#adventitious

“I should say them as well.” She smiled, but only a half-curve.

“Not if you don’t want to,” Myka told the uncurved half. “You should say what you want.”

“My advent calendar was intended to make my wants evident. Gradually, yet clearly.”

“But you chickened out.”

“Indeed,” Helena said, with a glum tinge.

“Because maybe you didn’t want to say it?” Myka pushed, without a purpose clear in her mind... or maybe the pushing was the purpose. Probing how far she really could relax into this new accord?

“Because I didn’t want to say it incorrectly,” Helena said, her voice careful, stepping backward over last night to yesterday’s restraint. “Or at all, if it meant making you uncomfortable. Angry. Less than content.”

The result of Myka’s push, purposeless or not, was that she now needed to take pity on Helena. An unusual position to be in. Then again, she was still looking up at Helena, who still loomed, elbow-propped, above her, so “unusual position” was today, overall. “Well, neither did I. Want to say it incorrectly, I mean... ridiculous me, looking for some perfect little clockwork that would do the exact right interpretive dance about sentiment. And instead, what did I do? I gave you a bloody nose. And oh my god—not one but two black eyes.” Because the sun was rising. Because she could now see the full extent of what she’d wrought.

Helena’s tone was rightly dry as she said, “It is true that one would most likely have been sufficient.”

“I go the extra mile,” Myka gloomed. “In the wrong direction.”

And now it was Helena’s turn to take pity. “Don’t be so downhearted. Here we are, in bed together,” she said, and Myka’s mood did respond to hearing her say those words. “My face notwithstanding.”

“Your face has more than a little to do with it,” Myka said, and she was rewarded when Helena dipped down and kissed her.

When the kiss—which Myka extended maybe a bit more than Helena had intended? and should she have expected her own want to outstrip Helena’s?—concluded, Helena said, “As does, or did, that historical advent calendar. Without it, would this have happened?”

This. That word. “Our first night here makes me think no. I was wishing, but it probably would have stayed a wish. What about you?”

“That better version of myself did want to be decorous. To refrain from disturbing our... should I say ‘stasis’?”

Myka did know what she meant. “Stasis. Inertia? Do we both need to press? Be more blunt?” She raced past the answer—obviously, “yes”—and landed on, “Okay, here’s something: I want you to give me that advent calendar next year.” Helena was already a constant calendar of the adventitious, leaving Myka in a perpetual state of anticipation about what she might open a door to find, or open her eyes to see, in each next minute of each new day... still the idea of what Helena might design for her to reveal was differently, dangerously, tantalizing. Particularly now. Particularly, rather, in a projected future, one in which “this” had become plural.

“But what will you give to me?” Helena asked.

“I think if I have a whole year to plan, I’ll figure out something good.” But Myka felt her “you’re going to need the pressure of procrastination” wheels grind to life.

“Of course Christmas will arrive, regardless of the gifts you and I could not accomplish. We’ve never had one.”

Her saying was needless, and Myka, thinking on need, said, “Maybe we don’t need it. Maybe it’s just something normal people have.”

“I’d hoped it could be meaningful. Meaningful in a way that was profound... because of being normal?”

“So did I,” Myka said.

“So: exclaim over your gift, whether book or bauble. On the day.”

“You have to too. Whatever I end up putting in some paper. A book. Maybe even a bauble.” That led her to think on the thrill she might feel—would likely feel—if she saw Helena in the wider world wearing some adornment she had gifted. I did that, she could boast, if only internally. It would certainly beat having to acknowledge it about black eyes.

“My thespian abilities are unsurpassed,” Helena said.

“I have to warn you, though,” Myka said, “Claudia’s a hard sell. Last year she accidentally put my name on a video game that was really for Pete, but when I unwrapped it, I said I liked it.”

Helena smiled. She moved her hand through Myka’s hair for a caress of her own... a possessive intrusion. “I conclude that your thespian abilities are surpassed,” she said.

“Regularly,” Myka admitted, ruefully—proving herself true by failing, she was sure, to hide how nearly faint-inducing she found Helena’s fingers in her hair.

“That’s comforting,” Helena said, still moving her fingers, very clearly aware now of what it was doing to Myka.

“What is?”

“This news about your poor acting.”

“Is it?”

“In that it allows me to believe more thoroughly in what happened this night.”

“Helena,” Myka reproved.

“Myka,” Helena reproved back.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” Myka conceded, even as she felt the pocket of their accord deepening.

“I suspect.”

“I really want to get used to it, though.” Because that pocket was luxurious.

“That’s a gift as well. That and all of your wants.”

“Not for Christmas.”

“No,” Helena agreed.

“But not not for Christmas either.”

“Everything is a gift. For Christmas or any other occasion of your choosing. Write them all down, gifts, occasions; draw them from a hat; shuffle them as playing cards. This occasion, that gift. That occasion, this.”

“From now on?” Myka asked, but she didn’t want it to be a question, so she said it again, affirmatively: “From now on.”

“I believe so...want it to be so, at any rate.”

Want want want. “I want to give you so many things.”

At that, Helena smiled a fully lascivious smile—a smile that spoke of what she knew Myka could give. Myka had never seen that smile before, and she hoped it meant that Helena would move into fully lascivious behavior, taking advantage of what she knew... but instead, Helena said, “Not this morning. We need to go home.”

Home. It jarred against Myka’s wish for more hotel-room intimacy, for she couldn’t remember Helena having ever before applied that word to the B&B, to Univille, to any of the places that were now Warehouse-adjacent. Jarred, but in a way that knocked a new kind of sense: she caught that word and brought it close to her heart, a gift she would not acknowledge aloud, not now. “Do you remember when you first said ‘home’?” she imagined asking, in some later year, some time of reflection, remembering, reminding. A hotel room was one thing. Home was another.

They began, reluctantly on Myka’s part, to rise and prepare to leave. She inferred some reluctance on Helena’s part too, though she was trying very hard not to reason too far beyond the evidence: the drag of Helena’s body out of the bed, the body-to-body press and long kiss she bestowed on Myka once they were standing, there beside that first bed.

“I don’t know how to be when we walk into the lobby,” Myka said, after that kiss. that first kiss standing beside that first bed.

“Act as usual,” Helena said.

“Wasn’t I just explaining about my nonexistent thespian abilities? Plus I don’t know what ‘as usual’ is this morning. Don’t you feel different?”

“Of course. Happier, primarily.”

To hear Helena say that, about this... it was transporting. Myka said a barely contained, “Me too. It’s... weird.”

“Good weird or bad weird?” Helena asked, playful now.

No tears rose to Myka’s eyes; instead, she was able to say, “Good, I think. But I may need to revise, depending on what we get from Pete and Steve.” She couldn’t help but tense for what would happen when they had to rejoin that wider world.

*

What did happen: Steve said, “Hey, Myka. Hey, H.G. Nice shiners.”

Helena said, with seemingly unforced cheer, “Thank you so much. Note the symmetry of the bruises. Myka’s aim was quite true.”

“I wasn’t aiming for you,” Myka said, to no purpose at all.

“They really are something,” Pete agreed. “Not as purple as mine though.”

“Alas, I lack your hematological vigor,” Helena said.

Myka couldn’t honestly tell from her tone if that lament was fake or real; nevertheless, she was smiling about it all, if gingerly, so Myka let herself smile a little too, because maybe this was actually going to be—

“Oh! My! God!” Pete exclaimed.

It wasn’t “hey hey hey” but that was exactly what he meant. Exactly. “Don’t say it out loud. Please,” Myka begged him.

Pete ignored her completely, saying excitedly and very loudly, “You and H.G. just—”

“Banana,” Helena advised.

In the sudden silence, they all regarded Pete’s body, draped full-length on the garishly patterned lobby carpet.

Steve eventually said, “Don’t you think that was a little extreme?”

“‘Little extreme’ is an oxymoron,” Helena informed him. “In any case, Myka told him not to speak. By the way,” she said to Myka, “your thespian abilities.”

“Remain surpassed,” Myka conceded. “But I admit I kind of like having an enforcer.”

“Please wake him up so we can catch planes,” Steve said.

Helena blinked, the picture of innocence. “Are you certain you can’t carry him?”

Steve blinked back, just as innocently. “I’m certain I won’t carry him.”

“A fine partner you are,” Helena said.

“A fine partner,” Steve said. “Aw, thanks for the compliment.”

Helena smirked at him, Steve smirked back, and Myka smirked at the both of them. It was a moment she was, guiltily, pleased that Pete was not sharing.

*

At home (home!), they didn’t even make it past the foyer before Claudia asked, quite reasonably, “Why do Pete and H.G. have matching double black eyes?”

“To go with the matching jammies they’ll be wearing on Christmas morning,” Steve said. Myka wanted to kiss him.

“Jammies,” Helena said, sotto voce, with an eyeroll, and in terms of kissing, some level above “wanted to” that stopped juuuust short of “actually doing”: that was where Myka was in response to that.

Claudia said to Steve, “Sometimes I feel like I get how weird we all are, you know? Like I’ve really dug it out. But then there’s another level. An entire sub-basement, if you will.”

“DE-basement seems more applicable,” Helena said. “As a descriptor of what we all regularly undergo.”

“Knock knock!” Pete yelped.

“No,” Helena said.

“Debasement,” he went on.

“No,” Helena repeated.

“Debasement is where we keep debananas.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Myka said.

“Deoranges made less sense,” Pete said.

“It isn’t funny. Either way,” she told him.

Helena nodded. “I believe you have grasped the essence of the knock-knock joke.”

“I’m really not getting it, guys,” Claudia said, her face a comedy all its own: as if she really believed she could think her way into fathoming it. All of it.

“You will, directly,” Helena said. “Banana.”

Out Pete went.

Claudia looked down at the sprawl with a blank face. “New,” she remarked. “Although not in a ‘Gasp! What just happened?’ sense, given that sub-basement, because sure, Pete taps entirely out on account of H.G. says banana. That’s just a day ending in Y around here. Still confused about the knock-knock, though.”

Myka said, “Me too. But it actually is kind of funny to watch him fall over.”

“No doubt,” Claudia said. “Also it’s really... soft? The falling, I mean. So, good on you, H.G.!”

“Not attributable to me, I’m afraid. That’s simply how he goes under.”

Steve said, “I honestly never would have bet that anybody’s hypnotic-suggestion sleep-collapse would have a personality. I wonder what I’d be like? Or you or Claud or Myka?”

“I suspect Myka would be far more inflexible,” Helena said.

“Hey!” Myka objected.

“Your spine alone indicates,” Helena said, and the way she said it, with a tiny lift of eyebrow, made clear—to Myka alone—that she was using her new intimate knowledge as a guide.

Not that Myka had ever been known for flexibility, whether physical or ethical... “Okay, you’re right,” she said, both in response to the intimacy, and for the wider world.

“Try it out!” Claudia enthused. “Make Myka fall asleep when you say... ooh, I know: Twizzlers!”

Steve said, “I don’t think it has to be food.”

“Make Myka fall asleep when you say... uh... Toyota Prius!”

“I don’t think it has to be a sponsor, either,” Steve told her.

“I don’t think it has to be at all,” Myka told them all—except, of course, for somnolent Pete—because Steve’s “you’d want her to have that kind of control over you?” was rattling in her head. New intimacies were one thing... ceding control was something Myka was going to have to think very hard about.

“You’d feel quite rested,” Helena said. “That could have its advantages.” Another tiny eyebrow-lift.

“Well...” Myka said, pretending to consider, “I guess if you’re not going to give me a slow-burn advent calendar, some decent REM sleep would—”

“Make Myka fall asleep when you say power nap!”

“Too on the nose,” Steve said.

Claudia huffed. “Is there some reason you keep shooting down my ideas? How about ‘former BFFWYLION,’ and that’s my final offer.”

“Too many syllables,” Helena objected.

“Not you too!”

“Or I could just stay awake,” Myka concluded.

“We’ll see about that,” Helena told her. She said this while stepping unequivocally into Myka’s space. Suggestive, invasive: it made Myka supremely uncomfortable, and she manifested nervousness, a little fidget in her feet and dart of her gaze. At the same time, she reveled in it.

Secrets between them.

*

What is the perfect Christmas present?

“Knock knock,” Helena said to Myka, very late on Christmas eve... or maybe Christmas had already come. Myka had, intensely pleasantly, lost track of time. She’d done so every night since Minneapolis, and so her real gift was, as it happened, a de facto advent calendar of sorts after all. Abbreviated, but even so.

“Who’s there,” she responded, lazy. She could be lazy. Another gift. Gifts, occasions.

Another gift: now a long kiss. Beautiful. A week ago, impossible, but in this middle-of-the-night, real. Helena’s mouth against hers... Myka had no idea whether Helena was an objectively good kisser, but she was without question considerate about it. What did Myka’s mouth want? Helena seemed determined to anticipate and provide it. She seemed determined also to provide the answer—the present, gift, offering—that Myka needed: “Myself. And all that that entails,” she said.

“You better not be joking,” Myka told her.

“I don’t know how,” Helena said.

END

Note:

So I couldn’t work this into the story as such, but I really really wanted Helena and Pete to present a slapsticky farcical version of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” inserting “banana” at salient points: “’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the banana,” and down Pete would go; “not a creature was stirring, not even a banana,” and he’d wake up, and so on and so forth throughout the poem. Maybe not performance “art,” exactly, but certainly a performance... you see why it didn’t fit.

What is the perfect Christmas present?

Second (and very much foremost), the perfect Christmas present was one that would make everything clear: a token that would speak of everything Myka wanted to say out loud but couldn’t muster the courage to do.

She was tempted to ask the wishing kettle for either the exact right present or the necessary will to speak, but she was too afraid she’d get another ferret. In either case.

The speaking should have been simple. In the immediate aftermath of the Warehouse-saving, it had seemed just that, and inevitable too. Their eyes had met; Myka had been clear-minded: When we are alone, I will say the words. And we will be alone for what happens after that.

But they were not alone, not at any point in that aftermath, not for speaking or for anything to happen after. And then Helena had disappeared.

She was gone for months, and when she came back—finished at last with the secret errands she’d been so abruptly, cruelly sent on—nothing was simple. Nothing seemed inevitable. Myka heard in her head a constant murmur of Say the words, say the words, but every potentially right moment turned wrong: e.g., she happened upon Helena, alone in the kitchen, late, so of course Pete stumbled in a minute later for a snack. Or: tension rose between them as they apologized their way through the aftermath of a near-collision in the hallway, but then Claudia wandered by. Once, in a fraught moment, Abigail had made a too-shrewd comment, stranding Myka speechless. During the debrief of Helena and Steve’s first retrieval together, Artie had pushed between Myka and Helena when Myka made the mistake of looking and breathing (made the mistake, in fact, of letting her relief at Helena’s return from the retrieval show), as if he knew what she would do, in an ideal world, if she weren’t body-blocked. On one very promising occasion when Steve, the only person in whom Myka had confided, raised his eyebrows at her as if to say “I’m leaving the room so this is the time,” his eyebrows and his leaving had embarrassed Myka to such an extent that she left the room too.

How frustrating to be performing yet again this constant cat-footing, as she’d done at the beginning, before Yellowstone. This time around, however, featured an unfamiliar twist: Helena had begun respecting Myka’s personal space. She would begin to encroach, like she used to, but then, as if Myka put up a shield, melt away. Was she nervous too?  Or was it that she was more aware of her materiality now, valued it more highly, and so was less inclined to waste it? Waste it on Myka?

Still, that tentative one-foot-in continued to give Myka hope... but the conditions never turned right. She was trapped in the shiver between rain and snow, knowing how the rain felt, yearning to crystallize, yet not quite reaching solidity in the air.

Myka tried not to believe too hard that such a sparkling shift would, like winter itself, surely come: As if you can predict the weather, she chastised. As if she could change it. As if she could. Some butterfly flapped its wings; some tornado across the world ensued. Then again, if everything was so nonlinear, so sensitive to initial conditions... well, maybe she would have to overwhelm those inputs. Do something so enormous that sensitivity wouldn’t factor. If a meteor hit Earth, the butterfly and the tornado both would have to step aside.

Certainly Myka had never before ideated herself as a world-endangering meteor.

But of course that was a function of Helena Wells, in a very Helena Wells sense: I want to do outsize things in response to Helena Wells. Claudia sometimes applied the word “extra” to what she saw as culturally outsize—including some of what Helena did/said/was—and Myka wanted that now for herself too. Extra. Extra enough to match Helena in a real way. To be a match for Helena in a real way.

Not stochastic but extra. The Wells effect. So much for you, butterfly.

But none of that pugnacious theorizing mattered at all, not as days passed, then weeks. And so, Christmas: only the present given on the day would do, because Myka had set her mind on the way in which a present, once put under the tree, couldn’t be retracted. That would be her commitment, her first and final statement, because once Christmas arrived, nothing and no one could stop Helena from opening her Christmas present. Which was of course utterly untrue, but this was the story Myka had settled on.

All her life she’d been unable to shed this instinct to pre-narrate how things would go. She was both surprised and disappointed, perpetually, that the Warehouse hadn’t managed to beat it out of her.

The ping, when it came—as of course it would have, so close to Christmas, because Christmas could not be free of complication that was extra—was an enormous relief. Yes, it was going to take time away from her non-Platonic questioning, time she couldn’t spare. But, conversely, procrastination did focus the mind. Fewer days meant faster thought.

“Something’s happening at the Mall of America,” Claudia announced. She, Myka, Helena, Pete, Steve, and Artie were in Artie’s office. Unusual, to have the full agent complement on hand, and Myka suddenly understood that part of what she’d thought had been worry over Helena’s Christmas present had in fact been “a ping must be imminent” tension.

Pete cocked his head. “That sounds like an ad.”

“Something pingy’s happening at the Mall of America,” she revised.

“Not so much of an ad now,” he said.

“Could be,” Claudia said. “Who knows what market space they’re moving into. Ours? Because they’re pretty aggressive, and—”

Artie interrupted with a resigned, “What is happening.”

“I told you: something pingy. You want specifics this time of year? Ask somebody else. I’m technically on vacation.”

“I didn’t authorize any vacation.”

“I’m sorry, the Caretaker-in-training cannot process your objection at this time.” Claudia paused, considered, then shrugged. “I’d blink out, but Mrs. F rations those, and I don’t want to waste one.”

“This is going to get worse,” Artie observed.

Claudia nodded solemnly. “Oh yes. Also it’s getting worse at the Mall of America. Even as we speak: reports of altercations.”

“Altercations,” Artie harrumphed. “At the Mall of America? Are you sure it’s an artifact and not just the death spirals of late capitalism?”

“Death Spirals,” Claudia said. “Aren’t those the new Girl Scout cookies that came out this year?”

“I’d try Death Spirals,” Pete said, “but nothing beats Thin Mints.”

“Except Samoas,” Claudia said. “Fight me.”

“Oh, I’ll fight you—” Pete started, but Artie interrupted with, “Myka, go deal with the Mall of America. I can trust you not to get distracted by cookies.”

Not by cookies, no. Myka tried not to look at Helena, but she also sighed internally, for the idea of going anywhere at all, and particularly to the Mall of America, was completely unappealing.

Artie went on, “But cookies aside, take Pete with you!”

Myka said, as fast as she could, “Not at Chris—”

“And Steve!” Artie bulldozed. “And H.G.!”

“—tmas,” Myka finished, but quietly now, because with the addition of Helena, the idea of going anywhere at all—even to the Mall of America, even at Christmas, even with Pete—had just become a lot more appealing. And distracting.

Pete sniffed. “This seems like a job for mall cops, not us.” Then he opened his eyes, wide. “Ooh, but can we go undercover? Can I have a Segway?”

“I never get to go to the altercations,” Claudia complained.

Artie made good use of his eyebrows. “I thought you were on vacation.”

“Just a staycation. But doesn’t an altercation sound more on brand for me?”

Helena said, “More martial arts training might tip the scales.”

“And target practice,” Myka added.

They shared a glance of accord. Myka’s heart skittered.

But then deployment logistics intervened: suitcases were packed and planes were caught. Myka didn’t even get to sit next to Helena on those planes; instead, she sat in the seat behind Helena and marveled at the gloss of her hair and wished she could communicate telepathically through that gloss, with such thoughts that Helena would whip her head around in surprise. As a bonus, her hair would probably do that shampoo-commercial thing, where it moved practically in slow motion and was so unreal it made Myka’s mouth water...

You are stressed beyond belief, Myka assured herself then, so it’s no surprise you’re a little unhinged. But you should keep it in your own head. She tried to lean back and take a nap, but her eyelids made a strong case for staying open, given the view. Through which Myka was clearly not communicating telepathically, because she couldn’t keep her mind from wandering as it wanted to, and Helena would certainly have had some response to that. But she didn’t turn around. Not once.

Weather delays put them in Minneapolis late, too late for the mall; they couldn’t start investigating. Myka was too tired to care. Another day closer to Christmas, the Helena-focused corner of her mind muttered, and still no ideas. She tried to remind it that she was procrastinating. Tick tock, it warned back.

At their hotel, Pete checked in, then reported, “So Artie only reserved two rooms.”

“So?” Myka said. Artie’s approach to hotels was “don’t give them any more money than absolutely necessary,” which she found eminently reasonable.

“So who goes with who?” he asked.

“Whom,” she corrected.

“I don’t know her,” Pete said. He looked expectantly at Steve and gave a tiny interrogative snap of the fingers of both hands.

Steve sighed. “Yes, Pete. You get gay points for that.”

“I’m saving them up for a ‘Macho Man’ T-shirt,” Pete told them all, as if that were really a thing. “Because quién es más macho? This guy!”

Steve sighed again. “Seriously? You just lost them all.”

“Ugh. I’ll never get my T-shirt. But c’mon, I’m so sassy.”

“Fine. You only lose half.”

Pete sang, “Halfway macho, macho man.”

“Accurate, perhaps,” Helena said, sotto voce, to Steve, and he smirked back at her.

An intimacy between them. Myka shifted her gaze—by default, it had been focused on Helena—away. How could she begrudge them their burgeoning partnership, their working chemistry? She had Pete; it was unfair of her to want to stake a similar claim to Helena. And to Steve. Neither one of them belongs to you. “No singing,” she told Pete, too gruff, to cover her embarrassment. “I can’t take it. Reminds me of... singing. Just tell me what room to go to; I don’t care who else is in it.”

Helena nodded. “At this hour, I concur.”

“Then I call Steve,” Pete proclaimed. “So I can talk him into more points.”

Steve said to Helena, “You sure you don’t care?” Solicitous. Like a partner would.

Helena responded with a slightly teasing, “I don’t care. You might.”

Steve then asked Myka, “Is this really okay?”

She shrugged. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? I mean, maybe not for you.”

He shrugged an “okay” back... but she knew he was asking out of genuine concern; that was an intimacy between them.

*

Months ago, they’d been in a bar, post-retrieval. Waiting for their adrenaline to ebb. Talking about the Warehouse, and difficulties. “H.G. is god knows where,” Myka had said, deliberately using the estranging initials, meaning it as a generic complaint: oh, what a Warehouse thing, that we simply do not know where a person of some significance to all of us could possibly be.

She might as well have said “I don’t know where Helena is,” in exactly the non-generic way she would have meant that, because Steve responded, “And that hurts you.”

“It... how about I don’t say anything else. Then you can’t get me on it, like you just did.”

“It isn’t ESP, the thing I do. I’m just hearing you as your friend. At least I hope so.”

“I don’t want to lie to you,” Myka said. “You who does the thing, or you my friend.”

“So don’t.”

Don’t. “But I keep trying to lie to myself,” she admitted, guilty. “Saying it’s okay that she’s gone. She’s gone and that has to be okay.”

“Why does it have to be okay?”

“Because it always has. Has had to be. Okay, I mean. That she’s gone. She was before, and she is now, and it has to be okay.”

That rested for a moment.

“But it isn’t okay,” Steve said then.

Myka said, honestly (because there was no point in anything else), “It is not okay.”

“I thought it was like that.”

“So what do I do? About it being like that?” Some ideas would be infinitely helpful.

“You wait,” Steve said. “Until you can’t anymore.”

It was the wisest advice Myka had heard in some time. “That’s smart. How’d you get so smart?” What she really meant was Why am I myself not that smart?

Steve answered both questions: “I waited. Until I couldn’t anymore.”

“Steve,” she said.

“It’s okay.” He smiled. “See?” The smile faded. “Or it will be, one day.”

Steve’s honesty pushed her to voice the base of the fear: “What if she never comes back?”

He nodded. “It’ll be okay. One day.”

“You are pretty smart.”

“Maybe. Sometimes I think all that does is make it worse.”

“Is it egotistical for me to say ‘I know’?”

He smiled. “Maybe,” he said again. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the truth, too.”

“Here’s to making it worse.” She stopped, considered. “Or making it a little bit better, which you did. If I can ever return the favor...”

“When H.G. comes back, don’t lie to her.”

“That seems like not the same thing.”

“Right speech is part of the eightfold path. Excellent return of favor.”

“I keep not fully factoring in who you are, spiritually,” she said. Another guilty admission. “And I respect how difficult that is—I mean, how difficult you are—to get my brain around.”

“Not to sound clichéd, but namaste.” He broadened his smile, and the weight of their conversation lessened. “I’m probably supposed to salute you anyway, right? Aren’t you the agent in charge?”

Myka smiled back at him. She felt more human than she had since her waiting began.

*

In the time since Helena had come back, Myka hadn’t lied to her. Not out loud. Sins of omission, though... in any event, she also hadn’t, in the time since Helena had come back, spent the night in a hotel room with her. An entire night, in a hotel room, with her. Alone with her. For a night. In a hotel room. Steve’s question notwithstanding, Myka told herself, you really should have thought this through. Because her libido went immediately to: Maybe there will be only one bed. And: Maybe you won’t need to worry about Christmas presents making things clear because something will happen this very night because—

Two beds greeted them.

Oh, maybe the heat will fail, Myka jeered at her pathetic libido, and you’ll have to huddle together for warmth.

“Would you prefer the bed nearer the window?” Helena asked. “There seems to be something of a view.”

This gentle courtesy, like the step away from Myka’s space, was a new feature of post-everything Helena... the politesse was itself a bit extra, yet the Helena of before would have been expansive about either taking the view for herself or handing it over magnanimously. Myka tried to slough off her deep awareness of the contrast with a short, “Doesn’t matter,” but that sounded insufficiently courteous... clumsy, at the very least. Trying to make it better, she added, “You choose.”

With exquisite delicacy, Helena placed her overnight bag on the far bed. “The view, such as it is, is yours.”

How effortlessly she seemed to have tiptoed her way to this reticent, rather than ostentatious, charm... and of course Myka was just as susceptible to it. Maybe more so. She sighed. “Not that we’ll have a lot of time for the view,” she said. “Probably.”

With the smallest of reticently charming smiles, Helena said, “That thought did cross my mind.”

Myka yearned to be able to respond with something flirty. Suggestive. All she managed was a weak “Of course.”

The night, during which Myka did not sleep, was uneventful. Was Helena asleep? It didn’t matter: she was breathing. Myka lay awake and listened to Helena’s body breathe. She’d heard breath from hologram-Helena, but that inhale-exhale had been nothing but noise; it hadn’t disturbed so much as a molecule between them. She tried to give sufficient thanks for the material push and pull, even as its force didn’t reach from Helena’s bed to hers, not as a whisper, not even as warmth.

*

Day broke bright, the sunlight insistent, fast and cold against the window. Myka turned away from it just as Helena said “Good morning.” Countering: soft, like a secret. Her face, the only visible part of her, was soft too.

Myka had never before seen Helena burrowed into blankets. “Good morning,” she said back, and she was telling the truth. It was good. The sound, the sight. She had been wrong about Helena’s breath: a night spent in proximity had shifted the air between them, such that in the peaceful moment before they rose, Myka could have at last fallen asleep.

Then Helena pushed the bedcovers from her body, dissipating the perfect intimacy. Myka followed suit, and the real day began.

*

The subtle morning made the Mall of America that much more harsh. Loud—Christmas music like a holly-jolly jackhammer—and gaudy—was Christmas now made of mylar?—it was an ecosystem of excess, against which Myka’s gut rebelled. The number of escalators alone was something out of science fiction. Or an Escherian nightmare. She supposed those weren’t mutually exclusive: A Science-Fiction Escherian-Nightmare Christmas sounded like a movie Pete and Claudia would watch, one that Myka would have to beg them not to force her to watch with them. 

The crowds made her skin prickle—too many moving parts. Nothing struck her as particularly pingy, not that it seemed at all possible to identify odd behavior when people seemed to be mesmerized by performers in Christmas Lego costumes. Or maybe they were Christmas robots made of Legos.

Maybe the whole place was an artifact. “I want to go home,” she said, to no one in particular... but she would have settled for going back to the hotel room. With Helena. To try to recapture the gentleness that had overtaken them, so few hours before.

“Agreed,” Helena said, quiet, as if she were in accord with all of Myka’s wants.

Steve said, “Me too.” Myka was grateful for his affirmation, though it was no surprise.

Pete, on the other hand, enthused, “Christmas shopping! It’s huge! It’s like you aren’t even American.”

“I’m just not that materialistic.”

“Like I said,” Pete affirmed.

Materialism aside, Myka didn’t want Christmas shopping to be huge. She wanted it to be small. Perfect.

Steve said, “People seem to be hurrying. And talking about discounts? Is that artifactual?”

“Bet not,” Pete said. “It’s like Black Friday. Times a million.”

Helena cocked her head. “Black Friday?”

“Sales,” Pete told her.

Helena in “genius” mode was magnificent. But Helena in “I don’t have any way to make sense of what you just said yet am attempting to pretend otherwise” mode was adorable, and I adore her, Myka thought. She had never adored anyone, not ever in her life, and she ached to tell Helena of this new thing, right then and there. “An artifact? For discounts?” she asked, to distract herself.

Pete sighed. “Like. I. Said. You’re so un-American, you should move to Canada. Except don’t, because if you leave again I’m going with you, and I’m not made for Canada. It’s too cold and the football’s weird.”

Myka thought she saw a little wince from Helena at “leave again,” so she hurried to say, “Some might say the football’s weird in Cleveland, but that doesn’t seem to bother you.”

“Why do you only know stuff about sports that hurts my feelings?” Pete whined, and Myka watched Helena and Steve both swallow laughs as he went on, “Anyway, the Browns are rebuilding. Next year looks great.”

“Your ability to hold onto hope is strangely inspiring,” Myka said.

She was being sincere, but Pete snorted. “It’s Americanly inspiring, you Canadian.”

“I am as American as apple pie.”

“Which you don’t even eat.”

“Well, the sugar.”

“Like. I. Said.”

“Um,” Steve offered. “Still, artifact? Probably somewhere?”

“Pete and I do sometimes lose the thread,” Myka acknowledged, but as she spoke, something far down the concourse—something enormous, plastic, pink, and sparkly—caught her eye. “What’s that?”

“Like I keep saying,” Pete groaned. “That is a life-size Barbie Dream House. Weren’t you ever a kid?”

“Not that way.”

Helena invaded Myka’s space—not physically, but sonically—with a dragged-out “Hmmmm...,” like she was putting effort into pulling Myka’s attention back to her from Pete. It worked, of course. Once she had Myka’s full regard, she said, with a courtly sincerity, “I’m sure you were darling. In every way.”

“Well...” Myka was weak in the face of that, weak from wanting to know what it meant, whether it meant what she hoped it might mean, for Helena to say such a thing. “My mom might disagree. She would’ve liked me to be a girlier girl. Like my sister.”

“I should meet this mother one day, to interrogate her preferences re children. And this sister. For the benefit of comparative insight into the Myka Bering I know today.” Helena twinkled a smile at Myka, rendering her weak again.

Weak and insufficient, for her instinct was to say, “It wouldn’t be that beneficial.” But some vestige of the morning stopped her. What wouldn’t she give to meet Charles Wells? To meet Helena’s mother? Did Helena mean what Myka would have meant, articulating that want?

Pete interrupted Myka’s wondering with, “Hey, what’s today?”

“A noun,” Helena replied.

“A morning show,” Myka said, trying—absurdly—to outdo her.

“Oh come on,” Pete complained.

“Fine. Today’s Tuesday,” Myka said.

“The date,” he said.

“You should specify from the outset,” Helena told him. “We can’t all be Steve.”

Steve gave her a companionable shoulder-bump that Myka envied. “I don’t read minds. It’s the eighteenth.”

That caused Myka a near–heart attack: Oh god. It’s a week away. She entertained a momentary wild hope that something here in this consumerist singularity could spark an idea... but that was ridiculous.

Pete was saying, “Then I think I got an idea about what the problem is. What do you know about advent calendars? Like, in history?”

“Why are you asking me?” Helena said, sounding strange to Myka’s ears, even more offended than she usually did when Pete suggested she’d know something about something just because—

“I’m not saying you’re old,” he said. “Even though you are. And I’m not asking you. I’m asking everybody. Because look at what’s going on over there.”

Myka looked. What was going on over there seemed to be the occasional person perusing a small display of a few shadow boxes hung on a wall between shops. They were garlanded with sad drapes of fake fir, and above them was a banner proclaiming them—or most likely their contents—“Christmas History.”

Helena said, “I for one did not expect that Christmas history would be so... paltry. Did you?” She glanced at Myka....

Steeling her heart against the skitter, if only so she could answer the question with actual words, Myka said, “I’ll go out on a limb and assume that not many people in charge of, or in, this mall care about history. Of Christmas or anything else.”

One of the boxes exhibited what appeared to be a very old-fashioned advent calendar, a tri-fold of cardboard depicting a stylized snow-covered village, the doors and windows of its quaint little buildings numbered for opening on the appropriate days. “Replica of calendar given to President Eisenhower’s grandchildren, 1956,” she read from the placard that accompanied it. “This is what you’re looking at?” she asked Pete.

He nodded. “Watch. Not everybody goes up to it, but when somebody does, if they open the doors for 18, their face changes. Like they just got some news. And then they take off.”

As they watched, one such interaction took place: a grandmotherly woman opened the little cardboard doors labeled “18.” She turned away from the display and, wide-eyed, began to quicken her pace. Pete stepped in front of her. “Out of my way!” she complained.

“Sorry,” he said. “But hey, what just happened there?”

“The discount! I have to hurry.”

“Can you tell me a little more about it?” Pete wheedled.

“No! It’s my discount! Christmas is coming, and I have to buy for everyone!”

Pete said a bewildered, “In the world?”

A goatee-sporting young man shoved past them all to reach for and open the calendar’s “18” doors. He underwent his own revelation, then shoved again in the opposite direction, declaring, “Outta my way! Christmas is coming! I gotta hurry!”

Helena blocked his path, as Pete had done to the woman. “Because of your discount, presumably?”

He reared away from her, saying, “Get your own!”

“Altercations,” Myka murmured to Steve.

“So we bag the calendar,” he said.

“And then go home,” she agreed, digging into her coat pocket for gloves and an appropriately sized static bag.

“Stop wasting time!” the woman was admonishing Pete.

“It’s all your fault!” the man accused Helena.

The altercation caught the attention of a woman in workout gear pushing a toddler-filled double stroller. She scanned the scene, saying a cautious “What’s going on?”... but then her eyes lit on the calendar. “It’s the eighteenth, right?” she asked, seemingly of her toddlers.

“Don’t open—” Helena began, but then, “too late,” she finished, for the woman’s face changed, and she took off running, the toddlers shrieking at the ride.

Pete continued defending himself against the outraged grandmother, shouting, “Listen, I’m not doing anything to you!”

“You tried to take away my discount!” she roared at him.

Pete bellowed back, “I don’t care about your discount!”

“That’s even worse!” the woman wailed. She took a swing at him. He ducked away, but she managed to grab his hair, yanking hard as he stood back up.

“My hair!” he yelped.

Mr. Goatee pushed at Helena’s shoulder, but she held her ground, warning him, “If you touch my hair, you will lose your hand.” That did give him pause.

Pete’s antagonist apparently didn’t fear for her hand or any other appendage; she took another swing, connecting with the bridge of his nose. “Ow! That’s a wicked jab! Mykes, come on, save me!”

Gloves on, bag at the ready, Myka marched up to the shadowbox, pulled the cardboard calendar out, and dropped it into the bag. Some feeble sparks ensued, but the discount-crazy pair showed no signs of letting up on Pete and Helena. “There are better discounts on the second floor!” Myka shouted at them, and like squirrels they swiveled their heads at her, then darted off trying to outrun each other to, presumably, those even-greater discounts.

“Okay, why didn’t that work?” Myka demanded. “Why are they still under the influence?”

Pete pushed his hair back into place and pinched gingerly at his nose. “All I want for Christmas is to not wake up looking like a raccoon. As for the McFightersons, I got a guess, but you’re probably not gonna like it.”

“Of course I’m not,” Myka said.

Pete nodded. “It’s not Christmas yet. ‘Christmas is coming,’ they kept saying. But until it does...” He squinted, making his “thinking” face. “Remind me not to do that; it hurts.”

“I have never had to remind you not to think,” she said.

“True. So anyway, altercations till Christmas. Hey, why don’t we just go home and let everybody have at it? Tell Artie it was the death spirals of state capitals or whatever cookies after all.”

“What about the downside? Whatever it is,” Steve said.

Myka made a face of her own. She said, “The downside is us having to be here. Because of course we can’t just go home. But obviously we can’t wait this out—or what I mean is, I don’t think I can force myself to wait this out.” In a place where she wouldn’t be able to figure out that essential gift. Discounts, altercations, hurrying... none of that was helpful. I should just buy her a staple gun and be done with it.

Helena said, “I don’t believe you’ll need to force yourself to do anything. I have an idea.”

“Of course you do,” Steve said, right as Myka was about to say the same thing.

“It might not work,” Helena cautioned.

Pete snorted, which seemed to cause him even more pain than squint-thinking had. “Ow. What’s the point of having you around then, Supergenius? If that’s your real name.”

She ignored him and said, “We trick the artifact.”

“We do?” Myka said, trying not to sound skeptical.

Helena nodded. “Into believing time is passing more quickly than it in fact is.”

“You really are very into manipulating time,” Steve said.

To which Helena responded, as if genuinely puzzled, “Why bow to its tyranny unnecessarily?”

“So much for the laws of nature?” Myka tried, but when Helena seemed to be formulating an objection, she hurried to say, “of course I of all people appreciate your willingness to break those laws.” At that, Helena smiled and bowed her head.

“How do you plan on conquering the tyrant here though?” Steve asked Helena.

“First let us try the obvious: opening later windows on the calendar. Be ready to tesla me if I develop an inappropriate interest in purchasing items at a discount.”

Pete pulled out his tesla—a little too eagerly for Myka’s taste—and trained it on Helena as she searched the calendar and discovered the window for the 19th at the top of a clock tower. She opened it, waited... then shrugged. She then tried the 20th, the 21st, and on until the 24th.

“Feel like a buying spree?” Steve asked her.

“Not at all,” Helena said, and Pete put his tesla back in his coat pocket.

“So what’s next?” Myka asked. “Or I guess I mean, what’s not obvious?”

Helena blinked the softest of blinks, one that Myka wished she could witness alone... with only Helena’s face visible, her body burrowed in plush down. “So many things,” Helena said, also soft. She cleared her throat. “But with regard to the artifact, I put to you: how does one suggest that a child encourage Christmas to arrive more quickly?”

“I take it back,” Pete said. “Your real name is Supergenius, and I’ll buy you a T-shirt that says so.”

“What?” Myka asked. “Not that I’m saying she’s not.”

“Big sleeps!” Pete enthused.

“What?”

“You seriously were not ever a kid. Not in your whole life.”

“I bet she was,” Steve said. “But willing to wait. For Christmas and everything else.” Myka tried to hide a burgeoning blush as Steve went on, “What’s your idea, H.G.?”

Helena vocalized that low “Hmmmm...” again, making Myka feel—or, no, she was wishing; it was only a wish—that the entire supergenius show might be Helena flaunting for her alone. It wasn’t, but if only it could have been... the hum slid, rose, becoming the word “my.” Then “idea,” and finally, “Tell me this: which one of you is most susceptible to the power of suggestion?”

“I can’t believe it,” was Helena’s response: like she had got something she wanted after having fully convinced herself it was impossible. This feeling now permeating Myka’s heart? It was there to be heard in Helena’s voice.

Her voice. Myka had never imagined Helena’s voice like this, and that she herself was the cause of it? Add it to all the “never before” of this day—put it in place of the first kiss, in fact, which was always going to be, always going to have been, too much to process. Which still did not seem at all real. At all material.

They sat together, angled slightly away from each other, jaws aslack, as if similarly stunned.

Myka spoke first. Because someone had to. “For so long, I wished I could have this back again.”

“This?” Helena said, like the word came from no dictionary. “You—we—haven’t had this. Or do you mean, have this back again with anyone?” There Myka heard a little lace of hurt, a fear that Helena herself might be only an interchangeable “anyone.”

The idea that Helena could ever be so generic was of course laughable... but Myka knew better than to laugh. Instead, she defined “this”: “I mean you being so close to me. You used to move so close, all the time.” Their arms—Myka’s left, Helena’s right—were ghosting against each other, an echo of that so-close, not-quite.

“I did do that. Before. When my purposes were... sullied. I haven’t wanted to remind you. I’ve been attempting to present a better version of myself.”

“I don’t want a better version.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but that is unconvincing.”

At that, Myka did feel free to laugh, quiet in the dark, against Helena’s starchy little reassertion of her daytime self. “Whatever, Steve.”

Helena smiled, then settled her face down. “Even the better version fails to... fit. With your teams. I feel the strain.”

“I’m just going to say ‘Steve’ again. Both ways.” How could Helena be insecure about Steve? Steve, who clearly adored her? But of course Myka knew how Helena could be insecure, about Steve and everything else. Because none of it could ever be fully fixed—just managed.

“He is gracious,” Helena said. “You all are.”

Myka laughed again, happy in the moment to be able to do so. “No we’re not. Pete can’t even spell ‘gracious.’”

“You are.”

“I’m not gracious at all,” Myka said, even as she thought on grace and motives—whether she had been in fact trying to bestow something that wasn’t hers to give. “Not at all,” she concluded. “What do you think this is?” She meant it as, How could you or I or anyone mistake this for graciousness when it is painfully clear that it is stark, stark want. It had always been, in response to every version of Helena she’d seen. Every single one.

She should have said that part out loud, for Helena cocked her head, that turn and twist that said We are not on the same page. “What do I think this is? The most astonishing gift. I thought my life but instead this.”

“This isn’t instead of anything. Besides, your life is more important.”

“Don’t quibble. What is more important now?” Weirdly, endearingly testy.

“I’m not quibbling,” Myka objected, responding to the testy. But then: “Never mind,” she said, low, because she had turned a bit more toward Helena to answer, and they were so close now, so humanly close, and Myka could not resist leaning for more of a kiss—the second, on their so-new continuum, but the first that she intended. Her prior efforts at the art of kissing, over the course of her life, were now revealed as amateurish, but then again they didn’t matter; she and Helena were sudden animals, wanting and taking, no hesitation, no negotiation.

The unmagnificent view with its lumping of snow was a memory—in sharp contrast, they were heat, edges, nothing cold, nothing smooth. Myka surprised herself: she was precise, decisive. But of course she had honed herself for this; for years she had wanted, waited, whetted.

Awkward, glorious. Scapulae. Ribs. Hipbones. Friction. The rough joy of abrasion.

But abrasion and its cousins had their downside. Myka, too overcome to be gentle, ran her hand over Helena’s face, and Helena flinched; Myka took her hand away. “This beautiful face of yours. I’m hurting you.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do. I mean I would, if you did, or I mean I do, even if you—”

Helena stopped her, and now Myka could process a kiss, this one, and more...

“I’m yours,” Helena said, from below Myka. From below Myka. “Yours to damage as you wish.”

Myka protested, as coherently as she could, “No, no, no, I don’t want to hurt you. I want to heal you.”

In response, Helena pressed her mouth to Myka’s ear, and in a hum that seemed to penetrate directly into its inner bony labyrinth, said, “They are the same.”

That spoke to a deep, deep well, one that Myka didn’t know whether or how to try to plumb. She lost her focus, shook her head, managed only a weak, “The implications of that...”

“We can chase those down later,” Helena said. “Much, much later.”

So for now: careful, careful. In all Myka’s imaginings of how she might touch Helena, in the deepest of lonely nighttime wishes, she had thought “reverently,” she had thought “heatedly,” she had even thought “desperately,” but she had never, would never have, predicted any need to be so physically careful.

But careful she was, and careful she was rewarded. She had never before been intimate with someone who gasped “perfect,” in simultaneous abandon and self-possession, and it was so striking she said it back, in barely voluntary agreement. Helena turned her head away. Myka did not grasp, for a breath of a moment, that Helena had turned to hide tears. When she did grasp it, she ran her own face soft against that salt.

The skin-to-skin moments before sleep were a gift all their own: this at-last relaxing from years, years, years of tension. A universe of new issues had been raised, but how vast the ways in which they might fork and branch... Myka couldn’t even begin to formulate how things would go.

Give up the habit, she told herself as her shoulder began to numb under the weight of a solid head, as her skin wavered between exultant and uncomfortably warm due to the presence of a solid body against hers.

*

The next morning, another sight new to Myka: Helena asleep, only inches away.

Irresistible. Of all the never-before-seens, this the most.

But Myka spent that early morning, with Helena beside her, resisting: she reflected on want—reflected on whether it would be all right to wake Helena up, based on that want, then concluded that it would be impolite, given the day she’d had yesterday. Want, though... Myka understood, now, that she’d been distracting herself from its immensity by concentrating on the “perfect present” idea, keeping physical hunger at bay, minute on minute. Easier to think about what to give Helena than to be forced by her body to focus on what she wanted from Helena.

The vision of Helena asleep merited a lyric poem, but the world would have to be deprived of such a document: Myka herself couldn’t scribe it into art, yet she knew quite clearly that she wanted no other witness to this fine sight. Stay away, poets. This is mine.

Helena’s lips moved, shifting the shadows on her face. A talking dream? What would Helena say in her dreams? A passage from a research rabbit-hole about the Greek Magical Papyri materialized unbidden in front of Myka’s eyes: “to know the secrets of a certain woman’s dreams, the petitioner ‘takes a strip of hieratic papyrus, inscribes it with powerful names and characters, wraps it around a hoopoe’s heart that has been marinated in myrrh,’ and then tucks it in next to her sleeping body.” Myka considered the possibility of laying hands on hieratic papyrus, a hoopoe’s heart, and myrrh... surely the Warehouse database could give her a line on such things... and that couldn’t possibly be the same thing as using an artifact for personal gain...

As if intending to interrupt Myka’s dream-wondering, Helena woke then, quickly, evincing no transition from deep into lighter sleep; her eyes sprang open.

Or you could just ask, Myka told herself against those sudden-focus eyes. If only to spare the poor hoopoe. And: Now you should be able to ask. Bodies together. Be brave. Thus pushed, she murmured, “Were you dreaming?”

Helena said, “I’m dreaming now. I must be.” Quiet. Low.

Myka wanted to fly. “Beautiful answer.”

“Beautiful questioner.”

Flying higher. “Maybe we’re both dreaming.”

Those lips moved again, a little moue, correct for the moment. “Would we both dream this particular hotel room? With its ‘view’?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what hotel room you’re talking about. I’m in paradise.” Too much? It was probably too much, even if Myka was being brave enough to—

“So am I. But I didn’t want to assume.”

Satisfying. But: “I don’t want to assume either,” Myka said, because she had just had a troubling thought, one that demanded airing. “What if this was just once, to find out? Because if you wait for something long enough, you just desperately need to find out. So now we’ve found out. Is that it?” Helena didn’t speak, so Myka chose to soldier on, “Finding out isn’t enough for me. It’ll have to be, if you say that’s all, but I want more.”

“More,” Helena said, at her most single-word inscrutable. But then she said, “For the life of me—the literal life of me—I can’t imagine our not doing this again. And again and again. And all that those agains entail. I know you don’t take this lightly.”

Weak with relief, Myka said, “I didn’t know, not for sure, that you wouldn’t either.”

“I didn’t know what I took lightly or heavily or otherwise, when I was showing that worse version of myself.”

“Those days are really gone? Mostly gone?” They had never had this conversation out loud.

Helena shifted her body. “A reasonable question. I’m trying very hard. My purposes... they may not be completely unsullied, but they are less sullied.” She paused. “Or not. Where do my attempts to persuade you to think better of me fall on a dirty-purpose scale?”

“All I know is that I think of you. Better, worse... it’s probably going to fluctuate. So you don’t have to work so hard. For example, you can do the I-don’t-understand-personal-space thing. If you want.” It was a proffer, but also a wish: to touch the forbidden-charm livewire of earlier, headier days.

“If you want,” Helena said, in a return to that soft politesse.

“I might pretend I don’t.” Pretending back to those earlier days... so as not to relinquish them entirely.

“I like that we could have secrets between us.” That was soft, too, but rich, thickening on the word “like.”

That put Myka in mind of the past as well. “I think we always have.”

“Others do think they know how to read. How to make meaning. But we’ve done differently.”

Myka said, “We have. And speaking of reading, sort of”—a little feint of nonchalance regarding her so-long preoccupation—“there’ll be a present under the tree for you. Maybe a book? I’m not sure. But there’ll be one.”

“I haven’t put a gift out for you either.”

Myka refrained from noting that she was already hyper-aware of that. “You really don’t have to. Especially now.”

“Especially now, I do. But I had hoped something brilliant would occur to me.”

“Something in that vein generally does.”

“However, you flummox me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Thank heaven, you are revealed to be not Steve,” Helena said, with drama. Myka kissed her temple in rebuke, and Helena responded with a similarly rebuking push of that temple against Myka’s cheekbone. “Don’t interrupt my narration. Like you, I told myself ‘I could buy her a book.’ But what book? I had no sufficiently meaningful ideas. My next thought was ‘I could buy her some expensive bauble.’ But you said it: you aren’t materialistic. I know that. Knew that. And yet there I was, thinking to buy you something rather than give you something. Fully wrong. I then tried to research what I might appropriately give you. Gift-giving comes to signify differently over time, you know.”

“Does it,” Myka said, falling a little drowsy at the lull of Helena’s voice, feeling that nodding allowable now that some (not all) things seemed resolved; she had the luxury of not needing to care what Helena might have given her, not after what she had this night given. Time and strength for curiosity later. Time and strength for everything later. Thank god.

Helena nodded, clearly not respecting the drowse... but at least her movement came against Myka’s neck. “Jewelry highly recommended. Were I a man, that is. I found very little help for what a woman should give to a woman. Nothing seems to speak so directly. So meaningfully.”

“No one’s ever wanted to give me anything meaningful before.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one that I knew about.” And certainly no one like you.

“Those other potential givers, of whom I’m sure there were many, should have informed you of their intentions. So that you would know. As I’m doing now.”

“It’s very weird to know about it,” Myka said. It was even weirder that she could, or would, say that out loud.

“As Claudia would ask: bad weird or good weird?” Helena asked, putting a surprisingly correct pin in it.

“All the weird.” And in that moment Myka couldn’t hold back a spring of the tears she had, earlier, managed to work her way around.

Helena didn’t try to console her, not directly. Instead, she said, “Speaking, perhaps, of the weird: I did have an idea. Very early on. Of something I could myself make, to give to you.”

The words gave Myka time to clear her eyes, clear her emotions. “What was your idea?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“At the weird?”

“At the irony.”

“Okay.”

Helena sighed. “An advent calendar.”

“Seriously?”

“Ironically.”

Myka chuckled. “Only if it had to do with discounts. Otherwise really just a coincidence.”

“It did not have to do with discounts.”

“What did it have to do with?” This conversation was turning out to involve a lot of tooth-pulling, which Myka found in itself sort of ironic, given what they had spent the night doing. Though she should have understood physical intimacy would be no overarching fix for communication roadblocks.

“It was intended to be...” Helena sighed again. “Incrementally revelatory.”

“Of?”

“This.”

The difficulties of defining that word. “This? This romantic ‘this’?”

“Yes. That I... wanted this.”

“You were going to draw it out over a month?” Myka barely, raggedly held back an enormous bark of laughter. As it was, she was afraid Helena would misread the shudder the holdback caused.

“I thought perhaps such progression could be symbolic.”

“Of?” Myka strangled out.

“I hadn’t entirely thought that through.”

“Liar.” This conversation they might have had across a room, but it was happening in bed, body against body. Unbelievable.

“I truly do need only one Steve, thank you,” Helena said, reinforcing body on body, moving her legs against Myka’s, making Myka think strongly again on want. Unbelievable—yet here was the evidence. “Symbolic of? The passage of anticipatory time, I suppose. The future: there being one, toward which you might anticipate your way?”

“See, just a coincidence. Advent-calendar-wise, I don’t think those people at the mall cared much about the passage of anticipatory time.”

“I disagree. They seemed to care very much indeed, if only to reduce its length.”

“But you wanted to draw it out.”

“But as you see, I lost my nerve.”

“You. Lost your nerve.” Preposterous. Helena was nerve.

“Well, the proof: are you at present in possession of an advent calendar?” Helena asked.

“Yes. It’s in a static bag over on the desk there. Steve gave it to me.”

“Funny,” Helena said, and Myka felt her lips move, most likely only a little smirky curve, but the movement.

That move of lips recalled all the moves of lips, and Myka had to breathe, very carefully, before she could speak. She eventually said, “See, Steve’s wrong; you do know a thing or two about jokes. So what would I have opened a window of an H.G. Wells–created calendar to reveal today, if not a deep discount on those mocha truffles Pete wanted so bad?”

Helena shifted a bit away, then turned her body, up and onto her elbow, to regard Myka. “I hadn’t worked it all the way through, but.” She moved her mouth, tilted her head, shifted her shoulders—all very familiar to Myka as Helena-speak for the discomfort of self-judgment. “Given how little simple time we’ve spent together, I had thought to suggest”—now a throat-clear—“activities for the two of us. Or perhaps topics we might discuss. Today, for example, the directive might have been to prepare a meal of our mutual choosing. Or to speak of our childhood Christmases. As you see, my creativity was somewhat impaired. By.” A little shrug. “Sentimentality.”

And you think I wouldn’t have jumped you, December the first, offered any such thing. Or wanted to, desperately. “I would have been... delighted by that,” Myka said. “By any of those.”

“That pleases me more than you can imagine.” Helena emphasized this with a press of her lips to Myka’s, one that they both seemed to understand should stay calm. “But the start of December seemed too early to initiate such things. I’d been back for so short a time. And to try, or to appear to try, to push you in any way struck me as not etiquette.”

“Whatever happened to ‘change the rules’?” Myka asked, intending it as a tease.

Helena clearly didn’t hear it that way: “A better version of myself,” she reproved.

With no tease at all, Myka said, “A rule-following version isn’t better. Just different.”

“You adore rules.”

Myka knew that Helena knew this, but there was still some pleasure in hearing her say it out loud. Out loud and as a justification for what Helena had been trying to perform into being. “I do,” she affirmed. And I adore you, you rule-changer. “I’m complicated. And also incompetent. My present for you—that currently nonexistent present—was supposed to be symbolic too: ‘Oh, here’s what will make all these ungovernable feelings clear.’ Because I couldn’t find a way to say the word ‘love.’”

“Wait,” Helena said.

TBC