Note: This is a continuation of the day related over the last three chapters, part four of a five-part finale to this story. Please read those first if you haven't already.

3.48 pm

"Oh, the actual first time isn't even worth telling." Gail rolls her eyes and rests her head against the tiles at the end of the bath. She is quiet for a moment, and then shakes her head and smiles, rueful. "It was awful. I was incredibly drunk. All I remember was that it was after a party, it was in a car, it was quick and it kind of hurt. Oh yeah, and I threw up." She laughs at Holly's horrified look. "Later, of course, not during."

Holly chuckles, re-tying her hair in a knot at the back of her head. "Real teenage dream, huh?"

"The one I call my first time was better. Twelfth grade with my actual boyfriend. I told him I was a virgin, so he was all sweet and gentle. There was an attempt at romance. You know, clean sheets, candles … a bed." Gail pulls a face, half-smiling, half-cringing at the memory.

"You told him you were a virgin?" Holly tilts her head forward, wondering if she heard right. "You lied?"

"Yeah, well" Gail shrugs. "Like I said, I count it as my first time."

"Uh, I'm not sure you can actually do that, Gail." Holly tells her, blinking. "It kind of defeats the point of a first time."

"Well, whatever," Gail shrugs. "That was my first time," she insists.

Holly shifts her legs so she can sink a little lower into the warmth of the water.

"A revisionist sexual history," she muses, shrugging.

Why not, she thinks. She finds it amusing— and telling— that Gail tells this lie more for herself than for the guy in question.

"What about you?" Gail lifts her arms out of the water and rests them along the edge of the bath, blowing at a strand of hair that has fallen over her eyes.

"Ah," Holly smiles. "First time with a guy, it was first year of university. He was in my Human Bio class. We got drunk after an exam and he made a pass at me and I thought 'Okay, why not? Let's get this done.'"

"You did not!" Gail laughs, her eyes alight. "It's not homework, Holly ... or cleaning your room."

"Um, excuse me?" Holly pokes Gail in the shin. "Who got drunk and threw up afterward? You'd best not judge."

Gail shrugs, still smiling. "Oh, I am always judging, Holly."

"Anyway, I wasn't in the least bit interested in him. I just liked him as a friend, really. In fact, I had actually kind of thought this guy was gay until that point," Holly chuckles. "I didn't think I was, but I had totally gaydar'ed him for some reason."

"Was he?"

"Nope." Holly shakes her head, remembering how he'd turned up the next year engaged to some girl he met on holiday. She remembers how he'd thought Holly would be upset. How wrong he was, Holly thinks. "I was way off. He's a doctor now, married with a couple of kids in Mississauga."

"And what was it like?"

"It was mostly awkward. It wasn't awful, just," Holly tips her head to the side, trying to find the right way to describe that long ago encounter. "Just clumsy, I guess."

"What about with a woman?"

"Also awkward. And drunker. A girl I met at a party. I was more nervous that time." Holly adds. "Actually, my second time with a woman was way better."

"Tell me!"

"It was kind of amazing. I was so out of my league." Holly shakes her head, smiling at the memory.

She tips her head back against the rim of the bath; remembering and recounting the story of that end-of-semester party where she had somehow, magically found herself making conversation with her ridiculously, previously-thought-untouchably cool Science in Literature TA. This woman was four years older than her and impossibly attractive. In the classroom, at the start of semester, Holly had been smitten from the minute this woman stood at the front of the classroom, ran her hair through her short wild black curls and started talking about evolutionary theory as autobiographical narrative. She'd stayed enamoured all the way through to the exams, taken that morning in a fever of sleep-deprived desire to impress this woman with her summary of all that she'd managed to take in that semester.

And then somehow, that night, finding herself at the same party, she'd miraculously stayed sober enough to manage to pull off some sort of hapless, not-quite-intended seduction, finding herself at the end of the night in this woman's bed in a cool apartment way removed from the sweatpants, IKEA furniture and joke-y poster chic of Holly's first year university residence, shared with a bunch of fellow science geeks. Of course, despite her crush and her sense of victory, Holly had been smart enough to know she was out of her league and had gotten completely lucky. And sure enough, it had been a one-time thing and the woman, Lucy, had never so much as looked at her again when they'd seen each other on campus the following semester.

"Maybe I can claim that as my real first time." Holly sighs, finishing the story. "I still don't know how I managed that," she laughs, shaking her head.

"Is it weird that I am a little bit jealous?" Gail asks her.

"Probably." Holly tells her, smiling "But of course, like as you know, I like it."

4.25

Gail yanks Holly's t-shirt (you can borrow clothes, it seems) over her head and sits down on the edge of the bed. She can hear Holly moving around out in the kitchen. She'll go out there soon, but she just needs a minute.

Holly's story did make her jealous. Well, perhaps envious is a better word. But it is more than just the tale of Holly sleeping with a beautiful woman. Sure, Gail admits it, she is envious of the thought of Holly being enraptured by another someone else- a gorgeous, idolised woman at that. Gail really is, she will admit to herself now, that far gone with Holly.

But that isn't really it.

She sits and turns her earring, staring into space and thinking about Holly's story a bout the TA and the feeling she got while Holly was telling it to her, seeming so nostalgic and happily in possession of her past. What Gail is more envious of, she realises, is of Holly and her experiences. Gail can't help wondering whether, by only realising so late something that has clearly always been there (that crush on her French teacher, hello?), if she has somehow missed out on some experiences of her own. She can't help wondering if she had figured all this out sooner, could she have been telling the kind of stories that made her smile at the memory, rather than cringe?

She drops her hands into her lap and sighs. Part of her wants to spend some time with these thoughts, to turn them over in her head, to consider the infiniteness of the possibilities of could-have-beens if she'd lived her life differently from the start. Who doesn't want to do that sometimes? And with this growing inescapable sense that she, Gail, has arrived late to a party she didn't even know until recently she was invited to, the desire to do so is even greater.

The other part of her, however, the part that is feeling so good, and so strangely complete right now, wants to ignore the feeling that she missed a very important memo a long time ago. That part of her doesn't want to mull it over. Because that might lead to regret. And Gail doesn't want to feel regret right now, not when things seem to be finally feeling so good.

"Tea?" she hears Holly call from the kitchen.

"Yes please," Gail calls back, but doesn't move, stalling leaving the bedroom for another moment.

She takes a deep breath, holding in the air for a second and contemplating the fact she might have to spend some time going over this new, or rather revised version of herself. She has no idea what it will mean. All she knows right now is that there will have to be some kind of retrospection, some more hindsight applied to whatever is happening to her now at some point.

She lets the air go in a slow sigh. She'll put it off for now, though, she thinks as she gets up from the bed. As Holly says, knowing the feelings exist is good enough for now. She has plenty of time for the figuring out what it all means.

Instead she will focus on the feeling good of it all for a little while longer. For today at least. Because today, she knows, is precious. Tomorrow she is already going to have to go and deal with being Gail and having these feelings out in the world. And that will be a brave new world, if there ever was one.

4.40pm

"I can't help it, I don't like your job, sometimes," Holly tells her, gently rubbing the tincture the woman in the chemist had given her into Gail's bruise.

When Holly had first shown the small jar to her this morning, Gail had petulantly labelled it hippy crap. Then she has just as quickly insisted that Holly be the one to apply it. Now, feeling sore again, she has asked for it again, and is lying on the couch, willingly submitting to Holly's tending of her bruise.

"It scares me," she continues.

"It scares me too, sometimes," Gail tells her, wincing slightly, but stoic.

"How does one even decide to do a job like being a cop?" Holly takes another dab from the jar and rubs it gently it over Gail's belly, tracing the yellowish edges of the wound. "How does one decide to do a job where they are constantly placed in danger?"

"I don't know. I just wanted to. It's in my family. It's something I know. It's something I think I am good at, too." Gail shrugs, watching Holly's cautious ministrations. "Besides, some days are just boring, run-of-the-mill days, and nothing even remotely risky happens. And the days when something does, there is usually something at stake, and someone who really needs your help and it is totally worth putting yourself in danger for. This," she points at the bruise, "was a freak."

"I guess." Holly shrugs, screwing the lid back on the teeny jar and placing it on the coffee table, before turning to face Gail again. "Tell me, am I going to have to worry about you a lot?"

"Maybe." Gail shrugs again. Her face is serious. "Sometimes, I guess."

"I don't like it." Holly tells her, looking at her for a long time. It scares her sometimes, when she thinks of all the things that are worrying about Gail: her dangerous job, her emotional frailty, her irrational self-doubt. Holly can deal with the last two— she can even help— but the first? The first she has no control over. And now, she is just as much at the mercy of the fate Gail so often has to tempt as Gail is.

Eventually she sighs and turns her back on the thoughts. She has to. She leans down slowly to kiss Gail's stomach, just above her navel, before pulling her singlet back down over her pale skin.

"There's nothing I can do about that, Holly." Gail tells her quietly, reaching up and pulling gently at her hair.

"I know." Holly whispers. "But, I still don't have to like it."

"No, no you don't."

6.50pm

Gail is the stillest movie watcher Holly has ever seen. She cannot even gauge if she is enjoying it, she is so quiet, her face fixed to the screen, her body completely inert. Maybe it is because she is reading subtitles, Holly doesn't know, but her eyes don't stray from the television once and she hasn't said a word or moved as she lies there, curled against Holly on the couch. She could be hating it. She could be bored by it. She could be asleep, for all Holly knows.

It all started because Gail said she had never seen a gay film, "except that one with the cowboys". And she has never, ever, seen a lesbian one. Holly had told her that she wasn't surprised she hadn't seen any because there are so few good ones. Gail's questioning about what made a good lesbian movie ended in Holly searching, at Gail's prompting, through her on-demand movies for a decent example. Finding what she remembers to be a charmingly awkward European film about two teenage girls falling in love, she showed Gail the blurb and, at her bidding, put it on.

At one point Gail has been motionless for so long, Holly wonders if she really has fallen asleep, but then a slight snicker at a particularly gauche scene testifies to her wakefulness. Holly smiles, smoothing back Gail hair, so she can see the screen properly over her head, and watches the small, sweet love story play out until the end.

"That was so freaking cute," Gail says, rolling over to face Holly as the credits begin to roll, stretching her arms out above her head. "So, so cute," she yawns.

Holly smiles. You can never tell how Gail will react to things.

"I thought you'd fallen asleep," she tells Gail, kissing her nose.

"Nope," Gail murmurs.

They lie there in the light of the lone lamp, legs entwined, both lost in their own thoughts. Holly can hear the sounds of people coming home from work to the apartments around hers. Doors slam, and voices rise and fall along the hallway and once again Holly feels that slight bubbling of pleasure at the thought that she is having this short respite from the world, even for a day.

"Where were you when I was fifteen?" Gail suddenly whispers.

Holly runs a hand through Gail's ponytail and chuckles. "You think that might have happened if we met at fifteen?"

"Maybe," Gail shrugs, sliding her hand around Holly's back and squeezing her to her. "You never know."

"Oh and I suppose you think you would have been that blonde popular one?" Holly teases.

"Uh, of course." Gail scoffs, lifting her head and looking at her. "And you totally would have been that cute geeky little brunette one."

"Probably," Holly laughs, kissing her. Probably.

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