Honey Girl

by Morgan Rogers

  “Relax.” Yuki frowns. “Technically, I think I got her drunk.”

  “You did,” Grace says, fidgeting with the straps of her backpack. “And I can’t remember it, but from the picture, the wedding seemed really nice,” she admits.

  Yuki makes a surprised noise. “You kept it?”

  “Yeah.” She shrugs. “It makes me happy when I look at it.”

  The room is silent, and she stares down at her feet.

  “Did you bring the picture?” Dhorian asks. He shakes a spoonful of cookie dough at her. “You can share this with me if you say yes.”

  “Yes,” Grace says. “Why?”

  He lets out a shriek. One of their neighbors beats on the wall. “Yuki refuses to let us see it,” he says. He lifts his mixing bowl like an offering. “Today, girls and gays, we feast on drunk love.” He jumps down off the counter. “I think I have vodka stashed somewhere. Reconvene in fifteen. Hut hut!”

  “Hut hut!” Sani and Fletcher yell.

  They scatter, and Yuki grabs Grace’s hand and pulls her down a hallway. The grip has started to feel familiar, as does the way Yuki sends shy glances at Grace out of the corner of her eye, like she’s checking to make sure Grace is still there.

  Are you there?

  “I’m here,” she says quietly. She feels an unhindered sense of acceptance. She can just be here, without any heavy, weighed down expectations.

  She says it now, standing in the middle of Yuki’s room. She is surrounded by posters and old radios and a little altar, as Grace suspected, with crystals and herbs and vials of sea salt.

  Yuki looks at Grace to check that she is really there, and yes, she is.

  * * *

  The first lesson Grace learns about Yuki Yamamoto is that she’s a blanket hog.

  It would bother Grace, if she was someone who slept much. Instead, she climbs out of the full-size bed and the memory foam topper Yuki splurged on. The apartment doesn’t have a balcony like Grace’s back in Portland, so she makes do with cracking the window open. Yuki doesn’t wake.

  She has to be careful with the windows because Yuki has little statues lined up along the sill. They go in between burned down incense, and Grace leans down to smell the lingering remains. She finds herself wondering, sleepy and alone under moonlight, what Yuki was thinking when she lit these. If she was thinking about the stars or work or the lonely creatures in the dark. If maybe she lit these once and thought of Grace, and watched the incense burn down to its stumps.

  “Honey Girl?” Yuki murmurs, voice hoarse with sleep. The half-moons under her eyes are part of their own galaxy. “What are you doing?” She doesn’t lift her head off the pillow, so her hair falls in her eyes and covers them up. “Sleepy.”

  “Sorry,” Grace whispers back, carefully closing the window and tiptoeing back toward the bed. Her body sinks into the mattress as she crawls back in. “Insomniac.”

  Her hair falls around her in streaks. Yuki reaches out hesitantly, watching Grace’s face as her fingers start to twirl in the sleep-flattened curls. She hadn’t said anything when Grace changed out her pillowcase for a silk one. Had only rolled toward it and said it smelled like jasmine.

  Now she tugs lightly at Grace’s hair, the strands meandering over the sheets. “This is what I remember,” she croaks out. “It never really got dark that night in Vegas, and you were passed out on the bed. All the lights hit your hair. Honey gold,” she tells Grace. “A girl with hair from the sun.”

  Grace sighs. She closes her eyes, cocooning herself in the quiet intimacy. “That’s not me,” she says.

  Yuki makes a soft noise and shifts closer. “It’s a good story,” she says.

  “It’s just a story.”

  She feels Yuki’s gaze on her, sharpening by the second. “Can I tell you something I’ve learned from stories, Grace Porter?”

  In a fit of spiteful bravery, she tugs half the covers away from Yuki. “Yes,” she says finally, burrowed underneath. “What have you learned?”

  Yuki takes her half of the covers and burrows under, too. The two of them are underneath, a hidden fortress for whispering secrets. “People may not believe the stories,” she says, pink mouth cracking open with a yawn, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”

  Grace spends the rest of the night staring up at Yuki’s ceiling, wishing for her own plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars. She spends the rest of the night breathing through the feeling of her chest aching, her heart breaking, wishing she could believe the stories as simply as Yuki does. In the real world, people do not easily accept the things on the fringes, the things with teeth and claws and wants and dreams. Stories do not change that.

  Grace gets up at eight while Yuki is snoring away next to her. She sleeps in, Grace will learn, until about noon, then wakes up angry to be alive until she’s had her toast with jam.

  Grace meanders into the living space.

  No one is cooking breakfast, but Dhorian is slinking in the door with a hoodie pulled on over his hospital scrubs. He waves a tired hand at Grace before he collapses against the kitchen counter and sighs longingly at their cheap coffee maker.

  “I need coffee,” he says, “but I’m too tired to make coffee.”

  She hesitates. “Do you want me to—” she starts to ask, voice breaking in the middle. “Do you want me to make your coffee?”

  He tilts his head. “Porter,” he says quietly, “if you make the machine do the thing, I will fly to Vegas and marry you, too.”

  She laughs quietly, coming out of the shadows. She waggles her fingers until her gold band is visible. “I think I did okay the first time around.” The coffee machine gurgles. “How was work?” she asks, anxious to fill the space with words that aren’t about her drunken night with desert flowers and forever vows.

  Dhorian groans. He instructs Grace on how to work the machine between yawns. “Night shift in the ED. Sorry, the emergency department. It’s—what’s a nicer phrase for ‘absolutely fucking ghoulish’?”

  “I think that works.”

  “Okay.” He looks like he could fall asleep right here on the counter. “Then, it was absolutely fucking ghoulish. Kid came in with a broken arm and a suspected case of negligence. Probably child abuse. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you,” he says, “but it’s really fucked up when you gotta send the kid home. Sugar and cream, please.”

  She gets the sugar and cream.

  “What made you choose that field?” she asks him. “You’re a resident, right?”

  He nods. Watchful, sleepy eyes follow her progress. “Mom’s a pediatrician. Dad’s a pediatrician. Sister’s finishing up her pediatric residency,” he says ruefully. He stands up to stretch. “What’s a rebel without a cause, huh?” He grabs his mug with both hands and shuffles down the hall to the room he shares with Fletcher. “Next time you see me, remind me to ask you about your work, okay? Thank you, Porter,” he says, before his bedroom door shuts behind him.

  If Grace has anything to say about it, she won’t remind him. She doesn’t even want to think about it herself.

  Instead, she wanders around the apartment, careful of creaking floorboards. She runs her hand along all the exposed brick, and the rough scratchy surface reminds her of the asteroid particles back in the MacMillan lab. Their little living room is exploding with pictures and magazines and a film of glitter. There’s a fish tank in the corner of the room filled with neon-bright fish. They are the same color as Grace’s stick-on ceiling stars, the ones that hear all her hopes and dreams and fears and worries.

  She crouches down in front of the tank and wonders if these fish, innocuous and quiet, have heard the same from the people in this apartment. She presses a finger to the glass and taps lightly. One darts toward the sound.

  “Hello,” she says quietly, watching it flick from side to side. She taps again, and it follows. “Hello, bright little thin
g.”

  The fish swims away, back into its little coven of neon friends. They are mesmerizing to watch, content as they are to swim in their little group in their little tank in their little world.

  “What do you think about?” she asks the fish in the tank. “Do you ever think about the big, wide ocean, and how you would feel if you could swim in it?” She taps the glass again, and another, or maybe the same fish, darts forward. “I thought I wanted to be out of my tank,” she confesses with a whisper. “But the ocean is big, you know, and I am very, very small.” The fish follows her finger. “I don’t know that I like it,” she says, so softly she can barely hear it herself. “I don’t know that I like feeling this small at all.”

  Eleven

  On the nights Yuki doesn’t close up the restaurant and come home with aching feet and meager tips, she does the radio show. Grace watches her undo her work-sanctioned white button-down and black tie, and turn soft and pink and relaxed after a shower. She only wears comfy clothes to the radio station, and tonight she tumbles out of her steamy bathroom in black leggings and oversize lesbian flannel and settles on the couch.

  Fletcher has been trying to teach Sani and Grace how to play Egyptian Rat Screw for the past hour, still in his suit jacket and tie from school. His hands are covered in paint.

  The end of the school year is bullshit, he said when he came in. I just let them finger-paint.

  Now he says, “Seriously, how have you guys never played this?” He deals the cards evenly. “Every day at recess I used to wipe the floor with those uppity punks who tried to out-slap me.”

  Fletcher is from Queens.

  Sani wrinkles his nose and stares warily at the cards being thrown in front of him. His long hair hangs in his face. “I don’t know,” he says, collecting his pile. “There are other things to do when you grow up on a reservation. Egyptian Rat Screw was not one of them. Blame your government for not giving us access to your weird-ass settler card games.”

  He looks up when silence falls. “What? Too deep?”

  Fletcher sighs. “No. Go on, do you want to give Porter the speech? She’s never heard it.”

  Sani sniffs, offended. He’s like a cat, all long, stretchy limbs and wary affection.

  “What’s the speech?” Grace asks. “I didn’t know you grew up on a reservation.”

  “Well, I did,” he says. He cuts his eye at Grace. “Are you going to ask me what it was like?”

  “I’m only half-white,” she argues. “Give me some credit for sensitivity.”

  Sani lets out a surprised laugh, leaning into Grace’s shoulder. “You’re not so bad,” he says, resting his head there. He looks at Fletcher. “Teach us how to play this game. We’re going to kick your ass.”

  “No kicking any ass,” Yuki says suddenly, looking up from her phone. “I won’t be here to supervise.”

  “Can I come with you?” Grace asks, feeling courageous. She wants to see Yuki work. She wants to watch the stories come to life as they move through radio airwaves.

  Yuki blinks. “You want to? You’re actually asking to come?”

  Grace stares. “Why do you sound surprised? I like hanging out with you.”

  “Oh,” Yuki says. “I think I’m having an emotion.” She disappears into her room.

  “Rain check on Egyptian Rat Screw?” Grace asks, the three of them staring at Yuki’s closed door.

  Sani waves her off. “Go, go,” he says. He throws the cards behind him. “We,” he tells Fletcher grandly, “are going to play Uno to the death.”

  Grace leaves them. She knocks carefully on Yuki’s door. There’s no answer, so she lets herself in slowly.

  Yuki sits on a small pillow in front of her altar. She has two little crystals in her hand, quartz and another one Grace doesn’t recognize. The room smells like the ocean, like Yuki, like her basil and herbs and little green flowers she lets grow wild on a sacred tabletop.

  “Hey,” Grace says softly. She sits down, careful of the crystals and the plants and the magic and reverence that seem to hover here. “Talk to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” Yuki says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It was a rough day at work, and I realized I just wanted to come home and—”

  “And what?”

  “You make it feel easy,” Yuki says, “and it terrifies me a little. I had a rough day at work, and I wanted to come home and see you. I wanted to kiss you, and touch you, and, I don’t know, maybe even fuck you if the mood was right. I wanted to let you in.” She presses the two crystals tight into her palms. “I almost wish you would stop making it feel so easy.”

  Grace bites her lip. The words warm the pit of her stomach and make her throat dry. She did not just leave Portland because she wanted time, perspective, a breath. She also wanted a girl singing a song that drew her in. “I think it’s a good thing.”

  “Do you?” Yuki asks.

  “I was scared to come to New York,” Grace admits. “Terrified. But from the first time I heard your voice on the radio, I knew you were a good thing.”

  Yuki lets out a long, slow breath. Her flannel shirt hangs off her shoulder. Her hair sticks to her forehead. She is a prickly cactus flourishing in desert heat. “Terrified to come here,” she starts, turning to look at Grace, “but not terrified of me, right?”

  Grace folds herself up, knees to chest. Yuki has all sorts of quartz on her little altar. Rutilated quartz and pink quartz and smoky quartz. Quartz is supposed to be a healing crystal. She doesn’t know if all the quartz in the world could heal two lonely creatures in the dark. She hasn’t kissed Yuki yet, not here, because she feels too much like the things in the shadows. Like she could draw blood without trying. She hasn’t kissed Yuki because she is still learning how to be this lonely creature.

  “I don’t know yet,” Grace says. This close, Yuki’s eyes are black, glittering pools. Her arms, like armor, guard her heart and her ribs and her soft parts, like she is scared, too. Grace doesn’t want either of them to be scared. “But I wasn’t scared of you in the desert when we put flowers in each other’s hair. I wasn’t scared when a man in a fucking glitter suit asked if I wanted you as my lawfully wedded wife. I wasn’t scared when I said yes.”

  Grace reaches out, hoping desperately that Yuki will reach back, and she does. She does. Yuki opens her palm, and Grace takes one of her crystals. “I don’t want to be scared of you, Yuki Yamamoto.”

  “Then don’t be,” Yuki says, voice quiet and low and reverent. “I looked it up, you know. I looked up how to get an annulment. Printed out the paperwork and everything. Even filled it out and signed my name. But then you called me, and I ripped them up.” She places her crystal on the altar like an intention. “I don’t want to be scared of you, either, Grace Porter.”

  Grace lets out a small laugh. “We’re kind of a mess.”

  Yuki shakes her head. “On my show I asked ‘Are you there?’ All the lonely creatures that were listening said yes, and it turns out you were one of them,” she says. “Us lonely creatures have to stick together.” She taps at the matching band on Grace’s ring finger. She reaches up to touch a glinting key, the one nestled against Grace’s chest that feels so a part of her that it thumps in time with her pulse. “You’re my mess now, and I’m yours. No take-backs.”

  Grace told her parents she was coming to New York for research. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she said. Maybe that part wasn’t a lie. “Then can I come with you to do your show?” she asks. Let me in, she thinks. I will try to be your good thing, too.

  Yuki smiles. Her eyes are dark and her teeth are sharp. She is a lonely creature of the dark. Grace doesn’t want to be scared. “Yes,” she says.

  This part is easy.

  * * *

  Yuki’s radio station is an unassuming building. The guard at the front desk hands Yuki a key.

  “Need me to lock up?” s
he asks. “You know I love having so much power, Jarrell.”

  The guy, Jarrell, rolls his eyes. “Babysitter fell through. I’ll owe you one.”

  Yuki waves him away. “Go be a responsible parent,” she says. “Is Little Jay still working on that history paper?”

  Jarrell nods. “He says Tudor England is, and I quote, ‘a white people soap opera,’ like I got any idea what he’s talking about. They ain’t teach no damn Tudor England when I got my GED.”

  Yuki laughs, leaning against the desk. “Tell him to text me, and we can talk it through.”

  Jarrell glares at Yuki as he leaves. “Don’t let me find out you’re turning my son into a history major like you.”

  “He’ll thank me when he’s in debt up to his eyeballs all for a useless degree,” she says. “Night.”

  “Night,” Jarrell calls, “to you and your friend.”

  He turns the light off and waits until Yuki locks the door behind him. “I didn’t know you were a history major,” Grace says quietly. “You never told me that.”

  Yuki leads them down a long dark hallway, until they get to a door hanging ajar. “Like I said,” she starts breezily, “completely useless for the real world. My classes taught me some of the first stories I used for the show, though. Yay for secondary education.”

  Grace follows her inside. There’s a brown-skinned girl with headphones on and her feet up on a small desk. She gives them a peace sign and keeps tapping at her phone.

  “That’s Blue,” Yuki says, flicking the girl on the forehead. “She makes the magic happen.”

  Blue takes one headphone out. “She means that literally. After two years, she still has no idea how any of the controls work.”

  “Host,” Yuki says, pointing at herself. “I don’t need to know those things. Also, this is Grace. We’re married. It’s complicated.”

  Blue lets out a low whistle. She looks Grace up and down. “This is why all your stories have turned so romantic lately, huh?”