“Are you working, love?”
She swallowed. The monosyllable still stunned her with its implications. “I’m free tonight. But they want me tomorrow—I’m on day shift for a while…”
“Great! I’ll be right over!”
Head still foggy from a disrupted sleep cycle, but fundamentally, anomalously, almost distressingly happy, Rita barely noticed what she was doing as she packed her suitcase. The checkbox on her soul was slower to respond than the one on her Facebook profile, but it felt as if everything in her life was slowly rearranging around it. The idea of spending another night in this characterless, concrete commuter cage filled her with revulsion. Then the hotel phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Douglas? Front desk here. There’s a Ms. Hagen to see you?”
Rita started. “Uh, send her up?” A minute later, the doorbell rang. She walked to the door, leaving her half-packed suitcase behind: “Hey, room service sent me an Angel!”
“Surprise!” It was her rustbelt girl. She opened the door, and Angie stepped inside. She opened her arms to accept her checkbox’s reward and found herself, an hour later, lying in a twisted wreckage of hotel bedding and discarded clothes. “Hey, you fell on your feet, girl! This is some nice shit they’re putting you up in.”
“I, I was hoping to spend the night at your place instead?” Rita rested her head inside the protective curve of Angie’s arm. “If you can cope with a roomie, I mean. I’m getting to hate hotels; I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the past year.”
“I didn’t know you were homeless.” Angie sounded amused.
“No, I’m not homeless—well, not exactly.” Her shared lease with Alice on the apartment outside Cambridge had expired while she was in Camp Graceland, and Alice had found a new flatmate. The Unit had kindly cleared Rita’s possessions out and stashed her stuff in storage. Meanwhile, her modest pay was stacking up in her account faster than she could spend it. “I’ve got a job—they just keep sending me places so fast I’ve lost my center.”
“No you haven’t.” Angie ran a fingertip down her spine, pausing at her coccyx and spreading a palm across her right buttock. Rita shivered. “You just temporarily misplaced it.” Rita kissed her. It paused the conversation for a while. When they were ready to talk again, the sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling blinds was dark. “I wasn’t expecting this, Rita. You’re moving fast.”
Rita had looked at Angie’s time line that afternoon. She’d checked a long way back. “Ever got the feeling there was a hole in your life that suddenly got filled in?”
“All the time, baby, all the time.” Angie sat up, leaned over, rummaged in her shapeless messenger bag, and pulled out a fancy e-cig. Chrome (or was that really silver?) gearwheels, implausibly meshed into immobility, cradled a transparent oil-filled chamber. She took a hit, leaned back against the headboard, blew white vapor back through her nostrils. “Why didn’t I notice you earlier?”
“I was busy working. You were busy working. We lived too far apart.” Rita shrugged. “All the old excuses for drifting out of touch.” She pushed herself up, sat cross-legged, and glanced around the room. “It’s not like I even had the time and energy for speed-dating.”
Angie leaned against her and draped an arm around her shoulder. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We could hit room service, but there’s a diner I know—”
“I’m starving. Why don’t we go there?”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
They dressed, exchanging shy glances of complicity. Rita gathered her handbag, wrapping a sock around her fatphone for privacy before she tucked it away. Angie handed her a hotel notepad and pencil: that went in too. She hip-bumped Rita as she slid her room card key out of the light switch by the door. “I love you so much,” Angie murmured.
Not holding hands, or sliding arms around waists and kissing as they made their way to the elevator, felt like a denial of self. But hotels were public spaces. The outraged were everywhere, disguised as ordinary people, but ready to show fangs and claws in an instant like so many werewolves of homophobia if their prejudices were affronted.
The culture wars had been in overdrive for a decade now, energized by the dreadful unknowns that had tumbled the entire nation into post-traumatic stress disorder nearly eighteen years ago. Civil partnerships were legal in some states, their relationship unremarkable among friends and family: but random public spaces were another matter, the risk of queer-bashing far from negligible. And that was in those states that weren’t actively trying to turn the clock back to the seventeenth century. And so they stood just a few freezing inches too far apart until they reached the darkness of the parking lot doorway, whereupon Angie took Rita’s hand to lead her to the pickup.
“You’ve been parked a while.” Rita thought for a moment. “If you want privacy, you should know—they’ve got me on a very short leash. I know they bugged my phone: I wouldn’t put it past them to have bugged your truck, too.”
“Then we’ll give them something to remember.” Angie hugged her. “I’ll drive manually.” Then they climbed into the chilly truck cab.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
They ate at a pizza joint and spoke, somewhat disjointedly, of inconsequentialities: of mutual unfriends, of distant contacts, of hobbies and horses and hopes for the future. Rita caught Angie looking at her from time to time with the stunned gratitude of a lottery winner whose dream ticket had implausibly come true. It gave her a shocked frisson of delight and tenderness to realize that she could have that effect on her—she couldn’t help seeing Angie as she’d been when they first met, over a decade ago, even though they were both grown up now, debauched by time and feeling the infinite weight of their mid-twenties adulthood upon them.
“Do you want to move out of that hotel? You’re welcome to stay with me as long as you’re in town, if this is just a few weeks. If it’s longer, though, we might need to get somewhere bigger.” Angie carved a slice of pizza, slurped its dripping tip into her mouth, and masticated as she continued: “And with more of an eye to privacy, if you follow me.”
“I don’t know how long I’m here,” Rita told her, eyes disquietingly clear, concealing her mouth with a cup of Coke: “I don’t really know what they want me for. Probably nothing good, but nothing good beats something bad, doesn’t it?”
“Guess so. Let’s take a walk?”
Leaving the remains of their food, Rita and Angie strolled around the food court and then out into the mall. It was safe enough to hold hands here, so they did, using finger squeezes for punctuation whenever the conversation took a turn toward more sensitive subjects.
“So you got a job working for the DHS?”
Rita nodded. “Yes, I sure did.”
“OMG. Bet that makes you popular at parties.”
Rita shrugged. Yes. “I can live with it. Before it happened I was looking for a job. At least this way I’m inside the tent.”