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“Silna?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, there you are,” Harry said. “Sorry, it’s just hard to tell with you, sometimes.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
“No, no, don’t take offense,” Harry said. “It’s always hard for me to tell when people aren’t listening, really. Especially with you. You’re one of the few people that don’t stop me when I really get going. I did hope I would get your interest with that bit about the introduction of Paralithodes camtschaticus in the Barents Sea, though.”
“Big news in the crab world,” Silna said, causing Sophia to glance up and raise her eyebrows. Silna grinned at her.
“Oh yes, indeed,” Harry said. “But I get the feeling you’re less interested in Paralithodes camtschaticus than you are something else. What are you up to?”
“Not much,” Silna said. “Hanging out with Sophy.”
“Ah,” Harry said. “Inside on a day like today? It’s lovely out.”
“You’re inside.”
“I’m at the lab,” Harry said. “That’s different. I’d better be off, anyhow. They dislike me making personal calls, even if I am calling about crabs. Bye, darling.”
Silna hummed a goodbye and leaned over to set the phone in the cradle on the nightstand. Sophia had an extension in her room, yet she seemed to have a preternatural sense of which calls were for her and which weren’t. She hadn’t even flinched toward the phone when it rang this time. Nearly all calls to the flat were for her, though, so maybe she just knew when they were unimportant.
Sophia was occupied now, dragging the point of her tongue along the edge of a well-rolled joint. Silna had been watching her from Sophia’s bed for the last few minutes. She stood by the window seemingly without a care in the world as to who might see her from the alley below, half-dressed and rolling a marijuana cigarette. She was wearing the tanktop she had gone out in earlier, probably to purchase the pot, maybe to go to campus. Silna could see the buds of her nipples through the fabric. Worst of all she had taken off her corduroys, leaving only blue cotton bikini panties and legs as long as a flight home.
Sophy often did things without much care for who might be watching: unused to or uncaring of scrutiny. In the evenings she usually walked around the apartment in one of several white nightgowns. In the first week they lived together Silna had caught her in the act of leaning into the refrigerator, the light from within illuminating her body through translucent fabric, contours visible through cotton. In the six months since such circumstances hadn’t arisen again, but Silna remembered it as clearly as if it had been etched into her.
Satisfied with her work, Sophia looked over at Silna, proffering the joint; Silna, who had been fighting sleep for the better part of an hour, shook her head. “Later?” she said.
“Suits me fine,” Sophia said. “I’ve got nothing on.”
She sat the joint down on a small tray she kept on the windowsill, then reached out to pet Tuunbaq, who lay pelt-like on the window seat in a patch of sunlight. At Sophia’s touch he stirred, stretched lazily, then got up and leapt gracefully to the floor.
Sophia shook her head. “He hates me,” she said, moving towards the bed. She seemed amused more than anything else, her fine blond eyebrows aloft. “How is it he still hates me? I feed the bastard when you aren’t here.”
“He hates everyone,” Silna said, watching Tuunbaq leave the room with his tail aloft.
“Everyone except you,” Sophia said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I suppose I can’t blame him for that.”
Silna’s cheeks warmed, though Sophia was not looking at her as she spoke; instead she was concentrating intently on arranging the sheets over herself as she got back into bed. She got a foot tangled and gave it a little kick, a rare display of gracelessness.
“Perhaps we’re right to hold off,” she said. “I’ve gone cross-eyed.”
Silna grinned; this time Sophia was looking at her and grinned back. They’d spent many hours together on the couch or at the kitchen table—even once on the living room floor—but never before had Silna been invited into Sophia’s bed. The newness of it had turned her giddy in ways that defied the lethargy the pot inspired. Her limbs were heavy but her heart pumped like a hare’s. If she had been a hare, she wouldn’t have made it long, even if she had never strayed far from the den; she would have been slow and clumsy and happy, in the end.
“How’s Harry?” Sophia asked once she had settled, on her back with her eyes on the ceiling. She cast a hand towards the dresser next to her but couldn’t reach the dials on the radio; she gave up without much effort, maybe sapped of her strength by the crooning coming from the speakers, low and hazy like smoke. I want a love that’s on the square, a woman sang, voice limned with static. Can’t seem to find somebody, someone to care.
Sophia looked at her and Silna said, “He’s fine.”
“Just fine?” Sophia said. “He seems more the type to be marvelous, or splendid, or even fantastic.”
Silna considered this for a moment, feigning seriousness. Deadpan, Sophia had called her once, a compliment. “Splendid, then, today.”
Sophia smiled. “He’s a dear,” she said. “You really suit one another, you know.”
Something about this line of conversation unsettled Silna, as abruptly and certainly as if she’d seen into Sophia’s thoughts through an open window. “How do you mean?”
“Well, he’s sweet, and so open about everything,” Sophia said. “He can’t help not to be, poor thing. Whereas you play it cool, but really—when you aren’t trying to be funny—you’re an open book, too. Honest to a fault.”
This wasn’t news. She had never been able to tell a lie, even what Sophy would call a white one; she kept secrets through omission, not through deceit, and she hoped for the best. She found that most white people, and certainly most Brits, assumed she was mysterious by nature. It was advantageous, except for all the times it wasn’t.
“Harry talks too much, I talk too little,” Silna said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” Sophia said delicately, “but I wouldn’t be wrong, would I?”
Silna grinned. Sophy forgot, sometimes, not to be posh. Her books and her burnout friends couldn’t sand off all the polish. She slipped into that voice when her aunt and uncle called, that lilting drawl, words that floated above her head to form cartoon balloons when Silna’s head was heavy and filled with cotton: oh, I haven’t the faintest, Auntie, spoken into the phone while she lined a mirror, but really, must dash. Ta-ta.
Sophia grinned back. “I had my doubts about Dundy, but he’s proven me wrong,” she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the window, perhaps meaning the pot, perhaps meaning something she had never intimated to Silna before. That happened often; she would refer to someone Silna had never met, or at least couldn’t recall meeting, and Silna had a good memory for new faces. Sophia had a bustling social life, an endless line of friends and classmates, unlike Silna, whose guests were always stooping, studious men from the biology department. In Sophia’s world there were parties, meetings, theory sessions in the kitchen in the middle of the day or the middle of the night; there were phone calls to and from various acquaintances, one of many Johns or Edwards or Toms from the political science program. There was an ex-boyfriend named Frank who sent letters every few months. There were men she took into her room, sometimes, to smoke or do other things, depending on the hour and the man.
Of late there had only been Tom: the blond one, young, who showed up in football kit asking for Soph, sweetly charming. He had been gone for about a week now and there had been few parties or phone calls since—few appearances of Sophia, really; just murmurings from another room, a cramped sound, as if spoken into a receiver wedged in the crook of her neck.
“What are you thinking of?” Sophia said, giving Silna’s knee a nudge under the covers. “I meant no harm by that, really.”
“Nothing,” Silna said. “Just thinking.”
“You looked very serious,” Sophia said, turning over onto her side, facing Silna. She propped her head up on a hand and blinked at Silna. A trace of navy blue was smudged under her eyes, dark against pale lower lashes.
Silna pulled a grim face and Sophia laughed. Emboldened, Silna said, “You know that Harry and I aren’t—we don’t date. Right?”
Sophia raised her eyebrows. “Right.”
“Harry’s—well.”
A beat passed, and Sophia said, “I did think he might be.”
Silna wasn’t sure why her words failed her, why she couldn’t say gay or even queer. Sophia hung out with all sorts of people and was unlikely to be offended by it, at least in passing. Silna had the feeling that one could never be sure. But if the words felt foreign on her tongue, it was because they were; without direct translation, but with clear and heavy meaning, here and now—a connotation she was pricklingly aware of whenever those words came up.
She barreled on. “And you know that I—that I’m that way, too.”
Sophia’s eyebrows lowered slightly, as if this was a totally reasonable thing to say. “Well,” she said. “I thought you might be.”
Sophia held Silna’s gaze, and Silna nodded, then said, “Right.”
For an instant they only looked at each other. Sophia looked expectant; Silna had no idea what to say. She was suddenly very conscious of Sophia’s knee brushing the side of her own, only the thin layer of Silna’s pajama trousers separating them.
At last Sophia said, “Oh, darling.”
She leaned forward and kissed Silna very lightly, a brush of soft lips and then nothing else.
“Are you?” Silna asked finally. It was as much as she could manage.
“Here and there,” Sophia said, her mouth twitching. Her breath smelled as musky and sweet as Silna’s own. They’d shared the first joint, passing it between them, the butt faintly damp from both of their mouths.
Silna nodded, and Sophia kissed her again; this time she lingered long enough that Silna opened her mouth and let in her tongue. It had been a very long time since she had last been kissed by anybody: since undergrad, on the other side of the world. She hadn’t expected it to happen here, whatever she may have thought or wished or wanted.
Sophia parted their lips. “Silna,” she said. “Are you alright?”
Silna nodded.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to overstep,” Sophia said, her expression shuttered. She made to withdraw.
“You didn’t,” Silna said. “How could you?”
Sophia knew. Of course she did. Maybe she always had: maybe Silna’s feelings, apparent as they were to anyone who took the trouble to know her, had been so abundantly clear from the very beginning, from the day she answered the ad on the flat, that Sophia couldn’t help but know. It was as much a disappointment as it was a relief to have it be known. At the end of her time in England Silna would go home, Dr. Nelson—at least on paper, that was the name she and her father had been given—and Dr. Cracroft would go on to parts unknown. There was no possibility in it, no promise, though Silna had tried as best she could to cultivate one. But there was desire—and affection—both mutual. Perhaps that would do, for now.
“Darling,” Sophia said again. She was uncharacteristically solemn-faced, all traces of amusement gone. But she had always been tender to Silna when they were together: always darling, dear, Sil. She was tender now, soft and questioning in a way she’d never been before.
Silna kissed her, and Sophia obliged; she sighed softly between kisses, her breath warm, fluttering against Silna’s hot cheek. They kissed for several long minutes. Sophia petted her hand through Silna’s hair. For a few moments Silna hardly noticed until she started at the gentle brush of fingers at the nape of her neck.
“Ticklish?” Sophia said, her mouth brushing Silna’s.
Silna shook her head. “Keep doing it,” she said. Touch me anywhere, she meant. Touch me everywhere.
“Alright,” Sophia said. “Anything you like, my dear.”
She shifted, settling herself lightly over Silna, hips to hips, legs to legs. Silna wanted her full weight; they were of similar sizes but she had spent so long desiring Sophia that she had taken on an insubstantial quality in Silna’s mind, a weightlessness, never close enough for Silna to really feel her. Silna would be crushed by this in the end, but she resolved not to consider it any further. She spread her legs and opened her posture, as inviting as she could make herself. There would be no place for them together but here in the flat, no time but in the moment.
One of Sophia’s narrow thighs fit neatly between Silna’s, solid and heavy, now, with pressure. She was spread against Silna’s own thigh, warm through two layers of thin cotton, but she seemed in no hurry to do anything. Her lassitude was contagious. Silna would lie there happily forever, would grow roots, if only she could.
“I’d like to make you come sometime,” Sophia said against Silna’s cheek, rocking against Silna’s thigh for a moment, then settling. “Would you like that, Sil?”
“Oh,” Silna said, lips tickled by Sophy’s hair. “I got nothing on.”
Sophia huffed, amused, mock-sulky; she squirmed, settled, and kissed Silna again. She might decide to carry on kissing or she might decide to get up for that other joint; she didn’t seem to have made up her own mind. Silna wasn’t bothered. She was resolved to be easy, whatever happened next.