’t have?”
“You can,” Nymphia says and it’s from somewhere deep inside herself, something speaking without permission. Something she couldn't stop if she tried. “You can have it.”
Jane looks up at Nymphia. Her eyes are wide and impossibly glassy, almost childlike, almost willing to believe in something like magic. She’s beautiful in the worst way - cruelly captivating, unforgivingly so. She blinks up at Nymphia and does what she does best - completely and utterly perplexes her.
“Can I have you?”
And in her heart of hearts, Nymphia knows the answer.
“You already do,” she whispers back.
-
There’s another drink after that, another snippy exchange between Jane and Amanda, another watchful look from Xunami. Nothing of note, except for the way that Jane’s bare skin feels when Nymphia’s fingertips brush just beneath the hem of her shirt, how warm and inviting her body is, how Nymphia can barely keep herself from hooking her fingers just beneath the waist of Jane’s shorts, if only to brush a sliver of her skin. It’s only a short while before Jane is glancing up, her eyes these soft stars that are burning just for Nymphia.
“Can you take me home now?” Jane says, voice sincere and just pleading enough to make Nymphia’s chest ache and her stomach drop. “Your home?”
And, well. Nymphia supposes it has all been leading up to this.
-
Jane’s shoes are the first things to come off.
The polka dot platforms are dangling from her hands by the time Nymphia is digging out her keys, Jane muttering something about the staircase and the ache in her feet. Nymphia is turning the key in the door when Jane traces one finger up her spine, and Nymphia has to stop herself from turning around to kiss her right there on her front porch.
She fumbles around for the lightswitch and wishes that she’d tidied up more. They enter her kitchen, which is no messier than usual - a few dishes in the sink, a pot on the stove, her fridge tacked with random clippings and an assortment of magnets - dimly lit by the table lamp she’s tucked into the corner of the countertop. Nymphia’s work shoes lie beside the door, and when Jane drops her heels beside them it sends a rush of satisfaction rippling through her.
Jane lets out this enthused little hum as she walks through the kitchen and into the wide room Nymphia has split into two sections. On one end there’s her living room, with a very worn antique rug she’d snagged at an estate sale and a striped armchair pushed up against the window. Her telephone sits on the side table alongside an ashtray that needs to be emptied, and a stack of books threatens to topple over beside it. Her record player sits on the far wall, a collection of vinyl tucked carefully on the shelving beneath it.
“Nymphia,” Jane coos, the words an aimless marveling from her mouth, eyes spinning around the room and her lips curling into a smile. Nymphia’s heard this tone of fascination from Jane before, though never quite to this intensity, but always when she’s struck by the simplicity of Nymphia’s life, or, at the very least, simplicity she perceives from it.
Nymphia smiles, because there’s something so amusing about this - Jane, larger than life and walking barefoot around Nymphia’s cramped studio apartment - a superstar sort of gorgeous amidst Nymphia’s string lights and secondhand furnishings.
It should be all wrong, there should be alarm bells sounding in Nymphia’s head, except Jane is pointing at the trinkets Nymphia’s grandparents had sent from Taiwan and the jar of seaglass Nymphia has collected over the years and there’s something about it that suits Jane, softens her somehow. Something that says this is how it's supposed to be.
Jane takes it all in, this charmed smile at her lips. “I love it,” she says as she floats across the room, her hand finding Nymphia’s, their fingers sliding together as she passes by.
Nymphia admires Jane as she slinks through the apartment, dim light seeping in through the gauzy curtains and shining off the smooth curve of her calves, her skin almost pearlescent, thinking that this must be what Leonard Cohen was talking about in “Hallelujah”, her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you. Nymphia is almost sick with want.
Stay as long as you want, Nymphia thinks to yourself. Forever, if you’d like.
Jane pads towards Nymphia’s bedroom, sectioned off by an ornate privacy screen she’d swiped from her mother when she’d moved out all those years ago. Beyond that lies Nymphia’s bed, made up with white sheets and a well-loved quilt. There’s a nightstand with an antique lamp and an array of half-read books, a dresser with drawers too full of clothes to shut neatly. The top is strewn with more treasures - random jewelry, an incense burner, stray rocks she’d pick up on various adventures, the expensive colored pencils Dawn had given her last Christmas.
Jane inspects everything silently - her index finger tracing up the spine of her books, lips curling up at the pictures Nymphia has tucked into the corners of her mirror - and Nymphia wonders if there’s anything more intimate than this.
And then Jane does it - sits on the edge of Nymphia’s bed.
Her blonde curls are backlit by the moonlight, gracing her with a bluish halo when she runs a hand across Nymphia’s comforter and muses, almost to herself, “Is this where you think about me?”
It’s uncanny. It’s everything Nymphia never let herself imagine for fear of needing it this badly. She opens her mouth, speechless at the sight of this girl, this gorgeous fucking girl who she can’t fathom is in apartment, nonetheless her bed, gazing at her longingly and saying insane things like,
“You do think about me, don’t you?”
“Jane,” Nymphia says, her voice this collapsing sort of groan. She comes to stand against the bed, feeling every bit like a ship sailing towards its siren. She’s reaching down to cup Jane’s face, about to say something like there’s never a moment when I’m not thinking of you when Jane beats her to it.
“I think about you all the time,” Jane murmurs, pressing a kiss to Nymphia’s palm that she feels everywhere. Then Jane is kissing up the inside of her arm, the tender crook of her elbow, presenting her a dozen tiny offerings, silent pleas.
Then Jane is reaching for her face, leaning up to kiss her with an unmistakable hunger, the parting of her lips punctuated with this put-on breathiness that Nymphia has never heard from her before. Jane’s hand trembles where it curls around her neck.
They run out of air quicker than they should, and when Jane pulls back it’s with her eyes low and her smile a bit too slick. There’s an almost imperceptible change, a switch that flips in the moment that it takes for Nymphia to catch her breath. Jane tilts her head, eyes flickering over Nymphia in a well-rehearsed routine, and pouts in a way that makes Nymphia’s fucking stomach drop. She isn’t exactly immune to this, god she’s not immune to this; it’s just that it’s catered towards someone who so clearly isn’t Nymphia.
Nymphia wonders if this is what it’s always been like for Jane - sex as a sort of performance, a means of securing one end or another. Jane tilts her head, eyes flickering over Nymphia in a well-rehearsed routine, something in them out of place against the slick of her smile. Nymphia stares down as Jane reaches to pull her shirt over her head, wanting her desperately, but not like this.
“You don’t have to do that with me,” Nymphia says softly. It still wipes Jane’s face totally clean. “I mean, whatever you do with anyone else. You don’t have to be like that with me.”
Jane stops, hands frozen at the edge of her shirt, eyes fixed on Nymphia. She could be startled, almost is, but that look in her eyes is a little closer to a revelation.
Nymphia pushes a curl gently behind Jane’s ear, an enormity at the edge of her fingertips, an unraveling happening just beneath them. “This is just for us, okay?”
Jane stares up at Nymphia, something never permitted until now surfacing in the crystal blue of her irises, some profound fear that manages to become faith.
“Okay,” Jane nods, and her voice is the sound of every one of her defenses collapsing. “Okay.”
What comes next isn’t rushed or hurried or fumbling, or like anything Nymphia’s ever known, for that matter. Nymphia kisses Jane slowly, like they have enough time, like it will never run out. It’s a rare moment, the kind Nymphia knows she’ll spend the rest of her life wanting for them - uninterrupted, nothing to threaten the sanctity of this night, this room, this space that they’re holding open for one another.
Again and again Jane’s mouth angles towards her own, and Nymphia touches Jane with the reverence and care she’s always wanted to, touches her like she’s healing her, hands firm and gentle, soft and certain. It’s a flame that they’ve been fanning for weeks finally swelling into a full blown wildfire, consuming everything in its path.
“Are you sure?” Nymphia whispers, eyes rolling back when Jane sinks her teeth into the base of her neck. It’s dizzying - the very idea that Jane could want her just as badly. She’s already accepted her fate, surrendered herself to the sensuality that swallows her whole, but when Jane breaks the kiss and shimmies up the length of the bed, she figures Jane deserves this - one last chance to spare herself the consequences of what comes next.
Jane draws back, pulling her shirt over her head. Suddenly there’s the smooth expanse of her torso, the shadows that pool in her collarbones, the white bra strap slipping down one sun-kissed shoulder and then off completely. Nymphia is trying really hard to be respectful, but fuck.
“I’m sure,” Jane says, fingertips already flying to the button of her shorts. She tugs them down her legs and Nymphia is too overwhelmed by the sight of her - the soft curve of her waist, the valley between her hip bones, the swell of her thighs and the heat that radiates from between them - to notice where they land in a heap on the floor.
“Are you positive-”
“Nymphia,” Jane whines against her lips, years of wanting at the edge of her mouth. “Please.”
Nymphia shudders at the feeling of Jane’s hands sliding underneath her tank top, silently begging off, off, off. Nymphia obliges her, pulling the fabric over her head and letting her hair fall wildly.
She’s brushing the dark strands away from her face when she finds Jane staring up at her with this mesmerized breathlessness, this takeness that almost moves Nymphia to tears. There are no words after that, just Jane moving to kiss her and the guttural sound of her breath catching when her bare skin hits Nymphia’s for the first time. That says enough.
It’s a kind of poetry- the warmth of Jane’s mouth as it opens against Nymphia’s, the parting of her thighs to take her in, the gentle rutting of her hips, the dragging of her nails down the small of Nymphia’s back.
It’s not the first time Jane’s been touched, but when Nymphia finds her, tracing her so delicately with the pad of her middle finger, there’s this look Jane gives her - wide-eyed, pupils blown out, this sick downturn to her brows that is so close to disbelief - that says this is the only touch that’s ever mattered.
It’s a touch that means they might as well give up now, because nothing is ever going to come close to this - Nymphia on Jane, coaxing her very soul right up to her skin, meeting her at the surface and reaching in, finding the very core of her and resting there for a while.
And when Nymphia fucks her, when she descends on Jane like the sun does upon the water, coming to meet every crest and fall, every wave that laps against it, it’s nothing at all like the movies. None of it is a performance. It’s just them, breathy and speaking in a language entirely their own.
Nymphia is lost to this - the way Jane folds for her, taking whole fistfuls of her hair for herself, every rock against her tongue a sort of proclamation, a promise in the making. And when Jane finishes with this beautiful, broken cry, Nymphia imagines this must be what shooting stars sound like when they fall back to earth, glittering and gorgeous and irreversibly changed.
Jane is pawing at Nymphia’s head not long after that, exhausted and a little desperate, as if to say too far away, come closer now, now, now. There’s still a delicate trembling about her thighs when Nymphia crawls back to her face, lips wet and cheeks flushed, head swimming in this blissed-out blurriness until she is once again face to face with Jane and finds her teary-eyed.
“What?” Nymphia cups her face with panicked desperation. “What is it? God, I didn’t hurt you did I-“
“No,” Jane sputters this wet, bubbly little laugh, eyes twinkling with tears. “No, you didn’t hurt me at all.”
Nymphia hums, frowning. She thumbs gently at Jane’s tears and thinks about bringing her wet fingertips to her mouth if only for another taste of her. Jane’s chest heaves beneath her and Nymphia almost hopes that it never slows, that there will always be some lingering evidence of what’s come to pass between them, physical proof of what Nymphia does to her.
“It’s just…” Jane shakes her head to herself, one hand flying up to smooth the mess she’d made of Nymphia’s hair, this absent-minded smile pulling at her lips. “This is what it’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
Nymphia just looks at her, mouth falling open. She’s had sex before, meaningful, caring sex with people who really liked her, but never quite as impassioned as this, never quite as momentous, never with the sort of immediacy that she imagines only befalls serious lovers. She thought she’d known what it meant to be moved. That was before this, before Jane had come along and struck some secret chord in her, before she’d known what it really is to want someone. To have them close, impossibly close, and still need more.
“Yeah,” Nymphia says, knowing she is utterly, completely lost to the world as she formerly knew it. Knowing that there’s no hope for her now. That there never was any to begin with. “I think so.”
-
Nothing was the same after that. How could it ever be?
-
Notes:
if you have ever left a kudos or kind word on this fic, please know you are the reason why it continues to be written!! leave a cute comment, it’ll make the next chapter come faster (and trust me it’s gonna be a doozy)
see you all there ::) love, g
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