On Sunday, out of the blue, I wrote 4000 words of Greatest Day drafts. This fic has been living rent free aggressively in the background of my mind for a while. It decided it wanted some attention this weekend.
In this fic, Clarke and Lexa were big time lovers in College in Boston. Their love was mature and genuine and huge, but they couldn't figure out how to make it work when they graduated, and parted ways. Exactly twenty years later to the day, and without telling the other about it, they both move back to Boston and bump into one another by total chance in their old neighborhood, and develop a genuine friendship. Slowly, but surely, they fall back in love, but all along the way, their past leaks into their present and mixes old and new feelings in the best way.
In this sneak peek from part three in the present, they have had their re-meet cute when Lexa brings her step son Aden to the dentist to have his wisdom teeth checked. His dental surgeon is Clarke, and everyone is shocked and full of fun and surprised feelings. They decide to get some drinks and reconnect and catch up. At the bar, the Bartender is playing full albums on vinyl, and the two of them have both noticed that he's playing the full Sean Paul album that was absolutely everywhere the fall they got together. All of the parties they were violently making out in public at? Sean Paul's Dutty Rock was on. The back seat of Lexa's BMW because they couldn't wait to get inside? Sean Paul on the radio. That album was everywhere when their love first started burning, and neither of them will admit it, but those songs have always made them think of each other. But now the other is right across the table:
“Do you know what Echo’s been up to?” Lexa asked as her laughs died down. Lexa flicked her wrist to check the time on her watch, then clenched and unclenched her hands a few times before pressing her fingers together at the tips then slowly down to the palms to stretch them out.
Clarke didn’t answer right away. She was caught somewhere between the wine and the Sean Paul on vinyl and those familiar hand stretches Lexa used to do all the time when they were sore from rowing. She did it first thing in the morning when she woke up and rolled onto her back, and the image of those hands doing that stretch was the first thing Clarke woke up to hundreds and hundreds of mornings.
She completely forgot about it until that moment, and was knocked back by piles and piles of tiny moments all at once. She could smell their apartment senior year and see the waterstained paint job on the bedroom ceiling.
Lexa still kept her nails short, but they were well manicured now. Her hands used to be covered in callouses from rowing. She trained around the clock when she was a division one athlete and her palms kept the score. When she reached for her wine glass, Clarke noticed that Lexa’s palms were smooth now.
They looked so much softer.
“Clarke?” Lexa repeated.
“What? Sorry,” Clarke gently shook her head and brought herself back to the present and out of all of the beds she’d been in with those hands all over her. She was uncomfortable with how many memories of exactly that came back so quickly after a few tracks of reggaeton and a few glasses of wine in Lexa’s presence. She couldn’t remember the last time she thought about Lexa like that and not as a comfort concept from her youth. “I think she’s coaching at Bates in Maine now?”
“What’s going on?” Lexa asked with a welcoming smile. She knew that look in Clarke’s telling blue eyes so well. Clarke was somewhere else.
“Nothing,” Clarke softened and waved a hand. She took a reassuring sip of her wine. “I just noticed that your hands aren’t covered in callouses anymore.”
“There’s a lot I miss about rowing all the time, but the rowing hands is not one of them,” Lexa grinned and held her hands out for Clarke to see them clearly. She had a few well worn small callouses at the base of her fingers, but nothing like the peeling hands she used to have. “I still get out on the water a lot, but not at all like I used to.”
“It made my brain buffer. That’s not how I remember you,” Clarke chuckled.
“Well?” Lexa shrugged playfully. “You’re getting to know me again, so you’ll just have to get to know my new hands, too,” Lexa wiggled her fingers at Clarke innocently, but a flicker of something familiar burst in between them.
The cadence of her words, the slight and perky brow raise, the flirty, swaggy shoulders Lexa always shrugged just right alongside a desolating innuendo, and the ever charming smile she was born with exploded across the table and ripped open the fabric of time and space to transform her into a delightfully cocky twenty year old Lexa across the table from an eager Clarke who fucking loved it.
“Time is funny like that,” Clarke replied as evenly as she could and begged everyone of her features not to flirt back. She didn’t even want to. The response was automatic. It was a default Clarke couldn’t reroute.
“Sure is,” Lexa broke into a more genuine smile, thankful that Clarke was still slick enough to outcool her when she needed her to.
