Page 259 of Every Almost

Everything was coming up now. All of it. Everything she had spent months sitting on, every night in that observation room with her hands in her lap, every time she had watched Charlie laugh at something and didn't react the way she wanted to. She had held it together the whole time, telling herself she was doing the right thing. She had been so good at it that some part of her had started to believe there was nothing there to hold.

But there was. There was so much there that Reyna didn't know she could even carry it all.

It tore through her in the corridor between her office and the lift, slicing through her like something ripping. Reyna stopped and put a hand on the wall.

She had not known it would hurt like this.

That was the thing she couldn't get past. She had known that everything she was avoiding would hurt. Hell, she'd built her entire life as a captain around knowing how much grief can hurt.

But this was so different. This wasn't grief. She knew grief, had lived inside it. She could handle and battle and twist grief around in her sleep.

This was Charlie Wickett being taken out of her life, and there was nothing in Reyna's experience that had prepared her for what that felt like. But then, that was because there had never been a Charlie Wickett before.

Soul match.

That was what her mind produced, unhelpfully, in this corridor at God knows what hour. Reyna felt her body shudder, and she staggered, placing her other hand on the same wall to catch herself. She leaned her forehead against the cool surface as her world crashed down around her.

She knew she couldn't go back to the library. There was not a galaxy available where she could stand in a warm room, full of her own crew, with the weight of what she was actively losing as each second ticked by, letting Tavi just hand her a drink.

And underneath all of that, further down in a place she didn't want to access, she knew she couldn't face Charlie.

That frightened her more than she knew how to conceive.

She wanted Charlie so badly right now that she could not trust herself in a room with her. Every part of her was pointed at that woman with nothing left in front of it, and Reyna did not know what she would do if she got within arm's reach of her.

Because Charlie would look up at her. That was all it would take. Charlie would look at her, and it would be better. But then it would be so much worse, because Reyna knew now that they were taking her, and she would not be able to look at that woman and hold any of this back.

And Charlie would get all of it when she deserved much better than that. Charlie deserved better than that since the day she fell into this ship. It was Reyna who had spent six months giving her exactly nothing, and the last thing she was going to do was make this the first thing she ever gave her.

Her body vibrated again, the need to move so visceral Reyna almost worried something was medically wrong. But she knew there wasn't.

So instead, she walked.

She didn't choose a direction. Her body chose one, and Reyna went with it, one hand out against the wall to stabilize herself, the deck no longer feeling level.

Reyna moved through her ship like a ghost, not registering a single turn she made.

At one point, she reached a dead end. As it registered, she came back into her body, finding herself standing still in front of a door.

She knew which room this door belonged to before she even looked up.

The Observation Roomdoor was open.

Charlie was sitting on the bench. Their bench.

Her legs were drawn up, arms wrapped around her knees, still in the clothes she had worn to the party. Her button down's sleeves were rolled up her arms, the shirt now untucked.

A nebula had come around while Reyna was in her office, and now the Observation Room, serving its intended purpose, was completely full of the violets and rose pouring through the viewport and across the deck. It was covering Charlie's hands, face, and mixing with the colors of the bracelet on her wrist.

But Charlie was not looking at the stars.

She was looking straight at the door.

She did not move when Reyna appeared. Her eyes found Reyna's and would not let go, and Reyna lost any chance of being able to leave.

Reyna put a hand on the doorframe because she should have known Charlie would be here. She should have known Charlie would be sitting in their room, waiting. This woman had walked out of a party she'd built and come here to wait for Reyna to come and find her. Because that was what Charlie Wickett did.

She showed up.