“You are an excellent recess from the humdrum,” I tell him.
“And old flames can’t hold a candle to you,” he replies.
I’m sad to see him go—to see all of them go, really. But I also know the time has come to give the party its grace note and send it on its way.
When the door closes behind them, the apartment seems even emptier than it did before any of the guests arrived. I know there’s still one around, but Czarina’s bedroom is practically soundproofed. So I may as well be alone as I finish clearing the table, then push the coffee urn back into the kitchen to empty it in the sink. Everything I’ve done for the evening, I am now undoing. And the undoing, I find, is simply another form of doing.
I’m thinking about the future, but I don’t want to think about it too much—not until I can talk to Ilsa about what we’re going to do.
nineteen
ILSA
“Wake up, Ilsa.”
I don’t want to wake up. I’m having the sweetest dream about taking a bath in a tub filled with chocolate. The chocolate is creamy and heavenly until I turn on the shower spout. The spray of chocolate is indeed delicious, but really messy dripping from my hair, and practically blinds me. Like many of my ideas, the chocolate bath had seemed like a good one at the beginning, but as I step out of the tub, I wobble, and get chocolate all over the sink, floor, and wall. The bathroom is starting to look like a crime scene, from what I can glimpse through my chocolate-covered eyelashes. Is this what death by chocolate means?
I feel a hand running softly along my arm. No chocolate seems to be interfering with the hand’s path. My eyes pop open. The dream is over. Another one is beginning.
“How long was I asleep?” I ask Li.
She’s lying next to me, on her side, looking down at me. “Not long. Less than an hour.”
I remember now. We came into Czarina’s room to have some private time. To explore whether our lips wanted to explore more.
“Did I literally fall asleep on you?”
She laughs. “Pretty much. You drank too much. And you were over-stimulated.”
Classic Ilsa. The life of the party who crashes hard just when things get interesting.
“Sorry,” I say.
“There’s nothing to apologize for. I had a little catnap, too. Snuggled against your cat dress.”
“Are we already a lesbian stereotype? Should we just skip right to moving in together?”
“Hah!” The room is dark, but there is plenty of city light coming in through the window. I see Li smiling at me. “Did you know you sing in your sleep?”
“I do.” My parents and Sam have been telling me this for years. I don’t want to talk about this habit. I’m not embarrassed by it so much as worried that I reveal parts of myself I don’t want revealed while I sleep. So I ask Li Zhang what I’ve wanted to know since our kiss on the rooftop. “How long have you liked me, Li?”
“I’ve always liked you.”
“I mean, like like.”
“I don’t know. It just evolved. Sitting next to you in chemistry every day, I noticed little things about you. Like how your backpack is always a mess but you have a plastic pencil case that you neatly put your pens and pencils into at the end of each class. That you quietly hum Beatles songs when you’re working out chem problems. Like how you were always so patient with Igor Dimitrovich’s stuttering when other kids teased, and always defended Jane Tomkins when the mean girls ganged up on her. How you called Mr. Abbott out on his patriarchal teaching methods and got the syllabus changed.”
“Wow. I’m amazing,” I joke.
Surprisingly, Li breaks out into song. “The way you’re singing in your sleep / The way you look before you leap / The strange illusions that you keep / You don’t know / But I’m noticing.”
“That’s really nice. Where’d you hear that?”
“I didn’t. I saw it written on a bathroom wall at some music club down on the Lower East Side. It’s kinda how I feel about you.”
“I fear you might see a better version of me than I actually am,” I confess.
“Then be that better version,” she suggests.
Huh. There’s something to that idea.
“Do you think I’m a bitch?” I ask.
“I think you have a bitchy sense of humor. That doesn’t make you a bitch. But I like bitches, for the record. They get shit done.” She reaches over to caress my hair. Then she presses her body closer to mine, leans down, and places her mouth on mine. This kiss is longer, and also a surprise—not for its sweetness (which is definitely there), but for its intensity.
It feels right.
I thought I wanted wild affairs. Really, what I want right now from Li is not the promise of a tempestuous dalliance. I want to share in Li’s focus. And decency. The strength of her kiss that makes me want to be better than I am.
“I have to go home,” Li says after our lips disengage.
“Stay over.”
“My parents won’t like that. My curfew is two a.m. If I take a ride service home now, I’ll get there just in time.”
“Were you serious about me coming to Taiwan with you?”
“Yes.”
“Would that be weird? At your grandma’s house, if we’re…a couple?”
“We’re not a couple. We’re potential.”
I’m not wounded at all by her statement. (If Parker had said it, I would have taken it as a failure on my part.) “Are you out to your family?”
“I’m neither in nor out even to myself. I don’t believe in labels. Just in what feels right in my heart. I’m not positive that makes me gay. All I know is I’m not traditionally straight.” She pauses, then says, “If you came with me to Taiwan, you’d sleep in the guest room, which is also my grandma’s sewing room.”
“No shenanigans,” I tease.
“There might be shenanigans…eventually. I’m not in any rush. Are you?”
I don’t
