to Friday night in the split-second before Doc drew away.

Yaya was suddenly freezing. Doc must have noticed; she reached past Yaya’s head and shut off the icy rain. Cold water droplets dotted her forearms.

Yaya looked the same down her chest, belly, arms, legs. Her once-curly hair had plastered against her scalp and back, and each dripping lock sent a chill down her spine. Her teeth began to chatter.

Doc helped Yaya to standing. She shifted in an awkward semi-circle, leg aching less now. Her lips opened and closed, trying to think of something funny to break the tension, maybe spit sarcasm to throw off any questions, but her wit had frozen. Nothing she said tonight would make herself or Doc feel any better.

Doc offered Yaya’s tank top and underwear. She was looking at Yaya, both of them stone-faced, the air growing silent and still.

A fog slid at the edges of Yaya’s mind, and it carried memories it had obscured since Friday night. She and Doc, standing like this, one clothed, one naked, a look in Doc’s eyes, piercing through a tipsy haze. Or had they both been drunker than that? Didn’t matter now. Drunk, sober, tipsy, Doc’s place, tumbling, okay sex, a long sleep curled in each other’s arms—Friday was a lifetime ago.

And yet standing here with Doc, that history felt ready to repeat itself.

~

At each step from bathroom to bedroom, Doc felt hands helping to peel away her pajamas. Already naked, Yaya had it easy. Doc’s pants somehow tangled in her bedframe when she tried to crabwalk back onto the mattress, and she laughed while Yaya untangled her.

Yaya then climbed on top, and they both tangled in the sheets. A fire crackled through her trunk and across the bed, cooking Doc’s skin to sweating. How could it be November around this summer day?

She wasn’t being careful. There was no telling what Yaya was like right now, what Magenta’s influence would mean for this moment. Doc was letting this happen—no, worse, encouraging it. There was wrongness and danger here.

Was she just going to ignore that?

No, she wasn’t. The danger only pressed her back harder into the mattress.

If she was allowed one terrible decision this year, let it be this.

“What’s it like?” she whispered. Her breath cast a soft wave through Yaya’s curls.

Yaya trembled, a darkness spreading from between her legs. “Like I feel every part of myself. Nerves everywhere, muscles hard. I can flex my entire

body, one big bicep. Every sensation is ten thousand kisses.” She laid a kiss on Doc’s neck. “And being firebombed.”

Doc took a deep breath. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t.” Yaya began to sit up, hands running from Doc’s chest to her slender hips. “Are you sure?”

Like all of the proudest people, Yaya’s heart seemed a shrine to self-doubt.

And Magenta? She was a mystery. But deep between them, they cared.

Doc hadn’t expected that. She sat up toward Yaya’s face. “I’m sure, yes.