Chapter Text
She doesn’t tell Adena about what she’s doing. Partly to keep up the air of mystery and surprise, and partly because everything turned into a blur after sending the text and making the decision, and Adena doesn’t respond to it until she’s already on the airplane so she can’t even tell her what’s going on.
(She purchased a coach ticket time and after the $11,000 first-class ticket, well, she wasn’t about to spend the money on in-plane Wi-Fi. Not this time, at least.)
The first flight she found had a layover in Miami, and just as she was about to click on it, Sutton barged over and said, “No, no. You don’t have time for layovers. Move. I’ve booked so many flights for Lauren, let me do this.”
So the flight is nonstop and takes eleven hours, and the flight attendant with the blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun kept offering her coffee cup after coffee cup—she’s more alert than she would have expected walking through the foreign airport but also she now wants to throw up even more than she had expected. It’s a catch-22.
She finds the nearest row of hard, plastic airport seats (which are remarkably similar to the ones back in America, she notes) and plops down, dropping her two bags by her feet. Her phone still has almost a third of it’s battery left as she plugs in earphones and composes herself, pushing away any flyaway hair and straightening her back. She taps on the FaceTime icon, onto Adana’s contact, and then waits.
(She’s not 100% sure about the time—sure, her phone adjusted as she moved across country lines, but the time difference and copious amounts of coffee and lack of sleep have rendered her justifiably loopy, but the sun is shining outside of the windows, so she at least knows that it’s probably a reasonable time.)
“Kat!”
Kat smiles. She tries to push down her heart that’s thumping rapidly, hard, so hard that she thinks it’s going to climb up her chest and out of her mouth. “Hey.”
“How are you?” Adena is sitting upright on a bed, a black scarf wrapped lazily around her head and an easy grin on her face.
“I’m good, I’m good,” Kat says, trying to frame the phone camera so that Adena can’t see where she is. “Um, so, where are you right now?”
Adena flips the camera on her phone, showing Kat the end of the bed where her legs (her legs, god, her legs) are stretched out still in lounge pants, a set of brown drawers with a flat-screen television on top, a generic looking painting hanging above it. The view scans to the left, a window with an a/c unit below it and a small bedside table, to the right, a large chair and a closet door with a hook on the outside. “My hotel room,” Adena says lightly.
“That looks suspiciously American,” Kat points out.
Adena flips the camera back and sighs. “Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s owned by an American company,” she says. “It’s in a tourist spot.”
“Why Adena, I would have never pegged you for a tourist!” Kat vibrates in her seat as she contains her laughter, eyes crinkling. An elderly couple walks in front of her, speaking loudly. She hopes Adena doesn’t hear them.
“I booked it on short notice and it was one of the only places to take an international credit card,” Adena says plainly. “Are you at work now?”
Kat ignores her question. Her heart begins to jump again. “So, uh, where is your hotel room?” She lets a beat pass before adding, “Drop me a pin?”
“It’s right—wait. What?”
Kat barrels on. “I showed you how to send locations on your phone, right? You just—”
“No, Kat. I remember how.” Adena isn’t smiling anymore. “Why do you need my location?”
“Because.” Kat can feel her face growing warmer and warmer. She shouldn’t have let that flight attendant give her so much coffee—she wants to tumble out of the chair and onto the floor.
“Kat…”
Kat bites down onto her bottom lip and then flips her own phone camera, showing Adena the airport she’s sitting in.
“You didn’t,” Adena says quietly, barely above a whisper.
“I did,” Kat says back.
*
She got a solid five on the AP Latin test, thank you very much, but her ability to recognize Latin roots is of no use to her in a country where the people speak predominately Spanish. She feels like a ridiculous American, using her phone to find translations and then trying to read them out loud. It does absolutely nothing for her coffee-I-just-flew-to-a-random-country-for-a-girl-I-really-like-who-knew-I-was-this-romantic-wow induced anxiety.
“It’s okay,” her cab driver tells her with a smile after she had just tried to tell her where she needed to go. “I speak English.”
Kat sighs and gives him a grateful smile back. “Thank you. And, uh, sorry.”
*
It’s forty-five minutes before Kat makes it to the hotel. At least twenty of those minutes were spent in traffic, “Morning workers,” the driver had told her and, “It’s always hard to get out of the airport at this time.”
(Kat gives him a big tip anyway with the cash she had exchanged from American money at customs.)
*
Adena greets her in the lobby of the (yes, very obviously catered to American tourists) hotel. She’s quiet, and the hug she gives her does not last nearly as long as Kat had hoped, but she doesn’t question it, not now. She follows Adena onto the elevator, too tired, too anxious, too excited, too everything for words, and Adena doesn’t say anything to her.
“Was this a bad idea?” Kat finally blurts out when Adena opens the door to her room.
The door closes with a heavy thud the same time that Kat drops the bag from her hand. The coffee has subsided and now she just feels like she’s going to pass out every time her heart beats deep in her chest. Adena looks up at her, eyes dark and searching.
She leans forward onto her toes and kisses her.
Kat moves backwards and bumps into the door, her backpack cushioning her. Adena cups her face with her hands, bringing them closer, closer, and Kat relaxes.
They break apart, Kat’s mouth still partially open, and Adena says, “No.”
Kat breathes out and smiles.
Adena bends down and picks up Kat’s dropped bag, bringing it over to the large bed and setting it down in front of the set of drawers. She unzips it and starts unpacking for her.
“I don’t really have anything planned, unfortunately,” Adena says, refolding one of Kat’s shirts and placing it into the drawer where her own clothes are.
“That’s okay,” Kat says, shrugging off her backpack and turning it to pull out her phone charger. “I think I might need some time to adjust to the…time.”
Adena laughs, opening up the top drawer to put her garments in. “Kat, we’re only an hour behind New York.”
“Are we? I must just be delirious from travel.” She scrunches her nose. “And the two hundred cups of coffee they gave me on the flight.”
Adena closes the bag and sets it aside, moving to sit next to her on the bed. “Two hundred, huh?”
Kat laughs. “Okay, okay. Maybe not quite two hundred, but it was a lot. I think my flight attendant was flirting with me, because I don’t think she offered anyone else that much coffee.”
“Was she pretty?”
Kat pretends to think, humming before she says, “Yes, very. Gorgeous, even. Total super model.”
Adena rolls her eyes and Kat kisses her, because she can—because she put in for two weeks of vacation and flew to South America and she’s here, with Adena.
“Would you like to shower?” Adena asks, standing up.
“Do I really look that bad?”
Adena rolls her eyes again but then says, “I’m not sure you could ever look bad. I just thought that after being on a plane for twelve hours, a shower might be good.”
Kat smiles (because all she can seem to do around Adena is smile) and nods. “Yeah, actually. I think I really would like to take a shower.”
Adena ticks her head to the side and slips off her shoes. Kat raises a brow at this. Adena doesn’t say anything as she unwraps the scarf from around her head and discards it to the bed. She walks over to the bathroom, flicking on the light, and Kat hears the water begin to run.
“Are you coming?” Adena calls out to her. Her shirt gets tossed out from the bathroom for added measure.
(Kat is definitely going to pass out.)
*
She manages to come twice before they even touch the complementary hotel soap, and she’s pretty sure she left an honest-to-god hickey right above Adena’s clavicle.
(She also has to explain to Adena in between gasps that her hair can’t get wet. It’s still a bit of a learning process.)
*
She flies back into New York on a Monday night, and both Jane and Sutton are dutifully waiting for with big smiles and open arms.
“How was it? How was Adena?” Sutton asks, only crushing her slightly with her hug.
“Yeah, we wanna’ know everything,” Jane adds. “You only called us once the whole time.”
Kat sighs a happy sigh as they walk, Sutton grabbing the third bag (because yes, she had to buy an extra bag because yes, she may have gone a little crazy with the souvenirs) that Kat had with her. “It was…amazing. She’s amazing.”
“What did you guys do?”
Kat slows down her pace and then deadpans, “We had a lot of sex.”
“Amazing.” Sutton says, closing her eyes and nodding her head proudly.
“Okay,” Jane puts her hand up. “Please tell me you did not travel to a different continent just to sleep with her.”
Kat laughs. “I won’t deny that that wasn’t a motivator.” They keep walking until they’re at the front of the airport and she says, “I watched her work and we did a lot of site seeing. Some touristy stuff. She made me climb a mountain.”
“Pics or it didn’t happen,” Sutton says and Kat rolls her eyes.
*
An Uber takes them back to Kat’s apartment, and the ride almost reminds her of the drive from the airport to the hotel, only this time she thinks maybe the driver knows less English than the one from two weeks ago.
Kat showers while Jane orders a pizza and Sutton throws her travel clothes in the laundry because they rock, and when she emerges from her bedroom in a clean pair of sweatpants and t-shirt, her two friends are waiting eagerly on the couch.
“We have pizza and cinna-sticks and cheap wine. Now spill.” Sutton gestures to the spread on the coffee table.
Kat sits down in between them and pulls out her phone to show them all of the pictures. She narrates each one in between bites of food, adding little anecdotes and laughing as she recounts stories.
“Please,” Suttons says, “please make the picture of you on the ground with an alpaca licking your face your profile picture. I will pay you real money.”
“Wait,” Jane cuts in. “So this means that you two are like, official right?” She smiles earnestly as she looks up at Kat.
“Uh.” Kat sets her phone down on the coffee table. “I don’t know?”
“What? What do you mean you don’t know?”
Kat shrugs sheepishly. “We…didn’t really have that conversation?”
Jane looks aghast. “You didn’t?”
“Well, in between all the site seeing and hiking and…”
“And the sex,” Sutton adds.
“And the sex,” Kat nods. “We didn’t really talk about that.”
“But, you took time off work and surprised her and flew all the way down, I mean…that’s gotta’ mean something, right?”
“Does it?” Kat asks.
Sutton nods. “It does, it totally does.”
“I think she’s your girlfriend,” Jane says, smiling and squinting an eye at her.
“I, well, I mean, we…” Kat splutters, shaking her head.
“Shh, you know you can’t use words like that in front of Kat!” Sutton says. “She’s a certified commitmentphobe!”
“Hold on,” Kat says loudly. “I am so not a commitmentphobe!”
Jane tilts her head to the side and says, “Weeeelll…”
“Well what? I might not be a ‘relationship’ person, but that totally does not mean I’m afraid of them.”
“Okay, but what about last year, when you were seeing that accounting guy from the building across the street?” Jane asks. “You went on like, six dates with him but then suddenly cut things off.”
“Yeah, or, oh! When you dated that singer? He was so hot,” Sutton says. “Anyway, you definitely ended things abruptly with him after a few weeks.”
“Or when y—”
“Okay, okay!” Kat throws her hands up in defense. “I get it. Relationships scare me, okay?”
“Kat…”
“They do, a little,” Kat says. “I’ve never been very good at them, so when things start to get heavy, I sort of…”
“Bolt?” Sutton offers.
Kat frowns.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
“You’re kind of right,” Kat says back.
“Are you gonna’ bolt now?” Jane asks earnestly.
Kat licks her lips and then says, “No.”
*
It’s Wednesday and it’s her first day back at work and already she wants to leave.
(Okay, so that’s a bit of a lie. She doesn’t want to leave, per se, she’s just still tired from traveling and on a high from seeing Adena, so the last thing she wants to do is Tweet about lipstick and compile analytics from their Instagram page.)
She minimizes the document she’s working on for Jacqueline and the board and let’s out a breath, leaning back into her chair. She looks at the new pictures she’s added to her desk, of the view from the mountain they climbed, of Adena not paying attention while standing in front of a mural, of the two of them smiling at the camera while the sun sets behind them.
She thins her lips and then decides to swipe her phone from where it’s sitting, calling Adena.
“Hey, is this a bad time?” Kat asks when Adena picks up.
“No, actually, I was just about to call you.”
“Yeah?” Kat smiles into the phone.
“Yeah.” Adena swallows. “I reached out to the state department again.”
“Oh.” Kat perks up in her seat. “How’d that go?”
“It went…okay.”
Kat slumps back down like all of the air has been deflated from her body. “Just okay?”
“They didn’t have much to say,” Adena says.
“What does that mean?” Kat tries to stay composed, to keep herself together for Adena’s sake.
“They didn’t have an answer on if and when my visa would go through. Just that it was still in the process.”
“Okay…” Kat nods her head, pressing the phone closer into her ear. “But hey—this also means that, um, when you flew to New York it didn’t hurt your chances. That’s something, right?”
“Yeah.” Kat can hear Adena smile into the phone. “It is.” She sighs. “I guess I should just be glad that it hasn’t been completely thrown away.”
Kat starts to lazily spin around in the chair, twirling a pen in her hand. “Yeah and hey, I work at a giant magazine, I bet I could use one of my many connections to find you a good immigration lawyer!”
“Really? You could do that?”
“I can do a lot of things, babe.” Kat laughs and the word slips out and then she’s not laughing anymore. The spinning chair comes to an awkward halt as knee bangs into her desk. She hisses and drops the phone. Her face feels red, hot, burning. She scrambles to pick up the phone and says, “Sorry, sorry, uh, I have to go. Sorry. Um. Jacqueline needs me. I’ll talk to you later.”
She says goodbye and slams down her phone before Adena can say anything else.
*
The September sun is bright and the air is cool, calm, still. Kat stares absentmindedly at her salad, her fork balancing precariously on the edge of the plastic bowl.
“Kat? Did you want the Cesar salad instead of the spinach one?”
“What?” Kat looks up. Jane is sitting next to her on a bench, hair pulled back into a high ponytail and jean-clad legs crossed. “Oh, sorry. No, I’m fine.”
“Is…everything okay?”
Lunch with Jane had become a weekly thing since she had left Scarlet for Incite. With Kat and Sutton still working together and Sutton and Jane still living together, they both wanted something—something just for them so they could remain in each other’s space and company.
“Yeah.” Kat shakes her head. “I, uh. Is it weird when I call you names?”
Jane laughs. “What? Like Tiny Jane? Or when you got mad that one time and called me Tiny Bitch?”
“No, no.” Kat rakes her fork over the spinach in her bowl. “Like. Like when I call you babe and stuff.”
“Oh.” Jane shrugs. “No. Not really. It’s just a term, y’know? You call me and Sutton that because we’re your friends and we’re close.”
Kat doesn’t say anything and Jane presses on. “Is it…weird for you?”
“No,” Kat says. “At least it never was before. Bu, um, I was on the phone with Adena earlier and it just sort of slipped out and, I don’t know. It felt different.”
“Different because you think she might be offended by being called an infant or difference because you like her, like her, and secretly want to have a cute name for her?” Jane gives her a knowing look, a smirk almost, and Kat wants to roll her eyes so hard that they fall out of her head.
She ignores Jane’s question, instead choosing to spear her fork down into her salad and take a bite. She chews, rolling a chickpea around with her fork when I thought comes to her.
“How inappropriate would it be if I asked Sutton to ask Richard a favor for me?”
Jane sets down her fork. “Uh. I’m not sure. Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on between them; she’s been pretty closed door about him lately.”
“’Cause, see, the last time I went up to his office did not go well, so I figured if I was gonna’ ask him something, it might sound better coming from Sutton first.”
“What do you need?” A big smile spreads onto Jane’s face. “Oh, don’t tell me! You got into a Peruvian gang on vacation and now the authorities are after you and you need a lawyer!”
“Yes, that is exactly what happened.” Kat chews on a chickpea. “Actually, I wanted to know if he knew anyone who could help out Adena.”
“Why? Did something happen with her visa process? Did they throw her application away?” Jane looks concerned and part of Kat wants to reach out to her, to hug her, because she never asked her friends to be so caring or so involved and yet here they are, caring more than Kat could have ever asked for.
“No, they told her it was still in the process, but that they didn’t have a time frame of when she would know. I just feel like it’s taking forever, y’know? And maybe if a real immigration lawyer or someone could just take a look at her case, maybe she could get some better answers and finally come back.”
(She leaves out the part where she says, “come back to me,” because it sounds a little needy and possessive and she doesn’t want to be that kind of person. Also she doesn’t even know what Adena is to her, because apparently that’s a conversation they were supposed to have, but no one told her. Relationships are hard.)
“Well,” Jane says, leaning back into the bench, “I don’t think it could hurt to bring it up to Sutton first. And who knows, maybe she’ll finally spill on the whole Richard thing.”
*
She doesn’t talk to Adena again until Friday afternoon. Well, talk outside of a text-messaging app, at least.
(Adena prefers actual phone conversations. Kat prefers convenience. They seem to have found a nice balance.)
“What’s up? Anymore news?”
Adena shakes her head and Kat tries not to frown.
“It’s okay,” Kat says, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s only been a couple of days since you last heard.”
“I’m trying to stay…calm,” Adena says, her voice still and unwavering through the phone speaker. “I don’t want to push too hard, do anything that would make them want to revoke my application.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Kat says, leaning back into the white couch in the conference rooms. She crosses her leg and taps her fingers against her knee.
“I am traveling again, though.”
“Oh yeah?” Kat smiles. “Where to? Gonna’ climb Kilimanjaro or walk The Great Wall of China?”
Adena laughs. “No, I’m heading back to Paris. A company has commissioned me for a project.”
Kat swallows. “Oh, um. That’s great, Adena! I’m so proud of you.”
“Kat.”
(Even miles away and through a phone speaker, Adena can still catch her. How is that possible? Is it magic? Kat thinks that, perhaps, Adena knows her a little too well.”
“What? This sounds like a really good opportunity.”
“You sound concerned about something.”
(Damn.)
“What? What do you mean?”
“I’m staying with my cousin,” Adena says, and relief floods through Kat like a rushing river.
“I, um, didn’t know you had a cousin who lived there,” Kat says, fidgeting with a loose strand of fabric at the hem of her blazer.
“Well, technically she lives right outside of the city, but it’s near a train station.”
“That’s good, that’s good.”
“Kat.”
Kat sighs.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Uh, you do?”
“Yes. And I haven’t spoken to Coco since I left Paris the last time.”
“Oh.” Kat looks up through the glass window and sees Jacqueline cutting through the rows of desks, Lauren and her new assistant trailing behind. Alex is hunched over his desk, typing away at his computer. Sutton walks past with an armload of scarves and he looks up at her. Kat makes a mental note to talk to Sutton later that day.
“Kat?”
“What?” Kat snaps back to her phone. “Sorry.”
A muffled sound comes through the phone and then Adena says, “That’s a closed chapter in my life, Kat.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kat sits up a little straighter and feels something swell inside of her. “Listen, um, I had something I wanted to ask you.”
“Hm?”
Kat licks her lips. Jacqueline walks past again, pointing to something on the tablet that Lauren is holding. She thinks about when she first met Adena in her studio, the sex toys, that phone call from Adena’s manager, the gallery opening…the kissing and the sex. She starts to feel dizzy.
Kat suddenly stands up. “I, uh. You know what, I totally forgot what I was going to say.” She tries to laugh it off.
(Adena can probably see through that too.)
“Okay.”
(She knows Adena is smiling through the phone.)
“I’ll call you tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Adena pauses before saying, “Have a good night…babe.”
Kat drops her phone.