Chapter 1
When Kia was five years old and learning to read, she took a long look at the name on the inside of her dominant arm. S-T-E-V-E-N. She could spell. She added the last name to that list after she realized that she had a last name, and Mommy had a last name, and Daddy had a last name, and all of her friends had last names. Last names were important, so she learned his (even though she never called her best friend by anything but their first name). R-O-G-E-R-S. At five, she couldn’t quite pronounce the ‘R’s, but she recognized it and knew what it sounded like when an adult said it. Just like she couldn’t quite say her whole name right (Kiara) but knew what it sounded like when someone was saying it.
Two of her friends in kindergarten had already found their soulmates: each other. One was almost five and the other was excited to start first grade. They were how she learned about soulmates. Her dad was a veteran (whatever that meant) and all she knew was that he was gone a lot of the time. Kia’s friends were never to be seen without one another. They played together at recess, shared their packed lunches, and helped each other with their homework. To Kia, they were the closest friends she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t wait to meet hers.
Later, as she grew, she learned that those two friends weren’t the norm. Most people didn’t meet their soulmates when they were so young. In elementary school, Kia knew a grand total of two people in her homeroom classes who found their mates, and although she heard of several others that had, either they didn’t tell her or it just really didn’t happen as much as she’d thought.
When she was nine, her daddy came home after being far away for a long time. Her mom said that he was in the Middle-East. Kia found it on a map with the help of her teacher one time and asked how far away it was. The answer was saddening. What if she needed her dad or he needed her? She couldn’t pack a bag and stay in a hotel in the middle of the ocean. She asked how much it would take for an airplane, but the laughing reply of her teacher was staggering. It was that much money? She earned ten dollars in allowance a week when she did all of her chores every day. How could she ever earn that much money? She’d be twenty before she even bought the tickets, and by then, her dad would’ve come home.
Her father’s weird clothes had a new meaning. She’d last seen him when she was eight, and he picked her up and spun her around in the middle of the airport. There was another person in his military fatigues leaving the security gate after her dad’s plane docked, and he was limping. That was the day Kia learned a simplified version of what war was, and why her dad was gone, and what the word ‘veteran’ meant.
Being nine and loving her dad, she decided she wanted to be a veteran, too.
Kiara had been subjected to some bullying for her nickname. She wasn’t a car, and she knew that, but apparently not everyone did, so she started using her full name again. At twelve, she was looking forward to high school with a mix of excitement and nervousness. Most of her friends couldn’t wait to get there, and Kiara seemed to be one of the few that was willing to patiently wait out the final year of junior high.
That final year dragged out when she was excited, and it hurried past while she was kept busy. She turned thirteen a month after she started eighth grade, joined the cheerleaders that rooted for the school’s junior football team, and when her dad came back from another overseas tour, she took an entire week of her social life and spend her free time with him instead of with her friends, instead. She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He promised he wouldn’t go back again and said that he’d served his contract.
A movie came out in December that romanticized soulmates and told the story of a girl in high school who met hers. The problem was that he was a freshman college boy. They lived in the same town, but because of their three-year age difference, their neighborhood discouraged them from dating. They, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, tried to run away, only to be found by the police, and he was charged with kidnapping by the high schooler’s hysterical parents. Thought it ended sadly, it was such a hit that it restarted the soulmate buzz in Kiara’s school.
“I bet he’s going to have green eyes,” her science partner sighed, focused more on the cupboards she stared at dreamily than the worksheet they were supposed to be filling out. “And he’s going to be able to teach me to waltz.”
“If you want to waltz, you could always just go online,” Kiara offered helpfully, putting her pencil down and picking up her calculator to find the density of the plastic block.
Hannah sent her an exasperated glare, rolling her eyes. “That’s not the point!” Hannah had never really seen eye-to-eye with Kiara, mostly because she didn’t want to be in the armed forces and didn’t understand why Kiara would. “I want him to teach me. It’ll be so cute and romantic!”
“You know what’s really romantic, Miss Barnham?” Their teacher said from behind their chairs. Hannah squeaked in surprise and blushed a bright red. Kiara calmly wrote down the answer her calculator gave her in the corresponding blank space on the worksheet. “Not making your partner do all of the work. If you want to daydream, do it in someone else’s class.”
That wasn’t the only time that Hannah imagined what her soulmate would be like. Kiara quickly realized that Hannah was lonely. She noticed that the other girl rarely talked to anyone else, didn’t seem to have many friends, and Hannah herself had mentioned in passing that her parents were separated. From one day to the next, her ideal mate would look like a teenaged Johnny Depp before doing a one-eighty into a young Cuba Gooding Jr.. When there wasn’t something to distract her from her sort-of-friend’s imagination, Kiara would roll up her sleeve and look at Steven’s name. Sometimes she wished that she’d meet him sooner rather than later, but she tried not to guess at who he was, what he liked, what he wanted. She knew that her aunt had had expectations when she met Kiara for the first time, and when Kiara fell short of them, she’d felt terrible, even though her aunt tried to be nice about it. She didn’t ever want her soulmate to feel that way because of her.
When she entered high school as a freshman, that dumb movie had mostly been forgotten about. Hannah had moved away when her mother was offered a job in another state, but Kiara still found herself wondering about her soulmate more than ever before.
She gave up cheerleading. She hadn’t liked it as much as she’d thought, but it had been fun while it lasted. Instead, she started to play in the girls’ soccer team at the community center. Her dad, true to his word, had stayed home since returning, and had started putting in around twenty hours a week volunteering at the VA, helping soldiers who hadn’t been as fortunate as he was to reintegrate. Kiara met a lot of kids her age through her father’s position, as he had a talent to make friends easily, and before she knew it, she’d be going with him to dinner with another veteran and his child or children.
Kiara opted to take American history as her elective, just to get it out of the way. There was a boy in her period whose name was Steven, but before she could get too excited, the teacher called him by his last name, and it wasn’t Rogers. She tried not to be very disappointed. They spent three weeks reading about the political, social, and historical impact of WWII. Kiara learned a lot more than she expected. She’d known about the Nazis, and she’d heard of Captain America (who hadn’t?) but she hadn’t really known much about the latter or the motivations of the former. She also learned a little about the Red Skull, although there wasn’t much general knowledge on them other than that they were German scientists who Captain America had fought. History became one of her favored subjects, so when she was offered the choice of topic for her mid-term essay, she chose to do hers on Captain America, while the other students near her chose things like the importance of nationalism, the rise of Hitler, and America’s involvement against the Axis.
While writing her paper, Kiara went digging. The school library was more than decent, and it was rife with information about the forties, but very little of it was specific to Captain America. He was in practically every book as a footnote, at the least, but she wanted to do her essay on him, not on his patriotic impact, so she took to the internet, where she found a black-and-white photograph of him in his iconic costume, holding up his shield, while a cast of dancing chorus girls stood in a line behind him, performing. It was a still from an old TV broadcast as the captain urged for Americans to support the war. Under the photo was a link to an entire article dedicated to him, where she found the name he used when not in his starred and striped uniform.
Steven Rogers didn’t seem like a terribly unique name (no offense to him) but when she saw it and looked back to the picture, Kiara knew, deep in her soul, that she had finally found her soulmate.
And he’d been missing, presumed dead, for the last sixty years.
Kiara made a last-minute adjustment and wrote her essay on the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg on the UK instead.
A month after she turned in her paper, she realized she still had the tabs on Captain America saved on her computer. She tried to approach her mother about it, but while she was sympathetic, she told Kiara that she was just anxious and overreacting; that her soulmate was young, healthy, and alive somewhere, waiting for her. Much as it was any history fan’s dream to be the soulmate of an iconic international hero, Captain Steve Rogers had probably had his own soulmate in the forties. She suggested maybe it was Lt. Peggy Carter, who Kiara later Googled. Lt. Carter had come forward after the war ended, telling the story of the brave young man she recruited who gave his life to save the country and lost his plane at sea.
In the documentary which Lt. Carter gave an interview for, she was wearing a wedding band. Not all soulmates were of a romantic nature, so Kiara supposed her mother could’ve still been right, had it not been for the feeling of certainty in her sinking heart that told her it just wasn’t true.
As more and more of her friends found their true loves, Kiara grew bitterer, angrier, and more cynical before she eventually resigned herself to what she’d learned at fourteen. She let a boy a year older than her take her to his junior prom, but shortly after that, he started chasing after a girl in his own graduating class, practically forgetting that Kiara existed. Any friends she had ever tried to tell her secret to believed that she was either pulling their leg or being overly dramatic, and no one understood that she just knew Captain America had been her soulmate. Sometimes she wanted to scream. Other times, she wanted to cry. More often, she wished that his uniform hadn’t covered his forearms. Maybe then there would’ve been photographic evidence somewhere that her name was on him, just like his was on her.
Finally, at sixteen and a junior in high school, Kiara pulled herself out of her own wallowing. It had lasted long enough, and the therapist that her parents began taking her to see didn’t believe her, either. She only felt worse after those sessions of being told that she was upset about nothing (it wasn’t nothing), that she was just lonely and projecting onto someone any girl her age would admire (she wasn’t lonely, she had plenty of friends, she just knew something no one else would listen to her about). She let them all think that the counsellor had struck a chord at long last, and she began to move on. So what if she could never so much as meet her soulmate? Plenty of people lived long and happy lives without theirs. The names on everyone’s arms were more of a predictor than a promise.
She picked up some Spanish in a class to fulfill her foreign language requirements, decided that chemistry was neat but not for her, and, most importantly, decided that she did not, in fact, still want to join the military when she graduated. She couldn’t pinpoint if it was because, while her dad volunteered at the VA, she saw some sad cases, or if it was because the novelty had worn off, or if it was because there were other things she could imagine doing with her life that were just more appealing to her. She tried not to think about Steve Rogers being the cause, but she knew he’d almost definitely played a role in her decision.
From early in her junior year to about a month before Valentine’s Day, she dated a nice guy she shared a health and nutrition class with. Most of her friends booed about them breaking up so close to the holiday of lovers, but Kiara shrugged her shoulders and got over it. She did the typical moping already. Her dad jokingly offered to give her his shotgun and look the other way, her mom let her eat an entire pint of ice cream at once, and she stayed home all weekend after the breakup. Then, because Kiara was looking forward to the future and growing bored with the high school grind, she stored her blankets and Kleenex, focused on her scholarly duties, and signed up to take the PSAT so she’d know what to expect the next fall.
As a seventeen-year-old, she did well on the SAT. Well enough that, when she applied to several universities across the country, she was accepted into the majority of them by February of her senior year. Her parents helped her root through the pile of acceptance letters, figuring out finances and taking into account the scholarship she’d been awarded. They talked, Kiara decided she wanted to move further away than her mother would have liked, but her dad talked her mom into being excited about it with a little persuasive reminders of what New York had to offer, and by the time Kiara was mailing her confirmation to NYU, her mom was already enthusiastically making plans to visit her in Manhattan.
Her social group scattered. April went to UC Berkeley, Sarah was excited to go to the University of Knoxville, Rachel got into Sarah-Lawrence, and while her ex-boyfriend spread his wings to go to a college in Nevada, one of her closer male friends was vibrating with eager anticipation, because he’d been accepted into a study-abroad program at a prestigious university in Finland.
Moving to New York, Kiara realized how alone she truly was in the city that never slept, and the freshly-eighteen-year-old began to regress back to the nights when she would trace Steve’s name on her inner arm, wishing that things had been different. For the hell of it, she bought a vintage Captain America poster that she saw at a store and hung it in her dorm room.
She excelled in her history courses, and as she worked to push through the ghost that she’d been haunted by since ninth grade, she wrote an awesome final paper on Captain America. She felt like she’d gotten some closure, since she’d changed topics way back when, and although the poster in her dorm still made her smile sadly, she also began to move on a little, and for the first time, she started thinking about finding a soulmate who was a little more accessible.
Well, that plan backfired, Kiara thought at the tail end of her sophomore year.
After going steady with a man who she’d really liked for more than a year, they’d broken up messily because he thought she was cheating on him. It was the way she stroked her arm at night, a habit she hadn’t yet broken, and the way that she was protective of her phone and kept her computer under password protection. He thought she was cheating on him with her soulmate, the man whose name matched the one on her arm, and although she desperately refuted it, he wouldn’t believe her. She spilled to him that her soulmate had been dead for approximately sixty-five years, but he didn’t believe her, just thought she’d pulled a lie out of thin air from the poster in the room, and although she showed him the name, he still wouldn’t hear it.
This breakup wasn’t as easy to get over as her high school ones had been. She’d been invested in this one, more so than any in her past, and cried herself to sleep more than she’d have liked to admit. She hoped that maybe they’d make up, but when he blocked her phone number, she took a hint and reluctantly let him go.
She had also changed her major a semester prior, deciding that the path she’d been going down just wasn’t working out for her. She’d thought that her penchant for history would mean she’d make a good history major, but she found that unless it pertained to Captain America, it wasn’t as engaging as some of her other classes. She had over forty credit hours, most of them geared towards a major she no longer wanted, and was about to add sixteen more to them. She needed to decide on a course of action, because unless she crammed in an unreasonable number of classes, she wouldn’t get her bachelor’s before her four-year scholarship was up. She needed a way to generate income.
Kiara went job searching in between her classes and on the weekends. A lot of employers were unwilling to accommodate her class schedule. She applied for a secretarial position in a small office building in the city, but they had been one of the businesses that wouldn’t let her work the odd hours she had available. A few days after she received word from them, she was glad to have been turned down. The place had suffered serious damage during a superhero fight between two iron suits that she wouldn’t have believed, had it not been everywhere on the news, radio, TV, and social media websites she used.
A couple of days later, ultra-rich, former-weapons-designer Tony Stark admitted to being Iron Man, the name coined by the press, and although no one would confirm who he’d been fighting, several sources cited the mysteriously-missing Obadiah Stane, Tony’s former partner, and the similarities between Stark’s designs he made under duress in Afghanistan and the villain he’d been fighting in the city. When she saw a re-run of the interview in which Tony confirmed his identity, it struck her that she needed a job and Stark Industries was currently under a lot of scrutiny. Not only had Stark’s technology been used to destroy the city, but in the process of saving it, a lot of property damage had been done that many civil suits wanted to hold him accountable for. She figured that the aloof engineer could possibly have an opening. Wouldn’t people be resigning to get out from under that shadow?
Her anxiety had started to make her desperate. The last thing she wanted to do was worry her parents, but if she couldn’t find a way to supplement her tuition and her boarding expenses, then she was going to start taking out student loans. NYU was an expensive college. On top of that, she still needed to be able to save for what she’d do after getting her degree.
She got lucky. Pepper Potts accepted her application after an interview, and next thing Kiara knew, she was being paid well over minimum-wage to do some fairly easy archiving work, which freed up other employees to do things that the company needed done that she was unqualified for. The best part was that she was given an access card to Stark Tower, and so she could come and go as she needed for her classes.
Several years passed this way. She met Iron Man himself a few times (he made a point to meet her after he heard that she applied for the position right as Stark Industries looked pretty bad), and although he made her nervous initially, Kiara quickly learned that, as long as she didn’t try to double-cross him or his company, he was a generous boss she didn’t need to be intimidated by. For the most part, Pepper handled the employees, so Kiara's interactions with Tony were limited and brief.
She was finally about to do it! Come May, she was going to walk up that stage in her regalia, and get her degree!
Kiara had been in a perpetual good mood for the last several weeks, and no one could take her down from it. She went to work at five AM with a huge, face-splitting grin. She said hello to Happy on her way in, clocked her time in the computer servers, and put on her headphones while she got a ton of stuff done. Although by the time she left to go to class, she was starving, she was still wearing her grin.
“What’s got you in such a fit?” He asked, looking up from his computer screen.
Kiara smiled even brighter. Nothing could take her down. Happy congratulated her when she told him the good news, and she left, feeling even lighter on her feet than before. She should’ve known it wouldn’t last.
While she stood in a café, waiting for her coffee hours later, a portal opened up over the top of Stark Tower. It was massive, dark, and through the rip in the sky, she could see what looked like the mystical colors and stars of outer space. The scene looked like it came straight out of a video game or sci-fi movie. At first, everyone was alarmed, then curious, and then went back to being alarmed when an army of sorts started to pour out of the sky, flying to the city and starting a battle.
“Mom’s going to have a panic attack when she sees this on the news,” Kiara sighed as she watched the first of what would be many explosions. Then her head caught up with her and she took action. “Hey,” she called to the barista over the clamor of panicking civilians. The barista looked about to pass out, herself, her face gone incredibly pale. “Do you have a cellar?”
The girl, who was probably five years younger than Kiara, shook her head, looking petrified as a car was thrown onto the street in front of the café. The car came out of nowhere, just fell from somewhere above the ceiling of the restaurant, and landed upside-down, glass shattering into the asphalt and metal crushing and twisting like wet paper at the impact. It made a terrible crunching noise when it landed, and they could feel the ground shake under their feet.
With cars falling from the sky, Kiara couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend that they go outside and try to find shelter. An unwelcome voice in the back of her head reminded her of the decimated building she’d applied for a job at, completely destroyed during one of the many disastrous battles New York seemed to attract. She expected Iron Man to be zooming around overhead, fighting with the terrorist-of-the-year outside, and although she should’ve been more alarmed, she could still think surprisingly clearly.
“Okay,” she said unconvincingly, nodding reassuringly to the barista. She pulled out a chair, stood up on top of it, and waved her arms for the patrons’ attention. “Listen, guys, I know this looks bad, but New York’s had worse, so let’s just stay calm and go into the back room, okay? If someone wants to call the police, that would be good, too, but let’s stay indoors until this passes.”
They listened to her and crowded into the back room behind the counter. A mother’s child fussed and whined, then broke into hiccups and bawls when something went boom nearby. Kiara tensed when she heard it and briefly wondered why she hadn’t let April talk her into going to a college on the other side of the country. If she’d gone to UC Berkeley, then she probably wouldn’t have had to deal with even half as many attacks in her city.
Close to forty minutes passed (she was timing it on her phone) before something in the front of the café slammed and the door was opened. The tiny, charming bell over the front entrance made the barista moan as if she was going to be sick with fear, and the toddler opened her mouth and screeched in protest.
Kiara crept to the doorway and took her phone, holding it at angle to look through into the front space of the restaurant. The screen reflected what was through the doorway without necessitating that she make herself visible. What she saw nearly gave her a heart attack, because a body was right outside the door, and her phone offered her a reversed image of long legs in black pants.
“Everyone okay in here?” The woman asked calmly, ducking her head as she entered. Her shoes were heavy and she wore almost all black, but her red hair would’ve made her stand out in a crowd. Well, that and the plethora of weapons on her person. Kiara counted at least three guns, and those were just the ones that were visible.
“What’s going on?” Someone asked shakily.
The redhead hesitated before answering, “Bad Samaritans.” Kiara snorted. The redhead turned her piercing eyes on her, and that was when they both clicked.
“Natalie?” Kiara asked, puzzled. She’d seen Natalie Rushman around Stark Industries before; she worked with Pepper and Tony. Not once had she ever been dressed like a femme fatale.
Natalie looked annoyed with herself and she offered Kiara a hand. When Kiara put her hand in Natalie’s, the redhead pulled her up from her kneel with more strength than she’d been expecting. “Natasha,” she corrected. “Stark thought you were on campus.”
“Not now,” Kiara replied, her head buzzing. What’s going on? “Class got out early.”
Natalie/Natasha shook her head and then looked over her shoulder, calling out into the front of the café. “We’ve got civilians back here, Captain,” she yelled. A moment later, someone else joined the in the back room. Kiara’s heart stopped beating.
An updated costume and seventy years had barely changed him. Kiara covered her mouth. More than the portal over Stark Tower, more than the chaos of a battle in the streets, more than the falling car, the arrival of Steve Rogers blindsided her. It felt like she couldn’t breathe. A helmet covered part of his face, but Kiara could still see his blue eyes. His pictures didn’t do justice to the depth of his eyes.
He extended a hand to her, his shield over his back. “Come with me, ma’am,” he said with a polite, yet firm, tone. “We’re evacuating this part of the city.”
Kiara reached out for him and clasped his hand numbly. He looked past her to the others. It was a small crowd, but there were more than a few people hiding in the room. “Natasha,” Steve said, “I’m sending Barton in here. He can help get people out the perimeter.” He started to take Kiara out towards the front of the café again.
She let him lead her, staring at his back with amazement. How was he alive? How was he there? What was going on? Why was the city under attack? Who was doing it this time? Who was Natalie really, and why would she have lied about her name? She had a thousand questions and no answers. Just as he took her outside, she summoned up the nerve to begin asking.
“What’s going on?”
“This one of them?” Another man asked before Steve could answer Kiara. He seemed to come out of nowhere. One second he wasn’t there, and the next, he was in front of Kiara, sizing her up. This man also had blue eyes, and, similarly to Natasha, was dressed in dark clothes with lots of weapons. A compact bow was slung over his shoulder, and a technologically-enhanced quiver of arrows laid on his back. “I got her. Go get the others. Stark says he can’t hold them off much longer.”
Before she could process what was happening, much less protest it, she was passed from Steve to the guy she could only assume was Barton, and the latter dragged her to waiting police cars at the outside of a perimeter two blocks away.
Mere days after what had come to be known as the Battle of Manhattan, also referred to as the Battle of New York, Kiara went to Stark Tower around the normal time she would’ve, had Pepper not send the staff an email telling them to take the next few days off until further notice.
Happy met her at the doors. Evidently, he was one of the employees close enough to Tony not to be sent home while things were cleaned up. Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow (Natasha) and Hawkeye (Barton) had majorly made the news, and if they weren’t careful, they were going to get their own groupies sooner rather than later.
Happy looked at her briefly, smiled slightly that she wasn’t hurt in the battle, and then apologetically tried to turn her away.
“Sorry,” he said, looking as though he truly was sorry. “You can’t come in today, Ki.”
“I don’t need to work,” she said bluntly. Inside she was shaking, and she had her hands in her pockets because she was sure her hands would tremble otherwise. “I just need to talk to Tony. Um, or Steve, if he’s here.” Her goal was to speak with her soulmate, but she knew that the odds of him staying in Stark Tower were slim, and she would be more likely to gain entry if she wanted to speak to her boss than to someone who had fangirls all over the internet and no public ties to Kiara.
“He says not to let anyone in.” “Please, Happy.” Kiara let him have the puppy dog eyes, but before she knew it was going to happen, a wave of nerves crashed down on her. What if she really was turned away at the door and never got to see her mate again? Tears welled up in her eyes. “I need to talk to them.”
“What was with the waterworks?” Tony asked, entering the waiting room outside of Pepper’s office.
Kiara jumped up from the small sofa and rubbed at her face self-consciously. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I just got really antsy.” She paused. Tony tucked his hands in his pockets and stared at her expectantly. “I need to see Steve. Please,” she remembered her manners at the last minute.
She wasn’t very close with Tony, so she wasn’t surprised that he questioned her, but it still kind of hurt. “Want an autograph?” He asked sarcastically, then made a joke out of it, crossing his arms and frowning at her. “Frankly, Kiara, I’m insulted. If you want autographs, the first signature you want is from Spangles, when you have a perfectly-capable superhero right in front of you?” He took his hands out of his pockets and wiggled his thumbs. “See? My hands are in practically-mint condition.”
“Tony,” she sighed. “It’s important.”
The engineer grew serious and he stepped closer to her. Kiara’s heart started beating faster; when he wasn’t screwing around, his serious mood was more intimidating than she had expected it to be. “We hardly know each other. Now, I’m not exactly Team Cap, but I’m not going to let someone who could be a stranger up into his space without a good reason. This tower is kind of our space right now. Why do you think everyone’s been sent home? Until we regroup and settle, this is our home base. You’re not getting past the business floors without express permission from me. So if you want to see Mr. Stars-and-Stripes up close and personal, you’re going to have to convince me it’s not so you can prod him with a stick and write home about it.”
Kiara swallowed and pulled up her sleeve, holding out her arm for Tony to see the name of her soulmate inscribed onto her skin. If that wasn’t a good reason, then she didn’t know what was.
When the door next opened, Kiara jumped to her feet, expecting it to be Tony again. He had left without saying anything. But no – it wasn’t Tony; it was Steve, this time in trousers and a button-up white shirt, the cuffs rolled up. Kiara bit her lip and held her hands up to her chest, fingers laced and palms clasped tightly.
Steve surveyed her for as long as she studied him. He was the picture of health, and although she had never expected to see him before her after she learned who he was, he somehow surpassed all imagined expectations; maybe it was just because he was actually alive. And how is that? She looked to his face, where his heart was practically on his sleeve, earnest confusion mingling with hopefulness in the slight smile of his lips and the light behind his eyes.
“How are you-“
“So you were-“
They started to speak at the same time. Kiara blushed fiercely and looked down. Steve chuckled.
“Go ahead,” she gestured.
“So you were at the café.” He canted his head at her as he stepped closer. Kiara met him halfway, and with about a foot of space between them, they looked to each other’s eyes. She had to tilt her head back. “I’m sure you have questions… I don’t really know where to begin answering them,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. A light dusting of pink rose to his face, and Kiara thought it was quite possibly the sweetest thing she’d ever seen. “But I’m so glad I’ve finally met you, Kia.”
She blinked, startled. No one had called her Kia since she was ten and she asked her parents to stop. “Kia?” She asked, curious.
Steve blinked, too, mirroring her expression. Then he quickly went into a mild panic in which he assumed her reaction was because he’d done something wrong. “Sorry,” he backpedaled. “I, uh – well, I’ve been looking at your name every night for as long as I can remember, and I – I guess I just felt like I already knew you.”
Kiara smiled. “No one’s called me Kia since elementary school. It’s a car thing, so the teasing got a little out of hand. It’s okay, though. I like it.” More shyly, she quieted her voice and continued, “And I’m really happy that you’re here.”
The smile he gave her made the heartbreak, the therapy, and the failed relationships since all worth it, just to be meeting him for the first time.