THE EVANGELION (18+)

Hi that me.

I write prompt-based short stories for queer women (usually either the saddest shit you ever read at 2am on AO3 OR the dirtiest kinky fanfic, perverts.) You can find my entire catalogue HERE along with content like the above in the event you would like to:

1) read some stuffs

2) pretend your reading but actually do wank stuffs

3) do a little of both stuffs

4) appreciate my bdsm stuffs

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32)

Five years, one marriage, three new additions to the top five list of viewing points in the city later. They were still falling in love in new ways, some days, but just not every day.

That was what Kara wanted to write in the anniversary card. The thing she was trying to capture in a less on-the-nose way. She stared at the blank card, wanting to write the perfect thing, understated but precise and bursting with adoration for her wife and the funny, lovely, wonderful life they had built together.

Even now, some substantial interim of time having ticked since everything went the way life eventually goes; Kara still felt the urge to pick up her phone, exasperated and at a loss with herself, wanting to run it past someone who had a very distinct, if not mean-spirited, knack for words.

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31)

On Thursdays, a little late in the morning, Kara kept a rolling date.

It was less of a date in the traditional sense, more of a perpetual visit to confession. The winter had prolonged and drew out the frost. The coldness ordered the city with the skeleton of a tree on each corner, here and there, empty shrubs, flower bulbs on apartment balconies fused tightly with pre-grief, and try as everything might, the world still struggled to find bloom in the rapidly approaching mid-March, some three months since the story spread was published.

“Turns out I can be a drama queen.” Kara pushed out her cheeks, rocking back and forth on her feet. “I mean, who does that? At a funeral. Makes it about them—their wedding. Then she cancels the venue, like some perfect Princess Charming, and there I go, three days later, asking if we can rebook it.”

In her head, Kara imagined the knowing look.

“I know.” She folded her arms. “I’m getting better. At being a good girl, I mean. It just hit me hard. It felt like…how do I go through with it? Pushed all the way back to square one—worse than square one even. Just some awkward, boring, sad, hurting person, and there she is—Lena Luthor—looking at me like I’m important, and special, and like...I’m worth the wait.”

“You are worth the wait,” a voice chipped in.

“You’re stalking me now?” Kara snatched around with a glimmer in her eyes, smiling as she glanced the eavesdropper up and down.

Lena grinned and faced a headstone adjacent. She shook her head, flowers in her hand, apparently here with the same idea that some things needed to be confessed to those who would not tell secrets, and other things forgiven by those with no absolution to offer.

“I’m running a little late today. I usually come by around nine, nine-thirty.” Lena rubbed her neck. “I can come back?”

“Don’t, stay.”

“You’re sure?” Lena glanced with careful eyes, double-checking and very gentle in the way she said it. “She was your person.”

“She was your friend.”

“Still is.” Lena tilted her head. “Always will be.”

“Want to text her and tell her you can’t make brunch today?” Kara had a mischievous smile, thinking about how long it had been since they did something good and sporadic. “There’s a park nearby. Let’s get coffee and take a walk, baby.”

“Which park?” Lena offered her arm for Kara to hook into as they walked back the way they came.

“It’s not in the top five, maybe the top ten though.”

“If it’s not in the top five it may as well be a multi-level parking garage.”

“Would you still come on a date with me if it was?” Kara looked at her a certain way, as though spring had finally broken behind her eyes. “You look beautiful. I like what you did with your hair this morning.”

“Brush it?” Lena knitted her brows.

“Sure, yeah.” Kara tucked a rope of jet-black hair behind her ear.

“I would go on the date with you.” Lena pressed forward and pecked her lips, then slipped an arm around to tug and keep Kara warm in the clutch of her side. “About the wedding venue…”

“So, you did listen in?”

“A little.” Lena shrugged. “Our original date got snatched up quickly. What would you think about a June wedding?”

“June is only a little longer to wait, sure.”

“June of next year.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not in a rush.” There was a patient, radiant smile and no irritation to be found behind sea green eyes—despite the insanity—despite the nightmare Kara had proved to be in the aftermath. Lena just kept loving her in the right way. “I’m not going anywhere. I have some time on my hands, enough to waste, just to follow you places for the exercise, maybe the view of your butt too. June next year?”

“June next year.” Kara pressed her cheek to her girlfriend’s shoulder. “Lena?”

“Mhm?”

“I love you,” Kara whispered and stared ahead, clutching her arm, matching her idle pace. “I don’t just mean I love you, here and now, I mean…” She blew a little exhale, almost a whistle, like someone’s dad recounting the size of a big freshwater fish that had taken some time to reel in. “I love you in this horrifically logical, sensible, and completely thought through way. I love you the way you love someone when you look at them and your brain says…” Kara grinned. “Oh, there you are. The woman who’s going to be the mother of my children. The person I’m supposed to build a nice, good life around. Who I’m going to be sixty, seventy, maybe eighty with, and I’ll still be looking at you like you’re my best friend, my wife.” Kara held it for a moment. “My person.”

Lena nodded slightly and held open the gate, glancing at Kara with a certain look as she walked through first.

“Your person, huh?” Lena rasped as she followed. “I think we clarified that a person is much, much, much bigger of a deal than a wife or soulmate—we did do that, right?”

“Mhm.” Kara cupped her cheeks. “And there you are.”

“You know”—Lena brushed the tips of their noses—“I think being the mother of your children might be one above that.”

“We should probably get married first.”

“Probably,” Lena grinned as she thought about it. “It’s a fourteen-thousand-dollar dress. You should wear it the way you chose it. Then we can have a baby, maybe two, or seven, what do you think?”

“Two would be nice.”

“We’re still stood in the middle of the path. You want to keep walking, save this for the park?”

“Nah,” Kara kissed her—really kissed her—kissed her for the first time in a long time like it was unavoidable and necessary. “Let’s just stand here in everyone’s way, outside a cemetery, and plan our children’s names please.”

“Boys or girls?”

“Girls.”

“Not one of each?” Lena seemed surprised but happy. “Two little girls?”

“Mhm.” Kara nodded. “Both of them with your hair and eyes.”

“I want a little Kara Danvers too?”

“Then three daughters.”

“Not two as in one little me and one little you?” Lena’s brow knitted again. She suddenly jolted forward, careening into Kara and nearly knocking her over, a busy pedestrian elbowing them out of the way unceremoniously. “Are you okay?” Lena patted. “Hey! Did your mother never teach you to keep your hands to yourself and play nicely?”

Lena went fiery and bright-eyed at the stomping man, in a way Kara had never seen before, and knew she shouldn’t feel so tight, awoken, and aroused about. It hit too quickly. Lena was so feminine and dignified, silver-tongued and faintly upper-class, but never arrogant or precise with it, and so the clenched fists and snarled bottom lip did things for Kara.

Then the man turned around.

“I would ask the same but the way your brother turned out?” He spat at her feet. “Shame it was your wife who died and not him—what a fuck piece—I would have banged.”

John, Kara suddenly realised it was her old colleague—the man who wrote the original questions and found himself fired because of it.

Kara barely managed to keep a grip on Lena.

Then she let go, in a decided and intentional way, because Lena was owed this one. She strode forward. It wasn’t some towering, terrifyingly intimidating change in her demeanour. John didn’t take a step back. He didn’t have some—or any—fear in the eyes. He just grinned, shit-eating and smug, pleased to get the reaction he wanted.

Lena said something inaudible. John’s expression flickered, softened almost. They talked. He hung his head, a little solemn. They talked for what felt like forever. It was maybe only a minute or two, but the fact they were talking the way people talked and there was no shouting or aggression proved to be equally as confusing.

Lena came back in her own time.

“What was that?”

“Karma.”

“Spill.” Kara hooked her arm again, noticing the tension of a barely cooled-off temper. “Whatever you said seemed to have an effect.”

“Apologies do that to people.”

“He apologised?”

“I did.” They stopped, largely because Kara stopped dead in her tracks. “Don’t…make it a thing. I know, I know I should have defended Sam’s honour, or something.” Lena pinched her brow. “That was a very broken man who lost everything in his life because of my brother. He just…needed to feel like that mattered.”

“He was awful to you!” Kara pulled away and scanned the street, ready to give him a much harsher reality check. “He does not get to blame you for his problems—”

“I know that. Kara—stop. Kara, I know that.” Lena took her biceps firm and brought the stormy temper back to attention. “He was—is—a very broken man, and sometimes people just need to begin healing on their own terms.” Lena almost hushed it away.

“Wait.” Kara paused. “You didn’t just apologise, did you?”

Lena grew sheepish.

“Lena, what did you do? Kara glared.

“In fairness—” Lena held up her hands defensively. “He was a very good reporter. I followed his work solving the Riddler killings—it was fascinating.”

“What did you do?”

“I offered him a job.” Lena scrunched her face. “Nothing that involves interfacing with me—ever. Just, you know, an auditor of sorts.”

“Of sorts!” Kara felt furious and well aware it was not her right to be angry over this. “Lena, baby, have you lost your mind?”

“The first real conversation you and I shared” —Lena did the look, the pre-argument look, when she was frustrated and holding it back— “You asked me what I was going to do to help the Midwestern Mom who lost everything on the LexCorp IPO. Well, there is your Midwestern Mom, Kara, I’m sorry it isn’t the sweet, nice, naïve old lady who buys lottery tickets for her grandson’s college fund.” Lena tossed her hands in the air. “I said I was going to fix it and do something good for the people who lost everything, and I meant what I said, Kara. It wasn’t lip-service. It wasn’t conditional on those people being objectively good people. So, who better to judge me than my worst critic?”

“Definitely two of you.” Kara realised and said it simultaneously. “An abundance of you. I did not know you had that kind of temper, that’s the first thing. The second thing is…well you know.” Kara tugged her girlfriend’s attention with the firmest grasp on either cheek. “All of it together, combined, accounted for and on the books? I want your children. I want you, because you are very hot, and very—you know—Daddy.”

“Is that…” Lena looked around. “Is that the argument finished?”

“Mhm.”

“We still haven’t moved.” Lena observed and dipped her chin in her scarf, blinking and furrowing at the absurdity. “We just—did we just plan our children, plus all the other stuff, and have an argument, right here?”

“Mhm. Yes, we did.” Kara kissed the corner of her mouth. “I think this becomes the third, maybe even the second stop on the tour, when our kids are old enough, and they groan in the back of the car while we drive around and point our lives out for them.”

“Where’s the first?”

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30)

In an empty church, beneath the steeple, the doors remained open for two broken hearts pretending to be people.

A true lady to her last breath, Catherine Grant went in her own time.

Kara was there with her, till the very end, and she made sure Catherine left as Catherine would want to leave. There was a little blush on her cheeks, highlighter across the bones, lipstick and a spritz of perfume. Cat opened her eyes, for the first time in days, beautiful as she always was. She looked at Kara, tired but determined, and Kara said the things she needed to say.

The things she would never tell Lena.

The things Lena knew, perfectly well, would have been said, and yet did not mind nor pry.

Then Cat closed her eyes in the most decisive way, smiling a little as she did, and she was gone minutes after.

Kara sat craned and hunched, jagged and heartbroken.

“I want to cancel the wedding.”

“Alright,” Lena didn’t hesitate.

“It’s not alright.” Kara shook her head vehemently. “We shouldn’t—we can’t be planning something happy. I don’t. I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to marry you anymore.” She swiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“That's quite alright,” Lena said it slow and certain, she clasped her girlfriend’s fingers and Kara pulled them back quickly into her lap. Lena felt no resent. “Alright, my darling,” Lena didn't try to touch her this time. “Kara I don’t care about the wedding. If it's just the wedding, or if this is the relationship done for now or forever, then I am still sitting right here next to you because I care, and I love you very much, and I'm not going to stop doing those things. It requires no uptake or effort on your part.”

“You should care about the wedding! You should care about all of it!” Kara snatched her swollen eyes across to stare with hateful, boiling anger. “You should care that I have been awful to you for nearly two weeks! And horrible, and cold, and someone not worth signing-up for marriage with, and—and!” Kara shattered anew. “You should care that you deserve better. You should care that you did not sign-up for this the day we met, in your office, when I thought you were the cleaning lady—and despite asking you those awful questions—you took me to the second-best park in the whole city the very next day because you're a good person who deserves good things!”

“I know. I’m not saying you are being crazy or imagining things—you’re not. You have been impossible to be around these last two weeks. Not because you’re a bad person but just…grieving. It turns people inside out, unrecognisable, and so yeah, I’m walking on eggshells, but I'm not mad about it.” Lena hushed and brought Kara’s head into her shoulder. “I know I should care but I just…don’t. I love you. Turns out I love you so much that I don’t need to find new ways to fall in love with you every day. And if this is you? For a while, or for the rest of your life, then it’s us, and it’s me walking on eggshells for the rest of mine.” Lena pressed her lips to Kara’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Lena wiped a tear with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry you are in so much pain and that I cannot make it better. But I’m here. I’m here if it never feels better—and I’m here if it does.”

Kara nodded.

“Can we go home?”

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29)

The room was dark. Cat awoke to a dry throat, balm on her lips, and some faint surprise that she had awoken at all. The sense of surprise was incremental like a bruise in her conscience that pressed and announced the state of things; an ending meandering towards itself in its own good time.

It was coming undone now.

It was the hard to ignore feeling that Kara had brought her home here in dribbles over the months, by the canvas tote bag, until the hospital became somewhat hybrid because...there wasn’t a home to go back to at the end of this.

Silk pyjamas, curled on her side most days with little movement, in a different bed than her original room, Cat still had zero regrets—plenty of complaints. Not the change of scenery. This room was bigger and much more comfortable with real pillows and comforters that smelled like home, stayed smelling like home, vanilla and old books and a touch of essence, Kara laundered them with the right things—in just the right ways—despite it never being asked, not once.

The view beyond this window was better. Cat didn’t know it was possible. It looked over the lower side, at just the right angle, so she could see her building sprouting tall in the distance like a solitude creature in the skyline; her radiant, proud, towering life’s work.

In the world of treatment, timeframes and ordinate doctors, it was never a good sign when they pulled out stops. They ceased with incessant disapproval about the champagne; no side glances to the empty ice bucket, then the two giggling grown-ups indiscreetly discrete about it, with water marks on top of the ugly, dinged steel cabinet that had been hidden away beneath a patterned silk kimono to make it somewhat less ghastly. The doctors said nothing anymore. Things had gotten bad, all the paths ahead leading nowhere but champagne.

Cat saw it all for what it was and she did not mind.

The dog on sore knees and silver whiskers always found its good fortunes when the six cheeseburgers arrived for dinner after a long day of good, lovely things; Cat took the champagne, every drop, until her hands struggled somewhat, and then Kara proved most useful for that too.

Kara seemed to mind a great deal despite saying she didn’t mind at all.

Her refusal to leave seemed quite indicative. Against the adjacent wall there was a camping cot. Cat squinted and saw the huddled shape of a Kara-sized lump. Moonlight struck a distinct, bolting sheen of light through the cracked blinds. It fell across the blonde hair on the pillow as Kara laid turned to the wall. Cat saw the sleeping cot when she was awake in sporadic jaunts through the day, a distinct wrinkle in the made-up blankets, yet she had never seen Kara sleep much—if ever—at all.

Cat smiled and sincerely hoped that even through the hard times there were still lovely dreams for the foolish, optimistic, loyal Kara Danvers of the world. The girls who, despite crippling anxiety, run from their doldrum lives while shaking in their boots for what is waiting at the finish line. The ones with good hearts who say horrible things anyway. The people who, without merit or reward, stick it out until the very end.

She closed her eyes. Tiredness came with immediacy despite the good long sleep, which wasn’t anything new anymore. Laying there, she became aware of her body—the proximate parts of her skin. Her face. Her hands. Her lips. It was a comfort that Cat hadn't expected for the last stretch of her days, back when the news arrived last year, her mind immediately wandering, there while they talked prognosis, simultaneously not there, running through all sorts of sad notions.

This had never been considered. The clean, balmy tack of solid deodorant under her arms. Her face clean and moisturised—the full Korean programme—cleansed, swiped with toner, then serum and ampule, moisturised, then moisturised some more. She could tell from the slipperiness of the silk pants on her shins that her legs had been shaved too, which was silly, almost obsessive, and she rolled her eyes because it felt too much. Then it didn't feel silly. Cat sat with her thoughts, for the briefest moment, then hurried her mind elsewhere.

It got her throat a little tight otherwise.

Kara took it seriously.

Cat didn't need to ask some underpaid stranger to help her use the bathroom, that was the main thing, that had been the big fear. There was preservation to her dignity. A procedural silliness to it. Kara carrying her some days, dipping around the room, supporting her waist on others, joking about conga lines, but always hanging by the door for just a moment too long with something in her eyes.

“Yeah?” Cat glared the first time.

“Sometimes it takes looking at just the right woman, on just the right commode, to realise you do have a pee fetish after all—”

“Do you say that to all the girls?”

“Oh just the ones who get my name off their skin with a Bic lighter and some sense of determination for a better life. Shout if you need anything.” Kara always left it right there, on the line, precisely between silliness and respect.

The spritz of perfume. The little mirror set-up on the bed tray so she could check her lipstick. Things were coming undone, rapid and quickening. Catherine still felt entirely her own creature. She felt respected. She felt like a woman. She felt beautiful, human, and as though her life still had some good moments ahead too.

It wasn’t anything new.

Kara was consistent.

Cat closed her eyes and took herself for a brief waltz. She never used to sleep easy. She slept in this rare, sporadic and fraught way that dictated her understanding of how assistants should model themselves. Cat slept much easier now. It came to her as a form of escape; a prolonged dream of warm days, that she could pick up and put down, consistent and reliable; the mid-eighties, the first sports car she ever purchased—a boxy little thing with head lamps that came up mechanically from the hood when the engine started—and taut, tight twenty-something year old eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Good skin, great hair, and a silk navy blouse without tags in the collar anymore.

Her memories were worth reliving. The initial success of the magazine had brought a wave of correctness to her young, youthful life; there would be no more returns, no more tags, not ever, Catherine always knew what she wanted, always stood by it.

Plus it felt good spending money.

In her dreams it all came back to her, the early days, when money was a new thing and her attitude towards it was young, gauche and cavalier. Her life had gone from some humdrum, boring, cycling food menus back-and-forth to afford a Vanity Fair; into everything Catherine had ever dreamed overnight, with immediacy, all in the blink of an eye. Thirteen with ladylike ideas of herself one moment, twenty-three and put-together the next.

In her mid-twenties she lived very fine. A demitasse with her coffee in the morning. A caviar spoon—carved from precious mother of pearl with her name engraved along the handle—that coincidentally proved to be just the right size for a less than conservative blast of cocaine.

Catherine Grant never did think much of caviar.

In her dream, Cat dipped into an enormous bump with the Tiffany’s spoon, true to the old days as it had all once been, back when it was a procedural and professional thing to do; she drove, with the top down, men in suits with blowing ties in the passenger seats talking numbers for a local news network that she wanted to purchase.

It was the delicious, perfectly precise moment right at the very start of the CatCo expansion.

Cat rubbed her nose and didn’t care, not particularly knowing much about the mechanics of the business or what she was getting herself into, simply giddy and away with it all. It was a smash and grab way of living; an economic boom that had arrived precisely the same time she did, with skyscrapers sprouting up, stock prices up-ticking, Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys, and it felt good to remember.

She wondered if that was what people had meant when they said life flashes before one’s eyes at the end. The best parts, the things that were worth remembering, they had come back to her in a loud, bright, and colourfully trumpeting hello; there were no hospice-shaped goodbyes, not in her nineteen-eighties.

Cat had never told Kara the majority of these things for her story spread. She regretted withholding some of the details. On some level, the messy things; the candour, the ruthless and cut-throat bad things she had done too would have made a much more exciting read.

One Kara wouldn't have enjoyed learning about.

Cat kept things abridged for the sake of her own image. Maybe just a bit to protect the little fool too—her little fool—who had come to believe in fairies and giants, and that Catherine Grant was somehow both of these things.

“Kara?” Cat murmured with her eyes still closed—aware time had moved.

“Mhm. I’m here. Are you ready for something to eat?”

There was a distinct pressure on her bed as though someone had sat down. Then a shift in weight, legs pulling up, until Cat felt someone laying beside her. She opened her eyes. It was daytime, bright and warm, Kara laying there in clean clothes and damp hair and a cheek settled against Cat’s ribs.

“I’m not hungry just yet.” Cat observed the distinct, persistent lack of hunger or thirst as a symptom of progress. “Is there a reason you’re laying all over me like some sort of remedial, drooling and rather overly personable puppy?”

“Because it’s a small bed and the best view of the television. Lena has a live broadcast interview airing this morning.” Kara nudged her to look at the photographs and exposition on screen, glancing up with the most tender and excited blue eyes. “I took her for lunch yesterday. She was so nervous about it but we practiced, and I think.” She didn’t seem so confidant. “Well. You know. I think…she’ll do great.”

“That bad, huh?”

“She forgot her name.”

“Ha!” Cat’s chest hurt from the push of her lungs. “She is terrible in front of cameras. The worst social anxiety. Enjoy the rest of your forever, kiddo.”

“Hush,” Kara said, the silly mood detectable, slinging an arm over Cat’s waist absentmindedly. “I still love that boy, Daddy, think I might just go ahead and be his wife one day.” She joked and parroted the hammy, transatlantic accent in all of the old classic films she had been forced to watch over the last few weeks.

“Alright. You don’t like Turner Classic Movies. We can watch other things if you’re going to be fucking petulant.”

“Not true.” Kara gawked, her brow furrowing. “Why do you think I put them on?”

Cat smiled, not saying anything, trying very hard not to think too much about anything, just watching the television as it all went by, and the interview carried alright enough.

Lena remembered her name.

Surprisingly, she even remembered Kara’s too.

Now the world knew Lena Luthor had found love again and Kara Danvers, soon to be Luthor, would be wearing white in the spring.

“What colour do you think I should wear for your wedding?” Cat felt a certain sudden possession on her soul. Aware she wasn’t going to make the day, just not quite ready yet. “I think floral, maybe something with a little colour?” she whispered.

Kara didn’t say anything for a moment, she laid there, cheek to her ribs, arm slung like a seat belt, thinking about it or holding in her tears, but Cat had grown somewhat expert in not thinking about things, and so she didn’t think about it.

“Navy blue,” Kara quietly replied, an absolute certainty in the rasp of her voice. “You should wear that navy silk blouse, and the matching-coloured pants. I would like that. Will you sit close to the front?”

The smoke struck and the sting grew tense.

“Well, I am Catherine Grant”—she said the line often, it was different this time, meant something very different altogether—“I should be as close to the front as possible.”

It was Kara who cried first, which felt more of a surprise than it should have been. Cat had not seen any tears, for months, for this whole thing, not since the argument on the doorstep.

It had been a good thing.

Cat didn’t like mess.

Yet there Kara finally was, a little contained mess, and Cat felt a warmth flood her heart at the sight of these little stinging tears and the corner of her blanket suddenly repurposed as a hanky.

“It’s okay.” The whimpers on her ribs huffed in breaths that tickled. “We’re going to have so much fun at your wedding. You’ll see. But, you know, I don’t think I’ll be drinking on the day.” Cat wasn’t very good at joking but she kept her tone as bouncy and light as she could. “Will you have two glasses when they get you dressed in the morning? One for you, one for me?”

“You’re the meanest woman I ever met and I want you there on my wedding day.” Kara grabbed a slender wrist and brought it around herself. Cat didn’t know what to do, but she allowed herself to be turned into a seat belt, quite determined to keep the little girl safe for now. “It’s supposed to be you and me. On my wedding day. And I…” Cat grew tense. “I’m getting dressed in the morning and I don’t know what to do, what shoes to wear, feeling ugly and awkward, because I always feel ugly and awkward. But you would be there. You would do the thing you do.”

“The thing I do?”

Kara inhaled and seemed to decide if she couldn’t have the real thing, they would just have to make a wedding day, here and now; put it in her heart and tuck it away for later.

“You grab my shoulders and do the awful mean thing you do with words—but in the Catherine Grant way—that puts everything into perspective.” Kara nuzzled with the saddest smile one woman could possess. “And we look in the mirror together at my wedding dress. It’s not me and my mom. Or, me and my sister. It’s supposed to be you and me—” The tears marched in and they didn’t stop this time. “And I get to see myself different because you fixed whatever thing I didn’t realise needed fixing, something only you could fix, and suddenly I get to feel beautiful and attractive and put-together and ready for it all, like I can go and marry Lena Luthor, because you are there.”

Cat nodded and smiled.

“It’ll be your glasses and your earrings.” Cat moved some hair off her face with gentle fingers. “Take your glasses off and make sure your earrings match either the bouquet or your eyes. And, in God’s name, whatever you do please don’t release doves. It’s tacky and gross—”

“You’re the most hateful person I know.”

“You’re the most irritating, foolish and blindly-optimistic woman I have ever had the displeasure of tolerating an elevator ride with much less the final months of my life.” Cat rolled her eyes, then dramatically softened her tone. “And I want to be there on your wedding day too, Kara, very much, so for now I’m saying that I am going to be there.”

“You’re going to be there.” Kara understood what was being asked of her. “Cat?”

“Mhm.”

“I figured it out—by the way.”

“The thing you said you had originally figured out for your article?”

“Mhm.” Kara nodded. “The thing I was trying to…capture.”

“My forties?”

“Your scar.”

“No.” Cat felt angry. “We agreed. I understand it’s your story too. I understand it’s a big request—but it’s one you agreed too. I do not want reporters making insinuations or asking Lena for the rest of her life whether there was a rift between us after she proposed to ‘my soulmate’ while I was dying of cancer. Does that sound like a fluffy, nice portrait piece for either of you?”

“Cat.” Kara pushed up on her arms. Cat glanced, noticed the tautness, the biceps, the blonde hair sitting crooked in her blue eyes. “You said you didn’t want an obituary and I don’t want to write it. You were right, with what you said, and I want to put that perspective in the story. Most of all because I am selfish and it…keeps you alive, forever, beyond always.”

“I’m always right, be specific.”

“Soulmates.” Kara had this emphatic look in her eyes. “It’s bullshit. It’s…” Kara paused. “I think it’s not the universe designing perfect marriages. You could have more than one perfect marriage, or more than one great love. Look at Lena. I met other people too. I even met a woman once who loved two boys, both called Harry, and I think she preferred the wrong one more.” Kara’s eyes flickered and brought thoughts together into words.

Cat grinned too big for her cheeks.

“Two boys called Harry?”

“The first one tattooed her name on his arm just so she would talk to him,” Kara whispered, astounded and romanticising new things. “Isn’t that the most beautiful little thing you ever heard?”

“Maybe.” Cat nodded. “So, hurry it along. If it’s not romance—then what?”

A slow smile, a deep inhale, the optimist blinked slowly and looked like a scared little girl who needed to believe her own dreamy outlook.

“I think it’s a buddy-system.” Kara propped her chin on her hand and stared off. “I think we come from star dust, on some great adventure, some big school bus trip down to earth, and that’s your person—your unconditional person—on your birthmark.” Kara adjusted her weight, lifted the hem of her shirt and trailed a finger over something that had once been important. “It’s not romance. It’s not even love sometimes. It’s the person who understands how to care for you in the right ways in the exact moment you need it. And you, ballsy and knowing everything, decided you weren't in the business of taking care of people.” Her expression exaggerated as though it were enough explanation.

It wasn’t.

Cat didn’t understand Kara’s point.

“Sorry if it still gives you a boo-boo in your feelings?”

“It doesn’t.” Kara scoffed, impressed by it this time. “You were only nineteen years old, and you knew, despite all of human history and the entire world insisting you...force yourself into the idea of marriage?” Kara smiled. “In your very Catherine Grant way—you set your eyes on bigger things. You did it all for yourself. You were selfish, and you were better off for it, you had the biggest life and chased all your dreams. I think…” Kara inhaled. “I think people should fall in love more, with different people, different things, for different reasons at different points in their life. Not just take the safe bet or the road mapped out for them. I think you are my buddy-up person. I think I’m yours. We found each other to take care of right when we both needed a little help, and that?” There was a forced calmness in her tight throat. “That is a happy ending, it's our happy ending, because nobody in my life has ever got it quite so right as helping me grow the way you have, Catherine.”

Cat didn’t say anything.

It struck her funny.

It struck her right in the heart.

“You sound like you have found your story.” Cat pushed a smile. “I don’t think I was ever wife material. I think, probably, I made a much better…” She sighed and didn’t know what to say. “I liked listening to your perspective, but I don’t think I’m much of a buddy either.”

“Just my person then.” Kara patted her hand, teeth on the rim of her lip as she staved off the tears. “A person I probably would have married if I had been born thirty-years earlier.” She tilted her head and left it at that.

“Mhm. Well, let’s just get you to the alter of your actual wedding.”

“She is going to be quite the bride,” Kara grinned.

“Kara?”

“Mhm.”

Here it was, Cat realised.

“You’ll be a good girl won’t you?”

“For Lena?” Kara softened. “I’ll eat healthy and take care of myself just so I outlive her, yeah. I think she’s earned that much.”

“No, no.” Cat shook her head and—for the first time in her life—felt stupid. “Just, in general. You’ll be a good girl, and find all those different things to fall in love with, and never lose your optimism and keep trying to do good things for people?”

“Like you do?” Kara gave her the sarcastic look.

“Fuck off.”

“Mhm.” Kara smiled sweetly and pecked the back of Cat’s hand with a chaste kiss. “Will you be a good girl? You’ll get home safe—wherever it is we’re all going in the end. Tell everyone I said hello?”

“Good girl? I’m fifty.”

“Still a pretty little girl to me.” Kara was not joking and her expression said as much too.

That did it.

Cat felt those words puncture through her soul.

“Thank you.” Cat stroked Kara’s hair. “Really. For everything, for coming around, but for that too. I can’t even remember the last time somebody dared to speak to me like that.”

“Well, you are a pretty little girl,” Kara murmured as she settled a cheek back on her belly. “You should consider yourself lucky. If I had been born thirty years earlier? Your life would have looked a lot different. I could have married a pretty little girl like that.”

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28)

It became unnecessary to bring the wedding date forward.

Cat wouldn’t be attending.

She had taken a fast turn, just the way they said it could happen and yet Kara hadn’t put weight behind the idea. It happened. Here she now was under the weight of it.

Lena didn’t mind one bit for what that meant in the schism of it all. Kara slept at the hospital, spent her days there, slipping out for lunch and dinner dates with Lena when she could, texting when she could, but largely she was away from the world for something her fiancé understood and agreed to be the priority right now.

The only person who disagreed was Cat.

“You again?” Cat whispered with frustration. “Stop. No, just—” She barely moved her head aside to interrupt the lipstick application. “There’s no point.”

Kara grabbed her chin firm and brought it back.

“Shut up. You look beautiful,” steady and calm, the lipstick went on without further complaint. A little highlighter, a stroke of blush, and Kara sat back down quite satisfied with her work.

“So, how are things?” Cat murmured.

“Swell. You?”

“Not dead yet.”

“I finished my article.” Kara pushed glasses up the bridge of her nose, unsure of what to say. “You will hate it.”

“Probably, I don’t like endings. I think reading my life cover to cover is…” Her eyebrows went up. “Well. You don’t read stories before they’re finished, do you?”

“Are we at the place where I can ask real questions, Cat?”

“I’m not sure,” Cat smiled.

“So you never—” Kara came undone and looked around, feeling stupid. “You never felt anything for me?”

“I feel everything for you, kiddo, that’s what a soulmate is.” Cat looked at her seriously. “Maybe just some person in the universe who just follows you around one life to the next, and you don’t always like each other. I think, rarely you actually like each other. But, despite all of that, you’re on each other’s team anyway.”

“That’s very pretty.”

“Shut up,” Cat said half-serious. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Kara.”

“Now you shut up.” Kara pointed the finger. “Old news. We need a new scoop.”

“We could runaway you know,” Cat joked. “Lena Luthor all alone at the alter? That would be front-page.”

“Well you did buy my wedding dress.”

“I did do that,” Cat agreed. Her eyes had never broken, staring right at Kara in this calm and persistent way. They were tired but she kept looking, kept analysing, kept trying to figure out the answers. “Can I ask you something, kiddo?”

“It seems only fair, sure.”

“The picture. The one from Paris Fashion Week.” Kara remembered with a smile all of a sudden, belly on her bed, nose in a magazine, looking at that beautiful immaculate woman in the navy outfit. “Did you…” Cat shook her head and paused. “Never mind.”

Kara didn’t push her to finish the question. She wanted to, she knew Cat well enough to know that she didn’t like to be pushed or prodded. Despite her own curiosity, she just nodded and went for the glass of water, lifting it to Cat’s lips and chiding her to take a sip.

“Kara?”

“Yeah?”

“You take care of her.” It made Kara look at her in surprise, but she was serious. Cat’s eyes were lasers, stern and locked. “She is a good woman, one of my favourite women, the best. You protect her, and some years from now, when you’re older, and still as stupid, don’t you fucking start playing house in the back of your head with me.” Cat shook her head in severe, foreboding warning. “It’s on you if you do, because I’m not in that house waiting for you.”

“I know Cat,” Kara smiled and didn’t feel any sting. “You don’t worry, I’m going to take care of her. I’ll even let her die first, one day when we’re old, just so she isn’t left holding the door again.” Kara cupped Cat’s cheek. “Don’t you worry.”

“Good girl.”

Cat swallowed and closed her eyes, dreaming a little dream, half-here and half-asleep. The sleep took her quicker these days, for longer, for brief waltzes that went into breakfast the next morning, some days.

Cat tried not to think about it.

She had her life, and what a good life it was.

She regretted nothing.

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27)

In her calm way, Lena thought about how to deal with this situation.

Kara was sobbing in a way that she had never witnessed before. It was hysterical, beyond herself, beyond the situation, sort of nonsensical in a way that made perfect sense. Lena had tried to comfort but that had made things worse. Then Lena tried to listen, patiently, but now the hours were passing and escaping them, and Kara still hadn’t calmed down.

“I don’t…” Kara’s fists were wound so tight as she rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do. It’s a fourteen-thousand-dollar dress. It’s more than I paid for my car. It’s too expensive. She looked so happy. She just, she looked so happy—”

“Then keep the dress,” Lena whispered with reassurance. “Kara, I’m not embarrassed. I don’t feel like she bought it because she thinks I can’t afford it.”

“But I embarrassed you,” Kara hiccupped.

“No, baby.” Lena shook her head and took her in her arms. “You didn’t embarrass me. You didn’t do anything wrong. Kara, you bought your wedding dress today, it’s supposed to be a good day.”

“She isn’t going to be there!” Kara blurted.

There it was.

“I’m sorry,” Kara panicked and covered her lips. “Lena, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t mean that she’s not going to be at the alter—I mean she isn’t going to be in the pulpit.”

Lena didn’t say anything.

She just stepped forward, took her girlfriend firm and steady, held her so close, so forgivingly, so loving and understated because…

Lena remembered this.

She knew how it felt.

“It’s okay,” Lena hushed. “It’s alright, baby. I know. I know—” She took on most of Kara’s weight suddenly. Kara went slack, almost hanging off her shoulders, breaking in a way that she was always going to.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re second best.” Kara barely got the words out. “I feel—I feel like I’m making you feel like you’re some safe bet when you’re…you’re the woman I want to marry…”

“I don’t feel that way,” Lena told her honestly. “Can I ask why it is you feel that way? There isn’t a wrong answer. I love Cat too, she’s one of my closest friends. There’s no…fucked up feelings there.”

“I don’t know how to make sense of the fact I’m marrying the love of my life and simultaneously burying my soulmate.”

Lena paused.

“Yeah, that makes sense.” She stroked Kara’s back. “Okay, I’m thinking on my feet here, but can I offer you some possible options?”

“Possible options sounds good.” Kara kept her face buried into the safe spot of Lena’s neck and collarbone.

“We’ll go back to Jefferson Elementary on Monday. Take one of those big, dumb, ridiculous fucking cheques with us. You know the cardboard ones—for lotteries and charity fundraises?” Lena took Kara’s cheeks and peered at her with a grin. “I have a stack of them in the basement at the office. Fourteen thousand dollars buys a lot of fruit and greens if you know where to shop, right?”

Kara laughed despite her tears.

Lena took that as progress.

“And we’ll move the wedding up—”

“Don’t do that.” Kara’s face instantly fell serious. “Lena it’s your wedding day too. We can’t—you can’t do that. I don’t want you to make your wedding day fit around…” She didn’t want to finish the sentence.

Lena didn’t mind, not one bit. “She’s my friend too,” she swept Kara’s hair. “A winter wedding. That satin wedding dress? It’s going to look a whole lot cuter with your nipples rock hard underneath. For fourteen-thousand dollars I don’t even mind if you let Cat suck on them,” she whispered, pecking Kara’s temple.

“You are disgusting.”

“I know.” Lena smiled at the guilty laughter. “Definitely not your soulmate,” she joked.

“Can I ask you a question?” Kara’s voice got quiet and nervous.

“Yeah baby, always.”

“Do you miss Sam?”

Lena understood what was being asked. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t Kara expunging something she had wrapped herself around like she had been competing with Sam, trying to amount to her, fill in the gaps of spaces she left behind. Kara was asking because it was going to be her too. Not in the same ways but in similar ways.

“Yeah baby,” Lena told the truth. “Always.”

“Does it get easier?”

“I'm not sure. I grieve in different ways now, quieter ways. I don't know if that constitutes easier.” Lena laughed sincerely. “Sam was my person. I don't mean like my special magical tattoo girlfriends soulmate kinda person. It was better than that. It was...more than that." Lena felt how much she was smiling, the entire time Kara watching her cheeks push higher, and it jarred her suddenly. "Sorry, baby." She shook her head before her lips started wobbling.

"What was it like?" Kara slipped her hands around the back of Lena's neck, listening and curious.

Lena hesitated.

She realised, quite sadly, that she was hesitating because she was trying to think of a dark and pointed joke. The kind of barbed humour used to deter questions like that; it hurt to remember but today not-remembering hurt more.

Safe and secure, Lena felt Kara's warm palm gently pressing to her cheek and come away again. It was unhurried, a certain tenderness melting between them, ebbing and abundant. The grief came in quiet footsteps, no banners or trumpeting arrival. Lena felt the smoke get in her eye and the sting get in her throat.

Kara waited in her patient and affirming way—all big blue eyes and time to waste, gathering dust, listening to stories that the furniture around here hadn't heard in quite some time now.

"She was my best friend." Lena croaked. "She was the person who laughed with me, and told me things straight, didn't care if we stayed up all night fighting about it so long as we got Chipotle after and made peace. We sacrificed things for one another—real things—for the other to stay-in the marriage, at different points, for different things. So, Sam was my wife and yes, oh goodness, I miss her very much—" Lena felt a tear and nearly snatched her body away so Kara wouldn't see. She paused, holding it, breathing, allowing herself to not pull from it. "The thing that they don't tell you in grief counselling is that people are different things to you at different times in your life, and you don't—"

It halted.

Lena simply halted.

"It's okay," Kara hushed. "If it's alright I'm going to just stick around here, for a while, looking at you looking right back at me until you feel ready to keep telling me. Jokes are funny and all, but I think these moments mean more to me, so you should speak now or forever hold your peace if this is an uncomfortable amount of eye contact."

It was.

Which made Lena laugh, and that broke the tension, had Kara exaggerating those big blue eyes into a dinnerplate stare. Lena nodded and decided today was as good as any for a heart to heart. The sofa was closest; they went for the dining table instead. It was easier to sit and talk. Lena could also see the reading nook from her seat at the table, the armchair by the window, the shelves and cases; a Kindle with some reading glasses set aside as though Sam was coming back for the last two chapters she had been savouring.

Kara had put it all back after an argument once; she hadn't understood why she couldn't sit there, move the things, dust off the books, until she did understand. Then she felt terrible. Lena felt terrible for being upset about it in the first place.

"We should tidy it away, donate the chair to a library. I think Sam would have liked that," Lena had told Kara just after the incident when she noticed Kara's near-perfect reconstruction of the reading nook.

"Is it okay if we don't?" Kara's fingers found her bicep with the lightest of touches. "If it's best for you then yeah, sure, absolutely. It's just I spent a while falling in love with you in new ways, in your absence, because I figured that was your reading spot and that made me look at it all the time. So, I would world-build and think about the kind of woman who had a reading spot like that, those specific books, the parts you—she—highlighted. I don't know. It's silly..."

"I don't know where this is going but did you fall in love with my dead wife, Kara?"

"No, no. Just got to know her a little. When I look at that reading nook, at that kindle and all those bookmarks on the coffee table that she was coming back to?" Kara stalled and her eyes flickered slightly. "I thought it was your reading nook but it's not, it's hers, and she was coming back to it—to you. She didn't up and leave, you know? I look at it now and feel like I know her. I look at it and I feel like I'm not replacing her." Kara turned her head and looked at Lena as though she were the single-most important woman who had ever lived. "I have to love you the way she would want you to be loved." Kara swallowed and had this expression on her face as though unsure whether she was making sense. "Those are her books, this was her home, she went to work one morning with every intention that she was coming home. So, I don't want to put her away in a box—"

"I did." Lena was deadpan.

Inside, she had been feeling too many things. Here, today, at the dining table, she was feeling too many things; it hurt, and it was always going to, but the reading nook reminded Lena of good little quiet moments.

"So you were saying how she was your best friend?" Kara put down a cup of coffee for her fiancé.

"I know," Lena whispered.

"Tell me?"

Lena inhaled and looked at her with a smile because surprisingly, if she felt anything, it was an awareness of how good it felt to talk about Sam without some sharply barbed punchline concerning her driving.

"She was my best friend since we were five years old, way back in kindergarten. Twenty-five years of my life I spent with her. Only the last six years, once that little birthmark spelled out my name, were we even a couple." Lena saw the surprise in Kara's expression. "She was a good wife. I wish I could tell you that she had all these annoying little things that I hated. I did, I don't anymore, grief does that. I miss her but it's not this...abstract pain. It's localised." Lena pinched it off for a second to keep her throat clear and steady. "My best friend however?" Her eyes pearled. "It will never be okay. It will never make sense. I'm getting married to you and it's like I want to call Sam and tell her about it. Sam, my best friend in kindergarten, middle and high school, college, my person. Not Sam—my wife. Until I remember she piked a sixteen-wheeler going eighty in a little red convertible—like a complete fucking asshole because it was my little red convertible—and now I can't talk to my best friend anymore." Lena laughed very softly with tears dribbling in their own funny rhythm.

She was wrong.

The sharply barbed joke about Sam's driving did make her feel better.

Kara settled her warm palms on flexing knuckles.

"I don't know if this is weird to say but I really wish I had met her, I think we would have been great friends."

"She would have hated you, for a while at least." Lena chuckled hard. "Sam would have thought you were preachy and self-righteous. You would have thought she was a bitch."

"How come?"

"Because you are a little preachy. And she was the biggest fucking bitch I ever met, and I loved that about her the most." Lena shook her head as though exasperated by the mere memory. "Also, you are fucking her wife too so there is that. Sam, my best friend, would have loved you right away for how much you love me. Sam, my wife, would have hated you for at least a little while. Somewhere between... flipping the bird behind your back whenever you walked out of a room and insisting you both carpool to work the day she died. That's top end. That's where it maxes out." Lena gestured with her hand raised to her hairline.

Kara's eyes went wide with the kind of laughter that felt gross, guilty, and so unavoidable that it snorted out of her nose.

"I am the easiest, most-likable and chill of second wives—"

"Kara you have a soulmate who is in end-stage care that is not chill."

There were tears, good ones, absurd ones.

"I'm guessing it doesn't help that my terminally ill soulmate also happens to be your closest friend?" Kara narrowed her eyes.

"God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers." Lena shrugged in the pithiest way possible. "Funny. I don't understand the whole soulmate birthmark thing, like how it must feel, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but sometimes I wonder if soulmate is just..." It was her turn, all of a sudden, shaking her head and unsure if she was making sense. "A limitation. Just this dumb word men in funny hats came up with in ancient times to ringfence something there isn't supposed to be words for."

Kara stared at her girlfriend for the longest time.

"Soulmates are real." She nodded, a little too certain and cocksure. "A soulmate is—well. A soulmate. That's your soulmate."

"I don't have a mark?" Lena tilted her head in a very non-plus, unphased way. "I don't have a soulmate?"

"Maybe you just..." Kara gestured. "Maybe your birthmark is inside your asshole." She shrugged and earned the most boisterous laugh possible. "Maybe it's Sam's last joke on you?"

"Sam, my best friend maybe." Lena grinned.

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)

Months had passed.

The time did to her what it was always going to do. It got harder, everything and nothing, to catch her breath on the stairs, to find the energy to open the highlighter palette and care about those things. She did, but not because she cared all that much anymore. Cat went through the motions because it kept her entirely her own creature.

The cells were dividing uncontrollably, spreading, taking up the real estate of healthy tissue, but it couldn’t metastasise through the grit of who she felt to be as a person. Cat felt that so long as she painted her nails, kept moving her hair in certain ways, caring about things that no longer mattered, then she wasn’t losing any fights worth talking about.

Time at home became sporadic and rarer, but the room at the hospital had the view, and when she opened her eyes from sudden little bouts of sleep, the sight of the city took her with a certain fondness.

Catherine Grant had conquered something far bigger than this battle.

So what if she was losing?

If she felt grateful for anything then it was Kara’s lack of fuss and dramatics. Cat had imagined it, felt it to be a certainty, that the longer time went by doing what time was always going to do, Kara would somehow devolve and find herself in worser straits than she was this time last year.

Today Cat awoke to soft bristles on her cheeks.

“Lips,” Kara instructed as though it were nothing. “There we go. Figured I would save you a job.” She capped the lipstick and put it back in Cat’s purse.

“Thanks,” Cat rubbed her lips.

“Which dress?” Kara showed her a centre fold in a wedding brochure. “Well, not one of these specifically, but which neckline? Which style?”

“None of them.” Cat adjusted herself in the pillows and pushed up. She looked to the side, then the other side, patting around. A moment later, Kara handed her glasses almost automatically. Cat put them on and looked closer. “These are too much for you.”

“Not to be arrogant but I am marrying Lena Luthor,” Kara murmured.

“Not price.” Cat struck her arm with the magazine as though she were an idiot. “It’s too much lace, too much fabric. You don’t want to walk down the aisle on your wedding day feeling like the dress is wearing you—it needs to be simple.”

“Simple like…?” Kara waited for an example.

“Pass me my phone.” Kara did as she was told. It took a few moments, typing, scrolling, finding something that she had already looked at but didn’t want to tell Kara that part. “Here, something like this.”

When Kara took the phone and looked at the screen. Cat watched her expression, analysed it, hoping for something positive, unbothered if it was a frown. She knew her taste was the right taste. Whether Kara agreed was largely irrelevant. Her wedding day—her ugly dress.

“Cat this is beautiful,” Kara whispered.

The dress was vanilla silk, calf-length, quite plain with thin straps, but it had rouging—folds of fabric slightly off-centre at the waist—that drew in the shape and brought attention to the right dips, modest, yet showing off the curve of hips on the model.

In Cat’s mind she imagined Kara wearing the dress, with a very small and clean bouquet of pink flowers, rose gold simple bangle and matching earrings, with small drop diamonds—or maybe white flowers and dark sapphire earrings. Cat ran through different variations, different ideas of Kara on her wedding day, though none of them felt as though she were imagining herself at the alter too.

Cat was thinking about it purely because it mattered to Kara.

Her taste was the best taste when it came to such things.

“The designer has a store a few blocks from here.” Kara’s eyes went wide as she noticed. “I’ll have to call. See if I can get an appointment, what are you doing—” Cat was already pulling herself out of bed.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Cat quirked her brow and pulled out the canula. “Pick your dumb face up off the floor and pass me something to wear.”

Kara didn’t fight or argue, it felt as though they were passed all of that now. She just sighed and rolled her eyes, went along with it anyway, biting and annoyed yet still driving the car while Cat reeled off directions from her phone.

Lena Luthor’s fiancé or not, Kara would never get a priority appointment with a designer like this. Catherine Grant had keys to locked doors in the city. Cat knew it but didn’t say anything, partly because she was being nice, partly because…

She wanted to see Kara in the dress.

She was glad for it.

An hour later, Kara was wide-eyed and staring at herself in the mirror. She had the look on her face, the way Cat imagined she had the look on her face when she tried on that navy blue dress for the gala. Kara looked at herself as though she were beautiful, objectively, in a way she could believe, in a way she could see with her own two eyes.

Cat was inclined to agree.

In her heart, there were so many different versions of herself, and they were persistent but not constant. Cat looked at Kara, and in Cat’s heart there was a twenty-five-year-old version of herself feeling things and thinking thoughts that bore no sense in this reality. Cat didn’t force them away or shove them out this time. She just smiled, did the right thing, and told Kara how well it suited her.

“Can I—” Kara looked between the store assistants. “Can we put this on hold? I’ll call my fiancé and see what she thinks. We could come by this weekend and purchase it.”

Without meaning to, Kara showed herself to be the wrong kind of clientele. The assistants were polite and nice, agreeing, nodding, but they wouldn’t hold a dress like this. People who could afford to buy dresses like this didn’t need to convene and think it over.

“We’ll take it.” Cat produced her card.

“Cat don’t do that.”

“In wax paper, not a bag.” Cat made specifications and took over. “What shoes do you have in the shade? No. Those ones are closed toe—it’s a spring wedding.”

“Cat,” Kara bristled under her breath and looked uncomfortable. “It’s fourteen thousand dollars.”

“Mhm.”

“Cat!” Kara bristled.

“Shut up,” Cat said softly and signed the purchase. “Shut up. Stop, be quiet.”

It was something and it was nothing.

She had seen her soulmate in her wedding dress, one that she paid for.

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25)

“I’m happy for you both,” Cat coughed the sleep away. “Never call me this early again.”

“Understood. Me and Lena are going for breakfast, then she is away for the tradeshow, see you the same time as usual this afternoon?”

“I’m a little too tired today for question and answer.” Cat expected that to be the end of the conversation.

“I could come over still, we could watch television.”

“I don’t know how your fiancé would feel about that.”

“Lena?” Kara called out her name. “Do you give a fuck if I see Cat today for a Housewives marathon?”

There was silence. Then, in the distance away from the receiver, Lena’s voice.

“Not particularly,” Lena said.

“She said not particularly, she doesn’t care no.”

“I heard.”

“So, same time?”

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24)

Lena awoke with bleary eyes and a warm body tucked against her ribs. Kara nuzzled, kissed the corner of her jaw, giggling and taken with an earlobe she had been nibbling softly on.

“Happy first anniversary,” Lena husked with sleep in her voice. “Beautiful girl, look at you…”

Kara kissed her hard, kissed her sudden and took her jaw and prolonged it all. Surprised by the uptake, Lena rolled on her back and brought Kara with her. A hand slipped back, into her pyjamas, then her underwear, Lena fluttered her eyes and whimpered. She opened them again, saw the way Kara was looking at her and didn’t know what to do with it.

“Yeah?” Lena furrowed her brow.

Kara looked at her as though she had never seen a woman before, as though she would never—could never—look anywhere else. Twenty-four, too young and too old for her age, she just sat there with her hand bobbing in Lena’s underwear.

“I want to marry you. I thought that last week, then every morning after, how I want to do this until one of us takes it to the grave.”

“Are you proposing or asking me to propose?” Lena pushed a slow happy smile.

“Either or.”

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)

The burn on her ribs hurt in a way she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t infected, but it was going to go that way if she kept idly touching it.

There was a bandage between the skin and the navy silk blouse. It was too expensive, to own at least, but Cat had bought it on the Friday afternoon so the cheque wouldn’t cash from her bank account until Monday. After the job interview, she would fold it neatly with the tag still in the collar, then return it to the department store—make some excuse that it was too big, too garish, too unimpressive for a fine lady such as herself.

Fake it until you make it, that was her theory.

“Catherine, you’re ballsy, and I like that in a woman.” Archer puffed a hard guff on his cigar and leaned back in his barely managing, straining chair. “Look you come here every week and demand an interview. I’m sorry, you’re going to get the same answer. You want a job as a typist or a secretary then maybe we can talk but…” He gestured at the tiny, doe-ish little girl sat in front of him. “You’re not cut out to be a journalist.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“Because you’re Tinkerbell.” He inhaled again and the smell deflated the air from the room. “Give it up, kid, or go see Sharon across town—”

“Sharon writes trash fucking garbage for women in the suburbs who want to feel reassured that they’re the apex of sophistication.” Cat rustled in her chair. “I can do better than horoscopes and cocktail recipes. I want to be on the ground, reporting on things that mean something, that are interesting.”

“I respect your tenacity, kid, but that place doesn’t exist here.” He told her straight. “Not for you.”

“Then I’ll start my own magazine.” Cat shoved herself up and out of the chair. She stopped, glancing around his office, nodding to herself with fiery certainty. “And then? I’ll buy yours.”

Archer laughed her out of the door.

Four years.

Archer’s office became her office, largely because the Archer building became the CatCo building, and for all the things she had done in her life—upsize and relocate her headquarters wasn’t one of them.

“That’s a true story?” Kara didn’t know how to make sense of it. “You just said fuck you and started your own magazine.”

“It was nineteen eighty-five, people had ambition back then. What else was I going to do?”

In Cat’s mind, she remembered the justifications, the emotional driving factors. Not even twenty she had walked down the street after that last impromptu job interview that had gone nowhere promising, cupping the bandage against her ribs that gave her trouble, completely aware she had made a decision that could never be undone.

Years had taken the poignancy of Kara’s name from Cat’s soul.

But in nineteen eighty-five, the wound had been fresh, the name as clear as it was now. Cat had to make something, do something, be someone and have it all. She had to do it—because whoever Kara was?