are you doing requests again? Would you do a VB x kate counting down the days and being reunited now they’re on different teams 😍😭 so glad you are back!!
every mile between us
pairing: golden state valkyries!veronica!exs!lovers x los angeles sparks!kate!exs!lovers
wc: 6.1k
summary: kate martin has gotten very good at counting veronica burton has gotten very good at pretending she isn’t.
🏷️: @timunhater, @marleymarleymarleymarley, @sammiejane22, @c-grace56, @333dee, @yourmom-25s-blog, @authentic-girl03, @ladyluvbugs, @italy4life, @nervoussagittarius
kate learns to count in a new language that season. not minutes or possessions or the gap between her team's record and the top of the standings she learns to count in the particular unit of days until veronica, which is its own kind of arithmetic, messy and inexact and completely impossible to stop doing once you start.
it doesn't announce itself, it doesn't come with a warning one morning in early june she wakes up, rolls over, and before she is even fully conscious her brain has already done the calculation: twenty-three days. and then it keeps going, day by day, like a clock she didn't ask for and can't figure out how to turn off.
she does it in the morning when she rolls over and reaches for someone who isn't there, her arm moving across the cool left side of the bed with the particular stupidity of a body that keeps expecting something that isn't coming.
she does it in the locker room when her phone buzzes and her heart does the small embarrassing jump it does every time now, and then it's her mom or it's her trainer or it's a brand email and her heart has to climb back down from wherever it went.
she does it during film sessions when the footage shows her making the right read, the smart play, the clean assist, and all she can think is seventeen more.
seventeen more days and veronica will be here seventeen more days and this city will feel like it belongs to her again instead of just being a place she happens to sleep in.
the sparks are playing the valkyries in los angeles. she has had this date circled in something that isn't quite a calendar more like the inside of her chest, a bruise that keeps finding its own edges in the dark when everything else goes quiet.
the schedule came out in february and she had looked at it the way she looks at everything involving veronica now, which is carefully and with her whole chest, and she had found the date and sat with it for a long moment before she let herself believe it was real.
home game los angeles veronica on the floor in front of her veronica doesn't know she's been counting or maybe she does.
veronica has always known things about kate that kate hadn't said out loud yet, which is either the best thing about her or the most terrifying, depending on the day and how much sleep kate has gotten.
in their two years of whatever this is which has been called everything from complicated to long distance to, once, by veronica's teammate on a drunk facetime kate was not supposed to be part of, the situation veronica has demonstrated a consistent and slightly unnerving ability to know when kate is struggling before kate has admitted it to herself.
it's not magic kate has figured out, it’s just that veronica pays attention in a way most people don't she listens to the pauses, she clocks the things kate says around what she actually means.
kate has found this both the most comforting and the most exposing thing about being loved by her, this sense of being known so completely that there is nowhere to put a lie even if you wanted to tell one.
kate texts her after practice “staples is going to be loud.” she sends it without thinking about it too much, standing in the parking lot with her bag over one shoulder and the los angeles evening warm and pink around her she means i've been thinking about this game for three months she means i'm already thinking about after she means a lot of things she doesn't know how to put in a text message and probably wouldn't even if she did.
veronica texts back three minutes later good and then, after a beat i like it loud. kate puts her phone in her bag and stands in the parking lot for another thirty seconds doing absolutely nothing then she gets in her car and drives home and does not think about the fact that she's already at sixteen.
here is what nobody prepares you for the way distance gets physical kate had expected the missing, the ache of absence, the particular loneliness of a city that is beautiful and full of people and somehow still manages to feel like a waiting room.
what she hadn't expected was the way it settles in the body. the way she reaches for her phone in the middle of the night not because she needs to call anyone but because the weight of it in her hand feels like something.
the way she keeps her apartment colder than she needs to because veronica runs warm and kate has spent enough nights pressed against her to have calibrated her sleeping temperature around someone else's body heat.
she doesn't tell her teammates that she doesn't tell anyone this, actually, because she doesn't fully have words for it yet and the words she does have feel too large for a locker room conversation.
her teammates know about veronica the way you know about a weather system in another part of the country they're aware it exists and they know kate checks her phone too often and they have the decency not to make it weird.
dearica has said, once, gently she's gonna come for your neck on the floor, you know that right. kate had said that she knew but she had not said i'm counting down the days.
the facetimes help and don't help they help because veronica's face on a screen is still veronica's face, still the particular stillness of it, the way she listens with her whole body even through a camera, the way she laughs at kate's bad jokes with this small reluctant brightness that kate has spent considerable energy trying to provoke on purpose.
they don't help because kate can see her and can't touch her, which is its own specific cruelty, and because sometimes the connection goes bad at exactly the wrong moment — mid-sentence, mid-laugh — and kate is left sitting in her kitchen holding a frozen image of veronica's face and feeling something she doesn't have language for yet.
she learns veronica's schedule the way she learns opposing defenses; she knows when veronica has morning shootaround and when she has film and when she has the two-hour recovery window in the afternoon where she will actually answer texts instead of leaving kate on read for six hours.
she knows veronica prefers to call late, after ten, when the day has settled into something quieter she knows that when veronica is tired her voice gets lower and slower and more honest, like fatigue strips away the last of whatever professional distance she keeps around herself during daylight hours.
kate is very much looking forward to being in the same room as that voice again.
she doesn't sleep well this is not new kate has never been a good sleeper before big games, her body treating stillness like a problem to be solved, her brain cycling through possessions and rotations and the film she watched three times that afternoon — but tonight is different, tonight the insomnia has a specific shape and it is not shaped like basketball.
she lies in the dark of her culver city apartment and thinks about the last time she saw veronica, which was four months and three weeks ago, which was after a preseason game in phoenix that neither of them should have been playing in — both teams were running their second units, going through motions in october heat, and it had felt vaguely unreal the whole time, like a rehearsal for a play nobody had finished writing.
afterwards they had found each other in the corridor outside the visiting locker room, no plan no plan
arrangement just the particular gravity that operates between them, the one that has been operating since northwestern, since the first time they guarded each other and kate had thought oh, this is going to be a problem.
veronica had pressed her hand flat against kate's sternum, right over her heart, and held it there not a hug not a kiss, just the weight of her palm against kate's chest like she was checking something, like she needed to confirm for herself that the heart was still going kate had stood very still and let her the corridor had emptied around them and veronica had not moved her hand for a long time.
kate had said i'm okay veronica had said i know. i just wanted to feel it. kate turns onto her back now and stares at the ceiling, which is the color of nothing as she thinks tomorrow she also thinks one more sleep, which is something you say to children about christmas morning but apparently also something you say to yourself when you are twenty-three years old and a professional basketball player and in love with a woman who lives eight hundred miles away and is going to beat you tomorrow in front of your own crowd and has been pressing her hand against your heart for two years in one form or another.
she thinks about the game she thinks about the matchup, about what the valkyries will run against her, about the way veronica sees the floor which is unlike the way anyone else sees it, unhurried and total, like she has access to a version of the game that plays slightly slower than the one everyone else is in.
kate has guarded veronica enough times to know that the only way to do it is to stay with her for the whole possession, not to guess, not to anticipate, just to stay, because the moment you commit to a read is the moment veronica has already moved somewhere else.
she wonders if veronica is lying awake right now in whatever hotel room the valkyries have her in she thinks probably not veronica sleeps with the specific discipline of someone who has decided that rest is a form of preparation, who has organized her entire relationship to her own body around what it needs to perform.
kate has always admired this about her and also found it slightly irritating, in the way you find irritating the things about someone that expose your own failures by contrast.
she picks up her phone it's 1:17 a.m veronica's last message is still there from three hours ago which was her saying get some rest. i mean it. kate types and deletes can't sleep types and deleted it thinking about you. types and deletes then finally texts her what hotel you are in she puts the phone back down she stares at the ceiling.
she thinks one more sleep and she falls asleep sometime after two with her phone on the pillow beside her she dreams about iowa she dreams about a gym she doesn't recognize, wooden bleachers, the particular smell of a practice facility before anyone else has arrived.
she dreams about veronica at half-court, alone, putting up shots in the dark, and every one goes in, and kate stands at the baseline and watches and does not interrupt, and in the dream this feels like the most important thing she has ever done.
she wakes up at five forty-seven as the city outside the window is the gray-blue of a very early morning and the wanting is already there, already sitting on her chest, patient and absolute she lies still and lets it. she has gotten better at this at not fighting it, at letting the feeling do what it needs to do and then setting it aside so she can be a basketball player today, which is what today requires.
tomorrow she can be everything else but today she gets up, makes coffee, and starts thinking about the game.
she sees her during warmups this is the part kate has been both dreading and constructing elaborate mental scenarios around for three weeks — the first sighting, the moment when all the counting and the waiting and the 1 a.m. insomnia resolves into an actual person standing on an actual floor.
she has been trying to prepare herself for it the way you prepare for a hard defensive assignment which was by studying the film, by anticipating the reads, by deciding in advance what she will do and how she will feel.
all of that work is immediately useless veronica comes out of the tunnel in golden state purple, which is a color kate now has complicated feelings about, and she is laughing at something one of her teammates has said, her head tipped back slightly, and kate is standing at half-court and she forgets for a moment that she is at work.
she forgets the game plan and the matchup and the four months and three weeks and the eight hundred miles and she just looks the way you look at something that belongs to you even from a distance the way you look at a city from an airplane window when you're finally coming home.
veronica doesn't look at her not yet as she goes through her warmup with the same focused efficiency she does everything with, moving through her layup lines and her stretches and her shooting series with the unhurried precision of someone who has done this ten thousand times and is doing it exactly right.
kate watches in her peripheral vision, pretending to focus on her own shot preparation, hitting mid-range jumpers with the automatic quality of muscle memory while her brain is somewhere else entirely, then veronica straightens up from a stretch and looks directly at her.
it is not a long look it is not dramatic it is maybe three seconds of direct eye contact across the width of the court, and in those three seconds kate's body does about fifteen different things at once.
veronica's expression doesn't change much — it never does, in public, she maintains this quality of composure that kate has spent two years learning to read past — but there is something in the set of her eyes that says i see you. i know you're there. i've been counting too but then her teammate calls her name and she turns away and kate goes back to her warmup and the arena starts filling around them and kate hits seven shots in a row without thinking about any of them.
the thing nobody tells you about playing against someone you love is that you can feel where they are at all times. not in a mystical way — in a basketball way, the game sense that has been calibrated by years of study and repetition, that tells you where the pressure is coming from and where the help is late and where the gap is opening in the defense.
that sense has always been reliable it has helped kate in every gym she has ever played in it goes wrong when it's her it goes sideways in a way kate can't fully explain and would be embarrassed to try.
she knows where veronica is on the floor without looking. she knows when veronica is bringing the ball up before she hears the PA, before the commentators say anything, before the defense has even set it's not supernatural it's just that kate's body has been paying attention to veronica for two years and apparently that kind of attention leaves a mark.
the first quarter is professional kate is proud of herself for the first quarter she does her job, she runs her actions, she makes the right decisions, she does not do anything embarrassing like watch veronica run a pick-and-roll with her mouth slightly open she plays basketball which is fine.
veronica plays basketball too drops eight in the first quarter, which is a problem for kate's teammates but kate is having trouble generating the appropriate level of distress about it because eight points means veronica is in rhythm and veronica in rhythm is one of the better things in the world to watch even when you are supposed to be stopping her.
they don't make eye contact until the second quarter kate is coming off a curl, using a screen on the elbow, and she turns the corner and veronica is right there, two feet of air between them, and for a half-second the game falls entirely out of both of them.
it is so brief that kate isn't sure anyone else would have clocked it half a second where they are not basketball players but just two people who have spent four months apart standing close enough to touch and not touching, and kate can see the small thing that moves across veronica's face not quite a smile, not quite relief, something that lives in the space between those two things and then the ball swings wide and kate cuts hard and the moment closes like water over a stone and they are back in the game.
the second quarter is harder kate's focus keeps doing the thing she told it not to do, which is locate veronica on the floor and then stay there she catches herself twice watching a veronica possession when she should be transitioning, standing at half-court for half a beat too long, the part of her brain that is supposed to be running offense temporarily hijacked by the part of her brain that has been thinking about nothing but this for seventeen days.
halftime the locker room her coach says things kate processes with the surface of her attention she drinks water she thinks about adjustments she thinks, briefly, about the fact that veronica is forty feet away in another locker room right now, and she buries that thought under the professional layer of herself that is going to go back out there and compete.
the third quarter is the best kate has played all season she doesn't fully understand why until it's over something about the halftime reset, or the adrenaline climbing now that the game is real and close, or maybe just the simple fact that veronica is on the court and kate has always, even when it was inconvenient, raised her game in her presence.
she drops twelve in the third and the crowd gets loud for long stretches she is just a basketball player, just in the game, just doing what she's spent her whole life learning to do, and it feels clean and good and right.
veronica drops seventeen in the second half kate watches two of them go in once on a pull-up mid-range that is so unreasonably pretty it makes kate briefly furious, and once on a drive where veronica simply decides she is getting to the rim and does, with three defenders in her way, with a calm that looks less like confidence and more like inevitability — and feels something she can't name cleanly proud, probably sick with pride, a little.
the specific disorienting feeling of wanting your team to win and wanting the person you love to be unstoppable and finding that these two things are fundamentally at odds with each other.
the valkyries pull ahead with four minutes left kate is running back on defense and she hears veronica's voice calling out a coverage adjustment to her teammates m not loud, not commanding, just precise, just the exact right information delivered to the exact right people and kate has to look at the scoreboard to remind herself which team she's on.
golden state wins by six kate finds out the final from the jumbotron before the horn even finishes echoing through the arena; she is not surprised she had known somewhere in her body since the third quarter that this was where the game was going.
she had played well really well, actually, the kind of game that will show up in the box score in a flattering way and they had still lost, because veronica had been better, which is a thing kate has made a complicated peace with over the course of two years.
veronica is often better kate is the only person in veronica's life who finds this genuinely beautiful instead of threatening she shakes hands down the line. she says the right things.
she is professional and composed and gracious, and the whole time she is doing all of this correctly she is counting the minutes until she can find the tunnel.
the tunnel smells like concrete and sweat and the industrial cleaner they use on the floors after games and kate is standing in it in her warmup jacket with her hair still damp from the shower and her heart doing something complicated in her chest when the visiting-team door opens and veronica comes through it.
she stops they are maybe ten feet apart in the narrow corridor and the tunnel is moving around them staff with equipment carts, a beat reporter kate recognizes talking into a phone, two valkyries assistants laughing about something all of it flowing past like they are two fixed points in a current.
veronica is in her travel clothes now, golden state blue on the bag over her shoulder, her hair pulled back, and she looks she looks like herself, which sounds like a useless thing to say but isn't, because kate has been looking at her through a screen for four months and the specific thing about veronica in person is that screens don't get all of her.
they don't get the way she takes up space, the stillness at the center of her that you can feel when you're close enough, the way she looks at you like you are the most solved problem in the room she is looking at kate like that now.
kate crosses the distance first, because kate always crosses the distance first, and she has been thinking about this moment for seventeen days and in none of the versions she imagined did she say anything, and this one is no different.
she just closes the ten feet between them and veronica's arms come up and around her and kate exhales something she has been holding since phoenix, since the last time veronica's hand was on her chest, something that has been accumulating in her sternum for four months and three weeks and releases now all at once like a pressure valve finally given permission.
veronica is warm she is always warm, always running a few degrees hotter than the people around her, and kate presses into that warmth with the unselfconsciousness of someone who has stopped pretending she doesn't need it.
veronica's hand goes to the back of her neck, fingers spreading against her hairline, holding kate's face goes into veronica's shoulder veronica smells like the same shampoo she has been using since iowa, since the first year, and kate's entire nervous system does something involuntary and enormous in response to this fact, something that says home this is home you found it again.
the tunnel keeps moving around them; nobody says anything to them this is professional sports and everyone has seen everything and a long hug in a tunnel after a game is not remarkable kate is grateful that she is not ready to move yet.
"you counted," veronica says into her hair it is not a question, it has the quality of something she already knew and is only saying out loud now that they are close enough for it to land correctly kate pulls back enough to see her face and does not release her grip on the back of veronica's jacket.
"i didn't," she says and then, because she has never successfully lied to veronica about anything that mattered "seventeen i was at seventeen when the schedule came out and then i stopped at —" she does the math, which she has already done — "i stopped keeping track around day nine."
"you didn't stop," veronica says. "no," kate agrees. "i didn't stop." veronica exhales, slow and a little uneven, the specific exhale of someone releasing a breath they have been holding for longer than they admitted.
she reaches up and pushes a piece of kate's hair back from her forehead, a gesture so quiet and familiar it makes kate's chest do something it does not have a name for. "i was at twelve when i booked the travel," veronica says. "then i made myself stop. then i started again at twenty-two." a pause. "then nine."
"nine," kate repeats. "nine days out i just — couldn't stop anymore. it would've taken more energy than i had." veronica looks at her with the expression that kate has been trying to describe to herself for two years and still hasn't found the right word for, the one that is not soft and not fierce but occupies some specific territory between the two. "you played well tonight."
"you played better."
"yes." not a brag just a fact veronica has always been comfortable with her own excellence in a way kate finds quietly extraordinary not arrogant, just accurate. "i always play better when you're watching." kate stares at her. "you can't say things like that."
"i just did."
"in a tunnel. you can't say things like that in a tunnel where people can see me react to them."
the corner of veronica's mouth moves not quite a smile the particular arrangement of her face that is what veronica looks like when she is happy but is not going to perform it for the room.
kate has been cataloguing this expression for two years and it still does things to her. "come back to the hotel with me," veronica says kate doesn't answer she takes veronica's hand her fingers fitting into the spaces between veronica's with the ease of something practiced, something that has always known where it belongs and they walk out of the tunnel and into the los angeles night, which receives them without ceremony, which is exactly what kate needs it to do.
the city is warm in the way los angeles is warm at night in june, which is not the warm of summer elsewhere but something thicker and more specific, threaded through with jasmine from somebody's yard and the lingering heat of pavement that has been absorbing sun all day.
kate has been living here for a year and she still finds it slightly unreal sometimes, the way the city refuses to cool down, the way the nights feel like a continuation of the day rather than a break from it.
they walk three blocks without saying much this is comfortable one of the things kate has learned about veronica, one of the things she has come to love, is that she does not fill silence for the sake of filling it.
she is content to just exist next to you and let the silence have its own texture kate used to be a talker, used to feel silence as a problem to be solved, and two years of veronica have slowly taught her that sometimes the quiet is the conversation.
veronica swings their joined hands once, lightly. "your third quarter was something," she says. "you were watching."
"i'm always watching." kate processes this for a moment. "even when you're running your own offense."
"especially then. peripheral vision." veronica says it with the flat matter-of-factness that kate has learned means she's being completely serious. "you came off that drag screen in the third and i almost called timeout just to watch you shoot it."
"you almost called a timeout," kate says, "to watch me shoot a jumper."
"i didn't. i exercised restraint." a pause. "it was a very good jumper." kate laughs it comes out bigger than she means it to, spilling out of her in the warm night air, and she feels veronica's grip tighten slightly on her hand in response, and she thinks this. this is what i've been counting down to. not just the physical fact of her but this, exactly this the specific ease of it, the way laughter sounds different when she's the one who caused it.
they walk another half-block in the good silence.
"i missed you," kate says she has been saying this to herself for four months in various forms and none of them have been adequate and this one isn't either but it's what she has.
veronica is quiet for a moment. "i know," she says. and then, softer "me too." she does not elaborate kate has learned to receive this at full weight rather than waiting for more.
veronica means what she says and says only what she means, and me too from veronica contains multitudes, contains four months of facetimes that weren't enough, contains a lamp still burning in a golden state apartment, contains all the counting.
the hotel comes into view half a block ahead.
kate does not walk faster she has been waiting seventeen days and she can wait another thirty seconds.
there is a specific silence that belongs to veronica, different from the silence of an empty room or the silence after a hard loss or the silence of the tunnel with the game still on everyone's skin.
kate knows it the way she knows veronica's game from the inside, from having spent enough time inside it that she has learned its particular texture veronica goes silent when she wants to pay attention it is a focused silence, a receiving silence, the silence of someone who has decided you are the most important thing currently happening and is giving you all of themselves in response.
she is very silent now at the hotel three blocks from the arena kate doesn't remember the walk in any detail she can reconstruct she remembers warmth, and veronica's hand, and the smell of the city and the way the streetlights made everything amber-colored and slightly unreal.
she remembers the lobby, cool and quiet after the street, and the elevator, and the door of the elevator closing behind them, and then veronica's hands on her face and veronica's mouth on hers and the specific quality of that kiss, which was not a first-kiss kiss and not a hello kiss but something that had been building for four months and had therefore accumulated significant pressure.
kate pressed back into the elevator wall and let it land. she thought, from some distance right. this. i had forgotten the specific geometry of this and i should not be allowed to forget it again.
she had not forgotten that it was the thing she had been carrying the memory of this in her body the entire time, but memory and the thing itself are not the same, and the gap between them is exactly the size of four months and three weeks.
the room is dark except for the city light coming through the curtains in long amber rectangles across the floor the city outside is doing what cities do indifferent and gorgeous and completely unaware of them and kate is not thinking about it at all.
she is thinking about veronica's hands, which know her the way her own hands know a basketball with the confidence of long practice, with the particular certainty of something that has been done enough times to become fluent.
she is thinking about the sound of veronica saying her name, which is different from how anyone else says it, which has always had a different weight in veronica's mouth, more considered, like she means it specifically every time.
kate has wanted this so specifically and for so long that when it finally happens it feels almost too much to stay inside of the wanting has been living in her like a weather system for months, low pressure building and building, and now it breaks and she is in the middle of it and it is enormous and good and she says veronica's name once into the dark, not as a question, just as a fact, just as a form of saying i know where i am. i know who i'm with. this is real.
veronica answers it with her hands with her mouth. with the specific patience and intention of someone who has also been counting down, who has also been carrying the weight of the waiting and is now finally, finally allowed to set it down.
later when the city went purple outside the curtains, that particular transition between deep night and the first gray idea of morning.
kate is on her back and veronica is beside her, tracing something on her shoulder with one fingertip a shape that might be letters, might be nothing, might be a word veronica is writing against kate's skin because she doesn't feel like saying it out loud yet.
kate lies very still so she doesn't disturb it she breathes she looks at the ceiling, which is the color of right now, the color of this specific moment she has been trying to get back to since phoenix.
she catalogs veronica the weight of her warmth, still, even now the specific temperature of her that kate has been cold without for four months.
the sound of her breathing, which kate has memorized and which is different in person than through a phone speaker, fuller, realer, the kind of sound that can only exist when someone is actually next to you in the dark.
the way she traces the shape on kate's shoulder with the deliberateness of someone who is not ready to stop touching her yet and is not going to pretend otherwise.
kate turns her head veronica is looking at the ceiling, or at the window, or at something kate can't see. the city light catches the clean line of her profile the quality of attention she carries even in stillness, the particular expression of her face when she is somewhere that feels safe enough to let everything down.
kate has seen this face in early mornings and late nights and the aftermath of hard games and the private spaces between all the public ones, and it is still the thing that undoes her the most, every time, without exception. "how many days until the next game?" veronica asks her voice is low, slower than usual, worn down to its most honest register, meaning how long do we have right now. and she also means i'm already calculating. she means tell me so i can start.
kate has already done the math she did it on her phone two nights ago at midnight and now she carries the number in the same place she carries all the other numbers. "forty-one," she says.
veronica is quiet for a moment. the city breathes outside the window. somewhere below them a car passes, music briefly audible through the glass, and then gone. "forty-one," veronica says, like she is placing the number somewhere inside herself, making room for it, rearranging things to accommodate the weight of another wait. "okay." kate watches her.
"okay," veronica says again softer as she resumes the tracing on kate's shoulder the maybe-word kate watches veronica's profile and feels the tenderness of it settle over her like something physical the specific particular tenderness of loving someone across distance, of knowing that in a few hours they will be back to counting, back to phone calls and texts and the insufficient medium of screens, and choosing to love them anyway, completely, without holding anything back against the leaving.
she doesn't say i'll count with you but she doesn't say forty-one is survivable. we've done worse.
she doesn't say i love you in a way that has made every city i've lived in feel temporary except the ones where you are and all of it is true and none of it needs to be said right now, in this room, with the city going purple outside and veronica's fingertip still moving against her shoulder.
kate puts her head back down. veronica's arm comes around her outside the window los angeles keeps going, indifferent and gorgeous and entirely unaware of the two of them, and somewhere eight hundred miles north a lamp in a golden state apartment is still on, still burning, pointed at a door that is going to open again in forty-one days kate closes her eyes she is already counting.
