Soulmates: Chapter XXXII

(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?”

“I’ll show you.” Kara pushed a slow, certain smile. “June, next year.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXXI

(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?”

“Let’s go home, baby.” Lena cupped her cheek. “Let’s get you home.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXX

(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.”

“Nah,” Cat said with a shake of her head. “I'm selfish, Kara, not made for taking care of others—never was made that way.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXIX

(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.

Except, some days.

Soulmates: Chapter XXVIII

(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.

Kara seemed to think on that for a moment.

Soulmates: Chapter XXVII

(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.

She knew she wouldn't be there for the day.

Soulmates: Chapter XXV

(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.”

“Then yeah,” Lena agreed in a very quiet and ordinary way, blinking and in love. “Let’s figure out logistics after breakfast but sure, yeah, I’ll marry you.” She grinned.

Soulmates: Chapter XXIV

(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?

Cat had given her up just for a shot at something better.

Soulmates: Chapter XXIII

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

On the farm where she grew up, there were seldom good things to do with the time. Farm work, the rough kind that started before dawn, then went into the late-night bringing home the cows and rounding up the sheep, that was for her father, her brother, the boys on the land who held some priority when it came to all the purposeful ways to waste a summer.

So, she spent most summers doing the same as she had always done. She rode her bike. She peddled, lost herself, went as far as she could, until all the muscles were tight, her palms blistered on the handles, panting and dry for a sip of water from her backpack.

In all the directions she could go off from her home, only a few of them led somewhere that wasn’t same old. There was the old reservoir, that was her favourite, where she wasn’t supposed to play but she did anyway. It was nice for the view, for the danger that came with playing hopscotch along the side of a steep drop into certain death, but children don’t care about things like that. Not during the Summer when school is out, when boys are a distant thing, and all there is to wile through the long, doldrum week is church on Sundays.

Then magazines happened.

Brighter than books, shorter and more jam-packed. It was the Woman’s Weekly in the doctor’s office. That was her first. Even now, she remembered it perfectly. A bright red cover with a headshot picture of this beautiful woman, with gleaming teeth, her hands positioned in such a way that she looked like some kind of angelic creature.

Inside, there were too many stories and not enough stories. The kinds of clothes that girls in the city were wearing—though certainly not wearing by the time the magazine had reached her some six months post-issue.

And there were stories about regular people too, doing regular enough things, yet none of it felt regular when it was read from the thin column surrounded by an air of manicured drama. That kind of gossip had only ever been heard before on Sundays, after church, sitting in the packed Denny’s on the outskirts of town, surrounded by other families who lived exactly the same way they lived.

So, she would eat her pancakes, precocious and quiet and straining into the sound of it all, learning about the schoolteacher who had left her husband and ran off with a woman. The salacious gossip of a boring, plain town that wasn’t actually all that boring when you got underneath the surface.

On the advent of magazines, all of a sudden, the gossip didn’t have to be gleaned and worked for, it was there in black and white, digestible as and when she wanted to read it.

But the fashion was, indeed, what she liked the most.

She had never seen women dress quite that pretty before.

Woman’s Weekly turned into Vanity Fair. It was more expensive, and so she picked up a few hours riding around on Saturdays delivering food menus, just enough money if she saved everything over the month, to send off for a Vanity Fair and a Cosmopolitan with a little change to put in her piggy bank.

Through the shiny, expensive pages of glamour magazines she learned about the world in ways her mother and aunties didn’t even know. The demitasse was for coffee—the teaspoon for tea. The only good silks were navy or emerald. The darker the material—the less the wrinkles showed after a day of wear. A bottle of champagne wasn’t champagne unless it came from the region. Prosecco was just as good because it was fashionable at the time and also cheaper—if not a little sweeter.

Twelve years old and tiny, yet already a woman of the world, and far too big for a place like that.

No wonder she ran.

Kara listened to every word and felt as though Cat were telling her a shared story—one that she felt to be own too. There was a smile on her face the entire time, remembering, recalling the gossip from Denny’s and the time she nearly fell over the edge into the dry reservoir.

Kara couldn’t imagine it.

A rambunctious, rural, dungaree and checked shirt, little Catherine Grant.

“You look surprised?” Cat observed the shock.

“I am,” Kara admitted. “I am and I’m not.” Her eyebrows quirked.

“I didn’t like the city when I first got here. People think rural places—”

“Are quiet, but they’re not, just a different kind of loud,” Kara finished her words.

They looked at each other for a moment.

Cat sighed and pushed up out of the chair first. “It’s getting late.”

“Yeah, I should be going.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXII

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

The car was a lease hire.

More than that, Cat had found the information within ten seconds of Kara offering the drafted expose. She had sat there in her armchair, back at home for a week now, reading it all carefully, humming sporadically every few seconds as though unimpressed.

Then she picked up the phone, spoke to someone that Kara assumed to be an almost Kafkaesque bureaucratic source. Someone only Cat Grant would have access too. The sort who operated in the highest levels of government, shadowy, a voice distortion box to maintain their anonymity.

A few seconds later, Cat had given her the bad news.

“Lease,” she said, throwing the paper in the trash can. “I mean, sure it’s probably not sensible financial decision making but…” She shrugged.

"Who told you? Someone...in government?"

"Avis." Cat scrunched her face in disbelief. “This isn’t the junior leagues, Kara. You’re up against deep south, Republican senators getting caught in their wives’ underwear for column inches here. Who gives a fuck about an under the table deal on a mud kitchen?”

“The lunch ladies care.” Kara folded her arms and grew steely. “The janitors care. The groundsmen. The school bus drivers. The people paying out of their own pockets to take care of the kids.”

“Okay, now you’re talking about a much larger issue.” Cat pointed out, straining with a wince as she pulled herself out of the chair. “And that’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly not what you just handed me. Nobody gives a fuck about a mud kitchen in the seventh district, but city public funding inequity?” She made a face.

“Okay,” Kara felt ideas begin to collide behind her own eyes. “So, you know, what next? Where do we take it from here?”

“We are taking it nowhere.” Cat furrowed and re-tied the sash of her silk pyjamas. “You? Take it wherever you want. Call me when you have something worth reading.”

“I have other things to pitch too.”

“Oh yeah?” Cat glanced.

Kara hesitated and pulled something out from nowhere.

“Your life story?” she suggested. “You know, just. Who you are? The woman behind…” Kara gestured to the opulence of her home.

Cat blinked in this funny, offended way. “You want to write my obituary before I’m even worm food?”

“I want people to know you.”

“You want to know me.”

“You asked for a good story,” Kara followed her into the hall and through the kitchen. “That would be a good story.”

Cat wouldn’t agree. She wouldn’t go along with it. Yet, there she was, silent for a moment, her head slightly going side to side as though thinking about it.

“Perhaps I’m a narcissist after all.”

“Is that a yes?” Kara balked with shock.

“It’s an initial interview. Call my assistant, schedule something.”

“I am your assistant?”

“Then schedule something.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXI

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

In the office, Kara meandered in this quiet and uncertain way. It felt different without Cat around the place. It was the same, it was somehow different, not like when Cat was on business, gone for an interim then back for Monday. The office seemed to lose a little of the energy.

There wasn’t a felt tension in the air anymore.

It was as though, by and large, everyone accepted it as an improbability that Cat Grant could walk through the door any moment looking for heads to roll.

By the photocopier, Kara paused and daydreamed and went through the motions of a job. She thought about scoops. There was a school on the outskirts of town that she passed by on her morning train, with a derelict roof, potholes in the playground, and a brand-new Maserati parked in the principle’s space.

That seemed…

Odd.

For some reason and no reason, Kara put on her coat and went for a walk. She got coffee, then caught a train back on herself as though going home for the day. She got off four stops early and took another walk. It was around noon, the kids playing, the noise of it something wonderful to hear ear as she turned the corner largely because it proved different than the city noises she had grown used to.

“Hey,” Kara noticed the lunch lady leaving through the gate. “I’m sorry. Do you work there?”

“Sure do.” The woman smiled politely.

She had wiry dark hair, thick glasses, and that pleasant warm smile that made Kara think of lunch ladies back home, and she wondered for a moment if it was a requirement for the job. To be that kind of woman, kind smile, warm eyes, a little boring to the eye of an adult, but for a child who didn’t know how to say they were hungry because there wasn’t much food at home, there would not be a safer person to confide in.

She looked like the kind of woman who saved seconds, thirds, and extra apples.

Kara figured that meant she was the kind of woman who would talk if public funding was winding up in places it shouldn’t.

“Are you…” The woman looked around. “Lost? Or do you have a kid here?”

“I was lost,” Kara said decisively and felt a little reinvigorated. “It’s a long story. Would it be okay if I walk and talk with you? I’m a…” She paused. “I’m a reporter.”

“No comment.”

“You don’t know what I’m asking.”

“Something I shouldn’t give a comment on if I like having a job.” The woman fixed her purse and started walking.

Kara tailed slowly. “Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s a Maserati parked in that spot—which I’m guessing is the principle’s?”

“Why would that be strange?”

“Because you’re holding a fistful of empty canvas bags.” Kara observed, then glanced at the row of tiny supermarkets and grocery stores sandwiched together at the end of the street. “Which means you’re probably spending your own money to bring food for the kids?”

“Lady.” The woman laughed and turned, her hands going outward as though to gesture to the whole neighbourhood. “Look around. You’re in the seventh district. Of course I bring fruit and greens for the kids.”

“But the principle drives a brand-new Maserati?” Kara levelled seriously. “That’s…normal in the seventh?”

The woman didn’t reply but her lips fidgeted, and her eyes glanced.

“If I give you something, what are you going to give to me?”

“Something too, sure.” Kara shrugged. “Seems like you care a lot about the children. We could start there? I wouldn’t need you to go on the record. We could just talk?”

“What should I call you?”

“Kara,” she offered out her hand. “And you?”

“Shirley.” She shook. “Okay, Kara, let’s take a walk.”

Kara felt she had this reporting thing nailed and in the bag.

It defined the rest of her day. She didn’t go back to the office, but it put pride in her legs, had her strolling a little firmer, and when five rolled around and she found herself heading up to Lena’s office, Kara almost skipped through the foyer, buzzing with excitement to have a good thing to talk about.

“Well, hello you.” Lena’s eyes widened with fondness as she put the phone down. “You look happy?”

“You, Miss Luthor.” Kara lifted her chin. “Are looking at Kara Danvers, CatCo Reporter, future Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who just blew the case wide open on Jefferson Elementary School Scandal.” Kara’s hand wafted through the air as though painting the words.

“Jesus what did you find?” Lena footed around her desk, folding her arms over her blouse, hooked on every word.

“The principle.” Kara’s eyebrows wiggled. “He’s been taking payments under the table to secure public sector contracts.”

Lena’s green eyes went wide, then wider, her mouth opening and closing. It was as though she was trying to seem as enthusiastic and interested as she was the moment prior, but had caught herself slipping, then booted it all into overdrive.

“What kind of public sector contracts?” Lena stayed engaged.

“Plumbers, grounds maintenance, the works.” Kara gushed as though she had caught the biggest fish in the pond. “Word on the street? He brought in his brother’s building company to build the mud kitchen and new playground in the kindergarten courtyard. I don’t want to get ahead of myself until I find sources, but his brother’s building company could very well be under the mafia racket. It happens in cities. Just look at the Chrysler building.”

“I think…” Lena trailed and blinked. Kara smiled when her girlfriend took her wrists, clasping, thumb moving in circles on the little bones. “We should go for dinner tonight to celebrate?”

“I’ll pay but I don’t mind waiting for you to finish up,” Kara pecked her lips. “I should email Cat anyway and tell her I took her advice—oh fuck.” Kara realised too late that she had said too much.

“Relax,” Lena laughed softly. “Baby. Sweetheart. Did you—did you think I didn’t notice you had started going into work again?”

“I know I just feel like I should have said something, but I didn’t know how…”

“I completely empathise, believe me.”

“You do?” Kara’s lips quirked. “What haven’t you been saying?”

“Nothing,” Lena excused it with a shake of her head. “Oh, you know, nothing, just…” Her hand started rubbing the back of her neck.

“Lena Luthor!” Kara’s eyes went wide and funny. “You’re keeping a secret!”

Lena grimaced and crumpled. “Yes but—” She didn’t want to say it. “Can we, just, have secrets on the understanding we would tell each other if it was essential? Do we…are we there yet, in terms of trusting each other?”

“We are there.” Kara nodded. “I don’t need to know everything, it’s healthy to have some boundaries. You can keep your secrets, I trust you.”

“You know for two girls who aren’t soulmates…”

“Shut up,” Kara whispered softly with the most heart-eyed expression, kissing her girlfriend’s nose. “Where do you want to go for dinner?”

Soulmates: Chapter XX

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

Cat watched the television, half-interested, still not committed to the new Judge Judy syndication. She let the touch up on her manicure dry on the little tray table, where lunch sat untouched, lemon water remained without a sip, because despite outer appearances, she was beginning to feel a little under the weather.

Lena had left a little later than she was hoping but there was time to touch up her lipstick, move her hair this way, then that way, and that made her feel better. It made her feel entirely herself. It was a sense of primness if only because that was who she felt to be, chic, stylish, put-together and unconcerned if it made her conceited. It was certainly not for anybody else. Despite that, Cat felt Thursdays to be both complicated and reliable as far as her diary went.

She had nudged Lena out of the door at eleven forty, if anything, just to prevent a scene unfolding. Cat paid through the nose, liked having a room with a view, but the nurses—all of them paid handsomely to sign non-disclosure agreements—were beginning to talk about her busy, reliable Thursday visitation schedule.

Twelve o’clock, right on time.

“Your final cover sign-off and the important documents.” A heavy brown leather bag filled with work struck the bed in a hard, heavy thud. “I’m still angry about last week.” Kara seethed quietly and folded her arms.

Cat grimaced and looked at the heavy leather bag sprawled on her legs with documents cascading. She rolled her eyes, aware Kara wouldn’t apologise but knowing she still felt a little guilty and that deserved to be drawn out—somewhat.

Cat didn’t have to look away from the television to know Kara’s eyes were doing the thing. The righteous, angry, narrowed and self-grandiose thing that made the corner of her lips twitch with the urge to smile.

“You’re angry every week,” Cat sighed and reached for her reading glasses.

“Then call me consistent.”

“I call you many things. Consistent, while accurate, is not in the top ten.” Cat reached for the brown paper folder first. It was almost over-spilling, fat and wedged with printed stills and photography. “Spit it out, Keira. I have Pilates at two then yoga right after and I don’t want to be late again.”

“Hilarious.”

“You think I’m kidding?” Cat glanced, her brow furrowing deeply.

Kara stalled and didn’t know what to say to that. She grimaced, rubbing her brow as though it might help the tension. Cat blinked and didn’t say anything. She knew how this thing always went.

“About last week…” Kara sat down on a seat that was probably still warm from her girlfriend’s residency. “Cat, I can’t keep doing this.”

“I don’t recall ever inviting you.”

“I just.” Kara shook her head and took off her glasses. “I feel bad because you still pay me my salary even though I quit, which makes me feel like you don’t take it seriously when I tell you that I have quit! I no longer work for you.”

“Kara, I want you to use your listening ears and hear me when I say this to you.” Cat felt herself stiffen, tighten, become stern and at her wits end with all of this. “I pay you to be a personal assistant. I pay you to make sure there is the coffee in my office waiting for me in the morning. My meetings scheduled, my mail organised, my important documents brought to me the way I like them.” Cat nodded down at the heavy, overfilled bag that Kara still brought every week reliable as clockwork.

“I don’t understand your point?”

“Do I go into the office in the morning?”

“No.”

“Do I look as though I have busy, back-to-back meetings to schedule?” Kara didn’t reply but her expression faded into something blank. “You don’t show up to work. If that’s how little you think of yourself, of the industry I have given thirty years of my life to…” Cat shook her head. “If I was your age and I had all this time at my disposal—holding the career position you have? I would be chasing every assignment, every opportunity, on the ground hustling for my next report. As for your salary? I pay you to be my assistant, and here you are, the bag still shows up every week.”

The realisation came in this slow, undeniable way that etched itself across her face. Kara wouldn’t admit it. Today, just like every Thursday, the matter would be finished with for another prolonged interim. It was unspoken but they both understood it the same way. Without the salary, the pretence of a good and logical reason to be here, then Kara would still be here, every week, without a good logical reason or justification.

That would be when things got messy.

Cat didn’t like messy.

“Well, if you’re going to be a giant asshole and keep paying me then I’ll have…” Kara shook her head. “I’ll have to make the most of it and find a story to write.”

“Of course you would show up uninvited to an oncology unit and act like the continuity of your salary despite a total lack of uptake is…” Cat pinched her nose. “Some slight.”

“Sorry.” Kara dipped her head.

“No, you’re not.”

“A little,” she meant it this time. “I felt like I was starting to have things figured out. Then it happened. You happened.” It struck like a sharp barb but with a small inhale Cat held her impenetrable expression. “I feel like I’m…someone I don’t like anymore. It’s like Lena leaves for work—” That made Cat laugh. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” Kara locked her eyes firmer.

“Nothing, nothing. The medicine.” Cat nodded off to the stacked pole. “You were saying?”

“When Lena leaves for work and I have to sit with myself?” Cat felt like a confessional alter on Thursdays, she realised and felt she would now rationalise it this way. “I think about you, and it makes me angry, and most of all it makes me confused, because you…don’t want me. I don’t want you to be my soulmate. But here we are, on borrowed time, and I don’t know how I am supposed to make something of it before…”

Kara broke into tears.

Just a little bit, so small it was almost imperceptible, a shield of layered ice melted from Cat’s heart.

“Well, you are here,” Cat offered softly while tears were dried away. “That’s more than being angry at home.”

“You were right.”

“About?”

“Wasting my talent.”

“I don’t believe I described it as talent.”

“If you’re going to keep paying me then the very least I can do is turn up to my job.” Kara seemed decisive about it. “Maybe there’s a story worth writing, something to get my teeth into.”

“That’s the spirit!” Cat praised something she felt didn’t merit praise, yet today she was a confessional, and perhaps that softened her heart. “Go forth, little one, find me a story worth reading. Also…” Cat paused and glanced at the hemp shopping bag at Kara’s feet.

“Yeah. I brought the two bottles of champagne, and the glazed miso duck, but the place you like wasn’t open so I got the grilled duck from the roof terrace spot and then picked up miso and soy glaze from the Chinese supermarket on my way here. I hope that’s okay, I used the company card.”

“That’s okay.” Cat smiled. “Thank you.”

“Mhm.” Kara placed it down on the little tray table and took away the cafeteria lunch and stale water. “Do you…want help?” She glanced back and forth between the bag as though unsure if Cat felt up to feeding herself.

“Fuck off, Kara.”

“Yes Ma’am.” She left without an argument this time.

Soulmates: Chapter XIX

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

Lena felt a little guilty as she stared down at the sandwich in her hand.

Not for the morning spent teasing Kara breathless and panting but for the lie she had told after.

Then again it was straight out of Kara’s old playbook. Not technically a lie but just a little bit of missing context.

Lena didn’t go to work; not right away at least. That was the main thing she felt conflicted about. She had known for some time she wasn’t going to work because Thursday mornings had become a period for constantly reliable out of office engagement.

A short interim of time spent elsewhere, nothing salacious, sometimes an hour, sometimes four, and she didn’t really talk about it to anyone.

At first, Lena didn’t mention it because she thought it might awaken something painful for Kara. That feeling passed. It solidified and became its own secret, just for the sake of having a secret to keep between old friends, silly, fun, and little more than that.

She had been meaning to talk to Kara about it.

She just didn’t know how anymore.

“It does look like bunny ears,” Cat agreed.

“You want half?” Lena offered the other one forward.

“With respect, I would rather try and perform fellatio on a horse running the Kentucky Derby.” Cat’s eyes came to the side again, smirking at the paltry excuse of a sandwich, then back to the television. “Salmonella written all over it.”

“I know, I said the same.” Lena sighed and leaned back in the plastic chair. “How are you feeling?”

“Good.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I know,” Cat sighed. “Me too.”

“You don’t want…” Lena wasn’t even sure what there was to offer. “I can’t get you anything?”

“A magic bullet to rewrite the faulty genetic code that is causing cells to uncontrollably divide and spread into the healthy tissue of my body?” Cat suggested. “Did you pack that with your sandwiches this morning?”

“Forgot it on the kitchen table, sorry.” Lena shrugged and earned a grin. “Cat?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Cat sat there, unbothered by it, in her perfectly Catherine Grant kind of way. There she was in a hospital bed drowning in the size of the gown, some inches too big, still growing bigger by the day, yet still so immaculate and beautiful.

There was this power she held in her hands, even like this, it simply exuded from her; to sit there with an IV pole, dangling chest port, with this certain pronounced thinness from the treatment, and yet she was beautiful in a way that announced itself—demanded it from the eye of the beholder.

Fierce, dignified, highlighter and blush on her cheeks because she still held herself to that standard, and Lena could tell that her blonde hair had been cut and styled, blown out, some pride put into it despite…

Lena didn’t want to acknowledge that Cat’s hair was thinner than last Thursday, but it was. Cat didn’t care, for as long as she had it, she would make the best of it, the most of it, and that was yet another perfectly Catherine Grant thing to do given the circumstances.

“Cat?”

“If you tell me that you love me again—”

“I do.” Lena nodded, solemn, exasperated, staring at nothing. “You are…one of my best friends. You are the person who was there every day, when Sam died, when I was sick and in the hospital after, you killed every hit piece dead in the water—never said a single thing in the magazine despite knowing all the big scoops. I hate things feel weird between us, I hate that you don’t call or text anymore. I hate that we’re not talking about the elephant in the room because you are—were—my best friend.”

“And yet here you are, despite all of this supposed disconnect from my end, every week, more reliable and on time than a German train service.” Cat’s eyes twinkled with amusement, though she never looked away from the television. “Lena, I don’t call or text because I’m…” She gestured at herself, at the room, as though it was arrogant for Lena to assume some priority above it in her thought processes. “Listen, I don’t know what elephant you think there is but if you want to talk about it you should talk about it.”

“Kara.”

“Nope.” Cat shook her head.

“You’re soulmates.”

“We may very well have been,” Cat quietly agreed in a way that was non-committal to the idea, then shrugged and finally looked at her friend. “Here’s the thing, Lena. We can play what if games, we can go round in circles, talk about hypotheticals where I have some long years ahead of me, where Kara is…” She shook her head, as though wanting to say something based and cruel, yet struggling to find something.

That was very unlike Cat Grant.

“She does this thing, you know.” Lena stared off to the side, thinking about it, smiling despite how sad it made her feel. “We’ll be doing something, watching television, eating dinner, whatever. I’ll say something. She doesn’t reply. Then I look and she’s…” Lena gestured at nothing. “She’s away in some daydream, with this vacant look on her face, and I know she’s playing out a different life—some life she says that she doesn’t think about despite very much, constantly, always running away from anything that makes her think about it. She just sort of comes back to life, and there’s this look in her eyes, as though she’s looking at me but seeing…”

Lena didn’t know how to say it.

She didn’t want to say it because then she would be admitting it.

But she gestured.

And Cat understood.

“Lena.” Cat gestured her hands for the rambler to slow down on her rapid, nervous rabbiting. “It sounds as though you care a whole lot more than either of us do and for that I can only apologise.”

“I am objectively the person who should be apologising to you.”

“That won’t be necessary. I sincerely am sorry that I have…become an imagined competitor in your relationship with Kara Danvers. I want you to be happy. I want Kara to be happy. I want that for you both because me?” She stared very seriously. “I have had the happiest, biggest, greatest of lives. I regret nothing. I wish for nothing. If I am supposed to be sat here, filled with regret, then I’m not.”

“I’m not Kara, Cat.” Lena pushed forward slightly. “I know you well enough, for long enough, that I know when you’re talking out of your ass.”

“Then ask me whatever it is you really want to ask me, Lena.” Cat closed her eyes and sighed.

“Did you…” Lena stopped, because she didn’t want to ask, she just wanted the answer so that if ever Kara wanted to know, one day, then someone would have answers to give her. “Did you feel some pull, some awareness? People say that but I wouldn’t know. I just, I’m curious?”

Cat opened her eyes and looked at Lena with a faint, vague expression that couldn’t be deduced. It wasn’t displeasure but it wasn’t a happy memory.

“I felt drawn to her, yes.” Cat nodded. “I think…a week after she started with the temp agency? I realised I was having to force myself to call her Keira. I knew her name, and I don’t know names, not assistants at least.”

“That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

“Because it isn’t.”

“Do you love her?” Lena blurted.

That took Cat back more than a little. She blinked, then blinked again. Lena felt guilty because the answer wasn’t for Kara. It was selfish, it was necessary, it was something she herself wanted to understand, because how could Cat possibly not love that girl?

More than that, Lena didn’t feel jealousy, just this faint sense of unselfish purpose to somehow give everyone a little of whatever they needed. Mostly because she felt greedy, as though there had been an abundance in her life, a prolonged series of habitual good things, despite the fact it wasn’t true. Her wife had died. She had grieved it then, still grieved it now, but there was joy, and her love with Kara didn’t feel like a band aid. It felt like a breath of life. It felt like this good, insular thing where she might make a home for the rest of her life.

But, Lena knew what she had been seeing as time had gone on.

She knew because she used to do the same thing, staring off, losing herself, playing house with Sam long after she passed, wondering about a life that would never take root. The trouble was that Kara still had time to know things, hold it in her hands, have moments beyond the realm of her imagination, and Lena felt it was be selfish—repugnant—to deny her of that.

To deny either of them that small moment in time to just have whatever the universe wanted to give them.

“Your lack of answer is an answer,” Lena told her straight. “I’m not asking because I’m hoping for one or the other. I’m asking because…we’re too old, too jaded, and too fucking deep into this thing not to talk about it?” She rolled her eyes at her friend.

Cat sighed and looked at her manicure resting in her lap.

“She is a very pretty girl.” Cat smiled to herself. “She reminds me of myself when I was younger. It’s not the sweetness, it’s the fury, every now and then her eyes would…” Cat imitated Kara’s expression, eyes narrowing with tension, angry and righteously laser-focused. “I know you won’t believe me but there isn’t some pointed, obsessive attraction. I don’t think I’m supposed to have a soulmate, Lena, because the truth of the matter is that I like women, a little, sure, but I have always preferred men because they are stupid and well-behaved, and Kara Danvers is neither of those things.”

“Please talk to her?” Lena shut her eyes and pleaded.

“I don’t want to make this situation any worse than it—”

“Please,” Lena begged between tight, uncomfortable lips. “Cat, please let her know you a little better. I want to spend my life with her. I want to be the woman who is rock solid and there when she needs me the most. You—” Lena felt a dampness on her cheeks because it hurt, not just for Kara, but her heart too, Cat was her true friend.

“Well go on.” Cat snarked, smiling a little. “Don’t quit just before you start blowing smoke up my ass. You were saying?”

“I was saying, you royal bitch.” They both chuckled and staved off some differing sized rocks in their throats. “You are bowing out in a way only you ever could, you know? A little too early, but still in your own time, with everyone on baited breath hoping for an encore because you are Catherine fucking Grant.” There was such fierce respect in the way she said that name. “I do not know how I am supposed to compete with you, Cat, at some point after the dust settles when she starts to put you on the pedestal. I do not know how to explain and talk about my friend, to the girl I love, knowing that she is falling in love with some version of you in the back of her brain.”

“Kara Danvers will never put me on a pedestal. I think, personally, for her to have my name on her ass cheek?” Cat lifted a brow and thought about it. “Well, she is the person consecrated by the universe to not put me on the pedestal. Everyone else does, seems only right that she wouldn’t.”

“She is twenty-three, but she won’t be always.” Lena shrugged. “What the fuck am I going to do when she’s thirty, forty, then fifty, and she stops and looks around and realises she’s closer to you than she ever was when you were alive? I mean, fuck, dude, don’t do that to me?” Lena scowled at her best friend.

“Lena,” Cat cleared her throat. “I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’m worried.”

“Then shut up and stop worrying.” Cat levelled. “Jesus Christ. Only you. Only fucking you could step on to an oncology unit and feel like you have the right to be upset and wronged by the world. Yes, fine, I will write a letter or something. Just, please can you leave now?” Cat made her laugh without meaning too. She grinned despite herself, rubbing her temples. “Go. Bring actual food next week, and champagne, two bottles, something corked before we were born.”

“Cat?”

“I know,” Cat shooed, “You too.”

Soulmates: Chapter XVIII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)

Two months passed. Kara had not gone to work, not for a single day, yet the wire transfer came on the fourth of every month, like clockwork her salary still ticked along as though nothing had happened.

Kara didn’t acknowledge it, though she would eventually, but right now there was a steadiness at home that left her protected from the flux of the universe outside. She stayed with Lena, simply because it was a rolling date, a prolonged series of dinners and movie nights and all manner of things that went past the subway timetable.

Then, one day, it simply felt like her home too—or at least it was going that way with more consistency. Sometimes she went back to her place during the day, to shower, to decompartmentalise, but then four o’clock would strike, and back across the city she would travel to Lena’s, taking it all in while simultaneously hiding from the world.

Four consecutive nights at Lena’s place, Kara didn’t want to go home yet. It was alright, Lena made her feel that way, bought her the little things she might need to feel like this was her space too. A toothbrush, towels, pyjamas, a cleared-out drawer at the side of the bed, then a small portion of her closet.

It was a trickle of progress, all of it accumulating, building on top of the other in its own healthy rhythm.

Last night, there had been a small argument. Kara was beginning to come to terms with the idea that these moments, the tense ones, also added to the accumulation of good things. It was as though they would cross wires, find themselves at odds, unsure of how to proceed, then figure it out anyway.

Furious emerald eyes had caught her immediately when Lena came through the door from work. She stood there, stuck, watching Kara curled up in the leather love seat positioned by the window.

Kara had been reading a book that she had assumed to be Lena’s last good read. It was strange. She had never sat there before—never saw Lena sit in the seat either. Assumptions had been made that it was okay, and then she understood why it wasn’t okay.

A short, bursting argument. Lena went for her shower, remorseful when she reappeared, dripping at the ends of her hair, wet on her cheeks with a dampness that found her from tears—not the shower. Kara didn’t point it out, just hugged her, apologised in this quiet way, then accepted Lena’s apology.

They were navigating what it meant to love one another; for Kara, she was beginning to feel more proficient at what it really meant to love Lena. To accept that there were always going to be sore moments—sad moments—because she had loved Sam very much, then lost her so soon. It didn’t make Kara feel as though she was second-best, or that Lena somehow needed to move on and forget that part of her life.

That, among other things, left Kara more certain they were supposed to be together.

That sense of space and acceptance. The calmness they lent the other. The private amusement to be found at the other’s misfortune in a way that didn’t feel mocking or cruel—just funny, just too absurd for anyone but them to understand.

It was the other feelings too that left Kara wrapped up and in love, not just the calmness, but the breathless, rushing, tumbling over rapture of emotions that felt to be anything but calm.

Lena glanced at the sandwiches made for her lunch, they were ready on the kitchen side for her to take to work today, with an apple beside them, and she squinted at the shape slightly as she packed her purse for the day.

“Bunny ears?”

“A love heart!” Kara flicked her bottom with the towel. “I cut them with scissors—”

“The meat scissors?” Lena laughed. “Kara, you’re going to give me salmonella.”

“I used the other scissors,” Kara sighed, grinning and in love. “I got up, before dawn, slaving over that hot stove for you.”

“I didn’t realise a sandwich took such strenuous preparation.” Lena stepped closer and glided her hands along her girlfriend’s hips. “I love you, you know that?”

“I think so, sure.”

“They look like bunny ears.”

“They are a love heart!” Kara playfully shook her.

“If that is a love heart then I am…” Lena pushed out her cheeks. “I am falling in love, more and more, every day, with your abstract and colourful interpretation of the world—”

“You’re the worst.” Kara kissed her hard, like she meant it, mumbling and unbuttoning her girlfriend’s dress shirt. “You are the worst person I have ever met.”

“Definitely not your soulmate,” Lena agreed, husking and nipping the plump bottom lip at her teeth. “I could be late for work, I’m the boss, I think I’m allowed to do that?”

“I think so.” Kara kissed her again, slowly this time.

She liked the way Lena tasted like toothpaste.

She liked the way Lena had a metal filling on one of her back teeth, and sometimes, if Kara kissed her hard enough, she could taste the metal. It was weird, and strange, and Kara felt like some sort of psychopath for noticing and enjoying that kind of thing, but the kiss tasted like toothpaste, and the filling tasted like metal when she slipped her tongue, and that was a great start to the day.

Kara tugged off her own shirt, fumbling, giggling, kissing her, then small pink nipples instantly stiffened in the morning chill. Lena bit her bottom lip, grinning when she glanced down and saw, out of her mind, she bobbed and took them in hungry kisses and nipping teeth.

“You’re going to be late for work,” Kara giggled and threw her head back.

“I’m the boss.” Lena sucked and released. “I’m the Good Luthor, remember?”

“Mhm. The best Luthor, I would agree with that.”

“It’s not hard competition.”

“You said it, not me.” Kara lost herself to giggles when Lena nipped her breast with teeth and kisses. “Please can we make you late for work? I like making you late for work, baby, it means your mouth has been busy in places that leave me overflowing with gratitude…”

"Overflowing?" It caught Lena's attention.

A second later, Kara was giggling on her girlfriend’s hips. Lena picked her up as though she weighed nothing, forearm grasping a thigh, her other hand tight around her back, carrying them in the wrong direction, assured there would be a late start to the workday.

“There’s this thing you do,” Kara husked against her ear, hesitating, kissing the reddening top of it. “Well sometimes you do it, the thing when I’m about to, you know...”

“Cum?” Lena laughed at the shyness and lightly kicked the bedroom door open. “Oh yeah. What is that I do, remind me?”

“You know.”

“I know.” Lena shrugged and laid Kara down on warm, unmade sheets. “I just want you to tell me anyway.” Her emerald stare fixed and smouldering, Lena unbuttoned the rest of her shirt and waited for it.

“The thing when we make love in the morning and I get really close, and you look at the clock.” Kara broke into spurts of giggles, blushing, thighs clenching, hating this in the best way possible, because she was so unsure of how to make it leave her mouth confidently, she just was not raised this way. “When you see the time, and tease me, and then run off to work before I can cum, and tell me out the door you’ll make it feel good when you’re home later…”

“Oh.” Lena exaggerated her eyes and nodded. “That thing? Yep. Yes, I do know what you mean. Also, have I ever told you how fucking adorable it is that you call it making love?”

“Wait, are we—have we not been making love?” Kara’s eyes went wide and nervous.

“Oh my goodness!” Lena cooed and became guilty instantly. “Baby girl, oh no. I’m so sorry, I was teasing, of course we have been making love.” She craned and kissed Kara’s temple. “I just find it sweet, that’s all, you’re just so sweet and lovely when you say it that way.”

“Well, you know.” Kara shrugged, her hand gesturing between herself and Lena. “Some of us were brought up right—some of us were dragged.” She dodged the throw cushion aimed at her head perfectly and felt giddy, overwhelmed, tears in her eyes from the laughter that piled up into the room from both of them.

“Now you’re being silly, little girl.” Lena unclasped her bra, then took her pants down her legs. She clambered on the bed between Kara’s thighs, pulling them up with her along her warm, taut sides. “So the thing I do. When I see the time, and I leave for work, while you’re still panting and whimpering. Does it make you feel all tight, tense and desperate for the rest of the day, baby?” She kissed Kara’s cheek, then the tip of her nose.

Kara barely stifled the whimper.

Her girlfriend was Lena Luthor, topless, perfect, hard nipples grazing, pressing against this sensitive part of her body that had never felt quite so explored and understood. The sex was beyond lovely, more than that, it was sometimes mean, and Kara was beginning to realise how much she liked that too.

“You want me to make sure you get to finish and feel good before I go work, sweetheart?” Lena pouted sweetly, making fun of the situation in this soft way that did things for Kara. “You’re so pretty when you blush though…”

“No. No, I was thinking something else.” Kara cupped either side of her jawline, astounded by her, in love with her beyond reason. “I was thinking it would feel good if you did the thing…”

Lena looked surprised.

“You…you want me to tease you and make you wait until tonight?”

“Please, Daddy.”

Lena’s eyes went languid with the melting of her body, muscles simply slack and useless, until they all gave up altogether, and Lena slumped on Kara’s belly. Kara enjoyed how that word did things, touched her girlfriend in places that couldn’t be reached, and then all of it twisted into something that made Lena a little rough and possessive.

Lena almost came back to life instantly, she snatched the thighs back, all the way, pressing them into Kara’s body until pink wet folds were sandwiched and exposed. Lena dove down, kissing them, sucking them, burying pristinely painted red lipstick and eager slow tongue into one spot that made Kara cry and moan, shaking, stuttering and completely at a loss, because every time Lena did it, felt like the first time all over again.

“Baby girl,” Lena cooed and loved it, her eyes narrowing and glancing at the tremors, the flexing belly, at the way Kara folded her forearm across her eyes and gritted her teeth because it felt too good. “You like me that much, huh?”

“Mhm.”

“Say it.”

“I like you, yeah.” Kara grinned. “You…are quite the prize.”

“You are the most beautiful thing I think I have ever seen.” It fell off Lena’s tongue so easy and slow.

Kara felt nervous.

She felt nervous because she was beginning to believe her.

Lena mumbled into her ministrations, teasing words, sweet words, all of it flexing and melting together with total fluid ease. Lena kissed Kara right there, open-mouthed, tongue sweeping, gliding, back and forthing, focusing into this one particular spot, just beneath her clit, that left Kara trembling and groaning and out of her mind.

“Feels good there.” Kara clenched her eyes and stroked her fingers through Lena’s jet-black hair, holding her head so careful and light. “I don’t—I don’t know how you do that, but that spot, right there, you do it every time and it feels so, so—”

“Baby,” Lena husked and took a little pink nipple in her pinch. “You are so, so pretty. Look at you, all sweet, falling apart, I love the way you look. I don’t ever want to stop looking. I fucking love the way you taste.”

“Daddy please can I—”

“Oh dear,” Lena interrupted, kissing, pecking and looking at the time. “Kara, baby, I’m going to be late for work.”

“No I take it back.” Kara giggled and sat up, fighting to keep her girlfriend right there, locking her legs behind Lena’s back. “No, no, don’t—I give. I take it back. I was being short-sighted, I didn’t know you were going to do the other thing.”

“The other thing?” Lena’s eyes went so wide and stupid. “How many things could I possibly do?”

“The clit thing, where you suck and lick at the same time, but you do it…you do it just underneath, so it doesn’t feel too sensitive, and I didn’t anticipate you were—” Kara shook her head and clung tighter. “Please? Daddy, I’ll be so good. I’ll be so sweet and nice,” Kara whispered.

Lena stopped playfighting all of a sudden.

Nose to nose, Lena looked at her, in love, as much as one woman could ever be. It made Kara stop too, her breath catching slightly. Lena noticed it and smiled, really smiled, as though she would never be able to make sense of what this was—yet certain it was what she wanted.

Then quick as a flash, Lena jumped her, buried her into the bed, pinning her down and leaning close to kiss her neck, her jaw, her pushing chest that couldn’t hold a single moaning whimper back.

“I don’t want you to be nice,” Lena husked quietly.

She got up and grabbed her shirt, grinning over her shoulder as she did, and Kara just groaned and accepted her girlfriend’s silliness. She reached for a pillow, then hooked her hip over the mountain of blankets.

“You know,” Lena spoke up, glancing back again. “I think I’ll have to do the other-other thing tonight. I just…cannot think of a way to repay you for slaving over that stove, breaking your back this morning, baking the bread, slaughtering one of the pigs for the ham.”

“Chicken.” Kara swallowed the dryness from her throat and scooped her blonde hair back into a bun. “Chicken and avocado, but sure, yes, continue, what other-other thing?”

“The other-other thing?” Lena buttoned her shirt up again, her red lipstick smeared in the most delicious way possible. “You know, where I bend you over and tongue your butt until you—”

“The other-other thing!” Kara’s eyes flew wide. “No. Yes. I mean, yes, but also, we only do that when we’re drunk?”

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“What if I want to?”

“Then say your prayers and shower before six tonight.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Kara husked.

Soulmates: Chapter XVII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

Time crept in its peculiar way, constant but not fast enough, Kara had fallen into a light sleep on the sofa. The beep of the scanner on the front door stirred her just a moment before it opened. She sat upright, blinking herself awake, then a yawn struck her just as she turned to say hello.

“You look like a dinosaur.” Lena smiled sweetly and put her purse in the dish, then took off her coat. “Do I ask how your day was? Is that—do we just…” She seemed equally at a loss. “If we need to have serious conversations, we can do that, and if you need something else, we can do that too.”

“Define serious conversation?” Kara perched on her knees and hung her chin over the back of the sofa, watching the way Lena moved, how she didn’t seem to know what to do with her body. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so nervous before…”

“Me, nervous?” Lena glanced back with a calm expression. “Well maybe a little bit. It’s not every day that Catherine Grant’s soulmate—”

“No jokes, please?” Kara didn’t feel any anger. She understood, knew Lena’s reasons, but today wasn’t Lena’s pain. “We can do jokes when it’s your bad time, but today is my bad time too, so let’s save that for lunch tomorrow.”

“Alright.” Lena pursed her lips and put down her defence system. “I’m sorry, darling, I’m not very good at processing hurt but I have been trying to get better, and I did do that on my flight, the processing thing, and I…I can share that space with you.”

“I don’t want you to feel this is a break-up.” Kara blinked. “We’re not breaking-up, I figured that much.”

“You’re…sure?” Lena seemed taken aback.

“Unless you want to find one of those unmarked, plain and unbetroth girls you kept talking about when we first met?” Kara’s eyes brightened. “Didn’t think so,” she whispered at the stalled girlfriend rooted near the door.

“I just don’t want you to feel pressured, like you have to stay, that’s the main thing. I want you to feel heard, and respected, and—” Lena exhaled a fast, lost gasp of steadiness that escaped her. She snatched her head away, because she was crying, and she didn’t want to draw attention there. “Sorry. Excuse me, sorry.” She calmed instantly, as though it had never happened. “I want you to feel loved, Kara, very much. To me, loving you means wanting the best for you—not standing in the way of it.”

“Wine.” Kara lifted the bottle from the coffee table. “It’s been a weird day, I figure we just drink wine from the bottle, talk until we don’t want to talk, then go to bed and lay-in late tomorrow.”

“God yes.” Lena sighed and relaxed, finally daring to come close and sit on the sofa too. “So, a dumb question, but how was your day?” She flopped and turned, trading off with the opened bottle.

“A day.” Kara burst with inappropriate laughter. The tears came, slow and unfought, because she felt safe and that made it okay. “It was a day, babe, turns out you and me? We’re…” Kara shook her head and couldn’t think of a good word.

“Not special magic tattoo girlfriends?” Lena murmured against the neck of the bottle resting to her lips, blinking as she swallowed a swig. “Well, it’s a complication sure.”

Tired as she was, Kara didn’t want to be asleep. She took fingertips to Lena’s cheek, took the loose eyelash that had fallen there, closed her eyes and blew on it. She didn’t wish for anything. The universe wasn’t in that mood. But, Lena laughed, and that felt reliable and familiar.

“You smell good.” Kara sighed and kissed her neck.

“Are we allowed to do this?” Lena murmured, joking, a little serious beneath that. She slipped her arm around the cuddler. Kara pressed her jaw to Lena’s shoulder, tucked into her side and intending to stay there. “Do we—do we cuddle and talk about how we’re not soulmates?”

“I think so.”

“Alright then,” Lena settled and slumped deeper into the sofa, her muscles relaxing against Kara’s body. “So, Cat, how did that go?”

“Terrible.”

“I would ask if you gave her some long, impassionate speech about how I was the light and moon of your life but…” Lena grinned, somehow not jealous or angry. “I take it she didn’t want to run off into the sunset with you?”

“You think I suggested that?” Kara balked.

“I think you have spent your life waiting for a soulmate.” Lena was calm and unaccusatory. “I think it’s been a weird day, and you’re doing your best, and I think I’m not angry whichever way you tried to make sense of it all.”

“You’re a good person.”

“I know,” Lena agreed and tucked blonde hair around Kara’s ear. “You don’t give me enough credit.” She leaned and pecked the temple.

“Would you hate me if I told you…” Kara paused and sighed. “I mean, it’s hard to explain. I wanted, I think, to understand why she didn’t tell me—didn’t help me understand what was happening. I wasn’t selling her unconditional love. I just, I guess, had this idea all of my life that there would be some person, like just one person—my person—and they would love me just the way I was, think I was beautiful, and sexy, and enough, like I was really something, you know? And I…I didn’t understand…why I wasn’t enough.” She didn’t cry but her voice wobbled and strained around it.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Lena stroked a single, bitter tear that had broken from the pack. “It’s okay, baby, I’m not mad. I’m not hurt. And, for the record?” She tilted Kara’s cheeks and looked right at her. “You are more than enough. You are everything, you are all the things, you are beautiful, and sexy, and kind, and…” Lena seemed at a loss. “You’re beyond that, even. So what if special magic tattoo girlfriend doesn’t see it?”

“I told her Lena Luthor was twice the woman she could ever dream of being.” Kara didn’t lie, technically it was the truth.

“You said that?”

“I did.” Kara nodded as she took a swig of merlot.

Lena’s smirk stifled until she couldn’t hold back a spurt of laughter. “You’re doing the thing, right?”

“Which thing?” Kara glanced.

“The Instagram thing. Where you tell the truth a little out of context because you’re worried the whole thing isn’t pretty. So hit me with it, Kara Danvers, the context, the big scoop, I’m sure I will somehow love you anyway.”

A roll of emerald eyes, an exasperated sigh huffing on its own amusement, then breaking into giggles, as though Lena thought it was silly her love might cease, and that was all it took to make Kara feel a little safer with the idea of being seen as…

Not a good person.

“You’re sure you want to know?” Kara’s voice was steady and quiet. “It was…horrible. I was awful to her, Lena.” With a jostle, she pulled away far enough to really look at her girlfriend. “I guess, by extension, that means I’m being awful to you too, right? I mean. Here I am, I’m sitting here, drinking wine with you, feeling like there’s nowhere else I would rather be, but a few hours ago I was on Cat’s doorstep—”

“Hey, stop. It’s okay. Kara it’s alright I’m not…I know this isn’t how things are supposed to be,” Lena sighed and softened. “I know you want to feel certain, like you love me, and I love you, and we could never not be those people, constantly and without complications. But I don’t think it’s that simple. This a weird situation, but I’m okay with it, because you’re telling me the truth, and so maybe you can just be a good woman who is fresh out of good, ethical choices to make right now?”

“Well alright.” Kara pecked the corner of her girlfriend’s lips, then her cheek, settling back on to her shoulder for a little more cuddling. “You’re sure you want me to tell you what I said?”

“I mean, you have edged me for long enough, if it’s not the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard then I’m definitely leaving you in the morning—ouch.” Lena burst into laughter from the cheeky, playful pinch of her ribs. “Alright, alright, I’m sorry.”

“It was fucked up.” Kara wanted to be forgiven for it but didn’t know how. “I said to her…you want to die alone, lonely and without love? You go right ahead but don’t think you’re breaking my heart on your way out the door.”

“Wow.” Lena tilted her chin. “That was…pretty fucked up, sure, I see that.” She offered the opened wine bottle. “What did she say?”

“Something about thirty years ago we would have maybe really loved each other.”

“I could see that, sure.” Kara caught her looking at the mark on her hip. “Do you feel like you have a grasp on what was happening underneath the words? The emotions that were niggling?”

“All of them.”

“Yep, sounds it.”

“Anger.” Kara settled there first. “It was…this feeling of rejection. Not because I wanted her to be my soulmate. I wanted—you know—your name.” The tears gathered up and hung on her lids, but Lena already knew that, and Kara knew that she knew it. “But the way she showed me her mark. It was like, this puckered scar where she burned my name off, put her name right over it, like I didn’t exist, and I wasn’t important, I wasn’t good enough.” Kara shook her head. “It just…I don’t know. I felt worthless.”

“I know it’s not what you want to hear, but it is pretty fucking badass that Cat Grant burned off her soulmate mark and put her own name there instead. Can we just—can we agree that it deserves a Woman of the Year, Glamour Award?”

“Oh, fuck yeah.” Kara laughed and nodded. “I mean, who does that? Who looks in the mirror, stares at the person who is going to love them, wholly, completely, in all of the right ways, for all of their lives—” That did it, Kara lost herself to halting tears and a choke in her throat. “And says, you know what, I deserve more. I deserve everything I want. You, perfect stranger, can go fuck yourself.”

“So, this is it huh?” Lena sighed with a low, content rasp in her voice. “Me, with my dead wife trauma. You, with your unrequited soulmate—who will soon be dead wife trauma too. Which, by the way, I couldn’t be more qualified for helping there, so you made a great choice. And we’re just here, just figuring it out anyway, loving each other as it all stands?” Green eyes found Kara with a little hope.

“I think so.” Kara’s lips twitched, fidgeting side to side. “I hope so?”

“Me too.” Lena’s lips wobbled. “I wish I could give you this perfect soulmate thing. I wanted to give it to Sam, I want to give it to you, it feels difficult making sense of that sometimes like maybe I’m insulting you both because at different points I loved you both in different ways. But I want to be all the things you deserve, Kara. I’m going to go to bed tonight, with you, and feel lucky that we’re going eat breakfast together in the morning, and tomorrow?” Lena rubbed her forehead and thought about it. “We’ll just keep finding different ways to love each other, in spite of everything, day by day, steady as it comes.”

“And if…” Kara inhaled and held it. “If life brings more weird, complex situations?”

Lena smiled warmly. “Kara if you’re supposed to be with Cat then the universe will bring you and Cat together, and I’m not going to stop it, I’m not going to stand in the way. I’m just going to love you for as long as you love me, and enjoy that time, because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed for anyone—not even soulmates.”

“Bedtime?”

“Bedtime.”

Soulmates: Chapter XVI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)

No more than two steps down and Kara instantly regretted it.

The city didn’t care. The street was empty and devoid of life yet the sound of a busy world carrying on despite her sat in the air, spilled over from the closeness of the city, as though carrying with the black evening clouds and settling on top of the entire street.

The strangeness of it wasn't all that strange. There had been this big, angry and colourful argument. A dramatic escape. A slammed door and pounding, rushing feet. A push-pulling chest. A mind compounding itself. Then two steps into the street and returned to the world, Kara finally looked up and took stock.

It didn’t make sense.

She looked at the empty stationary cars parked adjacent, then the stillness of the streetlamps with nothing making shadows, almost a photograph, all of it without movement or motion. The street was too calm, too still, and Kara instantly felt how little the universe cared about her troubles despite somehow caring enough to create them in the first place.

But there was still all that noise. The proximity of the lower-side district fell on the doorstep. The city always eating away at everything, devouring and consuming any silence. The residential townhouses were central and expensive, tightly packed, sitting beneath it all, and yet the nothingness of the street seemed to compound and echo the thumping constant of a city, as if the world was peering around the curtain—sneaking glimpses and then ducking out of sight—laughing at the state of Kara's life.

For a few minutes Kara simply listened to the noise, gathering herself, standing there and taking it in, rooting herself in something outside her thought processes.

In the distance there were alarms, traffic, laughter and conversation. Then the distinct sound of helicopters choppering through the air, maybe a news helicopter or police surveillance.

Kara sighed, then sighed again. She stood straighter, unsure of which direction to start walking. She had always felt at odds with the universe but right now she mostly felt at odds with herself. One problem at a time; she figured out her feet, got them walking, slow but steady, and that allowed her brain to work again.

The guilt compounded. She regretted every horrible, nasty word that had tumbled over her lips. The ones she could remember. The ones she couldn’t remember. Kara didn’t even want to try. In the moment it had felt beyond anger, something she knew, while hissing hateful things, was little more than cruelty for the sake of cruelty, because how else could she make Catherine Grant understand the effect she had on others?

There it was, Kara thought.

Her carefully curated life online—pretence, filter, pleasantly out of context and glowing—was gone in the blink of an eye. For her, at least.  Kara felt confronted with the truth in a way that couldn't be unrealised.

All that effort to seem less dowdy in photographs, less boring through the lens of a curated life, less ordinary, less woefully Kara Danvers; she realised on the turn of the street corner that it was more for herself than it ever was for a soulmate researching her online.

Just too feel that she was actually interesting.

Beautiful.

Successful.

Someone that she herself might admire and want to know more about.

Then Cat had lifted her blouse and showed her the scar; the permanence on her body that Kara...

Wasn't good enough.

Wasn't interesting enough.

Not beautiful, worthwhile or valuable.

She was just...

Kara Danvers.

Kara Danvers, who had moved here to National City above all other reasons because something in her gut said this was where she would find the one. Just, not that one.

It wasn't supposed to be Cat.

There were emotional justifications to her rage and anguish, of course there were emotional justifications; she had a soulmate who was inconveniently—someway, somehow—not her girlfriend Lena.

“Can I come over?” Kara texted her.

“Of course.” The text from Lena popped up, then another followed immediately. “My flight lands in two hours. Your thumbprint will let you in the front door so make yourself at home. I won’t wake you if you are asleep.”

“I won’t be asleep. Thanks, I love you. I’ll see you when you get home.” Kara replied and put her phone in her pocket, looked both ways, then got her feet going again.

Lena felt, more than anything, to be her person. It felt right with Lena in this settled, certain way in her heart—right the way other people talked about soulmates. It was quiet and correct, solidified and assured, despite a lack of time under their belt, which felt romantic if anything, fated maybe.

More than that, Kara felt like there was this safety that ran parallel to the romance, the sex, the push-pull of wanting to touch her all the time, and how nerve wracking that was. Kara didn’t worry about it, not once, because in Lena there was the safety that came with having a best friend too. This person who was looking at her, really looking; not just seeing the outside, noticing the zit, the sweatpants, but grinning and looking and seeing right past that stuff.

Kissing would slip into giggles, then long conversations about silly things, as though Kara could do that, all night, all week, all her life, sitting on Lena’s hips; nose to nose and consumed with conversations about stuff that wasn’t important.

It wasn’t just happy with Lena.

It was happy like it would progress into some prolonged, always state of happiness. A shared life that would look and feel no different to anybody else’s perfect happy-ending story with their soulmates.

But Lena wasn’t her soulmate; the universe had said so. Kara couldn’t make sense of it, not just because she was head over heels in love with Lena, but because her actual soulmate wasn’t going to be around for the long-haul, and like salt into the wound, Cat made it clear whatever time there was left to be spent—it was not time she wanted to spend with Kara.

In some tiny way, that had been an instant relief, almost like Kara had been spared because Cat refused to even try and love her. Kara didn’t want her too, not as she was thinking about it, pounding the pavement, collecting the events of the day into something that made sense. Kara didn’t want her purpose, her life, her nudge from the universe to point towards making herself a vestibule for teaching Cat Grant how to be a decent person.

Which was silly, Kara knew that too, because she didn’t exactly feel like a good person after the things she had said. She just didn’t know how to make the accounting in her brain square it all away because soulmates were…

Soulmates.

A sure thing.

An inescapably concrete, arranged certainty that people simply did not avoid and ignore. A soulmate wasn’t just a partner—they were a fixed point. A tomorrow that was coming, because tomorrow always came, and that could only mean one thing despite Kara’s conflictions.

So, Kara just walked.

One foot in front of the other down the street, without determined direction, because the truth was that she didn’t know how to be a good person, not tonight; she just knew how to walk and breathe, and there was little else she felt capable of trying to do, so she just did those two things.

Past the first towering office building that sprouted up and welcomed her back, Kara realised there was one other thing she knew how to do; think in prolonged and expansive trails, losing herself, consuming and simultaneously consumed by an overactive mind. It was fine on vast farmland and wheat fields, helpful even, but not smart near busy traffic and tram lines.

Kara lost herself anyway.

Cat felt to be this complex creature who was neither malevolent or benevolent, yet exuded both of these energies abundantly, in a way that felt strange and unimaginable for a shared life—a loving partnership.

Kara walked towards Lena’s home, hands dug in her pockets, crying quietly, unsure of how to process these things. At least, not with heckling conversations back and forthing across streets from neighbours. The raring, clattering sounds of the city colluding and sticking with righteous imposition in her disordered mind. The smells, the traffic, the noise, the unforgiving totality of it was overwhelming.

It pushed her further into her thoughts; into her steps, trudging into internal questions and conflicts, because she could not imagine Cat in any other light or gaze, yet there had to be other lights, other gazes, other moments to be shared with her, all of which would inevitably make sense because right there on her hip…

Catherine.

Kara walked, and walked, and found herself a mile later right in the centre of towering concrete, into the billow of a restless city sprouting around itself. A real city, one that never slept, never ate, never lived or breathed, but just took up all the good views and good air in a way Kara began to realise that she hated and wanted no part of.

She couldn’t stop walking.

She couldn’t stop the inertia of a dense, unimpressive, greyish city.

She couldn’t stop wandering through ideas that felt tentative and uncertain; to imagine what a life with Cat would look like, certain it was a life she did not want.

The main junction was tailed with traffic in every direction. Kara dipped her head; walked through the slow, non-existent movement of traffic, around a stalled hood, then slipped around the trunk of the opposite pushing car, saving no time at all, yet simply feeling as though she should not stop walking.

It was the thought of Cat in a kitchen, at dawn, making coffee and eating toast. It broke her brain eleven different ways. The way that thought did not—could not—sit in her mind long enough to even fathom a picture. It was too impossible and absurd. A flash, a vague idea of comfortable domestic quietude, with an exhausted woman eating toast, naked, some little smile in her bite when she looked Kara’s way and saw Kara looking back at her, but then Kara realised it was someone else’s smile etching in her mind, someone else’s penchant for avocado toast with two eggs and a sprinkle of pepper.

It was at best, on the sixth attempt, a very Lena-esque rendition of Cat, there in her head for just a second, then quickly morphing into jet black hair and a radiant dimpled smile, making crumbs on the kitchen floor in her brain, and Kara did not want to sweep them away, not for a second.

Kara kept trying to picture it, to put Cat in some domestic scene. It was as though Cat Grant, for such a small woman, had made herself too big to fit inside a warm, homely kitchen. Time and life had taken her somewhere else—somewhere too far gone for Kara to meet her there.

There it was, Kara realised on the corner between fourth and fifth, perhaps the only thing Catherine Grant could not afford to buy in any meaningful way. A chipped, used breakfast table with two chairs, a newspaper on top, and a wife sitting opposite to share a crossword with. It was sad. It was heart-breaking and morose; to have all that success, all those fancy things, and yet own nothing quite as important as a burgundy spilled wine stain on the kitchen table from too much laughter shared with someone worth laughing with.

Beyond the mundane, ordinary things that people shared, breakfast in the kitchen, moments of domestic quiet; Kara found herself at other losses. Big and small. She swung her stride into the turn of the pavement, squeezing to the side as the foot traffic grew thicker, somehow three or so miles further than where she started her walk.

Cat was beautiful but she was also greyish, asexual almost, in the same way a teacher feels to be asexual. Kara couldn’t imagine it—her—doing anything of the kind. Cat was…too pristine. Too difficult to imagine as a woman with kinks, and turn-ons, and preferences, and so they didn’t exist because they could not be imagined.

Kara skipped faster when she saw the tram pulled into the spot, it was heading northbound, and she instantly gave up on the idea of walking anymore. It was getting her nowhere fast—literally and metaphorically. She hopped on the back.

There was a little railing and platform just before the door of the cart. Kara stood beneath the shelter of the roof, half-inside, half-outside, cold pricking air on her cheeks. She patted her pockets and didn’t find her card, her purse was quickly rummaged through, but it was late and the attendant at the front didn’t glance her way, so she stopped, strangely, as though an engine had stalled.

Kara stopped entirely.

No movement, no thoughts, just that cold pricking air needling her skin, reminding her of her body.

The day had brought so much stress, her body needed to be without her overactive processing for a minute, just for a pause to get her lungs working the way they were supposed to. It came to her. She remembered how to breathe again, properly this time, and that felt like a battle won.

Slowly, the cart pulled and ricketed along the line which jump-started her brain into movement. Kara stepped into the car, sitting down on the first empty row of seats. She hunched over, all unladylike and almost folded over her lap, rubbing her headache with a hard sigh.

It wasn’t that Cat was totally impossible to imagine in her future, Kara thought around that a little more.

Cat was the boss Kara felt she would tell her children about one day. Twenty-one or two-ish, somewhere between college and real adulthood, convinced they are the first and only person, in the city, in the world, to have an asshole boss who inflicted misery in gleefully proficient ways. Almost tucked away, that was where Cat had been living inside Kara’s imagination of the future.

A story to be told to the kids, everyone sitting altogether on the back porch, with rolling eyes and laughter, because who could ever believe someone once made their mother ensure all the bubbles in the bubble wrap were no more than a millimetre to one another. There Kara had indeed found herself, with a ruler, because the gifted vase being sent to the other side of the coast had the thinnest lacquer of hand-stroked gold that needed careful transport. A wedding gift for some vapid, tenured reality show cast-member.

A story worthy, prize winning, blue-ribbon bitch of a boss.

To Kara, at the time.

Maybe not to the gift’s recipient.

That vapid and self-absorbed reality star, whom Kara found out weeks afterward was actually a former subsidiary employee. A junior weather girl on a local station that Cat had bought-out some long years ago. They had met only a few times, talked to each other just the once or twice, all of it too many years ago for anyone to really remember but Kara had seen the photographs in the archive, the two younger women chatting politely to one another, and she knew that Cat must have remembered it all quite perfectly.

Sometime after the nice young weather girl left, though years before she became famous for other things, Cat had heard about what the charming news anchor at the same station had been saying and doing behind closed doors. Handsy, but certainly charming and successful enough that it would never stand up under investigation—not on the complaint of a young, unimportant, unremarkable weather girl.

Kara couldn’t be certain of the facts because there were no official documents or complaints, but maybe just like that junior weather girl who had curiously left the station quickly and quietly, despite gushing to Cat, wide-eyed and optimistic, in the archive footage Kara saw online, how she had wanted to be a weather reporter since she was in second grade, how amazing and exciting it felt to be living her dreams.

Cat fired him the same afternoon she heard the allegations.

And some years later, she sent the vase as a gift for that unremarkable, unimportant weather girl’s wedding day; made sure on the most explicit terms possible to her temping assistant that the bubble wrap was to be checked, twice over, just to make sure it was proper for such a nice vase, and that it should be wrapped neatly in gorgeous paper, a handwritten card with no words—just her signature—tucked neatly into the crease.

Cat Grant was many things, forgetful didn’t seem to be one of them. She sent Kara the navy-blue dress after all, despite knowing what Kara did not know at the time. Cat must have felt some sense of wrongness in her soul, small as a seed, it had to have taken root somewhere, yet she sent the navy-blue dress and gala invitation.

She waved her wand, sent Kara to the ball, and if Lena didn’t want to go then that was too bad—she told Kara to go ahead and take her anyway, because Kara was young, in love, and the dress was very beautiful, one had to make haste of such things.

The cart came to a slow stop to take on passengers, and Kara continued to wonder on the reasons; why Cat would care enough to send the dress, but not enough to tell Kara the state of things, because there had to be reasons, and Kara hoped for lovely ones.

It made Kara feel less terrible, less confused, entirely less awful. Until she remembered the things she said—shouted—while glaring Cat down in the hallway and bitterly wishing her well on a lonely, sad voyage into the end.

“Smile.” Kara jerked up and met eyes with the old woman sitting across. “Whatever he did…he is either not the one you’re supposed to cry about, or he’s the one who is going to make those tears worth it in the end.” She winked.

“Thanks.” Kara sighed and took the backs of her hands across her cheeks.

“Soulmates aren’t easy.” She lifted her sleeve and pulled it up to show a mark on her wrist—a name that was blurred and old like an aged tattoo. “Harry was difficult. It took work…men always do. Would you believe there was a Harold before him? I had a Harold before Harry, for three years, and those were good years—the best years.” The woman’s eyes went calm with a certain light. “Love is very difficult, and it’s a younger woman’s game, I remember that.”

Kara pushed a small smile and nodded, “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“What always happens, dear. I met Harry.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Tall, plain, not terribly handsome or exciting. Till, one day, I see this mark under his shirt collar. It was summertime and he had unbuttoned the top of his shirt and I had seen it before but never…” Her expression became furrowed. “It was my birth name, from before I was adopted, that the nuns had gave to me when I was a baby. It’s still so strange but until that moment, seeing it there on his neck, I had never thought about my birth name. I never told a soul about it.”

“What happened after that?” Kara asked curiously.

“Three children, plenty of arguments, thirty years of marriage, a life that went how life always goes.” The woman smiled.

“But the first Harry?” Kara blinked. “You just…” She wanted to say left, abandoned, deserted him as though he had never existed, because those were her own feelings from the day, but she said nothing and let it hang.

The stranger sat there with her expression calm and paused.

“Well.” Her coat buttons were fiddled with. “The heart wants to believe what it knows, what it feels is right. Harry—the first Harry—he had this birthmark on his bicep with my name. It was my name, the name he knew, but not the name I was born with. It looked…different to other people’s marks. I always used to tease him about that.” Her eyes shone a little, then she sniffed and gave nothing else away. “A tattoo, not a birthmark. He had it put there. To trick me. To…try and stop the natural order of things.” She exasperated as though it were understandably deranged.

“So, you left him?”

“Mhm.” She nodded, surly. “He had noticed me before I ever noticed him. He saw my birthmark and introduced himself by his middle name, Harry, not his Christian name, Edward.” Kara was enthralled and conflicted by each detail. “He said it was love at first sight, but love is so far above us, it’s the universe’s business, and you do not need to trick or lie for it.”

The last part made sense; Kara felt inclined to agree.

The car slowed toward Kara’s stop, a ten-minute walk from Lena’s apartment. She got up, gathering her coat and purse.

“Did your husband, the second Harry, the right Harold.” Kara looked back over her shoulder to the older woman, inhaling and working herself up to it. “Did he love you like he was trying to always get better at it, to keep you for always, or like you were something he had a right to? Like, he didn’t need to try because the marks said so?”

The older woman didn’t verbally respond, she didn’t need to, her expression gave her and the truth away with little more than silence. It was as though she flinched slightly at the unexpected question, her eyes flickering as she thought about it, and the fact she had to think about it told Kara everything she needed to know.

“I think if somebody adored me that much, looked at me and felt things so deeply that they tattooed my name, figured what the hell, they would just love me like they were playing for keeps, because I was more than enough for them—” Kara imagined that first Harry, some idealistic young man, stood on a street corner with his heart thump-thumping wildly in his chest, so desperate and certain of himself that he had just locked eyes with the woman he wanted to grow old with. “Well. I…I think I would have made a different decision. I think I preferred your first love story better.” Kara turned back and got off the tram.

Maybe it was a choice.

Maybe a soulmate wasn’t what her life had been lacking, Kara thought.

Soulmates: Chapter XV

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

She had stayed at the park some long time past ten, just standing there, thinking and not thinking, until a ranger had appeared, uniform and khakis, somewhat concerned.

As it turned out, Southview Hill Park was a suicide hot spot.

Cat had laughed when he said that. She laughed, so hard, so violently, that it took her right back to her early twenties. The park ranger clearly thought this was strange, but satisfied she wasn’t a risk to herself, he let her on her way back down the path towards the turn that would lead to a footbridge, then a stroll to the gates that went back out towards city streets.

For all the things Cat knew in this world, this fact was fond and sacred and morbid in the second-most charming way possible, learned at the precise moment she needed to learn it, perhaps if only because the universe felt some semblance of debt it needed to square away.

She now knew why it was Southview Hill Park was the second most-charming view in the city.

And, sooner rather than later, she would take it to the grave, but there was no need to dwell or hurry things along—she had spent nearly fifty years living slow, idle, in her own distinctly Cat Grant way.

Why change now?

She took a car to her townhouse in the west district. The late-night visitor huddled near her doorstep was half expected, but Cat felt no fondness or romanticism for the display. She got out of the car, rolling her eyes, shoving her purse in Kara’s arms so she could open the front door.

“One hour.” Cat hummed. “You can ask whatever questions you want, but then you need to figure out a way home, and never ask me prying questions again, because that is still very much my area of expertise that I spent thirty years building a conglomerate upon...”

“When were you going to tell me?” Kara’s voice broke her heart.

“Never.” Cat remained firm. “Next question—”

“You don’t get to do that!”

“Why?” Cat snatched and turned around, rearing up close beneath the little girl’s nose. “Why do you feel so entitled to my life? For what reason, exactly? Because bippity-boppity boo—a tattoo showed up on your ass cheek one day?” She balked.

Kara’s chin wobbled and her tears refused to fall. “When did you know?”

“I didn’t,” Cat told the truth. “I didn’t until I did. I burned my birthmark off a long time ago, kiddo, you would be surprised how quickly you forget things with some determination and years behind you.”

“So I am…” Kara nodded and fiddled with her hands. “And you are…”

“Kara. Can I level with you a second?”

“Jesus, I would love it if you did.” There was a loathing, hateful fire in her gentle blue eyes.

It made Cat feel a little warm inside.

Almost resistant to the mere idea, Cat forced it away, told it to go fuck itself, shovelled and buried it dead until a certain sense of wherewithal found her again.

“You are so bright, so hungry for life and in love with the world, so let me ask you this and please—enough with the romantic bullshit—just think about your answer.” Cat swallowed hard. “How many happily ever afters do you really know? How many have you really seen with your own two eyes, enough to trust the biggest decision of your life to something as cruel and arbitrary as the universe?”

“Everyone, Cat. Literally, you fucking narcissist, everybody on the fucking planet except you and Lena Luthor get a happily-ever-after.” Kara grew red faced, shaking, too angry to contain any of it. “Here I am, caught in the shittiest love triangle in the history of the world, the literal worst fucking romance story in the duration of forever!” Kara pointed accusingly. “I was happy! I met Lena, and you knew, Cat, you knew what was happening and you let me fall in love with her anyway—”

“Your parents.” Cat felt her eyebrows knit with accusation. “What’s their marriage like?”

“Like…” Kara twisted and thought about it. “Like a marriage? They're quiet, content, happy.”

“Your grandparents?”

“The same.”

“And that's what you want?” Cat scoffed. “The same old safe bet? You don't want to be twenty, and thirty, and forty, falling in love in different ways every day, hating in little unimportant new ways every day?” Cat narrowed in disbelief. “It's cowardly. Beyond that, I am Catherine Grant, and I am nobody's safe bet.”

Kara stood there like a fool. Largely because she was a fool, and Cat never forgot it, but in some moments it felt more distinct and poignant than others. The youth. The age difference. The levels of life experience so vastly different between them that they were playing entirely different games.

It wasn't Kara's fault, Cat understood that, but it did nothing to alleviate her disappointment.

She didn't love Kara.

But for all of her mercurial ways, Cat wanted so much better for her.

“Soulmates aren't safe bets.” Kara's lips trembled in a different way, something other than anger stuck in her throat this time. “Love isn't...quiet or content! It is hopeless, peaceful, madly in love, blissful! It's not cowardly. You, Cat. You are the coward!”

“Alright.” Cat laughed at that. “Your friends? Do they seem… hopelessly, head over heels, madly in love, blissful in their little fairy-tale lives?”

“I don’t get what you’re trying to say…” Kara knew exactly what was being said.

“I’m saying that it’s bullshit, Kara!” Cat emphasised with boisterous, exploding laughter. It was disbelief, not humour, because it felt as though for all of her life she had been the only person in on this absurd joke. “It’s your Instagram page. It’s make-believe. It’s shiny, pretty little exaggerations because everybody is so fucking consumed with this idea of instantaneous and perfect love that when it dawns on them how empty and lacking it all feels…well!” Cat scoffed. “They must feel like they’re the only people in the world who feel such a thing—who have ever felt such a thing—because everybody else is so happy, shiny, and too terribly frightened to admit it either.”

“So, the entire world is fake other than you?” Kara stuck her hands on her hips. “Love isn’t real. It’s all a lie. You don't have a Kara-shaped birthmark somewhere on your body, and this is...what exactly?”

Kara turned and slightly adjusted the waist of her jeans.

There it was on her hip.

Funny.

Cat forgot, for just the briefest moment, what it was they were fighting about.

“Do you believe in free will?” Cat fixed her most formidable, mercurial, serious of stares and stepped forward to the optimist.

Kara scoffed.

“What does that have to do—”

“Do you, or don't you?”

“Sure. Yes, of course I believe in free will. I'm not...” Kara glanced around. “I'm here on my own conviction not because I think the universe is trying to spite you!”

Hesitant, Cat remembered herself, but she nodded at Kara's assessment of things.

“Do you think the woman you are is the same woman you would be if your life had been different, Kara?” Cat reasoned. “Your whole thing is your shitty little boring rural life back home, right? How it made you—defines you in these big crucial ways you need to process your life through and compare back to—do you think you would be the person you are today if you had different influences, or if you had made different choices?” Cat suggested with a slight cock of her head. “I made a decision thirty years ago that cannot be undone, Kara, because it led me to a lifetime of decisions that I wouldn't have gotten the chance to make had I prioritised something as stupid as a soulmate. Whoever that woman is on your hip...” Cat shook her head in repulsion where none was felt. “She isn't me, kiddo, not this version of me.”

“I think you’re right, Cat, because you are being a giant cunt, and I hate saying that to you, firstly because you are sick, and secondly because you are my soul—”

“If you say that word you’re going to find out the hard way why Anne Wintour tripled her security from late 2014 onwards.” Cat folded her arms. “I’m not sick, Kara, I’m just not yours. Thirty years ago? Maybe. I see that, sure, but I’m not some googly-eyed twenty something doing my first lap around the block.” Cat felt her eyes sting and she wished, prayed, hoped to god they would not reveal her.

“It’s not too late,” Kara whispered with reticence.

She was saying it because she was young, stupid, and life had taught her that it was her line in the script. Cat just shook her head, frustrated, ignoring the thump-thumping of her chest and the strange grief that came with a natural love she felt no desire or claim to.

“Kara, I’m sorry, I was nineteen and I made a choice. It was you or it was me, and I chose me.” Cat unbuttoned the bottom of her blouse and pulled it up to her ribs, tilting to the side, so Kara could see where it had one been. “I chose me, Kara, because it’s my life too.”

There was a puckered, silvered little scar that looked like an old burn. It was where Kara’s name had, indeed, once been—some long time before she had even been born.

The scar had healed, and over it, a new name had been tattooed.

Catherine.

“You deserve to be alone,” Kara cried, heartbroken, furious and without words for the things she was feeling.

“I know, kid.” Cat pushed a small smile. “But you? That does not have to be your choice for your life.”

“Good. That's good, because Lena Luthor is twice the woman you could ever dream of being even if you had batted a thousand instead of wasting your life justifying the nasty, callous way you treat people!” Kara seemed as though she was convincing herself more than anyone else.

It was a good thing, in Cat’s books, meant this whole ordeal would be just a little easier on the crybaby when it got to where it was all going.

Kara wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, adjusted her glasses and seemed to itch for a great escape through the front door she was stepping backwards for.

“Oh no, you're going.” Cat deadpanned, expressionless behind the eyes as she extended her palm. “But wait, I was just about to recite sonnets—”

“Fuck you, Cat. I’m going to Lena’s place, to a woman who loves me, and thinks I have inherent value and worth! You want to die alone, lonely, and without love? You go right ahead but don’t think you’re dismantling my self-esteem on your way into the grave!”

“Well fuck.” Cat reached for the bourbon decanter on the table, rolling her eyes, fond despite the temper steaming out her ears. “You know for what it’s worth I think you and I really might have loved each other to death. Sorry you were thirty years late to the party, kiddo.”