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Nothing happens at all until Katya is seven years old. This is not unusual. Not everybody has a sestrinskoye serdtse, her mother tells her, using the old Russian term for it. Katya likes it better, thinks it’s romantic, and she rolls the phrase around in her mouth for a whole afternoon.

Her parents were not soulbound. It runs in some families; doesn’t run in others. No one in their recent history has been. There’s an aunt way back on her father’s side who, upon finding herself soulbound to an awful tyrant of a man, had walked calmly right into the water and never come back. Or so Katya’s brother had told her and her baby sister one night, sheets over their heads and a flashlight underneath his chin.

His white, round face had hovered disembodied in the darkness, illuminated from below like a carnival head. Anya had shrieked and writhed and put her hands over her ears, but Katya had been transfixed. She thinks about her a lot. The courage it must have taken, to look her fate in the face and tell it no.

It makes her sad, to think that she might not be soulbound. Lots and lots of people aren’t - most people. It occurs in populations with about the same frequency as red hair. Still, Katya can’t help but feel like she’s special. She knows it to be true.

“You’re still special, Katenka,” Mama tells her when she tucks her in at night, smoothing her hand over Katya’s mousey hair.

Sometimes she will pretend like she is. She will double over as if she has been suddenly struck down with grief in the middle of recess. Nobody buys it, and she doesn’t care at all. The idea of it fascinates her.

What must it be like? To be one half of the same soul. To feel the exact opposite emotion to whatever the other person feels. To know, when overcome with euphoria, that your sestrinskoye serdtse is hurting so deeply. To know that your own joy causes them hurt, too.

No one will tell her very much about what it’s really like, and she thinks it’s because they don’t know either. From what she gathers, it’s only extremes of emotion that are intense enough for the other person to notice. So you wouldn’t feel it if they get their favourite coffee in the morning, but if they lose a loved one you’ll have one of the best days of your life.

So far, Katya has met only one couple who are soulbound. They go to their same church and must be about a hundred and twenty years old. They are always holding hands; Katya has never seen them not holding hands. She wonders if they’re capable of letting go anymore or if they’ve grown entwined just like that, like the beech trees in the forest back home in Russia.

“Ne smotri,” Papa whispers at her during mass. Don’t stare.

She can’t help it. No one will tell her exactly what happens when you do find your sestrinskoye serdtse. How do you tell? How can you know for sure that it’s them? And do you continue to feel opposite emotions, once you’ve found them? From watching Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, she thinks not. They always smile all the way through mass, both of them soft and melty at the edges.

Katya has tried asking, her mama and Dmitri and some of her friends at school, but no one answers. Soulbound people are rare, and Katya thinks that makes them superior, but mostly it just means she doesn’t really know what they’re like.

It’s a Wednesday late in August and Katya is lying on her back in the grass. She’s getting stains all over her dress but she doesn’t care, she hates it and its frills and lace. The air is thick with summer and she moves her hand slowly through it, imagines she can feel it shifting like molasses. She is seven years old, and it feels important. Seven is a lucky number, a good year.

Anya wanted to play dolls with her earlier but she doesn’t like how the boy one and the girl one always have to get married and have babies. She wants her doll to be an astronaut or a rockstar, but Anya tells her she’s stupid and Katya’s face gets all hot and Mama has to tell her “bud dobrym.” Be kind.

It’s better, out here in the grass by herself. Mama made lemonade and she spilled a little because she tried to drink it lying down. Her face is sticky, and her hands. She can feel the bridge of her nose burning, prickly with the heat, and she knows she’ll get in trouble later for not wearing enough sunscreen.

Out of nowhere, she feels a wave of bliss roll over her. That’s not unusual for a summer afternoon, except that she can tell right away that this emotion is not hers. It feels milky and intangible, like looking at her reflection in a pond or a river. Something shifting and not quite herself. Katya sits upright in the grass and presses her hand to her chest. She’s trembling and she bites her bottom lip while she waits for it to pass.

For a moment, after it’s over, Katya doesn’t breathe or move. She is so still that an ant crawls up onto her leg and marches up and down her thigh. Another burst of emotion hits her right in the centre of her chest. This time, it’s fear. Katya closes her eyes and breathes slowly through her nose until it goes away.

It isn’t quite the same as her nightmares, or the very first time she tried out the rope swing and arced so wide before plummeting into the river below. It’s more like when she and Dmitri got to watch Pet Sematary at their cousin’s house after Anya went to bed. A fear with no stakes behind it, a synthetic sort of terror.

She does not tell Mama. She doesn’t tell anyone. Who would believe her? All this time she has pretended to feel her sestrinskoye serdtse right on the inside of her chest, carrying them around with her every day. And now it’s really happening.

For the first year or so, it’s not so bad. Sure, sometimes it wakes her in the middle of the night and she lies on her back with her sheets pulled up over her head and her arms folded over her chest like a mummy. Like she’s in a sarcophagus, and she thinks of beetles crawling all over and nibbling at her flesh and her brain being hooked out of her nose or her ear.

No one has told her, but she’s not an idiot. She knows what it means, that she felt her sestrinskoye serdtse so suddenly. She’s older. The person she is soulbound to is an infant. It explains the bright bursts of intensity she feels at all hours of the day and night, that never last more than ten minutes or so.

She’s a little jealous. Everything is going to be different, for them. They won’t have seven years of feeling hollowed out and unwhole. They will feel Katya from their first breath. Have been feeling her. She thinks about them all the time, and wonders how many years it will be before they start to think of her, too.

For Christmas, her babushka buys her a journal. It’s bound in red leather and comes with a lock. Katya slides the key onto the same thin gold chain as her cross and wears both every day. She likes how the key bounces against her chest when she runs around at recess, how in the wintertime it gets so cold against her skin that it burns livid hot. She likes the reminder. There is someone out there in the universe whose soul is bound to hers, a person designed perfectly just for her.

Every night before she goes to sleep, Katya writes notes in her journal. The date, and her feelings. It’s not all that different to how everybody else uses their journals, except that the feelings she writes in it aren’t hers.

As she grows older, and her sestrinskoye serdtse grows older right along with her, it becomes more difficult to separate her emotions from theirs. Whenever she feels joy or peace, she knows that they’re hurting and then she grieves for them and then she’s hurting, too. Now that she’s actually experiencing it, it’s not as fun as she’d always imagined.

At nine years old, Katya goes through a rolodex of counsellors and behavioural therapists and doctors and psychologists. They toss around various diagnoses. Some of them say she has ADD, or maybe she’s autistic. She lacks the vocabulary to explain that her mood swings and her difficulty focusing and her explosive temper are because half of her emotions are those of a toddler. One therapist suggests developmental delay, and Katya supposes that’s not inaccurate.

She learns to be calm through it. She will clench her fists tight enough that she feels the thump of her pulse in her palms like she’s captured a hummingbird. She will count her breaths until it passes. Most days are dreadful. Every time she thinks she’s got a handle on it, something else flares furious and crimson in her chest.

One Saturday afternoon, Katya comes home from the woods and her palms are chafed and red from breaking sticks. She rubs them against the thighs of her pants as she walks in the back door. Her parents are waiting for her at the kitchen table, a chair pulled out for her to sit in and her journal on the table between them. Cracked open, and the lines of her spidery handwriting are barely legible.

“Sit down, Yekaterina,” Papa says. His voice is firm but not unkind.

She does, flopping into the chair and toeing out of her boots. It’s March and not quite warm yet; the heat of the stove makes her cheeks ruddy and she pulls her sweater off over her head. It makes her hair all staticky and her bangs flop down into her eyes.

“What’s going on?” She knows it bothers her father when she uses English at home, knows also that she’s doing it to spite him. “Where did you get that?”

“Tvoya sestra,” Mama says. Your sister.

Katya is up out of the chair so fast that she stumbles over the leg of it and almost goes to her knees. She shoves her sleeves up past her elbows as she bounds up the stairs two at a time. The door to their room bounces off the wall when she slams it open. Anya is sitting cross-legged on her twin bed, brushing the hair of one of her dolls.

When she sees Katya she cowers back against the headboard, her hands up in defence already. She knows what she’s done, then, and she’s afraid. Good.

Katya rips the doll out of her sister’s hands and pops the head off of it in one clean motion. For a second, she flounders. She wants to make Anya hurt, feels the mercury of her anger boiling inside of her stomach. Katya sweeps the rest of Anya’s dolls onto the floor. If she’d kept her boots on she could stomp them. She does it anyway, not feeling the prick of their stupid little hands and pointy noses against the soles of her feet.

Her parents have caught up to her now. She lunges at Anya, her hands extended and her fingers curled up like a dreadful beast. Papa grabs her from behind and lifts her clean off the ground. She thrashes in his grip, screaming and spitting.

The violation of it has cleaved her in two. She feels pink-raw, like the old paintings of surgeries she likes to look at sometimes. Herself, strapped to a table with her guts tumbling out, and rows and rows of people watching from the gallery.

Anya is wailing and clutching at her disembodied doll’s head. Again and again, Katya roars and writhes in her father’s grip, until he manages to get her through the doorframe and out of their bedroom.

“Ya ub’yu tebya,” she screams at her sister. I’ll kill you.

Mama has closed the door on Anya now, but she hears. The whole street must hear. Katya is choking on her anger, trembling with it. It streams out of her, nose and eyes and mouth, and the indignity of it sends her outside of herself.

Papa is still holding tight to her. She fights it for a long while, and then she sags in his arms and brings him to the ground with her. They are all three crumpled in the hallway, Mama on her knees next to Katya and Papa and their pile of tangled limbs.

“Breathe, Katenka. Breathe. It’s okay.” She does, raggedly at first but evening out with Papa’s strong arms still banded tight around her chest. After a long while, Mama says, “you have a sestrinskoye serdtse?”

“Da,” she spits through the grit of her teeth, the rictus of her jaw.

The whole messy truth of it comes spilling out of her, then. She tells her parents how for three years she’s been carrying another soul around with her every day. Feeling the antithetical emotions of that soul. Mama cries, and doesn’t furiously swipe her tears away with her palms the way that Katya always does. She lets them come, lets them collect in the creases at the corners of her mouth as she listens to her daughter.

After a little while, Anya and Dmitri poke their heads out of their respective doorways. Now that the beast of their sister has come to rest, they sit in the hallway as well to listen. Katya talks, and talks and talks.

She understands, now. Why nobody seems to know the truth of what it is like to be soulbound. The sensation of it is like pins and needles or gooseflesh, a tingling hyper awareness and the feeling of not quite fitting correctly inside your skin. It is hard to put words to it.

Katya gets her journal back, and doesn’t even get in trouble for ruining Anya’s doll. Everybody is tiptoeing around her like she’s sick, like she’s dying. It’s not true. Nothing is going to happen to her because she’s soulbound. Well, other than that if her sestrinskoye serdtse falls in love with somebody else, the grief might drive her to madness.

She would not be the first.

It’s the middle of the night; Anya is sleeping on her stomach in the bed next to Katya’s. She sneaks out from beneath the sheets and pads in her sock feet across to the closet. There’s a box at the bottom of it, where she keeps her supplies. Katya rummages through it until she finds her superglue.

Anya’s got her doll laid out on the nightstand, separated from its head by a half inch. Like it’s lying in state, and all the other dolls might come to visit it. Carefully, and still getting glue on her fingertips, Katya fixes the doll’s head back in its right place. She sits it upright on the nightstand, so it will be the first thing Anya sees when she opens her eyes in the morning.

Back beneath her sheets, Katya tries to pick the glue off her fingers. She thinks about her sestrinskoye serdtse. They will turn four later this summer. She wonders what it must be like, for their parents. Raising a toddler grappling with the enormity of two people’s emotions. Today Katya was angry, angrier than she’s been in her whole life. She’s not quite sure what the opposite of that is. Calm, maybe. Or peace. At least her sestrinskoye serdtse had a good day, she thinks, and it makes hot tears form along her bottom lashes.

* * *

Katya starts her fifth journal the same week she starts high school. She has them all labelled carefully with the length of time that they span, lined up chronologically along the bottom shelf of her bookcase. Sometimes she flips through them at random, chooses a day and reads it over.

There are days when she feels all alone in the universe, and remembering that her sestrinskoye serdtse is out there helps her. It lets her feel close to them, to read over her meticulous notes and try to imagine what they might have been going through. She’s fourteen now, and her sestrinskoye serdtse is seven. For half of her life, every single day, Katya has felt them.

It’s been a tough summer. Her anxiety has been there her entire life, when she looks back on it, but it has gotten so much worse since she finished middle school. There are voices in her head all the time, whispering to her. Catastrophizing. Convincing her that every decision is the wrong one. She knows they aren’t really there, but…there is a voice in her head.

Well, not a voice. And not in her head.

A presence in her chest, at all times and in all ways. Whatever she does, she has to weigh the consequences. If she does something that makes her happy, she condemns her sestrinskoye serdtse to misery. Most of the time it is paralytic; she doesn’t dare feel anything at all.

When she thinks critically about it, when she reads back on the last week or month or year of entries in her journal, she knows. They are not having a good childhood, whoever they are. Katya feels happy most days, but she knows it’s because they’re hurting and that makes her hurt as well, and it isn’t ever true happiness. It is ersatz, doesn’t belong to her.

She’s been grappling with it all summer. Trying to figure out just how the fuck she’s supposed to make it through high school. It’s difficult enough trying to fit in without being the freak who is predestined to be with someone she hasn’t even met yet. Who is going to want to date her?

Mama let her dye her hair at least. It felt like watching herself appear, like she was meeting herself for the very first time as she watched the bleach circle the drain. Her hair is waist length and wavy and white blonde. It makes her feel like a Waterhouse painting.

Her therapist keeps trying to instil her with coping mechanisms. Together they agreed that Katya should try yoga, and she does love it, but it also doesn’t cure her mental illness. There has been suggestion of medication, multiple times, but she won’t do that. She has no idea what psychotropic drugs might do to her sestrinskoye serdtse, and they’re only a little kid.

Katya’s not about to fuck them over like that. She’d much rather fuck herself over every day.

For the first semester, she does okay. Having a routine helps her. She gets up at the same time every day, goes to the same classes, practices yoga when she gets home. It’s impossible to predict what she might feel on any given day, but she can control everything else.

She’s doing okay, she really is, and then finals roll around. Everything in high school feels so much more important. The rational part of her brain tells her that it’s okay if she messes up a couple exams, she still has three more years after this to prove herself, but the anxious part of her brain is the one in charge.

It’s exhausting every day just keeping her head above the water, so when Dmitri’s friend offers Katya a drag of his joint she finds herself saying yes. That first time, she doesn’t feel much of anything. The smoke makes her cough and he laughs at her and shame burns hot and insistent along the column of her neck and into her cheeks.

After that though, it becomes their thing. Three or four times a week he sneaks away from the PlayStation tournament the boys are having in the basement and he and Katya share a joint on the back porch, after her parents are in bed.

When he kisses her, it isn’t a surprise. They’ve been building up to it for weeks and weeks, she knows that. His fingers brush hers when he passes the joint over, and he likes to prop his elbow on the back of the bench seat behind her head so she can feel the heat of his bicep.

It’s nice. She’s a bit awkward, not quite sure what to do with her hands, but she likes the soft little puff of his breath against her cheek. When they separate, he tells her “don’t tell your brother.”

The image of Dmitri beating the shit out of him makes Katya snort a laugh. They joke, her family, that Dmitri spends so much time down in the basement and out of the sunlight that it’s stunting his growth. Katya’s stronger than he is, with her yoga and now gymnastics too, these last few weeks.

Still, she doesn’t tell Dmitri. They get high together almost every day. Not just weed anymore, either. Katya discovers that when she has a synthetic euphoria, it blocks off her sestrinskoye serdtse so that she can’t feel them. It’s as if her brain is too full, there’s no room for anyone else’s emotions. It’s the respite she’s been hoping for for nearly half her life. The first couple times, she wonders what it’s like for them when she’s high, but then she stops caring.

Katya fucks for the first time in her twin bed in the room she shares with her sister. Anya and their parents are out of state for the weekend. Dmitri stayed behind and Katya did too, because she has to work her shitty retail job at the mall. She’s sixteen years old, and so wasted that she can’t lift her head up off the pillow.

This boy is not the same boy as her first kiss. He is also not her sestrinskoye serdtse, but she hasn’t been thinking about them so much anymore. She’s not sober, a lot of the time. It actually makes it easier to focus on her classes, because it quiets a lot of her anxiety. Adderall is lovely, makes her so focused and calm. She’s making good grades, so no one seems overly concerned that she has to be drunk or high or both in order to do so.

When it’s over, the boy passes her a tissue from the box on the nightstand and leaves her to clean herself off. She didn’t come, but according to her friends who have started having sex she shouldn’t expect to for the first few times.

After that, she has a lot of sex with a lot of different people. With guys, and with girls too. When all of her friends started becoming interested in the opposite sex, Katya did too, but she also realised she had those same feelings about girls. It complicated a lot of things for her. She doesn’t really tell people. Certainly not her Catholic parents.

She likes sex, likes making people feel good and letting them make her feel good, but there’s always something missing. Sometimes she’ll be rocking over someone’s face and gasping and she can’t help but wonder, just for a second, what this feels like for her sestrinskoye serdtse. They’re still only eleven years old, so she figures she has a good few years until she finds out for herself, but she can’t imagine that it’s good.

Intense pleasure starbursts in Katya’s stomach and she moans softly and arches off the mattress. Violet grins up at her from between her thighs, her cheeks pink with exertion.

“You’re so fucking hot, Kat,” Violet says.

College has been a lot about experimentation, so far. She’s tried drugs she never had access to in her small suburban town, tried a lot of new things. She got her first tattoo recently and it still makes her smile so big every time she catches sight of it. Papa is going to kill her, but it’s worth it.

Violet is hot. Objectively. She’s tall and striking. Katya loves to wrap her hands around Violet’s waist and marvel at how they encompass it completely as she guides Violet down to grind against her face.

They’re not girlfriends. Katya doesn’t do well with commitment, and Violet is totally fine with that. They’re both also fucking other people, off and on, but Katya enjoys Violet’s body and how skilful she is with her hands and her mouth.

Violet doesn’t know that Katya is soulbound. It’s not something she shares with her sexual partners. Some of her friends know, but she doesn’t think it makes particularly good pillow talk.

Hey, I really enjoy fucking you but I’m actually predestined to love somebody else, so.

She can’t imagine it would go over that well. It does feel like something is missing. There’s no intimacy with most of the people she fucks. Violet is different; they’re friends, and they do spend time together outside of sex, but not one on one. Always with the rest of their group.

“Are you coming to Ginger’s party?”

Violet is propped up on one elbow, looking down at Katya. Her makeup is smudged from being between Katya’s thighs, but her hair is still perfectly smooth.

“Duh. You want me to…”

“I got it.”

Usually Violet is the one to supply the weed whenever they all hang out. Her friends know that Katya does a lot more besides that, and she offers to hook them up, but they always decline.

She doesn’t miss the looks they shoot her when she rolls up to a party out of her mind on something a lot stronger than college pot. It’s out of love, out of concern and she knows it, but she bristles at the mere suggestion that there might be a problem. She’s fine. She is fine.

Her sestrinskoye serdtse? Not so much.

They have hit their teenage years, and Katya is riding out those mood swings right along with them. It is really fucking hard. She’s at college now, and everyone is always in chaos but everyone is at least an adult. Katya is thirteen again.

She feels tenderly towards both her own thirteen year old self, and her sestrinskoye serdtse. It’s the hardest age you’ll ever be, Katya is very sure of that. Not fitting in anywhere, the oldest of the children and the youngest of the adults. Still, it’s really hard to be focusing on a class and then have a sudden rush of shame or joy or sadness so intense it makes her lightheaded.

The drugs help her to level things out, and they also provide a very convenient excuse. Oh, that’s just Katya, people say, and it lets her get away with a whole lot. She’s very hung up on the fact that however hard this is for her to deal with, she is at least twenty years old. For her own teenage maelstrom, her sestrinskoye serdtse was only six. There’s an immense guilt there, even though she knows that it isn’t her fault and there’s nothing to be done about it.

When they get their first crush, Katya is certain that she’s going to die. They are middle of the night mooning over it, and she sits and chain smokes out of the open bedroom window. Grief is lodged in her chest, an unexpectedly hard thing in the flesh of her, like a peach pit.

She puts her fingertips to the windowpane to feel the cold of it. Sleep seems like a faraway thing. Her sestrinskoye serdtse is up, thinking on someone, so Katya is up right along with them. She lets her head lean against the glass and closes her eyes, cigarette dangling precariously from between her two fingers.

It is not a pleasant feeling. And when they kiss for the first time (Katya remembers her own first kiss, almost goes under with the weight of her guilt) pain is alive in the pit of her stomach. She tries to be happy for them, glad that they’re able to enjoy being a teenager, but mostly she just hurts.

Sasha keeps trying to distract her. Let’s get out of the house she will say, in Russian or in English depending on how bad she thinks Katya is. They walk around Boston and Sasha talks and talks, and Katya listens because she’s good at that. And she loves her roommate, is grateful to have someone holding her accountable.

“I think they’ve discovered how to jerk off,” Katya says over breakfast one Saturday.

Sasha is at the stove making eggs. She didn’t appreciate Katya’s cannibalism joke and keeps self-consciously rubbing one hand over her smooth white head. Katya has taken to calling her yaytso, mostly because she’s jealous that Sasha pulls it off so well.

“Oh?”

“Yuh-huh. I get these like, insane moments of agony that last for ten seconds.”

She doesn’t know what else that could be. It makes her grin every time even though it fucking hurts. She’s happy for them, feels strangely proud. They’re fifteen now; she’s been wondering when it’s going to start.

“That sounds…unpleasant.”

“Da,” Katya snorts.

Sasha sets a plate down in front of her and Katya starts eating, very slowly. There’s nothing to be done. Unless she finds them, which she has no clue how to even begin to do, all she can do is tuck her chin close to her chest and endure it.

“Katya, are you okay?”

“Right now, or in general?”

Sasha considers her for a moment. She is so calm, so absolutely unflappable. Never loud or crass. Sometimes when she’s drunk or high Katya will try to get a rise out of her, will say things that are both unkind and untrue. It never works.

“Both.”

“Right now I’m good.” She gestures at her plate with her fork. “These are good. Thank you.”

“And in general.”

The way Sasha is looking at her, round and wise like the moon, makes her pause to actually consider it. Is she good? She doesn’t know. It’s been her whole life, like this. It’s something she grew up with, and she was forced to adapt around it. She feels gnarled and wizened.

“This is just…how it is. I have to be okay with it.”

By the time she’s thirty, it’s not cute anymore. When she comes home at four in the morning high, when she’s drunk out of her skull at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, it isn’t charming. Not like it was when she was in high school or college. She can’t explain it away with youthful arrogance.

Rehab is the hardest thing she has ever done, and she does it twice. When she gets out the first time she tries to surround herself with people who are steadfast and calm. She sees Fame almost every single day, needing proof of life from her and glad to be held accountable herself. Sasha got married and moved out, but still loves her deeply and answers the phone at any hour.

For a little while, Anya comes to stay with her. Her sister tries to understand, but she has no experience with addiction or with being soulbound so it’s hard for them both. After Anya goes back home to Denver, Katya relapses hard.

She’s out of rehab now, a whole year clean and sober. She has two jobs and her own tiny shoebox apartment. Sometimes she still misses the place above the bar, but she knows that being able to walk down a flight of stairs from her front door and get wasted is not a healthy environment for an addict.

Her therapist worked with her to handle her anxiety, since she can’t fall back on any of the usual ways she silences it. It is always there, but she is much better at looking it in the face and telling it no.

Her sestrinskoye serdtse is doing well. They’re twenty five now, and Katya can only assume that they’ve built a life for themselves. She gets the odd day of blistering joy, but most of the time she feels sad and has to reconcile that with the fact that they’re happy.

It’s been rough for both of them. She still keeps her journals, has so many of them now that she’s thought about putting them into storage in her parents’ attic, but she likes to have them close. She’s happy for them, she is.

But she’s thirty two years old and she hasn’t met them yet, and it feels more and more like she’s never going to. It seems unfair of the universe. If it’s going to tie her to somebody, surely the least it can do is deposit that somebody neatly into her lap.

These days, there are groups online. Forums where people talk about their experiences being soulbound, and tentatively try to figure out if the person behind one of these usernames could be their sestrinskoye serdtse. It isn’t easy. The general consensus, among the people who have been fortunate, is that you can’t know for sure until you meet them face to face.

Katya doesn’t do a whole lot of meeting face to face. New people make her wary. She teaches, yoga in the mornings and Russian in the evenings. Every time she gets a new student, or a whole new class, she is careful to look each of them in the eye and introduce herself. She’s never felt anything more than pleasure that they trust her, that they have come to her for guidance.

She settles down nicely into her little life. There’s no more partying, no more stumbling vulnerable and high in the street. She goes to bed at the same time every night, wakes up at the same time every morning. The routine is the thing that keeps her anxiety at bay. And she supposes it’s a kindness on her part, towards her sestrinskoye serdtse. Katya never throws any curveballs at them, doesn’t fall in love or risk her heart.

Sometimes she wonders whether they can feel her at all, or whether they’ve completely forgotten that she’s there.

* * *

“Could you at least try to have a good time, tonight?” Fame grumbles at her. She’s leaning on the vanity with both elbows, as she puts the finishing touches on her lipstick.

The crisp edge of Fame’s mouth is such a contradiction to the smudge of Katya’s own lipstick that she laughs, can’t help it. She’s only going to this stupid show for Fame. Because it’s in a bar, and now that they’re both sober they can lean on each other.

“Tell me again who she is.”

Fame rolls her eyes so hard Katya is worried for a second she’s going to pop her lashes. They’ve been through this at least four times already, but Katya’s memory is not the best and well…she likes hearing Fame describe her.

“Her name’s Trixie. She and I worked at the beauty counter together in college. She is a-”

“Full Dolly fantasy!” Katya interrupts and then screams out a laugh and stamps her feet.

She’s seen a couple pictures from their college days, but Fame wouldn’t let Katya google Trixie. She wants her to get the full effect live and in person. It’s country music, Katya knows that much, covers and some originals.

“Right.” Fame hesitates for just a second and then turns to face Katya. Her hip props her up against the edge of the countertop, and she reaches for Katya’s hands to hold in both of hers. “Hey. Thank you. I know you hate music.”

“I don’t hate music. Just like…singing. Live singing.”

The so-familiar fluttering starts up in Katya’s chest and she kneads two fingers against her breastbone and waits for it to pass. She’s been feeling a lot of dread, lately, which she supposes means her sestrinskoye serdtse is excited about something. She’s happy for them, but she would love to make it through just one day without a cataclysmic sense of doom hanging over her head.

“All good?” Fame ducks her head just a touch to grab Katya’s eyeline.

Part of their journey to sobriety together has been total honesty. Fame knows that Katya is soulbound, and that it played a big part in her addiction issues in the first place. Addiction is a disease, she knows that, but it can be aggravated the same way her hip flexors get achy if she pushes too hard to try and get her straddle split.

Her sestrinskoye serdtse aggravates her. The last thirty years of her life, every single decision she has made she has had to consider them too. It made her very selfish for a long while there in her teens and early twenties. She’s back to selflessness now, tries to avoid things that will trigger any extreme of emotion in her at all.

“I’m good. Let’s go.”

The bar is crowded, because it’s a Friday night in Boston so they all are. Fame clings tight to Katya’s hand and leads them through the crowd. They have a little table reserved right up front near the stage, because Trixie is apparently a big enough deal that she gets to do that. Fame deposits Katya at the table like a toddler and goes back to the bar to get drinks for them both.

There’s no band, Katya notes with interest as she drums her fingers against the tabletop. There’s a microphone set up in a stand, and a pink guitar, but no other instruments.

When Fame comes back to the table, Katya gives her an exaggerated groan and drops her head into her hands. “Is this gonna be some acoustic bullshit?”

“Probably,” Fame says. “She plays guitar. And autoharp.”

“What the fuck is an autoharp?”

Fame pulls her phone out of her purse to start searching for a picture, but the lights dim and a few rowdy dudes whoop and holler and Fame hastily puts her phone away again. “I’m pretty sure you’re about to find out.”

Trixie comes out onto the stage, and Katya takes it like a punch to the gut. The lights make her blonde hair glow pink and it feels like intimacy, like pre-dawn. She’s wearing a very tiny, very tight dress that is all pink gingham and white fringe. Full Dolly fantasy, indeed.

Her hair is teased so high and it curls all the way down to her waist. It gets in her way so she can’t pull the strap of her guitar over her head, has to have a techie guide it around the back of her neck instead.

She strums her opening chord and the crowd roars wildly. According to Fame, Trixie has quite the fan base. She started posting music online and earned a following pretty quick. Now she tours around, playing small venues and selling her EP.

Katya is transfixed by Trixie, can’t draw her eyes away from her for more than a second at a time. She bops around the stage like she’s buoyed by the audience, stomping and jumping in her white cowboy boots. And every time the noise of the crowd swells, each time it crescendos, Katya feels anguish right in the centre of her chest. The same as always, she recognises it as something that doesn’t belong to her. It’s her sestrinskoye serdtse, having the time of their life.

She works two knuckles of her right hand against her breastbone and wrinkles her nose. This is fun, she’s having a good time watching Trixie, and she refuses to let her sestrinskoye serdtse be in charge tonight. It’s Katya’s turn.

“Now? Really?” Fame leans over to whisper to her.

“Guess so.”

She does her best to push it down. Everyone cheers and claps for Trixie so loudly, because they all came in here already loving her. They know all the words to everything she sings, even her original songs, and they sing along with her. Katya cheers too, whistles loudly with her fingers. It makes Trixie’s head snap towards them and she grins widely when she sees Fame.

At the very end of the show, everybody is applauding Trixie and hollering, and Katya feels misery rolling in thick waves that crest over the top of her head. It’s the strongest it’s been for a really long time. She ducks her head to put her chin against her chest and breathes raggedly against the feeling that she’s going to pass out.

Fame has one hand wrapped tight around Katya’s elbow and she focuses on those five points of contact. It’s so unfair that she can’t have just one night without having to share her whole self with somebody else. Hot tears of frustration collect along her lash line and she watches Trixie liquidate and shimmer pink and gold in front of her, blinks hard to bring her back into focus again.

“She texted me earlier. Said to come backstage after. Wanna come too?”

It’s maybe not the best idea. Her ribcage aches with the phantom hurt so that she can’t take a deep breath. One time, she watched a documentary about people who have had limbs amputated but can still feel them. Sasha found her crying into a bag of Skittles and took the remote away from her.

“Sure, okay. I need a cigarette first though.”

She heads outside, already fumbling with the carton of cigarettes and her lighter. There’s a lot of people crowding right outside the entrance of the bar and it feels like they’re all touching her at once but from the inside, beneath her skin. Katya loops around to the left and into the alley, leans back against the brick. The dumpster hides her from view mostly, so she closes her eyes and tilts her face up to the moonless night.

Everything is beginning to wear off now. She’s not sure whether it’s the cigarette, or if whatever her sestrinskoye serdtse was doing that made them so happy is finally over. It’s quite a bit colder out here than inside the bar. Katya crosses her left arm over her body and secures her hand at her right hip. It is not her first time hunkered in an alleyway on the precipice of tears.

Once she’s done with her cigarette she stubs it out against the wall and rummages in her purse for gum. Smoking is disgusting, she knows that, so she always does her best to cover up the smell of it after. Especially when meeting new people. And, well, her therapist does always say she has an oral fixation. Gum helps.

There’s no bouncer or anything - Trixie might be popular but she’s not that famous - so Katya knocks once and then opens the door to the tiny green room. Fame is seated on a little couch, her legs crossed at the ankles and tucked neatly in. She’s watching Trixie remove the layers of performance from herself.

“There you are,” Fame says when she sees Katya. “Trixie, this is-”

“Katya, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Trixie is wiping away something Katya assumes to be Pond’s cold cream with a facecloth. She’s brushed her hair out so that it isn’t teased quite so high anymore, but it’s still curly and thick and shiny. She’s changed into a different dress, a floaty lacy thing that looks like a Victorian nightgown. Katya wonders if Trixie ever wears pants of any kind. She can’t imagine it.

“Yeah! Katya.” Sasha told her once that she responds to her own name the same way a golden retriever does. She feels the warmth of embarrassment spreading up her throat and scrubs a hand at the back of her neck. “I’ve heard almost nothing about you. This one wanted me to experience you myself.”

“And how was your experience? Of me.”

Trixie gets done wiping her makeup away and starts rubbing some kind of lotion into her skin. The fancy bottles look familiar and Katya figures she’s probably seen them in Fame’s bathroom, before. The two of them did work the beauty counter together all those years ago, they probably trade all kinds of secrets. A weird flare of jealousy burns in Katya’s stomach for just a moment.

“Really good. You were…wow. You had them eating out of your hand.”

“I told you you’d like it,” Fame says. She’s so smug, but Katya is not about to point out that Fame specifically told her she probably wouldn’t like it. Not in front of Trixie, who looks so quietly pleased.

She’s finished with all of her serums and creams and wipes her hands clean on the facecloth. Freckles scatter her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, Katya notes. She’s really, really cute. Full lips, round cheeks, a graceful slope to her nose that Katya is very envious of.

A flutter starts in her chest, something with wings that Katya cages immediately. She doesn’t date anymore, doesn’t bother with it. Sometimes she will take a random girl home with her for the night, but it’s a lot more difficult to do now that she’s sober. She’s a solitary creature, and that’s okay with her.

Done with her beauty routine, Trixie finally turns away from the mirror to look Katya in the eye for the very first time.

Oh.

Years later, people will ask the two of them how they knew. To those who aren’t soulbound, it’s difficult to understand, but Katya explains it like this: imagine you’ve spent your whole life with a stone in your shoe, you’ve learned to live with it, you don’t even notice the discomfort some days. And then just like that, the stone is gone.

Neither of them says anything. For a horrifying second, Katya thinks she’s the only one who feels it and she has actually lost her mind here in this bar. Then Trixie takes a couple of stumbling steps backwards and catches herself against the edge of the vanity table. Her knuckles are white. Fame darts a puzzled glance between the two of them and then gets to her feet.

“I’m going to um…give you a minute,” she says, but Katya’s not even hearing her. Not really.

She’s staring at Trixie, she knows she is, but she thinks it’s okay because Trixie is staring at her right back. Neither of them moves or speaks. She knows that it’s true, feels it as surely as she’s ever known anything, but she wants to be certain.

“Trixie. Trixie, when’s your birthday?”

“August 23, 1989.”

“Fuck,” Katya says, and has to sit down.

It seems to jolt Trixie into action. She crosses the distance between them and goes to her knees at Katya’s feet on the disgusting green room carpet. Trixie fumbles for Katya’s hands, takes both of them in hers and squeezes.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Is it you?”

Katya bites her lip. She feels relief, and wonder, and she feels it twice. After thirty years she’s gotten very good at separating her own emotions from those of her sestrinskoye serdtse. From those of Trixie. Holy shit. She recognises Trixie’s own awe, feels it milky and ephemeral the same way she always does. But now she doesn’t feel the opposite of what Trixie feels. She feels the truth of it.

“I felt the day you were born,” Katya says.

Of all the things she ever imagined she would say to her sestrinskoye serdtse when - if - she ever got to meet them, this was not high up on the list. But Trixie is at her feet like supplication, like exaltation.

Trixie’s hands are still in hers. Katya absently notes her nails, trimmed short and painted baby pink, and wonders whether that’s for playing guitar or…

When at fifteen she figured out she was bisexual, Katya had been extremely annoyed. Her friends were sweet about it, told her it widened her dating pool and really she was so lucky, but all she kept thinking was that she wouldn’t even know whether her sestrinskoye serdtse is a man or a woman until she met them. And then she’d worried that they’d be a woman, and they’d be straight, and they wouldn’t want her.

“How old are you?” Trixie asks, wide-eyed.

Katya screams and clutches tighter at Trixie’s hands. “Shut up, you cunt! I’m only thirty seven, so.”

“I’m just about to turn thirty.”

“Yes, I know. Trixie. Oh my God. You’re…”

She trails off, not entirely sure where she’s going with that. Thirty years of anticipation, and no small amount of despair, is welling up in her chest. It comes spilling out of her eyes, one hot tear that rolls cinematically down her cheek. Trixie reaches up to swipe it away with the pad of her thumb.

“Katya.” She gets up from the floor and comes to sit next to Katya on the little couch. There’s not an awful lot of room, and Trixie’s hips are wide, so their knees press together tight. “You’ve been there my whole life. Like, whatever I’ve been doing I’ve always known there was someone out there who cares about me because I could feel them. You.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Trixie. God.” She can’t seem to stop saying Trixie’s name. She likes the feeling of it in her mouth and the way it sounds, likes too how Trixie’s smile grows wider each time.

One gentle hand comes to rest at Katya’s knee. Trixie is tall and broad, and her hands are a lot bigger than Katya’s are, she notes with interest. Trixie is the most beautiful woman she’s seen ever, ever, ever.

“What do we…do now?” Trixie asks.

Kiss me, Katya thinks, but doesn’t say it. She’s known Trixie for all of five minutes, even though her soul has known Trixie’s for thirty years. It’s an insistent and quivering thing in her chest that she tries to ignore.

“Do you have to like, get on a bus or something? I don’t know how tours work.”

It makes Trixie laugh, and Katya is quietly pleased. She’d like to make Trixie laugh more, would like to hear it every day from now on.

“I’ve got three days in Boston before I move on to New York. Wanted to catch up with a few friends in the city while I’m here.”

“Okay! Do you maybe want to come back to my apartment?” Trixie opens her mouth and Katya hurries through the rest of her sentence. “Not for- just to get to know each other a bit. Oh! And I have something to show you.”

Trixie’s eyes drag very slowly down Katya’s body, from the crown of her head, and come to rest right in her lap. She arches one eyebrow. Katya screams her most obnoxious, pneumatic laugh and shakes her fists in the air.

“I would love to see what you have to show me,” Trixie says once Katya’s done screaming. “I gotta tell Bob.”

She gets up from the couch and smoothes her skirt out against her legs with the flat of her palms. Katya is struck once more by how lovely she is. Want fills her up slowly, warm and liquid. She presses her thighs together, and then realises that not only can Trixie see her doing that, she can probably feel it too.

Trixie holds out a hand for her and tugs her up off the couch. When they move for the door, she doesn’t let go. Katya’s palms are clammy and definitely unpleasant, but when she moves to take her hand back Trixie squeezes tighter.

“Roberta!” she yells down the hall.

A woman appears with a cardboard box in both arms. She’s taller than Trixie, even, and her braided hair is piled up on top of her head in an intricate style that gives her an extra six inches at least.

“Beatrice,” Bob says with a smile that definitely reads I am going to murder you. “I’m very busy hawking your merch right now.”

“Sold any?”

“Not a one. Actually had to pay damages to a few people for the indignity of having to look at your face.”

Katya watches their interaction with interest. She knows almost nothing about Trixie, but seeing her with Bob is putting a couple of pieces into place. Trixie is acerbic and sarcastic. She might look like a princess, but there’s a bite beneath the pink and the lace that Katya is very interested in knowing more about.

“Tell your dad if he buys five shirts I’ll let him stick it in.”

“My dad’s dead,” Bob says, and then cackles. “My bomb pussy killed him.”

Trixie suddenly seems to remember that Katya is still there, tethered to the end of her arm. She glances at her, but when she sees that Katya is grinning right along with them her shoulders come down a little.

“I’m going home with Katya. I’ll text you.”

“Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova,” Katya says, and offers her hand for Bob to shake.

She doesn’t miss the tiny squeak Trixie lets out next to her. Katya enjoys her full name, enjoys how Russian she sounds when she says it even though she was born right here in Massachusetts and doesn’t have an accent. Or not a Russian one, anyway.

“Nice to meet you.” Bob turns to Trixie. “Since when do you go home with groupies?”

“She’s not a-” Trixie starts indignantly, and then catches herself. “Katya’s different. I’ll text you.”

“Be safe, please. I’m not paying for your gonorrhoea treatment. Again!” Bob calls after them as Trixie starts dragging Katya down the hallway.

“Ignore her.”

“You haven’t had gonorrhoea?” Katya says sweetly.

“I pay for my own treatments, bitch!”

Katya cackles again. The way Trixie makes her laugh is new, feels different. She doesn’t recall herself ever having made some of these sounds before. Her heart is so light she feels six inches off the ground, and Trixie is still holding her hand.

They come out into the main area of the bar. A couple of people are hovering and Trixie signs autographs for them, takes selfies, listens intently as they gush at her. She gave Katya her hand back, had to, so she stuffs them both into her pockets and hovers a few feet away. Waiting for Trixie to be done. Waiting to take Trixie home.

Fame is sitting at the bar, stirring the straw around and around in her glass. Panic guts Katya and her intestines fall out at her feet. The whole reason that she’s here in the first place is to be sober with Fame, and then she let her wander off to the bar by herself.

“You good?”

“Are you good?” Fame says. She notices Katya’s eyes on her glass and huffs. “It’s virgin. Give me a little credit.”

Katya climbs up onto the barstool next to Fame’s. “Right. I’m sorry. Yeah. I’m good. I’m really good.”

“Are you going to explain, or?”

Across the bar, Trixie is saying goodbye to the last of her fans. She exchanges a couple words with Bob, who is beginning to pack up the merch table, and then she turns around. When she sees Katya her face breaks wide open and she smiles, starts heading for them.

“It’s her, Fame.” Katya rests a hand at Fame’s knee and hopes that she can feel how Katya’s whole life has changed. “It’s Trixie.”

Fame doesn’t frown - she would never invite a permanent crease to form - but she does tilt her head in puzzlement. “What’s her? What’s going on?”

When Trixie reaches them she rests her hand at the back of Katya’s chair. Her knuckles are just barely touching Katya’s spine and she leans back into them, likes feeling Trixie so close to her.

Understanding drops Fame’s jaw and yanks a gasp from her throat. “Wait a minute. Oh my God. Trixie, are you soulbound?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“She doesn’t know?” Katya whips around in her seat to look at Trixie, who is blushing so furiously that it’s spreading down to her chest.

“I never told anyone. Ever. My whole life.”

Katya can only stare at her. It’s been hard enough all this time carrying Trixie’s heart along with hers. She can’t fathom doing it alone, not having Sasha to sit with her when it gets bad or Fame on the other end of the phone any time of the day or night.

“Wow. Uh. Congratulations?”

“Thanks,” Katya grins. She hops down from the barstool and adds another two inches difference between herself and Trixie. “We’re headed to my place. I’ll call you tomorrow?”

She shouldn’t leave Fame here, she knows that, but Trixie is growing rapidly more impatient and Katya wants to get her home before she changes her mind. Fame is still mostly just staring in wonder at Trixie, but she does manage a little nod.

“Yeah, sure. Or before that, Katya, if you need.”

Tenderness makes Katya’s heart soft and sticky. She kisses Fame’s cheek, even though she hates it when Katya leaves red lipstick on her. While she’s right there, she whispers her gratitude into Fame’s ear. Reminds her that it goes both ways, that she can call Katya too.

And then she leads Trixie out into the night. She has an overnight bag with her, a pink duffel, and Katya takes it and hikes it over her shoulder. It’s still humid from the day and the back of her neck feels damp already, but it’s less hot and she’s glad for that.

“Are you okay to walk? You must be exhausted.”

“Walking‘s good. I always have a ton of adrenaline after a show.”

That piques Katya’s interest. She would very much like to know how Trixie usually burns off that energy. It’s not a question for right now. She starts moving, feels the warmth of Trixie right beside her. Her apartment is only a few blocks from the bar.

“So. You told Fame you have a soulmate?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty much common knowledge in my circle of friends.” Katya is glad that they’re walking, glad she doesn’t have to look Trixie in the face for this. “I haven’t always…found it easy. I’ve needed them.”

Trixie hums a little noise at that, but doesn’t say anything else. They’re at Katya’s building now and she swats Trixie away when she tries to take her bag back, fumbling awkward and one-handed for her keys. She’s determined to be chivalrous.

Her place is a two-story walk up. She invites Trixie to go ahead of her, pretending that she has to lock the door behind them even though it locks itself and she absolutely just wants to look at Trixie’s ass as she goes up the stairs.

It’s electric and thrilling, feels adolescent to be here with Trixie like this. It’s been a long time since she’s brought a girl home with her. If she can, she likes to go back to their place instead so that she can leave when she wants in the morning and doesn’t have to awkwardly try to shepherd them out of the door.

Katya gets the door open after wrestling for a second with the sticky lock. The humidity is making it worse than normal. It’s not because Trixie is leaning with one shoulder propped against the wall, shamelessly watching her. It’s not.

“I am comfortable with a level of filth that other people find it difficult to accept,” she offers as a prelude before she opens the door.

It’s not actually that bad, not as bad as it was in her twenties, but still. She imagines every inch of Trixie’s home is color-coordinated and pristine. Katya double checks the front door is locked and puts the chain on it, turns back around to see Trixie already in her kitchen and studying the paraphernalia Katya has tacked to the refrigerator.

“Can I get you a drink? I don’t keep alcohol in the house, but I have tea, coffee, juice.”

“Hot water is fine. Do you have honey?” Trixie starts opening cabinets to check for herself and finds it almost immediately. “Lemon?”

Katya wrinkles her nose. She is notoriously terrible at feeding herself. Her refrigerator is usually barren. She only likes two foods at a time, would happily eat the same thing every meal for the rest of her life if her friends didn’t intervene.

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s fine. Honey’s good for my throat.”

Once the kettle is on the stovetop and heating up, Katya excuses herself to change. In the bathroom, she stares at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her sestrinskoye serdtse is here. Right out there, in Katya’s living room. And she’s tall and blonde and gorgeous and famous, sort of a little bit. It’s so ridiculous that Katya actually laughs, out loud, and then splashes cold water on her face.

When she comes back out, Trixie is over by the bookshelves running her fingers along and touching all of Katya’s tchotchkes. She turns around at the sound of the bathroom door opening.

“You have a lot of cool stuff.”

“Thanks! It’s vintage, mostly.”

Trixie tilts her head in consideration of that. “Does it count as vintage when you’ve been alive for a hundred and fifty years?”

Katya screams, again. Her neighbour is going to give her that stern look when they bump into each other in the mailroom tomorrow, but she doesn’t care.

When you’re an addict, people often tiptoe around you. Katya is used to people - especially new people - treating her like she’s gun shy or easily spooked.

“You’re a villain, Trixie Mattel.”

Her cheeks pink at her full name. Trixie spreads the skirt of her dress out in her hands and bends her knees in a little bow. “What was it like, witnessing the Industrial Revolution firsthand?”

“Stop!” Katya gasps.

Trixie is grinning open-mouthed. Even teasing, Katya thinks she is so lovely, so sweet and wonderful. She can hardly believe it. For just a second she wonders whether this is a soulbound thing, whether it puts rose-tinted glasses over her and that’s what makes Trixie a pink angel, but she doesn’t think so. She thought that the second she saw her, before they knew they were soulbound.

The kettle starts whistling and Katya fixes their drinks, hot water with honey for Trixie and green tea for herself. She joins Trixie on the couch and hands her the mug, wraps both hands around her own.

Her phone in her back pocket is jamming awkwardly into her hip. She tugs it free and goes to put it on the coffee table, then thinks better of it and hands it to Trixie instead.

“Here. Gimme your number.”

Trixie adds herself as a contact. She’s put an emoji after her name, the two pink hearts, and Katya grins to see it. She sends Trixie a text so that she’ll have her number too.

“Hold on, some weirdo’s texting me.” Trixie glances down at her own phone, but Katya doesn’t miss the way she watches her from the corner of her eye, looking for her reaction.

For a little while, they trade information back and forth like secrets. Katya asks Trixie about her childhood, her family, where she grew up, and she offers her own answers truth for truth. She learns all about Wisconsin, about growing up poor and how that has given Trixie the work ethic she has today.

It’s getting late, but they’re not on the other side of the night yet. It hasn’t rolled over into morning. Trixie is sitting with her elbow propped up on the back of the couch and she plays absent-mindedly with strands of her own hair. She’s warm and Katya smells adrenaline and sweat on her, and leftover perfume.

“Hey,” Trixie says when there’s a lull in their conversation, and reaches out to prod Katya’s bicep. “What did you want to show me?”

Katya gets up and leads Trixie to her bedroom. She keeps her old journals in here, because it’s easier than fielding questions whenever she has friends or family over. They take up the bottom three shelves of her bookcase. She gestures to them, and Trixie sinks down to kneel on the carpet.

“I uh, kept notes. Helped me make sense of things, I guess. And so that I could ask them - you - for the stories.”

Trixie looks up at Katya and she has one hand over her heart like she’s trying to keep it in her chest. “Can I?”

“Course. They’re about you.”

Katya settles cross-legged on the end of her bed to watch. She picks at her cuticles, feeling suddenly bare. Lots of the people in her life know that she’s soulbound, but since the day that Anya found her journal nobody else has ever seen them.

The first one Trixie picks out is the first one Katya started. It’s thirty years old and the binding is coming apart a bit, she keeps meaning to tape it together. The pages are yellow and her writing is a little faded; Trixie cranes her neck over it until her nose is almost touching.

“You didn’t start from my birthday?”

“I didn’t have the journal yet,” Katya explains.

Trixie doesn’t seem to even really be listening. She’s following the words on the page with her fingertips as she reads, like she’s trying to absorb them. It feels voyeuristic to watch, even though it’s Katya’s own words that she’s reading.

“Wow. I never even thought about that. How weird it must have been for you when I was a little kid.”

Katya snorts a laugh. “Weird is an understatement. Thought they were gonna ship me off to the looney bin a couple times there.”

“When did you get back?”

The way she teases with her sweet voice and her sweet smile is like taking a hit to the solar plexus every time. It’s like they’ve known each other years. Katya kicks her foot out in Trixie’s direction but isn’t quite close enough to make contact.

Trixie closes the journal and puts it back in its place on the shelf, skips ahead several years. The one she pulls next is from when she was nine and Katya was sixteen. It wasn’t a good year for either of them, Katya remembers that much. And she remembers how she had handled it.

Not gracefully.

“I had kind of a shitty childhood,” Trixie offers. They both know that Katya already knows that, but she’s grateful anyway that Trixie has chosen to share. “Yours seemed pretty good though. I was sad a lot, so I guess you were happy?”

Oh. Right. That.

“I was…” Katya pauses to swallow roughly. Her mouth is suddenly dry and she works her tongue around her teeth. “I was high, Trixie. Like a lot. For years and years.”

Trixie very slowly closes the journal and sets it down in front of herself. She doesn’t lift her head to look at Katya. A little crease has formed between her eyebrows that Katya wants to put her mouth to.

“You were high?”

“Yeah. Or drunk. Sometimes both.”

Katya is way past the point of shame. She’s worked through it a lot in therapy and in AA meetings and now she can view that part of her life with a sort of detachment. Like somebody else did those things.

“You knew that whatever you felt, I would feel the opposite, and you chose to get high anyway?”

“Trixie-”

“Do you know what the opposite of euphoria is, Katya?” Trixie suddenly seems to realise the imbalance between them and gets to her feet. “It’s fucking misery. All the time. And then imagine that you’re nine fucking years old.”

Katya hates confrontation, always has. And she doesn’t know enough about Trixie yet to know where the lines are, how carefully she needs to tread. She lays her hands flat against her thighs, palms up.

“I didn’t think it would count. If it was synthetic happiness.“

“Well it fucking did. I was a kid.”

God. She knows that. She thought about it a lot when she went to rehab. That it wasn’t only her own life she was destroying. And every addict says that, of course, because everybody has an intimate circle of collateral around themselves, but for her it was different.

“I know you were. I know. I’ve had a lot of guilt about that.”

“Well why the fuck did you do it then?” Trixie has her hands in two tight fists and she’s pressing them against her legs as if she doesn’t trust what she might do with them otherwise.

“I’m happy for you that you don’t have enough of a concept of addiction to understand why it’s not that easy,” Katya says very gently.

“Don’t patronise me!”

Katya closes her mouth. She always thought that feeling the opposite of what the other person feels is cruel, is an unkindness on the part of the universe, but this is even worse. Trixie’s heart is aching inside of Katya’s chest. She can feel how much she has hurt her, can even feel how Trixie is on the hot edge of tears.

“I’m sorry. I was selfish. I wish I could take it back.”

“I have to go,” Trixie says. She looks around herself in confusion, like she can’t understand how she got here. “I can’t be here with you. I have to go.”

She’s at the door before Katya can even begin to figure out how to ask her to stay. It’s an unusual sensation. She’s not in love with Trixie, not yet, but she is the love of her life. Trixie is her sestrinskoye serdtse, but Katya feels certain that if she lets her go now that’s it for them.

“Trixie, please-” Katya starts, and gets her own front door closed in her face.

She slumps against it and sinks to the ground, lets her head smack back heavily against the wood. And then again, and again, and one more time. Katya draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, opens her mouth to let her teeth scrape against her own skin.

After an indeterminate amount of time, Katya heaves herself up off the floor. Her phone is face down on the kitchen countertop and she reaches for it, dials without looking.

“Katya?”

“Da,” she says.

She starts explaining the whole situation in rapidfire Russian, and as she talks she moves through her apartment and lets her muscle memory kick in. She rinses their two mugs and closes her blinds and checks that her lunch is ready to go for the morning.

On the other end of the phone, Sasha listens intently. Sometimes she just needs to rant in her mother tongue, and her old roommate is always so receptive and kind. Katya tells her that she found her sestrinskoye serdtse and that they are beautiful and funny and kind and that Katya is never going to see them again because the mistakes she made at thirteen are still, still, wreaking havoc in her adult life.

“Katya, you said you can feel how upset she is?”

“Da.” She bows her head over the sink and lets a tear drip off the end of her nose into it. “It hurts.”

“Okay. Well don’t you think that might mean that she feels how sorry you are, then?”

That did not occur to her, and she feels like a colossal idiot. Katya turns out all the lights through the kitchen and living room and gets into bed, phone tight in her grip still.

“Do you think it will make a difference?”

“I’d say so.”

Sasha has switched back to English now. Katya assumes Shea is there, knows how much Sasha hates to speak Russian in front of her wife and exclude her in any way, even accidentally.

“I like her so much. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

“I think you should give her some space for tonight. She was fresh off a show, right? Her emotions have to have been running high.”

Katya huffs a little noise of agreement. She knows that Trixie is tired because she feels it, layered over top of her own exhaustion like she is the photograph and Trixie the negative.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Trixie is vibrant and technicolor and Katya feels not all the way here.

There’s whispering on the other end of the phone, the sound of a door closing. “Do you need me to come over? Or I can stay on with you till you fall asleep.”

“I’m okay. Really. I’m just gonna pass out. Thank you, yaytso.” The nickname makes Sasha grunt and Katya grins, hurries to follow it up with something a little more tender. “Ya lyublyu tebya.”

They hang up. Katya doesn’t fall asleep, of course not. She lies on her back with her arms crossed over her chest so she can feel it rising and falling, to remind her that she will go on breathing even though it feels like her lungs are collapsing.

All of her life, she’s imagined this moment. What it will be like to meet her sestrinskoye serdtse. She always figured that whoever they were, no matter what, the two of them would just fall into it. That it would be easy.

She’s still awake when the sun comes up and she rolls out of bed and runs through her salutation. It does help, grounds her a little bit. Now that she’s listening to her body, it has finally gone quiet. Trixie is sleeping, then. Katya is teaching some classes today, but not until a little later in the morning. She takes a long shower and tips her head back beneath the stream, lets the hot water pound down over her face.

Her bangs are getting long. She huffs a breath and they flutter against her forehead. Katya runs through her usual makeup routine, dark smudgy liner and a crimson lip. She feels a little more like herself now.

Having Trixie in her space brought a few truths home for her. Firstly, she needs to get some actual food. Her refrigerator is almost totally empty and it’s embarrassing; she’s nearing forty.

Part of the reason she doesn’t eat is that she hates the grocery store. The lights stress her out and she gets so self-conscious, worries that she’s in everybody’s way while they try to browse the shelves.

It’s not yet eight, so it’s fairly quiet still. She gets a cart in the hope that she will be encouraged to fill it. Katya paces up and down the aisles choosing things at random. Back when she lived with Sasha they had a good arrangement going: Sasha made meal plans and went to the store and cooked everything, and Katya did the dishes and took out the garbage.

She misses her, fires off a quick text to tell her so. There’s no response, but Sasha is probably busy getting ready for work and is also probably exhausted after staying up with Katya all night like she’s a colicky infant.

Katya finds herself picking up a whole bag of lemons without really thinking about it. She hates them, and she pauses for a second and then goes ahead and puts them in the cart. She pays for everything and heads down the block towards her apartment with a brown paper bag cradled in each arm.

She’s not looking where she’s going, because she’s trying to figure out how to get her keys out of her pocket without dropping all of her groceries. A voice startles her and it takes twenty years of yoga, of centring herself, for her not to dump everything out on the sidewalk.

“Let me help.”

“Trixie?”

“Hi.” Trixie chews on her lip. She’s not wearing any makeup and her hair is back in a ponytail. There are blue tinted shadows beneath her eyes and a line across her forehead that was not there last night. “Here. Give them to me.”

“You’re here.”

“I’ve been buzzing.”

“I’m not home,” Katya says, and immediately wishes she had a hand free to slap over her face.

It makes Trixie smile though. She’s still holding her hands out and Katya passes the bags over. She gets the door unlocked, ushers Trixie up the stairs ahead of her and opens her apartment door as well. She has about three seconds to collect herself while she locks it behind them and she takes a very deep, very slow breath.

Trixie is at the kitchen island unloading the bags, putting the perishables in the refrigerator. It’s so achingly domestic that Katya feels like she’s going to die. Instead, she heads to join Trixie and help her.

“These are for you.” She holds the bag of lemons out towards Trixie.

Her face goes soft around the edges. Now that Katya’s getting a good look at her, she sees that the whites of her eyes and the tip of her nose are a little pink.

“I talked to Fame,” Trixie offers. She takes the lemons and puts them away into the refrigerator, very carefully not looking at Katya. “You were right. I don’t know what it’s like, to be an addict. She helped me to understand a little better.”

For just a second, she bristles. She doesn’t like the idea of Trixie and Fame talking about her. But Trixie is here, so whatever Fame said clearly worked.

“And, Katya.” Trixie turns to look at her then. Her shoulders go down and she sets her jaw. “I felt you. Felt how guilty you’ve been, all this time. How sorry you are.”

“I’m so, so sorry,” she agrees.

Those words have been offered many, many times. To her friends and family and coworkers and doctors. This is the first time she’s really sure that the other person understands how deeply she means them.

“I forgive you,” Trixie says. She takes Katya’s hand in hers and laces their fingers together. “I can’t say I understand, but I…appreciate how difficult it’s been. For you.”

“Has it been difficult for you?”

Trixie huffs an adorable little noise. They’re just standing here, holding hands in the middle of Katya’s kitchen. It should feel ridiculous. It doesn’t.

“Yes. I’ve ached for you, every day. Tried to move past it-” She cuts herself off and frowns. “Well. I guess you know about that. But yes. I’ve wanted you so badly, my whole life.”

“That’s pretty gay,” Katya says. She’s grinning, can’t help herself. Trixie learned the truth, learned about the part of her that pads restlessly, concentrically in her heart. And she came back.

Trixie snorts. “Uh yeah, well I’m a giant lesbian, so.”

“I wouldn’t say giant.” Katya lets her eyes roam over Trixie. She’s in flats today, cute little pumps, but she still has several inches on Katya.

She screams that banshee laugh again and throws her head back, closes her eyes. It’s so cute. Trixie is so cute. When she gets done cackling she goes quiet and then she wells up, her brown eyes almost green in the early morning light.

“I don’t want this to be ruined before it even starts,” she whispers.

Katya reaches for her, not sure what her intentions are until she gets her hands on Trixie. She brings her in for a hug, one hand cradling the back of her head and the other rubbing the space between her shoulder blades.

“Hey, no. Trixie, baby, shh, it’s okay. Nothing’s ruined. We’re okay.”

She holds her for a long time, feels the material of her shirt getting damp. Trixie has her arms low around Katya’s waist. They’ve known each other for barely twelve hours. But they have also known each other for thirty years. Pressed together like this, Katya’s heart greets Trixie’s warmly.

Will - Bastard son of the king. Oldest. Serves in the royal guard by choice. Acknowledged by his father and was given a title, in spite of the fact that his father is originally from another kingdom. Starling is his stepmother’s family’s kingdom. Tremendous flirt. Most of the kingdom doesn’t take him too seriously, but he’s generally well-liked. Not seen as a threat to the throne at all, either in Starling or in the Verdant Isles (his father’s homeland). Surprised a lot of people when he claimed an infant little girl as his own, saying only that her mother died in labor. No one knows who that mother was, but there sure is a lot of speculation. 

Amelia - Princess of The Central Kingdoms. Promised by treaty before her birth to be married off to the heir of Starling. Takes her duties seriously. Absolutely not to be trifled with. Has secrets of her own. 

Princess Jules - Firstborn legitimate child to Queen Felicity of Starling and King Oliver of the Verdant Isles. Never met a rule she felt like following. Obsessed with finding who killed her lover, Jackson, the baker’s son. Constantly dragged back to the castle by the royal guards. More likely to hit a suitor than kiss him. Completely uninterested in marriage of any sort, much less something deemed appropriate. 

Alex- Captain of the Guard. If keeping his best friend Will safe doesn’t kill him, trying to rein in Princess Jules might. One way or another. Knows all of Will’s secrets. Really wants to know all of Princess Jules’ too. 

Princess Ellie - Twin of Prince Nate. The pair of them were born under the weight of prophecy. She’s been destined to lead their religious order since before she was born. Charming and bright eyed, she’s starting to wonder how much of her own life can be of her own making. 

Sara - Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Ellie. Longtime confidant and closest friend. Knows far more than she says. Always. Has her own agenda, which isn’t entirely of her own making. 

Prince Nate - Royal Heir. Carefully groomed for the crown from an early age. Puts his own desires a distant second to the needs of his family and kingdom. Has known he is destined for great things his entire life. Proper, polite, and endlessly appropriate. More than a little repressed. Can’t stop staring at the royal scribe’s daughter, but knows what his duty demands, and it’s not her. 

Penny - Daughter of the Royal Scribe. Training as her father’s apprentice. Frequent figure in court. More than a little enthralled by the crowned prince, but way too well trained in etiquette to allow the blurring of any boundaries. Sometimes stands near enough to Prince Nate that she can feel his body heat. Once they accidentally brushed hands. She still dreams about that all the time.