Lordy, this is a comfortable bed. Gemma splays on it like a star. Soon, soon, she’ll get up soon.

When Ava comes back, she says, “I have to pop into work for a minute. Bullshit. You know. I’ll take those leftovers for Holly.”

Gemma nods into the sheets. “Mmm.”

Ava goes about her morning as Gemma dozes.

Then Ava puts a hand on the back of Gemma’s head. She leans down and kisses her. She says, “If the A/C guy comes, let him in, hey?”

“Okay.”

There are footsteps, the clack of the beads, and the sound of the front door, and Ava is gone.

Gemma sits up.

Don’t wait for her to get back. Don’t hang around. Don’t make it weird. It’s easier this way. Leave a nice note. Or don’t. Or something. Whatever. She showers and puts on her black dress with purple waves and brushes out her hair and puts it up in pigtail buns. Makes a pot of coffee and raises the shade to look out the window one last time. Nice day by the looks of it. No clouds.

She takes a few pictures of the view for keepsakes. It has been good for Gemma’s heart to see this, these wide fields, and the number three running through them.

Gemma realizes she didn’t take any pictures of Ava.

Who, of course, is not on socials.

She will have no way to access a reminder of what Ava looks like.

Gemma feels the tiredness in her body. Not mentally, though of course she is tired in that way too, but the undying fog-behind-the-eyes physical fatigue that she is never not experiencing. When was her last real REM-filled sleep? Must’ve been when she last went on the wagon, which—well, hell, Gemma can’t remember the last time she did that. It’s been a while. Intellectually, she knows her sleep is ersatz, but now and then she really feels it.

Gemma doesn’t hate herself. She used to, of course, but she came up against the hard limits of that hatred’s usefulness over the years, bumped along its ceiling like an aquatic creature in a tank, and somewhere in the sea of sweaty, trembling mornings, that hatred faded. Gemma’s not a happy person, but she doesn’t hate herself.

She is, however, unable to truly understand what she looks like. When she is moving her body, when she is running down a sidewalk or closing a bathroom door, she is unable to conceive of a real picture of her likeness. The woman the rest of the world sees does not live inside Gemma’s mind. The woman is external, and to Gemma she has always been this way, and probably always will be. Her inner conception of her appearance is amorphous and difficult to describe, but if she had to try, she might say it is of something masculine without a face, a muscular crush of feathers travelling through a room.

She washes out her cup and lowers the shade. She finds a pen and paper and doesn’t overthink it for a second. She writes: