And yet…she’s torn. The moment Victoria invites her to come to an important conference in Seattle, followed by meeting Autumn’s parents in Northern California…Autumn is torn. “You’re sure you need me at the conference?” she asks. “Maybe I could meet you after, when we get to Big Sur.”

  Victoria’s lips are pursed. “It’s been, what, thirty years? And you’ve never missed the twins’ birthday? Surely they can spare you this year.”

  “But that’s just it,” Autumn says. Again. This isn’t their first cycle of conversation over this decision. “It’s their thirtieth birthday. That’s such a big one.”

  “It isn’t like they’re coming out here for your birthday.” Victoria catches her, hooking a finger in Autumn’s belt loop to reel her in. “I know. I was there.” She was. She’d gathered Autumn’s friends—all her Chicago people, even the culinary school crew flew in—and hosted a surprise party at an exclusive nightclub that Autumn had no chance of getting in alone. They’d danced all night, snuck edibles past the bouncers, and Autumn had glued Victoria to her side, unable to stop looking at her. It was as special as she’d ever felt, because Victoria didn’t like parties full of people only Autumn knew, and she must have hired a PI to track down as many of Autumn’s friends as she had. But she’d done it, all of it, for Autumn, and sent everyone home with actual care packages to alleviate the inevitable hangovers.

  Victoria kisses her, a welcome, beloved interruption. “Autumn,” she says carefully. “When’s the last time Sasha came to your birthday?”

  “That’s different,” Autumn protests, nudging their foreheads together. “It isn’t just about their birthday. It’s mostly their birthday. I make the cake. But it’s usually the only time of year I ever go back there now.”

  But Victoria is too smart and she doesn’t buy it. “Your parents are in Big Sur. They sent you an entire disposable camera just to share their trip with you.” She arches an eyebrow. “Who else do you have to visit at home? Except…?”

  Sasha is home this time, maybe even for keeps. She left New York and her New York girl and moved back into the Clearwater house. Back to the town and the tree house.

  Autumn bites her lip. Face-to-face with Victoria, it’s so difficult to admit. But Autumn has always loved so easily. Too easily, sometimes, with no thought to guarding her heart. She’s felt it most keenly with Sasha, who was so far ahead of her for so long, confident in her college coming-out and her girlfriends. By the time Autumn knew what she felt, Sasha was comically out of her reach. Oh, it haunted her. Autumn dreamed of chasing after her through the trees, watching her strong, straight back as she vanished into the horizon. And now she wakes up in Victoria’s arms. She loves Victoria wildly, to distraction, and in secret, her love is twinned by tumorous guilt.

  “What if she needs me?” Autumn asks finally.

  “What if she doesn’t?” Victoria’s counter is cruel. But fair. “Also,” she adds. “I want my girlfriend with me.” Not unlike a dragon, Victoria has a little possessive streak. Sometimes Autumn hates it, and sometimes she wants to wrap herself up in it, in the proof of Victoria’s love, her desire.

  It has crossed Autumn’s mind that Victoria might have known the birthday was coming. That Victoria’s work trip—some conference—for that exact week might not have been entirely innocent. But not even Victoria could force the whole world to bend, just to keep Autumn occupied during the one week of the year she is normally spoken for.

  “You really want me there? I won’t be a distraction?” Autumn presses.

  Victoria’s answering smile is slow and sweet. “Oh, you’ll be a distraction.”

  Sasha is a tether, tugging Autumn southward, past-ward. But Victoria is her present. Precious, worth keeping.

  So she kisses her again, smiles against her lips. She’ll do her best to keep what she has. In the morning, she’ll call Sasha. She’ll tell her then.

  “I always wondered if I should tell you.”

  ***

  August 2002

  It’s late in the evening, a single june bug dazedly spinning itself against the front door light, when Autumn finally carries the last box over the threshold and closes herself up in her new apartment.

  Everyone warned her that moving in the midst of summer heat—in Texas, no less—was a terrible, terrible idea. But Autumn is from the South; she knows all about heat. And breakups are a heat-death that consumes all.

  The one-bedroom is very dark. She’s left the light on over the kitchen oven, and it floods over the breakfast bar, right into the tiny living space where the kind movers positioned her couch, the only piece of real furniture that felt like hers enough to take it from Victoria’s. It’s green fabric, a vintage fade that Victoria allowed because Autumn unapologetically loved it. Squashy in all the right places. Sturdy enough to hold the weight of two women and their love. Probably still had popcorn somewhere under the cushions, too deep to ever pull out.

  Victoria is magnanimous, and much wealthier, so she offered Autumn her pick of their shared items. As ruthless as she can be at work, with subordinates and rude strangers, she still isn’t ruthless with Autumn. But Autumn didn’t want their things. Better to start over, with her clothes, her books—and overwhelmingly, her kitchenware. The last box is…

  Autumn peeks. A weird mix of scarves, cheesecloth, and her favorite oven mitts. She dumps it on the couch, on top of the box containing her cookie press and her cake-scaping tools. The cushions wheeze.

  Autumn feels empty. But the cleansing fire of the breakup hasn’t burnt her down, at least. Her leaves are gone, branches bare, bark scorched, but she stands anyway in the wreckage, still alive under the ashes.

  This is her choice. She’ll stand by it.

  With a nebulous plan after culinary school, Autumn jotted herself down into Victoria’s day planner. She spent seven years as Victoria’s most devoted high priestess, as Victoria’s shelter from a sharp world, letting her make all the biggest decisions.

  But this cruel, final one, is hers.

  “I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” Victoria teases her, the first time the two of them find a new little gray hair growing at Victoria’s part. Autumn says it makes Victoria look presidential. Calls her Madam President for days. It’s the first of the silver sprinkle of winter flowers that come with spring’s fervor during the last year they’ll ever spend together.

  Months later, holding a glass of red wine, Victoria looks down at Autumn, who wears the same threadbare shirt she bought at their first concert together, who has the same job she’s had since she was twenty-nine and wooed this dragon with pastries. It’s what they’ve been fighting about: Autumn’s job, spurred by Victoria’s newest promotion. “I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” Victoria accuses her. “You’re not even over your first crush yet. Don’t you want more for yourself?”

  And another time, in the dark butter of nighttime, one of Victoria’s hands slips around her hip. “Autumn?” Her voice is soft, like it hasn’t been in the weeks they’ve spent fighting. “You’re not… I don’t think you’ve changed.”

  And Autumn, staring out the window, having swallowed a stone that sits in her stomach: dread in its purest form. “You say that a lot.”

  “You see it too,” Victoria presses herself against her back and pleads. “It’s not just the job stuff. I don’t care—I mean, I do care about that, but it’s not what I mean. It’s you, your face, your body; it’s been seven years—”

  “Stop,” Autumn cuts her off. It’s out of character enough that even Victoria, who would argue with God if given the chance, doesn’t respond.

  Another night, one of the very final nights, watching Autumn cook: “You haven’t been back to your hometown in a while,” Victoria says. She still likes watching her work, even if she doesn’t understand why Autumn refuses to open her own bakery—the very smallest and meekest of Victoria’s ambitions for Autumn. “Maybe you should go there. See the bakery you used to run.”

  Autumn barely listens, because risotto takes her whole attention, because she’s tired of Victoria’s need to hammer Autumn’s life into some more acceptable shape. (It’s Autumn’s life. Even if Victoria thinks she knows better.) “Where?” she asks absently.

  “Your hometown,” Victoria’s voice rises above the mushroom-scented steam, baffled and suspicious. “Your childhood home, Autumn.”

  And then the memories flood back. Not that Autumn has forgotten. She simply hasn’t thought of that old town in a while. Home, yes. Home, of course. The papery smell of pecans housed in the tall canopies, molten praline cooling in bunny rabbit molds so she can sell them at the Pecan Festival, Sasha’s hair slipping out of her ponytail. “Oh, right.”

  She never went back. Ditching the thirtieth birthday turned into ditching them all. Or maybe Sasha stopped extending the invitation. Regardless, Autumn goes months without thinking about it, without even thinking of Sasha, other than occasional twinges of regret for how neither of them have reached out to the other.

  “No,” Autumn says. She needs to stir less. She’s making the risotto too starchy, too gluey. But she has to have something to do with her hands, or she’ll turn around and spit at Victoria: If you don’t think I’m good enough for you, if you’re ashamed of your deadbeat partner, just say it. Put me out of my misery. “Maybe I’ll go next year.”

  The end of her and Victoria’s relationship is marked with fights breaking out like lightning storms as Victoria’s patience fades and Autumn feels, once again, outpaced by someone more beautiful and capable. Sasha all over again. It’s too difficult to be outgrown, so Autumn, for the first time, made the decision for both of them.

  “No more,” Autumn says softly one night. She’s bought Victoria an orchid. No idea why. What does one buy their girlfriend after seven years, to express their forgiveness, their desire to be amicable from afar, but to never be in the same room again? It sits on their coffee table, pink petals, a gentle, swan’s-neck curve in the stem.

  Victoria doesn’t protest, because they both know Autumn is right. Victoria is fire and fury, growth and ascension. Time, years, love, fingerprints, bruises, tears, cities…and Autumn is unchanged.

  As for leaving Chicago, it is the right choice. Even breaking all ties with her old life, her old friends, for a new apartment in some state she’s never lived in is right.

  Because Victoria is correct about one thing: there are natural, normal ways Autumn should have changed.

  She pushes enough boxes to the floor that she can curl up on her couch. It’s getting harder to ignore. When Autumn presented her driver’s license, the agent gave her a long, strange look, eyes flicking between the birthdate, 1965, and Autumn’s face.

  “I have good genes,” Autumn jokes. “And hair dye.” Because she doesn’t know what else to say. She’s almost forty, starting over, but she doesn’t look it. Not a single gray hair. Not a wrinkle. Not a word from her best friend.

  It’s dark in her new apartment, where in the cold light of the breakup, Autumn admits what she hasn’t been able to, surrounded by friends and wrapped in Victoria’s love: something isn’t right.

  For the first time, on that shitty couch, in her lonely new living quarters, she does what Victoria always wanted. Autumn begins to consider her future. In case the impossible is somehow possible. In case she wakes up tomorrow and still looks twenty-five.

  Outside, the june bug must still be tapping on the light.

  “I always wondered if I should tell you.”

  ***

  January 2015

  “To New Year’s Eve!” Chloe screams over the noise of the club, about one shot and three minutes from climbing onto the table. “With the best people in the world.”

  It’s cold out in Greenwich Village, where none of them can actually afford to live—but can afford to party, here and there—the first snow of the year already underway. Autumn is sandwiched in the middle of the booth, surrounded by her favorite people, and the year is turning around them. She doesn’t know the club; to her it is indistinguishable from all the other long, black-boothed bars in Manhattan with low lights, high-priced whiskey specialties, too few wooden stools, and ample spillover into the street. But Chloe knew the bouncer (she’s very like Victoria, sometimes), and so here they are, in a sea of the city’s queerest and most glamorous, full of optimism.

  They toast, Matt and Autumn lock elbows and pour back their shots together. He kisses her on the cheek, a wet, limey smack.

  And…Chloe is on the table. She’s gorgeous tonight, with most of her tattoos, including the Taurus under her collarbone, on display, in her element. Autumn always thought Chloe would have liked the Club Kid era. She’s the lightning rod of their little group: Matt, Autumn, Ellis, and the Ryans. She was the one Autumn met first, at the bakery where she’d become head pastry chef. It’s how she finds all her friends: luring them in with pastry.

  And the countdown to a new year begins.

  Autumn’s proud of what she’s found here. Chloe with her solstice parties and astrology charts. Matt and his constant search for antiaging skincare: fountains of youth found in plastic bottles. The two Ryans and their annual enthusiastic Super Bowl party (cats allowed). Ellis’s ever-changing video game obsession—and their insistence that Autumn would definitely like this one. Occasionally it crosses her mind: what Sasha would think of the little queer crew Autumn has found, these brightly colored birds of a feather flocking together.

  “Another year,” Ryan P. demands of the world, of their friends. Tequila makes him loud, but it also makes him really cuddly, which is why he’s sitting on Ryan G.’s lap. “Another drink too, where’s my—” Ryan blinks at his empty hand and scours the club. “I think that guy stole my drink. Chloe, fight him.”

  Obligingly, Chloe hops off the table, but before she can actually fight anyone, Matt slides Ryan’s dirty, dirty, dirty martini over the tabletop at him, eyes glinting mercury with mirth. Matt’s still agonizing over his smile lines, even though they all swear they make him distinguished. Autumn doesn’t bother picking through her hair for grays anymore. She knows there isn’t a point. Instead, she resigns herself to the odd, inexplicable truth.

  If she really isn’t aging, there are worse fates. Technology, Pride parades, Friendsgiving, Pixar, Asian fusion donuts: there’s a lot to be grateful for, so much sweetness to love in life.

  “Are we making New Year’s resolutions?” Ellis asks, scooting closer to Autumn so Chloe can join their booth again. “Or is that too much? Is that stupid?”

  Matt looks up from his phone, where strangers seem to be messaging, and his eyes soften. “I’ll make a resolution with you.”

  Ellis snorts. “I resolve to find you a boyfriend so you stop telling me about your hookups.” Matt’s cruising his dating apps, because he’s at the sweet, raw time after coming out when living itself feels new and he’s desperate to make up for lost time.

  “Matt, you can always tell me about your hookups,” Chloe soothes him and turns, viper-quick to Autumn. “It’s Autumn who needs someone.”

  “Hear, hear,” Ryan raises his glass, one arm still looped around Ryan, to keep him from sliding to the ground.

  Autumn laughs, waves them off. “I’m fine. I like being single.”

  “But you’re so cute,” Matt protests. “And perfect cuddling size.”

  “I made her an account,” Chloe says, stealing an olive from Ryan’s martini. “Her profile gets lots of likes.”

  Matt stares. Ellis stares. The Ryans stare. Autumn stares. “Are you…catfishing people as me?”

  Chloe’s smile is slow around the olive. “It’s not catfishing if you’re the one who shows up on the date.”

  Autumn tries to be careful about dating as she suspects that she can’t promise anyone forever. But there’s still love to be had and life to live. Victoria still checks in, here and there, still beautiful, her sweep of hair cut short into a silver bob. She’s married to a virtual goddess now, a celebrity in the baking industry. Autumn unironically owns all her cookbooks. They are fierce social advocates for gay marriage and tied the knot the very day it was legal. Victoria looks like she’s never lived a day in fear, but Autumn knows it isn’t true.

  “Well…let me see my profile,” she decides.

  “Later.” Chloe ruffles her hair and slips out of the booth. “Dancing first. Go into the year as you want to go out of it, yeah?” She’s a devastating dancer. Once, she’d told Autumn, she wanted to go to school for it, but she broke her ankle, lost her scholarship, and…well. “My mom didn’t really have the money.” Autumn still recalls the banked pain in her eyes. “But I still dance in my living room.”

  The Ryans follow Chloe, and Matt and Ellis go to the bar for another round. For a moment, in the noise and pleasure of life, Autumn is alone, at a sticky table, covered in glitter because someone decided it was a good idea to celebrate midnight with glitter raining down from the ceiling. There’s a good chance she swallowed a lot of it.

  Autumn has only known these friends for a few years, not long enough for anything about her to be noticeable. But New Year’s never fails to bring a cloud over her head. It’s a reminder of the passage of time and it causes all of her unanswered questions to well up again. Like: Will she die? Or is it only aging from which she is exempt? Though she suspects she’s not totally frozen, but aging very slowly. People guess late twenties now.

  Autumn is afraid, sometimes, of being caught, whisked away to Area 51. It’s not unlike the ways she used to be afraid when she and Victoria would steal a kiss in a dark alley, not unlike the way she still fears for these friends, every time they catch a wrong look.

  While she is mostly content to just live, it’s nights like this that her mind starts groping for answers in the dark. Her childhood was average, wasn’t it? There is nothing in her parents’ ever-quickening deterioration to suggest their lives are interrupted. They’re normal, aren’t they?