38. Every Almost Leads to You #2
"You... what?"
Reyna took a breath.
"Charlie Wickett, I am telling you that I am completely, irrevocably, helplessly in love with you. And I have been for quite some time."
"How long?"
Reyna sighed, and her expression changed, content, and thoughtful. "I thought, originally, that I'd been in love with you since you told me my engines were suboptimal."
Charlie laughed softly.
Reyna held up one finger.
"I thought that was when. But I thought about it some more, and I realized I was wrong."
"You were?" Charlie's voice went soft.
"Mm hmm." Reyna's smile was small. "I realized I fell in love with you the moment I touched your heart. On the kitchen floor. The night you arrived."
And the smile that broke across Reyna's face changed the way Charlie thought about everything.
Her breath caught. She looked at Reyna, so earnest, so nearly stoic even now, and she understood the whole truth of the woman in front of her, and of a life with her in it.
Then Charlie laughed, her whole body shaking with it against Reyna, who looked at her with something close to confusion.
"Wow," Charlie said. "I never would have believed it."
"Believed what?" Reyna raised an eyebrow. "That I'm ridiculously in love with you?"
"Well. Yes. That." Charlie's voice dropped, and she leaned her forehead against Reyna's. "But also that you fell first."
"I... what?" Reyna pulled back to look at her.
"You. Fell. First."
"Charlie, you are driving me insane." The exasperation was clear, and it was losing badly to her smile. "What does that mean. Exactly." And she fixed Charlie with a stare.
Charlie gave in.
"It means, Reyna Solas, that I fell in love with you, too."
Reyna pulled in a quiet breath.
"You did?"
Charlie nodded and pressed her forehead to Reyna's again. "Is it really that difficult to believe? That I did?" Charlie lifted her hand to run her fingers against Reyna's cheek. "And I do."
Reyna let out a short burst of laughter. It quieted the second Charlie spoke again.
"I have been falling in love with you all over again every single day," Charlie whispered.
Reyna let out a wet laugh and pulled back.
"But you're saying it was after me."
A tear slipped down Reyna's cheek. Charlie moved her finger and caught it.
"Yes." Her voice was low and steady.
Reyna's eyes moved between hers. "How?"
Charlie took a breath and felt the first of her own tears come up. "Because for me it took about five minutes."
The silence sat there for a beat. Then Reyna laughed, open and whole.
"Five minutes?" Her whole face was lit up.
Charlie scoffed. "Yeah. Five minutes, okay?" She was already rambling. "Look. I plead temporary insanity, on account of being thrown across the universe at the time. I needed a minute."
Reyna laughed again. And then Charlie felt Reyna's fingers tighten against the back of her neck.
"You can have all the minutes, Charlie Wickett." Reyna's voice had gone quiet. "As long as they're with me."
And then Reyna kissed her again, and Charlie knew she'd give her every minute she had, for the rest of her life.
When she pulled back, the gold on Reyna's arms was moving.
Charlie had never seen it do that. It had always just been there, warm and steady, and now the gold at her wrists deepened, and climbed. Past her forearms, past her elbows, and where it went it turned, the gold giving way to something warmer, until it reached her throat and settled.
A soft, steady rose.
And it stayed.
Charlie watched it and couldn't breathe. It wasn't holding still. It moved with Reyna, brightening where Charlie's fingers rested against her skin, going deeper when Reyna looked at her. It was alive in a way the gold constellations Charlie was used to had never once been.
Charlie didn't know what it meant.
REYNA
Reyna felt it before Charlie pulled back. It came up out of her wrists, warm and slow under her rolled up sleeves. It was nothing she could have stopped.
When she saw the color appear on her wrist, she was shocked.
She knew what this was. Every Kaelari did.
You heard about it young, the color that came when one of your own found the person their entire self answered to.
It happened to the lucky ones. Reyna had seen it once, on a woman four decades older than her, and she had always hoped for it, but somewhere along the years, without ever deciding to, she had stopped expecting it.
Reyna had spent seventy-five years being certain of things by working them out. She had never once known what it was to be certain of something this way, to have the answer come up out of her own body before her mind had any say in it, plain and undeniable and entirely beyond her control.
Her body knew. It had known before she did.
And now it was saying so, out loud, in a color, where Charlie could see every bit of it.
She let her.
"Reyna," Charlie said softly. "Your—"
"I know." Reyna's voice was full of emotion. She didn't look down at herself. She kept her eyes on Charlie. "I can feel it."
"What is it?"
Reyna didn't answer right away. This was not something Kaelari usually explained. She had never once said out loud, to anyone. Most people already knew in Coalition space.
But Charlie isn't from Coalition space, is she?
"Our markings show everything," she said.
"Everything we feel, the moment we feel it.
There's no lying with them. A child blooms every color there is, a hundred times a day, because a child hasn't learned yet to hold them down.
" She turned her hand over, and the rose moved through her fingers.
"You learn young. You pull it all down to one base color and you keep it there. "
"Your base color is gold, isn't it?" Charlie asked.
Reyna looked at Charlie with total affection and nodded. "That's right. Mine is gold. Gold is steady. So 'holding gold' shows a captain that her crew can trust in the dark."
Charlie was very still, watching her.
"I have held gold through everything this ship has ever taken from me.
Even through Elena and Jere, the only other time in my life where it almost broke.
I held it because a frightened captain is a dead crew.
But it means I haven't let anyone see what I actually feel in longer than you have been alive. "
The rose pulsed at her collarbone, soft, without her permission.
"But there is one color you cannot hold down," Reyna said.
"No matter how much you have practiced. It only comes about in one circumstance, if it comes at all.
" Reyna took a shallow breath. "And if it does, it only shows because of exactly one person.
The truth is, most Kaelari never see it on ourselves. I stopped thinking I would."
Charlie's expression changed to determined focus, her brow crinkling.
"It's the last color," Reyna said. "That's what we call it.
The one you only wear once it arrives for that one person, if you're lucky enough to wear it at all.
" She looked down at her own arms, then back at Charlie.
"It doesn't fade. You can't fake it, you can't make yourself feel it, and once it comes, it doesn't go back down.
" A breath. "It means I'm yours. All the way down, in a way I couldn't take back if I tried. "
She watched Charlie swallow.
"And I wouldn't try." Reyna looked at her. "I turned this color for you, Charlie.” Reyna laughed softly. “That’s abundantly clear now." Her voice softened. “But that also means… it’s you. You’re… everything.”
Charlie didn't say anything for a moment.
She let her eyes wander up and down Reyna's skin, not even sure she was allowed. She watched the color warm in front of her.
"Your whole body did that," she said. "Because of me?"
"Yes."
Charlie huffed a laugh. "That's the most insane thing anyone's ever told me," Charlie's voice cracked as a smile spread across her face. "And I got flung into space by a broken piece of machinery."
Reyna breathed out something akin to a laugh.
Then Charlie went quiet again, and when she spoke, it was softer.
"You said you can feel yourself holding the gold. All the time."
"Yes."
"Right now even? Under the rose?"
Reyna took a shallow breath. "Yes," she whispered.
Charlie looked up at her, and Reyna watched as her eyes darkened.
"Then stop holding it."
CHARLIE
Charlie didn't want Reyna to be steady because, right now, Charlie felt everything further from the word. And deep down, she knew Reyna did, too.
Reyna's breath caught.
Charlie didn't wait for an answer. She reached out, not to kiss her, not to pull her close, but to touch the light.
Her fingertips found the rose along Reyna's jaw first, and traced it, slow. Charlie touched the bloom the way she touched every single thing that mattered to her, with her whole attention and nothing held back.
Her fingers moved from Reyna's jaw to her throat, following the light, mapping the constellations as they shifted under her hand, down to the collarbone where the rose ran warm enough that Charlie could feel it heat against her fingertips.
And the bloom answered her. It deepened where she touched, brightened when Charlie made a sound. It gathered to meet her fingers and collect around her specific touch, no matter where she went. Charlie could only conceive it as a conversation in light and skin, something she never thought possible.
Yet somehow, she was completely fluent.
"Does it feel different?" Charlie asked, barely above a whisper. "When I touch it?"
REYNA
Reyna could barely answer. Because it did. It felt like every nerve she had spent a lifetime keeping quiet awoke, one under each of Charlie's fingertips.
People had touched her markings before. Of course they had. But the markings had always been gold when they did it, held down, steady, giving nothing away. Reyna had learned a long time ago how to be touched without letting her skin say a word about it.
It had never once been like this.
Charlie was tracing a color Reyna had never worn. Her fingers followed the light across her skin as though it were precious, as though it was the most beautiful thing she had ever been allowed to see.