Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ava did not, and will not ever, remember how it started.

It was a weird year to begin with. The first of her teaching contract, the year they’d moved into that claptrap apartment in Romsey, where Ava’s queen sized mattress touched three walls in her bedroom, and the one where Mary had picked up knitting at the advice of her therapist to help with her stress. 

Autumn term had crept up on them with an unwarranted sense of hope, as it usually did. Ava had been rolling from school year to school year, without break, for a decade at that point, and each new one brought the false sense that everything was going to be okay. That evening she and Mary had gone to a party they’d been plotting on for weeks; a ritual end of summer, start of the term bash that a friend had been throwing since Ava was a master’s student.

Ava had always had fun at these parties. And being that it was the day before her first class, she and Mary had agreed, naively, to take it easy.

They hadn’t taken it easy. Ava crawled out from the bushes behind Anya Butler’s flat, a little puke clinging to the hem of her tank top, and saw Mary waiting for her on the back lawn, smoking a cigarette. 

“Can I get one of those?” Ava croaked, still on her hands and knees. Mary handed her a bottle of water instead, the rat bastard, and collapsed next to her on the lush green of the lawn. They sat in silence for a few minutes, Mary smoking, Ava taking a few gulps of the water, swishing, and spitting to clear her mouth.

“So—”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Ava threw the bottle, still half full, into the bush. She folded her arms on her knees and put her head down into them. “Mary, I really don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything. Just ask if you were okay.”

“I got dumped.” Ava whined sullenly. She lifted her head, listening to the sounds of the party still raging on behind them. “And now I’m drunk and,” She looked down at herself. “Covered in my own puke.”

“Yep, that seems right.”

“Has anybody ever told you you’re shit at comforting people?”

Mary just gave her an impish side eye and sucked down the rest of her cigarette, extinguishing it in the grass. If Ava were to remember anything about this, which she didn’t, she would remember that the grass had been wet and when she’d stood up later she’d looked like she’d just taken a tremendous piss all over herself. 

“He sucked, Ava.” Ava groaned. “I’m sorry, he did. He sucked and he was about a million years old. And married. You’re better off.”

“I don’t feel better off. I feel sad.” 

Mary’s face softened. “I know.”

“I’m twenty eight. What the hell do I have to show for any of it?”

“Uh, I don’t know. You’re partway through a doctorate program at one of the best universities in the country?”

“Stupid. What else?”

“You have me.” Mary waggled her eyebrows and nudged Ava’s shoulder with her own. “And if I get drunk enough you know I’ll let you crawl into my bed.”

Ava tilted her head up and started looking for stars. Between her state of drunkenness and the light pollution, it was pointless. “That’s nice, but you have Shannon. And someday you and Shannon are going to move in together, and I—“ She hiccuped. “—I’m gonna be all by myself.”

“I didn’t realize we were doing dramatic drunk Ava tonight.”

“Shut up.” Ava whirled her head around to look at her so fast that it gave her the spins. She tottered a little in the aftermath, but tried to keep her gaze steady enough to be taken seriously. “I want somebody who likes me.”

“I like you. Shannon likes you.”

“No, me.” Ava gestured sloppily to herself. “Just me. Or me, the best. You already have it, Mary, so what do you know about it?”

Mary looked for a moment like she might say something else. Her expression was a mix of good humor and an unidentifiable second thing—pity, maybe, if Ava thought she had the capacity for it. “Alright, Dr. Religious Studies. Why don’t you pray on it?”

“I’m not a Doctor yet. And you know I don’t believe in God.”

“You’re a funny woman, anybody ever told you that?”

“Ye—” She hiccuped again. “—yeah.” Ava considered Mary’s words for a moment. She was drunk enough that all things, even the existence of God, felt possible. She tilted her head up and blinked harshly, twice. “Okay.” She breathed, “God—can you please—I want a girlfriend. Or, I guess, a boyfriend, if that’s what you think is right for me—”

“I don’t know if he can hear you.” Mary was leaning back on her elbows, obviously taking the piss. Ava glared at her, then pitched forward, hands clasped together in front of her. “ God! “ She hollered, and suddenly they were both laughing so hard that Ava was finding it difficult to stay upright. It was like everything, the break up, her puke stained shirt, the fact that she had to wake up at 8 AM the next morning to teach a class, melted away behind her. So she whooped again, because she was drunk, and because she was delirious, and because anything felt possible: “ God!—”

***

Ava’s memory started the next day, at 8 AM, with the taste of tequila lining the backs of her teeth. She’d known it was going to be a hard morning when she’d woken up earlier, at 3, trembling and still drunk, but drunk on the downswing. 

Mary found her in the kitchen of their apartment, shuffling through the perennial pile of papers that lived on their table. It occasionally changed form, was shoved to the side or stacked differently to make room for dinner or a puzzle, but never left entirely. 

As Mary breezed by, coffee in hand, her free arm struck out and selected a paper for Ava, handing it to her. Ava looked. It was her syllabus. 

“Thanks.” She breathed, tucking it into her bag. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” Mary was dressed in scrubs, which meant she was probably heading to her job. Some people had super powers, and this was Mary’s. She was never hungover. It made Ava green with envy. “You?”

It was hard to say what was destined to derail Ava’s day faster; the big, sore headache sitting behind her eyes, or the nausea that had her half-shaking. It was hot out, too, even for early September, and the only A/C in their apartment was a whinging little window unit that could barely cool off the living area. She already had sweat stains forming at the creases of her blouse. But the big, heavy clouds looming overhead told her that she’d have to put a slicker on, anyway. 

“Fine.” 

“Do you remember anything about last night?”

Ava winced. She considered getting her own cup of coffee, but thought that rocking the boat wasn’t such a good idea. “A little. I assume I was charming and on good behavior throughout?”

Mary snorted over the rim of her mug. “I’ll tell you later. Don’t want to ruin your first day vibe.”

She hadn’t been nervous about teaching, and wasn’t still even as she made her way across campus and to her classroom. If there was one thing Ava could do, it was talk, even if the subject was a garden variety religious studies course, even if her audience was a group of bored eighteen to twenty year olds trying to fulfill their humanities requirement. 

All PhD candidates had to do it, after all. Ava reminded herself of that as she entered her classroom, slung her bag down, and tried not to focus too much on the state of her body. “I’m Ava Silva.” She began to scribble the words across the board. “Welcome to Intro to Religious Studies.”

Ava turned to the podium and stared at the thirty or so blank faces looking down at her. She couldn’t confidently say that she wasn’t about to hurl in the bin by the chalkboard. 

“This morning we will be going over the syllabus and then starting our first reading,” She looked down at the paper in front of her and rubbed her brow. “ Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology. I hope you’ve all had your coffee.”

By the end of class, it was raining sideways outside. Ava put up the hood of her slicker and dashed across campus to the library. She moved to the back of the first floor to the cloister of desks where the research librarians sat. 

Clayton was there, sitting at the very back of the grouping clicking around on his mouse, seeming focused. He scarcely looked up when Ava approached him. They’d been working together since she’d started her dissertation research the previous semester. Ava thought he was the best, though she’d never pursued the assistance of a different librarian to compare him to. There was something about his burliness and generally harassed demeanor that comforted her and imbued a sense of trust. 

“Ava, just one second please.” He raised a finger, then paused. “Wait, Ava—oh!” His brow scrunched, then released, and he finally looked up at her. “I have your lesbian nun sex journal.”

Heads across the library turned. Ava frowned. “Clayton, can we—”

“Right, yes, sorry. Inside voice. Pull up a chair please.” He was typing furiously as Ava pulled a chair around to his side of the desk. She watched as he pulled up a website, grabbed a sticky note, and wrote something down. “I don’t want to name any names, but I have a librarian friend who works at a private Catholic college. She has a relationship with the archivist at the Diocesean archives and has it on good authority that the book is there.”

He handed her the slip of paper. She opened it and read the name Sister Beatrice above a phone number. 

“I can’t believe that they would keep this in a church archive. I was sure it would be privately held.”

“Well, I can’t imagine that the Catholic church is very keen to advertise—” Clayton opened his mouth, then flicked his eyes around the library. “—that particular element of their collection.”

“I needed to make an appointment to go up there, anyway. They have a million things that I want.” She read the name over and over again. Sister Beatrice. “Is this the archivist?”

“Yes. I’ve spoken to her. She’s very…stern.” Clayton regarded her over the top of his glasses. “Though you seem like that may be your type.” Ava shot him a look. “A thank you, Clayton, for finding the lynchpin of my dissertation, which I have been trying to find for months, would be nice.”

She folded the note and stuck it into the pocket of her slicker. “Thank you, Clayton.”

“My pleasure. What’re you going to tell her you’re there for?”

“Who?”

“The archivist. Sister Beatrice.” He retrieved a mug from the far edge of his desk and took a sip from it. “Or are you just going to lead with writing a paper on lesbian nuns and hope she lets you come?”

“You don’t think I could get away with it? Even if I was really charming?”

Clayton stared at her. “I’d come up with an alibi.”

***

It turned out that the Dioseasean archives were nothing more than a collection housed in the basement of an–admittedly rather grandiose–church. The church itself sat on the outskirts of the city, sharing its plot of land with a small, grim looking cemetery. 

Ava had, admittedly, spent many hours after her initial phone call with Sister Beatrice imagining what she might look like. Her voice had been deep for a woman, almost expressionless, and Ava’s only experience with nuns had been Catholic school as a child and her brief stint at a religious orphanage. She imagined somebody old, in a full habit, stern. 

The woman waiting on the front steps when Ava arrived was none of those things. She was dressed entirely in shades of beige and had on a turtleneck under a long, oversized cardigan that was buttoned all the way to the top. Her skirt hit her below the knee and, beneath it, she wore nylon stockings. Ava noted, with some interest, that she was wearing Blundstones. There was also the top half of a dime store paperback novel poking out of the top of one of her cardigan pockets. 

“Ms. Silva?” She asked when Ava had mounted the stairs up to her. Ava cleared her throat and adjusted the strap of her backpack. “You are Ava Silva, yes?”

“Yes. Yup. That’s me. I have an appointment with Sister Beatrice at 1:30?” 

“I’m Sister Beatrice.” The person in front of her now couldn’t have been older than Ava’s own 28 years, and her demeanor, while serious, was also genial. 

She was also—Ava blinked once, hard, and then flicked her gaze up over Beatrice’s head to the cross that hung above the door. Jesus looked down on her with his beady, golden eyes, as if to say I didn’t die for you to think this nun is hot. 

But she was. Even in all her curated plainness, even with the wimple covering the majority of her hair, Ava could tell that she was. Sister Beatrice had the kind of face that a person had to look at for a minute to really absorb, but the more Ava looked, the more lovely her features seemed. She had dark eyes and a faint dusting of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Ava felt as though she’d transgressed for even noticing.

“Are you ready?” Beatrice asked, and Ava realized that she’d been staring, probably rudely. 

“Uh, yup.” She chirped, and followed Beatrice beyond the front doors.

Beatrice said nothing as they wound their way through the back rooms and down into the basement. She moved forward as if indifferent to Ava’s presence. Like, if Ava were to stop following her, she’d simply keep walking as if nothing at all had happened.

She led Ava into a dark, well-kempt little room. There was a large table in the middle with two lamps on it, presumably for researchers. Behind the table, metal library shelves that reached almost to the ceiling stretched back. There was a small step ladder tucked off to one side. 

Ava saw, on the opposite corner, facing the research table and the stacks, a desk. It had a laptop and a landline and a shawl hanging over the back of a computer chair. 

“This is the main archive room.” Sister Beatrice said, walking brusquely in ahead of Ava. “That’s where you’ll sit,” She gestured to the table, “And we have a copier and a microfiche machine through there.” She gestured again to a door on an adjacent wall. 

“Do I need, uh, gloves? Some of what I’m looking at is pretty old. I think.”

“Clean, dry hands are the new standard.” Sister Beatrice smiled. It only went as far as her mouth. It didn’t even touch her nose, which hadn’t wrinkled or twitched. “I’ll ask you to wash them in that basin before you get started.”

Ava looked over to where Beatrice had gestured. There was a plain stainless steel sink against one wall with a mirror hanging above it. “Alright.” She said, dropping her backpack on the floor next to the table. Ava reached into her pocket and produced a crumpled up paper. “I have a list of my sources.”

The smile on Beatrice’s face didn’t move. It was uncanny. She reached forward and took the paper from Ava’s hands, unfolding it and snapping it tight to smooth it out. Despite herself, Ava felt a twinge of fear. She knew that one of the things on that list was not like the others.

Her eyes skimmed down to the bottom of the page. “Interesting selection.” She remarked, re-folding it and tucking it into her unoccupied cardigan pocket. “I’ll find these for you right away.”

Ava watched as Beatrice went to the basin and washed her hands. It was meticulous, like she was giving a demonstration on proper technique. She sudsed up to her wrists and between her fingers, then shook them out before reaching for a pile of paper towels on the basin’s ledge.

She wondered if Beatrice’s hands got chapped from doing that all day. They didn’t seem like it. They looked soft. 

Beatrice disappeared into the stacks behind the table. Ava couldn’t see her, but she could hear the rubber soles of her boots colliding with the concrete of the floor, and the pauses where she had presumably stopped to retrieve a volume. Small crinkles as she checked and re-checked the list punctuated the silence. 

Beatrice returned with an armful of books, setting them on the table. Ava began at once to sort through them, taking one, checking the title, and then setting it aside. They were mostly ledgers, Parish histories, and church directories. When she got to the bottom of the pile, she looked up at Beatrice. 

“One is missing.”

“The journal.” Beatrice confirmed. She didn’t look perturbed or angry. Her head tilted slightly off to the side. “Who told you we had it in our collection?”

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.” Ava said, and left it at that. “But I had heard it was here.”

“It is.” Beatrice reached into her cardigan pocket and produced Ava’s list, which she handed back to her. “On the phone, you told me that the purpose of your research was a dissertation on women’s work in the Church.”

It was a generous 60% accurate. “That’s right.” 

Beatrice studied her face for a beat longer before straightening the hem of her cardigan. “Well then.” She said, “I’ll gather it for you as well.”

While Beatrice disappeared back into the stacks, Ava walked to the basin and flipped the tap on. While she was soaping up, she heard the other woman walk back in behind her and set the selected volume on the table. She tried focusing on doing it the way Beatrice had; scrub to the wrists and between her fingers, then flick the excess water out.

When she turned around, Beatrice had settled herself at her desk and had opened the novel in her cardigan pocket. Ava read the title: A Prayer for Owen Meany.

“Are you going to sit here the whole time?”

Beatrice barely acknowledged her. “I have to. To make sure nothing is removed from our collection.”

“Do I look like I’m going to steal?” She said, and then: “You know I’m going to be coming in here for like, months, right? You’re going to be here the whole time?”

Beatrice’s eyes flicked up. She said nothing, but her mouth twisted—a barely suppressed smile. 

Ava sat down at the table and surveyed her spoils, as if she didn’t know where she was going to start. She retrieved her pen and notepad from her knapsack and then selected the most recent addition to the table.

The journal was actually a series of loose leaf pages bound in a large binder, and it was thick. Ava picked it up. She felt the weight of it. She turned her eyes to where Beatrice sat, reading, legs crossed. 

“Is this it?” She asked. Beatrice didn’t look up. 

“Yes, that’s the English translation.” She responded drolly. “Unless you’d like to try and read it in French, in which case I can fetch the original for you.”

“No, I, uh–no.” Ava cleared her throat, peeling open the binder. “This will be fine.” 

She began to flip through the pages. They were neatly typed, all dated at the top; June 1, 1934, and so on. Whoever had prepared it had obviously taken great care. Ava noted, as she skimmed, that all the names had been redacted or changed to letters—X or Y. That of the woman author, and that of the other Sisters. Ava knew this would be the case—when she’d been tracking the journal down, everybody who spoke about it referred to the author as Sister Doe. It was ostensibly to protect her privacy. It still made her feel sad, somehow, in a way she didn’t fully understand.

For no reason, Ava looked up at Beatrice. She looked like she hadn’t moved an inch, still sat in the corner, legs crossed, reading as if she hadn’t any idea that Ava was there at all. 

***

Mary was knitting again. The progress she’d made on her blanket spoke more about how her day had gone than Mary herself would likely ever admit. When Ava blustered in the front door, she was sitting at the dinner table, needles working, watching the television from across the room with one eye. A plate of finished dinner sat in front of her.

“We need a bigger TV if you’re going to watch it like that.” Ava huffed as she let her bag fall from her shoulder and kicked her boots haphazardly in the direction of the shoe rack. “You’re going to fuck up your vision.”

“Hello to you too, sunshine.” Mary said. She sounded at least a little agreeable. “There’s leftovers in the fridge.”

“I’ll just have noodles.” Ava sighed, moving into the cramped kitchen and clambering through the cupboards. Mary wasn’t a bad cook, but she needed comfort food. Her head hurt from the microfiche machine. She’d made less progress than she’d wanted to that day.

And there was something else. A feeling that lingered in her the whole way home. It was about Sister Beatrice. Ava sighed as she watched the water boil. She’d been on her own for way too long.

“I think I need to download Tinder again.” She announced.

“Okay. Seeing nuns in action got you that depressed?”

Depressed wasn’t really the right word. Ava dropped a brick of ramen into the simmering water and poked at it with the prong of a fork. When they were finished, she poured them out into a bowl and joined Mary at the table.

“How’s your project going?”

Ava grunted, hunching over her dinner.

“Find anything good?” Mary’s eyes flicked over from her knitting. Her mouth twitched. “Come on, honey, tell me what you learned in school today.” Her voice was a teasing, sing-song imitation of a mother talking to her child. 

“I sat in a musty church archive all day. I haven’t seen sunlight since lunch. What’s there to tell?”

“Ah, yes. Who would have thought getting a PhD in religious studies would end up being boring? My heart aches for you, Ave.”

“Shut up. It wasn’t all bad.” The noodles were finally cool enough, and she began to wrangle them into her fork. Recently, Ava had been watching Youtube videos on mindfulness in an effort to try to increase the percentage of her thoughts she was able to keep just in her head. That training was about to fail her spectacularly. “One of the nuns is kind of cute.”

Mary’s fingers paused mid stitch. Ava’s fork paused halfway to her mouth as her brain caught up with what she’d just said. 

“Ava, what the fu—”

“Not like that. Not cute in a weird way.” They spoke over each other. “Just pretty. She’s a pretty nun.”

“Ava.” Mary’s voice had the measure that she saved for when Ava was being really stupid. “Leave that nun alone.”

“I never said I was going to do anything.” Ava gawked. Although, privately, she admitted that she couldn't exactly blame Mary. She was known for her deeds, for her tendency toward action no matter how chaotic or misguided or undercooked. She stuffed another forkful of noodles into her mouth. “Anyway, you have to admit—a nun wouldn’t be my worst pull.”

Mary looked scandalized for a moment, but then raised her eyebrows and sighed, her fingers working the needles again. 

“You’re right. The girl who took you to a monster truck rally on your first date probably holds that honor.”

“Not the one who puked on me when I told her I loved her?” Ava leaned across the table. “Not my old, married ex-boyfriend who dumped me?”

“You know, now that we’re talking about it, maybe you should go for it with the nun.”

Ava kicked her under the table.

***

Morning: Broke fast over 2 eggs and some cottage cheese, one half apricot and coffee. after mass turned over the yard with Sister Josephine. We spoke for many hours of—

Ava yawned, stretched, and sat back in her chair. Her eyes moved across the room to Sister Beatrice, who was in her seat as she was the day before, ankles crossed like they were, and book open as usual. She’d been there since 10 AM and Beatrice had scarcely moved an inch, except to lick the pad of her thumb and turn a page.

That, on its own, was a million times more compelling than the journal in front of her. The ritualistic thumb licking. The pink of Beatrice’s tongue sticking out in a flash. Ava swallowed. She had the urge to disturb her like people did with the guards at Buckingham Palace. 

“Are you ever afraid somebody’s going to keep your diary in an archive?” 

Beatrice’s gaze went to her. She looked unamused at the interruption. “Aren’t you here to research?”

“I’m not at the good part yet. So far Sister Doe is just writing about what she had for breakfast. Do you guys really eat this much cottage cheese?”

“It’s a good source of protein.” Beatrice’s brow furrowed. “That journal is an invaluable primary source on monastic life in the early 20th century. I think it would be an honor.”

“Yeah, well, I think most people are interested in it because of the detailed descriptions of her lesbian affair with her nun girlfriend. Slightly less honorable.” Ava said, before she could stop herself. A pang of anxiety shot through her, but Beatrice didn’t flinch. Her expression didn’t change at all. 

“That does seem to be your primary reason for reading it, though I’m not sure I would be so quick to project your intentions on others.” She responded and then, after a beat, turned back to her book.

Ava swam in the wake of that statement long after Sister Beatrice had apparently moved on. Her mouth opened and shut. “Are you calling me a pervert?”

If Ava wasn’t mistaken, she thought that she saw a little pinch of delight on Beatrice’s face when she looked back up. It lived at the corner of her left eye, a little wrinkle, and threatened to flow down and become a full fledged smile. “Simply making an observation.”

“Have you ever read it?” Ava asked, gesturing to the journal. 

“Of course, several times.” She blinked as if it were no big deal, or she was remarking upon the weather. “I translated and transcribed it.” Ava could have fallen over and taken the whole table with her. “And I advocated vigorously for its continued inclusion in the archive.”

Ava knew that her mouth was hanging open— vigorously?— she could feel it, and she also saw the exact moment that the smile that had nestled itself at the corner of Beatrice’s eye flowed down. It passed through her nose, wrinkling it, to her cheeks, and finally down to her mouth. The corners of her lips quirked only for Beatrice to bite her cheek a moment later, stifling it. 

“So you’re an expert.” Ava said, trying to cover for the fact that she couldn’t take her eyes off of Beatrice’s mouth. She kept imagining that smile as she’d seen it just a moment ago, before it had gotten cut off. “What’s her name?”

“I’m not allowed to say.” Beatrice shrugged. “It wouldn’t matter to you anyway. She died in the 50’s.”

“But it’s a little sad, isn’t it? I mean, to love somebody so much that you write—” Ava looked down at the binder in front of her, “—thousands of words about them, and it ends up in a church archive with your names redacted.” Beatrice said nothing, face inscrutable. “Do they end up happy? The nuns.”

They locked eyes, then, and something strange passed between them. 

“I don’t want to spoil it for you.” Beatrice said. If there was anything to come after that, it was cut off by the shrill ringing of the phone on her desk. She answered it, dropping her end of their conversation, leaving Ava to hold it all. 

***

Ava had learned quite a few interesting things over the course of six visits. Things about the archive, but also Sister Beatrice, because the more she came the more it felt like the archive was an extension of her. A living, disjuncted organ.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Sister Beatrice had rules, and those rules were not suggestions. There was the handwashing, which Ava was fairly good at remembering, and which she had only been scolded about once. But there was also Beatrice’s distaste for tardiness, which she’d learned the hard way when she’d arrived at 1:30 to a 1:15 appointment and found herself banging on the doors to the church.

Ava had to call down to Sister Beatrice’s desk. “Hi, Sister Beatrice, I’m so sorry, I lost track of time and—”

“I’m sorry, it’s the archive’s policy to not admit any visitor more than ten minutes late to their appointment.” Beatrice had said in a clipped and, if Ava weren’t mistaken, smug tone. She rolled her eyes. 

“Look, I drove all the way out here from Cambridge, it was like 35 minutes. Is there anything you can do?”

“You can make another appointment.”

Ava was now banging her head rhythmically against the wood of the door. “Yes, I’d like to. For the time I had my original appointment. So, right now.”

“Well, I’ll have to see if we have availability—”

When Beatrice had finally come to let Ava in, they’d passed by each other at the threshold. Beatrice’s face screwed up, and Ava had known she’d smelled the weed stench still clinging to her t-shirt from that afternoon’s bowl. 

Ava had no intention of apologizing or feeling bad. What, was she supposed to not get stoned before doing hours of tedious research just because she’d had to do it in a Catholic church? And, really, all Beatrice had said before she turned and lead her down the corridor was:

“Enjoying your afternoon, Ms. Silva?”

Which was fine, except for the Ms. Silva thing. That was the only thing Beatrice called her, never Ava. At first Ava had found it only uptight and old fashioned. But as time wore on, and especially as Beatrice began to use it in a more exasperated way— Ms. Silva, wash your hands, or, Ms. Silva, you know that taking photographs with your phone is not allowed— it began to make Ava feel like a naughty school girl. 

Which was—well, it was—

Anyway, Ava didn’t like to dwell on it. And there was the other thing, which was that Beatrice was extremely particular about the way she liked the archive to be kept. Ava often spent more time watching her than she did on her actual research, which was damning to her academic prospects but much more fun than looking through church directories from the early 20th century. 

When Beatrice wasn’t reading, she was taking calls. The archives didn’t appear to get many visitors, but Ava had noted her making the occasional appointment over the phone, and once or twice she had passed another student or a priest on her way in and out. 

She had also, as she’d told Ava proudly, updated the entire collection from it’s previous classification system just that last summer—she’d said the name of the nun who had put it in place with such a heavy film of disgust that Ava would have thought she was talking about a person who had insulted her mother.

She otherwise flitted around the room, orbiting Ava, maintaining everything in its proper place. Once, Beatrice had received a shipment of materials during Ava’s appointment and had scolded the delivery men for being 1) late and 2) apparently mispackaging the books for so long that one of them had started to look like he might cry. It was awesome. 

As she’d begun to unpack the books after the men had left, Beatrice had apologized. “I’m sorry, Ms. Silva, they were supposed to arrive after you’d left—”

“It’s fine.” Ava shrugged. She knew she was smiling, somewhat awestruck. She couldn’t help it. “I just don’t think I’ve ever seen two grown men afraid of a nun before.”

That morning, on her seventh visit, Beatrice had greeted Ava on the church steps as usual. She had on a gray cardigan this time and, instead of her usual novel, Ava noted two globular objects in one of the pockets. She’d fixated on them—what they could be—for the better part of an hour.

The nun’s journal sat in front of her, open to the place that she kept and untouched as Ava watched Beatrice tap the seam of her lips with the rubber of a pencil and then scribble something down on a large ledger book. Of all the nuns in all the churches in all of the UK, Ava wondered at how she’d gotten stuck with the one who was both hot and obsessed with touching her mouth.

Time to nip that thought in the bud. She thought, and turned down to the journal. 

She told me she’d never done it before. I hardly believed her. When she put her hand between my legs, it was as if she’d touched a place inside me that had been lying dormant, waiting only to receive her. I was so wet there—between my legs—that I thought she might scold me for it, or tease. But, G-d help us both, it seemed only to excite her. 

“Ms. Silva?”

“Uh—hm?” Ava slammed the cover of the binder shut. Beatrice had looked up from her ledger and her face was twisted with amusement.

“I think that’s the most I’ve ever seen you focus on your work.”

“You can call me Ava.” Ava blurted, her brain only just catching up with what Beatrice was saying. “Ms. Silva is so—”

Weirdly sexy. Ava’s brow tightened. Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. 

“Are you—” Beatrice was smiling again, her face sweetly pinched, which wasn’t helpful. She gestured to her temple. “What’s going on in your head?”

“Regular thoughts.” Ava’s fingers strummed against the edge of the binder. Beatrice had translated this. She had read the words in French and then chosen their English twin—pictured it, decided what would best capture the anonymous woman’s intention. Had there been many options? What, for instance, did she have to choose from before she decided on wet? “This is the most interesting it’s been since I got here.”

“I should think most theologians writing their dissertation on the Catholic church would find the rest of it fascinating.” Beatrice leaned back in her chair. “It’s invaluable insight into—”

“I’m not interested in that.” Ava blurted, before she could stop herself. “The minutia. The ritual itself without context. I’m more interested in religion as a, uh, excuse for intimacy.”

If Ava wasn’t mistaken, she thought she saw Beatrice’s body lengthen in her chair, even if just by a hair. It was as if she’d unspooled by one turn. Ava even thought that she might have felt the shift as Beatrice’s attention left whatever task she was working on and went to focus entirely on Ava. That turn, even if slight, started a redness creeping up Ava’s neck.

“Intimacy?”

“Yeah, I mean, uh—isn’t religion all about community? People get together and dance, or pray, speak in tongues. They touch each other. The priest puts a wafer on your tongue. You drink out of the same wine chalice. You—” Ava’s tongue darted out to wet her lips, “Live chastely in an intentional community with an intergenerational group of women.” 

This made Beatrice grin. It happened quickly and without preamble, which was happening more and more as Ava visited. It felt less like she was prising them out, hammering a diamond stuck in a mine, and more like they were simply falling free of her. 

“I’m not sure I agree.” Beatrice offered. “Loving God requires selflessness. Intimacy is one of the more selfish things we do.”

“Intimacy is about loving people.” She knew she was blushing then, because her face felt hot and her heart was beating fast, pumping blood to many different but equally inconvenient places of her body. “And loving God and loving other people is—” Ava shrugged. 

“Well. I suppose there are many different ways to be intimate.”

Ava felt absolutely insane. She laughed once, shakily. She knew she had to change the subject, because talking about intimacy with that book in front of her, detailing something that Beatrice had read and typed with her own hands, was— “I wish you were in my class. I can’t get those kinds to talk for shit. Uh, sorry. I mean for anything.”

“You teach a class? At Cambridge?”

“All PhD candidates have to. It’s part of my stipend.”

“On religion?”

“Intro to Religious Studies. It’s pretty boring, honestly, but my advisor said if I do well enough I might be able to get something better next semester. I was thinking Women in the Crusades, maybe—”

“Send me your syllabus.” Beatrice said, with no please or thank you to bracket it. She was still pouring all of her attention onto Ava, her gaze fixed and intense, and Ava was still drinking it in, letting it power her blush like a generator. “I want to look it over.”

Ava bit back the words yes, ma’am before they fell out of her mouth. “Sure, Sister.” She said instead. “I’ll email it to you. Although I’m not sure you’d find it very interesting.”

“I’m sure I would.” 

Ava gestured to the binder. “This is a tough act to follow.” 

Beatrice cocked a brow. “Do you think?”

“Do I think? You’re the one who translated it, Sister. And who advocated vigorously for it to be here.”

For a moment, Ava thought that perhaps she’d taken a step too far. That she’d mistaken the rapport of the last few minutes for something else and grown too comfortable. Beatrice just stared at her for a beat, blinking, and then said:

“Are you calling me a pervert?”

“Oh, God—shit, I mean—fuck, uh, no, Sister, I was just—-”

Beatrice was folding her lips in on each other to hide a smile. And, God help her, her eyes were twinkling. Ava, swept away by it, barked out a short and disbelieving laugh. “You’re fucking with me right now.”

“Language, Ms. Silva.”

Yes, ma’am. “Sorry, Sister.”

Beatrice looked at her watch, then, and Ava couldn’t help the bereft feeling that washed over her when the other woman’s attention left. The face of the watch had slid to the inside of Beatrice’s wrist, something that Ava found so tremendously endearing that she had to look away to keep her face straight.

“It’s 12:30.” She said, “Time for my lunch break.”

“Ah. Union rules?”

Beatrice ignored her, standing and opening her desk drawer, from which she pulled a brown paper bag. “You’ll have to leave the archive while I’m gone. I’ll let you back in when I return.”

“What? Come on. You’ve watched me struggle to read any of this for like, four weeks, and you think I’m going to steal something?” Beatrice’s look said that the leaving part was not optional. Ava sighed. “Fine.”

“You can meet me on the steps at 1.” Beatrice stood behind her desk, holding the paper bag with her lunch in it in the crook of her arm. Ava was so focused on where she would go—probably just the steps of the church—and whether she even had anything for lunch—just a granola bar at the bottom of her backpack, the kind that broke into about a million pieces if you looked at it wrong—that she almost missed the somewhat shy look that passed over Beatrice’s face. She caught it, though, right at the end, and puzzled over it. “Or, you could—” Beatrice cleared her throat. “—well, I eat lunch out in the graveyard. It’s…peaceful. You’re welcome to join me.” 

And there was Ava’s heart again, alive and thundering about something stupid. She swallowed hard. “Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”

The graveyard was peaceful. It was out behind the church and faced away from the street, which wasn’t even very busy to begin with, and was crowded with headstones that had grown white with age. They stuck out of the ground like great, pale tongues, or many rows of crooked teeth, some leaning towards each other, others broken or half falling over.

Beatrice led them to a bench where they sat, side by side. It wasn’t very big. Their thighs were almost touching. Ava tried not to dwell on it.

But then, Beatrice revealed what those objects in her pocket had been. She produced two mandarin oranges, perfectly round and perfectly ripe. Ava wondered why she’d been carrying them with her all day; had she thought she might eat them at her desk, as a snack? Snacking was such a human indulgence that she could scarcely imagine Beatrice doing it.

The silence they shared was surprisingly companionable. Ava knew already what she wanted to say, that she wanted to ask Beatrice why she had become a nun. The question fascinated her, but she was also sure that it was something Beatrice heard all the time from all sorts of people, and Ava shied away from the what’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this? Wroteness of it. She was suddenly and totally preoccupied with the fear that Beatrice might find her common, or gnatish. 

So, instead, she let the silence go, and let it be comfortable. She watched Beatrice’s clean, dry hands work their way around the orange. Her nails were blunt and well-kempt and her fingers had a smattering of freckles across them, as if from an errant splash of chocolate or dirt. 

A little juice came free from the fruit and dribbled between Beatrice’s fingers and over the back of her hand. Ava’s eyes tracked it all the way down to her wrist. 

“Ava?”

“Hm?” 

“Do you want some?” Ava was finally able to tear her gaze away when Beatrice extended the orange to her, now naked and fleshy. She shook her head. “Are you sure? You were just staring at it.”

“Uh, yeah, sorry, I probably just have—” She wracked her brain. “—A vitamin C deficiency.” 

Beatrice split the orange into two halves and then, instead of eating it piece by piece as Ava had supposed she might, she tore two slices from the half with her teeth. Her top lip folded over the middle part where the flesh of the fruit cleaved. 

Ava found herself apprehended by the perfect strangeness of her. Beautiful, intelligent, at least a little wry, at least a little drawn to things like forbidden lesbian sex journals. A nun. It felt like a person could only be two of those things, maybe three, but Beatrice embodied all, and probably more. 

And more than that, it was all so guileless. Most people at Cambridge could spend years perfecting a persona as cryptic as Beatrice’s, but there was not a hint or a trace of anything discursive on her. She simply sat on that bench, ankles strewn in front of her, eating her orange and tilting her jaw up into the breeze. 

A black cat came sauntering around a gravestone, arching and rubbing its fur against the granite. Ava smiled and held out her hand, making a tsk tsk noise. This drew Beatrice’s attention away from her enjoyment of the orange. Her eyes widened.

“Oh, Ava—”

The cat came plodding over, sniffed Ava’s fingers, and promptly hissed, swatting a paw at her. Ava reared back.

“Agh, God—”

“It’s just Lilith.” Beatrice reached into her lunch bag and produced a cream cheese and tomato sandwich. She smeared a little cheese on her finger and extended it in much the same way Ava had. Ava watched in puzzlement as Lilith, hair on her back still prickling from their previous encounter, went jauntily over to Beatrice and began to lick up the cream cheese contentedly. “She’s the church mouser. She’s just a little weary of new people, aren’t you, old girl?” 

Then, to Ava’s shock, Beatrice scooped the cat into her arms and cradled her like a baby. She watched as the animal purred and Beatrice stared down at it lovingly. It was the most emotion she’d seen from the other woman…well, ever.

“You’re a cat person.” She remarked, reaching into her backpack and retrieving her granola bar. Beatrice’s face screwed up.

“What’s the other option?”

Ava tore the granola bar open. Crumbs flew out. She persevered bravely, taking one and biting half of it off. Bits of granola went tumbling down the front of her shirt. “Dog person.” She said around a mouthful of food, glancing down. She’d worn a low-cut crop top, and some of the bar had escaped down inside of it.

“No, I don’t care for dogs. They’re so…hairy.”

“Well, cats are hairy too.” Ava began to pick bits out of her shirt, not paying any attention to Beatrice. “And they’re not as nice.”

A few seconds went by with no response. Ava chewed, then looked over, where she found Sister Beatrice, still holding Lillith, her gaze pointed downward toward—no, she had to have been imagining things. But as soon as she looked at Beatrice, Beatrice’s gaze snapped up and her cheeks colored as if she’d just been caught doing something. 

“Sorry.” Beatrice said, clearing her throat and setting the cat down. Ava watched, fascinated, as she smoothed her hands up and down her skirt. What the hell was that? And what had it meant? “I lost track of what you were saying. Something about dogs.”

“I don’t really remember.” Ava extended the half-eaten granola bar. “Do you want a piece of this? You were, uh. Staring at it.”

Their eyes locked. Something tightened between them, like a sheet being unfurled and snapped straight. 

“No, thank you, Ava.” Beatrice murmured. “I’ll be fine with my lunch.”

***

On her way home, Ava stopped at a bookseller to pick something up. She dropped the bag onto the kitchen table only to watch Mary jam her hand into it when she’d returned home a few hours later. They didn’t have a lot of boundaries between the two of them, anyway, but that was something that Mary was prone to doing—rifling around. 

“ A Prayer for Owen Meany?” She said when she’d pulled the book out. “Ava, don’t you get enough of this shit at school? I’m serious.”

“Nunya.” Ava snatched the book from Mary’s hands. “I’m going to bed.”

“It’s 9 PM.”

“I have to work on my syllabus.” Ava responded vaguely, drifting to her bedroom door. Mary rolled her eyes. 

“Suit yourself, weirdo.”

Ava settled into bed with a yawn, opening the book and thinking of Beatrice. From the living room, she could hear the faint sounds of a beer opening and the TV flipping on. It was comforting. She took her phone and fired off an email; her syllabus, to Beatrice, then returned to the text.

She tried to focus on the words in front of her, but she was tired. Her eyes kept unfocusing and her attention kept straying to the noises of Mary relaxing in the living room, of the window unit gamely powering on. Eventually, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Just for a minute.

Ava woke up in a church pew, wearing her clothes from the day—a crop top and a long skirt, boots. She sat up, back aching, and looked around. The church was dark except for the soft glow of candles that were lit and scattered everywhere; in sconces, at the altar. She squinted, taking a moment to simply feel her body.

“Ms. Silva?” Ava turned her head. How hadn’t she noticed? Beside her, in her full, usual garb, was Sister Beatrice. The dim lighting of the nave cast shadows all over her, making her face almost impossible to see. “What are you doing here?”

Ava blinked. “I was just going to ask you the same thing. Is this—are we in the church? I can’t…” She knew what the church looked like, but for some reason she couldn’t develop the image in her brain. It felt far away.

Then, she felt something warm on her knee, under her skirt. Ava turned her head and saw that it was Beatrice’s hand. Her breath caught in her chest. “No, Ms. Silva, what are you doing here?”

“I thought I said you could call me Ava.” Ava responded brokenly. 

“But you like Ms. Silva.”

“Uh, no, I—oh, okay.” Beatrice’s hand crept up to the fleshy inside of her thigh. Ava was shaking, hot, trilling with anxiety and excitement. She tried to steady herself, in case this wasn’t what she thought it was. 

“What are you doing here?”

“My dissertation. Research. I’m researching for my dissertation, probably.” Ava wondered how Beatrice expected her to give a full, cogent answer when she could feel the negligible inches that lay between her hand and Ava’s center. That, and the fact that she actually had no clue what she was there for, in that moment. She was lost and disoriented.

“Are you lying?”

The hand moved again. It clenched, squeezing her. Ava jumped, startled by the lightning bolt that jolted across her body. She wondered, if she gave the answer that Beatrice was looking for, if she wouldn’t move her hand up, close that distance. “No.” She wet her dry lips, then shook her head. “I mean, yes, sort of. I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Beatrice slid across the pew until they were pressed together, side by side, limb to limb. “Have you been bad, Ava?” Her voice was low, throaty, and inches away from the shell of Ava’s ear. Ava realized that she was dreaming and, in the same breath, that she hadn’t known that she was this kind of lapsed Catholic, but—go off, subconscious desires.

Beatrice’s hand climbed and pushed Ava’s skirt up with it, until it was bunched around her hips and exposed to the cool air of the church. Ava sighed and shuddered and slid down in the pew. “No.” She murmured. There was no question that she had been bad, but she liked to make people work for it a little. 

The hand slid up further until it was cupping Ava over the front of her underwear. There was a wooden sound as the back of her head collided with the pew. She screwed her eyes shut, but could feel Beatrice next to her. It was a dream, but the details were in high fidelity; Ava could feel the folds of Beatrice’s clothes, smell the musk of her breath. 

“Have you been bad, Ava?” She asked again, and this time her words were on Ava’s cheek. The fingers on her underwear began to move, applying gentle pressure, just enough to send Ava twisting. She slid down further, legs knocking open a little wider, and stopped herself from coming off the pew completely with the heel of her boot sticking into the floor.

“Yes, yes, God, I’ve been so bad.”

“What have you done?”

Ava thought that, in her subconscious, there was no point in not telling the truth. It wasn’t Beatrice next to her, anyway, not the real Beatrice. Only the Beatrice that Ava had conjured up in her own head. “I like you. I go to the archive partially because I just like to look at you. I look at you all the time.” What was the word—covet? The bounds of Ava’s desire felt so much bigger than that. “And I think, uh, bad thoughts. And I want you to be looking at me too and thinking the same thoughts.”

“And what do you say?”

The fingers were moving with renewed purpose. They’d found a sensitive spot, even beneath the cotton, and begun to stroke it. Ava was struggling to take complete breaths.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Sister Beatrice.”

“Are you really?”

Ava realized that she was, paradoxically, on the verge of tears. From the pleasure. From the anticipation, from something else, something unidentifiable. She laughed, short and wet, almost more of a pant. It was only her own brain. There was no reason to lie. “No.” She said, “No, I’m not sorry at all.”

The touch pulled away, then, and Ava almost yelped from the loss. She lurched forward, grabbing to bring Beatrice’s hand back, babbling something like “Please, please—”

And then she startled awake, alone, in her bed, her sheets damp from sweat. Ava shot up so quickly that she knocked both the book and her phone to the floor. “Fuck.” She murmured. Then, remembering the totality of her dream: “ Fuck.”

She reached down and grabbed her phone. There was a single notification, from Gmail. Sister Beatrice had responded to her syllabus, two words: Will review. - B.

Ava stared at it, eyes wild and heart pounding. She stared at it and stared at the time stamp that told her that Sister Beatrice had sent this response at 11 PM, that she’d been up, that she’d been—

“Oh my God.” Ava said, feeling unspun and heretical, beginning almost to laugh from it— “Oh my fucking God.” 

Chapter Text

After the first shock, the dream was not as troubling as it might otherwise have been. Ava was not a stranger to sex dreams nor was she a stranger to inapropriate crushes; her high school dentist, the gay guy she’d sat next to in calculus, one of Mary’s ex girlfriends—what was a nun to round off the gems in that crown?

Crushes and dreams were alike in that they needed more pairs of hands than one to pull them up into reality. They also needed legs. Other than an errant glance at her chest, Ava had no reason to think this one had any. 

So it seemed to her, in that way, like a match in want of a striker. It wasn’t going to do anything just on its own. There was some comfort in that, some defangdness. 

“Does this look okay?” Ava came spilling out of her bedroom and into the living area where Mary sat on the couch, focused on the television. Mary’s eyes flicked to her for a second, back to the TV, then back to Ava with a puzzled expression.

“You look nice.” She said. “Date?”

“Uh, no.” Ava was looking down the front of herself, adjusting the hem of the sweater, trying to see how it laid against her body. “I’m going to the archives.”

The silence that followed was long enough that Ava stopped fussing with the sweater and glanced up to Mary. The look on her roommate’s face was now less puzzled and more weary. 

“So why are you dressing up?”

Ava sighed and went back to fussing. “I’m not dressing up.”

“Ava.” Mary’s voice was low and deliberate, like she was talking to a misbehaving toddler. “Usually when you go to the archives you’re either in whatever you wore to class or sweatpants and reeking of a day’s worth of weed.”

“Aw, thanks Mary. I think you’re beautiful too. Actually, speaking of,” Ava trotted over to the back of the couch and leaned over it. “Can I get a smell test? This has been in my hamper for a while.”

Mary rolled her eyes, but she sniffed. “It’s fine.”

“Thank you.” Ava sing-songed, and went about gathering her things from the apartment. “Do you know where the cards are?”

“Like, the playing cards?” Ava nodded. “You’re trying to seduce the nun by showing her magic tricks. Very original.”

“I’m not seducing anybody.”

Mary clicked her tongue. “That’s kind of a seductive sweater.”

Ava spun around from where she’d been grubbing on the table for her keys. She had a tote bag with her notepad and laptop in it over her shoulder. So maybe the sweater was seductive. It showed a little more of her belly than her usual cropped shirts and it still made her tits look fantastic. It didn’t mean anything.

“Cards, please.”

Mary hesitated for one more beat. “In the junk drawer.”

“Thank you.” Ava wretched the drawer open and pushed past pens and miscellaneous leftover Ikea hardware until she found them and dropped them into her bag. “I’ll be back around six.”

“Okay.” Mary kept staring at her, brow furrowed, as if she was looking for something. “Are you wearing makeup?”

“Bye, Mary!” Ava chirped, and swung out the door. 

If Beatrice had anything at all to say about the sweater, she kept it to herself. Ava tried not to feel disappointed when the only reaction she got to her appearance was a “Hi, Ava.” And then their usual walk down to the basement, because she hated proving Mary right.

She noticed that Beatrice had a new book tucked into her cardigan pocket, Pet Semetary. It seemed she had changed guard with the passing of the seasons, as September bled into an unusually warm early October. Ava smiled when she saw it.

“Little on the nose, isn’t it?” Ava gestured to the book. She had settled into her place at the table and Beatrice to hers at the desk. Beatrice’s brow furrowed. “Resurrection?”

Beatrice rolled her eyes and went back to reading without comment. 

But as Ava went about doing her work, she couldn’t help but notice that Beatrice wasn’t really turning the pages. She had become so attuned to the rhythms of the woman sitting across from her, to the frequency at which she moved forward in her reading, that it struck her as odd when that pattern shifted.

When Ava glanced up, Beatrice was staring down at a page, brow furrowed, biting her thumbnail. It was as if she was struggling to concentrate, or perhaps concentrating so hard that it had become ineffectual. 

Ava watched her stare at the same page for a few more silent minutes, then glanced down into her tote where she’d stashed the cards. “Not very good?” She asked, and Beatrice looked up questioningly. “The book. You’ve been reading the same page for a while.”

“No, I think I just have a little bit of a headache.” Beatrice shut the book and set it to the side. “I’m finding it difficult to concentrate.”

“Hey, do you like playing cards?” Ava rubbed her lips together. If she was less afraid of proving Mary right, she might have been able to admit how long she’d ruminated over a plan to get Beatrice sitting across the research table from her. 

She might also have acknowledged how fixated she’d become on the feeling of Beatrice’s attention on her, like it had been that day they’d talked about the journal. It still felt so fresh in her that Ava could sometimes call the feeling up like pulling a book from a shelf, that same blush creeping up her cheeks. 

Just because the dream didn’t mean anything didn’t mean the crush wasn’t there. It was just too unlikely to waste time worrying about. 

One thing Ava could cop to was not really knowing what nuns did for fun. Beatrice was a little analog and so she’d figured cards would be an easier sell than, say, watching Tiktoks together.

“Cards?”

“Yeah, like Rummy 500. Actually, it has to be Rummy 500. I don’t know how to play anything else.” Beatrice opened her mouth, but Ava beat her to it. “I know, yes, I am here to research. But I need a 15 minute break. I would have thought you’d be glad that I’m not rotting my brain on my phone.”

“I don’t know how to play that. Mother Superion prefers bridge.”

“It’s easy, I’ll teach you.” Ava got the cards and tossed them into the middle of the table. Beatrice hesitated, sucking her teeth, then sighed.

“Alright, but I don’t think I’m going to be very good.”

But of course Beatrice turned out to be a goddamn card shark. They played for much longer than 15 minutes, and Beatrice took Ava to the cleaners every hand, even the dummy one they’d played to teach her the rules. 

Ava made an affronted noise as Beatrice laid down a jack, queen, and king. “Rude.”

“It’s not rude, Ava, it’s the game.”

“Very rude that you’re beating me.” Ava buried her face into her cards. 

“Yes, well.” Beatrice discarded a three. “Beginner’s luck.”

“More likely I just fell for the oldest trick in the book.” Ava watched as Beatrice attempted, poorly, to hide her grin behind her hand. “Plus, you know…” She flicked her eyes up to the ceiling. “I’m playing in God’s house with one of his favorites. Feels like an unfair advantage.”

“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you pulled out the cards.” Beatrice said primly. She picked up a card from the pile, smiled, and put the rest of her hand down. “Rummy.”

“Fuck!” Ava said, then: “Sorry, Sister.”

Beatrice said nothing, just began counting the groupings of cards in front of her. Ava watched her gather them back together and then turn to the side to note her score on the pad beside her. Ava regarded her profile with a normal amount of intensity. 

When she was finished, she checked her watch, which had slid around her wrist again. Beatrice’s eyes widened. “We’ve been playing for more than an hour.” She said, “Technically your appointment is over.”

Ava didn’t care about losing as much as she cared about stretching this visit as far as she could. “Why don’t we play one more hand to close us out.” She offered, eyebrow raised. When Beatrice looked unsure, she added: “At least give me one more opportunity to redeem myself. This has been bruising my ego.”

Beatrice acquiesced. But as Ava gathered the cards together and began to deal them, she noticed the other woman looking at her. It was a new expression; one of quiet contemplation. 

“I’ve been thinking about what you said last time you were here.” Beatrice said, when the cards had been dealt and they both had their hands. “About not really caring about the other parts of the journal.”

Ava pretended to be engrossed in her objectively shitty hand. So much for redeeming herself. “Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve just been wondering what any of the other parts have to do with women’s work in the Catholic church.” The way Beatrice parroted her words back to her made Ava feel like she’d known from the beginning that they didn’t make any sense. Ava didn’t respond at first. They went back and forth, picking up and discarding. “You know, you wouldn’t be the first person to lie to me about researching an unsavory topic.”

“What do you think I’m writing about?” Ava asked, and wondered how bad it was to try and bait a nun into saying the words gay sex . Beatrice didn’t look all that perturbed.

“Ava, I could hardly begin to hazard a guess into what ideas you dream up in your mind.”

Yeah, if only she knew. The mention of the word dream sent Ava somewhat adrift. She had the urge to say it, to say I’m writing about lesbian nuns, just to see if it made Beatrice as twisted up as she herself felt. “Well, according to you, the only value of it is in the boring stuff.”

Beatrice’s face did something odd at that moment. It sort of twitched, and her fingers twitched, too, around the cards she was holding. “I don’t think that’s the only value.” She said after a moment of silence. 

Ava looked at Beatrice, watched her study her cards, and felt absolutely gobsmacked by how little she knew about what was going on in her head. She looked so undisturbed, so impassive, as if she hadn’t just said anything at all.

“I’m writing about queerness in convents.” Ava blurted, giving in to that earlier urge. She offered it and watched the other woman’s face closely.

Beatrice said nothing for a long time. Ava felt hobbled by her inability to see underneath her turtleneck, or behind her wimple to the tops of her ears. She wondered if Beatrice was blushing. She certainly looked like she was trying to hold some bodily reaction back. Her face was taut and blank in a tenuous sort of way. 

By the time Beatrice had formulated a response to what Ava had said, Ava had already put down fifteen or twenty points, and only had two cards left in her hand. Beatrice had all seven, and was looking at them so hard it was like she was trying to x-ray through them.

“Why the interest in the subject?” 

“I’m gay.” Ava said, and that got Beatrice’s gaze up onto her. “Well, I like boys too.” She paused. Should she explain further? Had news of the existence of bisexuality reached the convent yet? “Less lately than usual, but that sort of thing is in flux a lot. But, I mean, yeah—technically I like both. Men and women.” 

Beatrice was blushing, then. It was full and bright, not just on her cheeks but on her nose and down around her jawline. She cleared her throat and discarded a five into a pile that already had two fives in it. “That makes sense, I suppose.”

Ava paused for a second, squinting, looking between Beatrice’s tomato red face and the discard pile. Then she picked up the fives and played them on her own side. Beatrice watched this and muttered something under her breath, eyes going back to her own cards.

“So when you say that the only value isn’t in all the cottage cheese stuff…”

“Every person’s story is valuable in many different ways.” Ava groaned. “Well, what do you want me to say, Ava?”

“The truth.” Ava said. “I just told you something that might have gotten me kicked out of here.”

“I was never going to kick you out.” Beatrice tutted. Ava shrugged one shoulder. 

Beatrice paused for so long that Ava thought she might not answer the question. She was looking at her cards in the way she had looked at the book before, like she was concentrating but there was nothing behind her eyes. “My job is to curate an archive that encompasses the history of the Parish and the church. That book tells a story.”

“Strikes me as a controversial one.”

“You think it should upset me because of the sex.” Ava had nothing to say. She did think that. “I think that’s rather narrow minded.”

“I guess,” Ava agreed. “Considering what I know now. You have a very rich vocabulary, by the way.”

She didn’t say what she was thinking, which was that ever since she found out that Beatrice had translated the journal, she could feel her in every word she read. Ava had no doubt that the replication was faithful, but there were certain places, certain turns of phrase, where it was like she could hear Beatrice whispering it into her ear. “I think you’re reading more into this than there is.” Beatrice said, but she couldn’t meet Ava’s eyes while she said it.

“Probably.” Ava said. “I just thought we were talking about things that struck us as odd.”

“An archivist translating a book?”

“No, that’s not the odd part.” 

“To be fair, I didn’t think anybody would come looking for it.” Beatrice shrugged. She didn’t look uncomfortable, but like the patience for entertaining the conversation was fast draining from her. “It was a pet project. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would be used in a dissertation about—”

“Homosocial intimacy amongst cloistered nuns?” Ava offered. Beatrice dragged her eyes up to her wearily and discarded. 

“Nuns aren’t really supposed to be intimate. With each other or anybody else.”

“That sounds hard.”

“Not really.”

“Alright.”

Beatrice sucked her top lip into her mouth and narrowed her eyes. Ava was beating her by easily fifty points. Some of her hair was starting to come free from the edge of her wimple. “I just don’t think you quite understand.”

“Probably not. Because to me, it seems like if you think that God gave you a body capable of desire and put it in a word full of things made to be desired, you must also think that he would want you to indulge in those things. Anything else feels a little mean spirited.” Ava surveyed the table for a moment, selected a card, then looked at her hand. It was exactly what she needed. She threw everything down. “Rummy.”

Beatrice didn’t even look. She was sitting, hands folded in her lap, face back to that earlier red hue. “It’s not as easy as that.” She said. “Not everybody is meant for—desire, or intimacy, or whatever you’d like. When you take your vows, you’re supposed to put all that to the side. It’s easier if you barely had it to begin with. I’m not saying that it is right, totally, only that it is right for—” She opened her mouth once and shut it thereafter with a snap. “—Some people.” 

There were so many crevices and tunnels in that statement that Ava had to take a second to decide which one she was going to go down. She was trying to figure out what to make of Beatrice’s posture—her whole body was angled toward Ava, as if she couldn’t do anything to change the slope of it. “So you’re saying you haven’t…desired anything since you got to the convent?”

It was a stupid question. Even for Ava. She knew it as soon as the words left her mouth, and it was solidified when Beatrice’s jaw clenched and she glanced away. Ava had never really known how to let things be, but she’d never felt as aggrieved about doing it as she did in that moment. It was like she’d been feeling for a bruise on Beatrice’s body, running her hands over her, testing. And, upon finding that bruise, like she had proceeded to jam her knuckles into it. 

“Ava.” Beatrice said. It was a complete sentence within a name. When their eyes met again, Beatrice shook her head, once, almost imperceptibly, as if to say we are not going there, not together, not right now. 

“Alright, yeah. Sorry.” Ava cleared her throat. “I’ll just—clean these up.”

Usually, at the end of an appointment, Beatrice would walk her no further than the front door of the church, open it, let Ava out like an energetic dog, and lock it behind her. That evening, Beatrice followed her out onto the front steps. 

It was pleasant outside, if a little chill. They lingered on the large front step for a moment, facing each other. Beatrice’s wimple kept rippling behind her and she had to put a hand on it, almost self-consciously, to keep it down. 

“I read your syllabus.” She said finally.

“Oh? Did you like it?”

“I found it a little…new age.” When Ava laughed, Beatrice’s mouth pursed and the corners quirked. “What? You don’t teach the bible, but you spend an entire class on Fun Home.”

“Okay, so we have different opinions on what the bible is.” When her joke only half-landed, Ava pressed on: “It's part of my unit on death and dying. It’s relevant.”

Another silence fell between them, this one comfortable, if a little charged. Beatrice clearly had something she wanted to say, and Ava very badly wanted to hear what it was. “I was a student at Cambridge.” The other woman offered. “For a year, before I took my vows.”

“Oh?” Ava crossed her arms against the encroaching chill. “Did you give your professors this much trouble about their syllabi?”

Beatrice’s face crinkled in good humor. Ava found that she couldn’t quite decide on where she wanted her gaze to stick; the wrinkled corners of her eyes, her nose, her mouth. “No.”

“No.” Ava agreed, voice an almost absentminded murmur. “I bet you were a pleasure to have in class.”

If she wasn’t mistaken—and it was true that Ava was often mistaken, but very rarely about things like this—she thought she saw Beatrice take a sharp inhale of breath. If it had happened, it was too quick and too subtle for Ava to really be sure.

“Well.” Beatrice said, “You probably should be going.”

“Sure.” Ava dipped her head and started down the stairs. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

“Oh, Ava?” Ava was already a few steps down. She turned to look back at Beatrice, smiling. “I like your sweater—the color. It brings out your eyes.”

Well, it wasn’t exactly where Ava had been hoping she’d focus, but a win was a win. She grinned. “Thank you, Sister.”

“You can just call me Beatrice.” The sun was at such an angle that Ava couldn’t really make out her face, when she said it. It was a shame. “It feels wrong if I’m the only one calling you just Ava.”

“Alright.” Ava put a hand up to shield her eyes, staring as hard as she could at Beatrice, and, behind her, the sun. It stung, but she kept doing it anyway. “I will.”

***

Looking back on it, that might have been the moment the match head met the striker. 

Ava tested out the new name for the first time during her next visit. “Beatrice,” She’d said, “I’m having some trouble with the microfiche machine.” She wasn’t. But Beatrice came to her side, anyway, and although there was obviously nothing to be confused about, she played along, fretting over it. 

They’d stood there, side by side, for many long minutes. Beatrice put on a good show of fiddling with the lens. All the while, they were close enough that the fabric of their shirts rustled together, and Ava could even make out some small snatches of whatever Beatrice was muttering under her breath. 

It was wishful thinking, but Ava still wondered if she hadn’t stayed for so long because she’d appreciated the closeness as much as she had. 

After that, they were off. It was only Ava and Beatrice, as if they’d never called each other anything else. 

And she wore the new name, Beatrice, just Beatrice, with no Sister holding it hostage at the front end, like a brand new dress. Like it had been tailored for her. It hung off her body in all the right places, cinched her in others. It was the perfect name for the woman in front of her and, therefore, Ava decided, it was a good name altogether.

Now, when she thought of it, or read it in an email, it was like Ava could taste it in her mouth. Like the letters of it stuck to the back of her teeth. Beatrice. Beatrice. God almighty, what a name. 

***

Ava got bold, after that. Or sloppy; she often had trouble telling which was which. As a child, her boldness had been complimented so much by others that the scale in herself had lost its calibration for what was good and what was just plain stupid. 

She would call Beatrice over to hover over her shoulder. “I can’t read this.” She’d lie about some priest’s careful, tight handwriting. And Beatrice would lean over her, not touching, but God so close to touching, the fabric of their shirts making acquaintanceship, Beatrice’s flyaway hairs almost against her face. She’d reach an arm out and place one freckled index finger to the text, squinting. They’d linger like that, breathing, quiet, both of them pretending to read. 

In her history classes, Ava had read about men who went searching for desire in women’s wrists and ankles when they couldn’t see anything else. She was feeling similarly burdened, placing heaps of importance on the inside of Beatrice’s wrist, or the lobes of her ears, or the bits of skin and pith that got stuck under her cuticles when she peeled an orange. She found herself thinking thoughts that were debasing to both of them, like I wonder what her knees look like. 

Once, she made a new addition to the list she handed to Beatrice at the beginning of every appointment. Beatrice, hawkish to the core of her, had noticed in an instant. 

“You want a church directory from last year?” She’d asked. “From this church?”

“Yeah.” Ava said, not elaborating.

She got it and went looking immediately for what she wanted. Ava found it in the back, on a page titled Church Staff, between the priest and another nun named Sister Camila. 

“Is this you?” Ava held the page up to show Beatrice, sitting at her desk, answering emails. Beatrice had reddened instantaneously. It was like that, now. Blushes were no longer something that Ava had to call up with thinly veiled discussions of lesbianism. It was like the smiles—they just fell from her. It was as if, once taken, those things couldn’t be untaken. Once conjured, never unconjured. 

“Ava, please. Tell me that’s not the only reason you asked for that.”

Ava grinned. “It’s not not the only reason I asked for it.” She set the book back down on the table and stared at the little, square picture of Beatrice. She wasn’t smiling, exactly, but her face was open and approachable. And Ava felt—God, Ava could’ve—

Beatrice was sloppy, once, too. Or she was bold. Ava couldn’t tell the difference and she didn’t care.

On that day’s visit, she’d noticed a new book in her cardigan pocket. But Beatrice hadn’t read it at her desk. She didn’t do anything with it until Ava left that evening and Beatrice followed her out, onto the church steps.

“This is for you.” She said, proffering the book. “I’ve marked a few passages that made me think of you. I mean—your dissertation.”

Ava hesitated before reaching out. “How Catholic is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Zero.”

“So it’s ‘new age’, then.” Ava smiled, took the book. Beatrice returned it as she passed it over. That simple act; the passing between them, the book a conduit between their hands, was enough to spark a light in Ava so damn bright she wasn’t confident that it wasn’t starting to leak out of her eyes and ears.

That night, in bed, she’d read one of the marked poems, the last stanza of which Beatrice had underlined in fine, black pen:

Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed

it would start to happen;

then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.

Ava had rolled onto her stomach, shoved her hand between her legs, and masturbated until she couldn’t feel her toes anymore. She’d had to clap her hand over her mouth, even, so Mary couldn’t hear. By the third orgasm she was sore and there was a faint ringing in her ears. She’d lain for a moment, panting, face squished against the pillow. 

Then, Ava had rolled over and gotten her phone. She’d pulled up Gmail. And, sticky fingered and still dizzy, she’d written an email to Beatrice.

Great poem. Thanks!

That was Ava’s first inkling that the situation had, perhaps, become untenable. 

For something to be untenable by Ava’s standards, it had to be catastrophic by anybody else’s. Her first inkling that it was catastrophic came the next day, when Mary returned from work to find her sprawled out on the couch in her underwear, vape and assorted White Claw cans haloing her head from the adjacent coffee table, and Jeff Buckley crooning from their bluetooth speaker at a volume higher than necessary for a person not having a breakdown. 

What Mary didn’t see was the screen of her laptop, balanced on her chest, Reddit thread open titled I had sex with a nun, AMA. Ava slammed it shut immediately upon seeing her. 

“Hi, Mary.”

Mary stood in the threshold of the living room for a moment, staring. “Feeling okay, Ave?”

Ava stuck her thumbnail into her mouth and began to nibble on it. “Mmhm.” 

Mary went to the bluetooth speaker and turned it off before walking to the armchair adjacent to the sofa and sitting. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped in front of her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

She did. But she was also afraid that naming it might demand action; that she might be pulled from the warm embrace of feigned ignorance. But this was Mary. This was friends since we were the only two Americans in our freshman dorm Mary , it was fireman’s carried me to the ER when I got alcohol poisoning at a rugby party Mary. She was a problem solver.

And it was undeniable that the crush had grown legs. That Beatrice’s hands had joined Ava’s and begun to haul it up by the collar of its shirt. The match wasn’t lit but it was closer to it than it ever had been, because Ava couldn’t stop thinking about it, about the almost touches, about the poem, about the lingering that seemed to go on forever, and she couldn’t stop thinking maybe . She couldn’t stop thinking why else?

“I have a crush.” Ava said. “On the nun. On Beatrice. Her name is Beatrice.”

Mary sighed, shut her eyes, shook her head. “Yeah, I know.” Reaching behind her, she pulled out a sweater, nearly complete except for the sleeves. “I started this last week. This is how stressed out you’ve got me over this.”

“Hmm.” Ava regarded it, pushing the laptop off her chest and sitting up. She shifted on the couch and dragged her knees to tuck up under her chin. “How bad do you think this is, on a scale of one to ten?”

Mary rolled her eyes, slumped back into the chair, rubbed her forehead with a hand. “I mean, I think things have gone better for you.”

“Yeah.” She paused, rolling her cheek against her kneecap. “Wasn’t Shannon raised Catholic?”

“Yeah. You know, she told me once she wanted to be a nun when she was younger.”

“Aha, see! Don’t make fun. You don’t know how close this could have been to being you.”

“I guess.” Mary’s head rolled against the back of the chair. She stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then tilted her chin up to look back at Ava. “I just don’t want to see you get so sad that you’re puking on your shirt and yelling at God again.” Ava’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I love you, Ava. But married people? Straight women? Nuns? You good?”

“I’m fine.” Ava insisted, and it came out of her mouth with such finality, such conviction, that for a second she almost found that she believed it herself.

***

Ava stopped at Tesco on her way to the church the next evening and, on Mary’s request, purchased a bottle of red wine to have with dinner that night. It clambered around in her bag as she ascended the front stairs, greeted Beatrice, and allowed herself to be led through into the basement.

Her brain felt foggy and it was impossible to focus on her research. But she aped the part, flicking through pages, taking pointless notes. When the clock struck 5:30, Beatrice looked at her watch. It was if she had tuned her internal clock to the exact times of Ava’s appointments.

“Are you finished?” She asked Ava, who was doodling on her notepad. Ava looked up, blowing a piece of hair off of her forehead.

“Yes.” She said. She’d never started.

Beatrice’s brow furrowed. Ava could feel her eyes on her as she stood, gathering her things and putting them back into her tote. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m alright.” She finished and slung the bag over her shoulder, waiting expectantly for Beatrice to act as she always did. Stand, grouse for a second looking for her keys. Lead Ava out onto the quiet street.

“You seem subdued today.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, you’ve scarcely bothered me. I actually got some other work done.”

Beatrice looked like she was bothered more by the absence of Ava’s pestering than she was by it happening. 

“I’m just…” She flapped her hand around in front of her vaguely. “…having a moment, right now, I guess.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“With you?”

Beatrice shrugged. She smiled. “Catholics are nosy. Famously.” God, Ava was not getting out of this, was she? When had she let it get this bad? So bad that just watching Beatrice smile made her want to lay down on the floor and never get up. “Or we could just sit for a little while. Enjoy the evening. Because you were so quiet I’m way ahead on my work.” She continued, perhaps mistaking Ava’s stricken silence for indecision.

They went to the same bench that they’d sat on before. Beatrice, to her credit, only looked faintly scandalized when Ava retrieved the bottle of wine from her tote bag and began to wrestle with the screw top.

“Come on, I went to Catholic school. I know nuns drink.”

“...Yes, technically. Not me, specifically.”

“What, never?” 

“I can’t believe you even brought that in here.” 

Ava laughed. “Yeah, I know, who’s running this place anyway?” She gasped. “Wait, isn’t it you?”

“ Ava—”

“I think I should speak to your manager.”

“Ava.” Beatrice was laughing now too, which was a good sign. She was also shaking her head. “No, I’ve only ever had communion wine.”

“Great, this will be better.” Technically it had been seven pounds from Tesco. “Well, it’ll be different.” 

She offered it to Beatrice. Beatrice looked at it as though it were a bug, then took it.

“Am I meant to drink it from the bottle?”

“Yes.”

She was prepared for an argument, but all she got was the image of Beatrice tipping the bottle against her lips, taking a swig, and then coughing as she leaned forward. She wiped a little dribble from her chin. When she turned to Ava to hand it back, her chapped lips were wine stained already.

This was wrong. This was so wrong, and Ava was going to hell. Maybe she’d get a few pity points at the pearly gates for being orphaned at a young age, but definitely thinking about sucking Tesco brand malbec off the lips of a nun put you in the hell bracket no matter what. 

“How’d you like it?”

Beatrice coughed again, but she was still smiling. “Not bad.”

Ava had put her phone on the bench between them, and it lit up. She was still too focused on Beatrice’s face, but Beatrice glanced down, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You have a text from somebody called Shotgun Mary.”

“Oh.” Ava took her own drink from the wine bottle, then retrieved her phone. She squinted at it. Mary was asking when she’d be home for dinner.

“That’s a…unique name. A friend of yours?”

“Uh, yeah. Roommate.” Ava slowly typed the words sorry, hanging out at church w hot nun and hit send. She needed a new sweater before it got cold, anyway. “Her name’s just Mary. We call her Shotgun Mary because she won the record for most beers shotgunned in a row in our freshman year dorm.”

“Shotgunned?”

Right. Nun. Convent since 19. “Yeah, it’s like when you make a little hole in a beer can without opening it, and then you put your mouth on the hole and crack the tab, so all the beer just shoots into—” Beatrice was either uncomprehending or disgusted. “—Nevermind. I think you kind of have to be there.” 

“She sounds delightful.”

“Mm. She actually is.” Ava took another swig of the wine and handed the bottle back to Beatrice. “She’s a physical therapist. She bagged this girl, Shannon, like three years ago—way too hot and nice for either of us. But she’s great. She’s like a stabilizing force.”

They sat in silence for a moment, trading swigs from the bottle. Ava kept watching out of the corner of her eye to see if Beatrice would unlatch somewhat in the way people did when they got drunk. But every time she got a glimpse of her, Beatrice was only turning her face into the breeze that was ruffling over the graveyard, wrinkling her nose.

“Is that your type?” Beatrice asked after a moment. She turned to Ava. “Somebody stable.”

Ava was caught on the back step. “To date? No. I like ‘em weird.” She puttered out a self deprecating laugh. “And as unlike me as possible. What about you?” Beatrice eyed her. “I meant before. You went to Cambridge.”

“Only for a year. I didn’t date anybody.”

“Nobody?”

And then, a disaster—Beatrice giggled. There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. Ava’s hands tightened around the wine bottle. “No. I’ve only ever been on one date, in high school. He kissed me tongue first. It went on for ages, too. I was never keen on it after that. Not that anybody was trying to change my mind.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Ava said, her disposition coming from a mix of her natural impulsiveness and the quarter bottle of wine that she might as well have mainlined straight into her brain. “That nobody was trying to change your mind.” She added. 

She knew that Beatrice wasn’t stupid. She sat with the evidence of it all day at least twice a week. She wasn’t demure, either, and Ava didn’t find her particularly naive. So she wasn’t sure what, exactly, she expected the reaction to be. But Beatrice turning to her, eyes mirthful, and saying: “Is flirting with me part of your dissertation?” Was somehow both better and worse than any other possibility that existed in the universe. 

Ava choked on her wine. “Who said I was flirting?”

Beatrice snagged the bottle from her. Ava was searching her face for any sign of discomfort, but she looked amiable, if a little teasing. “Ava, I’m a nun. It’s not my first day on earth.” She said, then took her own swig.

When their eyes met again, there was liveliness in the air between them. “Does it upset you?”

“Does what upset me?”

“That I’m flirting with you.” Ava paused. “Allegedly.” 

“No.” 

Ava felt hot inside. She felt like she was holding both of their hands over a stove burner, daring them to touch down. “Do you want me to stop?”

Beatrice took a deep breath in through her nose. She rubbed her wine stained lips together and her brow pinched. “No.” She said, and she said it rather decidedly, as if she’d given it a good, Christian thought and come to the only conclusion she could’ve. Ava couldn’t breathe. 

That was the moment that the match was struck. The moment that it came swooping down the sandpaper, the table, the side of the box, and came away bright and flaming. It was as if Beatrice had done it and then held it right between their faces in a dark room, illuminating them both, smelling of sulfur. 

It was the moment that Ava thought clearly and the first time that there might be something to this for Beatrice, too. Her gaze went to Beatrice’s mouth. It felt as automatic and instinctual as breathing. She watched it for a moment, then yanked her eyes up.

Beatrice was watching Ava watch her. And Ava knew she’d seen what she had just been doing. She saw it all over her face. 

“I think it’s normal.” Beatrice continued, keeping their eyes locked. She looked almost queasy. “We do spend a lot of time together.” 

She knew Beatrice was just trying to change the subject. But Ava had just seen her, even if only for one second, and there was no way that she was going to forget it.

“Thank you for the diagnosis, doctor.” Ava looked down at where their thighs rested only inches apart. She thought about the dream, which now had legs, and teeth, and had been wretched above the surface of unreality by the sheer force of Beatrice’s no . 

She wanted Beatrice to touch her. She wanted her hand on Ava’s knee, in her thigh, higher. She wanted it so badly that she understood, suddenly, why a person might try to remove their desire from themselves and leave it in another place.

“I do have to ask if you’ve ever considered flirting with somebody who isn’t a nun.”

“Wow. No, actually. Do you recommend it?”

Beatrice laughed. Ava, she realized, was fucked. She’d been taken down by a nun. A nun who’d never even lain a finger on her. A nun who was obsessed with archival coding and hand washing and had been kissed, once, so badly that instead of trying again she’d taken vows at the convent.

It was an honor and the greatest humiliation of Ava’s life, all wrapped up into one person. She couldn’t stop staring. Beatrice must have noticed, because she looked away, grabbing the wine bottle. 

They finished it talking about nothing, letting the day wear down around them. The sun shifted in the sky, and then it got cool. That was, Ava thought, the way the world went. Something loud would happen, and then everything would go very quiet. Spinning, drifting. The sun going down on it’s settled appointment. Ava did not believe in God, but that was the sort of thing that made her feel a little religious. 

“My ride is going to be here at 8.” Beatrice checked her watch. It was 7:30. 

“I’ll wait with you.” Ava said. “I need to sober up a little before I drive, anyway.”

They waited on the front steps of the church. There was something startlingly intimate about seeing Beatrice at nighttime, like Ava was in a museum after hours, touching the art. She was tapping the heel of her shoe against the edge of the stair beneath her, talking about meeting with the novitiates the prior afternoon. It was captivating.

A car pulled around the corner and came to an idling stop in front of the church. “That’s Camila.” Beatrice said, and made to stand. But the woman in the car got out of the driver’s side first. 

She was Beatrice’s age, and pretty, wearing similar clothes. Some of her dark, curly hair was coming free of her wimple.

“Camila.” Beatrice said. Her voice was taut. “I was just coming down to meet you.”

“I know.” Camila smiled. “I just wanted to get a look at Ava. Hi, Ava.”

“Hi, Sister.” Ava waved. Beatrice’s back was to her, but she could feel her seething. “Have you been talking me up around the convent?”

“No.”

“Yes.” Camila’s smile turned impish. “Don’t let her fool you.”

Beatrice turned to her, seemingly determined to change the subject. “Are you going to get home alright? Camila can drop you off.”

“I’ll be fine.” Ava flapped her hand. “You guys go ahead.”

After they left, Ava lingered on the steps for a few minutes longer. There were bugs chirping, leaves rustling in the breeze. She wasn’t drunk anymore, but a feeling of lightheadedness lingered around her. She acknowledged that it might have nothing to do with the alcohol.

Suddenly, there was a hissing next to her. Ava turned and saw Lilith, perched on the top of the railing banister. Her back was arched and her hair was raised. “Oh my God,” Ava said to the cat, her shoulders jumping. “You scared the shit out of me.”

The hiss turned into a low growl. “Okay, okay, I’m leaving.” Ava stood, slowly, not making any sudden moves and also not turning her back to the animal. She didn’t turn around until she was at the bottom of the stairs and when she did, she walked fast in the direction of her car. “Weird fucking cat.” She muttered under her breath. 

***

Ava did not remember how it started. But she knew how she thought it started. She knew what she’d say if somebody asked what her inkling was that something was due to happen.

It was Beatrice’s shoelaces. When Ava arrived, two days later, she met Beatrice and noticed that the ties of one of her black oxfords was undone. It was so small and bizarre that she didn’t comment on it until they were downstairs. But it nagged at her. Beatrice was so particular, so fastidious. Something about an untied shoelace seemed too haphazard for her.

“Beatrice?” She said. Beatrice looked up. Their eyes met. Every time their eyes met, now, there was a flash of energy. There was no more escaping it. “Your shoe is, uh…”

“Oh.” Beatrice looked down, eyebrows raised. “So it is.”

The next day, it was her cardigan. Ava came and it was buttoned wrong, the bottom edges uneven. And, that very same day, Ava caught her sitting at her desk, staring into nowhere. The fingers of one hand were resting lightly on the nape of her neck. 

The final straw came a few hours later. Beatrice had disappeared into the stacks and Ava was yawning over some large, open book. She heard something and at first thought that it was music piping in over the computer speaker. But she listened a little harder, and then she craned her neck around.

It was humming. Beatrice was back in the stacks and she was…humming a song.

Ava didn’t know what feelings looked like on Beatrice. Everybody wore them differently. Was this what it was? Untied shoelaces, misbuttoned shirt, humming an aimless tune while she rearranged books in the back shelves? Ava felt her stomach twist. She sat back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling. And then she relaxed, and she listened to the sound of the music coming from behind her. 

Chapter Text

Ava’s impression of touch had gone through three significant phases. The first had come and gone so quickly that she sometimes didn’t remember to include it at all. Her mother wrapping Ava up in her arms, Aunts and Uncles dropping an affectionate hand on the top of her head at a family Christmas party. Her father scooping her up and tossing her, yodeling with joy, into the air.

It had been good, in the way that happy childhoods were, but too brief to leave an impression. When Ava thinks about that period of her life, she almost always thinks about the hospital first. The moments in which she felt nothing at all, and then the moments when the only touch she felt came from a nurse or a doctor or a physical therapist. Cold stethoscope, dry hand. Her joints and limbs being moved and swung to the point of weakness. 

Everything after that had been an improvement. Fifteen, kissing boys in the storage locker where they kept all variety of sizes of rubber balls. Obsessively watching her Sims have sex on the desktop computer in the rec room of her Aunt’s house. Scratching her fingernails along the shorn scalp of a friend on the rugby team sophomore year, delighting in the way she’d laughed and knocked her head against Ava’s collarbone. 

It was an education on the concept of feast and famine, and Ava had decided early on that the only thing she was comfortable with was feasting. Anything else toed too close to the alternative. 

But lately—and, to Ava, lately meant everything after she and Beatrice had sat on that bench together, drinking wine, and everything after the shoes and the humming—the part of her brain that made things feel good had been harder to access. It was like the button she’d been pressing had sunk deeper until it was untouchable. 

Consequently, the only thing she was thinking about on that day, on that date with a woman named Neve, was ice cream. Ava was not focused on the slope of her mouth, which was objectively nice, nor her fingers, which were long and clean and held chopsticks without making the person attached to them look foolish. 

It was Rocky Road. It had to be. Ava had spent every day of the last week wondering why she was feeling so suddenly empty, so peevish, so close to famine. But now she was thinking about it and she’d decided that it must be ice cream, the thing she needed. She hadn’t had any for weeks because they didn’t keep it during the colder months, but she loved it. When had she let Mary run point on stocking their fridge, anyway?

Neve reached out and cupped Ava’s face. Ava had forgotten for a moment where she was. She focused her eyes again.

“I had a really nice time tonight.”

Neve was nice. She was pretty. She was pretty. Mary had said so. Although studying her face now, Ava struggled to find anything remarkable about her. She had dark, thick eyebrows and short, curly hair. She had no freckles.

And she was leaning in for a kiss. Ava realized this with barely enough time to act appropriately. She tilted her head up to receive it. It was an even split of politeness and desire. If Ava had been kissed at all in the last two months, she might not have allowed it. 

And it was fine. It lasted for a second and called nothing up in Ava, who pulled away when she felt Neve try to deepen it. She felt the exact same after as she had before. A little cold, like she should have worn a heavier jacket, and hungry because she hadn’t ordered enough sushi at dinner.

“Get home safe.” Ava said as soon as they parted, to dispose of any idea that Neve was going to be joining her in the flat. Halfway through their meal she’d texted Mary and told her there was no reason for her to spend the night at Shannon’s that evening. 

She’d then texted her again to ask for a pint of ice cream. Rocky Road, she’d typed under the table, eyes on Neve and pretending to listen to her story about ultimate frisbee. 

“Alright, yeah.” Neve smiled. Her cheeks were a little pink from the cold. “You too. I mean, we’re already at your flat, but—“

Ava was already sliding behind the entrance. “Alright, bye!”

When she shut the door behind herself, Ava leaned her back against it and sighed. She let her head fall against the wood. 

Upstairs, Mary was waiting for her, sitting in the couch, watching something stupid. Ava let herself swim in the domestic comfort for a moment before stepping fully into the living room, dropping her bag and jacket on the floor, and flopping beside her. 

“Ice cream will be here in a minute.” Mary said. Ava grunted. She had found the throw blanket half wedged between the cushions and the back of the couch and was wresting it out and wrapping it around herself. “Have a nice time?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. On the TV screen, Laurie Strode was making her way around the hospital in her white gown. Ava watched with half interest. 

“But not…too nice.”

“No. She was sort of—I don’t know. Bland? Oh, don’t give me that look.”

“I’m not giving you any look.”

“Yes, you are, you’re calling me a slut with your eyes.”

“I just don’t know if bland has ever stopped you before. Ow!” Ava had freed herself of the throw blanket and reached across the couch to wallop Mary with a throw pillow. Mary leaned back, laughing, and put her arms up. They were still wrestling when the doorbell rang.

Ava and Mary moved to the living room window and threw it open, both hanging their heads out to see who it was. A delivery man stood on their front step. 

“I’ll get it.” Ava said.

When she got back upstairs, Ava dished up the ice cream with more ceremony than she might normally. She ran the biggest spoon in the house under hot tap water and sliced it through the top into two half-domes, dropping them side by side into her bowl. She sat on the couch next to Mary. Laurie Strode was in the elevator now, still in that gown, pressed against the back wall in terror.

Ava put the first bite into her mouth. She let it linger for a moment, deciding. It tasted like nothing.

***

“Alright, and what does Williams ultimately have to say about womanist theology?” Ava’s blazer was too big. She had thought the problem too small to bother with when she’d decided to wear it that morning, but regretted it five minutes into her commute to campus. It hadn’t been too big the last time she’d worn it, six months ago. What had that been for, again? A networking event? “Come on, guys. How does the book discuss Hagar’s role in the bible?”

It kept slipping off her shoulders. She’d been trying to adjust it discreetly throughout the entire lecture, but doing so just made her feel childish and small. Ava kept glancing at the clock out of the corner of her eye, watching as the minute hand creeped to 12. 

Somebody finally answered, a boisterous girl who sat in the second row from the front. Ava found her sort of grating, but she was always around to pinch hit. Plus, her answer was good and rambling enough that it took up the last five or so minutes of class. 

“Have a good rest of your day. Remember, midterm papers are due next week. They are on this very book. I would suggest that some of you read it.” Most students had already filtered out by the time she’d finished her sentence. Ava waited for the last one to disappear out of the lecture hall door before flopping back into the chair behind the desk at the front of the room and fishing through her God-awful, too big jacket for her phone.

She had a text from Mary. Michael wants to go out tonight. 

Ava let her head fall back against the chair for a moment, then picked it up. She responded. Finally, something to live for. 

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Ava had to be on campus for the rest of the day and thus showed up to the pub in the same fucking blazer. It was halfway down her arm when she spotted Mary sitting at the bar with Michael and a third man that Ava did not know.

She studied the man for a second before she was noticed. He was handsome and had a hand resting on Michael’s back, right between his shoulder blades.

The sight of it made Ava’s chest constrict.

“Ava!” Michael heralded her arrival with a smile that melted into a concerned look when she arrived and saddled up on a barstool next to Mary. “You’re swimming in that blazer.”

“Thanks, Mikey.” Ava leaned on her elbows across the bar. “A beer, please. Your cheapest.” She said with a tight smile. 

What Ava had wanted, really wanted, was to wring some enjoyment out of the night. Neve had texted her earlier asking to go out again, which had only depressed her further, and the thought of grading forty undergraduate essays on Sisters in the Wilderness the following week made her downright hysterical. 

And it was, to an extent, fun, but the fun of the evening felt more technical than it did genuine. If Ava were to put any thought into it, she’d be sucked out of the moment in an instant and back into that vague, banal feeling that had been haunting her.

But there was music playing, and Michael spun her around a few times in the crowded pub full of revelers. In between he held her close and whispered in her ear about the man, Hugh, who he liked but found timid. Ava’s mood had been improved somewhat by leaving her blazer with Mary and Hugh at the bar. “He just hasn’t been taking the lead.” Michael said, cheek to her cheek, hand on her lower back and waltzing her around. “We haven’t even had sex yet. Well, you know—not really.”

Ava’s chest clenched again, for reasons she was aware of but refused to acknowledge. She pulled an inch away from Michael so she could look up at him, smiling. “Poor you.” She said, and pretended to spin him around by leading him in a circle with one hand and holding the other above his head, like a spinning ballerina in a music box. This made Michael laugh, which did create a spark of happiness in Ava.

But the whole night was on a razor’s edge. Ava knew if she let her guard down for one moment she’d be done for, a sad sack ruining the vibe until she slunk home early and depressed to eat a frozen pizza in bed. She kept drinking to try and stave it off, and by the time she realized that she’d drunk too much, it hardly mattered. 

Her head was full of a million pleasant, buzzing bees when she bummed a cigarette from Mary and went to the front of the bar to get a breath of fresh air. Ava leaned against the brick outer wall. She hadn’t put her blazer back on, and regretted it when gooseflesh immediately erupted all over her bare arms. 

“Do you have one to spare?” She looked to her side. It was Michael, a small grin on his face. He was also underdressed for the weather. Ava and Michael had always sort of been like that—what the right had did, the left did as well. She extended the half-smoked cigarette to him. 

“You can have mine.”

They stood in companionable silence for a minute, trading drags, watching people spill into and out of the bar. Michael wasn’t like Mary in that he didn’t pry. But his methods were a little more insidious. He’d either talk his way in circles until Ava was so confused she had no choice but to pony up the truth or guilt her into it.

“Mary said you went on a date last night.” 

“Sure did.”

“Did you have fun?” A grunt. “C’mon, Ava. I just word vomited about Hugh for like a half an hour.”

Ava turned her head and regarded him. Michael was handsome. They’d known each other for a few years and he always had been. Ava was never much into blondes, and he seemed mostly gay, so the spark had never really gone off between them. But he was tall, broad shouldered, kind and quiet and strange. Why shouldn’t it work?

She propped a shoulder against the brick wall and leaned into him seriously. “Do you want to kiss?”

Michael laughed. It was chummy at first, but then he just looked stunned. “What?”

“Do you want to kiss?” Ava asked again. 

“Ava, if you were going to proposition me, I wish you’d picked a time when I hadn’t come to the bar with a man I want to date.” His mouth twisted. “Plus, I tend to like a little more romance.” 

She shrugged one shoulder. “Might make him jealous. Maybe then he’ll…” She waggled her eyebrows. “...take initiative.”

Michael stared at her for long enough that Ava came to realize that she might have had more success trying this on a less kind person. He then looked over his shoulder and back at her.

“Are you okay?” 

She was really tired of people asking her that. “You could just say no.”

His face twisted in consideration. She thought that he was probably considering the over/under on her disappearing back into the bar and finding somebody else to kiss instead, something that happened semi-frequently and with mixed results. Then, Michael shrugged. Sensing what was about to happen, Ava flicked the cigarette they’d been sharing and stomped on it with the heel of her boot. 

He leaned down and pressed his lips to her’s. Ava tilted up on her toes to meet him. When the initial contact didn’t spark anything, she pressed as hard as she could in, searching. She put her hands to his biceps, then moved one around to the spot between his shoulder blades, like she’d seen Hugh do earlier.

It was three seconds of nothing, just like with Neve. Ava broke away.

“Goddamnit.” She said, frowning. Michael frowned, too.

“Rude. I was doing you a favor."

“I know. Thank you.” It was sincere. Ava realized in the same moment that the thing that she’d been afraid of happening had happened—she’d thought too goddamn much—and now there was nothing for it. She couldn't stay there for another second. The air had begun to feel suffocating. She turned on her heel, vaguely toward where she thought the flat was. “Tell Mary I said bye.”

“Wait— Ava—"

***

If Ava were to assign Beatrice one fatal flaw, it would be that she could never keep disapproval from showing on her face. Her features were so disposed to it that even when Ava imagined her as a child (not that she did it all that much, just sometimes—) she imagined her as a little Wednesday Addams type, frowning at other children breaking the rules and railing against the dewey decimal system.

So when Ava showed up on the church steps the next morning, bags under her eyes and gray sweatpants sitting low on her hips, she expected to see that scolding look. Or, at least, a tut or a pursed mouth. 

Instead, when Beatrice swung the door open to welcome her and she took in Ava’s appearance for the first time, her face softened and she said nothing. Maybe that was Beatrice’s other fatal flaw; everything she did was immediate and genuine, which was always worse than the alternative. 

It took about an hour of silence between them for Ava to realize how uncommon it felt. She had been visiting two-or-three times a week for almost two months and they were always doing something to each other; talking, playing cards, bickering. But even if they weren’t speaking, she could feel something radiating off of Beatrice from across the room. It was like the energy she was taking up by trying not to speak was flowing off of her in waves.

“Shall we eat lunch together?” Beatrice asked at exactly 12:25. Ava looked up at her, then down at her phone.

“You’re five minutes early.” She noted, to which Beatrice frowned but said nothing.

It was almost too cold to sit out on the bench. Ava wondered what Beatrice did in the later months and when there was nobody to eat with. Did she sit all day in that basement? The thought made her sad. 

Ava was still too hungover to eat. She hadn’t even bothered to pack anything. She sat next to Beatrice, jacket on, arms crossed and hands stuffed into her armpits. 

“Here.” There was a thermos top of soup in front of her face. Ava looked over at Beatrice.

“No, I’m not feeling well.”

“I know. That’s why you need the soup.”

It didn’t move. Fine, gray wisps of steam came off it and dissipated into the air above. Ava flared her nostrils. It smelled good, even if it turned her stomach over at the same time. 

She took it. The hot metal of the lid felt good in her hands. Pleased, Beatrice twisted her body and rummaged around in her bag, producing a spoon and handing it to her.

“Thanks.” She murmured, staring down into the soup. She took the spoon and moved it through the liquid, identifying little bits of carrot and lentil and celery. For some reason, the idea of looking at Beatrice while she was being kind to her was unbearable to Ava.

“Rough night?”

Ava wasn’t sure what about the words irritated her so much. They weren’t reproachful. If anything, Beatrice sounded cautious, like she was trying not to make waves. Still, her shoulders tensed and she exhaled out of her nose.

“You know, I really don’t need—”

“—I’m sorry—”

“Judgment right now.”

“I’m sorry.” Beatrice said again. Her voice was so light that it was almost transparent. Ava finally did look over at her and found her with big, worried eyes and cheeks pink from the cold. She was wearing a black, quilted jacket that was a size too big on her, and Ava wondered if it was a hand me down. Beatrice had rolled the sleeves to cuff them above her wrists. 

Something in her chest moved. She winced. “No, I’m sorry, I’ve just been feeling like a cunt lately. Ignore me.” As an offer of peace, Ava took a bite of the soup. It was wonderful and, despite her initial expectation, when she swallowed it she didn’t feel a debilitating wave of nausea. She actually felt better. “This is delicious.”

Beatrice smiled. Ava regretted ever having looked in the first place. “Thank you.” 

Ava proceeded to house the rest of the soup with very little self-awareness. It was the first thing she’d eaten in weeks that she’d really liked, and each bite seemed to ebb off the waves of nausea and made her feel more like a normal person. When the spoon scraped the bottom of the thermos top, Beatrice took it from her without a word and refilled it.

“No.” Ava said, half heartedly. “I’m going to eat all of your lunch.”

“Camila always packs me too much.” Beatrice said. Her smile took on new depth when Ava took the cap and kept eating. “You know, if you want to—we can talk about it.”

Ava worked a bite around in her mouth and swallowed. She pushed the spoon through the soup again, then scuffed the toe of her boot against the grass. “I thought nuns didn’t take confession.”

The color on Beatrice’s cheeks darkened a shade. “Are you confessing something?”

Their eyes met. Ava would not be confessing anything, not today, although there was no doubt she had things that would fit the criteria. The last time she’d been to church, she’d been a child, and her sins were so easy to categorize that she’d almost found comfort in doing it. I kicked Luz in the shin because she cut me in the lunch line or I swore at Aunt Linda. 

Now it was different. It was hard to tell what the nucleus of the thing she was doing wrong was—that is, the thing she needed to be sorry for. Was it liking Beatrice, was it suspecting that she might be liked back? Ava hadn’t even seriously considered doing anything about it. The potential violence that they could do to each other felt almost too great to bear in her mind.

“I died.” She said, instead of what was really on her mind. Because she hadn’t been thinking about it, Ava figured it must have been stored in another place in her body. “For like two minutes, when I was seven.” When Beatrice said nothing, Ava smiled wryly. “I know, impressive right?”

Beatrice snorted. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, nothing happened. I mean there was nothing when I died. Sorry for the spoiler.” Ava didn’t know how she expected Beatrice to react, but when she looked over she found her smiling, just slightly. “It really freaked me out. I mean, hugely. That feeling of just—being nothing. And sometimes I remember that, and remember that this is all there is, and get so upset with myself for wasting time. I don’t even know what it is I need to feel happy. And sometimes I think I’m afraid to find it. But the more time passes, the more I realize how I’m just hurdling toward—“ The word nothing died on her mouth. She pursed her lips around it, keeping it inside.

There was a pause. Then, Beatrice put her hand on Ava’s knee. It was that simple. She took her hand and she moved it and she put it on Ava’s knee, or just above it, almost on her thigh. Her whole hand, palm, fingers and thumb. Ava’s knee. 

Ava bit her cheek so hard she could taste the metallic tang of blood on her tongue. That touch—the hand, the knee—had more in it than a punch would’ve, or even a kiss. Don’t think about the dream, Ava thought. But that just made her think about as hard as she possibly could.

Beatrice’s hand. Ava’s knee. Have you been bad? 

Ava was disappointed to learn, in that moment, that all the other feelings she’d ever felt in her life were sham emotions. This was screaming, full technicolor. Like her body was a clap-on light and Beatrice’s hand was an audience giving a full, standing ovation. It felt good, after weeks of being underwater to finally surface, gasping and new into the cold air of the world.

“You have plenty of time to find the thing you want, Ava.” She said gently, either unaware of Ava’s sudden affliction or uncaring. Ava, for the first time ever, agreed with her. Yes, she thought, because I’ve just realized that you have it. “Also—I’m sorry—you’ve spilled soup on yourself.”

“Oh.” Ava glanced down her front and saw the brown stain on her jacket at the same time that Beatrice removed her hand. If she’d been one single rung lower on the caveman ladder, Ava would have snatched it back in a millisecond. 

She watched Beatrice use her newly freed hand to take a napkin from the lunch bag. Instead of handing it to Ava, she ducked her head and leaned a little closer, dabbing at the stain herself. In that position, Ava found that she could smell Beatrice’s shampoo, which was earthy and spicy and so exactly like her that it sent Ava into something of a tailspin. 

Because the spot was on her chest, a little lower than her collarbone, she wondered if Beatrice could feel how fast her heart was beating. She sort of hoped that she could. 

“You’ll have to chuck it in the wash as soon as you get home. It’s a nice jacket.” Beatrice made to pull her hand and the napkin away, but Ava reached out and stopped her. It happened so quickly that she’d barely even noticed she’d done it until she felt the soft flesh of a wrist beneath her thumb. 

She was hardly gripping it, her fingers hanging on loosely, but it stopped Beatrice dead in her tracks all the same. Ava watched her face, the entire time not knowing what she was looking for. She couldn’t understand completely why she’d done it, or what she planned to do with the hand now that she had it. 

Beatrice was watching her too. At first her expression was folded in, head tilted ever so slightly as if in question. Then, Ava saw her eyes go down to the place where they touched. Something shifted. It was in the air, which seemed to still around them even though there had been a cool breeze blowing just a moment ago. It was also in Beatrice’s face, which slackened almost imperceptibly. Her lips parted. The furrow in her brow smoothed. 

Then, she closed her mouth and swallowed. Ava could see her throat bob. It made her feel sick in the way she did when she ate too much cake all at once and didn’t realize it until it was too late. “Are you alright, Ava?”

“Yeah.” Ava’s voice was far too low and far too cracked for the situation at hand, which was having a normal conversation with a nun in a church graveyard. “If you give me the napkin, I’ll throw it out when we go back in.”

It simply made no goddamn sense. But she watched Beatrice accept this without question and place the dirty napkin into Ava’s palm as if it were a totally normal and reasonable request. Ava wondered if she was too stunned to notice, or if she wanted to believe that it was the true reason for those thirty seconds of prolonged contact.

“You have to eat more.” Beatrice blurted. “You look absolutely horrid, Ava.”

Ava put the napkin in the pocket of her jacket. “Are all nuns as charming as you?”

“And you need to have more water when you’re drinking. Your breath smells like the bottom liquor shelf of a bar.”

None of it had any bite or any hint of Beatrice’s signature disapproval. She was rambling, Ava could tell. 

But she quieted when they got back downstairs and remained quiet for the rest of the afternoon, save for one exchange where Ava asked for a new book and she disappeared back into the stacks to find it. Ava had sat, combing through a book of sacramental certificates, half-listening to the sound of her boots walking behind her.

When that noise paused for one minute, then two, Ava looked up. She frowned. She turned her head and looked behind herself. 

Then, she stood. Ava could have called out for Beatrice, but she’d never been back there before. It wasn’t that Beatrice had forbidden it, per se , but she’d never given Ava a reason to go, either. Even now, as she stood at the edge of the first shelf, Ava felt a little like she was walking into Beatrice’s bedroom without announcing herself first.

She went anyway. The ceiling high shelves were pushed up against one wall, leaving a narrow corridor along the other. Ava walked down it, looking through each row until she found the one that Beatrice was standing in.

It was near the back, and Beatrice was standing at the middle of the row, book in hand. She was biting at her thumbnail with the other, forehead leaning against a metal shelf, staring into nowhere. Ava felt again like she’d done something wrong—transgressed into a place she should never had gone, and witnessed something she should not have seen.

But she was there now. She cleared her throat. Beatrice jumped, nearly dropping the book in her arms.

“Ava. You scared the sh—” To Ava’s huge, infinite disappointment, Beatrice stopped herself before the word shit fell out of her mouth, pursing her lips. She straightened her body, shoulders going back, posture lining up. “What are you doing back here?”

“You were gone for a while, so I—”

“Just—yell for me next time, please?” 

“Alright.” Ava said quietly. Beatrice moved toward her and handed her the book, which Ava grabbed. She held it. For a moment, neither of them moved. It was so quiet back there, quieter even then the main room, which was already deep in the belly of an old church. They felt more alone than they ever had been, like the great stacks of books and microfiche and pictures were insulation padding them in, pressing them toward one another.

And just like that, the electric feeling from before rose back in Ava with a vengeance. That hunger, that feast-like want. She felt so relieved to have it again, like seeing an old friend. Her heart kicked back up into its old, furious beat.

“Ava?” Beatrice said. “Shall we go back?”

Ava paused over it for one moment, and then she nodded.

***

Can you spend the night at Shannon’s tonight? Ava tossed her phone on the bed and continued tossing clothes out of her closet. It was cold, but her skin was so warm that she had cracked the window by her bed to let the breeze in.

Just as she’d wrestled a black camisole with a sort of lacy hem out of her laundry pile, the phone went off. Sure. For who?

Just Neve 

Ava felt that she could hear Mary’s deep sigh from across the city. She wrestled her way into the camisole and then into a pair of shorts that were ill suited for the weather. Ava had decided as soon as she got home that she wasn’t going for subtly. There was too much thrumming in her for that. 

The doorbell rang and Ava padded over to the living room window, throwing it open and sticking her head out. She saw the top of Neve’s head. “I’ll be right down!” She called out, startling the woman beneath her into almost shattering the bottle of wine in her arms. 

The wine was cute but ultimately unnecessary. Ava all but dragged Neve up the stairs by the collar of her jacket and then, when they arrived in the flat, pushed it off her shoulders altogether.

“Hi.” She murmured, getting up on her toes and pressing a kiss to the other woman’s mouth. It didn’t feel right, exactly, but it didn’t feel wrong, either. Feels like nothing was a thought that Ava had to push into the deep recesses of her mind. She replaced it with a memory: Beatrice’s hand, her thigh. Her fingers on Beatrice’s wrist. 

“Hello to you, too—oh.” Neve watched Ava disburden her of the wine bottle and then return in a second to resume the kissing. So what if it wasn’t exactly what Ava had been hoping for, what she’d wanted. It was a warm, willing person who was objectively good looking. That wasn’t for nothing. “Sorry—I’m uh—” Neve pulled away, which was inconvenient. She looked flushed and dark-eyed. This, at least, was good for Ava’s cause. “Not that I’m not enjoying this, but I sort of thought we’d open a bottle of wine and, I don’t know. Sit on the couch for a bit.”

Ava stepped back a little, relying on the low cut of her camisole to do some of the work for her. Judging by Neve’s face, it worked spectacularly. “Yeah, we could do that.” She said breathlessly, reaching out and taking Neve’s hand. She rubbed her thumb over the skin between the other woman’s thumb and forefinger. “Or we could, uh. Go into my bedroom and sit for a while in there.”

They stared at each other for a moment. Then, Neve blinked and started nodding her head furiously. “Yes. Yeah. I don’t know what I’m talking about, actually. Let’s do your thing.”

Their lips met in another bruising kiss that stumbled them back towards Ava’s bedroom door. Ava tugged and they collided with one wall, then another, then the door, which she kicked open with a foot. 

There was still laundry on the bed that she hadn’t bothered to clean off. Ava pushed Neve down onto it and clambered on top of her, still kissing, hands still moving.

“Is this okay?” Ava breathed, and Neve nodded.

She couldn’t even be bothered to take her shorts off. Ava felt on the verge of actual, real death. Her knees went to either side of Neve’s hips and Neve’s hand, picking up on cue, slipped beneath the shorts and beneath Ava’s underwear.

The feeling of fingers moving over her was, like everything else that happened, both right and wrong. It felt good , but not in a way that was enough to satiate the gaping sinkhole that had opened up in Ava since that afternoon. 

So she replaced it with a memory again. Her and Beatrice, standing in that tight, quiet place together. 

A moan ripped its way out of Ava’s throat, low and broken. Neve’s fingers were doing capable, nimble work on her clit but she still grabbed her wrist, stilling it. 

“Just keep your fingers there while I—"

“Okay, alright.”

Ava started to move her hips against Neve’s hand, brain calling up images that barely even made any sense. None of this made any sense. But she was half wild with it, chasing the coattails of an orgasm that was so close that she could taste the promise of it in the back of her throat.

Then, next to them on the bed, Ava’s phone rang. Her hips stuttered, but didn’t stop completely. “Ignore it.” She murmured, leaning forward to place a wet kiss on Neve’s mouth. “It’s probably just my roommate.”

It rang a few more times before going quiet. Ava’s hips resumed their cant, she resumed her ragged breathing, her pursuit of something— whatever was waiting for her on the side of this—-

Then, it rang again. Ava groaned and let her head fall forward onto Neve’s shoulder. “I’m going to fucking kill Mary.”

“It actually says, uh—Sister Beatrice? Is that like a nickname?”

The world ground to a halt so fast Ava was surprised it didn’t throw her off of Neve’s lap. She had to do that part herself, dislodging the other woman’s fingers from her underwear and half-rolling to the other side of the bed to grab her phone. The name there did, in fact, say Sister Beatrice. She smashed the accept call button with her thumb.

“Beatrice?” She said, trying not to sound too out of breath. She ran her free hand through her hair, tousling it.

“You need to come get your scarf.”

Am I dreaming again? “ What?”

“Your scarf.” The voice on the other end of the line was so frazzled and impatient that Ava barely recognized it as Beatrice. She wracked her brain trying to remember if she’d ever even worn a scarf to the archive. “You left it in the microfiche room. I just found it.”

Ava pulled the phone away from her ear to look at the time. It was almost 10:30 at night. She saw, off to the side, Neve reclining on the bed. “Beatrice, are you still at the archive?”

“Yes.” There was a sound like something falling and crashing in the background, and Ava thought she heard Beatrice mutter something under her breath that sounded like shit. Her brow furrowed. “I’m cleaning.” Another crash, and then Beatrice saying ow—

“Alright, I’m on my way.” Keeping the phone pressed to her ear with her shoulder, Ava pulled herself from the bed and started re-fastening her shorts. “Don’t leave, okay? I’ll be there in a half an hour.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Neve with what she hoped was a placating smile. “Hey, sorry, um—something just came up.”

Ava didn’t have the time or wherewithal to change her clothes. She just threw a puffer over them, one that almost surpassed the hem of her shorts, and climbed into the car. The entire ride over, she wondered what was most likely to be going on when she got there. Were things spontaneously falling from the ceiling? How could she even have been there at 10:30 at night—didn’t nuns have curfews?

She executed the shittiest parking job of her life and half-jogged up the steps to the church. Ava banged on the wooden doors. “Beatrice!” She called.

They swung open a half second later. At first, Ava’s brain either couldn’t or wouldn’t process what she was seeing. Beatrice was a little shorter, and after a moment she realized that it was because she wasn’t wearing any shoes. She wasn’t wearing a cardigan, either, just a short-sleeved button down shirt with a wide collar. It was crisp and white except for a few coal-black smudges of dirt that ran down the front.

Her wimple was also gone. Her hair was laying in a french braid that ended between her shoulder blades, flyaways frizzing out at her temples and behind her ears. Ava wished she’d gotten some warning about that part, because when she saw it she forgot how to breathe.

“Where are your pants?” Beatrice said. Ava managed to tear her gaze away to look down at her mostly bare legs. 

“It’s 10:30 at night!” She scoffed. “If you want pants you have to call earlier. What are you doing in here, coal mining?”

“Come on, your scarf is down here.” Beatrice turned on her heel and began to march back toward the basement. Her walk was purposeful but her stocking feet made small, almost sweet padding noises as she walked over the slick hardwood of the nave.

“Beatrice—Beatrice!” Ava hastened to follow her, three paces behind. She unzipped the front of her jacket. “Where’s your—you’re not wearing your wimple.”

Beatrice didn’t answer her. Ava began to entertain the very real thought that she had completely lost her mind, a theory that was bolstered when she stepped into the archival room and saw the state of it. Books had been removed from the shelves and were stacked up on one the few surfaces or in boxes. Paintings, too, had been taken from the walls, and the mirror, and an ornate cross. They sat upright on the floor, tilted against the wall.

Beatrice disappeared into the microfiche room, leaving Ava to linger for one suspended, disbelieving moment. She drifted over to the work desk and saw that there was an open packet of unsalted cashews—a complete mystery, because eating near the books was forbidden. She saw Beatrice’s open laptop, a book laying next to it. On the chair was Beatrice’s wimple and a handful of bobby pins laying atop. Something in Ava’s heart shifted. 

“Here.” Beatrice came blustering out of the room, arm extended, holding a large gold scarf. Ava stared at it. 

“That’s not my scarf.”

There was a beat of silence in which Ava realized that Beatrice was just…gawking at her. She looked down and saw that her unzipped jacket offered a better view of the outfit she’d been wearing; the camisole with lace edges, the shorts.

“What were you doing?”

“I had a friend over.” Ava’s lips pursed. Her brow knitted. Beatrice seemed so small and so large at the same time, like a fire that had flamed huge with oxygen and then died out a moment later. She wondered, distantly, if any two people on earth had ever been so dumbfounded by each other as she and Beatrice were in that moment. 

“I have to keep cleaning.” Beatrice said, blinking and pulling her gaze away as if she’d just fought loose from a trance. “Take your scarf.” She extended it again.

“It’s not my scarf.” Ava repeated, but took it anyway. She watched Beatrice stick her finger to her mouth and turn to survey the disarray of the room. “Beatrice—hey, wait a second, let’s just, uh—what are you doing again?” 

Ava wanted so badly to reach out and touch her. Her fingertips burned with it. “Cleaning.”

“Okay, but—why? And why so late? It seemed fine when I was here earlier.”

“No, it was—I’ve been meaning to clean it for a while. It’s so dusty in here. It’s not good for the books.” At least now Beatrice’s voice was losing some of its strange edge. She seemed more subdued. Ava took a chance and slowly walked around so that they were facing each other again. 

“So you had to take all the paintings off the walls?” She asked gently. Beatrice’s brow furrowed.

“I was going to wash the walls.”

“Alright. Who is coming to get you, by the way?”

“I don’t know. I told Camila I’d take a car home, but I might just sleep here.”

“Uh, no, I’m taking you.” Ava started to zip up her jacket and threw the scarf over her shoulder. Beatrice was gawking again.

“No, I’m not finished.”

“You are for tonight. You can resume…whatever this is, tomorrow. Go on, where the hell are your shoes?”

“Language, Ava.” Ava had to suppress a smile. At least she was sounding more like herself. “I have clients coming tomorrow.” But she was going to her desk and locating her Blundstones, toing them on, and picking up her jacket and wimple from the chair. Ava expected her to put one or the other on, but she donned neither.

“Should have thought about that before you went turbo mode in the middle of the night. Out with you.”

In the car, Beatrice seemed to have lost her words. She slid into the passenger seat, holding her jacket and wimple on her lap, and quietly gave Ava the address before turning to look out the window. 

Ava flipped on the radio to fill the silence. It was on an independent station that she and Mary had found that played almost exclusively American country music. They’d listened to it as a bit at first before both admitting, a few months later, that it reminded them of home. Now they put it on when they drove together to get late night food and eat it in the parking lot, drinking milkshakes and listening to John Prine and talking about nothing.

She considered changing it, but thought that it might get some kind of rise out of Beatrice. It didn’t. She was silent for the whole ride, which took them further out of the city. Ava navigated them down several increasingly desolate roads, the rhythm of her flicking her brights on and off as other cars passed like some sort of peaceful morse code. 

The convent, when they pulled up to it, was invisible in the inky blackness. Ava’s headlights illuminated a sign at the base of a long driveway that said Novitiate House with an arrow pointing in one direction and Sacred Heart Convent with an arrow pointing in the other. She slowed to a stop at the curb.

“Do you want me to take you all the way up?” She asked.

“No.” Beatrice said. “I can walk.”

But she made no move to get out of the car. After a moment of this, Ava turned the ignition halfway, killing the engine but leaving the radio on. She flipped the headlights off right after, dipping them into a deeper darkness. She could only see the silhouette of Beatrice’s profile. 

“You are a surprisingly cautious driver.” Beatrice commented. Ava smiled.

“Being orphaned in a car accident will do that to a person, I guess.” 

Beatrice’s head turned to her. In the low light, Ava could not discern her expression. It was better this way, and Ava liked cars for these sorts of things for exactly this reason. There were some things, some reactions, that she preferred to be left up to the imagination. 

“I’m sorry, Ava.” Her voice had been drained of all its manic bravado. She sounded like regular Beatrice. 

“Oh, that’s alright. It was a long time ago now.”

They lapsed into silence again. Beatrice didn’t seem eager to move and Ava wasn’t eager to shoo her out. The radio murmured on in the background. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you up?”

“No.” Beatrice sighed. She took her wimple in both her hands and stared at it. “I don’t want to put this back on, so I’ll have to sneak in.”

Ava emitted a shocked, delighted laugh. “You’re going to sneak into your convent? You, Beatrice? You’re going to…what, shimmy up a drainpipe?”

“I don’t have many other options.” There was quiet laughter in Beatrice’s words. “There’s a back door with a faulty lock. I don’t have to…shimmy.”

“You could always put that back on.” Ava offered lightly. “The mirror has a light.”

Beatrice shook her head. On the radio, the song changed. George Strait started crooning Carrying Your Love With Me and, after a few bars, Ava noticed that Beatrice’s shoulders were shaking in silent laughter. It made her chest feel big and heavy with affection. 

“Excuse me—what’s funny?”

“What is this?”

“George Strait is no laughing matter.” But Beatrice was laughing harder now, the chorus curling around them in all its maudlin absurdity, and Ava was smiling too. “This is American culture. Please, show a little respect.”

“No, you’re right—I’m sorry.”

“You don’t look sorry.” Ava was moving her hand to the volume nob, fixing to turn it down. It was intercepted by Beatrice’s own. Her fingers touched down on Ava’s knuckles, stilling her hand.

“It’s really alright, you don’t have to—”

Her sentence dropped off a cliff into the darkness that surrounded them. Ava’s feelings were already close to the surface because of what she’d been doing just before she got to the church. The stroke of Beatrice’s fingers had them roaring up, huge and raw. All at once the energy in the car took a sharp turn from being jovial.

There was something else, too. Ava could feel a strange texture on her knuckles, like there was something on Beatrice’s hand. She reached above her and turned on the dashboard light, bathing them both in a soft white light. She saw that Beatrice’s expression was taut, as if in confusion. 

Ava took the hand and turned it over until it was palm up. It was covered in a fine smudge of dirt, palm and fingertips, matching Beatrice’s shirt. Transfixed, she stroked her thumb over the creases in her skin, feeling each touch low in her belly as if the two were connected by a string. 

“Ava, that’s disgusting.”

“It’s just a little dirt.” Ava murmured. She glanced up and met Beatrice’s eye, holding it, examining her. “What’s this all about?”

“Can you turn off the light again?” Beatrice’s voice was barely above a whisper. Ava assented, and the darkness made her feel bold, or she might’ve just been impatient. Either way, she turned Beatrice’s hand back over and held it between two of hers, one on top and the other on bottom.

Beatrice’s subsequent little inhale of breath filled the whole car to the brim. Ava felt it in her bones, in her knees, behind her ears. It took everything in her not to pull her closer all at once. 

“C’mon, you can tell me.” Ava urged, “God’s not listening.”

“Ava, you must know that my official position is that God is always listening.”

“No, but he isn’t. He just told me he’s taking a five minute bathroom break.” It was a poor attempt at breaking the tension between them. As long as their hands were together, the wire was live, snapping with electricity, menacing. 

There was an indecisive little pause before Beatrice spoke. “I just can’t seem to get a grip lately.” She laughed, once, short and derisive. “On myself. On…” Ava felt Beatrice’s hand squeeze against the one that still held it. She licked her lips. 

One of Ava’ hands moved of its own accord. It traveled up Beatrice’s bare forearm, feeling, grabbing, and landed at her elbow. She cupped it. 

“That’s alright. You don’t have to be in control of everything all the time. That’s normal. Getting a grip is overrated.”

Whatever she was saying didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. There weren’t many lights on inside Ava’s head. She was talking mostly because she could feel Beatrice’s grip move to her wrist, and then Beatrice pulling at her, even gently, and if she didn’t work on something else she was going to launch herself into the passenger seat with little to no decorum.

They tilted together, close enough that a little of Beatrice’s hair was tickling Ava’s face. Close enough that her expression became clearer. Her soft features, her long eyelashes. Ava’s hand left its post on her elbow and flitted up to her shoulder, to her ear, then to the line of her jaw, feeling all the way.

Things had transpired from subtextual touching to making a move and were now cresting on Ava shooting her shot with a nun. Ava had made many moves on many people, most successful, but at the moment she realized that they were going to kiss she was so frightened that she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. It was a silly, adolescent feeling. 

Beatrice turned her cheek ever so slightly into the palm of Ava’s hand. Their noses brushed. Ava inhaled and forgot to let the air back out. 

“I’ve never, um—"

She barely recognized Beatrice’s voice. It held emotion that Ava had never heard on her and wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard on anybody else. But that, of all things, was what made her sure of what she was doing. Ava was not very dependable about many things. But this, this was something she knew she could do for Beatrice. Do it and do it well. It made her chest swell with something strange and protective.

“I’ve got you.” She sighed. Ava wanted to take Beatrice’s hand and slip it into the open folds of her jacket, onto her waist, just to seal the deal. But it felt like playing dirty. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got you.” She murmured again, lost in the feeling of what was about to happen, and tilted her head up. 

“Beatrice!” There was a loud tap at the passenger side window and a flash of light. They broke apart so fiercely that Ava accidentally laid on the horn with her elbow. 

The person outside was holding a flashlight in and thus was invisible. But Ava recognized the voice and Beatrice did too, because she rolled down the window.

“Camila, can you please point that in another direction?”

“Where on earth were you?” The light flipped off and Camila stuck her head in the window. She was also wimpleless and dressed for bed, a robe on over her pajamas and a baseball bat in her other hand.

“Why do you have a baseball bat?”

“I thought you might have been down here with a murderer. Praise the lord it’s just Ava.” She paused and flashed a smile in Ava’s direction. “Hi, Ava.”

Ava plastered on what she hoped was a normal looking smile, all things considered. “Hi Sister.”

“I lost track of time.” Beatrice mumbled.

“And your phone?” But Camila looked between them as she said it, and her face softened. When she spoke again, it was only to Beatrice, “I already covered for you with Mother Superion. I said you were at the archive.”

She couldn’t see Beatrice, and so had to imagine the levels of indignity playing out over her face. “I was at the archive.”

But Ava knew what Camila had seen when she glanced between them. It was Ava dressed, objectively speaking, to be fucked, Beatrice with no wimple on, and both of them blushing like they’d just been caught playing show me yours and I’ll show you mine in the back seat. 

Which—maybe if Camila had been about twenty minutes later, but—

“It’s not really my business, Bea.” There was no trace of any judgment or malice when Camila spoke. She was clearly trying to say a lot of things in one sentence. Beatrice ducked her head.

“Are we going in the back door?”

“They fixed that weeks ago. We have to use the chapel window.”

“Uh, can I come? I would pay like, actually good money to see that.”

Both women turned to her, but Ava could only see Beatrice’s face. Her expression was barely visible, covered and cast over in shadows. Ava so badly wanted to ask if she could take her up the driveway just to have one more minute with her. She would’ve helped them into that chapel window, even, just to feel the sole of Beatrice’s boot on her hands while she boosted her into the bowels of the church. 

But she didn’t say anything, and Beatrice had opened the door and begun to leave by the time Ava’s thought had even completed. She waved goodbye to them and watched them disappear up the driveway, Camila’s flashlight beam bobbing in front, until she was sure they’d made it at least to the convent.

Then, Ava restarted her engine, took a deep breath, and began the drive home. 

***

The flat was quiet when Ava returned at half past one in the morning. She’d forgotten that Mary was at Shannon’s until she flipped on the lights and felt the stillness of the place. She couldn’t tell if it was for the best, or if her absence made her feel hugely, intolerably lonely. 

Ava shed her jacket and left it on the floor, walking to the kitchen and retrieving the unopened bottle of wine from the counter. She wrestled the cork from it and took a long, deep swig, surveying the space in front of her. 

She’d left the bedroom window open, and now the whole apartment was chilled. Ava could barely feel it. Trance-like, she removed her shirt and threw it on the pile with her coat. Then, she opened the freezer door. 

The carton of Rocky Road had the same four scoops taken from the top as it had before. Ava stared down at it, then she rinsed off a spoon from the sink, dried it on a paper towel, and started hacking away at the top. 

She was pleased to find when the first bite of ice cream hit her tongue that it tasted amazing. Ava braced herself on the counter with one arm and let it melt away in the warmth of her mouth, let it sting her molars and drip, sticky and sweet, into her throat. She cleared the excess from her teeth with her tongue. 

Another bite, and then another. Ava hadn’t been this hungry in ages, or she just hadn’t realized it, or perhaps she just hadn’t enjoyed anything as much. But then, in that moment, hunched over the counter and shirtless and goose pimpled from the cold, she was starving.

So Ava did the only thing there was left to do. She ate, and she ate, and she ate. 

Chapter Text

To call what Ava did that night sleeping would have been generous, silly, and wrong. She laid the length of her body atop her duvet, head to one wall, toes to the other, arm stretched out to drum her fingers against the adjacent windowsill, and stared at the ceiling. She dozed a few times, only to be awoken from her fragile sleep by the sound of a car passing by, or co-ed’s shouting on the street.

Around 5, there was the sound of a key in the lock and Mary’s shoes against the wood floor of the entryway. Ava lifted her head from the pillow drowsily.

She rose, still in her outfit from the night before, and padded over to her bedroom door. Outside, she could hear the sounds of Mary setting things down, picking them up. Disposing of her jacket. Ava put her hand on the doorknob and twisted it.

“Hey.” Mary said, not looking up from where she was putting a croissant on a plate. There was a large cup of takeaway coffee next to her. “What are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” Ava stretched and scratched the back of her neck. Mary glanced at her, absorbed her outfit, and then flitted her gaze over her shoulder. Neve? She mouthed. Ava shook her head.

“Did she leave or did you kick her out?”

“I kicked her out, I guess.” Ava tangled her hand in the hem of her shirt, making a ball of it around her fist. “I’m gonna make some coffee.”

“Just have some of mine. I don’t know why I get this much, anyway.” Mary took a mug from the cupboard and poured half of her takeaway cup into it. They sat at the table, shoving the decorative pile of papers away. Ava stared down into the brown-white liquid in front of her.

“So Neve was a no?” 

Ava kept staring. She heard Mary rip a piece from the croissant and pop it into her mouth, chewing. 

“I want to tell you something. But I need you to not give me a hard time about it.”

Mary stopped chewing. Her gaze went around the room, brow furrowed, as if she were trying to find something out of place, some indication of what Ava might have done. “What—oh my God, did you guys fuck on my bed?”

“What? Ew, no, why would I do that?” Ava paused and squinted. “Have you done that?” 

“On the couch.” Mary shook her head and threw the uneaten bite of croissant onto her plate in disgust. “Ava, we agreed when we got it—"

“We didn’t fuck at all. I left.” Mary paused, studying her face. “I saw Beatrice. I was there until like one in the morning.”

To her credit, Mary remained mostly impassive. She took another bite of croissant, perhaps to buy herself time to consider what to say. When she finished it, she cleared her throat. “Did you—"

“No. No.” Ava a shook her head. “But I think we almost—there was a moment when I thought we might’ve been about to kiss.”

She told her everything. About Neve, the phone call, the state of the archive when she’d arrived. It felt good to get it off her chest after a morning spent ruminating over it, turning each moment over like a mossy stone. Ava wanted to hand this cup of tea leaves over to Mary and have her decipher them instead of spend another day deciding what she thought they might mean. 

“So, what?” She asked when Ava was done, which was exactly what Ava was afraid she might do. Answer Ava’s laundry list of questions with another, bigger question. It made her frown. “Do you want to have sex with her?”

“Not just that. I like her.” Ava kept staring into her coffee. “There’s something about being with her. I don’t really know how to describe it.”

When she looked up, Mary’s expression was easy with compassion. “Then why are you trying to give her a nervous breakdown?”

“I’m not trying to do anything.”

“Ava—how long has she been a nun?”

Ava pursed her lips. “Ten years, I guess? A little less than.”

“ Ten years?”  And then Mary was laughing, a big, rowdy sound, and Ava was scoffing.

“What?”

“Come on, are you serious? Ava. I’m aware of the troubling effect you have on people—"

“Thanks, I think.”

“—but you think that’s going to bring her kicking and screaming out of ten years of Catholic repression? Does she even want that?”

Ava sobered. She thought about it. “I think she likes me, too.” 

“She would be stupid if she didn’t.” Mary’s lips folded together like they did when she was about to deliver news that was true, but that Ava was not going to like hearing. “But pursuing that might not be the kindest thing you could do for her, Ave. And if you really like her, you should want to be kind to her.”

Ava took a long sip of her coffee. It had gone lukewarm in the time since they’d been talking. Outside, a blue gray light had begun to creep in through the windows. “I don’t like it when you’re right.”

“Me either, to be honest.” Mary took a drink from her cup. “It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each tucked away in their own thoughts. Ava drank her coffee, even though it was past its prime, and barely tasted it. 

“Is that what you wore?” Mary said, “To see your nun friend.”

“Huh? Yeah, I guess.”

Mary tutted. Ava rolled her eyes. “What?”

“Nothing. You’re just dashing my hopes of seeing you someday in heaven.” She snickered when Ava flipped her off, then looked at Ava thoughtfully, like she was going to say something else. Ava braced herself for it. “You know, if I was a repressed gay nun living in a convent since I was 19 and you walked into my little cave library one day and started paying attention to me…whew.”

“You’d be fucked up about it, right?”

“Shitting my pants.”

Ava nodded once, vindicated, then frowned. “That’s also not helpful.” 

“The truth hurts. Hey, where are you going?” Ava had stood and was finishing the last of the coffee in her mug. She went and started to rummage around under their kitchen sink.

“I’m going to the church. Do we still have Clorox?”

“ Ava.”

Ava stood, hands on her hips. “I’m going to be extremely kind, I promise. I won’t even dress slutty.”

Mary’s face pinched as if she did not believe her. “Under the bathroom sink.”

Ava arrived before Beatrice did, a feat that left her shivering outside on the church steps with a paper bag full of half-used cleaning supplies. The day had started with the promise of sun, but that had turned out to be a feint. By half-past six it was cloudy and gray. 

She was dozing with her head against the railing when she heard Beatrice’s shoes coming up the sidewalk. She had a particular gait—it was straight and strong and rhythmic. Ava could have picked it out of a crowd of many. It was obvious, too, when it stopped suddenly at the foot of the stairs.

Ava picked up her head and opened her eyes. Beatrice was in front of her, tote bag hanging from one elbow, a set of keys in her hand. She was wearing that black, quilted, overlarge jacket. Seeing her in her veil again was strange; it almost made Ava feel like what had happened the previous night was a strange dream.

“Ava.” She said. Ava had never seen her look truly at a loss for words. If Beatrice wasn’t talking, it was usually because she chose not to. 

“Hi.” Ava said. 

“You don’t have an appointment today.”

“I came to help you clean.” She lifted the paper bag and Beatrice’s mouth tightened in response. Her hand clenched around the keys, then unclenched.

“I don’t think that’s a very good—"

“I’m not—" Ava started, then realized that she had no idea of how to move forward without acknowledging that something had happened last night. Judging by Beatrice’s face, it was not a something that she was eager to get into before 7 in the morning, and Ava wasn’t there to push. She was there to be kind, or to make some stumbling, aping attempt at it. “You said you had people coming today. I thought if we both did it…”

“I already canceled with them.” Beatrice looked down and toed the sidewalk. “It was a nice gesture, but you should go, Ava.” 

“Then it’ll go twice as fast. And you’ll have the whole day to yourself to…sniff your books, or whatever.”

Beatrice ducked her head and kept scuffing the ground. “Is that what you think I spend all day doing in there?”

“Could be.” Ava shrugged, smiled. She sensed a waning resistance. “Look, I promise no funny business.” Ava, for fuck’s sake, funny business? “Just cleaning. I feel bad. I want to help.” 

Beatrice paused. She looked up at the sky, and then back down to her feet. Then she began walking up the steps, past Ava. “Come on.” She said, “You’re going to catch a cold out here.”

When she opened the door to the church, Lilith’s little black head poked out. Ava startled. “What’s she doing here?”

Beatrice turned her head, looking incredulous. “She lives here.”

“I mean, in the building.”

“Ava, it’s freezing outside. I didn’t realize that you hated cats.”

“I don’t hate cats—"

Everything was exactly as they’d left it in the archive. It was a relief. It made Ava less insane to see the many stacks of books and the paintings propped against the wall and the microfiche room door hanging open. Beatrice moved as if she took no notice of it, shedding her jacket and pointing to the boxes against the far wall.

“Can you move those back onto the shelf? I’ll show you where.”

Ava did begin to wonder why the shortest person in the room was being put to work stacking things on high shelves. Even on the stepping stool she had to strain. But every time she turned to make a joke about it to Beatrice, she found the other woman engrossed in her work and pointedly not looking over to where Ava was. 

They cleaned efficiently and almost entirely in silence, except for when Beatrice would give Ava some direction or feedback. Ava remembered weeks ago, the humming, the quiet laughter that used to fill the space when they were together. 

But she wasn’t there to push. So she didn’t dwell, or she tried not to. She let Beatrice be as best she could, although it felt like as long as they were in the same room, neither of them could leave the other alone, not really. If they weren’t talking, they were looking. And if they weren’t looking, they were orbiting. 

Ava hefted up a box of microfiche and shoved it into a bottom shelf, huffing with exertion. When she was finished, she walked back through the stacks, sticking her fingers out and letting them hit against the edges of the bookshelves as she passed them by.

When she reached the main sitting area, she saw Beatrice’s sitting at the reading table, back facing her. Her shoulders were tall and straight and Ava watched as she scratched at an imperfection in the wood with her fingernail. 

Ava lingered for a second, fingers still wrapped around the metal edge of a shelf, then she shoved off. Gently, she pulled the chair next to Beatrice out. It scraped against the concrete of the floor. 

They sat side by side for a moment. Beatrice didn’t look at Ava and Ava didn’t look at Beatrice.

“All done?” Ava asked. It seemed like it. Beatrice hummed an affirmative response, fingernail still going at the table, and they lapsed into another silence.

This one wasn’t as comfortable as others that they had shared before. It was fraught with something. Ava felt almost suffocated by it. 

“There’s another church-run archive.” Beatrice said finally, clearing her throat, shifting in her seat. “Not far from here, maybe ten minutes west. It’s smaller but it has…mostly the same sorts of things we do.”

Ava sat with that for a moment. She also became suddenly very interested in the surface of the table. “Do you think I’m just…generally interested in church archives?”

“I thought you might finish whatever research you need to do there.” Beatrice finally stopped scratching and began to smooth over the spot with the tip of her finger. “Instead of here.” 

If you like her, you should want to be kind to her. Ava turned and studied Beatrice’s profile. Her mouth was sloped down, her brow pinched in concentration, as if wiping away the divot in the wood was the most important thing she could’ve been doing in that moment. 

“If I agree, will you look at me?” 

Beatrice paused, and then she did look. When their eyes met she blinked once, harshly, as if she’d just looked directly into the sun. 

There you are, Ava thought. 

“Is that what you want?” She said, “For me to go somewhere else?”

“It’s what I think is best.” Beatrice responded evenly. 

There was something about it. Like the messy room, it was confirmation that Ava wasn’t crazy, that something had happened. That Beatrice felt something about it too. 

“I doubt it’ll be as good as here.”

“It won’t be. I am excellent at my job.”

“And what about the journal?”

“What about it?” Beatrice said, then tsked. “Ava, don’t tell me you haven’t finished it.”

“I asked you to tell me the ending before.” Ava couldn’t really even say why she hadn’t been able to stomach finishing it, only that the idea gave her a vague sense of unease. “I like to be warned about sad endings."

“I am not doing that. It’s for your dissertation, Ava, honestly.” But Beatrice’s mouth was twisting, doing a shoddy job at hiding a smile. When she caught herself, she looked away again, as if ashamed. “And it’s hardly an ending. It was just a year of her life. One of many.” They sat with that for one long-feeling moment. “You may as well take it for all anybody cares. I’m not even allowed to list it officially in our collection register. Nobody but me would notice it was gone.”

Ava watched her. She looked so glum, her face pulled taut with the idea, that Ava had a thought she hadn’t really entertained for months. “Can I ask you why you decided to take your vows?” Whatever Beatrice thought of her was probably already set in stone. Wrote or gnatish or something else entirely. She might as well ask.

“The structure was helpful.” Beatrice said after a moment, “The order. The focus on devotion and service. I spent a lot of my teen years…scattered. And my family was already very religious, so it wasn’t strange when I showed an interest.”

“I can’t imagine you scattered.” Or she couldn’t have until the previous night.

“It’s been a long time since I felt that way.” Beatrice admitted quietly. “I’d thought I had left it behind. Recently I’m not as sure.”

Ava hm ed. “Is that why you spent your time translating a journal nobody was ever likely to read from French to English? For structure?”

Beatrice side-eyed her. Her mouth twitched. “I was bored and my French was out of practice. I haven’t studied it since I was a student. Occasionally we get a patron who speaks it, but it’s unusual.”

“Have you thought about going back? I bet Cambridge would take you again in a heartbeat.”

Beatrice started rubbing at the table again. “No. I’m too busy here.” She said, and Ava knew instantly that it was a lie. 

Ava had pictured what Beatrice did when she wasn’t there before. She did it again then; she thought of her alone in that basement day in and day out. Categorizing and recategorizing. Fixing the microfiche machine. Eating her lunch alone outside in the graveyard until it got too cold and then eating it alone in the church. Ava wondered if she ever laid back on a pew and looked at the paintings on the ceilings, all the angels and the clouds. She wondered if she ever took her shoes off and put her feet in the grass. 

And, all at once, Ava was awash by that desire to touch. Her last thought was whether anybody had ever reached out for Beatrice just because they felt overcome by her. She didn’t think so, but she wondered if things would’ve been different if they had. 

It would not have been the kind thing to do. Ava’s fingers twitched and she moved them to her lap.

“Well, it’s a good thing you kept it.” She said. “I needed it. And I can’t read French.”

“I always wondered if somebody might come looking for it eventually. When I read it, it felt…important. I guess I was really wondering if it was important to somebody else, too. What they’d be like, if they existed. Man or woman. Student. Whoever.”

Ava looked at her. Beatrice turned and caught her eye. “Well, here I am.”

“Yes.” Beatrice said. Her voice had dropped two octaves. “Here you are.”

Ava’s hands grabbed at each other. They squeezed. Her heart banged on traitorously in her chest, a wrench in the machine of her doing the right thing. “Let me just finish it. It won’t take me long. I’m not going to take it from you. Contrary to what you think about me, I’m not a thief.”

She didn’t disagree. “I don’t know, Ava.”

“Come on, I know you don’t agree with my hippie thesis—"

“I never said hippie. I said new age .”

“Same difference.”

“Lesbianism and…religious intimacy—are very new age. I’m not wrong.”

“Ah, but you are. Women have been doing terrible things to each other for hundreds of years. You’d be shocked.” Ava leaned back in her chair. “And the only thing people have ever really had is each other. That hasn’t changed and it never will.”

Ava didn’t know what to make of the expression that followed on Beatrice’s face. It looked almost like a flinch. She turned away on the edge of it so that her face was no longer visible. 

“Fine, Ava.” She said, not to Ava, but to the far wall. “You can finish it.”

They left not long after, gathering their things and going to the door. Lilith was meowing at it, and when they opened it she came and wound her way lovingly between Beatrice’s legs. 

“Well.” Said Ava, standing in the doorway, surveying the space. Nobody would ever know walking into it what it had looked like a day ago. Everything was perfect; perfectly hung, perfectly placed. It made something whinge in her. “There it is.”

“There it is.” Beatrice agreed, and they left it at that.

***

Ava, in the days that followed, began to wonder if she was kind.

She’d left the church that day feeling so. She’d even made it back to the flat carrying that sense of things with her like a tidy package; that she was charitable, that she would do the right thing. It was interrupted in the days that passed between one meeting and the next.

The thing was, Ava thought about Beatrice. She thought about her when she saw women wearing Blundstones on the street and when she passed gaggles of Catholic school children being led somewhere by a teacher. She thought about her when she noticed untied shoelaces. Ava thought about her when she breathed out and the air condensed in front of her in a cloud and when she bent to pick something up and the fabric of her jacket twisted against her just so. 

Once, she thought about her after giving herself a paper cut on a midterm paper. It was the best one she’d read, and ended up getting the only A+ of the class. That felt fitting. 

Ava had never experienced a crush so intense that it straddled meanness, a leg on each side. The feeling of it took her breath away. It exhilarated her like flexing a new and unknown muscle always did.

When she got to the archive for her next appointment, Beatrice set the book in front of her, as usual. It was, of course, amongst many others. The Parish histories and the directories and the stacks of microfiche. It was almost innocuous.

Beatrice returned to her desk and kept her eyes averted, just as she had on the pews. Ava looked down at the binder, then back up at the desk. Beatrice’s inattention was as studious as everything else she did. 

To Ava, it was obvious because nothing about Beatrice held any hint of pretense. She could have tested her between her teeth and found her genuine. So when she did something curated, it stood out. And, in that moment, she was obviously pretending not to care if Ava opened the journal or not. 

Was Ava kind? She didn’t open the book that day. She didn’t even touch it. She sat and basked in the ambient heat created by Beatrice’s brain, working perhaps as hard as it had ever worked, and all to make sure that she did not spare one glance at Ava. 

The evil grew in Ava overnight like a tight, moonfed little flower. When she was a child, she used to hold her breath as a way to avoid doing her physical therapy. “I’m going to hold it until I pass out,” she’d say, then suck all of the air in the world into her little lungs and hold it there to the distress of the adults around her.

That’s what it felt like she was doing then. Holding her breath. Demanding something, or demanding to be released from it. Ava wanted to know what Beatrice had been thinking that night when she’d been ready to kiss her and why she wasn’t thinking it anymore. 

Ava was still thinking it. Ava was waking up every morning and staring into her leftover cereal milk about it. It was a saturation; a total dye job. Ava had gone into her car that night and come out a different color. 

Was she going to live the rest of her life wondering what might’ve happened between them? Was Beatrice? It wasn’t that Ava was unsympathetic, just that she couldn’t get her arms around it. 

The next visit, in a fit of generosity, she did open the journal. She even looked at the words. But she only read them in Beatrice’s voice, like Beatrice was leaning over her shoulder, hand next to her hand on the table, saying cottage cheese or I half fell asleep at mass or , Ava’s favorite, I put her fingers in my mouth and tasted the salt on them.

Ava thought about Beatrice’s fingers pressing into her own mouth, but supposed that they wouldn’t taste like salt—orange, maybe, or paper, or the linen fabric of her dress. She ran her tongue over her bottom lip.

She made it one page, then moved on to something else. As soon as she shut the cover of the journal and set it aside, Ava could feel Beatrice prick up like a dog’s ears. She didn’t turn, but her fingers, which had been steadily clicking along on her keyboard, stuttered. Ava looked up and saw her jaw clench. She reached across the table and found a different book, and dragged it toward herself. 

They sat in perfect silence for a second. Ava, surrounded by her sham books, and Beatrice, jaw taut, clicking along at her keyboard. Ava wondered what she was writing. She imagined a tightly worded eviction notice. It was like they had entered into some sort of gentleman’s agreement; that Ava would do the right thing, read the journal, and exit peacefully, and that her not doing it was bringing something simmering to the surface in Beatrice. 

Because when Beatrice’s head turned and she caught Ava’s eye for the first time in days, her expression was perhaps the mirror image of Ava’s own. There were a few slight differences, but the meanness was there, the exasperation. It made goosebumps break out on Ava’s forearms. 

Ava thought, again, about what Beatrice did when she wasn’t there. But this time she thought of her at eighteen-or-nineteen. She thought of her being kissed with too much tongue. She thought of her in class, at Cambridge, legs kicked out in front of her like how she sat in the church graveyard. How many confusing feelings did a person have to have, Ava wondered, before they decided to bury them away altogether? Did Beatrice remember where she’d put them, even after all those years? Did she think of it like cutting a tree down, or like wrapping a sapling through the winter so it could survive to bloom in spring? 

Beatrice looked at her. Ava looked back. I am going to hold my breath until I pass out. 

It happened on the third day.

The world was built in seven, famously, but the rule of threes did feel like it was some kind of trump card for all other numbers of significance. It was a great equalizer; it applied to famous people and the Ava Silva’s of the world alike. 

Had Ava known something was going to happen? Looking back on it with clearer eyes, maybe. It was freezing that day, colder than it had been in weeks. Unseasonably so, even for late fall. Mary had finished the sweater the night before and laid it out for her on the couch. It was green, wool and scratchy. The neck came up high and it was a size too big on Ava, but short in the sleeves so that the bones of her wrists showed. She loved it. 

And then, that afternoon, her car had refused to start. Whenever the weather dipped near freezing, it required a lot of stroking and gentle encouragement to get it on the road, which Ava did. She rubbed one hand over the steering wheel and jostled the key into the ignition until the tortured wrenching of the engine smoothed into a hum.

Beatrice, too, seemed seized up by the weather. Even more than usual. When she opened the door to the church, she was wearing a dress over a short-sleeved mock turtleneck and a frown. Ava thought that she probably also could be eased by some stroking and gentle encouragement, but had the good sense not to try it.

But then they got down to the basement, and the basement was hot. The radiator that had been fighting valiantly to heat the drafty whole of the church was clanging so loud it sounded like there were little people in the walls having a fit over tin cans and symbols. The sweater was not helpful. 

“Jesus,” Ava said, pointedly, when they got downstairs. “It’s hot in here.”

Beatrice seemed unaffected. She didn’t even say language, Ava, which made that meanness rear up in Ava again. I am going to hold my breath until—I am going to—

“Hot as hell, one might say.” Ava tried. 

“Do you have your list?”

“Hm.” Ava handed it to her and Beatrice disappeared back into the stacks. Ava flopped into her chair. She pulled at the neck of the sweater. She squirmed. Sweat was gathering at the sides of her body and the back of her neck.

Beatrice came back with the books and laid them in front of her. Ava watched, and she watched her go back to her desk and resume exactly what she’d been doing for the last two appointments. The studious not looking. The frown.

Ava took the sweater off. She hardly thought about it before she did it, just pulled it from the bottom over her head and tossed it to the side. This got Beatrice to look up at her.

She and Mary had debated endlessly the semantics of whether or not what she was wearing underneath was a shirt or a bra. It ended somewhere around her navel and had thin straps that left indents in her shoulders. Reasonable minds, Ava thought, could disagree.

It wasn’t the first time Beatrice had gawked, openly, at something Ava was wearing. But the other times, her expression had been veiled, or almost surprised. It was indecipherable now, but hard at the edges. Her brow was furrowed, her mouth a sharp line. 

“Ava, put your shirt back on.”

“No. It’s like a million degrees in here.”

Ava imagined Beatrice coming to forcibly wrestle it on her. She imagined their bodies grappling against one another, Beatrice grabbing at her, taking her by the wrists, maybe, or the back of her neck. 

“Stop looking at me like that.” Beatrice said. She was blushing. 

“Like what?”

Beatrice tossed her pencil to the top of her desk with a curt snap. Her mouth twitched. Her jaw moved. She stood and she went to the door to the archive, which was shut, and opened it a crack. Some cool air from the larger, draftier nave came spilling in. 

Ava schooled herself into indifference. She’d seen something in Beatrice that night in the archive, when she’d turned over all those books and tried to wash the walls. She’d seen it the last time she was here too, in the fierce look on her face. Ava wanted it see it again. 

They stared at each other for a long moment. Beatrice by the door and Ava in her chair, arms crossed. 

Beatrice broke first. “Why aren’t you reading it?”

I am going to hold my— “Reading what?”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“I don’t know—"

“Yes you do. And you know I’m not stupid.” Beatrice’s voice was firm with a quiver laying just underneath. 

She marched over to the table, suddenly enough that Ava startled. She watched her begin to gather the books, stacking some of them together, shaking her head. “If you’re not even going to pretend to read these, I’ll just—“

“—Beatrice—“

“—I don’t know why I even bother—"

“ Beatrice.” Ava stood and reached out to put a hand in her wrist, stopping her gathering.

Beatrice looked up at her with a red face. It wasn’t a pretty blush; it was blotchy and desperate and loud. Ava liked it. She liked the way it looked on her, and she liked the hairs that were coming free around her face, and she liked the slight quiver that was coming to life at Beatrice’s chin. When Beatrice spoke, her words came apart at the ends. “You come in here. Into my library. You touch my books. You put your feet on my table. You swear. You take off your clothes. And you won’t listen to me when I tell you to go.”

The air around them shivered in the aftermath. Ava did, too. 

Ava dropped her hand from Beatrice’s wrist. The truth was not kind, but it was really all she had. She didn’t know what else to do, how else to let go. “I don’t want to.” She said, a swing for the fences. “I don’t want to go. I like you.” All emphasis on the word like , as if it alone could convey the damning weight of what was in Ava’s heart.

Beatrice looked away, back to the books, and wiped at her forehead with her forearm. It struck Ava as a nervous gesture. “Of course you do. We’ve been talking for weeks, and—"

“No, Beatrice, I like you. You.” Ava tapped the surface of the table two times for emphasis. “It has nothing to do with being in this creepy basement.”

“Ava, stop. You’re being mean.”

“I’m sorry.” Ava said, reeling somewhat at the accusation. She meant it, too, more than she thought she would. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Beatrice looked back at her, expression the same as what it had been the night she’d called Ava about the scarf. She looked almost manic. “What exactly do you think you want from me, Ava? Sex?”

Ava blushed. That word had never made her feel nervous before, but it did then. It sent an electric feeling zipping up her spine. “It’s not just that.” She admitted, quietly. It was a mirror image of the conversation she’d had with Mary, as if that had been the trial run for the big game.

“Why are you saying that like it doesn’t make things worse?” They were close enough that Ava could see the little details on Beatrice’s face that were only really visible when they were near. Her freckles, the true color of her hair. “You know, everything was fine before you came. I was fine. I had stopped thinking about—" She sucked her teeth, shook her head. “—now that's all I think about. I have trouble sleeping. I daydream. Food tastes different. I keep praying that you will leave me alone so I can act myself again. But it won’t happen, and I think it’s because God knows that I don’t mean it.” 

“Beatrice—"

“But it doesn’t matter. That’s a different person, it’s not me. I took my vows. This is my life. Nothing can happen between us. So does that make you feel better? Are you happy that I told you that?” She tilted her body toward Ava, talking quickly, harshly. Her chest was heaving. “Or do you wish I had just lied so we could walk away from each other?”

Ava wished for a lot of things at that moment. That the circumstances were different; that she was a better person than she was showing herself to be. A selfless Ava might’ve lied. A kind Ava might have apologized again and taken a step away. But she was no better than the Ava that she was right then. 

“Would it really be so bad?” She asked, tilting her head in. Beatrice didn’t flinch. She didn’t move away and she didn’t avert her gaze. Ava wondered if she was trying to call her bluff. “You never wondered in ten years if you’d make the same choice again, if something different had happened to you? You’re one of the most curious people I know.” She could hear Beatrice breathing, could see the way her gaze grew darker. Ava felt the air around them change, grow damp and heavy, as though they were outside and it was about to storm. “What if—"

Ava did not get to ask the question, because Beatrice answered it by kissing her. It was so fierce that it pushed her back a step, so brief that it was over before Ava really knew what had happened. It was chaste, warm and dry, as if she’d been kissing the back of her own hand. 

And when it was finished, Beatrice put her hands on Ava’s shoulders and pushed her back further. For a split second, Ava thought she might raise a hand and slap her across the face. 

They stood for a minute, both of them panting, both of them red faced. Ava wondered if Beatrice was waiting for her to say something. What could she say? Beatrice had just won the argument, full stop. Probably the only thing left for Ava to do was shake her hand and say good game .

She focused on trying to get her heart rate under control so she could speak normally. Beatrice, again, beat her to it. 

“There. Now I’ve done it twice.”

Ava’s mouth was burning. “I guess you have.” She said faintly, resisting the urge to touch her lips with her fingers. “I—"

But then Beatrice descended upon her again, taking two quick steps to close the gap that she’d created, and their lips met for a second time. She did it like a starving person sneaking back into the kitchen after a meal to for a second helping. 

It was more purposeful, but still furtive, still brief. She put her palms to Ava’s face, one on each cheek, and the feeling of it had Ava breaking open and rushing forward like an overfull river. Ava kept her hands to herself, unsure. When they broke apart this time, it was by a smaller degree. Beatrice removed her hands and tilted her head back.

When Ava saw her face for the first time, she understood that she’d done something. Really, really done something. Whether it was good or bad, right or wrong, she couldn’t say, but she’d played the stupid game and come away with the grand prize. She understood, too, the purpose of the second kiss—that Beatrice was perhaps trying to imprint something to her memory, to carry it out of the room with her.

She’d wondered earlier if Beatrice had remembered where she’d stored all those things that she decided to leave behind. Ava thought, then, that she was looking at the evidence that Beatrice knew exactly where they were, and that they were still there, and that, if anything, they’d grown larger and stranger in the intervening decade. Like she’d planted something where she meant to bury it and Ava was looking directly into the massive, tangled root system. 

So when she surged up a third time, Ava tried to give her something. She still didn’t touch—that felt like a decision that Beatrice would have to make—but when the third kiss lingered for half a second longer than the other two, Ava moved her mouth. She tilted her head. She deepened it, even if only by an inch, took it from total intolerable chasteness to something else.

The sound Beatrice made nearly brought Ava toppling over. It was so surprised, so pained, so—she couldn’t believe it. They broke apart. Their eyes met. Ava understood that they were in a church, and that churches were the trunks in which people came to lay their heaviest burdens—their grief and their love, their births and their deaths—and she knew also that to think you and your lover had just invented something new was a delusion so prevalent that had become a cliche.

But she couldn’t believe that the moment of discovery that passed between them was anything other than brand new, the first of its kind. Ava didn’t care if it made her trite.

They parted again. Beatrice wobbled back and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Ava was still reeling, still trying to catch her breath.

The fourth kiss was both of them, at the same time, closing in. It was not chaste, not even from its first second. Like the blushes, like the smiles, Ava had pulled something out of Beatrice that simply could not be returned to its previous tomb. 

For the first second, Ava didn’t move her hands. Beatrice had thrown her arms around her shoulders, pulled her in, got their bodies as close as possible. She leaned back. Her pupils were so blown that her eyes were black. “You can touch me,” She said, “I want you to touch me.”

Ava could have wept. Their mouths met again in a wet slant. Ava took her hands and put them to Beatrice’s waist, her sides, her cheeks, and finally her hair. It knocked her veil down and off her head. She tried to get a feel for everything she’d not known before this—the weight of Beatrice’s body, her skin, her muscles, the wild beat of her heart. 

Beatrice surged against her so hard that they knocked into the bookshelf behind the study table, Ava’s back meeting metal. Her hands went to the exposed inches of skin beneath the bottom of Ava’s shirt, a sensation that was, in and of itself, enough to send Ava spiraling. But then Beatrice’s hands moved, her palms smoothed over Ava’s body, and she dragged them up and under the fabric.

Ava emitted a startled, strangled gasp and pulled back, the back of her head hitting the shelf. It took Beatrice a second longer to realize that they weren’t kissing anymore. Her eyes blinked open and her brow furrowed. Ava could feel the tips of her fingers resting at the bottom wire of her bra.

“What’s wrong?” Beatrice breathed. She moved her head in to nuzzle at Ava’s cheek and Ava sucked in a breath so large that it arched her back.

How did you tell somebody that you were five minutes away from fucking them on the concrete floor of a church basement, but tactfully? “Shouldn’t we, um—” Beatrice started kissing her cheek, then over to the lobe of her ear.

“Shouldn’t we what?” Her mouth was right against Ava’s ear and her words sent vibrations straight to her core. Ava wondered where she’d learned this before remembering—the journal, the translation, and who knew what else. Beatrice had nineteen years before she went to the convent, and Ava was beginning to suspect that they were not all spent in blissful, pious ignorance of how she felt about women. She was beginning, also, to understand what Beatrice had meant when she said scattered. 

“Uh--” Ava struggled to remember exactly what she’s been saying. “I don’t know, slow down? Maybe just…”

Beatrice pulled back, which left Ava with a tragic coldness against the side of her face that she’d just been occupying. She was looking at her with an expression that Ava immediately found familiar. 

“Do you want to stop?” Beatrice breathed. Ava shook her head.

“No, but—”

“I don’t want to, either.” She urged her body a little further against Ava’s, hips against hips, breasts together. 

“Yeah, okay, but—”

“Ava.” Ava realized exactly why she recognized Beatrice’s expression. It was the look of somebody who had no idea when their next fix was coming, their next touch. It was also the look of somebody who was staring down the thing that was standing in between them and something they really, desperately wanted. “You did this. Why are you telling me I can’t have it now, if we both want it? I don’t—”

Ava understood the underlying meaning of the words. You break it, you buy it. And she did very much want to take care of the mess she’d personally created, even if it was certain to drive her to the edge of madness. She was in no position to say no. She didn’t want to say no. 

“Okay, yeah, you're right.” She said, and sighed in pleasure when Beatrice’s lips went back to her cheek, when her hands went back to moving along her skin. Like everything else about Beatrice, her touches were candid and forthright. She didn’t move like somebody who was trying to be sexy, she did it like she was exploring, trying to get everything underneath her palms that she could, like she was gathering information through it. 

It wasn’t fumbling and it wasn’t expert; it was a third, ill defined thing. Ava broke their connection for one brief second to pull her shirt over her head. When Beatrice took her in, goosebumps broke out over her skin despite how warm it was in the room. 

She pressed herself up against Ava an instant later, as if she couldn’t bear to continue looking. Her tongue and teeth went to her jawline, to her neck, to the crook of her shoulder, nipping and sucking and using her teeth—sometimes too soft, sometimes too hard, occasionally just right. It was like she was trying things, searching for the reaction she wanted. Ava’s body couldn’t keep up. Her stomach was twisting and she could feel her heartbeat between her legs, as loud and steady as a drum. 

When Beatrice’s hands went to cup her over her bra, they both sighed, shuddering. Ava took Beatrice’s face and guided her back to her mouth, kissing her again, running her tongue along her bottom lip. Beatrice’s fingers began to fight their way beneath the fabric, searching for more skin. 

Eager to help, Ava moved her hands behind her back to fumble with the clasp. But a second later Beatrice seemed to have forgotten about whatever mission she’d been on, and her hands started to travel lower, back over the plane of Ava’s stomach and toward the top of her pants. Ava’s hands went to Beatrice’s face—they grasped her, palms on her jaw, thumbs on her cheek, and she moved her mouth to kiss her in other places. Her eyelids, her forehead, her nose.

When Beatrice’s hands began to fumble with the button of Ava’s jeans, Ava felt a bolt of unmistakable anxiety. What had been the last time she’d felt timid about having sex with somebody? It had been years, maybe a decade. She remembered the first time she’d done it with a girl, how tricked she’d felt by the idea that it would be all hand-holding, all hair-braiding, all close-mouthed and chaste. She was deep in before she’d realized how odd it all actually was, how wretched and astonishing. Ava wondered if Beatrice was having a similar revelation—probably not. Ava had the distinct impression that Beatrice was the kind of person who knew everything, even if she didn’t know that she knew.

“Here.” When a few seconds went by without success, Ava moved her hands down to join Beatrice’s. She undid the snap, leaning back a little to take in her face. For the first time, there was a flash of uncertainty on Beatrice’s expression. Ava nudged her nose with her own. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” She murmured. “But I promise it’s not that hard.”

Ava was certain that she was going to come within two minutes of having Beatrice’s hand in her underwear no matter what the other woman did, but did not say that. Beatrice emitted a short chuckle. “Alright.” She said, then kissed her again, then moved her hand down, down past the band of Ava’s underwear and between her legs. Ava felt the wet pull of the fabric away from her cunt to make room for Beatrice’s hand and made a noise into her mouth that was completely unrecognizable as herself. 

Beatrice paused then, palm cupping her, and Ava had a hot flash of anxiety that the sound, somehow, had been too much. That she’d have to let this go here, now, on the precipice of feeling something totally new for the first time in years. 

But then the moment of indecision seemed to pass, and Beatrice’s fingers moved again, parting Ava, rubbing through and over her. Ava felt like she was trying to crawl up the shelving behind her with the way her body moved, jerkily, strangely. Her arms went around Beatrice, pulling her as close as she possibly could, burying her face into the side of her neck. 

Her fingers rubbed over Ava’s clit, in circles, back and forth. She moved down and slipped a single digit into her, a move that might just as well have been an accident for how wet Ava was. It kept her palm pressed over her clit, moving with the motion of her finger, and God, when had Ava gotten this easy to please? She began to tap Beatrice’s shoulder with the flat of her palm, nodding her head.

“Yes, yes, right there. Don’t stop doing that. Fuck, you’re really—” Whatever stupid thing she’d been about to say was cut off by a loud, strangled moan. Had Ava said two minutes? It would take an actual intervention from God for her to last another thirty seconds grinding on Beatrice’s palm, feeling her finger moving, curling, feeling a second one ready to join it. 

Ava felt the coil in her stomach tighten to an almost unbearable degree. She reached down and put her hand to Beatrice’s wrist, stopping her before she could push her over the edge. “Wait.” Ava panted.

Beatrice pulled back, looking concerned. Her braid had been almost completely pulled loose and strands of hair were falling all around her face.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no.” Ava kissed her and started pushing her back toward the table behind them. She gently extracted the hand from her trousers. “But I want it to be you first.”

“Oh—” Beatrice’s bum hit the edge of the table and juddered it. Ava chased her, not letting a single inch of space exist between them. She pushed her hands over Beatrice’s knees, onto her thighs, feeling the fabric of her tights scratch against the palms of her hands. She felt the exact moment that Beatrice started to shake, perhaps even at the origin of it, a few inches above her knee, almost to her hips. 

“God, I’m gonna make you feel so good.” Ava babbled as she fumbled under the many folds of Beatrice’s skirt. She made it under only to find herself contending with the control top of her tights. “Has anybody ever used their mouth on you before?” She asked. She knew the answer was no, but she wanted to hear it, to see the confirmation.

It wasn’t that Ava had ever been stirred by the thought of being the first at doing something; she’d been disavowed of the idea that that sort of thing was sexy many, many years before. But she liked the idea that being the only person for Beatrice might make it impossible for her to get rid of the memory. That she might have to be with Ava inside her while she was sitting in the pews, thumbing her rosary, taking her morning walk, cooking dinner for the others in the convent. That it might feel to Beatrice like she’d swallowed a stone that wouldn’t budge itself from her insides. 

Beatrice shook her head back and forth. Ava could see her struggling to breathe. “Do you want me to?” Beatrice nodded frantically. “Fuck. Okay, take this off.” 

They worked together to find the buttons at the back of Beatrice’s dress and pulled at them. One went clattering to the ground. The dress slipped off her and puddled to the floor, leaving Beatrice in just her tights and the mock turtleneck. 

Ava took her by the backs of her thighs and made to lift her to the surface of the table, but something obstructed them and promptly fell to the floor. 

“Oh, Ava—the books.” 

It was the journal. Ava blinked down at it, and the others that Beatrice had left piled around the table. “Shit. Okay, one second.”

With monumental effort, she pried herself away from Beatrice’s body and ran, pants open, to the sink. She turned it on with an elbow and put soap to her hands and washed them faster than she’d ever done it before, shaking them out and reaching for a paper towel to dry them on. 

When she turned to go back for the books, she saw Beatrice staring at her. She’d kicked off her shoes and scooted around the edge of the table to watch her. Her expression was—to Ava, it looked like she was a half-second away from crying, or laughing, or some other sudden and uncontrollable expression of emotion. It made her stomach knot.

“Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s perfect.” Beatrice said, and looked like she meant it.

Ava walked back to the table and gathered all the books, getting them all into her arms in one go, and walked to place them on the desk. There was some rummaging behind her, and upon looking back she saw that it was Beatrice wriggling out of her tights, popping them off her feet and kicking them away. When she was finished, she leaned against the short end of the table in just her underwear and her shirt. 

For somebody so pathologically afraid of death, Ava really should have been more frightened about how seeing Beatrice half naked would make her feel. That, and—

“Are these boxer briefs?” She’d returned to stand between Beatrice’s legs, to put her hands on her thighs, to pull incredulously at the fabric of her underwear. 

“They’re really comfortable.” Beatrice said, as if she had something to be apologetic for. Ava hooked her hands under her thighs again, and this time she successfully persuaded her to sit fully on the table. Ava could feel her burning against her stomach through the fabric of her underwear. 

“That is so fucking hot.” Ava said, and kissed her, and pulled back to say: “Sorry, but holy shit. Jesus Christ.”

“ Ava. ”

“Lay down.” Ava put a hand to her chest and pressed gently. Beatrice went without any extra persuasion; first to her elbows, then down to her back. Ava watched, leaning over her, keeping her hand at her sternum without pressure, just to steady. She felt the skin of one of Beatrice’s feet against the back of her thigh. She sighed. “You know, you don’t have to—”

“Ava, I know.”

“I’m just saying—”

Beatrice, apparently tired of the exchange, put her hands to the band of her underwear and pushed them down. She lifted her butt to get them to her knees, where they stopped. Ava stared at the hair between her thighs, at the darker ones underneath her belly button. She felt glad that she had to get on her knees anyway. 

She took the underwear and guided it along the rest of its journey, down over her thighs, her calves. She began to lower her own body, steadying herself on the table with her elbows and forearms, until she felt the cool of the concrete beneath her knees. 

“Just say stop any time, if you need to.” Ava said, already hooking her arms around Beatrice’s thighs and pulling her down the table and toward her mouth. Instead of answering, Beatrice reached a hand down. She took a finger and stroked it down Ava’s nose, from between her eyes to the tip. It was a gesture so strange, so affectionate, so articulate, that Ava could’ve laughed with the joy of having received it.

She nuzzled into the inside of Beatrice’s thighs, inhaling deeply, feeling the chalky skin there. Ava tried to draw it out, to kiss and bite, to press her cheek and her nose and her chin against the flesh. But Beatrice hardly seemed interested, or at least not patient enough. Her hips kept jumping, squirming, pushing forward.

So Ava took a small mercy on her and kissed up until her face was pressed between Beatrice’s legs. She nosed through and opened her mouth and tasted her for the first time, warm and wet and alive. She felt the shudder and jerk of Beatrice’s body, the bone of her heel pressing into her back. Ava sighed and pressed forward, not moving yet, just leaving her tongue still for a moment.

When she did begin to move, running her tongue up and over the ridge of her clit, back down, gentle and unpersistent, she raised her eyes to Beatrice’s prostrate body. Ava could see that she was perfectly still except for one of her fists, which was clenched so tightly that her knuckles were going white. Her stomach wasn’t even moving. Ava realized that it was because she wasn’t breathing. 

Ava went on for a minute longer, licking softly, wrapping her lips around her clit but not sucking. She pulled back, feeling the contrast of the slickness on her cheeks and chin against the air of the room. 

“Beatrice?” She raised her body to see her better. Beatrice’s eyes fluttered open and she sat up on her elbows.

“Hm?”

“Are you alright?” Beatrice nodded. Her hair had now come completely out of its braid and her eyes were unfocused. She had started breathing again, heavily, her chest rising and falling. “Breathing while I’m doing it might help.” Ava suggested gently, rubbing a hand against her thigh.

“I think I forgot to for a second.”

“Mmhmm.” Ava nodded. She considered wiping her face, but didn’t see the point. “Should I—"

“Yes.”

Ava stooped again. She put her mouth back in its place, licking a wet stripe from the base of her to the top, and this time all of Beatrice’s air left her in one mighty gush. She made a strangled noise. Ava saw her cover her face, first with both hands, then with her arms, crossing them over her eyes, leaving only her mouth and the loud blush on her neck visible. 

She wasn’t used to doing things, and this thing in specific, slowly. Still, Ava tried. She tried to go with ease, to go gradually. But with every noise Beatrice made, with every tilt of her hips, it became more and more difficult to keep the thread. 

When she wrapped her lips around her clit and sucked for the first time, Beatrice’s hips came wholly off the table and she wailed. Ava pressed them down with a forearm and kept going. She could feel the wetness on her cheeks, her chin, her nose. She felt possessed. 

“Wait—"

Ava came away with a wet sucking noise, coming up again, chest heaving. “Are you okay?”

Beatrice had removed her arms from her face and was up on her elbows again, nodding. Ava touched her, an open hand on her stomach, and felt the muscles underneath her palm tremble. 

“I just—“ Beatrice sucked in a breath. “—can’t catch my breath. And my heart is—" She put a hand on her chest as if to try and discern if it was still there.

“That’s normal.” Ava said, trying to be comforting, trying not to focus on the fact that she had come in one of her nostrils and strands of hair plastered to one of her cheeks.

“Are you sure?”

“Does it feel good?” Beatrice paused. Then, she nodded. “Then it’s normal.” Ava stroked her hand up, over the fabric of her shirt and to her jaw. Beatrice let her cheek fall into her palm. “I’m right here. I’ve still got you.”

“Okay.” Beatrice said, quietly. She turned her head to kiss Ava’s palm, then lowered herself back against the table. Before she could move her hands back over her face, Ava took one, tangling their fingers together and holding it on the table by her side. 

There was something different about the way Beatrice’s body moved the third time. It was looser, more insistent, and Ava felt more able to follow its cues. She squeezed her hand and pressed into her so hard that she heard the table scoot against the floor and had to steady Beatrice’s body to keep it from slipping off.

The noises Beatrice was making began to evolve into words. At first it was just one— oh, over and over again, when her thighs grew tighter around Ava’s cheeks and Ava felt her heels come to rest at her shoulder blades.

And then it was Ava, and Ava was sure she’d never heard her name sound quite like that. She began to think that Beatrice was using it as a placeholder for saying God, which pleased her. So she chased it harder, using her tongue and her lips, licking and sucking in a pattern that grew in chaos. 

“Ava, Ava, Ava—" Beatrice’s grip on her hand tightened. Her heels pressed into Ava’s back. Her body lengthened, back arching, and Ava pressed up to meet her. The air around them right before she came was electric, and for one long, breathless moment Ava thought it might never happen. 

But it did. Beatrice made a sound that was so close to a sob that Ava almost stopped altogether and her body tightened, trembling. Ava could feel the way her feet curled and how her calves, whether on purpose or without Beatrice’s knowledge, drew her in closer and held her there. 

For a second, she couldn’t breathe for how closely she was clutched against Beatrice. But her body loosened in the next breath, slumping against the table, trembling in the aftermath. Ava kept licking, gently, slowly, until Beatrice sighed and shifted her hips away.

She switched to kissing her knees, her thighs, burying her face into the skin, nipping. Beatrice’s body jumped and she giggled, gently pressing against Ava’s forehead with the palm of her hand.

“Are you ticklish?”

“Not usually— Ava, stop!” She shrieked with surprised laughter when Ava buried her face into the crease of her thigh, kissing, hands pinching gently at her sides. 

Ava pulled herself up at the same time Beatrice rose to sit. She ended up standing between her spread thighs again, Beatrice tilting herself up and toward her, and they kissed again so seamlessly, so effortlessly, that Ava forgot to be worried about what Beatrice would think about the state of her face. 

Beatrice’s ankles locked around her and her arms went about Ava’s shoulders. Ava could feel warmth and wetness against the part of her stomach that was exposed by her open jeans. It was a reminder of the state of her own body, how it throbbed and ached, how badly she wanted .

When the kiss deepened, when Beatrice started to squirm again against her, Ava was no longer surprised and no longer nervous. She just wanted to do whatever it was that Beatrice wanted her to do. It was a primal impulse, a thoughtless one.

Beatrice pulled back. “Can we—"

“Yeah—here, put your hand here—" She took one of Beatrice’s hands and moved it between their bodies, over her own clit. Ava’s hand joined her and she moved her hips back to bracket them in, to give Beatrice some leverage.

The desperation was still there, just quieter. There was no longer the question of if they were going to find each other, just how many ways they could think of to do it, or how long they could go for until there was no more energy left to keep discovering.

Beatrice gasped directly into Ava’s mouth when Ava pressed a finger into her and Ava could feel, against her stomach, the pace of Beatrice’s hand increasing. Their bodies moved tightly, rocking in a half rhythm, kissing interrupted by sighs or gasps or the clicking sound of their hands working together. 

“I’m going to—"

“I’ve got you, I’ve—"

They both moaned when she came, Ava because she could feel it against her hand and fingers and stomach. 

“Shit.” Beatrice said. Ava laughed, delighted.

“Oh my God, what?”

But she didn’t seem overly interested in banter. Her hands were going to Ava’s pants, trying to get them down, and Ava was doing the same with her turtleneck. Their mouths crashed together. Ava wondered deliriously how long it would take them to leave that room, if they would ever leave it. It felt like they might be down there trading blows for years.

“I want to do that to you.” Beatrice said between kisses. She got Ava’s pants to her knees and pulled back, allowing Ava to wrest her shirt from her. Their bodies came together immediately, like there was no longer any time to coyly admire each other. “With my mouth.”

“God, yeah. Just give me a second to—"

Suddenly, from in the stacks, there was a crash. They startled apart, both of their heads turning toward the noise. When Beatrice looked back at her, her expression was concerned.

“Uh, hang on.” Ava handed Beatrice’s shirt back and pulled up her pants without buttoning them. Her heart was still racing from everything that had just happened. It made it difficult to discern what was going on. “I’ll go check it out. I’m sure something just fell.”

But she didn’t want to. Ava had a sense that once she stepped away, it would all be over. Still, she walked back through shelves, checking them out row by row like the night she’d gone looking for Beatrice. Ava found the culprit in the second to last one, hunched on the top level like a gargoyle and surveying the pile of dropped books with something like satisfaction.

“You and I have beef.” Ava hissed at the cat, stooping to gather the fallen volumes and put them back in their proper place. Lilith only stared, tail swishing, with the confidence of something that knew it had already won. “I hope you get picked up by a hawk.”

Lilith jumped down, shuddering the shelf again and sending the books Ava had just cleaned clattering back to the floor.

“Ava?”

“Just a second!” Ava called.

Ava could tell as soon as she reentered the room she was right, and that most of the madness had been drained from it. Beatrice was back in her clothes, leaning against the table, re-braiding her hair. 

She watched Lilith leave the way she came, through the crack in the door that Beatrice had opened, with a sour frown.

“It was just Lilith.” She said, and Beatrice hummed, tightening the elastic at the ends of her hair. Her eyes were still dark, still blown, and her cheeks still pink, but there was something contemplative about her. Ava didn’t think she seemed upset, exactly, but like she’d been given a minute to think and now could not stop.

“Do you have any more appointments today?” Beatrice shook her head. Ava sighed. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch her, to wrestle her back out of her clothes and back into what they’d just been doing. “Why don’t I take you home?”

They existed in a liminal space for the entire drive, which was brief and fraught and thick. Ava could feel Beatrice’s eyes on her the whole way. She felt a few times that she might have to pull over, into the woods, to address the feeling that was filling the car ceiling to windows to trunk. She could still feel the unanswered ache between her thighs, and the way Beatrice was looking at her, Ava thought she might be able to feel it too.

“Pull over here.” Beatrice said when they were five minutes away from the convent, on a quiet stretch of road without any houses. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

Ava did as she was told, if only so she could finally turn her head and meet Beatrice’s gaze. “It’s freezing outside, I can just—“ She was cut off by a kiss, open-mouthed and messy. Beatrice had come over the console and cupped her neck. Ava wasn’t sure if it was meant to distract her, but it had the opposite effect. It made Ava feel sort of old fashioned about the whole thing, like she wanted to watch Beatrice until she disappeared into the front door of the convent, or the chapel window, or— “Come home with me.” In lieu of an answer, of an inevitable no, Beatrice kissed her again, chaster and sadder. Ava’s heart clenched. “At least let me drive you the rest of the way.”

“Ava.” Beatrice said fondly, stroking her cheek with her thumb. “You can get away with a lot, but you can’t go into a convent looking like that.”

Ava had no idea what she looked like. Hadn’t thought about it for hours. Beatrice looked fine, a little dreamy but overall put together. 

Beatrice shrugged on her jacket and tied her veil around her head with the quick motion of somebody who’d been doing it for years. She opened the car door, letting in a gust of cold air. She turned back.

“I’ll call you.” Beatrice said.

“I’ve heard that one before. Never from a nun, though.” Ava responded, a joke that was actually, desperately not a joke at all. 

Beatrice just smiled, squeezed Ava’s hand once, and left, shutting the door behind her. Ava resisted the urge to pull down her mirror and see what she looked like. Instead, and against her better judgment, she walked Beatrice walk away until she could no longer see her in the distance. 

***

It was late afternoon when Ava returned home,  and totally dark outside. Mary and Shannon were on the couch, television playing.

“Hey, Ave.” Mary said, barely turning her head. She did a double take when she saw her. “Jesus Christ, did you fall into a drainage ditch on your way back from the church? Where’s your sweater?”

Just as she said sweater , realization dawned on Mary’s face. She sat forward on the couch, covering her mouth with her hands. “Oh my God, you fucked the nun.”

Shannon had been taking a sip of water when she said it and it dribbled from her mouth back into the cup. “Ava did what?”

“Mary, I can’t do this right now.”

“ Ava—"

“No, seriously—" Shannon was looking between them like she was watching a tennis match. “Like an actual nun?”

“I have to take a shower.” Ava dropped her jacket and tote bag and walked toward the bathroom, not listening to whatever Mary and Shannon said to her in response. She entered, she turned on the light and shut the door. She saw herself for the first time.

Her mouth was swollen and her hair in disarray, some of it sticking together, some of it flying away from her head. Her mascara was smudged under one eye and she had a full, blooming hickey against the right side of her neck. 

Looking down, she saw that she did, in fact, have a come stain drying clear white against the fabric of her jeans. She could feel it against her stomach, too. Ava leaned forward on the bathroom counter and looked herself dead in the eye, breathing through her nose, feeling the thud of her heart. She stayed that way for a long time.

***

Beatrice remembered exactly how it had started. She would think of it often but tell no-one, as was her way. 

It was a dream. This was odd on its own because Beatrice did not dream, as a rule, and hadn’t since she was a child. Back then she’d been chronically plagued by nightmares, but her parents had locked their bedroom door at night and the nanny left at 9, and so instead of resigning herself to laying awake and alone, she’d decided that she would simply stop having them.

And she did for her childhood and the majority of her adult life, until a day in late September. It was the night before fall term started at Cambridge; Beatrice knew this because it was one of the only parts of the year in which she got an influx of patrons, and thus she had it marked on her calendar. 

It seemed fitting that Beatrice’s dream was about work. In it, she was sitting at her desk, and her phone was ringing. She picked it up.

“Diocesan archives.” She said, in just the way she did, in just the way she had been for the last seven years.

“Beatrice?” The voice on the other end of the line was a woman’s voice, but not one that Beatrice had ever heard before. Beatrice paused for a moment, unused to hearing her name without Sister in front of it. When a minute went by in which Beatrice hadn’t answered, the woman said it again: “Beatrice, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m—" But then Beatrice blinked and she was in her twin bed, in her nightgown. Both of her bedroom windows were open, letting in a cross breeze that cooled her body. It wasn’t hot, nor was the dream a nightmare, but she could feel sweat gathering underneath her nonetheless.

She did the thing she always did when she woke restless in the night. Beatrice went to Camila’s room, and she knocked quietly and waited for her to answer. Sisters were not supposed to prefer the company of some in their cohort over others. Beatrice had always thought that God might forgive her this one, minor transgression. 

They went down to the kitchen together and quietly put on a kettle for tea. Camila brought down some cookies. 

“What was the dream?” She asked, pulling apart an Oreo and scraping some of the creme off with her teeth.

“I got a phone call.”

“Ooooh, that is scary.” Camila said, and smiled. Her affect always comforted Beatrice, the easy way in which she addressed things. That was really all it took to put the idea that the dream had some sort of significance out of her mind. The kettle whistled. They had tea and whispered about other things.

So when the phone on Beatrice’s desk rang the next day around noon, she wasn’t thinking of it at all. Her mind had moved on to other things; shopping duty that evening, hiring somebody to tune the organ. When she picked up the phone, she said:

“Diocesan archives.” Just as she did, just as she always had. And the woman’s voice on the other end of the line said: 

“Sister Beatrice?”

Beatrice almost dropped it. It wasn’t that the exchange was at all unusual. It was painfully mundane. It was one of a hundred phone calls that she’d get that would go in exactly the same way. But something about it tickled the back of her brain. She held the phone between her ear and shoulder and pinched the skin of her forearm, gently. 

“Are you there?” And Beatrice, startled, realized that she hadn’t responded. 

“Uh, yes. Can I help you?”

“Yeah, my name is Ava Silva. I’m a PhD candidate at Cambridge—"

And so on. They made an appointment for later that week. Beatrice, brain suddenly foggy, noted it in pencil on her calendar. Ava Silva. 10:30 - phd research. She stared at it. 

“Thanks for your help.” There were traffic noises behind Ava, like she was out walking. “I’ll see you then.”

Beatrice blinked. She kept staring at the name. Ava Silva. Ava Silva. “Yes, I’ll see you then.” She said, and hung up the phone. 

Chapter Text

The issue was not, at first, that Ava didn’t know what was happening. She’d been rejected before. More than some. Less than others. That, in fact, was part of the issue that had led her to her predicament in the first place. 

Her relatives had taken turns taking care of her, as if no one of them could bear to keep her for more than a year. Some of them she never spoke to again. People made promises they either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep; to get a coffee, to see a movie. The first boy she’d given a blowjob to in the 11th grade, Connor Mcgowan, had pretended not to know who she was in the hallway the next day. Her married boyfriend had stayed with his wife. And so on and so forth.

So, yes. Ava knew better than anyone the ways in which people could slip into and out of your life without really meaning to either way. 

Take her parents, for instance. She was sure they hadn’t wanted to die. They likely hadn’t wanted to leave Ava, either, because few people had children and raised them with love if they were indifferent to the idea of them being left in an orphanage and then bounced around between increasingly distant relatives.

But they’d done both of those things, quickly and unexpectedly, on a Tuesday afternoon, regardless of how anybody felt about it or what they wanted.  Afterward, Ava had decided that it was best for her to learn not to take things so personally.

It had been getting harder and harder to keep that poise in place. Taking blows was a little easier when she was younger, when she was more elastic. When she had an appetite for another try, and then another, and another. By the start of that term, that appetite had diminished into a vague sense of foreboding. 

By the time she had the thought that Beatrice might not actually call her, after all, it was hanging like an unlatched picture, one corner clinging to the wall while the others dangled. 

On the second day without word, the nail that had been keeping the corner in place loosened in the plaster. Ava felt it like something that was happening in her body. She woke up, rolled over, looked at her phone. She put it away on her nightstand and stared at her ceiling. 

She tried to remind herself that there were many reasons that Beatrice might need time. That she shouldn’t take it personally.

Ava knew Mary noticed, too, because the flat was devoid of nun jokes by that afternoon. On the first, when everything was still trilling with possibility, when Ava was glowing from it, Mary could not stop pointing out that Ava probably could’ve passed her defense without taking a hands on approach. 

But when she found Ava at the kitchen table, mid term papers to grade in front of her and blanket slung over her shoulders, she said nothing. Mary moved around the kitchen quietly for a few minutes, doing nothing of substance, opening cupboards and shutting them, and then paused. 

“I think Shannon might come stay for a few days,” She said, “If that’s alright with you.”

They’d done this before. On the anniversaries of Ava’s parent’s deaths, after a particularly nasty break up. Ava liked Shannon, and when Shannon stayed with them there was always a person in the flat and food in the fridge. There were times when Ava felt like she and Mary were her best friends and times when she felt like they were her fretting, loving mothers. 

“Sure, that’s fine.” Ava said, scribbling something on a paper, not looking up. 

The second day came and went and Shannon arrived on the third. Ava had not made another appointment at the archive because, ostensibly, she had meant to stop going anyway. She regretted it. Showing up there without an appointment smelled awful and desperate and overbearing. Ava tucked the urge deep inside of herself.

Instead, they ate dinner together, the three of them at the table. Shannon made a salad that had at least five colors in it and kept spooning more onto Ava’s plate when she’d cleared it without asking. They watched a Christmas movie together and Ava laughed, even, at the parts where she was supposed to. 

Afterward, when they all went back to their own rooms, Ava laid down and listened to the ambient noises of them getting ready for bed. The flat was small, and either Ava or Mary could be as quiet as they liked and still send vibrations through the thin walls. 

It was all the little minutiae of two people preparing to go to sleep. It was footsteps and the faucet running. It was muted conversation and beats of silence. It was quiet laughter.

Ava’s throat felt tight. She swallowed against it once, twice, three times, and then gave into a baser urge and rolled to get her phone. Knowing that it was too late for Beatrice to still be at the archive unless she was washing the walls, Ava found her contact number and pressed call. She held the phone to her ear. 

Beatrice had never not picked up the phone before, and so Ava had never had the pleasure of hearing the answering machine message. It was Beatrice speaking and she sounded, charmingly, like she was reading from a script she’d written.

Hello, you’ve reached Sister Beatrice at the diocesan archives. If you would like to make an appointment, please leave your name, a contact number, and the nature of your research, and I will call you back as soon as I am able. If you are trying to reach the Parish office, please dial—

And so on. Ava didn’t leave a message. She hung up and rolled onto her stomach, face pressed into her pillow, and felt ashamed for even having done it. The phone was a landline, so it wasn’t like Beatrice would ever know if she didn’t leave a message. It was more about how hearing her voice had made her feel, even in that sweet, stilted cadence. 

It was more about how Ava wanted to call to hear it again. She had to physically turn away from her phone to stifle the urge. She steadied her breathing by force, taking deep breaths in through her mouth and exhaling them through her nose, until she tricked her body into sleep.

And then, on the fourth day—

***

“—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Ava stared straight ahead at the door to the confessional booth. She made the sign of the cross over herself, surprised at how easy it still came. “It’s been…many years since my last confession.”

She had forgotten how uncomfortable these things were, and how small. She and her tote bag were crammed together on a narrow, hard bench. Ava couldn’t yet process the idea of kneeling against the knee rest. She shifted, rustling, still in her overlarge winter jacket and beanie. 

“Please, go ahead.” Said the priest on the other side of the partition. Ava had almost forgotten that there was another person there. She took a deep breath. 

“I have had, uh, lustful thoughts.” She began, and then paused. “About a woman.” She added, and paused again. She tried to feel for the energy of the priest before continuing. “A very religious woman. Well, a nun. And we, uh, consummated those thoughts. Enthusiastically. In a church basement.” Ava felt the moment the silence turned vaguely shocked. She turned toward the partition. “Not one of yours though, don’t worry. I drove far away on purpose. I forget, is water allowed in confession? I haven’t done this since middle school. Hold on.”

Ava rifled in her tote until she pulled out a can of seltzer. She used a fingernail to crack it open. It fizzed. The sound was deafening in the silence of the church. She took a noisy sip, swallowed, and continued: “Sorry, I’ve been running around all day. What was I—oh, yeah. So we did that, but she hasn’t called me. It’s been a few days. I know she has a phone. She’s a nun, she isn’t Amish. And I know she has my number. She said she would call.” Ava took another sip from the can. “I want her to call me. Really badly.” It was the first time she’d admitted it, either out loud or internally. It was relieving. “I know you can’t, like, pray on that for me. You guys are probably pretty anti-nuns having lesbian sex. You are, aren’t you?”

A lengthy pause. The priest cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“Right.” Ava nodded. “Well, that’s not even—that’s just context. I’m not sorry for it. I know that I’m not a good person and that this probably isn’t helping my case. But I’ve been trying, and I’m exhausted. I really am. It’s probably mostly my fault—I mean, I knew she was a nun. Is a nun. But I didn’t stand a chance, really. Anybody who met her would feel the way I do about her. She’s insane. It wasn’t a fair fight.” Ava sucked in a breath.  “I barely know why I’m here, to be honest, except that she seems to find comfort in this stuff, and this is about her, so…” She trailed off, looking down at her lap, at the hand that wasn’t holding the seltzer can. Her knuckles were chapped and white from the cold. Ava’s heart, without warning, started to ache so baldly that it was hard to take breath in. “I guess what I’m sorry for is how badly I want her to pick me over everything else. I know it’s not realistic. And I know it’s selfish. But I don’t want to try any of this over again with somebody new. You know, right before we did it, she called me mean. I don’t think she didn’t want it. But it probably was mean. Her whole life is probably different now. I don’t think she asked for that. So, yeah. I was mean to her.” Ava turned to the partition, heart now too big for her chest. It pushed against the ladder of her rib cage. “Can that be the thing I apologize for? The thing I’m sorry about? Just that. I’m sorry that I was mean to her.”

“You can seek penance for whatever is weighing on your heart.” The priest said, rather diplomatically, all things considered. Ava decided that he was good at his job. She took another, steadying drink of her water, and nodded to herself.

“Then that’s it.” Ava said, “What’s my spiritual damage?”

There was a long silence. Ava imagined the priest in his booth, doing the math. Adding here, subtracting there. Carrying over a 0. “Five Hail Mary’s.” He said, finally. “And don’t do it again.”

“Less than I thought.” She breathed. “No promises on the second one.”

Ava did kneel for the penance. She stayed so through the prayer of absolution. She had no conscious reason for doing so, only that her body decided that it felt right and, these days, Ava did what her body told her to. She clasped her hands together and thought of Beatrice the whole time. 

She considered, briefly, the last time she’d been on her knees. How different and the same it felt to what she was doing then. It probably defeated the point of going to confession.

Afterward, Ava walked from the church sipping her seltzer. She wondered if opening it in the church made it holier, finished it on the steps, and dunked it into an adjacent trash can.

Mary had asked her to pick up groceries on her way home, so she pulled into the parking lot of the nearest store. Ava sat in her car for several long moments before going in. The church confessional had only made her think about Beatrice more. Beatrice’s hair shaken loose from its braid. The way she’d blushed down to the tops of her thighs when she was about to come, the way Ava could see her belly tremble, the way she’d said Ava’s name.

Ava thought about it as she pushed her cart through the store, throwing things in without really understanding what she was doing. She broke in the bread aisle, taking out her phone and hitting the call button under Sister Beatrice again. Again putting the phone to her ear.

Although it was the middle of the day on a weekday, the line rang five times and then clicked. 

Hello, you’ve reached Sister Beatrice at the diocesan archives. If you would like to make an appointment—

This threw Ava. The sickening feeling of what she was going to say to Beatrice was replaced by the realization that Beatrice, if she could do it once, might avoid picking up the phone forever. Ava threw a loaf of sourdough into her cart and hung her head.

When the message ended and the line beeped, instead of hanging up, Ava spoke. 

“Hi. It’s me. Uh, it’s Ava. You probably already knew that. It’s like, 3:30 in the afternoon right now? It’s Wednesday.” Ava kept walking, kept pushing the cart. She was headed toward the till. She paused for so long that she wondered if, when listening, Beatrice would think she’d hung up. “I’m kind of surprised you didn’t pick up. That means you’re not at the archive, I guess. Taking a vacation, maybe.” She reached the till and began to lay her things out on the conveyor, offering a tight smile to the cashier. “I don’t even know what I think you’d be doing on vacation. Do you have to do another job if you’re not doing that one? Do you go to, like, a nursing home?”

“Miss?” The cashier whispered, “Did you bring your bag, or would you like to buy a—”

“A paper one is fine, thanks.”

“Just one?” The cashier looked at the pile of groceries in front of them with a weary frown. Ava nodded.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Sorry, I was just—I’m at the store.” Ava put her card in the chip reader and tried to imagine Beatrice feeding porridge to an old woman, or reading a book to a nursery full of children. She pulled the phone away from her mouth to whisper thank you and take her overstuffed bag from the befuddled employee. “I guess that’s—I’m on a tangent. I just called because I wanted to…” 

She stepped out into the harsh, cold afternoon. All around her, people milled about, pushing their carts and getting into their cars. Her breath condensed in front of her. “I’m sorry, Beatrice, I just needed to—” Right as she said it, the thought came to Ava that, because this was an archive phone and not Beatrice’s, anybody could listen to this message. What if Beatrice got coverage, another nun coming for the days she wasn’t there? Ava scrunched her face. “—read the end of that journal.” She blurted, shaking her head at herself. “I just really, really need to see how that journal ends, Bea—Sister Beatrice. So if you could just call me, and help me out. Even if the answer is no. Okay. Thank you.”

Ava hung up the phone with a harsh tap of her finger. She wanted to throw it on the ground. “Fuck!” She said, loudly enough that a few people turned to look at her.

And then, just as she said it, the bottom of her grocery bag broke and disgorged its contents onto the pavement. She could only watch in defeat and astonishment as apples rolled toward the middle of the parking lot and people gave her loud, public misfortune a wide berth, as if they thought she might be contagious. 

When she got home, Mary said nothing, not about the absence of milk, not about the way Ava came to the flat carrying everything in her arms. She just took some of it from her when it seemed like Ava might drop it for a second time there on their kitchen floor. 

“It’s those paper bags.” Ava sniffed, watching as Mary put the survivors into the cupboards and fridge. “I swear to God they get thinner every time we go.”

Mary only hummed.

On the fifth day, Ava got into the bath with a stack of papers at 3 PM and had not emerged by the time she heard the sounds of dinner being made in the kitchen and Mary and Shannon’s voices having a gentle back and forth. She half-expected it when Mary’s knuckles rapped against the door.

“Come in.” Ava called, scribbling a note in the margin. The door squeaked open and Mary entered, a can in one hand and a cup in the other. 

“Hey, Ave.” She said, “Do you want a water or a beer?”

“My stomach hurts.” Ava didn’t look up. “Water is fine.” 

Mary walked over and sat on the floor by the tub, putting the cup on the wooden shelf that Ava was grading papers on and keeping the beer for herself. “Did your friend call yet?” She asked.

“No.” Ava said. She was focusing so hard on the words in front of her that they blurred. 

She expected a joke, a gentle ribbing. She expected Mary to say something like, rejected by a nun, Ava? New low. Which it was, which would have been true. Instead, Mary took a sip of her beer and said: “I’m sorry, Ava. I know you really like her.”

And that was enough, somehow, to light the smoldering fire in Ava’s chest. Her face got hot under the skin in the way it did right before she was about to cry. But she knew if she let it happen it would be all over, that it would be an acknowledgement of what was happening, that it would all be real, and that perhaps she would not be able to stop. 

So she flexed her jaw. She scrunched and unscrunched her face. She dropped her pen and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “You know how it is,” Ava said, when the threat of weeping felt more distant. “Easy nun, easy go.”

Mary smiled only thinly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m alright.” She said, opening her mouth and taking a breath. Pre-crying snot had dripped down the back of her throat and so the inhale was wet and clicked at the end. “Well, you know. Sort of.” She paused. “Not really, I guess.” And then Ava took a sip of her water. She hadn’t looked at Mary the whole time, but felt her body sort of tilt toward her. 

“You know, Ava,” Mary said, after a few minutes of silence, “For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think it’s because she doesn’t like you. Ten years is a lot of time to be doing something and just stop doing it. I bet it’s the opposite. It’s probably because she does like you.”

A wave crashed over Ava. Her eyes burned. Her lower lip started to tremble. She saw the look of horror that dawned over Mary’s face when she said “ Mary—” and knew it was because of the cartoonish warble in her voice.

“Shit, Ava, I’m sorry, I’m awful at comforting people.”

“It’s okay.” Ava said, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She would not cry. She wouldn’t. Ava took deep breaths and felt the burning begin to recede, to become less urgent. “It’s okay.”

Instead of responding, and probably wisely, Mary just tilted her head to rest it on Ava’s shoulder. Ava sighed at the feeling of it. “Watch it, I’m naked in here.” She said, trying to ebb off the last of the desperate sadness she was feeling.

“Wait, really?” Mary said, then jokingly made to look over the edge of the tub and into the bath. Ava laughed and flinched to cover herself, splashing water. 

“Oh my God, stop.”

“Excuse me,” Shannon appeared at the door, leaning against the frame and smiling. “Could you two carry on your illicit affair a little quieter? I’m trying to cook in there.”

Their words overlapped as they pulled apart, still laughing. “Sorry.” “Sorry, Shannon.”

“Ava, dinner’s in ten minutes.”

“Oh, my stomach kind of hurts, so—”

“Okay.” Shannon shrugged. “I’ll make soup.”

“Wait, Shannon, no, you already—”

“Sorry, can’t hear you. The soup wheels are already turning.” Shannon was angling back toward the kitchen, blithely gesturing to her temples. “I think we have some in the freezer.”

Ava ate the soup sitting between Mary and Shannon, hair wet. Shannon refilled her bowl every time it emptied, and Ava ate even though she wasn’t hungry. 

If Ava remembered that night at the beginning of the term, which she didn’t, which she would never, she would remember the way Mary had said I like you. Shannon likes you. She came up with the idea for the second time on her own, participating in those simple acts of reciprocal kindness. The dependability of Shannon continuing to fill her empty plate, of Mary’s shitty attempts at comforting her. Shannon likes me. Mary likes me. 

It wasn’t everything but, that night, when Ava laid down to go to sleep, she felt a little less like she was once again starting from scratch. 

Beatrice showed up on day six. Ava, later, would find some humor in this. Unlike three, unlike seven, unlike never, it was a number of no significance. It was just Friday. Cold, again, like the day they’d had sex, and threatening to snow. But otherwise totally unremarkable in form and substance. Ava had spent it finishing her grading and then, by the evening, had squirreled herself away into her room to play Tetris on her phone.

The doorbell rang. Because Mary and Shannon were in the living room, Ava waited for them to get it. A second passed.

“Ava,” Mary called, “There’s a nun on our doorstep.”

Ava’s head shot up. Her heart, which before had been quietly plodding along, began to slam. She fell from her bed and jogged into the living room, where she found Mary and Shannon sticking their heads out the window. 

“Which one?” She asked breathlessly. Shannon turned to look at her. 

“How many do you have?”

Not paying attention, Ava crammed her body into a line with theirs and stuck her own face out into the cold night air. 

And there, just like that, was Beatrice. She was standing on the front steps, veil on, wearing—it took a second for Ava to realize that it was Mary’s sweater, the one she’d worn the last time she’d gone to the archive, over the top of her dress. 

“Beatrice?” She called, and Beatrice physically startled, looking up. Ava, Shannon, and Mary all waved. Hesitantly, Beatrice waved back. “I’ll be right down.”

Ava whipped around the apartment like a tornado. She grabbed her jacket, pulled her beanie over her head, fetched her keys and toed on her boots. Mary and Shannon watched her, faces inscrutable, from the window. 

“I’ll be right back.” Ava said, not lingering to register what their reaction was, if they even had one. She shut the door behind herself and tore down the stairs.

She wasn’t sure why, but she half-expected Beatrice not even to be there when she opened the front entrance to the flat. Like maybe the whole thing had been a trick of the light. 

But of course she was there. Beatrice was, in many ways, as dependable as the moon pulling the ocean tide in and out. She was there, and her face was chapped with cold, and she was wearing Mary’s sweater and her Blundstones. And, when she saw Ava, she smiled.

Ava smiled back. They stood like that for a moment, in the threshold, drinking each other in. The sweater, Ava noticed, fit Beatrice better than it had herself. Where it had been overlarge on Ava, it hung normally on Beatrice. Even the sleeves were the right length. Noticing that made Ava feel something so sudden, so new, that she was sure she had no name for it. It was like Beatrice, in the midst of a magic trick, had pulled some foreign coin from behind Ava’s ear and placed it into the palm of her hand without explanation.

Ava was afraid to do anything to push the moment forward, to disturb it. But she figured she didn’t have a choice, that they couldn’t stand outside looking at each other forever.

“Do you want to come upstairs?” She asked, “I think we have some leftovers from dinner. And some, uh, beers.” As if Beatrice was going to come along, have cold spaghetti and a Stella. Maybe in Ava’s wildest dreams. 

Beatrice’s smile deepened. It crinkled the corners of her eyes. “No, thank you, Ava. I don’t think I’ll stay for very long.”

And there it was. Ava let her air leave her in a woosh , stepped forward, and shut the door behind her. She sat on the steps and felt Beatrice drop next to her. They stayed like that, side by side, for several moments that felt at once to be the longest of Ava’s life and take no time at all. 

“Ava—” Beatrice began, after a moment. Ava turned and saw that she was worrying her hands together, twisting her fingers. Ava resisted the urge to reach out and lay her palm atop hers.

“It’s—you’re fine.” Ava laughed in one puff. “Typically happy news isn’t preceded by five days of radio silence. You don’t have to—” She wasn’t sure what she was even trying to absolve Beatrice of. The need to talk around it, perhaps? Whatever it was, Beatrice seemed grateful. She ducked her head.

“I got your message.” She said, “At the archive.”

Ava’s face colored with embarrassment. “Not my finest moment, sorry. Were you there all week?”

“Only today. I’d taken—an extended break. Not in a nursing home.” She said, wryly, looking at Ava from the corner of her eye, lips upturned. “I was praying.”

“Ah, praying!” Ava smacked her forehead jokingly with her palm and they both laughed. “How could I have forgotten?”

It was a sweet moment, but the kind that soured in the context of the circumstances as soon as it had a moment to breathe. Beatrice sobered almost immediately, and the twisting of the hands began anew, and Ava’s heart plummeted deeper into her stomach. 

“You asked about the end of the journal.” Beatrice said, “In your message.”

“Oh, God.” Ava’s head fell to her hands. “Ignore that. I was just—I didn’t want to rat on you, if anybody else was listening.”

“It’s alright, I’ll tell you.” Beatrice’s voice was quiet. She still wasn’t quite looking at Ava, focusing instead on her hands, Even after Ava lifted her head and looked at her. “The two of them left the church in the year after it was written. I believe they raised…horses, for a time, in Newmarket. But they were very happy together, and for a long time. At least, as I understand it.”

Ava laughed. It was loud, sudden, ugly. Beatrice looked up with her brow furrowed. “What?”

“Why are you lying to me?”

Beatrice started laughing too, tinged with incredulity. “I’m not. Her nieces donated the journal to the archive. They have very fond memories of them.” Then, with mock offense: “Are you accusing a nun of being a liar?”

“Yes, an alarmingly shameless one.”

“Well, I’m not. That’s what happened.”

Ava tamped down her smile. “You’re lying to me to make me feel better about getting dumped.”

“I’m not dumping you.” Beatrice sobered. “Or if I am, I’m doing it very gently.” She sucked in a breath then, as if whatever she was going to say next was going to be both unpleasant and completely dire, but she still had a half-smile on her face, as if she couldn’t quite shake the humor of it. “I am telling you because you have incurred a lifetime ban from the diocesan archives, so I’m afraid you won’t be able to finish it yourself.” All at once, they were both laughing again, taken, perhaps, by the naked absurdity of it all. “Which is an honor, by the way. You should take it as a compliment. And you’re stuck with whatever I say the ending is, anyway.”

Without Ava noticing, snow had started to fall. It collected on her face and melted against the heat of her skin. It wasn’t until she reached to brush it away that she realized she was crying. Unlike with Mary, it had happened all at once. Stricken her while she was down. She hadn’t even felt it, like a wound so mortal her body was trying to protect her.

Beatrice noticed, though. “Oh, Ava.”

“I’m fine. I’m a crier.” She was not either of those things. Ava dug her heels into her eyes again, to no avail, but at least she wasn’t looking at Beatrice’s stricken face anymore. “I feel like I did something wrong.” She admitted, her voice again warbling and cartoonish. 

“No, no, you didn’t.” Beatrice scooted her body across the few inches that lay between them. She didn’t reach out to touch Ava, which Ava was grateful for. “I like you so much, Ava. That’s the problem. But I can’t really imagine that it’s wrong .” Ava started to cry harder. She couldn’t see Beatrice’s face, but imagined it looked something like Mary’s had yesterday afternoon at the bath. “I’m doing this wrong, aren’t I?”

“No.” Ava raised her head from her hands, mouth tasting like salt and cheeks red. She sniffled noisily, unpleasantly. “This is actually pretty good for your first break up. It’s just all going to be very hard to explain to my academic advisor.”

“It’s not about you. Or it is, but only because you did something really beautiful for me. Really unexpected.” Beatrice’s hand groped clumsily over and found Ava’s on her lap, grasping it. “I’ll never forget that. But whatever I do next has to be about me, and you deserve somebody who’s only real concern is you.”

“Oh my God.” An avalanche of fresh tears was gathering behind Ava’s eyes. She would be mortified, if she hadn’t already terminally embarrassed herself 10 or 15 minutes ago.

“I really feel like I’m not doing this right.”

“No, you are.” Ava sniffled again, tilting her head back. She felt flakes of snow fall on her cheeks, her eyelashes. “I just thought the first time somebody said that to me, it would make me really happy.” Beatrice squeezed her hand and moved her own back into her lap. “Right thing, wrong time.” Ava murmured, mostly to herself, though she knew by the way that Beatrice’s shoulders slumped that she’d heard it too.

They sat in silence for two or three minutes. Snow gathered on them, on the tops of their heads, or was blinked away. Ava saw a car pass by once, and circle the block. She didn’t think anything of it until it did the same thing a minute and a half later, driving slowly. Ava squinted.

“Is that…Sister Camila?”

Beatrice rolled her eyes, shook her head. “She said she was finding parking.”

“How did you know where we lived, anyway?”

“You gave your address when you registered for your first appointment.”

Ava snorted. “God, did I give you my social security number, too?”

A smile played out over Beatrice’s mouth. She gently bumped their shoulders together. “Our mailers are very good. I think you won’t regret it.”

“Good to know that I’ll still be getting mailers even in my lifetime ban era. Are you going to like, put a poster of my face on the entrance of the church? Do not, under any circumstances, admit this person to the archives?”

Beatrice’s smile turned, as it was wont to do, intolerably fond. “Now there’s an idea.”

There was a moment, then, in which it became clear that there was nothing left to say. Ava grieved for it. She wished, paradoxically, that she had never flung open the front door at all. Just let it be a sort of Shrodinger’s break up. Now Beatrice would have to leave, and her leaving would probably be so stilted and horribly mundane that it would sully all the rest of it. 

When Camila drove by again, Beatrice sucked in a breath. “I should—”

“One second.” Ava said, alight with something. “Can you wait here for just a minute?”

Beatrice blinked, looking bewildered. “Alright.”

Ava glanced back and up at the apartment window just in time to see Shannon and Mary yank their heads in. She frowned. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

She darted into the apartment and flew up the stairs. Inside, Shannon and Mary had hastily arranged themselves into a portrait of hadn’t just been listening. Shannon was mixing something at the stove and Mary was on the couch, reading a copy of Better Homes and Gardens that they’d gotten in the mail six months ago and put off throwing out ever since. 

“Do we have a pen?” Ava asked, ignoring them, going to the pile of papers. She found the first and most conveniently sized thing, an appointment reminder card from her dentist that came in the little satchel with toothbrush and extra floss. 

“Here.” Shannon handed her one from the kitchen drawer, and Ava hastily scribbled something on the back of the card. AVA, her name, in all caps, followed by her number. 

“Thanks.” Ava said, and flew back out the door.

On the stoop, it was snowing harder. Beatrice was standing, and Camila’s car had come to an idle on the curb. Ava came out, paused on a step right above her, and handed her the card. Her face was tight from the drying tears.

“I know you already have my number. And you know my name. But just in case you forget either.” She said, when Beatrice had taken and read it. When she looked up at Ava, her eyes were wet, too.

“I should give this back to you.” Beatrice said, tugging at the hem of the sweater. Ava shook her head. 

It became clear to Ava that Beatrice wanted to leave as little as Ava wanted her to. That she was stalling as much as Ava was. She saw it in her eyes, which were glassy, and in her mouth, which was twisted into something not quite a frown and not quite a smile but also not neutral. 

Ava looked at the sweater. She looked at how right it seemed on her. “It fits you better. You should keep it.” She said, honestly. But it wasn’t what she’d meant. Ava realized in the same breath the feeling that seeing her had evoked. The nature of the coin in her hand, of the ache in her heart. Then, she realized what she’d actually meant to say, and, because she had nothing else to lose, she said it. “I love you.” Ava knew it was true for several reasons. The perfect insanity, the sheer nonsense of it. The way in which she could not see the point at which it began nor the point at which it might end. For Ava, it felt like she might as well be about to spend the rest of her life out in those steps, feeling exactly that way.  She knew, also, because Beatrice looked like she believed her, and she looked like it was at once the best and most awful thing anybody had ever said to her. “I’m sorry, I know I’m probably being mean again. I promise it’s the last time, though.”

Beatrice looked at her for a moment. Then, she took one half step forward and tossed her arms around Ava’s shoulders. She leaned in and kissed her, right at the corner of her mouth. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds. Ava was still chasing the feeling by the time Beatrice stepped back.

“I’ll see you later, Ava.” She said, and Ava sniffled hard, nodding, scuffing her shoe.

“Yup, yeah, see you later.”

Beatrice disappeared into the car, sweater and all, which stalled for a half a moment before driving away, as if she and Camila were having some sort of conversation. Ava remained on the stoop for a few more minutes, frozen in time. She almost felt like, if she waited long enough, the car would come circling back around the block.

But it didn’t. Ava tromped back upstairs, leaving a trail of half-melted snow in her wake. She opened the door to the flat and found Mary and Shannon in much the same way they had been.

“Are you guys making cookies?” She asked, sniffing the air incredulously. Shannon was mixing together something that looked a lot like icing on the kitchen counter. “I’m really not—I’m not hungry right now.”

“Who said I’m making them for you?” Shannon said, not looking up from what she was combining. “Sometimes we just get a craving for cookies.”

And there they were again. Ava pretended not to notice that the cookies were her favorite kind. Shannon pretended not to care if Ava ate any. All of them said nothing when Ava went to the bathroom and washed the salt crust from her face and returned cleaner, but still red, like a newborn baby. 

It was not everything. But what the hell was everything , anyway, Ava wondered, and in the same breath wondered when she’d started winding herself so hard in the pursuit of it. 

***

Ava’s favorite movie as a child had been Clue . Besides the early and confusing feelings it evoked for Madeline Kahn, the many endings of it spoke to some unfulfilled promise of whimsy in the universe. Of options. She liked choose-your-own adventure books, too, for similar reasons, but was the fondest of Clue because of how plainly it laid out all the choices. How there were so many possibilities in disguise as endings. The black title card. The white, swirling font. This is what could have happened. 

To Ava, later, this would begin to feel like a story with many beginnings. Or possibilities disguised as beginnings. Some of which she knew about, some of which she remembered. Most of which she did not.

This is what could have happened. Ava, puke on her shirt, drunk on her knees and praying to God. Beatrice, humming in the back stacks while Ava listened in the front. A dream about a phone call. A phone call. An I love you, a kiss that felt like a me too. 

But then, always, at the end of the movie, while Ava watched on wrapped in a blanket, light flickering across her face, the final card. The ending that really was the ending. Black. White, swirling font. A declaration:

***

But here’s what really happened. 

***

“Ava, put that away. We’re doing family dinner.”

“Uh-huh. Sorry. My therapist just sent me like, a worksheet or something.” Ava squinted, tongue slightly out, and leaned toward her computer screen. When Shannon put a plate of tortellini in front of her, she lifted the laptop up and put it into her lap.

“Her therapist.” Shannon stage-whispered to Mary, who was already spearing pasta onto her fork. Mary shook her head.

“I know. Who does this bitch think she is?” She stage-whispered back, and Ava stuck her tongue further out, glaring. Then, an e-mail popped into her inbox.

“Oh.” Ava said. And then, frowning, “Oh no.”

“What?” Shannon had settled herself into the spot across from Mary and next to Ava. 

“JC’s mom is sick.” Ava said. “He needs to go home for a couple weeks. He asked me to take over his class.”

“JC.” Mary wiggled her eyebrows. Ava rolled her eyes. 

“Stop it. That was one time. I was in a dark place.” 

“But he likes you.” Shannon offered. “Doesn’t he? You’re always talking about how he’s trying to get you to go to coffee with him.”

“I am not doing that right now, as you know.” Groans from around the table. “What? It’s a therapist prescribed period of celibacy. You guys can’t get mad at me for that. One could say that I’ve taken—”

“Ava, please—”

“ — My own vows of chastity.”

Mary rolled her eyes and tossed her fork down onto her plate with a clink. Shannon snickered into her dinner. “Don’t laugh at that. It just encourages her.”

“Sorry. Ava, honey, it’s been six months of that. Maybe it’s time to try something else.”

Ava’s eyes flicked between them. They narrowed. “I thought you guys were in favor.” Ava figured that they at least thought that whatever Ava was doing beat the nine hectic months that preceded celibacy. 

“We are so supportive.” Shannon chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Celibacy just makes you a tad irritable.”

Ava considered this. She thought that Shannon’s perspective might have been impacted somewhat by what had happened two days ago while they rode their bikes to campus. Somebody had almost doored Ava and Ava had gotten off her bike and almost pulled him out of his car by the lapels of his jacket. Shannon had to hold her back with an arm around her waist. 

“Plus, JC seems nice.” Mary offered, half hearted in the way she was any time she talked about a man. Ava understood nice to be a substitute for the words blandly inoffensive. 

“He is nice.” Ava agreed, and she also meant blandly inoffensive. 

There was a twinge of uncomfortable silence between the three of them. This always happened when even the suggestion of Beatrice or Ava entering into another serious relationship came up. Ava had not missed, over the last year and a half or so, the looks of worry they exchanged when they passed a Christmas choir singing Nearer my God to Thee, during the entire week before and after Easter, and any time Ava took a bath that lasted for more than an hour. 

Ava wanted to ask them how they expected her to form anything like a romantic relationship with another living human being again—especially JC, who was cute, yes, but mostly just nice. In the beginning, right after it had happened, she’d been fucking half-heartedly and infrequently for a few months, but the suggestion of taking an extended break from sex had honestly been a warm relief. Even if it made her irritable. 

“Is it warm in here? I’m feeling hot.” Ava cupped her hands to her ears. “My ears are warm.”

“Means somebody’s thinking about you.” Mary said. “Maybe it’s—"

“Don’t.”

“Are you going to help him?” Shannon asked, blessedly moving the conversation along. 

“He said I’ll get paid hourly.” Ava shrugged, looked down at the e-mail. “Plus I’ll finally get to teach Women in the Crusades.” 

“There you go, champ.” Mary said chipperly, picking up her fork and beginning to eat again. “Maybe spring will finally be your term.”

***

She convinced Mary to come to campus with her the next day. JC had left some notes in the shared grad student office, and Ava sweetened the deal with the promise of a coffee. They ambled through the quad toward the humanities building, sipping their drinks, chatting lightly. It was the day before spring term and they were still locked in a spell of bitter cold. The students who had already returned to campus were bundled up in jackets, scarves, hats.

And so it was the sweater Ava noticed first. She saw the color from the corner of her eye and did a double take, turning her head away from where Mary was talking about something she’d done at work the previous day. 

“Fuck—come here.” Ava took Mary by the sleeve of her jacket and pulled her behind an adjacent tree. Some of Mary’s coffee splashed over the lid and she swore.

“What the fuck, Ava?”

“That’s her.” Ava hissed. They both craned her heads around the tree.

“Who’s her? Oh—shit, her, seriously?” Mary squinted out. “Are you sure?”

Ava was sure, because one never forgot the nun that they had a surprisingly tender sexual encounter with in a church basement. Even without that being true, she would have recognized Beatrice immediately. She was sitting across the quad. Her hair had nothing covering it and was down loose over one shoulder. She had on the sweater and a hooded jacket over that, loose pants and those fucking Blundstones. 

She was holding a book up to her face, using both hands, nose so deep into it that it might as well have been touching the spine. It obscured most of her features. Ava felt like she was going to throw up.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” Ava said quietly. 

“She’s not looking very nun-like.” Mary commented, then frowned. The implication of it set in—that Beatrice might not be a nun anymore and that, despite this, she had not called—she clicked her tongue and looked down at Ava. “Ava, I’m—”

“That’s alright. It’s fine. I’m being silly.” Ava shook her head, though something tight and aching had settled in her chest. 

“It’s a big campus.” Mary murmured, as if Beatrice was going to hear them across the quad. She hadn’t even looked up from her book. “Who knows what she’s doing here. It might not be—”

“Mary, it’s fine. Let’s just—” Ava began to walk away from the tree, Mary trailing after her. “—she’s clearly not paying attention.”

They began to walk off towards the humanities building. Ava stared ahead resolutely. 

“Ava—” She tried again, but Ava cut her off before she could say anything more.

“It’s been, like, a year and a half.” She said, “I’m fine. I’ve moved on. She probably has, too. She wasn’t like, legally required to call me.” 

But that night, as she laid in bed, Ava took out her phone and scrolled down to her Sister Beatrice contact, which she had not altered and not deleted. She hadn’t called, either. And now she understood that, if she did, some other non-Beatrice nun would probably pick up. 

Then she rose and tiptoed to her closet, as if she were doing something wrong. She opened it and, sitting on the floor, she pulled out a shoebox that sat underneath a pile of coats. Inside was a year and a half of church mailers. Ava sighed, letting her head fall against the frame of the closet. It wasn’t that she’d never felt stupid for keeping them before, just that she’d never felt as stupid as she did in that moment.

How long had it been since Beatrice left? Ava let herself rifle through them. Was she gone by the previous Easter? By Christmas? How long had she not been calling for? 

If she is a student, Ava thought, it’s been a while. She sucked her teeth and slammed the lid back onto the shoebox, shoving it into the closet. It didn’t matter. Mary was right. It was a big campus, and Ava didn’t have any idea what she was doing there. She might not have even been a student. And Ava had also meant what she said. She had moved on. She had. She had. 

***

There was nothing special about the outfit she picked out to teach JC’s class the next day. There was nothing special about the way she woke after pressing snooze exactly three times, about the way she ate cereal at the table while Mary sipped her coffee. Her commute to campus was wholly regular, as was the way she stopped at a cafe to review JC’s notes and, after losing track of time, the way she made it to the lecture hall with exactly one minute to spare.

Ava did not look up as she blustered into the classroom, letting her tote bag fall from her shoulder and going immediately to the chalkboard. She picked up a chalk, began to scribble her name. 

“Sorry for being late. As some of you may have heard, Professor Thompson is going to be out for your first handful of classes. My name is Ava, and I will be filling in for him. Now, this is Women in the Crusades section one, so if you think you’re in the wrong section—” Ava put the curl on her final a and turned around. Her heart stuttered and stalled completely in her chest.

Beatrice was sitting in the third center row. Of course she was. Front was too desperate, the second too obviously trying not to be desperate. Third row was for students who wanted to be attentive without making a spectacle of themselves. She was wearing a bomber jacket that day, zipped up.

And her face. Ava hadn’t been able to see it the previous day, hidden as it was by her book, but there it was. She almost dropped the chalk looking at it. Looking at the way Beatrice looked at her, with wide eyes and slightly parted lips. For one staggering moment, they might as well have been the only two people in the room.

But they weren’t. Of course they weren’t. Ava cleared her throat and tried to get her heartbeat under control. “—If you think you’re in the wrong section, please talk to me after class. I’ll sort you out.”

She lingered after the finished her lecture, purposefully not looking up at the stream of students as they filtered out. Ava tried to tell herself that the feeling she had when the room was empty, when not one person lingered to talk to her, was not disappointment. That it was simply leftover anxiety from what had been an objectively shocking realization. 

Ava put her things back into her tote composing an email in her head apologizing to JC and saying that she could no longer teach his class. She tried to think of any excuse that didn’t make her seem like a lunatic, her brain whirring as she stomped out of the classroom, head down, into the cold of the outside, and then—

“Jesus Christ.” Ava exclaimed as she bumped into something solid and human shaped. She looked up. 

“No, just me.” Beatrice said. She looked half-shy, half-pleased with her own joke. A backpack was slung over her shoulders. Ava opened her mouth and sucked in a breath, but it just wasn’t enough. They were so near that she could smell her. So close that she could see everything she hadn’t been able to the previous day. 

Beatrice looked so close to exactly the same that Ava thought, if she darted out a hand and reached into her pocket, she might come up with a fruit or a well-loved paperback novel. But there were things different about her, also. They were just indescribable, like she’d waxed fully into herself as gradually as a full moon. 

“I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry.” Beatrice said when a moment passed in which Ava gawked and said nothing. “I just didn’t want to approach you in class and make it seem like—well, it was probably stupid.”

“No, not stupid.” Ava said, finally finding her voice. She adjusted the strap of her tote bag on her shoulder. “Thoughtful. Thank you.”

Beatrice hmmed, almost anxiously. She darted her tongue out to wet her bottom lip. Students milled about them. “How are you?” She blurted, then winced. Ava smiled tightly. 

“I’m…fine.” She said. “And you? I mean—here you are. Out here.”

A small smile touched Beatrice’s lips. That, too, was achingly familiar. “Yes. Here I am.”

“Under happy circumstances, I hope?”

“Yes.” Ava looked down at her shoes. She felt she had to swallow the tinge of hurt before it showed on her face. She wouldn’t let her hurt make her cruel. 

“Well, I, um—” Ava sniffed and looked back up, having schooled her face adequately. “—I can help you switch sections, if you want.” She pretended not to notice when Beatrice’s smile lost some of its fullness. “Or if you wanted to skip a few classes and get notes from your friends, I wouldn’t tell on you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” Beatrice’s eyebrows pinched. 

“Yeah, I mean. I figure if you had wanted to see me you would have—” Ava paused, tried to decide how to say the next thing without sounding bitter, or jilted, although seeing Beatrice face to face was making it harder for her to pretend that she was not either of those things. “—called, probably.” 

Beatrice swayed a little. Her jaw flexed. She looked down at her own shoes, a strand of hair falling in front of her face. When she looked back up at Ava, her expression was soft. And just like that, the energy around them changed from awkward and stilted to something else entirely.

Ava watched her reach into the pocket of her bomber jacket and pull out, of course, a book. Leaves of Grass. She opened it, dog earing a page with the tip of a finger, and removed the white piece of paper she’d been using as a bookmark. She handed it to Ava.

Ava recognized it instantly. A smiling tooth and her dentist’s name. On the back: AVA. A phone number. Ava sucked in a short, stuttering breath. She read her own name over and over again.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to.” Beatrice said, quietly. When Ava glanced up from the card, she was holding the book close to her with both hands. “But it took a while. And then by the time I was settled, I worried that it might seem…I don’t know. Sudden. Unwelcome. Or maybe that you’d forgotten me.”

“You were never in any danger of that happening.” Ava said. The air around them had changed again, and it was making her feel honest. It must have been the right thing to say, because it made Beatrice grin in a big, un-self conscious way. “So, Cambridge, huh?” She said, changing the subject before she said something stupid, because she’d just discovered that her feelings for Beatrice had not been as well buried as she’d previously thought. That, perhaps, just as Beatrice’s had when she was nineteen, they’d taken on permanent roots. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you. It’s an accelerated program. I’ll go through the year to finish my degree and start my master’s next spring. You must be mostly done with your dissertation by now, surely?”

“Defending it next year.” Ava fixed a lopsided smile to her face. “Getting my boxing gloves on. You know.”

It wasn’t a funny joke. Beatrice laughed anyway. Ava looked down at the card, then extended it back out to Beatrice. 

“Consider this on a re-up on the offer. Call anytime. Or text. We don’t have to—” Ava, good God, she doesn’t have to what? “—you can just come for dinner. Meet Mary and Shannon. I know how undergrad is. All ramen. Not a vitamin in sight. Shannon will make you something green.” Did you just call her vitamin deficient? “I’m begging you to say something so I can stop talking. Save me from myself.”

Beatrice, in a saintly act, took the card back and tucked it away into her book. She had a soft, indulgent smile on her face. “I’d like that.” She said, as if Ava had just said something at all coherent. “I’ll call you.”

Ava wanted to say, again, I’ve heard that one before, but wasn’t sure if it was too on the nose. Before she could get too lost in it, Beatrice struck her hand out and grasped one of Ava’s. Their fingers knocked and tangled. She squeezed and pulled it back just as quickly. 

She knew, in that moment, that Beatrice would call. It warmed her through her chest. Her heart was suddenly like a jam jar full of bees. It was so sticky and alive that Ava was sure that she knew what it would feel like if she held it in the palm of her hand. What it would sound like if she shook it. 

“You’re going to think this is stupid, but I’d been hoping we’d run into each other.” Beatrice admitted. She was holding the book to her chest now, near her heart. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

Ava opened her mouth to say something stupid, something like I never stopped thinking about you, when somebody from the crowd that had melted behind them called out: “Bea!”

They both turned their heads. Behind them, a group of three girls stood. They were all wearing crewneck sweaters that said Cambridge Rugby. 

“Oh.” Beatrice turned back. She was blushing. “I started playing rugby. I thought it’d be sort of young, but there’s a fair amount of master’s students in the group.”

“Oh my God. That’s amazing.” Ava laughed, delighted, and Beatrice beamed back at her. “Go ahead. I won’t keep you.”

Beatrice looked back again, as if she were torn, but eventually she turned to Ava and said: “I’ll talk to you soon.” And then, as if that wasn’t concrete enough: “I’ll call you tonight.”

“Alright.” Ava agreed, and watched her turn and half-jog over to the group behind them. She saw one of the girls look at Ava with a jovial, scandalized expression, then back at Beatrice, and she thought she heard her say: “Isn’t that a professor?” And she definitely saw Beatrice duck her head. 

Ava watched them disappear into the throng of students. She forgot to feel self conscious about it. 

She turned in the direction of their flat. She put hands to her face, as if feeling whether or not it was still there. Everything that had felt so daunting the day before seemed suddenly less hard. And the universe, for reasons Ava could not articulate, seemed suddenly so much friendlier, in the way it sometimes did after a strange coincidence. Like it had just given her a wink and a nudge. Like they were old pals.

“Mary is going to freak out.” She murmured to herself. She glanced up at the sky, once, then shook her head at herself. “Fucking weird.” Ava muttered and, without giving it too much extra thought, she walked toward the flat—to talk to Mary, to eat with Shannon, to hope joyfully for a phone call.