Chapter 1
There’s this warehouse, old, abandoned. It’s a fair way out of the city and from the outside it doesn’t look like much—complete with grass that brushes up around Kara’s hips as she jogs toward it, flaking paint, and windows that screech their complaints when the wind starts blowing even a little. It’s big, though, and out of the way, and no one uses it anymore. They used to make cars there, or dishwashers, or crayons maybe. She’s not sure. It’s not very obvious just from looking at the machines—great hulking grey things that lay along the vast floor of the factory, still and silent. Covered with dust and streaked with long-dried grease, she knows they haven’t been touched in years. But Kara can still imagine them rolling and rumbling and she can feel the echo of the people who worked here, brushing up against her as she moves through the space.
It makes her teeth ache, sometimes, how full and vibrant this world feels. How bright its people are.
The whole city feels like this, hundreds of times over. She didn’t know it would feel like this when she was back in Midvale—in Midvale, she knew everyone and how they sounded and what they felt like, and she thought that was as hard as it could get. But Midvale was an exposed nerve, a sensitive tooth—she had everything new in the world to know, and learn, but more than enough time to handle it.
Here? Here, everything comes in wave after wave, with no way of stopping it or blocking it out. Sounds upon smells upon more sounds, all carried on air that tastes like salt and gasoline.
And the lights! The lights never turn off!
If Midvale is an exposed nerve, National City is her spine set alight with ten thousand volts.
But here, in this warehouse, she can pretend that she’s home in Midvale. Home, in Jeremiah’s tinkering shed, far down the slope away from the lovely home by the sea and half built into the side of the hill, his shed had been half study, half laboratory. His shed, which had become Alex’s shed and more or less Alex’s bedroom and study and haven and home after he’d died. She sets her bag on the ground and, after a moment of hesitation, takes her glasses off as well. She tucks them into their case and peeks around with her x-ray vision.
Not another soul in sight.
“Okay.” Kara licks her lips, wipes her hands on her hoodie. “Be careful. Go slow. No need to rush, just take it easy, plenty of time to do whatever you want.” She sets her feet shoulder width apart and braces herself. “Nice and easy.”
She sucks in a deep breath and—doesn’t jump.
“Rao, what are you thinking, Kara?” She closes her eyes to avoid seeing the skeleton of the factory, from calculating the width and length and height of the space, the strength of the beams that cross the roof. She can’t not see the numbers—they pile up in her head until she assigns them properly—and sorting them out gives her a few seconds of peace. First Kryptonian measures, then human, and once that’s done, the warehouse feels less like a warehouse and more like her warehouse, solid and real in her head and over her head.
She wanders down the line of conveyors belt and trails her fingers along the cool metal. They shake, but she doesn’t let them dig in hard enough to curl the metal into shavings.
“This is a bad idea,” she reminds herself. She shouldn’t be in a warehouse in the middle of the night preparing for this, she shouldn’t have spent the last two nights scoping out possible warehouse to do this—she should never have thought about doing this! She should actually have listened to her new parents slash scientists and locked this part of herself away a long time ago. She should not be—
But. But she’s a thousand miles from home—twenty thousand light years further from her home—and there’s too much energy buzzing inside her not to use it. And, Rao protect her, she wants to use it. She wants to feel whole and useful and to use this power inside of her, she wants to—it doesn’t matter. She can’t.
“Well, I can,” she mumbles. “Technically. But I shouldn’t. Right?” She looks over to her bag, a few short hundred metres away, and waits a long minute for it to buzz. Because that would be a sign that she shouldn’t do this.
It doesn’t buzz, it doesn’t ring.
There’s no one here and she’s certainly not going to be telling anyway. But she spent all day watching her cousin save a whole town from bushfires and flying injured citizens to the nearest hospitals, carrying a dozen at a time in buses, and the urge to fly fills her until she can taste it—it’s dangerous in her mouth, like sharp teeth and want on the edge of hot, like boiling water, like the metal from the inside of the soda cans she can always taste.
What could possibly go wrong?
She plants her feet firmly again and shakes out her arms and shoulders, rolls onto the balls of her feet like she’s seen Alex do when she’s about to fight. “Nice and easy,” she mutters, curls her hands into fists. “Nice and easy.”
//
As it turns out, there’s very little that’s nice or easy about flying.
The way it feels? Amazing. Once she’s landed—busted through the wall, technically—she can think of a hundred, a thousand clamouring, clashing superlative descriptions for it but in the moment she’s got nothing. Which is just—just—amazing. She’s never lost herself in something before, never been able to shut down her mind long enough to not hear, not see everything around her, but for a few brief seconds all there was in her life was the feeling of lifting her feet off the ground and power thudding through her like the sun itself had decided to rise at midnight and inside the chest of a girl—and then, of course, set immediately after that and slam her through the nearest wall when she lost control, too giddy, too thrilled to focus on staying upright and slow and still.
So, yeah, flying? Not so easy. And bringing down a distinctly human-shaped hole in the wall? Not so great.
“Oh boy, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.” She picks her way out of the rubble, runs both hands through her hair to shake free the dust and debris. “I want to go to university, Eliza! I want to be a normal person, Eliza!” A few pieces of gravel itch under her collar and she fishes them out, grumbling at herself. “I want to completely forget all the promises I made to you and go to a secret warehouse and practice my powers less than a month after I get here, Eliza! Rao, what’s wrong with me?”
She snorts, glances around at the damage. The wall, yep, very human-shaped hole right there. But hey, the place is still standing so that’s a good sign.
“Alex is gonna be so mad when she finds out,” Kara sighs, and shakes the excited buzz out of her hands. She feels like she’s crackling—what she imagines a human might feel if they’ve taken forty times their daily limit of caffeine, perhaps, which she’s only seen once before, when Alex had been taking her finals and brought out a saucepan no Danver woman had ever touched, a mammoth of a pot, and mixed together seven litres of coffee and some unlabelled energy drink that made Kara recoil when she smelled it. She poured the stuff into several thermoses, got Kara to carry the spare fridge into her bedroom, and Kara had kept the defibrillators with her all that week. Just in case. “Then again, no one saw me. And, pfft,” she laughs, lifting a few bricks back into the wall but when they crumble more—wow, it is hard to control her strength when she feels like this!—she gives it up for impossible. “I was just practising. Right? No big deal. Not a big deal. So really, I don’t have to tell her anything because there’s nothing to tell.”
She steps through the hole and with every step, she works on stretching out her senses. It feels like an unfurling, and she luxuriates in it—she can feel the dust on her arms, taste the atmosphere. She feels like she could hear everything in the whole city, if she tried. And this time, when she lifts off the ground, the threat of falling, of spinning off in every direction, doesn’t feel like something she needs to worry about.
Floating is good for about ten minutes—it’s not hard for her to get the hang of it and then she wants more. A dangerous feeling, maybe, but it doesn’t feel dangerous when she’s laughing and spinning somersaults.
“This is amazing,” she cheers, and spins right up and into a beam, which groans and bends around her shoulder. “Oops, sorry, sorry.”
She’s smoothing out the beam, trying to encourage it back into shape, when her hearing catches a voice—quiet, scared, pleading only in a slight gasp and swallow—and she falters. Small craters punch into the concrete when she lands. Head cocked to the side, eyes shut, she searches for it again. “Rao, Kara, what are you doing?” she asks herself. Arms wrapped tight around her waist, like she can somehow hold herself back, she nonetheless searches for that voice, tries to remember the timbre of it and—
“Please don’t,” that voice says, and now there’s a hole in the roof too because Kara rockets through it, craters fracturing further under the force of her take off. The iron peels apart around her head and shoulders, she hears it tear, but she doesn’t really think, or care, about it.
Or—she does think about it. She knows why she’s hiding—she still has nightmares about why she’s hiding. She got a two hour long lecture about hiding and how to fit in and to not use her powers the day she left for university.
But she heard them. Calling for her. Okay, maybe not her exactly but for someone and Kara knows that no one else could have heard. No one else is going to save them. And so, despite all of the reasons she shouldn’t, she goes to them.
She touches down just outside the warehouse and runs there, not confident enough in her flying to know for sure that she won’t break something or crash-land instead of helping. Besides—she runs fast.
“Hand the damn bag over now. Give it to me.” This gruff voice—it’s in the same place, Kara is sure of it—is what Kara hears next and her eyes pick out the tell-tale signature of something metallic. The shape of it tells her knife.
Kara pulls her hood up and over her hair and runs down the alley.
She takes a moment to fix it all into her mind—a lady, pressed up against the rough-brick wall, bag discarded at their feet and contents scattered, a man, larger, with an arm across her shoulders and his other hand at her side—and then Kara clears her throat, trying not to spook him into stabbing the woman.
“Um. Excuse me?”
When the man jerks around to face her, Kara sees that the woman is bleeding from a scrape over her eye and her hands too. She rolls wide eyes, mostly whites, toward Kara—a look somehow scared and worried at the same time. Leave, her eyes seem to be telling Kara. Don’t get involved in this too.
Kara smiles at her, trying to look reassuring.
It obviously doesn’t work, because the woman hisses at her, “Get out of here, what are you doing? Run.”
“Hey! Shut the fuck up!” He looks a little confused, which Kara thinks is probably bad because confused men with knifes aren't likely to make great choices.
“You need help,” Kara says to the woman. “Right?”
“I,” the woman looks down at the knife against her ribs. “Yes?”
“Both of you shut up.” The man presses the knife tighter against her and Kara smells fresh blood, sees a bead of it soak into her crisp white shirt, now rumpled. He jerks his chin at Kara, nods to the opposite wall. “Get over there.” Kara steps back. “Good, further.” She steps back again. “Now don’t move, okay, don’t fucking move, or I’ll cut her up.”
Kara cocks her head to the side. “With what?”
“What do you mean wi—“
She holds up his knife. “This?”
“What— How—” Kara steps toward him now, slowly, and the skin around her eyes burns a slow, hot red. The woman shoves him back when his grip on her shoulders weakens, and he stumbles away from her, eyes fixed on Kara. He pales. His voice is a croak when he asks the real question. “What are you?”
“Your worst nightmare.” It sounds tacky when she says it but she throws her shoulders back and tries to look confident anyway.
Rao, she hopes she can actually control this and won’t burn his face off, that would suck.
“Demon,” he whimpers, and turns and sprints from the alley. He trips over his feet and Kara considers collecting him before he can stand, considers taking him to the police, but she has no proof he did anything and he can tell them what she did. Instead, she turns away, crumples the knife in her hand and tosses it into the garbage.
She hears the slide of fabric on rough stone and looks to see the woman has sunk down onto the ground. Kara crouches carefully, slowly, near her. Not too close.
“Hi there,” she says. She wets her lips. “Umm. I’m not a demon.”
The woman—young, about Kara’s age—stares at her for a long minute. A laugh bubbles up out of her, at odds with her wide, alarmed eyes.
Kara umm’s and ah’s for a second or two, hands fluttering between reaching out to soothe the woman and realising that unfamiliar—and possibly demonic—hands touching her might not be what she wants right now. “It’s okay,” she settles on saying, because this girl is going into shock and she needs to do something. “It’s alright, you’re okay. He’s gone. He’s gone.” She shuffles a little closer, hands still held wide and open, as unthreatening as she can.
The woman breathes out and leans her head back against the wall, blinks a few times very quickly up at the sky, what little can be seen in the gap between the buildings.
“I—I don’t even have any money,” she hiccups. “And I don’t think he takes paypass.”
Kara laughs and nods, reaches out so slowly to wipe the woman’s face with the sleeve of her hoodie. Once she realises what Kara is doing, the woman gasps and shakes her head, wipes at her own face with quick, almost embarrassed, sharp movements.
“I’m fine, thank you, I’m fine, you don’t have to,”
“It’s fine,” Kara tells her softly, retreating a little again. “It’s fine. You’re alright.” The woman won’t look at her and she’s shaking a little so Kara deliberates for a second or two before she kneels and unzips her jumper, pulls her arms out of it and holds it out for her. “Here.”
“Oh. No, thanks, I—”
“You’re shaking. Please take it?” Kara doesn’t move closer, scared of scaring her. “I insist,” she says, too soft to really be insistent, but it works to jolt the woman out of her shock just enough to reach out and take it.
“Oh. It’s really soft.”
“Thank you! I’m sorry it doesn’t really smell nice, or of anything, I don’t really like smelly washing powder.”
“That’s okay.” She doesn’t put it on, though, she just holds it loosely in her hands and Kara risks leaning toward her and pull it around her shoulders. She doesn’t want to manhandle her into it but she hopes that it’ll at least be warm around her. “Thank you.”
“You reckon you can stand now?” The look Kara gets is uncertain and Kara shakes her head. “It’s okay, take your time. I’ll pack your things into your bag, okay?” She turns and is surprised when the woman reaches out, grips her hand tight.
“Don’t go!”
She’s surprisingly strong for a human and Kara wonders if that’s training or fear. Possibly both, she reminds herself, thinking with a little pride of the multitudes of human existence.
“I’m not going,” Kara soothes her. “You can hold my hand the whole time if you want. I’m just packing your bag. Okay?” She smiles sweetly at the woman before the dark look can settle in her eyes, something like fear, something hurting like shame. “I promise, I’ll be right here.” The grip doesn’t ease, but Kara manages to twist her hand so that she’s holding the woman’s hand firmly instead of being gripped onto. When she’s done, she hands the bag to the woman and she’s pleased to see that she’s not shaking as much anymore.
“Your hands are warm.”
“Demon, remember?” Kara jokes.
“Right. So, warmed by the fires of hell?”
“Roasty toasty,” she nods, and she’s even more pleased when the woman huffs a little laugh. “You ready to stand now?”
The woman bundles her hands into the sleeves of Kara’s hoodie and swipes underneath her eyes again. “Yes,” she says, tone firm, and Kara finds herself amazed by her strength. “Thank you for saving me,” she says when she’s standing. “God, I feel like such an idiot.”
“What?” Kara blurts out. “Why?”
She gives Kara a curious look, lips twisting into an unhappy smile. The smile isn’t for Kara, though. “I froze. I know how to fight, my dad insisted, I've been learning for years! And I just,” an unhappy noise grits in her throat. “I froze.”
“But you’re alright.”
“Thanks to you.”
“I’m…sorry?” Kara guesses, not sure what she’s meant to say. She’s not sorry, though.
“Don’t be, I’m grateful. It’s not like I wanted to be gutted, y’know.”
“I do. I,” Kara feels like there should be more to say to her though. Some other way that she can help her—more than just saving her body, Kara wants to make sure that she’s okay. And doubt and shame and fear do not make up an okay human. “There is no shame in being helped,” she offers to her, tentatively. She pushes her hands into her pockets and bites her lip. “If there is a person who should be ashamed, it is the man who attacked you. There is no honour in feeding on vulnerability and fear. He should be ashamed. He should be arrested, too. And you?” She shakes her head. “There is no shame in needing help, or in being afraid.”
“Well.” The woman squints at her for a short while before nodding. “Thank you.”
Kara nods. She kind of wants to say something dramatic like ‘it was my honour’ or ‘all in a days work,’ but that whole ‘your worst nightmare’ line was really terrible and also she just knows that she’s going to trip over her words and make a fool of herself if she tries something smart or suave. She decides to wing it—that’s also a bad idea. “I’m, it’s, sure. Yeah, anytime. Oh gosh, not that I want you to be atta—um, be in a position like this again, no way, that is not a thing that I want! But if it were to happen, I’d do it again. This. Helping you.”
The woman laughs and this time, Kara is very happy to hear, she doesn’t sound on the edge of hysteria.
“Do you want—can I walk you home?” Kara asks, and she’s pleased when the woman quickly accepts the offer.
//
They walk in silence for a short while. Kara can hear the woman working up to ask her something—she keeps sucking in a breath like she wants to say something, but she never does so Kara just keeps walking and waiting.
“Do I get to know your name?” the woman finally blurts out.
“Me?” Kara points to her chest and, when she nods, she licks her lips nervously. Alex is going to murder her. “Um. No?”
“Oh. Okay.”
“No, um, it’s not because I don’t want to tell you,” Kara hurries to explain, and she steps away a little so that when she reaches out a little entreatingly to the woman, she can’t quite reach her, isn’t quite invading her personal space. “It’s just…safer. If you don’t know.”
“Okay, mysterious.”
They walk on.
Kara ignores too, this time, the curious flicks of her eyes.
“So, you don’t have a hero nickname yet?” is the next question, half a block later. “Or a suit, I see.”
“I—ha—you make it sound like I have,” Kara glances around, lowers her voice, “superpowers or something. Which I don’t, by the way.”
“Right.”
“I just took martial arts since I was really little.”
“Which one?”
Kara swallows. “Which…one?”
“Which martial art.”
“Um. All of them?”
The woman snorts and Kara knows that was the wrong answer. Rao save her, she’s gonna be in so much trouble. “Sure, okay, karate kid. And that thing you did with your eyes?” Kara looks down to her feet worriedly—not something as easily explained away, that’s for sure. “No, let me guess. It was a flashlight. Trick of the street lamp on your contacts.”
“It certainly wasn’t demonic, that’s for sure.”
“Y’know, the more you say it, the less certain I am about that. But for what it’s worth,” she shrugs, “I don’t think you’re a demon.”
Kara blows out a relieved sigh. “Good. Nice. Because I’m not.”
“Sure. You’re a guardian angel, obviously.” Kara stops still and gapes at her. The woman looks over her shoulder, grinning. “I mean, you’ve clearly just been given your wings—”
“No, hold on, I don’t have wings!” Kara hurries to tell her and she rushes a little to catch up. The woman laughs again.
“It’s a saying. It means you’re a novice at this.”
“Oh. Okay that’s not inaccurate.”
“Thought as much.” The woman stops. Waves a hand at the building they’ve stopped outside of. “This is me.”
“Oh. Great! That’s great. That was quick.”
“Mhm. Well, see you ‘round I guess, Jane Doe.”
Kara snorts. “Jane Doe,” she nods. “Good one.” She waits for the woman to get to the door then, knowing this is a bad idea but not being able to help it—it’s her first rescue, she really wants to know—she calls after her. “Can I know your name?”
She hesitates, pushing the door open. Leans against the doorframe. “That seems a bit unfair.”
“Well, I did save your life,” Kara shrugs, grinning. “Consider that my price.”
“Your going rate is pretty low.” She rolls her eyes when Kara just smiles a little more. Twisting her keys in her hands, she nods. Unzips the hoodie and shrugs it off, wincing when the movement jolts the little nick on her skin. “I forgot about that,” she says a little uneasily, and Kara is quick to move toward her and hover worriedly on the top step. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“He hurt you. I’m really sorry I didn't get there sooner.”
“Could’ve been worse.” She shrugs and pushes Kara’s hoodie into her hands. “I’ll be fine, relax. I’ve gotten worse shaving.”
“If you’re sure,” Kara concedes.
“Am I sure that you saved my life? Yeah. And your reward, as agreed." She hesitates a moment longer before she nods, holds out her hand to Kara, which she takes very gently and shakes. "I'm Lucy.”
“Lucy,” Kara repeats. She gives her hand a little squeeze and lets go. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Lucy.”
“Better circumstances would’ve been nice,” Lucy grins, and Kara nods a fervent agreement. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Lucy.” She waits for the door to close and then listens to make sure that Lucy gets into her apartment alright. Third floor, she hears, and then a short walk down the hallway. The key in the lock, a rather heavy sigh. Kara is relieved, and a little upset, to hear Lucy check and double check the door locks and then each of her windows. It’s smart, but she’s sick to her stomach at the thought that someone could just attack another person like that.
She doesn’t mean to, not really, but when she turns away satisfied that Lucy is safe in her home, she glances at the letterboxes. Third floor.
C. Corman. 3A
L. Brittan. 3B
F. Maine. 3C
L. Lane. 3D
“No,” she breathes. “No, no, no, that’s…” It’s so improbably she can’t even start to comprehend—her first rescue, a Lane?
Alex is going to murder her.
“Ouch, too hard, Kara,” Alex complains about the hug, but not too much so it isn’t super strong, just a little not-human strong, Kara guesses. That’s okay. That’s fine. Nothing too weird about that. “Relax, it’s just eggs and bacon. You’re not that sick of cafeteria food yet, are you?”
“Yes,” Kara groans, latching onto that excuse with both hands. “I’ve eaten cereal every day for the last three weeks, Alex.”
“What? I know that place has good food, what are you doing?”
“I keep getting nervous that if I start, I’ll eat out the whole buffet,” Kara laughs. It’s a legitimate concern she’s had, so it doesn’t feel too much like lying. “Also, the tongs are tiny and I don’t want to bend them.”
“Well you have nothing to worry about here,” Alex teases her. “I made enough for twelve and I stole the reinforced tongs from Mom so we’re all set.”
“You’re the best sister in the world.”
“I know. Thank me in cash.”
“What?”
“I’m taking Suze out tomorrow night and I need money for gas. Don’t worry,” Alex rolls her eyes. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Uh no, you won’t? You never have done?”
Alex shrugs. “Whoops. And it’s do. I never do.”
Kara frowns. “You never do.” Alex nods approvingly. “Thanks,” she grumbles. “But I’d like to see you say even one sentence in Kryptonian without screwing it up.” She drops her bag on the ground and folds herself into one of the kitchen chairs, grabs the tongs.
“Touchy much?” Alex’s eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”
Kara pauses. “Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing, Kara—have the kids been giving you a rough time? I’ll come by and,”
“And what? Beat them up?” Kara snorts. “No. And everyone is really nice, mostly. I just,” she shrugs. “You know. I’ve been learning for years, I thought, I just wish it got easier at some point.”
“Hey, one word here and there isn’t bad. And you’re great with your strength—mostly,” Alex corrects herself, accepting the tongs from Kara and looking at the grip she’s bent into them. “Um?” She holds them up and Kara flushes pink.
“Whoops.”
“Whoops,” Alex agrees, very slowly. She nods. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Kara plasters on her most innocent face and nods, filling her mouth with toast and egg so she doesn’t have to actually reply. “Okay. Well, look, don't be so down in the dumps. You’re doing great. And hey, you texted me that you got a job, do you want to tell me about that?”
“I work with you in the lab?”
“No, the other job.”
Kara frowns. It takes her a moment but then her confusion clears up and she points her fork at Alex triumphantly. “The internship! Yes!”
“Sure, okay, internship.”
“It’s different from a job,” Kara tells her. “Interns do not get paid.”
“Right okay, I’m sorry. Intern Kara, please tell me about this internship. If you can tear yourself away from my bacon.”
“You made it for me—“
“I made some of it for you,” Alex agrees, curling an arm around her plate when she sees Kara stand and lean over with her fork to try and snag some right off her plate. “Back off!”
She does end up sneaking a piece that falls onto the floor—“zero point two second rule!” she cheers—and when she’s done eating, they collapse onto the couch and Kara grins at the ceiling. “You know my housemate. Cat?”
“Sure, you’ve mentioned her and her evil ways like once. Maybe twice,” Alex laughs, rolling her eyes.
“Well, she’s the student editor of the paper at the university and I applied there to work in the mail room. It’s not technically a mail room, because it’s all digital, so it’s more like a very small desk actually with a computer. Actually, you have to bring your own computer but you get a new email address. And if there is any space in the paper before it goes to print, I get to put in an article of my very own!”
Alex laughs. “And?”
“And she said yes!” Kara hesitates. “I think.”
“You think she said yes?” Alex rolls, slowly, over onto a pillow so there isn’t too much pressure on her very full stomach. She stares expectantly at her sister.
“Well, there was a lot of scowling? And she told me I had better uphold the standards of the paper and my behaviour reflects on her as my housemate and the editor and she’s not going to go easy on me just because we live together and if I can’t handle that—”
“Breathe, Kara.”
“—then I better pack up right now and run home to mummy and daddy and take my place milking cows and popping out my pretty two point five children and prepare for disappointment.”
“Jesus, Kara!” Alex looks astounded, and a little angry, and a little impressed. “Are you sure that was a yes?”
Kara shrugs, pulls her favourite blanket of Alex’s over her lap and up to her shoulders. She wriggles into the couch until the lumps adjust perfectly to her back. “I think so,” she yawns. “The threats are to make sure I don’t embarrass the paper. Which means…yes. Right?”
Alex, helpfully, shrugs.
“Well, I’m writing an article for this week just in case.”
“Smart,” Alex nods. “That’s smart. Cover your bases.”
“Also, also,” Kara nearly wriggles clear off the couch she’s so excited, “I thought I would do a painting! Watercolour, I think. There are some lovely wading birds down by the lake and I want to write my first article on them because the students keep feeding them bread and it’s really unhealthy for them.”
Alex nods. She flicks a hand to the fridge. “Run and grab me a beer, would you? And tell me all about your article. You need me to proof read it?”
Kara sits up straight. “For real?”
“For real,” Alex nods. “I want to hear all about it. You know,” she says, and Kara feels the world slow and get a little heavier, doing her best to focus entirely on her sister and her tender eyes and firm tone, “I am so proud of you, Kara.”
Kara feels her gut twist uncomfortably and does her best not to react—guilt feels terrible, she truly discovers in that moment. “A beer?” she confirms. When Alex nods, Kara rolls off the couch to get it. She pretends she doesn’t see Alex’s face tighten with worry—normally when she says anything like love, Kara nearly cries, or can’t return the sentiment quickly enough. To get nothing?
“Hey, Kara,” Alex calls after her, and Kara swallows hard. She doesn’t let herself pause reaching into the fridge for the bottle, that would be far too much of a giveaway.
She glances back over her shoulder. “Yeah?”
Alex grins at her. “Perfect use of the phrase ‘for real’.”