Eva only met Candice because of her dork brother. Marcus trained her twice a week at the gym where he worked, sometimes posting selfies on his Instagram of the two of them showing off. Flexing with mock-aggressive faces, grinning proudly under the barbell, pulling up their shirts on ab day. Her stomach was pretty nice—not nearly as defined as his, but Eva knew already that for women, that was much harder. “You guys have higher body fat than us just to begin with,” he’d told her, “and anyway abs are more about diet than exercise. You’d have to cut out almost all sugar and a ton of carbs for at least a few months.”

No thanks, Eva thought, and then told him. “Your diet is stupid.” He pointed finger-guns at her and said something about making the money, baby!

On his birthday, Eva and a few of their favourite cousins took him to that bar downtown that did Motown nights – Motown night was a good night to go with family, because the music was great but also pretty much guaranteed no strangers would be trying to grind on anyone. She and her cousins plied him with snacks and drinks (annoyingly healthy ones, but what have you) and his smiles got more and more face-splitting as the night went on. Marcus got louder and looser, laughed longer, and pulled them all out onto the dancefloor more insistently. And somewhere after midnight, at that point when he was what the small group was calling “peak Marcus”, that was when he ran into her at the bar.

Eva had just finished a drink, her fourth. Fifth? Just sucked the last of the lemon-and-gin taste from the last bit of liquid hiding between the ice cubes, and slid her butt across the leather seat to get out of the booth and order more. She stood up, and asked her three cousins (the twins and the twat, Andre had declared them, to howls from the booth) if it was time for another round. And someone came up behind her and threw an arm around her shoulders, making her jump.

“Guys!” Her younger-but-taller brother’s exuberant voice, right in her ear. “This is Candice! She’s my girl!”

Eva turned her head to look. Candice had Marcus’other arm around her own shoulders. She was very short. Thin and prettier in person, hair dark and straight to her shoulders, stark against her white strappy dress. Eva would have guessed she was Chinese, but wasn’t about to ask a stranger that. Her nose was a button, her smile a bit sheepish. Her hands were clutching a tiny silver purse and a mystery drink in a martini-style glass.

The twins were yelling right back, calling her “new girl” and waving her into the booth. (Sabrina had looked up from her phone, waved, and gone right back to her text.) Marcus handed Eva a drink before she could even say she was about to go and grab one, and then she was getting hustled right back into the spot she had just left. Candice was squeezed in across from her.

An hour or so passed in a pleasant blur. More drinks, more laughs. The new girl had a wealth of dirty jokes. Then Angelo had kicked off the filthy-stories part of the evening, and she had a few of those too. Eva briefly wondered if she had come out to the club alone, or where her friends were, but the thought passed. Until she announced she was going out front for a smoke, and after a few seconds, Candice followed, pushing through the heavy doors with a thump.

“Can I borrow a light?” she asked Eva, standing near but at an almost respectful distance. She murmured an affirmative and handed it over. When their fingers met, Candice’s were cold.

They smoked in silence against the brick wall, until she broke it.

“Marcus talks about you a lot. It’s cool how close you are.” Her voice was softer outside.

“Yeah. He’s a nerd.” Eva couldn’t help the smile creeping across her face when she talked about her brother. Candice laughed a little bit.

“I think he’s cool.” And there it was. Getting in with Eva before she made her move. And obviously her brother could go out with whoever he wanted, but…Eva didn’t know. She felt too tall and broad standing next to her. Big, dark, and ungainly. It made her not like this pretty, petite girl she didn’t even know, which she knew was mean, but she didn’t care. Why did Marcus have to bring her to hang out with them all night?

“Listen,” Candice broke the silence again. Eva almost huffed out her breath. “Can I give you my number, and maybe we hang out sometime?”

Eva turned her whole neck around to look at her. She could feel, even with her drunk face muscles, the are-you-kidding mouth she had. “Look, you can ask out Marcus yourself, all right? We’re close, but I don’t get involved with his business like that—”

“Eva, no,” she was already saying. Interrupting, really, what would have been a badass speech, but Candice continued. “I’d like to take you out. If you want.”

Eva’s mouth snapped shut. Candice was looking up at her with a very small smile, not mocking at all (even though she’d really missed the boat here), but her eyes were…soft. Fond, even. They were so big and dark Eva could literally see the streetlights reflected in them.

“Oh,” she breathed. Candice’s smile grew wider. Eva slowly, slowly smiled back.

Eva felt light. Airy, even. Not that people never came on to her, or anything, but…

Guys, though. Guys hit on her. Guys, who she had liked since she was a giggly pre-teen. Did Eva like girls? She’d never thought that way about girls. She thought lots of them were pretty—like, Candice was very pretty. But would she want to kiss her? Or touch her, touch her body, in a sexy way?

No. Right?

Eva exhaled smoke.

“That’s really nice,” she told Candice, “but I don’t go out with girls that way. I’m not…into women.” The words felt so awkward. What was wrong with her tongue? She didn’t have a problem with it, or anything, and she really didn’t want her to think she did.

Candice’s shoulders shrugged a small shrug, still smiling calmly up at her, dark hair shining in the moonlight and the street lamps. “That’s okay. We can just hang, but I would still like to go and get to know each other. If you don’t want to, that’s fine.”

“I—” why did Eva keep starting to talk before her brain finished thinking? “I don’t not want to hang with you,” she finished, lamely, feeling dumb.

“Well, that’s an okay start,” Candice said.

Packed in together for the cab ride home, the guys were drunk gabbing away a mile a minute right in her ear, but Eva didn’t hear it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what happened.

She’d given her her number, but now she wasn’t sure what came next. Candice did like her, she knew. Would it be leading her on if Eva met her for coffee, or drinks? Or a meal? Was one option less obviously date-like than the other?

Eva fell asleep quickly that night. In the morning, she couldn’t remember what she had dreamed, but she did know she’d had them, and felt a strange sense of loss.

           •                                              •                                               •

Eva arrived at the café first. She was early, though. She’d left expecting traffic, but the roads were uncharacteristically clear.

She’d wrestled and worried over what to wear and how to look. She didn’t want to seem like she was dolling herself up like she would for a date, but she didn’t want to look like crap either, and finding the right balance was harder than she’d thought about.

She had been thinking about this meet-up more than she would have told anyone.

She hadn’t told Marcus it was happening, and she didn’t really have a reason why.

In the end she pulled her microbraids into a thick side-braid that she thought looked cute, and settled on a peach-coloured dress that was clean and slim and sharp. Something simple enough to go to the office in, but nice enough that she could go to a restaurant afterwards and meet her girls in. Her friends. Her—god, she needed to stop that. She smoothed the skirt down her thighs and asked the waiter for a glass of water, to start with.

A little bell tinkled, making her look up. It must have been strung up above the door, because Candice was walking in. She looked breezy in a navy-and-white striped shirt and white pencil skirt. She had big sunglasses on and she smiled at Eva as she walked over to her seat by the window.

“Hey! Sorry, am I late?” she asked, putting her purse on the back of the chair.

“No, I was early. You’re fine,” Eva said, as she sat down across from her. Across the table again. Eva watched her take the shades off and lean back and look right at her again.

Silence for a second, then Candice smiled at her, a little bit sheepish like when they’d first met, but Eva felt herself smile back.

The waiter came back, a serious-looking guy with lots of complex tattoos on his arms, and asked them what it would be. They ordered coffees, and as he walked away, Candice gave a sly sideways look and said, “nice butt.” Eva laughed, a bit surprised, and with that they slid fairly easily into small-talk.

They learned where each other worked. Candice was clearly smart and very hardworking, she had a full-time job and did freelance as well, she networked pretty much non-stop and still had the drive to work with Marcus on her fitness regime. She asked how he had been the morning after his party, and Eva did a Walking Dead zombie impression and she laughed. She had dimples. Eva had forgotten that.

Eva felt pretty passionless by comparison as she talked about her administrative gig. It was a good job, but not what she wanted for a career, and that made her feel like she wasn’t as much of an adult as a lot of her friends. She told Candice about what she was writing on the piano, though, and she could feel herself lifting up and talking faster. Candice listened intently, looking up through her lashes and over the rim of her mug. “I really want to hear your music,” she said, and though many people had told Eva that, some of them people she’d known for years, she didn’t always feel that they meant it like she could tell Candice did. It made her face warm.

They talked about family. Eva had a lot of family, but Candice almost none. She spoke very simply about her mother’s death, and Eva surprised herself—she reached across the table, with no intention to do it, and placed her hand on top of Candice’s. Candice’s hand and wrist, really. She’d almost missed; she felt foolish. But something in her chest had twitched, and she wanted to comfort Candice, somehow. To touch her.

Candice didn’t say anything. Eva barely breathed. All she heard was the sound of slow jazz coming softly from the café’s speakers, and a bike bell from someone on the street. What Candice did instead was slowly turn her hand around, palm up, and lightly wrap her fingers around Eva’s own.

Eva raised her gaze to look Candice in the eyes, and found that she was already looking at hers. Her big eyes dropped to Eva’s mouth, then back, and when she talked her voice was quiet but sure.

“I want to take you out,” she said. “This didn’t have to be a date. But I like you, and I want you to let me take you out for a real one.”

Eva couldn’t look away, but she still felt nervous. “I’ve never done that before,” she said.

“I know.”

The question hung in the air between them for a few seconds, then Candice asked it.

“Would you do it with me?” That same hopeful little smile on her mouth.

Eva breathed, in and out. “Yes.”