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SIX. you will never be free of me.
Toronto, 2026.
What does a notorious pariah do for a living? June often wonders exactly how Serena occupies her days in that dank, grimy office with all those miserable, overworked people. The Serena Joy Waterford from before never would have the patience, nor humility, to work alongside them. Even Serena J. Sokolowski wouldn’t have been able to bear it. (Yes, June remembers now that fateful day at Peter’s office.) There had been many such women to come and go through those years, but when Serena had decided that Canada was a fresh start, somehow her pen name—Fred’s name—was brushed aside in her private life. To her, it’s just that easy to erase the past. Seeing that name had catapulted June back into a time before curfews and Hannah, a time of catty workmates and shitty coffee and weird bosses. And the rise of conservative traditionalism masquerading as ecofeminism.
Well, it doesn’t put people as immediately on edge to see Serena Sokolowski on a letter, but when they inevitably see the face in front of them, every single Gilead survivor recoils and flashes with betrayal, like it is yet one more trick, one more lashing. It's Waterford, over and over despite every effort to convince everyone else of an alternate reality. Even Serena doesn't seem to buy it. She winces. One bad history traded out for another.
June doesn’t think the maiden name suits. It’s too docile, too common, too much of a farce and literally a coward's way out. And she doesn't know why Serena even bothers.
But when the mail arrives, that ugly scar is often on the outside of the envelope in all it’s mockery. She often wonders if another name would be better, or if it's better just to be open and honest. No more hiding.
June remembers a lot more than that too.
She knows that at some point, at some party, once and only once, she’d tasted Serena Joy’s sweat mixed with Jell-O, weed, and cigarettes. That entire year is still not entirely clear, so the precise details of a single night are fuzzy, but the rest is there: Her hands, her tongue, her body, her dripping, drunken pathetic desperation as she pressed June against some stranger boy’s mattress. In retrospect, it was pretty sloppy sex that really wasn’t great. Nor particularly memorable, even if the alcohol had allowed for the permanent formation of actual coherent memories. But for some reason, that little uncomfortable snippet of unwelcome nostalgia hasn’t arrived until years after becoming reluctant roommates with her fully adult, fully fascist form. And when June vaguely hinted at Jell-O shots, just that once, Serena had made zero indication that the reference meant anything to her at all.
Maybe it had been a hallucination after all those inebriants. Or some sort of mixed up memory and it had been some other totally bitchy, tall blonde asshole because it’s not as if Serena is unique in that way. Standing in Naomi Putnam’s foyer and making a sly remark to Serena about it, only to have her ignore the insinuation… well, that was sorta gaslighting, right? Because June is absolutely certain now that it was. Or, maybe, Serena honestly doesn’t remember but giving her the benefit of the doubt evaporated long, long ago.
June is certain now because she’s had the opportunity to try it again, and in those moments with Serena touching her, lips on her skin, hot breath on her neck… Yeah, it was a little too familiar. Like reliving some sort of fucked up nightmare when wide awake. Except in the end, the nightmare didn’t suck at all, just like it didn’t totally suck the first time either.
The worst part was that dreadful split second before, when Serena came to her bedroom in the attic and June knew somehow with perfect clarity exactly how Serena would taste, how she would move, how her fingers would feel, how she would sound. No normal person knows that beforehand, not with such certainty.
Outside Gilead, she even made Jell-O shots on a boring Friday night and handed Serena one with a wink. No reaction. Not even the flicker of recognition. So, June has never actually brought it up and asked outright.
—————
It’s dark in the room. Too quiet. The secondhand minifridge hums loudly against the other side of a very thin wall but otherwise, it’s eerie and lonely.
And it’s also likely the worst possible time to decide to wrangle the subject.
True, she could wait until morning when Serena is sitting in front of her computer, checking email and drinking shitty instant coffee. There’s also cornering her at her work in her cubicle, on someone else’s dime and just going for it in public. She could wait outside like a stalker, except she’d have another cup of coffee and pretend she’s just being a good person and then insist on accompanying Serena home on the bus where she can’t escape. Again, a little too exposed and public. Finally, she always has the option of suppertime, in front of the kids. June remembers the feeling of adults having awkward conversations and arguments over dinner when she was a child, and how awful that felt. So, quite honestly, this is probably the best time—if such a qualifier even exists.
“Serena.”
No response.
Her hand reaches out, hits something warm. Maybe a shoulder, maybe a back. She pokes with a stiff finger. The body moves, shrugs it off and rolls further away.
Nice try.
She pushes a flat palm out and shoves, harder.
"We had sex."
"Hmm." Useless response from the lump on the other side of the bed.
She isn't getting out of yet another conversation by feigning sleep. "Serena." Another shove. "We had sex."
There's a huff from the other side before a very low, very gravelly, very pissed off voice mumbles, "Yes. Glad you finally figured that out four years after the fact. Goodnight, June."
What a bitch. "Not what I mean." How is it not clear that isn’t what she is talking about? "God, I hate you."
It's petulant. Reaching out, June pulls on the light switch, coating the room in yellows and golds. At least this time Serena turns over, squinting and glaring at the interruption to her sleep.
June hates how her mouth goes dry and her chest tightens at the incredibly casual sight of Mrs. Waterford with bedhead in an old t-shirt, rubbing at her eyes. "What is your problem now?"
So much for catching her off guard. June should have learnt by now that there is literally only one time Serena is ever vulnerable and able to catch off guard and they are not naked right now, and she is not even close to an orgasm. Bad timing.
"You don’t remember but not Gilead, our first kiss wasn't then. It was way before."
They're staring at each other across the expanse of bed, unmoving, almost a dare to see who breaks first. There may be a slight rise to the pink in Serena's cheeks but it's hard to tell in the dim, golden hue of the room. Knowing how good Serena is at this particular game of playing dead, June knows she's the one who will necessarily have to relent first.
"We fucked. In college." With a lazy shrug, June smirks, feeling triumphant in a battle that doesn't even exist. "Just thought you should know."
There's a prolonged pause before Serena sniffs. Then laughs in that stupid, dismissive way as if June is some dumb animal that has just learned an inane, new trick. "Okay." The patronizing tone. The arrogance. She wasn’t joking about hating this woman, probably 99% of the time — even when she looks this way: all comfy and half-asleep and harmless.
Eventually, after a long, quiet stare, Serena rolls her eyes and chuckles again. “You’re mistaken.” She rolls over so June only gets a face full of blonde hair and a whiff of strawberry shampoo.
The rage begins bubbling up in her gut, roiling with the stubborn resentment that Serena insists on bringing out of her time after time. “Don’t you fucking dare gaslight me. Not again.” Truth be told, June isn’t particularly angry but she’s tired. Pretty goddamn exhausted by having to prove herself every time she says a word just because Serena likes to live in some fantasy world completely divorced from reality even now.
“I’m not,” comes the impatient sigh from a pillow. “You’re just wrong, June.”
She can’t just say that, can she? Just brush the whole thing off as if it’s some pointless piece of trivia? “Oh? Well, then, tell me why not if you know so much better.”
“Go to sleep.”
When she hears that, June thinks about garden shears, scalding coffee, handguns, leather belts, bone saws, prison cells. She doesn’t consider fate or love or the fact she may actually be wrong at all. Except she’s a grown up now, and tangled in this totally messy, totally fucking warped codependency with a woman she should hate more than life itself, so she can’t murder anybody anymore. This isn’t Gilead. This isn’t actually war. Instead, she waits, seething and sweating and second-guessing every memory she has of that very blurry night. Maybe Serena can hear how fast her heart is beating, or how her breathing is short and sharp, as if she’s clinging onto a precipice where an earth-shattering panic attack lies below because she once again shifts to face June in the golden haze.
“That wasn’t the first time you kissed me,” she states, her voice softer than before and it makes June suck in a quick breath of relief. “Neither of those.”
“Shut up,” is all June can come up with because now it sounds even more demented than claiming it never happened at all. Whatever memories Serena has, June doesn’t and that’s a pretty disorientating feeling when allegedly it was a pretty important thing that happened between them, at some point. Was there another party in college where June was even more wasted? Did she totally blackout? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
For a long minute, there is a blanket of silence.
“You wore number 63 in high school, right?”
Reeling isn’t even adequate enough a word to describe how June’s entire reality shifts at that moment with that sentence. She’s not certain where Serena is going with this, or why her eleventh grade basketball jersey number would have been in her Handmaid file in Gilead.
“You played JV basketball, not well, admittedly, and liked that horrible pink cream soda. You wore the boy's style shorts instead of those short ones the rest of your team liked.”
Serena is simply creeping her out now, which isn’t generally difficult for her to accomplish but this is personal. Way too personal to be a coincidence. Stunned into silence, June can only listen to this terrible woman describe intimate details about her teenagehood back to her.
“You didn’t smoke — yet.”
June tries to remember her first cigarette and how that is important.
Basketball, cream soda, cigarettes, jeering and a ref’s whistle, Jell-O shots, sweat, blonde hair, it’s all slowly falling into place, chronologically this time. A brick wall. Bits and pieces form a wider picture.
Fuuuuuck.
“You were right,” Serena continues. “It was my first kiss. And I hated you for doing it, and for knowing that.”
June huffs out something resembling a laugh, still trying to fully grasp the implications of this whole, fucked up trip down memory lane. “I just hated you, period.”
"If it makes you feel any better, I got kicked off the team, suspended from school, and lost my scholarship because of that outburst." A rueful laugh escapes. "My parents pulled me out and put me in a strict Christian school, and I had to refocus all my energy on school instead of basketball. Ended up at Holy Cross instead of Wellesley."
All for walking through a gymnasium saying fuck you to the other team, and to June specifically.
"Nobody asked you to be such a psycho."
It’s funny that if June wanted to feel guilt—to feel some completely unnecessary responsibility for the downward trajectory of modern American history, she could easily misinterpret this whole thing as her fault. She could say Serena’s entire rise to fascist infamy is down to June impulsively kissing her outside a school when she was 16. Some stupid little revenge prank as a teenage girl led Serena down this insane path.
In fact, that may be precisely what Serena is implying.
Good thing June doesn’t believe in shit like that, or taking responsibility for other people’s actions. Nobody forced Serena to walk back into the school bursting with piss and vinegar and practically start a riot by swearing at the home team. And that was just the first time. She kept doing that until she eventually got shot. That's on her.
“Goodnight, June.”
Serena's voice is tight, but final.
It bothers June for an entire week. She stews quietly about everything, and especially how interconnected their lives have been for years longer than she thought. Of all the people on the planet…
She purposely refuses to make morning coffee for Serena every day in silent retaliation.
Serena pretends not to notice.
The thrift store is busy for a Wednesday afternoon in winter. It's supposed to snow 6 inches tomorrow, at least. Maybe that’s what is driving the flurry of used mitten and snowboot buying.
June finds Serena in the children’s section with a dress in her hands. She turns it over, studying it as if she’s found some long lost Aztec artifact.
Something about it seems familiar.
Serena's finger lingers on the faded print of cartoon bunnies and birds before placing it back on the rack, carefully. The big blue eyes of the woodland creatures glare out from the folds.
June is going to vomit. Her palms get sweaty and she can't seem to form words as Serena brushes past her, either oblivious or indifferent.
Decades. Literal decades.
Bourbon here isn't good, and there's been no trade in liquor with Kentucky since the USA died, for obvious reasons. But at the moment, it is all June can handle. The small bottle stares at her, half-empty, slowly leaking she thinks because she's fairly certain she hasn't had all of that. But maybe she has.
Would it really matter?
She doesn't want comfort; she wants war.
The kitchen is dark, but not black. Serena is elsewhere doing whatever it is she does at night. The kids are asleep. There is nothing in existence except for this brown liquor and her trembling hands.
In Gilead, she knew she was imprisoned, held captive and made submissive. There were gates, locks, fences, walls, and men with guns. There were ways of believing that something was on the other side if you tried hard enough. The prison was temporary, if you had faith.
This has no other side because June didn't even know she was trapped until seeing that awful Sunday dress. And Serena doesn't care.
33 years. And no hint of parole.
It's a life sentence.
What did she do at 7 years old to deserve this?
She drinks again. 33 years of being pathetic and helpless. The TV is droning on in the other room, and June knows she's still as fucking helpless as that 7 year old holding hands in church.
Serena tastes like the warm green tea she's been drinking. She’s pliant too, a little too much so, as June pushes her back into the sofa cushions. Just like that, June is reminded that somehow they’ve done everything before. All her actions have been predestined and Serena has had the cheat codes the entire time like a fucked up psychic. But she feels nice, she sounds nice, she tastes nice, smells nice. Everything is just so nice. And unreal.
Nothing was nice about the girl at Sunday school, or on that basketball team, or at the frat party or in the office. And June remembers too that even now, she’s not actually nice; she’s a liar.
She knew all their history this whole time and didn’t say a word.
The way Serena is kissing her makes all her bones feel like they’re made of jelly and she sinks so deeply into her. How swiftly joy and sorrow alternate.
“You smell like a distillery,” Serena mumbles as she moves her lips across June’s pulse point.
“Mmm,” is all that she gets in response. That and two grabby hands tangled in her short blonde hair. Serena’s teeth graze her neck, just enough to elicit a shudder. Fingertips, the same ones that had once dug into her arms during a basketball game, now grip her bare waist underneath her t-shirt. Why does that feel like the same thing?
The best time to wring anything truthful out of Serena is exactly at this point. She’s malleable and satiated, comfortable and relaxed with June in her arms, and her defenses are as far down as they get. June knows all the weak spots and tricks by now. And it’s not exactly a terrible trade-off, she admits as Serena slowly runs her soft hand over June’s bare back. No, it could be much, much worse than this.
“What?” That distinctive voice breaks through the fuzzy haze June was relaxing in.
“What?” she counters back, unsure of exactly what Serena seems to be asking and why.
“You tensed up just now.” Sometimes June forgets how easily her own body betrays her, especially when they’re naked, pressed against each other.
Ripping Band-Aids off is never fun.
“You knew the whole time.” June realizes how much sadder her voice sounds than she feels as soon as it floats over them. She should be angry, fuming, but somehow she can’t be.
They’re back to this discussion, again. It feels redundant and a bit stupid to keep returning to it but the fact that something so formative has been hidden from her for so long is infuriating and embarrassing. She’s unsure which hurts more. Serena, for her part, seems entirely bored. She’s always bored, aloof, too cool to deal with whatever emotional tantrum June insists on having – at least that’s how it feels. But June will never forget Serena’s literal tantrums in Gilead. She can play the ice queen card all she wants now but June remembers, and now she remembers high school too. That was some queen tantrum shit.
“Yes.” She offers no apology and there is not a sliver of remorse in her tone.
Lifting herself up onto an elbow, maybe a more direct approach would help. She glares directly at Serena’s face until those blue eyes meet hers. Victory. “When? When did you figure it out?”
Serena sighs as the afterglow of sex begins to fade and June knows she doesn’t have long left. Rolling her eyes, Serena glances towards the ceiling. “The minute I saw you in Gilead, in my sitting room.”
There’s no point in asking why it was never talked about, because why on earth would it have been? How could that conversation ever have even been broached? And it’s not like June knew anyway so it would have seemed merely like some maniacal fantasy by a deranged kept woman. It was ammunition, not a secret to cherish. Everything Serena had built for herself would have been shown for the mirage of bullshit it really was way too early on.
Still… it would have been nice that sometime in the last year, the stupid bitch had said something at all about their shared history. It would have been nice to have some hint that everything that has happened was inescapable fate anyway. Maybe June wouldn’t have felt like she was swimming upstream against the raging current for so long.
She fucking pretend-married this horrible woman when they were kids. Literal children. Serena Joy with her little bunny dress and scary parents was her first (and only) girl husband. June didn’t think much of it then, but now knowing she was in fact Serena Joy Waterford’s first kiss? That is huge. That is really fucking disturbing. Soulmates seems a horrible idea, especially when you don’t get to choose. They’ve known each other—hated each other—basically their whole lives, off and on.
Did Fred know? Would she have told him in some pseudo-conversion therapy couple’s counselling session? No, she wouldn’t. No man would have stood for that in his precious, precariously balanced household.
“Serena.” She honestly can’t come up with any other words other than a dejected whisper of her name.
“Trust me,” Serena continues tersely, her voice losing some of its patience. “I didn’t like it any more than you do.” She doesn’t pull away however. “I tried to put a stop to it.”
Did she ever.
But suddenly, and much to her group therapist’s dismay, June is back in Gilead, flicking through every memory, every moment that Serena seemed to give her a strange look or made a peculiar, loaded comment that June never could quite decipher in the moment. The way she touched June too easily, too comfortably when she never touched anybody else at all. The pointed silences and softened voices when they were alone and the explosions of violence when some gift was rejected. The odd clingy behaviour when none should be prompted. The way she had kissed her, so desperate yet certain, that first time in Gilead and how eerily familiar it felt. The inescapable nature of their entire bond for all those years.
God, there’s really no way out of this.
Surely surrender should feel worse, June thinks. Up until a week ago, their history had been a coincidence but finding out it stretches so much further back, the inevitability of this situation sinks in. She’d been living under the delusion that this, whatever it is in Toronto, is a momentary coping mechanism and eventually it too will pass. But now? It’s not going anywhere and that should be far more terrifying than it feels at this moment.
June suspects she’ll be a prisoner to this for the rest of her life.
And that knowledge should hurt, should horrify and sting, should enrage her into action to reverse course. To escape fate.
But what’s worse is June may believe in some version of God sometimes, but she has never believed in fate or soulmates or dumb shit like that. And she’s fairly certain someone like Serena never had either. Yet, here they both are and neither are struggling against it even if it is God’s cruelest joke yet.
Finally, June finds her voice. “You could have tried harder.”
Serena briefly considers this, humming in thought, her hand stroking slowly down June’s arm prompting a warm shiver. “You’re free to leave me anytime now.”
Her solution is elegant in both its simplicity and its idiocy.
After all of this, Serena is making a joke? For real? The idea of that being even a remote possibility for two people who have been reluctantly intertwined since they were children makes June snort. She swings a thigh over Serena’s hips, curling tighter against her body with a sigh. “Sure, okay.”
She could run right this second as an escape from the trap. Eventually the snare line will snap taut and she’ll learn once more that freedom was a chimera. If nothing else, this past week — this past lifetime — has taught her the sheer futility of such a move.
There are only a few minutes at most left before Serena will inevitably decide it’s time to put on clothes and become a respectable person again, even if they are the only ones awake in their quiet apartment.
Maybe, June thinks, she should stop trying to struggle against this so much. Maybe they should just lean in. She considers sweaty palms and the smell of musty basements and getting a girl husband at age seven.
She takes Serena’s hand, casually toying with her remaining fingers, chuckling to herself.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic if we got married?”
—