it could be better.

2031.
(13 years ago. Sabine is a junior in college.)

“Shit. Shit!”

The frustrated rattling of steel doors, as the little card reader beeps annoyingly at Sabine to drive it in through her thick skull that abusing the locked door isn’t going to accomplish anything.

“Goddammit!” Sabine seethes through her teeth. She can feel her knuckles, tightly gripping the door handles, go white in splotches as cold, heavy December rain pelts at her from thickly overcast skies.

Sabine thinks she’s going to have to start kicking when a tiny, yet surprisingly strong, fist grabs hold of her by the back of her jacket and yanks her under the staircase, and she’s so caught off by the sudden motion that she doesn’t think to resist until she’s thrown onto the dirt.

“Yikes, sorry—too hard…”

“Y—You??” Sabine yelps out, her breathing coarse. “What are you doing here?”

“You were getting all wet…” mutters Yunhua, looking like a marshmallow in a big, puffy overcoat, a pair of unworn white earmuffs hung around her neck. “The card reader’s not going to be updated for at least another ten minutes. Trust me, I called them and asked.”

“You… I didn’t know you lived in this building?” Sabine breathes, confused, the cold wind slapping her silly. “I never see you around.”

Yunhua chews her lip, looking a bit more vulnerable than usual. “You never asked. And also, I, uh, don’t. I just got shoved here for winter break… I have a single in west campus.”

“Ah,” remarks Sabine.

Right. Spoiled.

“You’re not going home for winter?” asks Sabine. You need special permission to hold on to housing for the winter.

Yunhua shakes her head. “No, international. My mom and I… We’re not on the best of terms right now. And it’s too much of a hassle… You?”

“Uh,”

Yeah, it’s definitely something about this numbing cold and this compromising situation. Normally Sabine would’ve snapped back with a ‘none of your business,’ but after leaving the comfort and warmth of her strangely quiet dorm room after having had nothing to eat all day, only to find that all the facilities had closed up for the weekend for maintenance, and then to be stranded out here… she thinks even she of all people might be on the verge of crying. The harsh rainfall doesn’t help the feeling, either, with the moisture soaking up through her sinuses.

And when, on top of all that, when Yunhua looks at her with the kind of eyes she’s never seen on her before, when they’re not quite enemies anymore, yet still far, far from friends, she wonders if the thorns are worth it. The smug grin that’s usually dancing on the girl’s lips are softened into a smile, cut ever so often with small winces from the blade of cold.

Sabine stuffs her freezing fingertips in between her arms and takes Yunhua’s offer of warmth.

“Yeah, me neither.”

So maybe it is the cold, or maybe it’s something else that gets broken in the moment, the resonant pelting of heavy rain and sleet over steel and rhubarb overhead, but something comes over them, and Yunhua listens with a warmer glow in her eyes than Sabine thinks she’s ever seen on anybody. And as the conversation goes on, they seem to forget about the fog in their breaths as they mingle together, and Sabine seems to forget how to be venomous and difficult, and Yunhua seems to forget that she’s meant to be toying with this girl.

And Sabine explains that she has nowhere to go home to anymore. Her attendance at this school is nothing short of an earned miracle, that she clawed her way into qualifying for her scholarship and emancipating herself from her parents, after that. That her foster parents weren’t the most accepting, that when she came out, she had a hard time, and that her brother, whom she’d trusted all her life under the same roof or no roof at all, had bailed on her when she needed him most.

“Oh… I’m… I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” Sabine looks away. “I’m sorry that held a grudge for such a long time, but now you know why I have that stick up my ass, as you say. It’s a miracle I managed to still get the grades I needed to qualify next semester, with you distracting me the whole time.”

“Hey now.” Yunhua laughs, more gently than her usual tone still, “No one was telling you to get distracted. That’s on you.”

Sabine ignores her, deciding to get what little else is left out right now that she’s being receptive. “I’ll have you know you spilling coffee on me last year almost cost me the scholarship too.”

“Hey, just because I thought you were so handsome and my hands were shaking and wait—”

Sabine blinks. Huh?

Before Sabine can say a word, Yunhua gags on her own spit as she doubles back to earlier in the conversation. “Wait, transcripts are out?”

She frantically digs into her pocket to fumble out her phone. A quick few taps later, Yunhua’s face goes red—maybe from the cold, partially—and she covers her face with her hands and folds up into her knees.

“Noo…” Yunhua whines. “Ue… My mom’s going to kill me… She’s going to make me shave my head and become an ascetic monk in temple…”

Sabine bursts out in laughter. Yunhua peeks back up and pouts.

“Sorry, sorry. I just have a hard time seeing you as a monk.”

Yunhua looks to the side. “I am one, technically. I’ve had training on and off when I was a kid. Ugh… Now I’ll have to renegotiate terms with my momm…”

“Um." Sabine mouths. “You mean you’re actually a monk?”

“What, like that’s weird, and your deranged little county summer camps aren’t? One of my sorority sisters said she went to water polo camp. Now that’s weird as shit.”

Sabine opens her mouth to tell her off that only rich people in the suburbs go to those weird things, but considering the kinds of things her foster parents sent her off to do instead, she decides that’s fated to be a heavier conversation better suited for another time.

So instead they talk about Yunhua and her mother.

And how since they lost her dad, they haven’t been able to stop fighting over the smallest things. That even though she understands she’s lucky to have her, she thinks maybe that’s why it hurts more when she lets her down. That it hurts when her mother’s expectations seem so unreachable but everything she tries just ends up disappointing her instead.

She talks about how the two of them had such an intense argument that the issue of her mother’s parenting skills and Yunhua’s poor grades both thrown on the table, and they’d stubbornly agreed to cancel her flight home instead of apologizing.

And how it hurts because of course she loves her mom, and of course she wants to make her proud, even if it doesn’t seem it…

“You know,” Sabine brings up carefully. “I wouldn’t mind helping you out with classes, if you went through the tutoring system again.”

And, without saying anything, Yunhua dives into Sabine’s chest in an awkward, yet deep, hug.

“Thank you…” Sabine thinks she hears Yunhua whisper.

Sabine wonders if it’d be overstepping if she lightly stroked her back, even if there’s a thick layer of parka between the two of them.

“You’re welcome.” she mutters instead.

And at a certain point Sabine just bursts out laughing, because this not-so-opportune traumadumping session in this cramped and awkward of a space reminds her of the kinds of raunchy encounters the straight jocks would boast about in high school, like getting to third base under the bleachers after a football game with the hottest cheerleader, except she has no idea if mommy issues are a home run or a foul ball.

And Yunhua laughs, too, although the bases euphemism is way too American for her to understand.

And just about when they think they might get used to each other’s warmth—

Clunk!

The thumping of footsteps overhead, and they immediately pull apart. The card reader buzzes, and they hear the door click open and shut with a loud thud.

“Er—” Yunhua yelps out, her eyes meandering away, embarrassed, yet not without some relief that maybe they don’t need to talk about that sudden hug anymore. “I… um, I guess it’s working now?”

Sabine checks her phone. “It’s been two hours.”

“Oh huh.” Yunhua peeks outside, past the slivers of light spilling in from between the steps. “Yeah, it’s snowing now.”

When they move to get up, and make their way up the stairs, though, Yunhua pinches the tail of Sabine’s coat with her fingers, lightly pulling her back.

“So…”

The catching of a breath. The squeezing of a fist around the pulled-back fabrics of a coattail.

“Did you… do you want to stay with me, a little longer?” She mutters.

“Um—” Sabine splutters in response, her stomach lurching as the pounding of her heart is all of a sudden way too loud. Her knuckles slip off the door handle and embarrassingly bang against the flat of the door.

Goddammit, she let herself get too vulnerable. No way Yunhua‘s getting to her like this, and she’s not even trying to flirt or tease, but she thinks she might’ve started hyperventilating .

“Oh?” The familiar mischief claws it back into Yunhua’s with renewed mirth, yet still accompanied by the heavy breathing that betrays her own nervousness. “What’s got you so flustered now? All I wanted was to get you some tea, silly.”

Yunhua lightly pats one of Sabine’s boobs with the flat of her hands.

“So shy around me still, and I’ve already sucked your titty. Loosen up a little.”

Sabine puts on her best deadpan, finally managing to click the door open after much fumbling. “Get your hands off me.”

And then, her voice, a little shakier and quieter, but the littlest bit so, to the point you could almost think it was from the cold…

“I’ll see you in the hall in a couple.”

Yunhua laughs, promptly taking her hand off Sabine. And Sabine’s never heard her laugh like this before, like her chest is full of relief and clear air. Maybe—and this is insane, right?—but maybe, she thinks, she’d be okay with hearing it again, from time to time.

“Yes ma’am.”

And maybe it’s not something she’d be so bold to call love, Sabine thinks, or maybe it is, but she can’t tell. But at Yunhua’s insistence more than anything, they take it at their own pace—and come spring, come summer, they share a life. And maybe it’s not something Sabine thinks has to be something big, it’s just… companionship.

But on some of the best days, Sabine feels herself hesitate, wondering what it really means when she tries to convince herself this isn’t something big, because the weight of what it has come to mean is maybe so obvious when she wakes up most Saturdays next to Yunhua, who still continues to drive her crazy with her playful attempts at annoying her 24/7, but is, beyond it all, tender. She’s never felt safe waking up next to anyone before.

And when they meet before class on the days they haven’t woken up next to each other doing a coffee run together, when Sabine drives Yunhua to the grocery store because she doesn’t have a car or a driver’s license, when Yunhua falls asleep in her lap in the middle of tiredly gossiping about her awful straight friends…

And when she tugs at her hair when she’s drunk, trying to be gentle and loving and to stroke it but pulling too hard with grabby hands, apologizing profusely, and when she makes her a playlist of her favorite songs from idols that Sabine thinks she’s never even heard of before and ends up somehow wears her down into enjoying it, letting her sneak a card from her photocard collection…

Haha.

Maybe, she thinks, she doesn’t know how she feels.

She wonders if it would be nice to know.

And in the blink of an eye, all that time is gone.

2032.
(12 years ago, a year forward: Sabine is about to graduate from college.)

“Eyes on the prize, Sen.”

Sabine swats off the hand sneakily snaking around her waist as she grades Yunhua’s mock exams.

“Man,” Yunhua pouts, obliging as she slides her hands back nonetheless. “But I did so well! I deserve a reward…”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Sabine feigns a huff.

“I got this in the bag,” she insists, neatly tucking Sabine’s hair behind her ear for her, and pressing a light kiss against the flushed skin underneath, “Don’t you even worry your cute little head over it.”

“You really have gotten a lot better,” Sabine admits, the pride swelling up in her chest far greater than she’s willing to admit. “But don’t complacent now, though, you still have the last final to be studying for. And besides, it’s not like I’ll be able to help you next year, right? You’ve got to get used to doing this stuff on your own.”

“Not if you stay right here forever,” Yunhua jokes, getting up to get them both a drink from the fridge. “Imagine you fail all your classes and have to retake another year.”

Sabine rolls her eyes. “Uhuh.”

Yunhua’s voice from past the door, in the kitchen: “I’m just kidding, though. You could totally sweep all the other top med schools in the country. Probably good to keep your opens option, right? Even though the program here’s pretty good still… Did you want soda or Monster?”

The little quiver of anxiety underneath her cheerful façade is, to Sabine, unmistakable. It’s something they hadn’t let themselves discuss, but for the past few weeks the uncomfortable question has loomed over them, between their loving ministrations of affection and intimacy an unspoken undertone of uncertainty, and of, maybe, grief.

Because time will rip them apart come two weeks’ time, and Sabine doesn’t know—Sabine knows she doesn’t know—if she’s ready to ask if they can hold on to each other.

Sabine doesn’t know if she’ll ever be ready. She’s not good at that.

What she is good at, what she’s always been good at, is running away.

An unease in her stomach as the room suddenly feels so much emptier when Yunhua’s only left for a brief moment.

Fuck.

Sabine bites her lip.

Yunhua walks back in, with a spring in her step that’s maybe a little forced. Sabine accepts the can from her and ticks it open as Yunhua sits back down on the other side, setting her own drink on the table, keeping herself and her hands busy by digging through her pile of notes.

A shaky, drawn out, breath.

“So.”

Yunhua looks up, her eyes swimming with concern. “What’s wrong?”

“So… the application window for the med school next school year closed yesterday.”

Yunhua turns to Sabine, dropping her study materials. She’s projecting nonchalance into her expression, trying to act casual, but her knuckles, Sabine notices, have already gone pale.

“Oh?”

“I, um. I ended up missing it.”

The clicking of metal as Yunhua’s nail slips and clips against the tab of her soda. Yunhua’s wince is stamped down with the pursing of her lips, in her best attempt at making a neutral expression.

“So I see.”

And in spite of it all, it’s not difficult to read the hurt in her voice to the point that it’s comical.

“And your other applications?”

“…”

“You’re taking a gap year? Where will you go?”

Sabine can’t look into her eyes.

“Oh.” Yunhua mutters, under her breath. “This isn’t just about us, is it..?”

It isn’t. But it is. It has nothing and everything to do with her.

Because there has never been anyone else who’s made her more afraid.

Just say that, Sabine.

“I can’t.” Sabine whispers. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t… what?”

All of it, she thinks.

The thought that a single decision could lock her into one inescapable trajectory for the rest of her life, a decision that she can’t put off of compromise with, not anymore, and one that won’t be made for her until she signs onto it herself.

The thought that she thinks it would be good, that it would make her happy. That she finds herself more and more convinced of that fact each and every day she spends with Yunhua. That she sees, maybe for the future, a future in front of her that isn’t full of unknown decisions and pathways that lie behind closed doors. That she can make a choice now and she can work towards it and it’ll be challenging but she knows it’s a stability that’ll make her happy, that’ll make her fulfilled.

She’s always wanted to be a doctor. She’s always wanted to wake up next to someone and feel like she was home.

But now all that is within reach, dancing about at the tip of her fingertips…

The prospect, Sabine thinks, is the scariest thing in her life.

“I…”

“I just thought—” interjects Yunhua, the pace of her words ramping up in a way she can’t control before Sabine can even continue, “I thought even if we were apart maybe we were going to go through it together...”

Sabine winces. The conversation needed to happen earlier. If it had—if she were someone who could—happened earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have needed to come to this.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Sabine isn’t someone who can give Yunhua what she needs.

Sabine isn’t someone who can take that leap.

Even if waiting across that gap is everything she wants, everything she’s ever wanted.

“I’m so bad for you.” Sabine mutters.

And in that moment, when the admission is finally made, Sabine’s vision swims with so much of the everything that could’ve been, all at once. And all the things they could’ve built, together. All the dreams they’ve ever dreamed, they could’ve dreamed, together.

“Are… you okay?” Yunhua asks.

When she’d practiced this conversation over and over in her head these past few weeks, she never imagined she’d be the first to cry.

“I… I don’t know.”

And when she’d played this looming fear over their future over and over in her head this past year, Sabine never imagined she’d be the first one to cry.

“I don’t know. I don’t.”

But when Yunhua looks at her like that, the visible lump in the back in her throat so apparent, like the seeds of so many questions she’s afraid to ask Sabine, each and every one of which Sabine knows she can’t answer the way she wants or needs—

“I think I just need the time.”

And when even still, Yunhua reaches out and holds onto her gently, even if she has no idea what Sabine is thinking, even if she’s being let down by someone who’d been too afraid to give her a real relationship, even if Sabine doesn’t want to tell her what’s going on. Even though everything it’s amounted to, because of Sabine, is just a waste of time.

“It’s okay.” Yunhua mutters, a gentle brush of her knuckles down Sabine’s back. “It’s okay to need time. And it’s okay not to know.”

But even as she says that, Sabine knows that Yunhua is smiling with everything but her eyes. And she wonders if Yunhua’s thinking the same thing she’s thinking, the same thing that neither of them can even say, because they’ve never even really dated.

That our futures will take us places where the other can’t follow.

2033.
(11 years ago, another year forward: the summer after Yunhua’s graduation. Radianite is discovered.)

The last droplets of rain in featherfall under dreary overcast skies, which seem to soak through the colors of the bouquet she’d left just moments ago underneath the headstone, rendering the petals faded in dusty grey.

A can of beer is cracked open, and tapped against the shared grave of Liam and Matilda Callas, who tragically passed in an accident when their children, Liam Jr. and Sabine, were only four and two.

She throws herself on the wet ground unceremoniously, the brittle, unkempt lawn crumpling underneath her weight. She drums her fingers along the can, wondering if there’s anything to say.

She can’t help out but let out an incredulous snort.

All this way, all this effort, and all this time. Only to find the answer was already long since gone, all along.

And the worst part—and Sabine does wait, she waits with her lips parted for the words to come, but they don’t.

She doesn’t think she has much to say to them.

“…The van den Bergs used to tell me it was rude to talk back.” Sabine mutters. “I don’t know if you would have said the same. I don’t know if you need to worry about that ever happening, maybe ever again. Sorry if that makes you sad.”

No response.

“Liam ever come visit?”

…

“Yeah, thought so.”

She drunkenly returns to work, only to be yelled at by the gas station owner for taking ten extra minutes off lunch. She could knock the tooth out of this greasy looking pig looking asshat if she wanted, she thinks, but she lets him have it, because she’s just… too tired today.

He saunters off out back to deal with whatever it is he does and Sabine mans the station, restocking the vape juice behind the counter and arranging it by color, not by flavor—Sabine rolls her eyes—at the owner’s insistence. This shit apparently makes up half of all convenience store revenue in all of Alaska. No idea where the owner gets his statistics, but she could believe it.

The bell chimes. A pile of cabinet desserts and a canned coffee are thrown on the counter.

A familiar voice.

“And I’ll have the peach flavor, please. The light.”

And when Sabine looks up, she’s eye to eye with Yunhua.

Her heart misses a beat in part disbelief, part fear.

Sabine blinks.

Yunhua gives her a sad little smile.

“Hey.” she whispers.

It’s been an entire year since they last spoke. And Yunhua had, in the end, been the first to ghost her, after that disaster of a conversation. Sabine thought she must’ve forgotten what Sabine even looked like by now.

Sabine opens her mouth to speak.

All that comes out is “Hey.”

An awkward silence.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

Yunhua breathes hastily, not used to the cold. The dim orange lights catch along the soft skin on her neck.

“Maybe almost a year now.”

“Ah.”

Sabine places the carton on her counter, clicking some keys at the register to log it in, her fingertips cold from walking in the rain without an umbrella.

“So, what brings you here?” Sabine asks, as though they were strangers making small talk, a forceful deadpan freezing her brain in place because if she so much as processes a thought she can’t know if she’s going to cry or yell or scream.

“Travel,” Yunhua answers simply.

“And you came here knowing you’d find me.”

“You never turned off your location sharing in our chat.”

“I don’t even use that app anymore.”

Yunhua ignores her.

The beeping of the barcode scanner.

“That’s 31.49.”

Yunhua ignores her.

“So there’s a 24-hour diner across the street. We should have dinner. It was a long flight.”

Sabine chokes on her own spit, and maybe she tastes the tiniest spurt of the rancid bitterness that’s been held back at the seams.

Because maybe the two of them had something almost a year ago, because maybe they lost it all, and maybe Sabine regretted losing it for many nights until she finally got herself over it—but here she is still, after hounding her down to the ends of the earth, still acting like the same entitled brat she’s always thought herself.

Dinner? Don’t make me fucking laugh, she thinks.

“Yunhua, why are you here?”

“What do you think I’m here for?” responds Yunhua nonchalantly, as she pries open her fancy leather wallet—a gift from her late father—and digs through her coins. “I came to take you home.”

Sabine blinks.

“What do you mean take me home. I live here.”

“I don’t think you can call what you do living anymore.”

Sabine ticks her eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Yunhua sighs.

“Sabine. Why are you here?”

Sabine doesn’t know how to answer that.

She knows it’s rhetorical. They both do.

But when Sabine tries to put the words together, the less she’s sure that she can keep up the act that she knows. Because it’s not news. She’s long since admitted to herself that all she’s good at is running away.

“You wouldn’t know,” she lies. And her voice escalates, even though the air in here is still and fragile, and a second chance at seeing Yunhua again, however briefly it may last, could be spirited away from her if she takes things too far—but it’s all she can say, it’s all she knows to say—“You don’t fucking know me, you don’t know my life. For god’s sake, Yunhua, you’re fucking insane, you know that, right, you show up at my workplace after we haven’t talked—”

“And so what, Sabine!?” Yunhua snaps, her voice still quivering as her volume escalates. “So what if I’m fucking insane, what if i’m fucking deranged and disturbed and have no boundaries? That-that all I can fucking live with. Because it’s true. But what I can’t live with is that for more than a year now every morning I wake up thinking I lied. I fucking lied, Sabine, I lied to you when I said it’s okay. Because it wasn’t fucking okay, what you did to me, what you did—what you’re still doing to yourself. So yes, I’m crazy, I’m the most clinically deranged person on the planet, maybe—”

She heaves, because even as she’s yelling at her ex-situationship for all the shit she’s put the both of them through, because even as she has nothing left to lose and everything to burn, she’s still fucking terrified, still fragile. “And if you want to call me a fucked up stalker and an insane obsessive ex-bitch you can, I don’t care, I don’t give a shit and if you want me to leave I’ll leave and if you want to never see me or think about me again that’s what the fuck ever but I’ll be damned because I can’t go on if I can’t tell myself I didn’t try. Because I did—I am. And if you don’t come home with me, if you don’t stop wallowing away here when you have your life to live, and you have your dream to live, that’s more than you’ll ever be able to tell yourself for the rest of your fucking life.”

Sabine blinks.

“Yunhua.” Sabine thinks for some reason it’s never been easier to speak with a tamed fury that still burns molten underneath the seams her chest. She continues, slowly, and with diction: “If you’re here to make me take you back, this. is not. the way to go about it. Don’t make me laugh, telling me to do this or that, as if you know what I want, as if you know what my regrets are, as if you know what I want. You don’t—you won’t, EVER. underst—”

And Yunhua interrupts her again.

“What, you’re going to tell me I don’t understand what it means to deal with what you had to deal with? You’re going to tell me I’m privileged and I’ve always had it better than you and I don’t understand you and I never will? You’re right. You’re fucking right. But that still doesn’t mean when you run the fuck away that makes you smart. If I don’t get it then fucking teach me. But don’t make me laugh and tell me you’re out here because you want to achieve closure with your family because even I know you’re not going to get it wallowing out here.”

Yunhua angrily slams her bills down on the counter, in exact change to the cent, along with a white envelope that seems somewhat crumpled.

“Here. Your brother’s contact information. He wrote you a letter, too.”

What.

And Yunhua digs into her bag and tosses several more envelopes on the counter, and then crosses her arms as though to say there. I paid you your goddamn 31.49 and more. “And rec letters from Coleman, Han, Sharif. Show me—show yourself—you gave it a fucking shot. And after that, if even then after all that you haven’t fucking found what you’re looking for, if you haven’t find a place where you belong, if you haven’t found a family or a name or a home…”

Maybe for the first time Sabine’s rendered completely speechless. Flustered, yes, fumbling for words, often, but right now for the first time maybe she opens her mouth and closes it and nothing will come out.

Yunhua smiles, and it’s punchable, it’s delusional, and it’s soaked in unearned confidence, even though the quivering in her voice that gives her away is still—it has been all along—there.

“…Then you can come to me, and you can be a Sen. I’ll be across the street.”

Yunhua turns around and leaves, leaving everything she paid for behind—besides the nicotine cartridge—alongside the lost fragments of Sabine’s broken life that’s she’s somehow managed to unearth from who-knows-where, and the shards of Yunhua’s own broken heart, all of it left for Sabine to choose to mend.

All of it, waiting—even if crazily, deludedly, entitledly—waiting, with patience: unyielding, daring, mad, deranged patience—

for her to be ready.