It Was on the Way to You #4
"I love you too," she said, and her voice broke on the last word, which suggested to me that she'd been holding it just as long as I had, maybe longer.
"I've been trying not to say it for weeks.
Every time. I'd be shelving books, and I'd think about the way you caught the dish towel without looking, and I'd have to put the cart aside and just—stand there.
" A laugh escaped her, wet and overwhelmed.
"I've been thinking about the way you said it was on the way to you tonight, and the way you ironed your shirt for our first real fancy dinner, and the way you hold your crew together, and the way you fixed my glasses before you fixed your own report.
" She pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment.
"I love you so much it's been genuinely inconvenient for weeks, Petra.
I dropped three separate books on Tuesday, and you know how sacred my classic literature is to me. "
I laughed, shaky with relief and joy and disbelief.
"I have a Vera face," I said. "Stevens told me."
"You have an extremely obvious Vera face. The entire station knew before you did."
"Rodriguez made it an order."
"An order to love me?" She giggled.
"An order not to screw it up."
She continued laughing, uninterrupted, full and real, tears still on her cheeks, and then she was in my arms and I was holding her, both of us a little undone and not minding it at all.
She pressed her face against my neck and said it again, quietly, like she was testing the weight of it now that it didn't have to be held back anymore.
"I love you."
"Again," I said.
"I love you, Petra." She pulled back to look at me, her eyes wet, shining. "Say it back."
"I love you," I said. "I've been trying to say it since the grocery store."
"That was weeks ago."
"I know. Maybe it started earlier than that."
"How much earlier?"
I thought about the cookie afternoon. The sewing morning. The dish towel. "Embarrassingly earlier."
"How embarrassingly?"
"Vera."
"Tell me."
"The Le Guin section? Vera, I don't know. Maybe even before that."
She stared at me. Then she covered her face with both hands, and I could see her smile even through them. "You've been in love with me since the beginning?"
"Since approximately the first time you Dewey Decimaled me. Maybe before. The hallway is a strong contender."
She made a sound I'd never heard before, a half-laugh, half-sob, completely genuine, and then her hands dropped and she was looking at me with the most open expression I'd ever seen on her face. No composure, nothing held back at all. Just Vera. Just this.
Just us. In love.
"You held all of that," she said softly, "for months."
"I was afraid," I admitted.
"Petra Alves." She shook her head slowly, fond exasperation in every delicate line and curve of her face. "You rappel out of helicopters."
"That's professionally sanctioned fear management. This was different."
She kissed me. I kissed her back, and tried to put everything into it.
All the weeks of almost-saying-it, all the Post-its and emoji systems and cookie afternoons and nightmares she'd held me through and birthday cakes driven across town and notes tucked in gear bags and three crossed-out letters I'd been carrying in my wallet.
I lo…
When she finally pulled back, her eyes were dark but decided.
"My turn," she said.
"Vera, you don't have to—"
"I want to." She pressed me gently back against the pillows, and there was such tenderness in her face that further argument became impossible. "Let me love you."
So I let her. I could never deny her a thing. Never.
Vera kissed her way down my chest, pausing at the phoenix, at Lucas and Santi's initials, pressing her lips to each one like an acknowledgment.
Like honoring them by honoring me. When she finally reached where I needed her, I stopped thinking in sentences entirely.
She was careful and focused, licking and sucking my clit utterly without hesitation, and when I came it was with her name on my lips and both hands in her golden hair and the knowledge that I was completely, irreversibly hers.
Afterward we lay tangled in her silky purple sheets, the candles burned nearly to stubs, the cake still on the nightstand looking lopsided and in desperate need of refrigeration.
"We should probably address the fire hazard," I said.
"You're the firefighter," she said, her cheek pressing a smile against my chest. "You handle it."
I put away the cake in the fridge in the kitchen and then blew out the remaining candles from bed, which took three attempts and moderate difficulty, and Vera applauded each attempt with genuine enthusiasm, including the failed ones.
"Thank you," I said, once the room was lit only by the ambient desert dark.
"For the applause? You're welcome."
"For this. For making it safe to say what needed saying."
She was quiet for a moment, her fingers resting over Lucas and Santi's initials like she'd decided that was where her hand lived now.
"Thank you for saying it," she said. "And for choosing me."
"Always," I said. "I'll always choose you, baby."
She hummed, already drifting toward sleep, her breath beginning to even out against my collarbone.
I held her and looked at the ceiling and thought about all the roads that had led here—the hallway, the diner, the library, the station, the cookie afternoon, the gear bag note—and how none of them had felt, in the moment, like they were leading anywhere specific.
Just one thing, and then the next, and then the next, and then… this.
I'd been to war. I'd rappelled into active wildfires that could've killed me. I'd made calls that kept people alive and lived with the ones that didn't.
But saying those three words was the bravest thing I'd ever done.
And hearing them back had made every painful thing that had ever happened to me completely and utterly worth it.
Because if it meant I got Vera in the end? I'd do it all again. A thousand times.