“Yeah?”
“Sleep here tonight. In the bed. Not the couch.”
She curls into me. Her breathing slows. Her hand relaxes on my chest.
“Teague?”
“Mm.”
“I’m going to tell Keely about this too.”
“I know you are.”
“She’s going to want details.”
“Give her details.”
“All of them?”
“Sure.” I press my mouth to the top of her head. I breathe in her soft hair. “Tell her I said hi.”
She laughs against my skin, warm and muffled, and then she’s quiet and then she’s asleep. In my bed.
I don’t sleep for a long time. I lie there with her breathing against my chest and I look at the ceiling and I think about the contract in the drawer at Anthem and the life I built piece by piece and the routine I followed for three years that had no room in it for another person, and I think about how she walked through the door and took apart every wall I’ve built with nothing but honesty and a Shirley Temple and the audacity to keep showing up.
She came back tonight. She’ll come back tomorrow. She’ll keep coming back because that’s what Zoe does, she walks into places and she stays until they’re hers, and I’m starting to think she’s right about all of them. She was right about Station 11. She was right about punk. She’s right about this.
I close my eyes. Her breathing is steady against my chest.
I sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
Zoe
Keely already knows everything.
She knew before I told her because Keely has a sixth sense for when I’ve had sex the same way dogs have a sixth sense for earthquakes. She FaceTimed me Sunday morning while I was walking home from Teague’s apartment in sweats that weren’t mine and a Black Flag t-shirt and she took one look at my face and screamed so loud her roommate threw a shoe at the wall.
She got the details. All of them. She asked follow-up questions. She took notes, which I’m not sure was a joke. She rated my experience on a scale she invented on the spot and informed me that my first orgasm from another person scoring a nine out of ten was “statistically elite” and that I should “protect this woman at all costs.”
So when I bring the full group to Anthem on Friday night, Keely already has opinions.
“That’s her?” Keely whispers as we walk in. Teague is behind the bar, pink hair freshly touched up, septum ringcatching the neon, rings on every finger. She’s shaking a cocktail for someone and she looks exactly like the woman your mother warns you about, which is exactly what she is. “Zoe. She looks like she could kill someone.”
“She gave me a Shirley Temple the first night I met her.”
“I don’t care if she gave you communion wine. Look at her.”
Jordan, Mia, and Raquelle are behind us, filing in, doing the same visual assessment they did last time except now it’s different because now they know. Keely told them. Of course Keely told them. Keely told them and Mia told her sister and Raquelle told her mom and somewhere in the chain of information my orgasm has become community knowledge and I’m fine with it because I have nothing to be ashamed of.
We take the corner table. Teague sees me and starts making a Moscow mule without being asked, and I feel a small warm pulse of something at the fact that she knows my drink and starts making it when I walk in and that’s just how this works now.
I go to the bar to get the first round.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” Teague sets the mule in front of me. Her eyes move past me to the table. “Full squad?”
