“Yeah,” Lara said.

There was another long silence. Lara looked up at the churning, purple sky.

“It doesn’t snow like this in New York,” Alexis said.

“Really?”

“Maybe once or twice a year,” Alexis yawned. “Most of last winter, it was just gross and rainy.”

“Do you miss the winter?”

“Yeah,” she said into Lara’s shoulder.

They both fell asleep after that.

♒

“I felt bad for messing with her boyfriend,” Lara said to Aaron. “I think I read too much into it.”

She was sitting at his dining room table like always. He had arms folded over his chest, listening intently, smiling a little. She was holding, in her arms, a bouquet of white roses he had given her when he opened the door.

“My friend, Tess, she says I have anger issues, and I used to disagree — you know, I’m kind of a passive person. But what I realized is, Tess is right, I am an angry person, but I don’t go about it the normal way. Instead of blowing up at people, I just get progressively meaner to them if they do something I don’t like, or are something I don’t like. Like, you know, he’s my friend’s fiancé, and he has this creepy staring thing like I told you. So I, like, get condescending, harass him a little. But I also wonder if I was just imagining the staring. And, you know, the thing with him is that he wants me to be the one to make an advance. He doesn’t want to own it, he wants just enough plausible deniability, and anyway, I went home with Alexis, the lesbian — ”

He was loving this. Grinning. Lara was certain he felt like he was getting the realistic trans girlfriend experience. She was also certain that the flowers meant that at some point, he expected to finally go from the kitchen table to the bedroom, and it somehow seemed so anticlimactic.

She was wrong about that, but he did kiss her on the way out. Lara graciously reciprocated, let him feel her up a bit, waited for him to take it in another direction, but he pulled away and smiled that stupid, fatherly smile.

“See you, Katie,” he said.

“See you,” Lara said, six hundred dollars richer. What a weirdo. That was gonna be the last time. She would find some other way to make money, she wasn’t cut out for this.

After she got off the bus, she walked over to Jenna’s apartment and buzzed the door.

“Here,” Lara said, handing her the white roses.

“Wait, did he tell you already?” Jenna said.

“What?”

She grinned, turned around, and didn’t say anything. Lara sat down on her couch while she put the roses in a vase and set them on the countertop. That done, Jenna came back and sat next to Lara, drew her knees to her chest.

“I said yes,” she said.