Page 315 of Every Almost

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Reyna turned her head, pressed her lips to Charlie's temple, and whispered, completely certain, "I love you. I think I have always loved you. Even across the universe."

Charlie's throat tightened. She lifted her head and found Reyna's eyes, and something clicked on in her that had never made sense before.

The truth was, she wasn't sure people were built to fit each other this precisely. That two lives could run alongside each other for so long and then, in a single night, turn out to have been the same line the whole time, seen from different angles. Whatever the rose was, it hadn't made this, but it had made it visible. Reyna wasn't someone Charlie had fallen for, not a feeling she'd stumbled into across all those careful months.

Reyna was the answer to a question Charlie hadn't known she'd been asking her whole life.

And Charlie, who had spent that whole life believing that anything true could be explained if you just looked closely enough, understood that she was never going to be able to explain this, and, for the first time, didn't want to.

"I'm not good at this part," she said. Her voice came out rough. "You know that." Her voice cracked as she pushed through it, because she wasn't going to be careful, not now, not about this. "I love you. I don't have a bigger word than that, and trust me, I've looked." Reyna laughed gently. "There isn't a bigger one. There's just you, and me, and the fact that I would fall out of the sky into a bowl of cake batter a thousand more times if this is where I landed in every one of them."

Reyna's eyes had filled, she wasn't hiding it. The rose held warm and steady between them.

"You said you've always loved me," Charlie said, softer now. "Even across the universe."

"I have."

"Yeah." Charlie pressed her palm flat over the rose above Reyna's heart, felt it beat beneath her hand, and her own answer it. Her hand pressed over the place she'd first touched a stranger on a kitchen floor and hadn't known she was touching the rest of her life. "Me too. I just took the long way here. Twenty-nine years and forty light-years and oneveryconfusing Monday."

Reyna laughed out loud, and Charlie smiled, wet and helpless, before it faded into something quieter, something certain.

"Here's the thing," she said. "It was always going to be this. You and me. Though, I didn't know it. Frankly, there's no way I could have known it, I was galaxies away living a completely different life. But I see now that every part of my life, even Katie, every single piece of it was already pointed here. At you. Like the answer was written down somewhere before I ever got to do the work."

Her voice thickened. "I don't believe in a lot, Rey. You know that. I believe in things that can be measured, mostly. But you and me? I believe in this. I believe this was inevitable. You were inevitable. Whatever I was doing back there, whoever I thought I was going to be, every road I was ever on was already bending toward this floor, this ship, this exact second with your arms around me. I just couldn't see it from inside."

"And now?" she asked.

"Now I can see it," Charlie said. "The whole line. All the way back to the beginning. And I wouldn't change one inch of the long way here, because every bit of it was the road to you." She pressed her forehead to Reyna's. "It was always going to be you. It was never going to be anything else."

Reyna laughed, tears spilling down her cheeks. "Oh yeah? How are you so sure?"

Charlie lifted her head to look at Reyna. "It couldn't have been. I checked the math."

And then Charlie smiled as Reyna's laugh echoed through her room, filling the space with one of Charlie's favorite sounds.

"I love you," Charlie said.

"I love you," Reyna replied, taking a staggering breath before she continued. “Bigger than the universe.”

Charlie felt those words move through her in a way she couldn’t remember than any others doing in her life. Except for one phrase.

I love you. More than the sky, the stars, and the universe.

“Wow,” Charlie said softly. “You love me a lot.”

Reyna laughed again, her voice soft. “Yeah, I do.”

And then Charlie leaned down and kissed her, just as Reyna covered Charlie's hand with her own, the rose glowing gently between their fingers, neither of them letting go.

TWO HOURS LATER

The room had gone quiet the way rooms only do very late, the cycle lights pulled down to almost nothing, the low hum of the Emberkind the only sound left. Reyna lay half over her, head tucked under Charlie's chin. She had one arm thrown across Charlie's middle, her weight warm and heavy, entirely trusting in a way Charlie was still getting used to. Charlie had one hand moving slow up and down the bare skin of Reyna's back, going nowhere in particular. Neither of them was asleep, but neither of them was trying to be.

"I want to tell you something," Reyna said, stroking Charlie's jaw with her fingertips.

"Tell me anything," Charlie said softly.