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It’s been sixteen days, and everything is awful.
Tap, tap, tap.
Pencil eraser, against concrete. They found a notebook, after daring to venture into the steely depths a week and a half ago. It’s already running out of space. The pages are crammed with curlicued cursive, bullet-pointed lists, musings separated into boxes and chunks with notes sardined into the corners.
But there’s always room for just one more.
Tap, tap, tap.
A Mary Jane, on the floor. Something’s missing. Something’s not right. That one—Plan G, it might’ve been—didn’t work, last time. Maybe it’s the boxes. Think outside of them. She squints, like the answer will show up in invisible ink if she screws hard enough.
It doesn’t. She thinks some more. Think, think, think.
Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap—
“Um, Ocean?”
Clatter.
The shoe freezes. The pencil slips and rolls lamely across the concrete. Ocean flounders for it.
Constance gets there before her own flailing fingers do. She stops its grand escape, picks it up, and holds it out, a little carefully, like a yellow, chewed-up olive branch.
“What’s up?” she tries.
A second, and then with an equally careful hand, Ocean takes it. Connie must see this as an invitation, because she plops herself right down to the left. Maybe it kind of was one. “I’m thinking,” Ocean tells her. “Well, I’ve been thinking.”
“Okay,” says Constance, slowly. “What about?”
“The window and the emergency exit”—she firmly crosses both off with the olive branch, uses the edge of her index to make sure the line is straight—”were a bust. But I thought, we just need something, something outside the box.”
Something weird is starting to cross Constance’s face, creasing it. “Outside the box?”
Doesn’t matter. “Right. Exactly. Here, let me—”
She shuts the notebook with a snap, mutters an apology when Connie jumps, but no time to lose. Ocean scrabbles across this cold, hard concrete, hurtling for the lever attached to the box that she swears still smokes sometimes, Connie bustling close behind.
“I thought,” says Ocean, bracing, “if we just gave it a little elbow-grease…”
She pushes. Pulls, up, down; leans with all she’s got, and when that doesn’t work, shoves so hard her tap-tapping Mary Janes skid and leave big ugly streaks across the floor, until sweat dribbles down the back of her neck.
Nothing happens.
She spins around. There’s the weird again, on Constance; she’s frowning, now, for sure. “Okay, so, we can cross that one off,” Ocean babbles, whips left, right, and there it is. “But, I also thought that we could—”
“Ocean—”
“No, no, I’m serious, right back here!”
She drops to her knees behind the box, the machine, the wires, and just starts jamming. “Look, see,” Ocean says, taking, red with blue? Black with yellow? Black with blue? Something’s got to make some kind of spark. Something has to work. “I thought, electricity! We could power him back on, and stuff. Right?” She turns off and on again, yanks and jams cords back into the sizzled sockets in the wall, fumbles with her fingers until they’re bitten raw by exposed copper and aluminum and still.
Nothing.
She’s quiet, just for a second. The stinging barely registers.
“Oce,” she hears, soft, “I really think we should—”
“No!” Ocean caws, arms flapping, wildly. “No, no, no, because—” Something. There has to be something. Something they just haven’t thought of before.
That’s it.
She scrambles to her feet, on her shoes with the scuffs, and makes a mad dash for the other end of the room. Everyone’s watching, now, but that’s fine; she just ransacks the box they’ve been tossing things in, desperately, and swaddled in a wad of gross paper napkins, there it is. Still pink, not moldy, it never molds, it always stays the same.
“Oh, my God?” says Constance, maybe because this is just so genius, so outside the box.
Icing plasters her fingers, Hello Kitty’s sightless eyes staring back. “The cupcake,” Ocean declares, “has got to have some sort of key. I mean, why else would it still be here? Right? Right?”
She ferries it back to the center of the floor, and it doesn’t matter how everybody’s looking at her. She just keeps on like she’s always done; peers at the bottom of the wrapper, inspects every crushed vanilla crumb, takes her two hands and rips it in two as it crumbles to look inside for something, anything, because there has to be some solution—
“Great,” comes Noel’s drone. “Now you’ve really lost it.”
The cupcake splatters to the floor, and Ocean breaks clean in two.
“Just let me fix it!”
Everything gets quieter than it already was.
She breathes hard, in pieces. Sickly sweetness drips down her palms, every plip on the concrete audible. They’re all still looking.
She can’t look back.
Instead, she stares down at Hello Kitty’s sad, sad face, and really wishes she had something better to fix with than Plans H, I, and J.
Then there are hands.
Clean ones, but they don’t stay that way. Because Constance fights her hands past the gross congealed frosting to her fingers, and she always did. She always went and held them, no matter how cold or harsh or sticky they happened to be.
“I think,” Connie says, and gives them a squeeze even despite the nauseating squelch, “we should stop trying to fix stuff for a little while.”
The words wash over her. There’s a firmness to her gentle voice that wasn’t there before all this, Ocean thinks.
She takes in the feeling of sugar and skin, and decides, she wouldn’t like to argue with the one person who always, always frosted her own fingers for her.
Ocean nods, limp.
“Okay,” she concedes.
Just for today, just for Constance, Plan K is on hold.
* * *
Five weeks later, they’re all trying to make the most of it.
On the other side of this gaping room, there’s a kind of commotion happening. Everyone’s clustered together on the floor. It’ll be quiet for a while, then they’ll whoop and holler, and occasionally there will be a shower of cards when someone (either Mischa, or Jane emulating Mischa) throws their deck up in a fit of rage.
Ocean is not in their cluster.
Something heavy and strange seems to be gluing her to this spot, away from their cards and their company. Instead she sits, alone, notebook balanced between two knees, making math problems and solving them.
It’s the only thing that makes sense.
“Hey.”
Ocean blinks up.
It’s Constance. When did Constance get here? Constance is sitting on the left, face kind, having lowered herself to the floor in the time it took her to recite the quadratic formula jingle. She’s donning the old purple sweats she found and shook the dust out of. They never seem to stain.
“Hey,” Ocean says back, pencil going limp.
“Do you wanna play cards?” Constance angles her chin, gently, towards where everyone is collecting the latest shower. “We’ll call BS instead of Bullshit.”
“No, no.” Well, that does make it a little better, but, “I’m good,” Ocean still says.
“Oh. Okay.”
Constance doesn’t move.
She just, stays there. Even as everyone else fires up another round, she taps her toes to the concrete, seeming content to quietly draw doodles and stars in the dust caking the floor. Aren’t you gonna go and play with them? Ocean almost asks, but then she doesn’t.
Because she won’t.
She’s Connie Blackwood. Of course she won’t. She’s going to sit here, and make sure she’s not alone, and that’s going to be hell of a lot more than Ocean should have.
She thumbs through the pages in her lap, absent.
“Um.” Connie’s hand stops on one. “Hey, what’s this?”
Ocean looks down. Right. “Math,” she tells her.
Connie’s nose wrinkles, glasses nudging up her face a little as she leans in close. “Quadratics? Really?”
On instinct, Ocean bristles. “What’s wrong with quadratics?”
“Nothing. I just think I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon.”
“Hey!”
Ocean swats her on the shoulder, and immediately, she devolves into snorting, snickering giggles that are so contagious, Ocean catches a wonderfully nasty case of them, too. “What was that for?” bubbles Constance, and her fingers reach up to cage over her curled lips, like a reflex.
All of a sudden, it hits like a sucker punch to the gut.
Ocean’s own laughter is dying out into the stale air when she says, “I don’t know.”
What was that for? She’s pretty sure she’s the reason her best friend’s first instinct is to hide the curls of her lips and snorts of her nose, and so why did she think she could do that? Ocean always did do too much, yet altogether not enough.
And equally suddenly, she’s saying, “Constance, I’m sorry.”
Her hand falls and her giggles snuff immediately. “What? Hey, no, you didn’t hit that hard. It was funny, I—”
“No.” Ocean forces herself to look at her straight. “I mean, for everything. Before that.”
It’s quiet for a while.
“Oh,” Constance finally says. She slides one knee up to her chest and hugs it close.
There's a hundred things playing across her face right now, and what a best friend Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg is, she can't read a single one of them. Is she even her best friend? Should she be? Because, Ocean took her hand and never really held it; ate meals at her table and never cooked; said she loved her and never tried to.
She’s selfish, though, Ocean finds.
Because she’d still like to be.
“Thank you.”
Ocean turns. Connie is smiling, so small, so soft. “For that. I appreciate it.”
There’s really nothing to thank her for, so she doesn’t offer her the customary you’re welcome. Instead, Ocean ends up blurting: “Could we try this again?”
Connie’s brow creases. “Try what again?”
“I want to be your best friend,” Ocean tells her, selfish in all ways.
She’s still smiling, though, confused. “You already are my best friend.”
“No,” says Ocean, “no, I mean, like, a—a better one. I want to be a better best friend.”
These expressions, she can catch, as they shift on Constance’s bespectacled face one into the next: astonishment, gratitude, and then, humor?
“So what you’re saying is, you want to be my BBFF?” Connie snickers, and her palm doesn’t reach up to smother it this time.
“Yes.” Ocean nods, violently. “Yes, that is exactly what I want.” She wants her to be like this. All laughter and gentle firmness and thank yous instead of it’s okays and herself. She’d like her to be herself. Ocean’s been snuffing that out long enough.
Connie doesn’t joke, though, she’s pretty sure, when she says: “Okay. Yeah, you can. Let’s try this again.”
She reaches for her hand, and Ocean doesn’t just take it. She’ll hold it.
It’s warm, always just a little clammy, and it’s soft. There’s dust caked on the tip of a finger, from all that doodling in the floor, and it’s perfect.
“Thanks,” Ocean says, faint. “I will be.”
Her BBFF smiles, and right there, Ocean has to make a correction.
Quadratics, and Constance are the only things that make sense.
* * *
A handful of months after that, she’s invited over.
Well, in a way. Over would imply having distinct homes to be invited to; really, where she is right now is her corner of crates and boxes, stacked like Tetris to make windows and doors culminating in what’s been a “room.”
They all have one. Constance’s is decked out with multicolored miscellany they've hauled back from the depths: an empty perfume bottle shaped like a cherry; tiny porcelain figure of a flamingo with leg chipped in two so it balances precariously against the wall; snowglobe featuring some obscure American town that appears to be WITH LOVE FROM EUREKA SPRINGS, AK.
It used to be strange, but a couple invites ago, Ocean realized when she looked at each of the seemingly random tchotchkes all peppered about this space, up sprung memories of each occasion in question. Most of them fond, of everyone jamming handwritten notes for Constance down the neck of the bottle; lamenting the inability to give this flamingo surgery; treasuring, a little bittersweetly, their own snowglobe of a town.
So, now, she gets it.
It’s a sleepover. It’s an attempt to capture the same sensation as being in the Blackwood living room, with Disney princess DVDs and a sheet of cookies freshly warm from the oven and the clicks of Jonah’s Legos and babbles of his small voice sailing across the coffee table.
They try to fill the air in the same way; with giggles and conversation and the gritting of the hundredth replay of the Hello, Dolly! tape and accompanying box TV they found another collection of months ago.
But it’s always just so quiet.
Constance shuffles against her shoulder. They’re burrowed in blankets and throw pillows embroidered with slogans from two decades ago they shook the dust and dirt from, and, at least, if not much else is the same, it feels safe. She yawns, blue light playing across her glasses in the dark, then flattens her cheek in Ocean’s shoulder again.
“I’m glad I’m stuck here with you,” Connie says, out of nowhere.
Ocean startles. “Really?”
How long has it been? She doesn’t keep a calendar in that notebook anymore, because there was no more white in the pages left to. Now, the days are counted by Constance; the extra scuffs on her lenses, wrinkles in her shirt, bruises and bumps of her skin. It must have been a long time.
Because Constance has two new scratches on her frames, and Ocean doesn’t argue that they’re stuck.
This, the tchotchkes and the giggles and the card games and the VHS tapes and the persistent, permeating quiet, has been the new normal. There is, she thinks, an equally persistent and permeating sliver of hope that it’s not, that it won’t be, that someday they’ll come home to warm arms and graduate with their diplomas and hear their little brothers click Legos again. But lately, it’s fallen to the wayside, in favor of living in this.
I’m glad I’m stuck here with you.
It must have been a long time since Ocean said harsh words, cut her with sharp edges, if she truthfully thinks so. Is time allowed to heal those wounds? Did she not gash them so deep that they’d fester? Is it possible for Constance to really, well and truly, be glad?
Constance might have read her face, her mind. She always could. She must have, because without prompting, except for the quiet crooning on the TV, Cornelius and Irene’s grainy fingers interlocking onscreen for the thousandth time, Connie reaches. She wraps her big warm hand around her spindly cold one and holds it tight, melts it down.
“Yeah, really,” says Connie, too serious, looking straight at her.
She squeezes. One, two, three.
Ocean lets loose a breath that trembles a little.
If her best friend has decided to let it all be okay, then, okay, Ocean decides, too. She’ll spend the rest of this forever ensuring her corners are never too jagged to hurt her again. She’ll take that mercy and hold it gently in her two hands to show her she won't break it. There's an indeterminate amount of days here with her in this place, and she won't waste a single one of them.
Especially not this one.
Ocean squeezes back. Four, five, six.
“I’m glad I’m stuck here with you, too,” she tells her. “And, I’m glad you’re glad.”
She might catch her drift. She always tends to. I’m glad you let me try this again. I’m glad you’re not bleeding anymore. I’m glad we’re here now.
Constance just smiles.
She turns back to the screen and sinks against her shoulder a little deeper.
“At least,” Connie’s voice comes, soft as ever, “we’ve got all the time in the world.”
Ocean memorizes the feeling of her weight cratered into her side before she realizes she doesn’t have to.
“Yeah.” But even if she’s probably got infinite opportunities to experience this, the feel of her fingers and the density of her body, she throws that knowledge to the wind and takes the extra second to savor it all, just for the heck of it.
Indeed, at least, if nothing else: “We’ve got time,” murmurs Ocean.
* * *
Over what might be years, things start to change.
The days blend together, when you’re in endless purgatory. It turns out, an unintended side effect accompanying such a thing is that shifts, no matter how seismic in nature, fly under the radar, as it were.
Maybe it’s because, the point at which one day, one period, one thing ends and another begins gets pretty indistinguishable. Time no longer starts with the day and seems to hold its breath for you at night, in a place with no windows, no suns or moons. It kind of just, keeps on flowing, in one straight line; the gentle current of a lazy river at the water park, sweeping you down the course, and you’re along for the ride.
Accordingly, change, in that way, is a sort of creeping normality; shifting baseline; slippery slope, boiling frog, camel’s nose, obsta principiis. A thing as slow and inconspicuous as taking a hairdryer to the polar ice caps; yet as hard-hitting and world-changing as a telephone pole to the face on a random Tuesday.
Today is that blip in time.
There’s a record player. It’s new—well, not in the sense of its make, that looks about a hundred years old, complete with the printed, fraying faces of various Beach Boys littering the front. In the sense that, earlier today, Mischa dragged it out from behind the Whack-a-Mole, held it high above his head like a fish, and hollered, “What the hell we do with this?”
The what-the-hell they end up doing with it is puddling around for an hour and a half trying to get the stupid thing to play whatever mystery record is still embedded in the platter, before promptly giving up.
Well, everyone, except one.
Ocean doesn’t have to look to know it’s Noel sitting himself down on the right. When you spend however-long in intimately close quarters with a batch of people, you just kind of know the shuffle of their shoes, the pull of their breath.
He slings one foot over his knee and bends over. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
She doesn't spare him a glance.
His tone implies it’s rhetorical when he asks, “What are you looking at?”
Constance is still futzing around with the record player. She didn't give up; she’s bent in half at the waist, tinkering with this flap and that switch, brow knitted and tongue pink as it peers from the corner of her mouth, so utterly determined. So unwavering in her quest for this tiny record-shaped slice of joy in their lazy river of monotony.
She looks quite pretty.
“I wonder, what makes something beautiful?” muses Ocean out loud, instead of submitting to redundancy.
“Love,” answers Noel, immediately.
“Love?”
“Yeah, are you deaf?” She snorts. Animosity gets old when you’re essentially imprisoned in eternal damnation together, but she figures maybe a tiny spark of it is what makes them them. “Love is beauty, beauty is love, blah, blah.”
“‘Blah, blah’?” Ocean lets loose another little puff. “How eloquent.”
“Oh, shut your trap, you old hag.”
They laugh, briefly, a little sober, but it goes away. Her chin rests itself in the heels of her hands, and she watches.
“I wonder what it feels like.” Connie fiddles, and fumbles, and squints, and shakes, steadfast. She’s zeroed in on using a toothpick as a screwdriver until something clicks into place. Her fists pump into the air with gleeful victory; she might even do a little shimmy, she’s so pleased. Of their own accord, the corners of Ocean’s lips tug, ever so slightly upwards. “Like, love, and stuff.”
She doesn’t have to look now, either, to tell when Noel follows her line of sight with his, and stops.
He chuffs out one more chuckle. “Maybe you already know,” he tells her.
She’s not sure what he means by that, but she doesn’t ask.
Something crackles to life.
It sounds like a demon being exorcised, for a split second, but then, after some hissing and sputtering, up warbles an old-timey, crooning sort of tune from the player across the room.
“I got it!” yelps Constance. “I got it, I got it! Guys, look!”
Ocean does, followed by everyone else lifting from their various spots spangled about the warehouse to creep closer, bundling around the record with perked ears.
So long sad times
Go long bad times
We are rid of you at last
“This is not a Boy,” observes Jane, “or a Beach.”
“No, it’s not,” Ricky confirms. “Nor is it an amalgamation of the two. But it sure is a nice tune.” He sways a little.
Her head cocks to the side, like she’s taking in evidence, processing this, arriving at a conclusion. She seems to analyze, particularly thoroughly, him.
“Yes,” deduces Jane, after a minute. “It is.”
Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
Mischa snickers. “Gay times.”
Noel gifts him a hearty swat on the arm. “How old are you?” he shrieks, but they’re both tittering, soon enough.
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So, let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
Constance is quiet.
She’s watching the record spin, around and around, with wide, vaguely shimmering eyes, almost in a trance. She doesn’t move; just blinks, every once in a while, fingers laced together, body at an angle, like she’s being pulled by an invisible string, ever closer to the music.
Ocean feels compelled to ask, because after an indeterminate amount of time spent in someone’s company, a sight of her you haven’t seen before is jarring enough. “Are you okay?”
Connie turns, startled, shoulders hiked, but then she liquefies, the instant she sees it’s her. That blossoms a weirdly wonderful feeling inside that Ocean doesn’t waste time decoding.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m cool,” says Constance. She offers a smile so sincere it’s possible to believe her.
All together, shout it now
There's no one
Who can doubt it now
All at once, Ricky’s yanked up off his feet by none other than a Jane, who has promptly inserted one hand on his waist, the other clutching his palm.
“I believe this is called, a ‘dance.’”
She proceeds to engage him in some wooden form of the cha-cha, and it’s the most ridiculous thing to ever be, maybe.
But he’s got stars in his eyes all the same.
“Yes,” agrees Ricky, fond, and lets her lead however clunkily. “That is exactly what this is.”
So, let's tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
When Ocean’s head whirls across the room, there, too, are Noel and Mischa, at some point, Noel’s head rested lightly on the soft firmness of Mischa’s sweatshirted chest of cotton. They mutter nonsense into the fabric between them, rocking from feet to feet in a disjointed, totally senseless rhythm, though they don’t seem to care.
Your cares and troubles are gone
There'll be no more from now on
From now on
And then she looks back, and there she is.
Constance’s hands are in that utterly familiar position, the one where they’re both asking a silent question: Would you like to hold me? Do you want to be closer, for a second?
But what comes out of her mouth is: “Wanna dance?”
There is no alternate timeline or universe wherein Ocean reasonably says no.
She answers that question by, indeed, holding her two hands and drawing in close. “I don’t know how to dance,” she still protests, weakly, lamely. She lifts their now-tangled, knotted fingers. “Where do I put these?”
Connie shrugs, and she laughs. “Keep ‘em there. Don’t worry about it.” She grins, again, so warm, so soft. “Doesn’t matter. Just, be natural. Move like, you.”
That strange little flower comes back, in her chest growing between the bones of her ribs.
“Okay,” breathes Ocean. “Sure.”
What’s natural ends up being swaying, side to side, left to right, left, and back right again. What is equally natural is also, in some blip in time, Ocean’s not quite sure when, drifting closer. Maybe gravity’s a little weird here, and she just never noticed, but she’s tipped forward to touch her forehead to hers, and who would she be to disobey the natural order of things?
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So, let's sing a song of cheer again
Constance is so close.
From here, everything is clearer, larger, fuller. Each divot and dot of her pores, all the scratches of her lenses Ocean once counted the days on, every perpetually-purple curl tickling the sides of her face. The in, out of her breath; whistle of her nose; rustle of her clothes. The deep warmth of her eyes—chocolate, her favorite—and the flit of her lashes and the squeeze of her hands.
Ocean can see, hear, feel everything.
Happy times
Happy nights
Happy days
Are here again
The music winds down.
But it just starts right back up again.
So long sad times
Go long bad times
We are rid of you at last
From here, Constance looks so…
“I love this song.” Connie’s head pulls away, to glance at the record, and the loss is a little bit of an aching sort of thing, but it doesn’t stick around long. “It, like, makes me wanna go shout from a rooftop, or something. If we still had ready access to rooftops.” She chuckles, gently—softens, even more. “It, makes me feel hopeful. Not like everything will be okay, but kinda, like…it already is.”
Each note and every word washes over her.
“Man, I love it.” Constance turns back around, chocolate eyes looking straight back at hers. “Isn’t it just so beautiful?”
Beautiful.
“I think I love you,” realizes Ocean.
Those chocolate eyes blink wide open. Constance goes still.
“What?” she breathes.
“Love is beauty, beauty is love.” Noel is right, for the first time in his afterlife. “I, I get it now. When I look at you, I think— I see something beautiful.” Ocean swallows. The words sound soppy and jumbled but feel correct. What other way is there to describe this strange, sudden ability to see everything so clearly, feel everything more deeply, tell time on the second, when she’s around? Constance makes her better, is what all that is. “I didn’t take the time to, to stop and look. At you. In Uranium— I mean, on Earth. In life.” How different would things be if she had, she wonders? It took a couple forevers and one big, huge do-over to realize: “Connie, I love you.”
The three words used to mean something so fixed, like it was on screens, in books; walking on the beach, kissing at sunsets, candlelit dinners and bouquets full of roses and a man and a woman.
But maybe, it can be whatever this is, too.
Constance’s face shifts into something that defies description, which used to be a kind of failure. Ocean once prided herself on being able to put words to anything, if she thought hard enough, talked long enough. Now, as it turns out, not everything has to be definable for it to be good.
“I get what you mean,” whispers Connie. She always did. She always could. She must, because she tips back in close again, forehead to forehead, skin to skin, mind to mind, and clutches her palms. One, two, three. “I love you, too.”
Ocean clutches back. Four, five, six.
She’s not totally wondering what those three words mean, anymore. Rather, instead what they’d like them to mean.
Whatever this is works, she decides.
And so Ocean stands there, in love, swaying. Constance sways with her for replay after replay after replay until everyone else has long gone back to their corners and Ocean doesn’t even notice.
Because time here flows, on and on and on and on.
* * *
It’s the middle of all eternity, and everything might just be okay.
There’s been a lot more cards, a lot more expeditions, a lot more movies and dancing and laughing and talking and time. There has been so very much time spent walking this tightrope between life and death, and at some point, that became okay. Because what is a great afterlife, if not unlimited quantities of time with the people you love?
Love.
Ocean’s head slumps over.
Constance is there. She’s always there, right beside, looking back.
Every night spells a slumber party. It never gets old; her company’s never trite. Not after watching the same tapes and listening to the same songs, not after fitting her hand in hers so many times she knows each centimeter of the lines in her palm, not after whispering and giggling into the dark until throats are hoarse and there should be nothing left to say, but there’s always something to tell her, even more to listen to. Eternity has proved Connie could never be temporary.
It must be something like evening—if such a thing even exists anymore—because they’re both lying horizontal on the floor, in a patchwork nest of rags and blankets, fingers linked and sufficiently spent. They were talking, for a while, until things got easily, comfortably quiet. This has got to be what love is, Ocean thinks.
It’s still not totally clear what it’s supposed to be, what that word means. They’ve been figuring it out for a couple leaps in spacetime, making it into something.
Constance blinks back. She slithers across the floor a little, across some faux fur to sidle up closer, and Ocean lets her.
Connie looks again. She has a sort of conversation with her in her mind. Ocean’s eyes flicker imperceptibly downwards.
And there is Constance, offering her lips as she does her hands: Would you like to kiss me? Do you want to be closer, for another second?
They haven’t done that. Not that close.
But Ocean finds she would like that, so she just does.
She kisses her, because there is no professor, no church, no movie, no script to tell her what that’s supposed to mean. Not here. They’re free. Ocean does it, simply because it feels right.
They spend the rest of Limbo doing whatever feels right.