#and we had to hold down our awning because the poles gave in

[ethwastaken]

its rained a lot where i am recently but there hasnt been a good thunderstorm in YEARS i am so jealous of you right now

same oh my god,, it doesn't even rain that much where i live, so this is really fucking nice

[fangirlxwritesx67]

Cross Timbers

Dean Winchester x Donna Hanscum, Sam Winchester x Jody Mills, no warnings, G-rated

Chapter 1 - 1830 words

A/N: This story was just a passing idea until I brought it up in my Slack chat and got a ton of great ideas from the folks there! Friends, I hope I have remembered everyone’s ideas and done them justice. Thanks for this and everything else! 

@boondoctorwho​ , @cherry3point14​, @cracksinthewalls​, @dawnie1988​ @fookinghelljensensthighs​ , @icemankazansky​, @itmighthavebeenintentional​ , @justcallmeasmodeus​ , @lastactiontricia​ ,  @mskathywriteswords​ , @rockhoochie​ ,  @there-must-be-a-lock​ , @thoughtslikeaminefield​ 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

"You ready Sam? Ladies?" Dean asked.

"Oh yah, you betcha!" Donna exclaimed, swatting his ass playfully as she walked around Baby to hop in the passenger side. 

Sam was already in his SUV, Jody by his side. He gave his brother a broad wave.

"Cross Timbers State Park. Here we come!"

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

It had started one cold night earlier that year. The four of them were at Jody’s in Sioux Falls, relaxing with pizza and beers after a hunt. Sam couldn’t remember how they had gotten on the topic, maybe joking about making dinner in the fireplace.

Dean had begun to wax eloquent about the best parts of camping: cooking around a campfire, fishing, and of course, tent sex. Donna was nodding along eagerly before Sam scoffed. 

“That’s your favorite part of camping, Dean, really? The closest we’ve ever gotten to camping is sleeping in the Impala in a field somewhere when we didn’t have any place else to go.” 

Dean looked down and shrugged sadly. “Ok, so maybe I’ve never been camping. But it always sounded like fun.”

“Never been camping?!” Donna’s mouth dropped open. 

“Oh, boys,” Jody chimed in. “We have to fix this. There are so many great places we could go, either here or in Kansas.”

“We could show you such a good time!” Donna added with a giggle. “But not right now. It’s too cold right now to sleep any place but my own cozy bed.” 

It turned out that the bed in Jody’s guest room was cozy enough for Donna, especially once Dean joined her there. Sam didn’t mind, though, since he was in Jody’s own bed with her.

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

Sam and Dean had long since forgotten the camping conversation, but they soon discovered the ladies had not. In early April, the two of them began to hint in the group chat that the four of them should go camping. It took no time at all to realize it was less a suggestion and more a coordinated campaign to rope the Winchesters into camping. 

The ladies were pleasantly surprised when it didn’t take that much effort. Sam and Dean knew better than to argue with the combined power of Jody and Donna. They knew they were outsmarted in the camping department, but they were eager to learn, to try the experience. 

Jody and Donna had already determined that state park was the perfect camping spot. Remote enough to have plenty of trees, hiking trails, and water for canoeing or fishing, but still with a certain amount of running water and facilities for drinking and basic hygiene. 

Dean immediately appointed himself in charge of meal planning, because of course he was. Sam started researching camping equipment and gadgets, digging out back issues of magazines and shopping on Amazon. The group chat was busy for weeks while the four of them planned and prepped.

The ladies rolled into town and spent one night at the bunker so they could all shop and pack before heading out. It took a surprising amount of gear to go off-grid, tents and sleeping bags and more. Donna brought an air mattress, although Dean laughed and assured her they would be fine roughing it. They packed their clothes in canvas duffels: jeans and button downs, hiking boots and sandals, and of course, swimsuits.

Dean brought his guitar and fishing tackle. Sam brought a book, a notebook and new pens, as well as several boxes of unidentified tubes and pipes. 

“So many years after college and still a nerd, huh, big guy?” Dean joked when he saw it. 

“I don’t get much time to do what I want, whatever I want,” Sam retorted. “I’m not sorry I’ll be reading in a hammock while you drink beer and dangle a line in the water and call that fishing.”

“Hey, at least if I’m successful, we have something to eat.” 

“Everyone finds their own happiness.” Donna interrupted with a grin. “You boys ready?” 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

Cross Timbers State Park was about 4 hours away, and the afternoon sun was still warm and bright when they pulled up. They rented adjoining camping spots, patches of clear level ground amidst the towering trees. There was a firepit already set in an iron ring, and the first thing the Winchester brothers did was haul the two picnic tables to either side. 

After that, they took a moment to ward the site, putting salt and sigils on every corner to keep themselves safe. Once done, they returned to the picnic tables where Jody and Donna were setting out supplies. 

Dean, as head of meal planning, reminded everyone that dinner that night would be in Donna’s hands. She had requested a list of sandwich supplies. She went to one of her bags and pulled out a set of sandwich making irons.

“These good old irons will make the best Pudgie Pies you ever tasted!” she crowed. 

“Pudgie Pies?” Sam whispered to Dean.

“It’s sandwiches and a campfire, I’m in,” he answered out of one side of his mouth. 

The two Winchesters left the ladies prepping food while they headed to opposite sides of the joined campsites to set up their tents. Their initial research into tent dimensions had been shocking. So-called “two person” tents clearly didn’t take into account one of those people being well over 6 feet.

In the end, they bought a pair of tents, each of them marketed to sleep six. Each tent seemed to have almost enough room for a couple, their duffels, and the Thermarest sleeping pads that Jody brought.

Sam spent a few minutes studying the instructions and then laid out the interlocking frame poles and nylon tent body exactly as directed. He understood the directions, but even with his reach, he couldn’t quite do it himself. Without him asking, Jody stepped to his side.

“It’s easier together,” she said as she took the opposite corner of the tent. 

The tent rose between their hands, and they staked it down securely. He arranged the bedding, rolling out sleeping bags and pillows, then stacked their bags neatly against one corner of the front wall. 

The tent had a small awning over the door, a space for them to kick off their shoes. Jody had brought a sun-bleached rag rug that she laid out right there. It was no bunker, but for a temporary habitat, well, he had seen worse. Once he had everything staked down, he looked across the campsite. 

Dean’s tent was a tangle of nylon on the ground. He was holding poles in both hands and swearing, the instructions nowhere to be seen. 

Sam started to close the space between them. “Can I give you a hand?” he called.

“I don’t need a hand!” Dean shouted, before throwing down the poles. “I’m gonna go get … water!” He stormed off into the deepening twilight. 

Sam followed the same steps he had before, but once he had the ridgepole assembled and in the tent, he called for his brother.

“Dean, I need help.” No matter how much Dean protested that he could do things by himself, he would never dream of letting his younger brother down when he needed him. Together, the two Winchesters finished setting up the second tent. 

Just in time, because Donna called from beside the fire, “Oh boys! Time to make Pudgie Pies!” 

Packages of ham and turkey were open alongside a stack of American cheese and a loaf of bread. There was mayonnaise and mustard, pickles and tomatoes too, Donna demonstrated how to coat the irons with cooking spray before layering in the sandwich makings, while Jody stoked the fire. 

A couple of sandwiches were burned in the process, but ultimately, everyone had dinner. They opened beers from the cooler and settled into folding chairs around the fire and passed around a bag of potato chips. 

“Hey you know what this needs?” Dean spoke up. “Ghost stories!” 

Everyone nodded enthusiastically, so he gave it his best shot. He opted for a classic, the hook hand in the car door. Somehow he managed to fumble it, much to the bewilderment of his audience.

“Dude,” Sam cut in. “How can you be so bad at this? Our lives are a ghost story. You literally could’ve told me how you spent your Monday morning and it would’ve been scarier than that story was. 

Dean looked to Donna and Jody for support but they shook their heads as Sam continued.

“You want a horror story? How about you in the morning, no coffee, no bacon, no nothing.”

“No nothin’?” Donna chimed in. “Now that I’d like to see.” She held out her hand with a smirk, and Dean took it. 

The four of them were comfortable together, Dean and Donna, Sam and Jody. This was a rare moment of ease for them, no one worrying about anything, just enjoying one another. 

But camping was a new thing for the brothers, still a whole different experience. They let the fire burn down and then everyone brushed their teeth at the pump out in front of their campsites, downing meds with handfuls of the metallic water. 

Sam and Jody ducked together into their neatly organized tent, leaving their shoes outside on the rag rug under the awning. That night, just being together was enough. They held hands and whispered to one another until they drifted off to sleep.

Dean and Donna tumbled into their tent, kicking their shoes off as an afterthought. They were too tired for more than sleep. But sleep eluded them. Well, it eluded Dean. Donna settled in comfortably and drifted off. But he tossed and turned on the hard ground.

By Dean’s watch, it was past midnight when Donna woke up and nudged him. 

“Still awake?” 

“No, I’m fine. I just -- can’t sleep.” He hated to admit it. 

He was a hunter, after all. He had been to heaven and hell and back. Damned if he would be beaten by a thin foam sleeping pad. But the front seat of Baby was more comfortable than this sad excuse for a bed. 

Without speaking, Donna got up. Dean reached for her but she was too quick. He heard the door to Sam’s SUV open, and then a motor running. He drifted in and out of a drowsy sulk until he heard her voice calling him softly in the dark.

“Dean,” she called from the door of the tent trying to wrestle in a giant air mattress. He got up and helped her to bring it in, lifting their sleeping bags and pillow on top. 

“Really?” he asked, his voice rough from trying to sleep.

“Okay, sure, Princess,” she answered with a giggle. “It’s me that can’t rough it, not you.”

Cross Timbers Tags: @deangirl7695, @elliloumom, @meeshw777​

“Hush,” he told her as he settled down and held out one arm. She sighed happily and curled into his embrace. Finally, for the first time all night, Dean was comfortable. His eyes grew heavy, and he yawned. Then he fell asleep with Donna’s blonde curls against his face. 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

SPN First Last and Always: @boondoctorwho @dawnie1988 @deanwanddamons @defenderrosetyler @divadinag @emoryhemsworth @fookinghelljensensthighs @idreamofplaid @kalesrebellion @kickingitwithkirk @maddiepants @magssteenkamp @onethirstyunicorn   @there-must-be-a-lock @tloveswriting

Sam Girl For Life: @awesomesusiebstuff @lilsylvia @winchesterxfamilybusiness

Dean Curious:@adoptdontshoppets @awesomesusiebstuff @deangirl7695 @deans-baby-momma  @mrsjenniferwinchester @stoneyggirl @wayward-gypsy @winchesterxfamilybusiness

[davidastbury]

Summer in the City There was high anxiety in Princess Street - sharp words at the junction with Mosley Street West. It was as if the sky was closing and the world was ending. But the right words were said and they kissed for a long time - two lovers in the doorway of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

Cat Love This coffee is a deep brown - as brown as Janey’s fur, with a rim of amber as golden as her eyes. A rich deep brown - as brown as Arab oil, as thick as chocolate, as strong as brandy. And I remember kissing the high dome of her head - her slow blink - her purring- and the hint of malevolence in her claws - as voluptuous and barbaric as the taste of this coffee.

Russell and the Billet Doux Russell’s parents considered music a very important part of education. At fifteen he was competent on piano and clarinet/saxophone - and excellent on trombone and trumpet. Russell’s appreciation of the merits of music even surpassed that of his parents. He showed me a note he was about to send to Tina; a pretty girl in our class. Apparently he had a rival - a non-musical rival - and this note was meant to win her over. It read - ‘Brass players are the best kissers.’ I laughed and said - ‘That should do the trick.’

Black Shorts If the Spanish police questioned me I am afraid they would be disappointed. They would ask me about that certain young woman, but I would have so little to tell them - despite having sat at an adjacent table at breakfast this morning. All I remember is that she was wearing black shorts. Not that wearing black shorts on the terrace is unusual - but I would risk the detective’s irritation by not being able to remember anything else! Or perhaps I can... She had poured herself a cup of hot chocolate from a jug. Then she placed two sugar cubes in a spoon and slowly - the tip of her tongue showing - lowered it; watching the edges of the cubes soften and their colour change from an innocent white into a ravishing brown before crumbling in surrender and toppling, collapsing like a child’s sandcastle at the irresistible licking of the waves.

Russell and the Siren The ‘Cold War’ had started and there was a noticeable increase in activity at the nearby barracks - lots of trucks arriving, soldiers shouting and bugle calls at odd times. My parents were gloomy and I picked up their anxiety. One day, military engineers put up a wooden pole near the roadside. It was similar to a telegraph-pole but perhaps higher. At the top was a frightening looking piece of equipment - double sided - like two black crows. It was actually twin megaphones. I didn’t want to ask my parents so I spoke to someone at an ice cream van and was told that it was an early warning siren. Apparently it will sound and we will have four minutes before the atom bomb hits us. Russia now had the bomb and Stalin would use it. I told Russell all this - how all of us would be killed. I said we would only get four minutes and asked - ‘What can we do?’ Russell replied - ‘You must run - run as fast as you can to my house.’

Majorca #1........(during Feb/May, Majorca attracts thousands of cyclists) Cyclists! Two females leading the pack - tanned and wiry. Men on the terrace peer over their coffee cups but there is no randy voluptuousness to be seen; these are athletes, honed and muscular, trimmed to the bone. I notice the skilful gear-changes, enabling the peddling to keep a steady rhythm, and how their saddles are leveraging points and not for sitting upon. And the perfection of the triangle, both of the bicycles and the girls themselves - the gun-metal click of gears - the buzz of the slim wheels. I notice their toothpaste ad smiles and how the bright lycra makes them look like beautiful insects - and the cloud of dust from the clay road and how they shout to each other - hips raised and heads down and brown legs pumping.

Snappy Dresser 1959 Suede shoes with pointed toes! Tight trousers, jacket with a tinsel in the thread, shorty raincoat with zips, silk shirt and thin tie - all topped with a very cool Italian hair-cut. He looks approvingly at himself in the bedroom mirror. Off out to attack the world - but failing to understand his own reflection, the clairvoyance of mirrors - of how the half-smile will eventually melt and slide down his face and become the fixed memory of lost friends and a hundred disappointed women.

Very Early Stuff My friend Jimmy’s house was never properly repaired - six years after being hit by a German bomb it still had a jagged hole in the gable-end. The bomb hadn’t exploded but the impact had knocked his grandfather out of bed. The man next door walked very badly; swinging his leg and rocking backwards. I asked Jimmy about him and he whispered that he had been tortured by the Japanese. Everyone in the street was a hero.

The Nile It was our first boat trip up the Nile and we spent our long, lazy afternoons under the canvas awning, sipping our drinks and talking to the other passengers. We all had our little stories and I remember a very young person in the group - perhaps still in his teens - who was with his older partner. The older partner was genial and garrulous but his young friend was shy and reluctant to speak. He preferred to pull his chair back into the deeper shade and read his book. Naturally I asked to see it - Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’. Seeing that paperback brought back my own feelings, when at roughly his age, I first read it. And I could see that it was affecting him in exactly the same way. I was a little worried about his fraught sensitivity and I didn’t like the overbearing way his partner treated him - the assumption of superiority - the heavy proprietorial dominance. Handing the book back I said that the ending was boring, and suggested giving it up. But of course he didn’t - he read it to the end. He read about Jude’s young son - just a little boy - killing his siblings and then himself, leaving a note saying ...‘Done because we are too menny’. I was astonished to overhear him saying that phrase ‘Done because we are too menny’ to his partner, who looked back at him and, for once, was silent.

A Hand Wave On a summer day like today it might appear odd to use the phrase ‘come in from the cold’. Let me explain - earlier, around lunchtime, as I was working in the garden, a man walked by and put up his hand. Total stranger, but he was being pleasant so I responded with a similar gesture. What struck me about this harmless encounter (but didn’t strike me at the time) was the enthusiasm of his cheerfulness. He was pleased to see me, but I’m sure he was pleased to see everyone - he was irrepressibly happy about something. All kinds of possible reasons - your guesses are as good as mine, but I actually saw him; I saw the force of his happiness! Think of the time when you were sure you hadn’t got the job. Think of the time when the driving examiner turned to you and your heart sank - or think of the time when you were convinced that your letter of appeal would fail. But in each case you won and, lost for words, you couldn’t stop smiling. That is the meaning of the phrase ‘come in from the cold’ - you are back where you belong - where life is good.

Russell 1958 I loved visiting Russell’s house with its sloping lawns, Walt Disney turrets and French windows. I loved seeing his glamorous mother drifting through the airy rooms, feigning distraction but actually as sharp as a needle - and his genial, businessman dad - and Caroline, his gorgeous older sister who was the white-hot focus of my burgeoning adolescent ecstasies. And Russell himself, gifted and utterly delighted at being who he was, totally selfish but also capable of astonishing kindness, as are many young boys. They were the happiest family I have ever known - but there was something else ... there had once been another daughter, a sister of Caroline and Russell’s. I cannot remember how I discover this, and being aware of Russell’s wincing sensitivity I never enquired. Only later, much later, did I understand that the entire home atmosphere and every aspect of their lives was coloured by the missing child - that her presence filled the whole house.

On the Train Two men - really drunk! Tripping and tottering and hugging each other; then collapsing untidily into the seats. Totally and utterly stinking drunk. Both at an age when drunkenness is unattractive; grey haired and rheumy-eyed; heads wobbling like dolls, dirty trainers and dirty fingernails. One of them giggles and asks the other what action the British Government should take (I think the subject was Russia). His friend gasped for breath. Then - trying heroically to look sober - he gave his opinion. ‘We - we - us - y’know us - we sh sh sh sh shit! Should! We sh sh sh sh sh should. We should! We should sh sh sh should f f f f fuckin, fuckin fuckin well b b b b b bomb the bastards.’ His friend pondered this, obviously examining the merits and then replied. ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

Stolen Kisses End of term and an open day garden party – quite a strong memory. My friend Russell was having his picture taken with our form-teacher; the two of them standing with the arch and the driveway in the background. He’s got his arm around Russell’s shoulders, something he often did, and no one bothered. Of course today he’d be locked up for five years, and then banned for life from the company of young people. Anyway, he was a nice man and perhaps viewed Russell as the son he never had - and all that crap. There was a crush of people, chattering, holding glasses, standing on the freshly cut grass – sunshine, the trees rustling in the breeze, a buzz of happiness at the approaching freedom – the weeks of holiday! I could see Russell’s gorgeous mother talking to another parent. She was wearing a thin dress and flat shoes and the man with her couldn’t take his eyes away. But I was looking for Russell’s sister – I knew she was there somewhere, it was just a matter of finding her. The elation of the afternoon had caught me – I was part of it - I was ready to be reckless and convinced that I would succeed. Older friends had given me advice – I was only twelve – and all I had to do was approach her and somehow survive the scorching heat of her loveliness – get close to her and say: - ‘Can I take you to the pictures?’ But first I had to find her.

Djerba, Tunisia The barber of Djerba has gone! Retired and gone home to his village. But one hot, scented afternoon, I had sat, perspiring and polite, on a damp vinyl chair, and commented on the faded photographs around the mirror. He had once been a professional musician, playing on luxury liners and in hotels and palaces. Putting down scissors and comb, he suddenly produced a violin and started to play. I remember the outpouring of Viennese waltzes and how he had stood blissfully swaying, eyes closed - and how his music was heard in the street and how a crowd of children stood smiling in the open doorway and how they giggled and played imaginary violins. He is gone now. His shop is no longer recognisable. The man had played his music at a time ‘when the going was good’. He had played for presidents and the crackpot royals - and he had also played for me and that swarm of giggling children.

On the Train An old man – very old – sitting alone. He’s so old that if the sun was behind him you might see his bones. He’s wearing unusual clothes – tan (cowboy?) boots, jeans with big turn-ups, shorty overcoat – all confirming that only the very old and the very young can wear anything and still look good. He has a placid expression; most of his struggles are over – he’s said what he wanted to say and played out all his tunes. Yes! He’s played his tunes and like a violin he is ready to go back into his case.

[theletterunread]

Homecoming

This story follows Reflexes.

After falling two stories, I saw a flagpole sticking out of the wall and, still remembering the chapter books about the scientist-adventurer and his daughter, I reached out two open hands for it. It bent with audible strain under my weight, but it didn’t snap, and once I was sure it would hold, I shuffled three inches at a time down the pole to the wall. Six or so feet below that was an awning, which I dropped onto. The sidewalk was only ten feet below me now, so I turned on my stomach and scooched slowly down the canvas until my feet were dangling flat above the ground. I dropped onto the balls of my feet, rocked backwards, and fell on my butt. (In case you find yourself in this position, you’re actually supposed to roll forward, as that’s the momentum you’ll be carrying from the fall, but I wanted to protect my belly.) Aside from a few bruises, and a strain in my shoulders from stopping myself on the flagpole, I was fine. (Honestly, since there was no lingering effect from the fall and the details of the stunt are boring to me, I would just as soon have ignored them, but the action scenes are the part of this story people always ask about, so…)

I looked up at the building and saw that I had been taken to the Meatpacking District, apparently into one of the few warehouses still used as such, not converted into a boutique. There were scorch marks around the frame of the broken window and while I was staring up, Molly, Stephanie, and Anastasia, charred and bleeding but still alive, stuck their heads out looking for me. After taking a second to feel relief that I hadn’t killed them (it was self-defense, but I had no desire to put “blew three women to pieces” on my spiritual resume), I took off south, figuring the zigs and zags of Greenwich Village were a good place to elude pursuers.

The streets were still empty. On 13th Street, I passed an off-off-Broadway theater that I had gone to years ago to see an evening of one-acts in which my classmate Elle was performing. She was playing a young housewife in 1962 who has to assuage her daughter’s fears when she sees President Kennedy on television speaking alarmingly on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The point being, I think, that there is a time when all children learn the fallibility of grown-ups, or maybe that there is something in a woman that naturally rises to the occasion when her child needs protecting. Whatever. It was a dumb play when I first saw it, and even on that day, as a soon-to-be-mother perhaps in the midst of a deadly calamity, I found nothing of value in it.

I walked a little while longer. The next time I actually considered my surroundings was on Washington Place when I realized that I was in front of my old apartment, obviously subconsciously drawn there. Of the five apartments I’ve had in New York, this was the only one that I truly loved, and I would have lived there forever if I could’ve. The situation was straight out of one of those old Dawn Powell novels about Manhattan: the townhouse was owned by Kathleen, a widow who rented out rooms at life-alteringly cheap prices to young women looking to get started in the city. It was an act of extreme generosity and I never knew why she picked the women she did to be her beneficiaries. There were surely hundreds of interested tenants who would have offered her more rent. I never asked her for an explanation, figuring that age had either made her beatific or senile, and both of those are impossible to talk to.

Tenants usually cycled in and out within a year, but Celia, Ainsley and I all moved in within six weeks of each other and stuck around for four years. We got along in all the ways that roommates have to, and in a few of the ways that friends must. Things ran cold as often as they ran hot, and sometimes the two of them ganged up on me out of what I can’t identify as anything but boredom. You know, the sort of thing where I’d mention that at lunch with a high-school classmate who was in the city, he kept staring at my chest, and I’d get from my roommates a rolled-eyed, “Welcome to life” response. But the next month, I’d mention in a tossed-off way that I was similarly gawked at by an intern at work, I’d be scolded by both of them for not taking it seriously. (I’m not saying this happens to me all the time, it’s just a convenient example that, sure, does happen enough to be a convenient example.)

I left the apartment once Celia and Ainsley got serious with their boys. Again, in a window of only six weeks or so, Celia got engaged to her boyfriend, Seth, and Ainsley, not to be outdone, got married to Ilya, a Russian student whom she’d met a year before during his summer in the city. The two couples were both starting to weigh the pros and cons of New Jersey versus Long Island, so the writing was on the wall: I packed up and left, figuring it was only right to leave the apartment wide open for the next iteration of young women. Or so I put it at the time. As I say, I could have lived in that apartment forever, but I didn’t want to stay around Celia and Ainsley any more. It wasn’t that I was jealous – I had no desire to get married, especially not to the prizes they had picked (Ilya, when I met him, told me that he didn’t care what work his wife did, as long as she made less money than he did, and Celia’s fiancee Seth was a monomaniacal body builder) – but that I didn’t want to face their condescension if they decided to think I was jealous.

None of these fine details were on my mind at the moment. I just needed a safe place to stop. There was no answer at the garden level door, so I walked up the stoop and tried the parlor level, where Kathleen usually kept herself. With a little difficulty, somebody opened the door. I first noticed the cast on her arm and next saw that it was Ainsley regarding me impassively.

“Yes?”

“Oh! Ainsley, I didn’t know you were still here. It’s Paige!”

She still didn’t react, which I took (and I guess this was where my insensitivity started) as indication that she didn’t remember me.

“I used to live here with you. You and me and Celia.”

“What’s going on, Paige?”

“Um…I recognize the craziness, but what’s going on is somebody just tried to kill me. They’re the same people who blew up the subway.”

“The subway?”

“You heard about the subway, didn’t you? Didn’t you notice that there was nobody out on the streets?”

“I’ve been in here working.”

“Well, could I come in for a bit? I can explain what’s happening.” Another blank look. “Or not. I would just rather get off my feet for a minute and think. Please.”

Ainsley stepped back and, with her uncast arm, gestured me up the stairs to our old apartment.

“I can’t believe you’re still here,” I said, kind of to her and kind of to the house. “Except for the broken arm, you look just the same. There’s no change.”

“It’s like I don’t even exist when you’re not around.”

I laughed, but she just said, “Have a seat.”

“Thank you. Actually, could I grab a glass of water?”

She sighed and walked into the kitchen. Over the sound of the running faucet she spoke to me. “When you spend time speaking English with someone who’s still learning it, and walking them through it, you notice all these little things that native speakers don’t get. And that one, ‘grab a glass of water,’ became one of my least favorite phrases.” She came back in, handed me the glass, and sat on a far couch. “It’s needlessly aggressive: ‘Could you grab that? Could you grab that?’” She punctuated this with angry hand gestures.

I wanted to be a good guest, but I felt this wasn’t worth simperingly apologizing over, so I just kept the conversation moving. “I assume it’s Ilya you were teaching?” Ainsley nodded and I was at least able to pick up in that gesture her discouragement against me continuing down that line of discussion. “And what about Celia? Is she still here too?”

“No, actually, I don’t really know where she wound up. I haven’t been all that interested to find out. Kind of like…” She started to say, and I cut her off with my next question – though I can now guess what she was going to say.

“But you decided to stay?”

“I own the building.”

“Noooo,” I said with genuine astonishment. “That’s amazing. How did that happen?”

“You left. Celia left. I was the only one here when Kathleen moved to Arizona. She gave me the first look because she didn’t want to put it on the market where just anybody could…”

“It was cheap, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing about you, just that it would be hard for anybody to afford a townhouse unless the price was–”

“One million is what I paid. What’s that?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty cheap. Wow.”

One million dollars, though still the quintessential “a lot of money,” is no money at all in New York real estate. Another negative feeling started to bubble up: I was jealous of Ainsley. Credit this as much as you want (though I think I’ve demonstrated to you so far that I’m an honest person), but I hadn’t felt jealous of another person for a long, long time. However, since I had moved out of this apartment, I had been steadily fantasizing about owning a townhouse in New York, a respectfully old-fashioned home where I could establish myself as permanent part of the city. I wanted five narrow stories from the cellar to the roof, a skyscraper for one. I wanted a place where I could hook up my own washer and dryer, anchoring me, making it clear I was never moving away. I knew that I would appreciate the house more than Ainsley, who I could still remember talking excitedly about “a big yard in Central Islip.”

I pushed that negativity away. “I’m glad it wound up with you, and not somebody who’d…ruin this place.”

“Ruin how?”

“Tear it down? Well, that’s probably not allowed, since it’s an old building. But somebody who would gut the inside or let it become pied-à-terres. It just makes me happy that…this place means a lot to me and I’m glad its going to somebody else who loves it and isn’t just looking to trade up for huge property out in the suburbs. What if Kathleen had sold it to somebody who was…you know, ‘Oh, I have to get out of the city every other weekend to recharge.’ As if this isn’t the only place in the world that isn’t exhausting.” I believed everything I said, but the withering atmosphere filling the space between us had me rambling and dropping the end of every sentence into quavers and hesitation.

“Even if I did want to get out of the city, I’m stuck here now. I’ve sunk all my time and money into this place.” Ainsley stood up, took my glass from me, and walked back into the kitchen. I thought she was getting me a refill, but she came back empty-handed. I noticed, for the first time, how un-lived-in the place look. There was only as much furniture as one person would use.

“You’re not renting out the rooms?” I asked.

“I don’t have any interest in roommates any more. Celia and Seth were enough.”

“Seth moved in?”

“After you left, Celia convinced Kathleen to let Seth take over your share of the rent. He was the first guy she ever let live here. He probably hastened her to retirement.”

“Was he still–”

“A piece of shit? Yes, he brought all of his weights. There are cracks in the floors upstairs from where he dropped them.”

She was mad enough about this that I didn’t ask her the question I’d actually been going for: was he still taking steroids? My appraisal of Seth was encapsulated entirely by a discussion one night when we were both in the kitchen at the same time. He was telling me that he’d got Celia interested in weight-lifting, and was trying to turn her on to SARMs, his preferred muscle-building drug, which he kept in handy syringes. He set the scene for me: “I see her in her gym outfit – I got her these amazing shorts – she looks so good. I’m trying to focus on training her, but I don’t know whether I want to fuck her or inject her. I guess they’re both the same!”

“I shouldn’t admit this,” I said to Ainsley, “because I shouldn’t admit that I even cared, but one night I looked up all his old pictures from years before we knew him, and he was just this stick-insect boy.”

“I think he had Marfan Syndrome.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s the Abe Lincoln condition.”

“Oh. Well, in any case…skinny guy becomes steroid guy. The insecurity is pretty obviously accounted for.”

“What do I care what turned him into a pig? Why do you even care?” Ainsley said, and I lost the rapport we’d been building up. “When I heard he got popped, I actually cheered.”

“Popped?”

“He was all over message boards talking about those drugs, buying and selling them. The feds got him. Probably just to have him flip on a big-level distributor, but he’s probably too stupid to get that and will wind up going to jail himself.”

Suddenly, a complete memory came back to me. “There’s one thing I’d give him,” I said. “I overheard them talking in Celia’s room one night, and they were getting mushy, and he said that he liked her upper lip hair.”

“Why?”

“That’s what Celia asked. And he said, ‘Because when I see it, it means I’m close enough to kiss you.’ So, I don’t know. I thought that was a nice thing to say.” Up to this moment, I had never felt anything positive about Seth, so I was surprised to hear myself talk like this. Later, I looked online for any sort of psychological explanation for this, and it seems like it may have been a self-regulating effort by my brain to counterbalance thoughts of schadenfreude with more charitable ones. If you’ve ever been so happy you cried, or found a baby or a puppy or a kitten so unbelievably cute that you wanted to “eat it up,” your brain has made a similar recalibration for emotional equilibrium.

Ainsley was adjusting her sitting position and delicately moving her cast, so she took a moment to respond. “You really think so? I think it’s more manipulative than anything else. To bring up an insecurity like that, to subtly reinforce it? To make her think it would be a problem if she went with any other guy?”

It was so obvious, I was embarrassed to have suggested otherwise, and tried to restore a disdainful position. “Maybe it was the steroids, too. He’s way into body hair.”

But it was Ainsley who was giving off all the disdain. She just stared, unimpressed at my joke. I ventured another line. “I’ve got that going now too, actually. Since I got pregnant, I’ve had more hair.”

“Why are you expecting me to care about this?”

By this point, I knew a line like that was coming, but its not something you can really prepare for. “I’m not expecting you to care about anything,” I said, generically. “But we are catching up after several years–”

“Exactly, Paige! Thats exactly the point! It’s been years. You left right when things got ugly, you stayed completely away. I didn’t hear anything from you until you come up today with your problems.”

“I didn’t come here with my ‘problems.’ I came here…well, whatever. I don’t think I stayed completely away, I’m sure I sent you some text or something on Facebook since then.”

“That’s not really meaningful communication, though, is it? It’s what you do when you’re trying to collect your credit while still staying comfortably away.”

“What are you accusing me of staying away from?”

“You bailed out and left me with Seth and Celia. I had to handle all their shit.”

“Ainsley, the only ‘shit’ there was in this apartment was from the two of you coming at me all the time.”

“So you just shutting yourself in your room when she’s screaming at me because she thinks I moved her food in the fridge? That didn’t happen? And you didn’t just, ‘Hey, I’m leaving,’ one day, with no forewarning? I had to live with Celia and Seth, with nobody on my side.”

“That is completely nothing. I supposed to protect you from fridge fights? Also, I left because you were all getting married. Why am I expected to do more on this than your husband? Or take care of yourself, for that matter.”

I’ve let this play out uninterrupted so you could see how overwhelmed we were both getting and see the emotional errors that I was making, but I now have to break in to elide the details of this story that need to stay hidden. What I will say is that that after finishing school, Ilya came back to the US and moved in with Ainsley, and that once he came over from Russia permanently, they found that absence was the secret sauce of their romance. Without it, there was nothing to obscure their incompatibility, no “make the most of the time we have” to enliven their ordinary sex life. The night before their formal wedding ceremony, they stayed up late talking, agreed that they should put an end to the marriage, but felt too guilty about having brought out their far-flung families to cancel the party.

They figured an exit strategy would come to mind and they could end the marriage cleanly, but one never did, and they stayed together for almost two years. And rather than growing increasingly distant and numb towards each other, they got mean. There were screaming matches and possessions thrown out of high windows. Once, before Ainsley left on a work trip, Ilya scrubbed the magnetic strips off her credit cards with steel wool – this really happened – and colored them back in with a magic marker, stranding her without money in a foreign country.

(Obviously, only some of this was in what Ainsley told me during our fight. The rest came in research that I’ve done for this book. And regrettably, my attitude towards the story while she told it was not as sensitive as it is in this summary.)

They finally separated after that, but divorce wasn’t the end of it. Six months later (one month before I arrived for this reunion), Ilya re-emerged, and I have to get even more vague here. This all butts against my earlier vow to always tell the truth, but there’s a terrible part I have to completely excise from this story. It’s not that I’m afraid that Ainsley will find out I used her life as grist for the mill – she’s probably the only person in New York who’s immune to my celebrity, and I suspect she’s going to pointedly avoid this book – it’s that it would be wrong, full stop. I’m not writing this book to make money or increase my profile, but those things will happen, and it would be ghoulish for me to profit at all from this awful turn in her life.

I just have to ask you to please trust me when I say that something terrible happened when Ilya came back…something bad enough that even hearing about it had a permanent effect on my speech. I no longer make jokes about a certain topic, or even use rhetorical expressions based around it. Again, I’m sorry for being so vague, especially given that this is actually a decision I’d advise other people to follow. The emphatic vocabulary surrounding tragedy is temptingly powerful, but consider the effect an unprompted, untelegraphed appearance of certain words or imagery might have on somebody who’s lived through the actual pain of those events.

But that was a charitable thought that only came to me later. At the moment, I brushed past the details of her shattered life, stung by her notion that I was the worse friend.

“Well, putting all that aside and focusing on us,” I said, “which is all I think you can expect me to do…I was always pushed around by the two of you. Maybe – maybe!” I yelled to stop her from interrupting. “Maybe you two treated each other like shit separately from me, but when I was there, it was always against me: you rolled your eyes at everything I said, I couldn’t get an inch in any conversation. I couldn’t have any friend over without you two squeezing us out of the living room because you didn’t want to share the space. When you two got engaged it was dialed up! Every single thing about me was trivial in your eyes after that. So…it’s baffling to me that you even wanted me to be there for you. Let alone that you’re upset I wasn’t.”

“You can’t understand why I’m mad at you?”

“I understand it makes sense in the reality that you have, but no, before I came in here, I had no idea you were thinking this. I had stopped thinking about what you were thinking. It seemed like that’s how you wanted to do it.”

“You didn’t know that I was ignoring you?” Ainsley asked in a showy, and-that’s-when-I-realized sort of voice. “You just said you don’t even notice when I’m gone from your life. Do you even feel guilty about how selfish you’re being?”

At first I latched onto the word “guilt,” and it threw all sorts of thoughts into my mind: pleading text messages I never answered, a habit of subtly accentuating my emotional wounds to inspire guilt in other people, reflexively and cruelly laughing when a friend told me she was interested in exploring the furry scene. And worst of all, a memory of my first month in New York, walking up Broadway between Union and Madison Squares and seeing a tiny, twitching sparrow on the sidewalk, stunned and shattered by a collision with a window…and leaving it there. It would have been so easy to pick it up and leave it in the cool dirt of a tree basin where it could have recovered, or at least passed in peace. But I kept walking.

Then I clocked the word “selfish,” and pushed away all those thoughts that might have led to softness, and kept fighting.

“You ignore me all the time. You ignored me when I was living in the room next to you, you and Celia grinding down every single thing that I did or said.”

“What is it supposed to be, Paige? I ignored you or I attacked you? Which is it?”

“Yeah, obviously, you didn’t ignore ignore me. Just ignored everything about me. So why am I supposed to notice something now? It’s the same way it’s always been. What’s the difference between you’re not talking to me because you hate me and you’re not talking to me even though you love me?” I said this firmly, even as the sentiment turned to soup in my head. Of course there’s a difference, a one that’s immediately understood once you’ve been on the transmitting end of both kinds of silence.

“Nobody’s trying to get you to notice anything, Paige. I didn’t ask you to come over here again when I’m trying to work. You showed up…you don’t even know what you want.” And if she hadn’t used that phrase, I would have soon enough.

Hearing those words out loud triggered the memory: I was sitting, in all likelihood, in the same chair I was now in. It was the middle of the night. I had come home from a date with a boy I’d seen a few times. Our first meeting was inauspicious: I was sitting in Riverside Park when he came up asking me to pay a fee because he “caught me not smiling!” I responded with a truly pissed off, “why the fuck should I be smiling?” but it turned out he was just collecting for some non-profit dedicated to mental health, and that was their scripted opening line. (I’ve tried to figure out what charity it was, but that’s not the sort of detail you can Google, and nobody I’ve asked was ever solicited by the same group.) I felt bad once he made that clear – people with bad jobs don’t need to be yelled at as well – and I guess I was weakened enough to let him have my number.

On our third date, I agreed to go out with him somewhere in his neighborhood, mainly because I was curious to see Inwood, which had always looked to me, on maps, hinterlandish without being actually inconvenient. He showed up looking “natty” (his word) and took me to a brick oven pizza restaurant where he made his drink selection based on an excited discovery of “angostura bitters” in a list of ingredients – all of which is of a piece, I now see. But he was polite and listened when I talked, so I acquiesced when he asked if I wanted to come back to his apartment.

We sat on his couch before a TV that showed a paused video game. Instead of ignoring it or shutting down the system, he picked up a controller and asked me if I’d ever played the game. I said no, I was an adult, and he unpaused and started explaining it to me. It involved a lot of sneaking around in some mutant-filled horror world. He directed my attention to the TV screen just in time for me to watch a body-horror monstrosity jump out of a window and split open a bystander. I told him that I didn’t want to watch any more. “You don’t like violence?” he asked.

“No,” I said, and then, before that could settle me as a square, “I don’t think we need to censor it, but I think it’s something we should…”

He smiled. “It’s tricky. You don’t even know what you want.”

I flipped it around on him. “Do you ‘like’ violence? Isn’t it something we should all try not to like?”

“No, that’s a good point. I don’t even really like gory violence that much. I’m more into psychological horror. Do you know about the live burials in Thessaloniki?”

You can guess what they were: true stories from distressingly recent dates of people stupidly, needlessly condemned to a horrifying end when they were accidentally buried alive. I lost my calm when he said, “they heard screams underground,” and actually clamped my hands over my ears. He pulled my hands down and said, “And, and, and…when they opened the coffin, the fingers were all cramped and there were scratches all over the inside.”

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, turned on the sink, and under the noise of the faucet, snuck out the front door. Normally I would have let a bad date know that and why I was leaving, but this time I ducked out of his building and walked to the subway constantly looking over my shoulder. The A was running local, but even in the hour it took me to get to West 4th Street, I still couldn’t get my head clear of bloody visuals, and my chest felt tight no matter how many deep breaths I took.

I came home, made it up one flight of stairs, but couldn’t go into the dark upstairs bedrooms. I stayed in the living room, with the lights on, for ten minutes before Ainsley, coming down to drop her dirty dishes in the kitchen, saw me. “Are you back from your date?” she asked.

I recounted the evening exactly as it happened, without adornments, working unsuccessfully to stay unaffected. Ainsley let me talk until, attempting a dry conclusion, I said, “So you understand why that didn’t work out.” At that, Ainsley came over and sat on the arm of the chair and stiffly hugged my shoulders. “It’s not good for people to deliberately upset you,” she offered. “It’s only okay if somebody does it as a joke…like, making you feel upset in a light and fun way where you don’t actually feel upset. And you’re in on the joke.”

I realize (and even realized then) that this sounds incredibly robotic and awkward, and it was. But it was no less sincere for all that, and in fact, it was even more moving for being so stilted. Anyone with a honeyed voice can toss off a soothing word like it’s nothing, but for somebody to go out of her comfort zone, to let herself sound so clumsy just to give me a little comfort, she must care about me. Maybe not most of the time, but there was something indivisible there.

It all came back to me, and though Ainsley was still pumping poison into the air, I felt no desire to fight anymore. She had made the last attack (“You don’t even know what you want”) and was waiting for me to return it. But I just sighed and stared at the wall, attempting to recompose myself until a phone rang in another room and Ainsley left. She was gone for several minutes, which let a number of apologies build up in my head. I figured I would start with the present, telling her that she had no reason to feel bad for winding up where she had, that maintaining this townhouse was vital to New York. And I wasn’t just saying that to be nice. Though it’s me who has been designated the city’s savior, it’s really – and this isn’t false modesty – the daily people who keep the old junky apartments standing and maintain the parks to a capped degree of modest cleanliness and refuse to give up on the subway – they deserve support and acclaim for keeping New York from turning into the gilded country club it always threatens to be.

Getting up to follow Ainsley into the other room, I heard a crunch beneath my feet: an old, disgusting syringe. Seth had been shooting up all over the house, apparently. The needle was still attached, and I thought of how easy it would have been to accidentally stick myself and, depending on what was in the barrel, how quickly it could have changed or even ended my life.

All the pieces didn’t come together there. But enough of them did. A line was strung between that idea of sudden injections and my recollection of the first thing that happened that morning – the conversation with Stephanie on the stalled train – and from it so many other details hung: the attack on the subway, the disappearance of Dr. Shimin, the celebrity tunnels under the city, the code names that Molly and her cronies were using. There was now a unifying thread between everything that had happened. I didn’t know that I needed to go to the bookstore, but it was an informed guess, the best I had. And there was no time to search for a better one.

Ainsley still hadn’t returned, and though I knew speed was of the essence, I hated to leave without turning down the heat between us. I checked every room in every floor of the building twice, but she was gone. I left for the bookstore wishing that we could have made amends since I needed all the good energy I could get on my side if I was going to stop an assassination.