They’ve been hanging out every day, and when Kara says every day she means every single day. Now that Lena owns CatCo she picks Kara up on her way to work, which is so much better than taking the bus. If Kara’s going to pretend that she can’t fly she at least wants to hang out with her best friend in the process.
They have lunch together in Lena’s office and leave work together so Lena can drive her home, except each time one of them says something like want to watch a movie? or I don’t wanna go home alone and they end up spending the night together too.
They laugh, all the time. Lena could just be breathing and it’d make her laugh. They create a new inside joke every day and they make fun of the other people in the office behind their backs, even though Kara feels a little bit bad afterwards and Lena has to convince her not to go up to them and apologize. That’s it, she says each time, that’s the last time i’m making fun of anyone with you, you angelic weirdo, and then proceeds to break that promise five minutes after.
Lena gets drunk on red wine one night and ends up crying in Kara’s arms, telling her that Lionel is her biological father and that she’s never told anyone before. Kara’s own eyes well with tears. I’m an alien, she wants to say. My parents left me in a pod and i’ve resented them every since. My dad’s dead and my mom and i are pretending like everything’s fine but nothing is.
She’s scared. She’s scared because everything’s perfect, because Lena ends up sleeping over that night and countless nights after, and she’s just so happy and she doesn’t want to fuck everything up. Lena knows everything about her, everything, even the things that she never tells anyone because she’s afraid it’ll change the way they see her, thinks it’ll make them stop loving her and they’ll leave.
She’s not afraid like that with Lena. She wants to tell her, knows Lena will be okay with it, wants them to be equal. I know all of you and you know all of me and we both know that we love each other no matter what type of deal.
She learns how many glasses of wine it takes before Lena goes from giggly, aggressively affectionate drunk to sobbing, nauseatingly reminiscent drunk and makes sure the bottle magically disappears before Lena crosses that line. She learns what kind of jokes are off limits and to not go overboard with the cuddling. She learns that Lena freaks out if Kara tries to rush her even the slighest bit in the morning, or even suggests that she shouldn’t be working so late.
She learns that she loves Lena, all of her, and Kara wasn’t made for lying, especially when her heart is not in it, which is why it just... slips out.
“I don’t like lasagna,” Kara’s saying, hanging out in the kitchen in one of Lena’s hoodies. Her hair’s down under the hood, and she’s watching Lena pour her fourth glass of wine, looking around surreptitiously for a place to hide the bottle.
“You don’t like lasagna?” Lena asks, her voice higher than usual. She scrunches her nose at Kara, fist propping on her hip. “How can you not like lasagna. What kind of lasagna have you been eating?”
Kara’s lips twist in happy amusement. “When I first came to Earth I hated pancakes because I thought they all tasted like how Alex made them. Maybe it’s the same with lasagna?”
She realizes it just as she’s sitting down on the island. Her heart drops and she falls quiet, feels cornered, just like every single time she’s ever told anyone. She wants to take it back, snatch it out of the air, is willing to fly backwards around the earth and burn inside out just to turn back time.
But Lena touches her shoulder, her entire palm soothing over the breadth of it. She presses a chapstick kiss to the apple of Kara’s cheek, the space that feels like it belongs to her, that Kara eagerly waits for her to kiss every day. “It’s okay, Kara,” she says, unreasonably loud when she’s right next to Kara’s ears. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Lena pats her cheeks dry and shows her a video of Britney Spears burning down her gym on the internet, and next thing Kara knows she’s huffing out a laugh and it’s like nothing happened at all. She hides the wine bottle, discovers she actually kind of really likes lasagna, and they send a ridiculous voice mail to Alex berating her for her shitty cooking skills.
Kara wakes up to Lena nuzzling the back of her neck, the alarm clock beeping for them to wake up. “Is that why you didn’t get salmonella when we ate raw cake mix?” Lena asks, her brows pulled together disgrutedly, and Kara starts her day by laughing.
She thinks I know all of you and you know all of me and we both know that we love each other no matter what.
