“I’m not a perfectionist,” I argue. “I just like plans.” I’m flailing my hands again, and Jack reaches across the table and plucks one out of the air like she’s capturing a nervous bird.

“I just don’t understand how you even go about drawing someone’s hand,” she muses, tracing the edge of my thumb, the crescent moon of my nail. I’m scrambling again, trying to keep up with her sharp-left turns. “There are so many intricacies in the human hand.”

I open my mouth to explain, but my chest feels too crowded again. I have four extra ribs, three hearts, and a fullness climbing into my throat as Jack continues to chart a path down the slope of my thumb, inward across the soft flesh of my palm. If this is how she touches a woman’s hand, I can’t imagine how she kisses.

Except, I absolutely can imagine it—it would taste like pralines and chocolate and feel like this, delicate and unhurried—and the thought curls my toes inside my boots like paper as it burns.

This doesn’t happen to me. I don’t picture kissing total strangers, and if I do, there isn’t toe-curling involved.

I rip my hand away from her.

“Sorry.” She places her hands palms-down on the table. “I should’ve asked before I touched you.”

“No, it’s not… um… I watched a lot of YouTube videos,” I say, “to learn how to draw hands. In high school. That’s how I taught myself how to do it.”

Jack smiles fully—not a quarter-moon or a half-moon, but something unguarded and infectious and a little goofy. “Come on.” She pushes back from the table and grabs her coat. “The snow is getting bad, so we should probably head to our next location.”

“What is our next location?”

She shrugs into her Carhartt jacket. “No idea. I don’t have a ‘plan.’ ” I look up to find her smirking at me for a moment before her expression falls. “But look,” she says, holding up that same stern finger, “I’m not your manic pixie dream butch—”

“My what?”

“But if you wanted to, say, spend a few hours with a kind stranger who has attractive hands”—she jazz-hands aggressively at me—“we could just… I don’t know… see where the day takes us?”

Out the window, nearly four inches of snow has gathered along the sidewalk on Burnside. On a snow day, you could get away with not having plans.

Chapter Ten

Sunday, December 18, 2022

“Is this a joke? You’re joking, right?”

“Why the hell would I joke about something like this?”

“Um. Because you’re hilarious?” Meredith guesses. “Especially when you’re trying not to be.”

“Okay, one, that’s harsh—”

“You know what’s actually harsh? The fact that you never watch the TikToks I send you—”