gossip girl: blame it on the weekends (jenny/agnes)
Originally for gossipink, chosen as Mod's Choice.
blame it on the weekends
PG13 | Gossip Girl | Jenny/Agnes
Jenny's a lot of things, mostly things that Agnes calls her with sharp white smiles, pretty little Jenny who's too good for her own good. She's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She cares a whole lot, just like her dad, and Agnes says that bad people will try to take advantage of her lovely, girlish innocence. And she smirks at her, nudges her knee with a slim foot, murmurs, "I'm not a good person," so Jenny has to laugh to excuse the color that flares up in her cheeks.
The first night after Jenny runs away is breathtaking; it's seeing the stars through the streetlights, throwing your arms to the sky. She takes over the city with Agnes, letting her take her everywhere she couldn't go when she was living at home, and they spill a half-bottle of vodka into a carton of organic orange juice on the rooftop of Agnes' apartment building at four in the morning. It's beautiful, like the cityscape is beautiful, like expensive shoes and dark eyes and long legs that look great in her dresses. Jenny can't believe she didn't do this before.
"We," Agnes says, "are going to be amazing."
"We already are," Jenny murmurs, words slipping together with her head spinning quicker, trying to make it back down the stairs. They lean on each other, or maybe Jenny leans on Agnes, because Jenny doesn't drink, does she? No, or not like everyone else in her tiny world, but she wraps arms around Agnes' neck because she's afraid of falling and giggles all the way to the bedroom. She's been in here before, seen the peeling movie posters and the makeup scattered on the little white kid vanity, but it's never looked so cool.
Agnes leaves Jenny sitting on the bed while she undresses. She pulls her dress over her head so all Jenny sees is a length of pale skin, her flat stomach and the black bra that showed through the white silk, with club lights and moonlight and lights through open curtains. She kicks off her heels then looks at Jenny, angling her head.
She asks, "Are you going to sleep in your clothes, or what?" and turns to slip into the bathroom. Slowly, Jenny leans down to unzip her boots and peel them away from her legs, a little sticky with sweat from dancing so long. By the time Agnes comes back with most of her makeup off, she's lying on her back in her slip, legs curled under her, mostly asleep.
"Sweet dreams, J," Agnes whispers, crawling under the sheets beside her. Jenny thinks about getting under them herself, but that would require moving, and then Agnes is tugging the duvet cover until it's covering her shoulders. Jenny smiles a little, even though she's already turning over so all she can see is a mess of hair, the long line of her spine. She doesn't even have a pillow, but Jenny rubs her face against the sheets, and they smell like they haven't been changed in awhile, a distant person kind of smell. Sweat, maybe. Sex, though she wouldn't really know, outside her own bed when nobody else is awake.
She presses her nose to it and thinks about walking through puddles with a thin arm around her waist and being young and free while she's falling asleep to the hushed sound of Agnes breathing.
*
It's been a few days.
All her clothes are in piles on the floor of Agnes' bedroom, shoved into free spaces in her closet, and they share a bed in lieu of Jenny trying to sleep on the sofa. Agnes always sleeps in her underwear, and Jenny doesn't; Jenny wears t-shirts that fall to her knees and stays on her side, her own pillow. It's a nice system they have, even if sometimes she can't really function when she wakes up with Agnes pressed up to her side, soft skin sleep warm and smelling like sweat and cigarettes and perfume, faintly, Jenny's mouth open too close to the freckles on her shoulder. She'll get up early, five or six o'clock like she's going to get ready for school, to make sure Agnes doesn't wake up and realize Jenny's been lying underneath her, wide awake. She moves as quiet as she can, making coffee and crawling onto the fire escape to catch the less impressive end of the sunrise.
On the mornings when Agnes isn't hung over, Jenny makes shitty eggs and pours juice for both of them, and Agnes will smile a ragged smile and mumble something about housewives and domestic bliss and tug at Jenny's hair as she passes by. She downs the juice and doesn't touch the eggs, because she mostly subsists on liquids and laughter and pills.
(That's the other part of the morning, their morning, Agnes' pills. The first time, she dropped them into her palm one by one, saying, "This is to keep me from hurting people," and, "this is to keep me from jumping off the roof," each one with a smile. It's kind of endearing, in a Girl, Interrupted way.)
Agnes goes on modeling jobs, and Jenny sews on a machine that she bought for her. She didn't get to bring everything she's made from home, and she's picking up the slack so they can have something to show for the next meeting they have. There are dresses draped all over the furniture, half-finished, and she's making everything to fit Agnes' figure.
It's strange to think about it like she did when she was drunk, to openly think about Agnes in ways that don't have to do with the clothes she's wearing but everything underneath them (the layout of her skin over her bones, the curve of her breasts, a long, long neck). It's better if she thinks about how the jacket she's finishing will fit on her shoulders, the jacket and not the slope of her arms.
They eat dinner, Indian takeout and expensive bottled water, and Agnes sits on the edge of the countertop and picks at her food and psychoanalyzes Jenny to make her nervous. It's sweet, almost, even if it makes her think too much. Jenny's a lot of things, mostly the things that Agnes calls her with sharp white smiles, pretty little Jenny who's too good for her own good. She's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She cares a whole lot, just like her dad, and Agnes says that bad people will try to take advantage of her lovely, girlish innocence. And she smirks at her, reaches out with a slim foot to nudge her knee where Jenny's sitting on the floor, murmurs, "I'm not a good person," so Jenny has to laugh to excuse the color that flares up in her cheeks.
*
They gets deals, first, and then they screw up and fight and lose them. And then they don't get the next deal, and the next, and Jenny is too young and too stupid, and Jenny is crying into the back of Agnes' sofa, trying to remember why she's here and what she's doing and maybe how to breathe.
Agnes catches her hand.
"Hey," Agnes says, and she's not even drunk, just sitting cross-legged facing Jenny and holding her hand. It's a stupid gesture, the kind of thing Dan and Vanessa used to do when they were kids, holding hands and kissing cheeks and speaking broken pigeon French, and Jenny doesn't expect it. She doesn't get it, Agnes repeating, "Hey," in her stop-being-so-fucking-uptight voice and holding Jenny's hand like that's something they do. Her fingers slip in Agnes' grasp, running over the bones of her wrist so she catches her pulse for a second, two beats too quick.
Jenny sniffs, says, "Leave me alone," and doesn't mean it. The part of her that wants to curl up in the chipped bathtub with her face against her knees and keep crying isn't as big as the part of her that wants Agnes to do something about the fact that she's having an episode on her sofa.
"Have I ever left you alone? That's kind of why you're here, kid."
Agnes is sixteen. Agnes is not even that much older than Jenny, and she can't call her kid just because she's some worldly, edgier-than-thou model that Jenny can't stop following around. She doesn't get to do that.
"I'm not a kid." She's been saying that a lot lately and even she doesn't always believe it. Her eyeliner is smeared everywhere, absolutely everywhere. She can tell because it's all over her fingertips, streaked across the top of Agnes' hand, the one that's still curled around Jenny's palm and holding on. She's wearing a nightgown, a pale pink thing with lace at the neck that probably used to belong to her mother but she can't remember, a nightgown she put on because she couldn't stand the thought of wearing something she made herself. If she's not a kid, then she's the aging, disgraced heroine from an awful romance novel, and that's probably worse.
Agnes says, "Of course you're not," and moves closer so she can wrap her arms around Jenny. She's all angles, angles and bones and pretty skin, and it shouldn't be as comforting as it is.
Jenny asks, into her neck, "Why aren't you ever scared?"
"Maybe because I'm fucking glorious." Agnes laughs so Jenny can feel it all over. "Or maybe because you are, I don't know."
Agnes has fingers on Jenny's cheek, and it's wet, and she'll get even more makeup on her. She wants to warn her away from touching her anymore, because she feels messy and gross, and because it means a lot more than she knows. Jenny wants to pull away, but not entirely, just enough to press her lips to Agnes' because she wants to know what flavor lip gloss she's wearing. And also because she wants to kiss her and Agnes should know that, if she's going to be touching Jenny like this while she's having nervous breakdowns.
She leans away, and it's close enough that she can just see Agnes raising an eyebrow, a tiny smile, maybe, at the corner of her mouth.
Agnes says, "Oh, so are we doing this now?"
Jenny doesn't know what she's saying.
Only, Agnes leans forward and bites at her mouth, not even trying to be gentle, and then Jenny knows.
*
Jenny measures Agnes for the dress that could almost-finish her almost-line, that could maybe get them somewhere that neither of them could get alone, and she runs hands down Agnes' waist even though she doesn't need to. Agnes smiles down at her from where she's on her knees, in the middle of the living room with Agnes in a bright blue bra and the bottom half of the dress and no shoes.
"Oh, Miss Humphrey," Agnes murmurs, wry and sweet, "take me now."
They've been doing this for a week or more, whatever this is, and Jenny presses her lips to the inside of Agnes' knee. She hasn't thought of Nate in awhile. She hasn't thought of anyone else, really, in awhile. After they fight, the first few ones when Jenny thinks about leaving and Agnes looks like she's ready to tear at her skin, Agnes says something about how she's Jenny's muse, drawing out the u sound so Jenny could read her lips if she wanted to. She says talented artists have fucked their inspirations for centuries, and they don't have to make a big deal out of it. She dances through a sprawl of words about sex and revolutions and art until Jenny puts both hands to her face and kisses her to make her stop.
Now, Jenny carefully pulls the skirt down, slow so she doesn't rip the stitches she put there by hand earlier. She leans up to bite gently at Agnes' hip, to lean into the hand Agnes slides into her hair, tugging.
*
Whenever Agnes doesn't come home, Jenny can't sleep in her bed. She stays up late and makes alterations and mostly ends up falling asleep on the kitchen table, on the sofa with the sound of late-night infomercials blaring. Tonight, she's not falling asleep at all. She drinks hot chocolate that she went outside to buy at half past two, and she's not watching TV when Agnes unlocks the door sometime after the sun has risen and all the televangelists have stopped preaching.
She has little bruises on her neck, the collar of her blouse (Jenny's blouse, or her blouse made by Jenny, or whatever) and she smiles.
"Good party," she says.
"Right," Jenny murmurs. "You look like you had fun."
"Should have come along, Little J," Agnes says, breezily, and she knows that Jenny hates being called that. It makes her feel small, like she's still desperate for people to know her name. And maybe she is, maybe she's still small and desperate, but it shouldn't tug at her heart so much.
"I couldn't," Jenny says, and her voice is louder because Agnes has stepped out of the room, pulling off her jacket. "I couldn't, because I was working."
"Jesus." Agnes comes back, with her hands on her hips, mouth slanted cruel and bitten red. "Could you be more boring?"
Jenny looks at her, and she doesn't say anything.
Agnes says, "Or should I say jealous?" and Jenny wants to throw herself at her and hit her and do all the other things that Agnes says she would do if she didn't take her medication. She wants to push her against the wall and make her own bruises.
"What am I doing here, Agnes?" she asks, and she means: what are you doing with me?
Agnes toes out of her shoes as she moves to fall to her knees in front of Jenny, curling hands on her ankles where they're curled up underneath her. Jenny wants to shift away, but she doesn't, not much. This close, she can catch alcohol on Agnes' breath, and if she was Agnes, she would probably be able to know what kind. That's not healthy, and neither is this, the way her stomach twists up when Agnes rests her head on Jenny's lap and breathes softly against her thigh.
"Making fashion history?" Agnes offers, and it's a little sharp, a little sarcastic.
"Not that," Jenny whispers. She touches Agnes' hair and pulls gingerly, so Agnes looks up, so Agnes pushes into the kiss. It's a quiet thing, and it tastes like somebody else.
Agnes talks against her mouth, says, "Jenny, what did you think? We're messing around."
And that's something a typical hot girl villain from a '90s movie would say, something to break the sensitive hero's heart and make him rush into the arms of the pretty, nice girl that was there all along, but Jenny's not a hero and she hasn't been feeling very nice, lately. She really is a kid, a kid who rushes into things because she thinks they seem fun or pretty or because she thinks she might be in love, and she's tried so hard. That's all she's ever done, is try, and she's been distracted by thinking that a girl like Agnes was feeling all the same things she was, all the scary ways her insides turn over and around when she looks at her. Agnes presses her lips to the corner of Jenny's mouth and says, "Don't be mad at me, doll?"
"No," Jenny says, "I'm not."
That night, they sleep in Agnes' bed, and Jenny tries to pretend like lying so close doesn't make her ache a little.
*
In the morning, Agnes wakes her up by straddling her hips, pressing lazy, slow kisses to her forehead, her cheeks. She sings Beatles songs too loud and off key while she showers and shakes her towel to get Jenny wet because she hasn't pulled herself out of bed yet. She's smiling the whole time, and Jenny watches her get dressed, pulling black tights over still damp skin.
She tells Jenny she has to go to a shoot, and Jenny still doesn't get up.
*
Jenny takes the contacts that Agnes never told her about and goes to do something for herself for once, and it feels like an ending, a grand finale even if nothing really comes from it. She already knows that she won't be sleeping there tonight when she goes back to the apartment, takes the steps instead of the elevator to stretch out the time. It feels off-kilter, too weird, because a few days ago she wanted to see Agnes all the time, and now there's dread sitting patiently at the base of her throat.
Later, her dresses go up in flames, and the smoke smells like burnt feathers, and when Jenny comes down from the fight, she remembers every feeling she labeled as happiness and independence before and writes it off as a youthful indiscretion. She remembers Agnes pressing her up against walls and tries not to feel anything, and it almost works.
She can do it on her own, she knows, because she's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She's fucking glorious.
blame it on the weekends
PG13 | Gossip Girl | Jenny/Agnes
Jenny's a lot of things, mostly things that Agnes calls her with sharp white smiles, pretty little Jenny who's too good for her own good. She's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She cares a whole lot, just like her dad, and Agnes says that bad people will try to take advantage of her lovely, girlish innocence. And she smirks at her, nudges her knee with a slim foot, murmurs, "I'm not a good person," so Jenny has to laugh to excuse the color that flares up in her cheeks.
The first night after Jenny runs away is breathtaking; it's seeing the stars through the streetlights, throwing your arms to the sky. She takes over the city with Agnes, letting her take her everywhere she couldn't go when she was living at home, and they spill a half-bottle of vodka into a carton of organic orange juice on the rooftop of Agnes' apartment building at four in the morning. It's beautiful, like the cityscape is beautiful, like expensive shoes and dark eyes and long legs that look great in her dresses. Jenny can't believe she didn't do this before.
"We," Agnes says, "are going to be amazing."
"We already are," Jenny murmurs, words slipping together with her head spinning quicker, trying to make it back down the stairs. They lean on each other, or maybe Jenny leans on Agnes, because Jenny doesn't drink, does she? No, or not like everyone else in her tiny world, but she wraps arms around Agnes' neck because she's afraid of falling and giggles all the way to the bedroom. She's been in here before, seen the peeling movie posters and the makeup scattered on the little white kid vanity, but it's never looked so cool.
Agnes leaves Jenny sitting on the bed while she undresses. She pulls her dress over her head so all Jenny sees is a length of pale skin, her flat stomach and the black bra that showed through the white silk, with club lights and moonlight and lights through open curtains. She kicks off her heels then looks at Jenny, angling her head.
She asks, "Are you going to sleep in your clothes, or what?" and turns to slip into the bathroom. Slowly, Jenny leans down to unzip her boots and peel them away from her legs, a little sticky with sweat from dancing so long. By the time Agnes comes back with most of her makeup off, she's lying on her back in her slip, legs curled under her, mostly asleep.
"Sweet dreams, J," Agnes whispers, crawling under the sheets beside her. Jenny thinks about getting under them herself, but that would require moving, and then Agnes is tugging the duvet cover until it's covering her shoulders. Jenny smiles a little, even though she's already turning over so all she can see is a mess of hair, the long line of her spine. She doesn't even have a pillow, but Jenny rubs her face against the sheets, and they smell like they haven't been changed in awhile, a distant person kind of smell. Sweat, maybe. Sex, though she wouldn't really know, outside her own bed when nobody else is awake.
She presses her nose to it and thinks about walking through puddles with a thin arm around her waist and being young and free while she's falling asleep to the hushed sound of Agnes breathing.
*
It's been a few days.
All her clothes are in piles on the floor of Agnes' bedroom, shoved into free spaces in her closet, and they share a bed in lieu of Jenny trying to sleep on the sofa. Agnes always sleeps in her underwear, and Jenny doesn't; Jenny wears t-shirts that fall to her knees and stays on her side, her own pillow. It's a nice system they have, even if sometimes she can't really function when she wakes up with Agnes pressed up to her side, soft skin sleep warm and smelling like sweat and cigarettes and perfume, faintly, Jenny's mouth open too close to the freckles on her shoulder. She'll get up early, five or six o'clock like she's going to get ready for school, to make sure Agnes doesn't wake up and realize Jenny's been lying underneath her, wide awake. She moves as quiet as she can, making coffee and crawling onto the fire escape to catch the less impressive end of the sunrise.
On the mornings when Agnes isn't hung over, Jenny makes shitty eggs and pours juice for both of them, and Agnes will smile a ragged smile and mumble something about housewives and domestic bliss and tug at Jenny's hair as she passes by. She downs the juice and doesn't touch the eggs, because she mostly subsists on liquids and laughter and pills.
(That's the other part of the morning, their morning, Agnes' pills. The first time, she dropped them into her palm one by one, saying, "This is to keep me from hurting people," and, "this is to keep me from jumping off the roof," each one with a smile. It's kind of endearing, in a Girl, Interrupted way.)
Agnes goes on modeling jobs, and Jenny sews on a machine that she bought for her. She didn't get to bring everything she's made from home, and she's picking up the slack so they can have something to show for the next meeting they have. There are dresses draped all over the furniture, half-finished, and she's making everything to fit Agnes' figure.
It's strange to think about it like she did when she was drunk, to openly think about Agnes in ways that don't have to do with the clothes she's wearing but everything underneath them (the layout of her skin over her bones, the curve of her breasts, a long, long neck). It's better if she thinks about how the jacket she's finishing will fit on her shoulders, the jacket and not the slope of her arms.
They eat dinner, Indian takeout and expensive bottled water, and Agnes sits on the edge of the countertop and picks at her food and psychoanalyzes Jenny to make her nervous. It's sweet, almost, even if it makes her think too much. Jenny's a lot of things, mostly the things that Agnes calls her with sharp white smiles, pretty little Jenny who's too good for her own good. She's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She cares a whole lot, just like her dad, and Agnes says that bad people will try to take advantage of her lovely, girlish innocence. And she smirks at her, reaches out with a slim foot to nudge her knee where Jenny's sitting on the floor, murmurs, "I'm not a good person," so Jenny has to laugh to excuse the color that flares up in her cheeks.
*
They gets deals, first, and then they screw up and fight and lose them. And then they don't get the next deal, and the next, and Jenny is too young and too stupid, and Jenny is crying into the back of Agnes' sofa, trying to remember why she's here and what she's doing and maybe how to breathe.
Agnes catches her hand.
"Hey," Agnes says, and she's not even drunk, just sitting cross-legged facing Jenny and holding her hand. It's a stupid gesture, the kind of thing Dan and Vanessa used to do when they were kids, holding hands and kissing cheeks and speaking broken pigeon French, and Jenny doesn't expect it. She doesn't get it, Agnes repeating, "Hey," in her stop-being-so-fucking-uptight voice and holding Jenny's hand like that's something they do. Her fingers slip in Agnes' grasp, running over the bones of her wrist so she catches her pulse for a second, two beats too quick.
Jenny sniffs, says, "Leave me alone," and doesn't mean it. The part of her that wants to curl up in the chipped bathtub with her face against her knees and keep crying isn't as big as the part of her that wants Agnes to do something about the fact that she's having an episode on her sofa.
"Have I ever left you alone? That's kind of why you're here, kid."
Agnes is sixteen. Agnes is not even that much older than Jenny, and she can't call her kid just because she's some worldly, edgier-than-thou model that Jenny can't stop following around. She doesn't get to do that.
"I'm not a kid." She's been saying that a lot lately and even she doesn't always believe it. Her eyeliner is smeared everywhere, absolutely everywhere. She can tell because it's all over her fingertips, streaked across the top of Agnes' hand, the one that's still curled around Jenny's palm and holding on. She's wearing a nightgown, a pale pink thing with lace at the neck that probably used to belong to her mother but she can't remember, a nightgown she put on because she couldn't stand the thought of wearing something she made herself. If she's not a kid, then she's the aging, disgraced heroine from an awful romance novel, and that's probably worse.
Agnes says, "Of course you're not," and moves closer so she can wrap her arms around Jenny. She's all angles, angles and bones and pretty skin, and it shouldn't be as comforting as it is.
Jenny asks, into her neck, "Why aren't you ever scared?"
"Maybe because I'm fucking glorious." Agnes laughs so Jenny can feel it all over. "Or maybe because you are, I don't know."
Agnes has fingers on Jenny's cheek, and it's wet, and she'll get even more makeup on her. She wants to warn her away from touching her anymore, because she feels messy and gross, and because it means a lot more than she knows. Jenny wants to pull away, but not entirely, just enough to press her lips to Agnes' because she wants to know what flavor lip gloss she's wearing. And also because she wants to kiss her and Agnes should know that, if she's going to be touching Jenny like this while she's having nervous breakdowns.
She leans away, and it's close enough that she can just see Agnes raising an eyebrow, a tiny smile, maybe, at the corner of her mouth.
Agnes says, "Oh, so are we doing this now?"
Jenny doesn't know what she's saying.
Only, Agnes leans forward and bites at her mouth, not even trying to be gentle, and then Jenny knows.
*
Jenny measures Agnes for the dress that could almost-finish her almost-line, that could maybe get them somewhere that neither of them could get alone, and she runs hands down Agnes' waist even though she doesn't need to. Agnes smiles down at her from where she's on her knees, in the middle of the living room with Agnes in a bright blue bra and the bottom half of the dress and no shoes.
"Oh, Miss Humphrey," Agnes murmurs, wry and sweet, "take me now."
They've been doing this for a week or more, whatever this is, and Jenny presses her lips to the inside of Agnes' knee. She hasn't thought of Nate in awhile. She hasn't thought of anyone else, really, in awhile. After they fight, the first few ones when Jenny thinks about leaving and Agnes looks like she's ready to tear at her skin, Agnes says something about how she's Jenny's muse, drawing out the u sound so Jenny could read her lips if she wanted to. She says talented artists have fucked their inspirations for centuries, and they don't have to make a big deal out of it. She dances through a sprawl of words about sex and revolutions and art until Jenny puts both hands to her face and kisses her to make her stop.
Now, Jenny carefully pulls the skirt down, slow so she doesn't rip the stitches she put there by hand earlier. She leans up to bite gently at Agnes' hip, to lean into the hand Agnes slides into her hair, tugging.
*
Whenever Agnes doesn't come home, Jenny can't sleep in her bed. She stays up late and makes alterations and mostly ends up falling asleep on the kitchen table, on the sofa with the sound of late-night infomercials blaring. Tonight, she's not falling asleep at all. She drinks hot chocolate that she went outside to buy at half past two, and she's not watching TV when Agnes unlocks the door sometime after the sun has risen and all the televangelists have stopped preaching.
She has little bruises on her neck, the collar of her blouse (Jenny's blouse, or her blouse made by Jenny, or whatever) and she smiles.
"Good party," she says.
"Right," Jenny murmurs. "You look like you had fun."
"Should have come along, Little J," Agnes says, breezily, and she knows that Jenny hates being called that. It makes her feel small, like she's still desperate for people to know her name. And maybe she is, maybe she's still small and desperate, but it shouldn't tug at her heart so much.
"I couldn't," Jenny says, and her voice is louder because Agnes has stepped out of the room, pulling off her jacket. "I couldn't, because I was working."
"Jesus." Agnes comes back, with her hands on her hips, mouth slanted cruel and bitten red. "Could you be more boring?"
Jenny looks at her, and she doesn't say anything.
Agnes says, "Or should I say jealous?" and Jenny wants to throw herself at her and hit her and do all the other things that Agnes says she would do if she didn't take her medication. She wants to push her against the wall and make her own bruises.
"What am I doing here, Agnes?" she asks, and she means: what are you doing with me?
Agnes toes out of her shoes as she moves to fall to her knees in front of Jenny, curling hands on her ankles where they're curled up underneath her. Jenny wants to shift away, but she doesn't, not much. This close, she can catch alcohol on Agnes' breath, and if she was Agnes, she would probably be able to know what kind. That's not healthy, and neither is this, the way her stomach twists up when Agnes rests her head on Jenny's lap and breathes softly against her thigh.
"Making fashion history?" Agnes offers, and it's a little sharp, a little sarcastic.
"Not that," Jenny whispers. She touches Agnes' hair and pulls gingerly, so Agnes looks up, so Agnes pushes into the kiss. It's a quiet thing, and it tastes like somebody else.
Agnes talks against her mouth, says, "Jenny, what did you think? We're messing around."
And that's something a typical hot girl villain from a '90s movie would say, something to break the sensitive hero's heart and make him rush into the arms of the pretty, nice girl that was there all along, but Jenny's not a hero and she hasn't been feeling very nice, lately. She really is a kid, a kid who rushes into things because she thinks they seem fun or pretty or because she thinks she might be in love, and she's tried so hard. That's all she's ever done, is try, and she's been distracted by thinking that a girl like Agnes was feeling all the same things she was, all the scary ways her insides turn over and around when she looks at her. Agnes presses her lips to the corner of Jenny's mouth and says, "Don't be mad at me, doll?"
"No," Jenny says, "I'm not."
That night, they sleep in Agnes' bed, and Jenny tries to pretend like lying so close doesn't make her ache a little.
*
In the morning, Agnes wakes her up by straddling her hips, pressing lazy, slow kisses to her forehead, her cheeks. She sings Beatles songs too loud and off key while she showers and shakes her towel to get Jenny wet because she hasn't pulled herself out of bed yet. She's smiling the whole time, and Jenny watches her get dressed, pulling black tights over still damp skin.
She tells Jenny she has to go to a shoot, and Jenny still doesn't get up.
*
Jenny takes the contacts that Agnes never told her about and goes to do something for herself for once, and it feels like an ending, a grand finale even if nothing really comes from it. She already knows that she won't be sleeping there tonight when she goes back to the apartment, takes the steps instead of the elevator to stretch out the time. It feels off-kilter, too weird, because a few days ago she wanted to see Agnes all the time, and now there's dread sitting patiently at the base of her throat.
Later, her dresses go up in flames, and the smoke smells like burnt feathers, and when Jenny comes down from the fight, she remembers every feeling she labeled as happiness and independence before and writes it off as a youthful indiscretion. She remembers Agnes pressing her up against walls and tries not to feel anything, and it almost works.
She can do it on her own, she knows, because she's young and talented and attractive enough to get by. She's fucking glorious.