“And then, Jane looks August straight on, folds her arms across her chest, and says, “What the fuck, August?”
August mentally flips through the plan for tonight—nope, definitely not part of it.
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Jane says. She paces toward August, sneakers thumping hard on the floor of the car. She’s pissed off. Brow furrowed, eyes vivid and angry. August scrambles to figure out how she screwed this up so fast.
“You—you can’t do what?”
“August,” she says, and she’s right in front of her. “Is this a date? Am I on a date right now?”
Fuck. August leans against the door, equivocating. “Do you want it to be a date?”
“No,” Jane says, “you tell me, because I have been putting every move I know on you for months and I can’t figure you out, and you kept saying you were only kissing me for research, and then you stopped kissing me, but then you kissed me again, and you’re standing there looking like that in fucking thigh highs and bringing me wine and making me feel things I didn’t even know I could remember how to feel, and I’m going out of my goddamn mind—”
“Wait.” August holds both hands up. Jane’s breaths are coming high and short, and August suddenly feels close to hysterical. “You like me?”
Jane’s hands clench into fists. “Are you kidding me?”
“But I asked you on a date!”
“When?”
“That time I asked you out to drinks!”
“That was a date?”
“I—but—and you—all those other girls you told me about, you were always—you just went for it, I thought if you wanted me like that, you would have gone for it by now—”
“Yeah,” Jane says flatly, “but none of those girls were you.”
August stares.
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, August, what do you think I mean?” Jane says, voice cracking, arms thrown out at her sides. “None of them were you. Not a single one of them was this girl who dropped out of the fucking future to save me with her ridiculous hair and her pretty hands and her big, sexy brain, okay, is that what you want me to say? Because it’s the truth. Everything else about my life is fucked, so, can you—can you please just tell me, am I on a fucking date right now?”
She makes a helpless gesture, and August is breathless at the pure frustration in it, the way it looks so broken in, like Jane’s been living with it for months. And her hands are shaking. She’s nervous. August makes her nervous.
It sinks in and rearranges in August’s brain—the borrowed kisses, the times Jane’s bit her lip or slid her hand across August’s waist or asked her to dance, all the ways she’s tried to say it without saying it. They’re both hopeless at saying it, August realizes.
So August opens her mouth and says, “It was never just research.”
“Of course it fucking wasn’t,” Jane says, and she hauls August in by the sway of her waist and finally, finally kisses her.”
―
Casey McQuiston,
One Last Stop
