February 8, 2019
Lilja looks like she’s been crying.
“Are you okay?” Agnes asks.
Lilja’s place is so much smaller than Ása’s, but far cozier. There are stacks of books along the walls, an enormous desk that’s piled high with legal textbooks and art supplies. The bed, covered in a haphazard pile of pillows and quilts, is in the farthest corner of the room.
“I don’t know,” Lilja says. “No. Do you want something to drink?”
“No.”
There’s a beat of silence. The black eyes snap to hers. Beseeching and understanding, all at once. Agnes savors the moment, the pause before the leap.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks.
Lilja’s there. Agnes can feel her breath on her cheek. Then there’s nothing but the nearly unbearable heat of Lilja’s mouth on her own, the tightness of her arms on her back, her head. It’s a lifetime of pleasure, and yet not enough. She comes up for air and realizes Lilja’s brought them to the bed, their bodies teetering over the edge. Then there’s the weight, the blessed weight, of Lilja pressing her down to the mattress.
Lilja unbuckles Agnes’s jeans, and time shudders to a stop. There’s a hand on Agnes’s bare thigh. Another on the denim, dragging the material down, revealing her skin to the air.
Revealing her scars.
She freezes.
“What’s wrong?” Lilja asks. She leans back, her hands sliding away.
It gives Agnes one brief, final glimpse of the room around her. The art supplies, the pile of legal textbooks. There’s the woman with the short hair and black eyes. The woman who needs Agnes just as much as Agnes needs her. This is the moment when she must decide if she will show Lilja her new body. The room around her is unfamiliar, the woman straddling her legs a stranger who will never know what she looked like before. This version of Agnes, broken and taped back together, is all that Lilja will know of her. She’s nowhere near to home, nowhere near to the woman she once was.
“I have scars,” she tells Lilja, “on my left leg. It’s my first time—since.”
Lilja runs a hand down the length of her leg. It sends a shiver through Agnes. “Do you want to stop?”
“No,” Agnes says. She lifts her hips, helping Lilja to pull her jeans all the way off. She feels the goose bumps puckering the exposed skin. Let Lilja see. Let her know. Let Agnes be new. “I want more.”