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kiss me before sunrise, or I’m leaving you tonight.
my love found a place to stay and rest like that.
one.
Tuesday has ten freckles across her nose.
A delicate collection of them, staggered, like the black and white keys of a piano—uneven enough that there’s space for melody in between. Carole counts them, again, from her perch over the couch: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Carole should wake her up. It’s past eight already, they need to get to the recording studio by ten, it takes an hour on the train, and if they show up without eating breakfast again they’ll never hear the end of it from Gus. Carole should tap Tuesday on the shoulder, lightly at first and then a harsher poke, until she sits up all at once, scattering those golden bangs away from her face and widening that pink mouth in a yawn. She should get up, and then Carole should fry an egg over rice for breakfast, and then they should run to the studio.
But Carole’s fingers are stuck here. Glued to the top of the couch, to the seam in the soft felt. If she moved, it would cause a seismic shift in the planet. The crater far beneath them would fill and rise. Gravity itself has a command: count the freckles again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. A line of freckles, accenting pale skin, porcelain, like one of those dolls in the shop windows that Carole had to stop herself from reaching out to touch, knowing her tough reputation would be lost if she admitted to wanting that delicate pink dress, those curls tucked into place by fairy hands. Tuesday is a porcelain doll, or a baby bird, slicked down and begging, except that she pushed herself out of the nest and screamed at the world to let her fly. She came to Alba City and turned it upside down, came to Carole’s dingy apartment and pulled open the curtains, let the light stream in.
Light is streaming in now. The sun, golden-bright even through Carole’s thick windows, reflects on Tuesday’s pigtails, gives them an echo like the ring around the moon. Ten freckles below closed eyes, long eyelashes, wispy-blonde. If Carole were to wake her up, her eyes would shine in the sunlight, too—and oh, she has brilliant eyes, the clearest blue Carole has ever seen and so wide when she’s excited about something. A new type of soda, or the fresh scent of clean laundry, or one of Carole’s skateboard tricks. Carole has never seen the ocean, all the ones on Mars are too far or too heavily guarded, but she imagines Tuesday’s eyes are something like it. Wide, brilliant, blue, teeming with life. Warm and buoyant, so that if you wanted to, you could float in them forever.
A car honks outside—the noise startles Tuesday. Her nose twitches, and then she yawns and lifts her arms—move, you idiot, move—but it’s too late, Tuesday’s right hand connects with Carole’s jaw. She’s stronger than she looks, of course she is. Carole winces, brings her own hand up to rub the spot.
“Ow.”
Tuesday blinks, and then sits up too fast for Carole to appreciate it. Her hair is a mess, curls flying everywhere, and her eyes are going wide as her brain catches up to her body—just as blue as Carole knew they’d be, God, she can’t even look straight on—
“Did I hit you? Oh, I did, didn’t I, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you were there.”
Tuesday twists on the couch then reaches up again, gentle this time, and cups Carole’s chin in her hand. “I’m really sorry, could I—could I get you ice? Or a bandage, or anything?”
Her hand is so soft, pliable from a rich girl’s childhood, but Carole can feel callouses along the places where her fingers bend, from years of guitar strings. Soft and rough, pliable and hard, all tied together by warmth. Just like the rest of her.
Carole tries not to lean into Tuesday’s hand, tries not to close her eyes to better remember the touch, but she’s only seventeen, only has so much willpower and so something must spill out—
“You could kiss it,” she says. “That’d make it feel better.”
Tuesday’s hand goes still, then slips back to the couch. Her eyes are wide, wide, wide.
“Really?”
“I mean—” Carole misses the warmth, the contact, idiot girl can’t keep your mouth shut— “I mean, you don’t have to, it was stupid, a stupid idea, I’m—”
Her words fade into the morning air. Smoothly, so smoothly she could be moving through water, Tuesday pushes up from the couch and kisses Carole, just there, on the corner of her jaw. Her lips are soft—a light press on Carole’s bruised skin, like the brush of a fairy, like a dream.
She pulls back—hovers there for a heartbeat or two, can she hear how Carole’s breath has stopped—and then leans in, moves one hand up to the top of the couch to brace herself—kisses Carole on the mouth.
This time she is not so gentle. If the first kiss was an opening note, this one is a chord, long and low, sustained by pedal—inviting harmony.
Carole grabs Tuesday’s face in her hands and kisses back.
They are, of course, unspeakably late to the recording session.
two.
Tuesday feels the hand on her cheek, first.
Carole’s hand is warm—Carole is always warm, not just the color of her skin, a deep brown like the last light of a long afternoon, well-burnished by the sun, but the texture of it, the temperature. She is always moving, maybe that’s why. Always running somewhere, running delicate fingers up and down her keyboard. She keeps her nails short, tight, close to the skin, so that they don’t clip her black keys during arpeggios, though recently it’s come in handy for other reasons.
One of those short nails rubs up against Tuesday’s ear, now. Pushes a strand of hair behind it, gentle, the piano at the beginning of a long crescendo. Tuesday smiles and leans into the touch.
Carole’s hand pauses, then slips down to her neck, sits comfortable in the hollow of her collarbone like it was built to fit there. Like they were made from the same red earth.
“Hey, Princess,” Carole says. “Did I wake you?”
Tuesday opens her eyes. Carole is close—curled up against her on the twin bed, curly hair splayed out on the pillow—and she’s grinning, dark eyes overflowing.
Close—not close enough.
Tuesday reaches out and pulls Carole in, kisses her mouth, her cheeks, her neck, and back to her mouth again. She never used to wake up quickly, always slipped back into dreams if someone didn’t shake her bed at five-minute intervals, but Carole makes her hungry—hungry to be up and running, up and rehearsing, feeling the sun on her back or just this. This. Carole has so much skin, all smooth and salty, and Tuesday could stay here for hours just marking every freckle and crevice.
“You did,” she says, pulling back but keeping a hand, still, on Carole’s shoulder. “But I don’t mind.”
Carole flips to her back, shaking off Tuesday’s hand, and grins up at the ceiling. It’s mostly dull gray paint, or was until a few weeks ago, when Tuesday was supposed to go to the convenience store for milk and came back with glow-in-the-dark stars.
Tuesday follows her gaze for a moment—the stars on the left, the ones organized in the vague shape of a heart, are a little uneven—then turns, goes up on her knees on either side of Carole’s hips. Her hair falls down against Carole’s chest, and Tuesday admires the way the colors shift into each other. Brown and gold.
“What did you call me?” she asks. “Earlier, before I. Ah.”
Carole keeps grinning, brings up her hands to cradle the back of her head. “Before you attacked me?”
“Yes.” Tuesday bends her knees to get her head level with Carole’s chest, buries her hair there in the warm circle above her T-shirt.
Carole lets her dangle there for a second, then moves one hand, gentle, into her hair. Strokes out the long strands carefully.
“Princess,” she says. “I called you Princess.”
“What? Why?” Tuesday tilts her head up—and, oh, Carole’s smile looks so nice from this angle, catching the light from the window.
“Because,” Carole replies. She tugs lightly on Tuesday’s hair, and Tuesday goes willingly, kisses her long and sweet until their smiles match.
“Wait—” And it’s Tuesday on her back now, Carole up on her elbows, both of them flushed and kicking the sheets off the bed. “Why, really? Because I’m a rich girl? Because I didn’t know how to cook rice?”
“That, at first,” Carole admits.
“At first?” Tuesday squeaks.
Carole sticks her tongue out at her, then goes on. “But then, because you’re, I dunno, you’re pretty like a princess. And you deserve nice things, like a princess. Like, I used to read a lot of old manga growing up, right? Samurai stories, fantasy, other action stuff. And if there was a knight, there would always be a princess, someone he’d swear to protect. You’re like that, I think. For me.”
She ducks her head, a red tinge just spreading out at the tips of her ears. “I mean—is that okay? I know we’ve only really been—been doing this for a few weeks, and—”
Tuesday reaches up, puts two fingers to the dip beneath Carole’s chin and tilts up. Looks her in the eyes. Carole makes her hungry, but this needs to be delicate, this needs to be measured.
“Carole,” she says. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. And you—you’re my princess, too, okay?”
Carole grins, and nods, and kisses her. Carole spreads her hands on either side of Tuesday’s long hair and presses her nose down into it, like she’s trying to melt into the sunlight, into this warmth between them.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
three.
Ssshk. Ssshk. Ssshk. PAH!
“FUCK!”
Carole sits up, rubbing her head. If the alarm went off—it’s too late, it must be. Shit. Fuck.
“Carole? What’s wrong?”
She looks down to the figure beside her, and, God, forgets to be mad for a second, even now. Tuesday is transcendent in the mornings, her hair sticking up and her eyelashes blinking softly and her mouth a wide O, pink as the pattern on her shirt. Inviting. She could’ve dropped in here from another world, a dream pulled from Carole’s mind and given three dimensions, given muscle and weight and warmth.
But of course, Carole never could have dreamt something like this: Tuesday blinking slowly and then fixing her gaze on Carole, pink lips softening and stretching into a smile.
Carole settles back down onto her side and puts up one finger to trace those lips, smooth in the center but chapped and peeling at the corners. Tuesday never remembers to wear chapstick.
“Good morning,” Carole says.
Tuesday closes her eyes, her smile widening under Carole’s touch. “Morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Carole says.
Tuesday pushes back and sits up, her hair dangling in Carole’s face. Carole is struck—as she often is, at moments like these—by the wholly unreasonable urge to grab a piece and bat it back and forth, like a cat AI with a ball of string.
“Sorry for what?” she demands.
Carole puts her hands up over her face. “Our anniversary,” she explains from behind the shield. “I was gonna get up early, make you breakfast, serve it to you on a tray, it was gonna be a whole thing, but of course I overslept—”
“Hey.” Tuesday pulls back first one hand, then the other, then leans down and kisses Carole on the cheek. “Hey. What do you mean, our anniversary?”
“One year from—you know, an idiot princess running away from home,” Carole says, enough honor regained that she can pull Tuesday back down to the bed, bury her nose in Tuesday’s hair. “Running away from home, losing her suitcase, finding a pianist on a street corner—any of this sound familiar?”
“The Loneliest Girl,” Tuesday replies. She turns to face Carole, her face stern. “Okay, so you can’t be sorry, because I didn’t even remember. What kind of girlfriend—what kind of music partner am I?”
Carole shrugs. She brings one hand up to trace Tuesday’s face: her cheek, her tiny button nose, the line of her jaw. “One with more important stuff to remember?”
“More important than you? Never.”
And Tuesday has something to prove, because Tuesday always has something to prove—she leans in and kisses Carole hot and hungry, their teeth knocking and their breath mingling together.
“We’ll make breakfast together,” she says, pulling back just to take a deep breath, just to press her forehead to Carole’s shoulder. “We’ll make breakfast, and then we’ll eat, and then we’ll go back to bed and take a nap. How’s that for an anniversary?”
Carole grins up at the stars taped to her bedroom ceiling, and then grins down at the girl beside her, golden and shining. “That’s perfect.”