Soulmates: The Ending
(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32)
Five years, one marriage, three new additions to the top five list of viewing points in the city later. They were still falling in love in new ways, some days, but just not every day.
That was what Kara wanted to write in the anniversary card. The thing she was trying to capture in a less on-the-nose way. She stared at the blank card, wanting to write the perfect thing, understated but precise and bursting with adoration for her wife and the funny, lovely, wonderful life they had built together.
Even now, some substantial interim of time having ticked since everything went the way life eventually goes; Kara still felt the urge to pick up her phone, exasperated and at a loss with herself, wanting to run it past someone who had a very distinct, if not mean-spirited, knack for words.
Five years later, her lovely perfect happy ending was still making good on the deal. Five years later, Kara still missed Cat as though it were a journey, in small and daily ways, in perpetual discovery of all the things that could remind someone of another person.
Cat was her platonic soulmate. It felt settled and okay in her heart. Her buddy-up for a field trip from some distant quaint patch of nebula where they were made from the same stardust; somewhere upright and decent where carbon took care of its own.
Their lives intersecting for no time at all, and yet the time had been exact, but just not enough.
The two concepts were not mutually exclusive. Her love for Lena. Her grief for Cat; a difficult, bicameral woman that—for one reason or another—the universe dictated some profound connection; despite their staunch, differing opinions in what they understood that connection to be.
Cat was a woman that Kara did not like—much less love—most of the days she had been alive; until Kara did like her, and then she liked her a great deal. That was painful. There, for just a moment, then gone like a mist of breath in the air. In the end, to lose her was the most pain she had ever felt. It was also necessary, and Kara understood that now; to have that good and precious small interim of time with Cat, was to know her, and to learn—true and for herself—that they were not each other’s great, grand, perfect romance story.
They were not supposed to be that thing.
To grow and understand who they were was perhaps their great and important service to one another’s life—defacto. The process of figuring it all out was both an act of war and healing, in fluctuating balances, and that changed everything. It changed Kara’s entire outlook on the world.
The grief had been steady and solid, time had now passed, it still hurt that way because it always would. But Kara had arrived at her own answers—with abundant certainty—feeling that if it were not for Catherine Grant; her temperament, her worst days, her selfishness, her grand and quiet gestures of love too, then Kara would have never understood the most important thing of all.
She did not need some soulmate scribbled on her skin to complete herself. Kara was already complete, perfectly as she had always been, and nobody could add or detract from that.
Kara had to lose something big in order to find the answers; the pain was necessary in order to shed her skin like a snake and embrace bigger dreams than a nice easy life that yearned for the only thing it knew would be an eventual guarantee; a soulmate.
Catherine taught her everything.
It was okay to be selfish.
It was okay to make scary, terrifyingly big decisions.
It was okay to choose and marry the woman she once mistook for the cleaning lady on her first ever, real day on the job reporting something for the news.
For Cat, or at least Kara hoped, their kinship was a reminder that one could never be an island. True love was indeed real; it was simply the way the world understood that love that wasn’t quite right. Love was abundant and everywhere, in the small acts, the big ones, if one simply looked hard enough—or didn’t look close enough at all—then love coloured everything.
Love painted lipstick, highlighter and blush until the last breath of itself.
Lena had Sam. Kara had Cat. The love was different, lasted for different times. They did not need to be grieved and gotten over. That was unnecessary. Their marriage was a different kind of love; something stronger, tougher, and all-terrain than the traditional soulmate thing.
It could weather funerals, weddings, too much time apart, too much time together.
There was room for all of their baggage, for all of their inappropriate laughter, for arguments that could be paused and came back to after a long stroll in the park with a shared ice-cream, licked and split with such tension that the comedy of it, the wobbling and held-back smiles, became too much to remember why they were angry in the first place.
There was room for a worn leather armchair, comfy for a good read, yet never sat on for good reason; they brought it to the new house and placed very precisely by the upstairs window in the hall.
Looking out towards the garden, where the roses bloomed, with a set of reading glasses and a Kindle to the side, as though someone might pick them up and find those last two chapters—someday.
For Kara there was room for a long protective dust bag, just about big enough for a dress, that sat solitude in the guest bedroom closet, unopened and never touched, yet always there and waiting just in case she got brave one day.
In the end, despite wanting to, it had simply never felt right or appropriate to open the bag and all the memories that had gone inside. That was okay. Catherine would understand. She wouldn’t, but Kara decided that she would, and they could fight about it someday if there was a great-beyond.
Kara blinked and came back from her daydreams. The card was still blank, and her expansive wandering thought-processes had stumbled along, finding nothing worthwhile. She sighed, rubbing her forehead.
“Kara, baby, just write your name in block capitals at the bottom, with a signature at the side, like you’re at the DMV.” Someone noticed her lack of discretion as she hung pensively over the card. “It will be funny, I promise, I’ll laugh with joyful abandon like an Edwardian school girl.”
“Lena!” Kara glared furiously.
She stared down the lens of the baby monitor interface.
“Sorry,” Lena said sheepishly through the speaker. “I just wanted to check I set it up right. I saw your stressed big decision thinking face. It didn’t look good—that was yesterday, and then the day before yesterday too. I was worried on the hat trick.”
“Worried or brown-nosing?” Kara narrowed.
“I figured you needed intervention. For my wellbeing, not yours. Two more days and you may have begun wondering if it would prove easier to throw out the whole wife instead of trying to write a good anniversary card—”
“Okay this.” Kara pinched her nose. “No, this is—” She pointed up and down at the glowing red light on the baby monitor.
Kara left the nursery that was coming along now, some furniture already built, with paint samples still sitting crooked on the wall for them to get used to—forest green was proving the winner.
Lena liked that it was unisex.
Kara liked that it reminded her of Lena’s eyes.
A trudge down the hall, fuming, furious despite not wanting to be, Kara opened their bedroom door. Lena was sat cross-legged and crooked, her spine hunched forward, glasses pushed up her nose, pretending to be technical support for the baby equipment in her lap.
Kara continued her point, “That was weird, like I was talking to HAL 9000. Can you not run a surveillance operation on me in our home? That’s the pressing issue on today’s agenda.” She was more flustered than she could cover.
“I’m sorry, Kara. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“HAL, stop it.” Kara lifted a finger, warning her, halting it, sincerely growing irritated with her wife. “Quit.”
Lena bit her lip.
She could not stop herself, because she was a dork, a bigger dork than Kara ever gave her credit for in the beginning when swept away by her charming, dashing and sophisticated thing. The lovelight had been too strong. It still was, but Kara had been married for five years, knew things she didn’t back then.
Lena’s dorkiness the main point.
The kind of adorable nerd who liked old science fiction with puritanical arrogance for the original Star Trek, Colin Baker as the Doctor, and Stanley Kubrick, so much so that despite the hot water…
Lena could not stop herself.
“Look Kara, I can see you're really upset about this.” Lena shone the mini-flashlight and spoke down the barrel as though she were an AI robot. “I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”
Kara rolled her eyes, flustered, amused, both things and also heavily pregnant, which for some reason or another always made her cry actual tears when her processing juggled too much at once.
“Joke’s over.” Lena shot up when she heard the hiccupping breaths that couldn’t hold the stuttering in Kara’s chest. “The joke is over. It was a terrible joke. A disgusting, rude, and thoughtless—baby girl.” Lena grimaced with shame and took Kara in sturdy, protective arms. “Beloved. Oh, what have I done? You’re growing a little baby and here I am—a big stupid asshole—pretending to be a robot.” She shook her head severely. “If you ever wanted to leave I would give you everything, the house, the works, plus the shirt on my back, and Jesus do I wish I was joking right now.”
They weren’t loud tears. That always made it worse for Lena. They were the quiet, embarrassed, sniffling tears that hid behind the backs of Kara’s hands because she felt silly—like she was a little girl being bullied by the popular kid, hiding in the bathroom at lunchtime—something heart-breaking and pitiful like that. Lena never felt so horrific as she did in these moments. It wasn’t discussed, it didn’t need to be, Kara knew her wife perfectly and she hated making Lena feel so guilty.
“I’m being silly. I’m not upset. It’s,” Kara’s lips wobbled, her croaking voice so soft and reassuring. “It’s pregnancy hormones, which makes me more frustrated, because I can pinpoint the problem but because I am more frustrated, because I know the problem, I then start crying all over again. It’s not you, baby. It’s the burden of carrying your zygote and making it into a healthy, happy and normal child, which as you can imagine, is a lot of pressure and my body gets dumb and sensitive.” Kara calmed down a little.
“Oh, my baby. Oh, my sweet, lovely, darling precious little—” A flurry of kisses, trailing, hurried, pecking and kissing all along her temples and hairline as though Kara had to be loved in this expunging and absolving way. “The burden of carrying my zygote must be horrifying and yet I have never been more in love.” She pulled back with a weak grin. “I have never been more attracted or felt more devoted, and I’m never going to joke about Stanley Kubrick again.” Lena took her wife’s damp little cheeks. “That name is on the list of names that can never be said in this home.”
“That’s a short list.” Kara smiled and felt a little more together. It was a short list. Lex, Morgan Edge, and that was it.
Lena pressed close and hugged tight, rocking them side to side, pecking and kissing and in-love with her wife.
“What do you want for dinner to—”
“Lena?” Eyes wide, Kara felt something different all of a sudden.
“Your water?” Lena pulled back and stiffened.
“God no.” Kara slapped her arm. “I’m only six months.”
“Right, yes. That,” Lena nodded and scratched her head. “I went to medical school. Why am I like this? Incessantly panicking. Thank you for not suffocating me with a pillow while I sleep. I would if I was you—twice just to be on the safe side.” Her eyes widened in gratitude that Kara was forgiving. “What’s up, baby?”
“You were hugging me, and you did the thing, absentmindedly, because your face was in screen-saver mode so I know you didn’t mean…” Kara bit her bottom lip and squirmed, aware they needed to get things done today and this was inopportune. “You did the thing and it felt so good, in a naughty way,” she whispered the last part lower than the rest of it. “So, do it again?”
Lena melted into something so fond and loving there were not words to capture such a tender and rapid decomposition of thoughts and feelings.
Her thin lips pushed slowly up her cheeks, pushing out a little too much, as though faintly cooing without intention or silliness to it. Time didn’t dampen the wonderment. Lena still felt the same things—in the same ways—that she had years ago.
Kara saw it in her face every time they did this.
That joyful curiosity when someone first begins making love to the person they love; the absolute astoundment that they could be a source of desire, of need, for such a mind-bogglingly beautiful woman who got the thump-thumping of Lena’s heartrate going mad.
That was how Lena treated it, every time like it was the first time, like she had something big to prove because she wanted Kara to feel good in the kind of way that would carve in her memories as the greatest first of all firsts.
It wasn’t the first, of course, not even the thousandth, but Lena did the look and Kara melted with a muffled, blushing exhale that craved and wanted Lena to fix her hormonal upticks like a problem to be solved with her hands.
“You felt good, baby?” Lena cocked her head to the side and smiled sweetly, absolutely in love yet teasing her anyway. “Did my leg brush between your thighs?”
“Daddy.” Kara gave her the warning look—the sincere threat that if she fucked around and edged her it wouldn’t end pretty. “Please.” She giggled and closed her eyes, rubbing her embarrassed red cheeks. “I don’t like using crude words they don’t sound sexy when I say them. You know you did the thing,” Kara whined.
“Oh, I can fix that sweetheart. I’ve got you.” Lena cooed in her very calm way, tugging down her panties, bunching them as she walked back over. “Here. There you go, baby, you just hold these, whichever way feels comfortable, don’t you worry about saying a single fucking thing. I’ll take care of everything—take such good care of you—I’ll clean up after myself.”
Lena stuffed her underwear in Kara’s moaning mouth, fingers trailing along the ripe cherry blush that came up instant and red on her cheeks; then the tip of Kara’s nose, the corners of her lips, her fingers slipping inside and pressing down on the end of her tongue, careful not to push too much cotton in her mouth.
Kara whimpered and stared with fixed eyes as though her brain were evaporating into steam—teeth biting harder into her wife’s underwear.
She was pregnant, Lena never forgot it, the panties hung on Kara’s chin in the most adorable way possible; the section inside her mouth between her incisors tasted like Lena’s wet, distinctly exact and perfectly intoxicating cunt.
Lena guided Kara towards the bedroom wall. They came to a gentle stop against the leverage of it. Lena’s knee slipped, opening the inside of Kara’s knee, then pushing it aside all the way. She took Kara’s leg one direction while her other thigh pressed forward, put pressure on little aching cunt lips and sensitive spots within, grinning and kissing and touching the side of her tummy in the gentlest way.
“Daddy!” Kara muffled through the panties with wide eyes and best hopes. “Feels good.” She nodded, frantic.
“I love this. I love you pregnant. I love the way you feel. I love the way your body gets so excited over the sweetest things.” Lena’s eyes almost rolled into her skull as she took Kara’s wrists up above her head. “You keep these here, okay? Can you lock your fingers behind your neck so they’re out of my way? I wouldn’t want to have to tie your wrists in ribbons. My wife all strung up and dripping down herself, pregnant and sensitive everywhere?” Her eyes narrowed and her lip went between her teeth. “It wouldn’t be the politest thing I ever did.”
“We’re married, we’re past polite,” it muffled sweet and cute through the panties on her tongue.
“I’m not.” Lena growled in the darkest, raspiest voice. “I’m very polite, and generous, and giving,” Her thigh pressed harder between Kara’s trembling legs.
The summer dress was the perfect material; the lemon printed fabric that had so much stretch and give to it. Lena pulled down the chest, exposed stiff sensitive nipples, darker, slightly bigger than usual, thumbed around softly and knew they needed to be touched very gently. She kissed her wife, teased breasts that had grown a cup-size or two.
Lena had a smile on her face, nibbling her bottom lip, a great mid-morning if ever there was one.
“Here.” Lena’s eyes flickered, noticing Kara’s arms shift funny and then a responsive wince on her face. She brought her by the waist to the bed, putting her down, shuffling her hips further up. “Here you are growing a little baby, and me—a giant stupid asshole—I’ve got you pressed up on that wall like your feet aren’t killing you.” Lena cooed and dipped down, disappearing immediately.
She slipped her head under Kara’s dress, teeth nipping at the hem of her panties, pulling them down and then pushed her thighs back, fast and quick, everything following on from the other in a way that left Kara stumbling over whimpers muffled through panties she didn’t want to spit out of her mouth.
Then Lena’s tongue went slowly up the parting of her cunt lips.
It touched everything, took everything, flicked up off the end of her clit and dove straight back down to kiss and suck on little pink lips that had never—for all of her life—been quite as sensitive as they had been for the last few months.
“Feels good.” Kara rocked her hips. “Daddy—Jesus Christ!” She wailed and craned her neck back when Lena started sucking.
She tugged her sun dress up her waist. Lena pulled it back down again immediately, a silly look in her beautiful green eyes, as though she had quite enjoyed hiding down there. It made Kara burst out laughing. Kara did it again, pulling it up her waist, Lena sucking her clit but gawking with a certain look—a hermit crab without her house—her hand reaching up to tug the skirt back over her head in a swish of fabric.
It took minutes, Kara was panting, rolling her hips, sobbing into cotton panties and the edging relief of an orgasm on the brink of itself.
“I love you,” Kara murmured and pulled a pillow over her face, lengthways, clutching it hard to her belly and burying forward into it. “I love you, I love you, please—please I’m going…” Kara cried out. “I’m sorry I know you like me to ask first.” Her hips thumped up instinctively where Lena was sucking her clitoris—fingering her one, best and most favourite spot precisely.
Lena licked everything slow and steady and perfect. She kissed around her cunt, gently, precisely, for no other reason than needing too—because here was this mind-bogglingly beautiful woman, her wife, pregnant in a lemon print sun dress, thighs and dripping cunt pressed into every different part of her face.
“You never have to ask, baby.” Lena finally reappeared. “It’s not serious, not like that. I love that you can’t hold back right now.” Her lips wobbled with a weak grin.
She pressed up and over, allowing Kara to cup and taste herself, enjoying the attention with responsive kisses back, the silly kind, the little kind, the ones that went all over her face in pecks.
“You’re in a very silly mood today,” Kara observed with glazed eyes.
“And you,” Lena said, lofty and somewhat butcher, because her little wife was pregnant, and this dictated a certain mood. “Are in desperate need of a snack and some water.” Lena guided her back down.
“Stop. It’s fine! You’re so much,” Kara teased and shook her head. “Come on, come here. Your panties are off—too late now. I had the sample, I want the wholesale size.” Kara grabbed her waist and tugged her close.
“Can we wait until tonight?” Lena hummed. “I want to figure out the accessible, OSHA approved, best way to sit on your face and rub my cunt all over it without killing you, please.”
“Jesus!” Kara’s eyes rolled and lips went between her teeth. “I love being pregnant. I love doing this with you. I cannot express how much I miss you sitting on my face and rocking yourself the hard way around into a widow.” Kara laughed boisterously with a furrowed, exasperated craving for her wife’s suffocating cunt.
Until she stopped laughing.
Lena was a widow.
“Lena,” Kara said and opened her eyes. “I know you won’t care but I’m sorry. I didn’t think when I…that was insensitive. I forgot.”
“Baby shut up,” Lena kissed her cheek, not caring in the slightest. “I know you were kidding. I know.”
“I just don’t ever want you to feel like…” Kara shook her head. “You know. I know you know.”
“I know, but I feel like you want to say it anyway just to make sure that I know.” Lena welcomed it with a very graceful patience.
She laid down at Kara’s side, touched the blonde hair off her forehead, swept it to the side, waiting for anxiety to reel itself away from somewhere Kara had wound it too tight.
“You know.” Kara agreed and closed her eyes because she did want to make sure. “I just don’t want you to feel like our marriage negates anything. I noticed you didn’t go see her last week. You do that every week and you didn’t.” Kara rambled. “You didn’t go and take her flowers and I don’t like that because then here I am—a giant stupid asshole—not reminding you when you forget to take her flowers. Or, making you feel like we’re having a baby and so you can’t go see her anymore...”
“I didn’t forget,” Lena smiled and shook her head. “You didn’t make me feel like having a baby means putting Sam in a box.”
“You didn’t forget?”
“I appreciate that it matters to you. I love that it matters to you, actually, because there are days where I feel it and on those days, I know I can just feel it and not hide anything from you.” Lena thought around everything, her eyes going to the ceiling, then the window, everything and anything but Kara. “I have a wife and I’m having a baby with her. I also had a wife—a best friend—and she has been gone for some time. That’s very sad, but it’s not sad in a flowers every week way anymore. I think it’s sad in a flowers when I want to take flowers kind of way.”
“If you’re sure,” Kara nodded.
“I figured we were on the same page.” Lena pecked her temple, sitting up and clambering to her feet for snacks and water. “You haven’t taken Cat flowers since…” She stopped and thought about it.
Lena realised she was thinking about it.
Lena looked, somewhat concerned, when she realised Kara was wide-eyed and thinking about it too.
“Shit.” Lena closed her eyes. “Kara, I’m so sorry.”
“No, no.” Kara waved it off. “You’re right, it’s been a while, I didn’t even…” At least three weeks by her own calculation. “Do you mind if I take flowers tomorrow?”
“Why would I mind?” Lena glanced, then smiled. “If you’re going into the city take the four-wheel drive please?”
“I’ll go the long way.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know,” Kara said. “But I want to do that. So, I’ll take the four-wheel drive and I won’t go the bridge way, okay?”
“Thank you baby.” Some tiny scars would always remain, this they both knew. “Take my card tomorrow. After you see Cat, buy some more sun dresses for me to play and hide-and-seek under; get lunch somewhere nice then come by the office and show me the sun dresses and we can get second lunch.”
Somehow, supposedly, by miscalculation of the universe, this woman wasn’t her soulmate.
Except she was.
Lena was her everything.
Lena went downstairs. Kara laid there for a minute, rubbing her belly, yawning and thoughtful. It had been more than three weeks. Cat wouldn’t mind, except Kara knew that Cat would very much mind. The pregnancy brain wasn’t just one of those things people talked about. It was real and it happened all the time. In big ways. Kara knew Lena had a baby monitor camera in the kitchen, up on one of the cabinets, peeking over, pointed at the oven just to makes sure the stove was always off.
That was the extent of the brain fog.
So, Kara didn’t put too much weight into the lack of flowers. She didn’t until she did, because she missed Cat, she always would, and she felt guilty on all directions about it.
Kara missed her more than she had ever missed anyone, anything, and it would always be poignantly uncomfortable to not have her for the big moments in life.
Not her baby shower.
Not even her wedding.
Kara sat there with that thought. It always got her. It always would. The smoke got in her eyes and the sting in her throat. The wedding, and the way Cat could have been there if they had known more sooner, moved it up quicker, but they didn’t, and so Cat wasn’t there, wouldn’t have ever gotten to see a fourteen-thousand dress she paid for.
That made it difficult and hard and unbearably poignant on the morning of the day, alone in the mirror, Cat not there to fix things, to drink champagne with, until she was there.
“Miss Danvers?” A man had knocked on the door with a package in his hand. “Miss Luthor told me to send this up for you.”
“She is so dreamy,” her mom lapped it up—thrilled just like the rest of her family. “Ugh, to think I tried to talk you out this…”
“She is a keeper alright,” Dad nodded too.
Kara couldn’t remember everything; the chatter, the ruckus of her sister and family and bridesmaids gushing away because their daughter—their sister, niece, and high-school friend—was marrying the perfect, charming and good Lena Luthor.
She couldn’t remember because nobody came.
Not one of them.
She just liked to pretend, sometimes, because that was something else that should have been at her wedding too.
Kara had married someone other than her soulmate. It was acceptable in National City. It made for quite the dinner piece. In the rural mid-west, where farmers and church people lived, it was not the done thing.
It was not what people did except it should have been fine—it could have been quite fine—because Catherine had passed away the year prior and there was no longer a soulmate to marry.
Kara could have gotten away with it if she didn’t publish the story spread. She thought about it before, knew the consequences, then did it anyway.
She loved Lena.
She loved Lena so much that she was not prepared to pretend that it had fallen in her lap as a consolation prize. It was the prize-winning, blue ribbon, best in show romance story, and Lena deserved to have it sung from the rooftops.
Cat deserved to have her story told the way it had been lived too, because soulmates weren’t just husbands and wives, they were friends, family, colleagues and all sorts of in-betweens.
The package came, Kara remembered now how she instantaneously knew the who and what, because she had known the handwriting clear as her own.
There was a letter first, simple and concise.
You deserve big dreams, my girl.
Take your glasses off and change your lipstick.
Sheer, not matte.
Cat had known ahead of time, and right as always, it had been the odd thing Kara couldn’t put her finger on. Cat hadn’t been there that day, except she was there in the ways that mattered, and it was perhaps the only reason Kara made it down the aisle.
Kara thought about her wedding, about the dress bag in the closet, the one she had never been able to bring herself to open.
Today was the day.
She got up off the bed and walked along the hall to the guest bedroom. It was empty and unfurnished, waiting for orders to be delivered. There was a furnished guest bedroom along the other end of the hall for family and friends, because Lena in her very charming way proved impossible to not adore, and so Kara’s family did come around eventually—just not in time for the wedding.
Kara closed the door and looked around the empty walls. This guest bedroom was realistically for show, furniture nobody would use chosen and ordered so neither of them would have to acknowledge that a seven-bedroom house was wildly unnecessary, just like everybody told them it was yet they wouldn’t listen.
They didn’t have better excuses; they couldn’t say they fell in love with good bones and solid structure, just the garden and the land, which would have been a fairly good excuse except they built the property from scratch, and seven bedroom was better than six, then six and a half bathrooms also seemed better than six, because maybe they would have more children, that was how they had justified it to each other.
More children, Kara now just hoped not seven bedrooms worth.
She took the dress bag out, hung it on the door, then stared at it for a minute. She knew what was inside. She remembered the first time she saw it, remembered the day perfectly, remembered Cat with a fondness to it, and a certain guilt too because perhaps Cat would be angry if she knew it was only being opened for the first time now.
There were tears in Kara's lids but none on her cheeks.
Things ended and that was always okay, it had to be okay, because Cat had a good life and Kara was having one too. She had her soulmate downstairs, making sandwiches, singing loudly, licking her lips to get every last little taste of Kara's good mood from the corners, and who could ask for more than that?
Who would dare ask for more?
Not Kara.
She unzipped the never-opened dress bag and there was her great, grand and final gift from Catherine Grant.
The navy silk blouse, the matching-coloured pants, perfect and pristine and exactly as they were.
The gold earrings and necklace were in a plastic bag attached to the hanger; the sunglasses carefully hung on the blouse pocket too. Cat had given her everything worn that day, in that photo, the first time Kara had ever looked at a woman and felt like that was who she wanted to be, how she wanted to look, felt things she didn't have words for at that age.
There was a note too. Kara didn’t want to read it, the tears were already dribbling, but she did read it; she cried into the nook of her elbow, quiet as could be, choking on it almost, because a certain wholeness settled in her soul. A confirmation, a goodbye, a closing of the book.
I wonder what made you look—a good day or a bad one? I don’t keep last season outfits, I never understood why but it always felt very important that I keep this one.
You were loved, Kara.
I know that you still are.
A little girl once laid on her bed, feet kicking in the air, revelling on every pretty picture, then found herself struck by one in particular. Everything about the picture leaving her stalled, fixed, blank and blinking, quite certain she had just seen the most immaculate, pristine and ladylike person who had ever lived, in the world, in the history of everything.
The clothes, Kara had thought at the time. She wanted to dress like that one day, when she was older and ladylike. Kara laughed despite the tears. Things come full circle. People leave, often sooner than we would like, but that’s quite alright, because life goes as it’s always going to go.
Now, Kara was having a little girl of her own.
Kara had made her decision.
She chose the cleaning lady.
And God, what a lady she was.
THE END.
***
AN: Well, this was a fun afternoon of posting 33 chapters to Tumblr!
So, Hi. Hey. Howdy. Thanks for reading--if you made it this far--and please consider checking out my other stories too! I have a ton on Patreon and that’s also where I accept prompts, and you can also find more included in my Tumblr blog here :)
