The day Rae met Amaya started out like any other back then for her in the heart of the winter season; she woke up with chills running up and down her spine, and with a sore, dry throat. She brewed herself some tea for warmth, brushed her teeth, prepared herself for the day ahead of her, and the moment she stepped out of her studio, the wind groaned, thick particles of snow slapped her on the face, and she reconsidered the worth of all she had to do for the day. Most of the time, it helped her slack off. Most of the time, she was able to convince herself to go back inside. But that day was special. It was her first day at work as a server for The Cheeseburger Factory. So she didn't let her demons win.

Finally, for the first time in ages, she got a job that wasn't seasonal, nor one that she didn't have to hustle for. She finally got a job that could kick-start a new chapter of her life. There was a promise of stability in it. She could stay there for as long as she wanted, for however many years, so long as she did the job right, and the hours were flexible.

She had to make a good impression. She intended to. But by the time she arrived at the Factory, she was thirty minutes late.

Ernie, the manager that hired her, had told her the week before to show up at seven o'clock that morning with a plain white polo shirt, black pants, and slip-resistant shoes. She had everything on save for the most important part of it── the shoes. She forgot about them, and had to rush over to a store near the Factory on foot, sneezing and shivering in the cold, only to realize that the store had yet to open up for customers. Without any other choice in mind, she took a bus home to get her shoes. It was seven-thirty-eight when she made it back to the restaurant. She remembered that vividly because of all the shame that had built up in her gut at the mere sight of her watch. In that moment, she had reconsidered the worth of a stable job, the worth of turning her life around for the better, of giving herself a shot at a life she had only dreamed of; a simple, modest one where there was no such thing as people spitting on her face. It wasn't like she had it all that bad, after all. She could just continue her life as is, moving from one place to another every other week, pleasing everyone for anything, doing as she was told. And at the cost of her practically non-existent self-esteem, she could survive until the ripe age of forty, give or take ten years, or however long her figure could attract patrons. It won't be a life she would like to live out, but it would still be a good life. She would be able to provide food and shelter for herself for years to come. She sighed and turned her back to the restaurant.

"Excuse me, miss... !"

Those were the first words she heard from the person she would come to know as Amaya Santana.

Amaya Santana, the bold woman who set ablaze Rae's insides. Amaya Santana, the bold woman who confessed on a whim of a love that Rae didn't allow herself to follow through. Amaya Santana, the bold woman who kissed like no other── full on the lips, tongue and all, sure, but with a passion so strong that Rae could hardly keep up. Amaya Santana, the bold woman... the bold woman Rae fell for.

Rae took in a deep breath beneath her scarf and looked down at her gloved hands as a thought came to her mind, one that wasn't another gateway to her past but came to her just as smoothly, as if it were nothing but a simple breath of air: I love her.

I love Amaya. I miss her. And there's nothing I can do about it.

The thought quickly cemented in her mind and brought about an inexplicable feeling to burn the back of her throat. She forced herself to cough in the hopes that it would go away, only to find that when she blinked, white-hot tears had already found their way down her chin, where her scarf and coat worked together to console them. Unfortunately for the scarf and coat, it didn't work.

She latched onto the handle of her mail cart and did her best to stare at all of the white below her feet. When it wasn't enough to keep her mind busy, she turned to everything that was mixed with it── the yellows, the bottle caps, the grays and blacks, but her vision was far too blurred by the pain that oozed out of her eyes for it to work.

Rae attempted to fight back for another five seconds, but she knew the futility of doing so. Her soul ached and it couldn't be suppressed or ignored. Facts were facts. She leaned onto her mail cart, let herself fall apart in the middle of her route.

There's nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

♦♦♦

"Excuse me, miss... !"

Her head had poked out of the Factory's main entrance as she called out for Rae, and was promptly hit with thick clumps of snow. It amused Rae, enough to pay attention to the tiny person before her.

"Yes?" The person quickly asked for Rae's name, and though she didn't necessarily want to reply, Rae all of a sudden didn't feel deflated enough to give in to her shame. Maybe it was the way the person smiled at her. It was warm and welcoming, as if she wouldn't lash out at her for being late or fire her on the spot. She just didn't seem like the type to do such a thing. Or maybe it was the funny way that the person spit out the snow that'd found their way into her mouth. Regardless of what it was, Rae felt compelled to reply. "My name's Desirae."

"So it's you, huh!" The person's face beamed. She jumped right out of the Factory's doors and motioned for Rae to come closer. "I'm Amaya, your trainer for the month, and after that, your fellow server. Come in, come in, it's so good to see you."

Somehow, Amaya managed to successfully sneak Rae in under the oblivious manager's nose, and claimed that Rae was there all along── that no, she wasn't late, and that was that. The smooth road to a friendship was paved in the blink of an eye.

Looking back, Rae might have loved Amaya since that first day they met, before the latter even introduced herself.

What Rae felt back then wasn't as simple as a 'click' or realization of an innate bond between kindred souls. It was something far more intimate than that. There was just... something endearing about Amaya that drew Rae in, and no, it wasn't the precious smile on her face, nor the curious glow in her eyes. It was something far too subtle for Rae to pick up on at the time. Something that took her a decade to take notice of. But the journey to get to that point wasn't a hard one to discover.

It happened during her third year as a server. Late August, on a slow afternoon. It was more likely than not a Monday or a Tuesday, since customers barely dropped by at the restaurant on those days, and Rae remembered that only two servers besides herself were on the floor, tending to the needs of the handful that did drop by.

Rae was in the middle of waiting a table when the journey began, writing down the order that a customer wanted on her notepad, when all of a sudden she found herself pressing a hand on her mouth and sprinting to the bathroom as if her life was at stake. She kneeled on the sticky floor of the staff bathroom and dunked her head into the toilet bowl, where in a matter of seconds, she threw up the contents of her lunch. It took her a while, but as soon as her eyes were able to wander out of the bowl, she spotted Amaya, and immediately felt her presence on her body. Her hand rubbed Rae's back. The other squeezed her upper arm. Her thigh poked Rae's. Her breathing, her loose strands of hair, tickled an ear. There was something pleasant about it all, something that surged some form of electricity through Rae's body, but the burns that rushed up Rae's throat demanded too much of her attention for it to stick in her mind long enough for her to get the chance to wonder why.

By that point in time, it was a given that the two young women were close friends; years had passed since the day they met, and the road to friendship that they had long paved had given them chances time and time again to get to know each other, bond over the thousands of things they had in common and the indefinite number of things that they came to like as their lives were exposed to new parts of themselves. They confided in each other, cried in each others' arms, supported each others' individual growth; lived through Amaya's toxic family drama and confrontation issues, Rae's chaotic love life and assimilation into 'normal' society. They'd gone through so much together by that point that they might as well have been considered each others' maps for life. They had each other's backs for everything.

In fact, Amaya was in the same room as Rae to provide support not too long ago from that point in time when Rae decided to finally reach out to her family. She hadn't talked to them for ages── the last time she'd done so it was literal minutes before she ran away from home as a teenager with nothing but spare change and a backpack stuffed with beef jerky, canned beans she'd snatched from the pantry, and dresses that were "easy on the eyes," and even then, it was nothing short of a "fuck you" from who knows which pair of bitter, enraged lips at the family house.

In the end, nobody answered the phone save for her sister, but her sister was... "happy" to hear back from her little sister Rae and promised to call again, with their mother to listen in on. Basically, she was offered a chance to reconnect over time. It was a whole lot more than what Rae expected, so she and Amaya celebrated with drinks, a movie, and a chocolate fudge cake they baked together.

It was a major step in Rae's life that went backwards just as greatly when a tiny positive sign looked up at her unwed self in the weeks to come of the Rae from a decade ago. She would be reminded of her position as the black sheep of her family, over and over and over again, and never see nor talk to anyone in her family save for the chatterbox of a sister that treated her like a charity case... a sister who thought Rae was lucky to have gotten pregnant by "a man who just so happened to have a good head on his shoulders," and constantly shamed her for the paternity tests she requested of others she'd had encounters with before confirming Prince's paternity. Her family just didn't understand, and didn't want to, either. But she didn't need them nor their approval in her life no matter how many times she thought otherwise. She didn't have to prove herself to them, she didn't have to show them that she was capable of doing good things; for one, capable of being a good mother. She had to prove that to herself and no one else. She carried the responsibility that came with it on her shoulders and followed its code religiously, with an iron fist.

Oh, what's a mother to do when helplessly in love?

Rae wiped away a stubborn tear from her eye with a gloved hand as she gave herself the answer she'd always known, and forced herself back into the comfort of her past as she slipped letters and postcards into mailboxes.

Rae flushed the toilet and threw the back of her head against the wall, exhausted from what she'd just gone through. The embodiment of all the shock she had felt before and as she threw up her lunch lingered in the goosebumps on her arms and legs. Her throat was dry and sore from all the half-processed food that had burned it. The bitter aftertaste that was left behind made her want to gag. Her hands trembled. Everything in her yelled at her for whatever she must have done wrong, and Rae cowered under their pressure. She didn't know what else to do, she'd never been through such a thing before. But deep inside, it pissed her off. There was a white-hot fire of ego and agency in her that hated to lose the mere scraps of power it had over itself. But it was, alas, far too small of a fire from the surface looking in for Rae to express it, and thus, the confused cowardice in her took over.

She'd never been so out of control of her body, and the thought of it happening again frightened her. She had always been capable of holding her own. The one thing she'd always been in control of, no matter how extreme the situation, no matter how much she had allowed the worst of people to help themselves to her, was her brain, the technical control of her limbs, the rate at which she could blink, the saliva that she swallowed or spit, her five senses. She'd never lost control of herself, period. When she drank, for instance, she never got drunk. She made sure of it. Everything she'd ever done was always under her complete awareness, her complete fucking control. Control, control, control── it was the one thing that let her sleep at night.

She needed to know what the hell it was that she did wrong for her to submit to the toilet bowl, but her mind went blank. It was still too shocked to think properly.

Amaya's mind, on the other hand, had everything in her under control. She chose to be in the bathroom with Rae. She chose to follow after Rae.

Amaya stood up from where she was, went to the sink, and turned on the faucet. She let water soak into the handkerchief she pulled out of her pocket. Steam fogged up her cat-eyed glasses. She paid no mind to it. Once the handkerchief was soaked to her liking, she squeezed as much of the water out as she could, and shifted her attention to Rae. Her head tilted to the right, just slightly. Only then did she briefly use the cuff of her shirt's sleeve to wipe the foggy lens of her glasses. The expression on her face was indescribable as she did it, but it threw Rae in for a loop. Whatever it was, it helped Rae claim some control back from herself. She was able to swallow imaginary saliva now.

Amaya bent down to Rae's eye level, leaned in. Their eyes, as if in a trance, were immediately fixed onto each others' pupils, frozen in time, fixed in the hues of their majestically dark irises. For a moment, Rae could have sworn on her life that the pupils in Amaya's eyes dilated to levels Rae thought were impossible. For a moment, Rae thought that her heart dropped to her stomach. For a moment, Rae thought that perhaps she wanted to throw up again.

Little did Rae know that her life was forever marked by that moment, in a multitude of ways. Her life was more or less defined by that moment. But the Rae of the past was clueless. She had no idea. She just lived in the moment.

One of the young women in the staff bathroom sneezed, and back to Earth they were.

With a firm grip, Amaya held onto Rae's jaw, and calmly wiped her lips with the warm cloth in her hand, within three to five centimeters' worth of a distance from her own. No words were said for a good minute. There was silence in that minute, a silence that brewed an unknown form of tension between them. Rae didn't understand it, and she wasn't sure if she was fully aware of what was actually happening. Her limbs were still weak and overwhelmed by the goosebumps on them. Her hands still trembled. Her throat was still dry and sore. Her mouth still tasted like pure vomit. She still lacked control of her body.

But somehow... it didn't feel half as bad anymore. It didn't feel bad at all. Amaya was there, and not just that── Rae caught a glimpse of something in the air. Something pleasant and warm and fuzzy. Something that she would come to understand a decade later. But in that fragile bubble of time, in the stickiest of bathrooms, as she lived in the moment, Rae thought for the first time ever of how undeniably hot Amaya was. Of how dumb she had been in the last three years she had known her to have only noticed it now, in the worst and best of moments.

The minute of silence passed, and then, as if they were held back by the minute before and suddenly released from it, words burst out of Amaya's full lips, left her out of breath; 'how are you?' 'what was the last thing you ate?' 'go home, i'll talk to Ernie' 'i'm gonna drop by tonight after the shift, i'll make you some soup and don't you dare eat anything but saltine crackers before I get there because then you might just throw it all up... '

Rae just stared at Amaya, confused and in awe.

In Rae's third year at The Cheeseburger Factory, on a rather slow afternoon in the final days of August── Monday or Tuesday, in a filthy-ass bathroom, the rest of Rae's life was set in stone.