i.

Harlow met Stevie while watching an otter in light-wash jeans and a leather chest harness snort poppers. There was an anticipation of what was next or who was next; always going to the next and then the next and then gone. The otter in the leather harness was grinding with a twink perhaps two-thirds his age. They writhed together as one. The club was brooding and industrial with black metal bar chairs and a stage retrofitted for drag performers. Vermillion buckets rife with dollar bills flanked either corner of the square stage. Strips of colored lights along the ceiling strobed onto club-goers below. Along a far wall was a pair of tuxedo couches that looked out upon the club floor. The couches were empty. 

A bartender clocked in for his shift and began to shout over the anatomical pulse of club music. Bass throbbed and young queers and old queers rallied under blistering magenta beams. The DJ wore a cropped black tank top with the word S-L-U-T spelled out in bolded white letters. He had a septum ring and nodded to the rhythm behind a desk of wires and knobs and switches with a jeweled headset on one ear. His nails were painted and chipped. 

Stevie asked for a cigarette and the two pushed through the mass of sweaty bodies. The fog machine stuttered and choked and thin tendrils of stale vapor snuck between them into the pitch beyond the club doors. 

Harlow asked how Stevie knew her name and Stevie only shrugged and said a friend pointed her out; the friend’s name was Axel. He had vaguely been a nobody in college as Harlow had been. Axel swore that Stevie would find her hot. Stevie looked away when saying the friend was right. Harlow held the cigarette in her mouth and her hot pink lighter sputtered as it coughed up sparks. 

“Need a cover?” 

Harlow nodded. When Stevie got close and cupped their hands around the flame, Harlow could smell their perfume—tar and bergamot. 

+

ii.

The first time they fucked was in Harlow’s shitty basement-level studio. Street light filtered in through two slim windows too high on the wall. She had a full-size bed pushed against one wall and held from the floor with wooden palettes she’d stolen off the streets during her first week in Chicago. She’d thrown a black-and-white striped rug down in an attempt to hide the concrete floor. Harlow flushed as Stevie stepped inside. 

“Nice dungeon,” Stevie said. “It’s very inviting.”  

Harlow didn’t have a nightstand. Her phone sat on the floor without a case and the charger cord snaked along the baseboards from an outlet almost too-far away. 

“What now?” Stevie asked. 

“Well,” Harlow’s words trailed off. “Whatever.” 

“Whatever?” Stevie sat on Harlow’s bed and the striped green comforter wrinkled around their body.

Harlow did not know what to do, so she bent down and kissed Stevie. 

“Again?” Stevie asked. 

Harlow laughed and sat next to Stevie and they sank into the bed as she kissed them again. Her head buzzed. They’d smoked a joint together on the walk back from the party. The drags stung so they ashed it after the second block. The two kept kissing and kissing and Harlow remembered the twink from the club and wondered what happened next but next arrived quickly and Harlow had taken off her clothes. Stevie had taken their clothes off, too. 

Harlow fucked Stevie and all she could think about was the river by her house growing up. It ran wide and chasmic and she swam in it as a teenager in her navy swim shorts like the shorts Stevie had tossed in a heap on the floor. In those days her mother called her “buddy” and Harlow hated her for it. She would hold her head under, never counting the seconds because it meant she couldn’t hear her heart and she wanted to know how those muffled thumps made her body work and why her body worked so wrong. The river ran all the way to the Southern Baptists who lived miles away and Harlow could’ve swam far enough to reach them but her mother said she’d get the paddle if she did. Harlow never tried it. 

The rhythm and friction of their bodies raw together was a throbbing pulse in itself and Harlow wanted nothing but to listen only to the music of skin on sweat on skin. The inside of Harlow’s thighs were damp. All she wanted was to go swimming.  

+

iii.

Perhaps coming home is a departure instead of an arrival. The two had made a home for themselves that felt unfamiliar at first. Harlow did not know then what it meant to find comfort in what they’d created. Harlow wedged her cellphone between her shoulder and her ear while Stevie leaned against the kitchen counter and the trees outside the window had umber leaves and it had been many months since they first met. Harlow was calling her mother.  

Her mother let her ring to voicemail after three other unanswered calls. Harlow would not call again. On the dining table they bought together at a flea market, brown decay crept up a bouquet of baby’s breath and roses. Rot whispered on the edges of each bud and petal. A supermarket birthday cake read Happy Two Years of Womanhood. 

“Let’s eat,” Stevie said. They wrapped their arms around Harlow.  

“It’s a shame she didn’t answer,” Harlow said and shrugged Stevie’s arms from her shoulders. 

“I know.” Stevie replied. 

Harlow wore a deep maroon sweater with a distressed bottom hem and the threads hung down like blood. She was wearing the perfume Stevie had bought for her birthday only a couple weeks prior. She blew out the pink candle in the center. 

Stevie cut Harlow a slice of the cake. There were dollops of white icing around the top edge that sunk under the knife’s blade when Stevie cut it. There were sprinkles all over that had begun to melt from the prior breaths of the candle. Harlow met Stevie’s gaze and the two rested in the silence. They’d learned how to read one another’s body language. They could have whole conversations with just their eyes. Stevie’s eyes widened and Harlow laughed. There was a softness that blurred the edges of everything. 

Stevie stepped around the dining table and wiped Harlow’s cheek. She’d begun to cry. 

“Hush,” Stevie whispered. They clicked their tongue. 

Stevie thrust forward a plate and a fork. Harlow took them and raised a sliver of the cake to her mouth.  

“I love you,” Harlow said. 

The cake was harsh and sweet and faintly bitter. 

+++

E.B. Davis (she/her) is a queer, transgender writer based in Lexington, Kentucky. She received a BA from Transylvania University in English and Creative Writing. This summer, she will begin her MFA in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work can also be found in Vagabond City and the Nowhere Girl Collective. On the off-chance she’s not plucking away at her writing, she can be found cozied up with her short-haired gray tabby and a book.