“When I started thinking about messing around with clothes, when I finally got my own machine, it felt like coming home in a way, you know? It breaks my heart that I started doing it after my grandma died. She didn’t like my body,” I was watching Lily like a hawk by this point, so I saw the way she swallowed here, thick and slow, “but I think she would have at least respected my clothes.”

A silence stretched then. I didn’t know what to say. Although my brain had plenty it wanted to say to her grandma. If, you know, she wasn’t dead.

Eventually, I brushed my fingers over her arm. It seemed to shake her awake, at least a little bit.

“I think...sometimes there are things we love as kids, and then we forget about them as we grow up, either by accident or because we think we should. And then one day we remember them, and it’s like, why did I think I had to give this up? And that’s how I feel whenever I go to the fabric store by myself now. I love all of the variation of fabric, patterns, designs; all of it is so...pretty and soothing to me. There are even sounds of the fabric store that are comforting to me, like when the workers roll out a bolt of fabric onto the table when they’re getting ready to cut it for you? And it’s like, thump, thump, thump.” She smiled, looking straight at me. “And the scissors when they cut it, they have this very specific snip, you know?”

I did not know. I had no fucking idea what she was talking about. But I was pretty much out of my mind with wanting to kiss her.

But...I didn’t.

Because...romantic prowess. Negative three.

And because at that exact moment, a new song started across the room. A song whose opening chords I knew by heart. A song that made me want to twirl Lily back onto the dance floor, hold her close, let her see all of me. But that would have been different from Bonnie Tyler, from Gaga. Even hearing it at all right now felt like a little too much. The stranger who was singing it was killing it. Killing me.

“Are you okay?”

I looked down, and only then realized I must have been spacing out. Lily was biting her lip.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m kind of drunk and didn’t mean to...ramble about the fabric store for an hour? Oh my god.”

Those splashes of pink returned to her skin and I almost spilled my gin and tonic all over her in my flailing.

“No! No. I could listen to you talk about clothes and the fabric store and your grandma for hours more. Seriously. I just...this song.”

Lily tilted her head, listening. “I think I recognize it?”