Archive of Our Own ^beta

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“What did you think I was gonna tell you about before?”

“Before?”

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“Harriet!”

“Harriet?” He repeats the name like he’s never heard it before, as if he forgot about the existence of anyone else in the world for a minute there. Her heart skips a guilty beat for being glad of it. 

She’s close enough to see every line on his forehead creasing up in perfect confusion. “What about her?” 

“Nothing,” she lies for Harriet’s sake, sparing a moment to regret the pain this will cause her friend. 

“Emma,” he stretches her name into a gentle warning, and god, she’s even missed that. 

“Really,” she promises, hands still on his collar. She flattens her palms to smooth over a crease there, wondering if she made it when she grabbed for him, kind of hoping she did. 

“It doesn’t matter. I was wrong.” She laughs. “Again.”

Alex ducks his head to try and catch her gaze but she can’t look at him, not right now. It’s too much. If she meets his eyes she’s going to cry again, she knows. 

Her hands stray, one wandering over his shoulder, the other falling to rest against his chest. She watches it for a moment, trying to calm herself with the steady rise and fall of his breathing under her fingers. It doesn’t work. When she presses her palm over his heart, her own breath hitches in an embarrassingly audible way. When Alex looks down at her hand, he swallows hard and damn it, she’s a goner. She can’t look at him anywhere, it seems. Nowhere’s safe.

She looks to the flowers on his desk instead, abandoned there when she’d reached for him. She reaches over and straightens the bouquet, fixing a flattened petal. Alex grabs her hand back in his the second she lets go of the flowers.

The flowers. Her flowers. Romantic flowers. From Alex. Even when he thought she might have loved someone else. Because he loves her, anyway. In spite of everything. 

She looks back at him and wants to say something, even if it’s only thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou for being that brave. But his eyes are over bright and she hasn’t seen Alex cry in years, maybe not since his Dad died, and that’s what does it.

Tears, still so close to the surface, spill onto her cheeks again.

Alex looks panicked at the tears, until she smiles through them. If her mascara hadn’t run before, it will have now and she really couldn’t care less.

She reaches for him, because she can, because he’s here, finally.

“I’ve never been happier to be wrong in my whole life,” she admits, resting her forehead against his again as if she could smooth out the lines there. 

The tears are getting really inconvenient now, swimming in her field of vision and that’s not ok, blurring her view of him is not ok.

She pulls away, wiping impatiently at her eyes.

“Sorry,” she gets out, voice wavering. “I’m a mess.”

He reaches for her, hesitates, shakes his head. Then, smiling to himself, he tries again. 

He lays a palm either side of her face, fingers curling under her jaw. He can cradle her whole face so easily, his hands even straying to reach into her hair. She feels tiny beneath his hands and though he touches her lightly, like glass, she is far from delicate. It’s the safest she’s ever felt. Fresh tears spill over when he wipes away her tear tracks, but he catches them too. 

“I’m not off to a great start,” he says, his voice far rougher than usual. “Just promised to make you happy and I’m making you cry.”

“Happy tears,” she assures him, blinking back a fresh wave.

Then she’s kissing him again. Because she does this now - she kisses Alex, one hand holding a fistful of his shirt, the other slipping into his $10 haircut. Yeah, she’s not going to get tired of this. Not ever. 

Five minutes ago she would’ve said she knew Alex inside out, better than maybe anyone else in the world. She knows every line of his face, knows the scar on his cheek and how he got it and that he cried in the ER when they put the two stitches in. But kissing him is new and how on earth has she gone all these years without knowing exactly how it feels to have him laugh against her lips?

She’s leaning so far over to him that when he pulls her closer she over balances, and throws a hand out to steady herself. It lands on his thigh. Obviously.

He jumps under her and she snatches her hand back, breaking the kiss.

“Feeling me up already?” he jokes.

“Shut up.”

He smirks, altogether too amused at how flustered she probably looks.

She arches an eyebrow. Oh, game on, Alex Knightley. 

He has the good sense to look scared.

Deliberately, slowly, she puts her hand back, a faction higher up his thigh. His eyes blow wide and when she lands her other hand on his other leg, creeping higher with featherlight steps of her fingertips, he actually stops breathing.

She lifts her hands away without warning and the sudden flash of disappointment that races across his face is so ridiculously adorable, she almost puts her hands back. Instead she raises both eyebrows, smiling sweetly at him. Gotcha.

Alex shakes his head at her, his face lit up with the same fond expression he’s worn a million times before.

He reaches for her again, like he can’t help himself, can’t go thirty seconds without touching her. She knows the feeling.

He tucks his hand under her chin and lifts it gently, leaning in for another kiss.

She smiles against his lips and her mouth falls opens for him. 

Part of her brain still can’t quite believe this is happening - she’s kissing Alex Knightley. And not just kissing, she’s all hands, wandering over his shoulders and clutching at him in a way that’d feel embarrassingly desperate except that he’s doing something similar, one hand at the back of her neck, pulling her closer. 

Kissing him feels like the exclamation point on every conversation they’ve ever had. Like every time he sat beside her just a bit closer than necessary, every time he complimented her, even scolded her, they were always just working up to this.

She’s a tangle of feelings - grateful and glad and god, no wonder she keeps crying. 

Alex isn’t doing much better, she knows his ragged breathing when they part is more than just breathlessness. He touches his forehead to hers, getting his breathing under control slowly. 

“Did you really not know?” he whispers into the tiny space between them.

His hand has made it’s way to her shoulder, half tucked under the thin strap of her dress. His thumb is resting in the hollow of her clavicle and his fingers are rough and warm and so. damn. distracting.

“Know what?” she asks, dragging herself away from thoughts of those hands in other places. 

“What I was going to say. That I –” he falters, blushing like she’s never seen him blush before. “That I love you.”

 “I thought you came back to–” It’s her turn to falter now, trying to find a way to explain honestly without bringing Harriet into it. “I thought,” she tries again, “you came back to say goodbye.”

His face clouds over. “You did?”

“I thought I’d lost you for good.”

The minute she says it, the crushing despair of the past few weeks makes a sharp reappearance, softened only slightly by the reality in front of her and uh oh, here come the tears again.

She throws her arms around him, burying her face against his shoulder and the smooth fabric of his shirt. He smoothes her hair like she dimly remembers her Mom used to, soothing her frayed nerves.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promises, his voice a raw edge. “Not ever. Ok?”

She doesn’t doubt him for a minute. If there’s one thing she knows above everything else, Alex Knightley doesn’t break his word. She nods and nods and nods into his chest. He relaxes a little into the hug, giving her a gentle squeeze.

“No more misunderstandings,” Alex says firmly, speaking mostly to the crown of her head. He tops his words off with a kiss into her hair, for good measure. “From now on, we tell each other the truth. Ok?”

She pulls back, nodding her agreement. “Promise.”

Alex smiles and offers his pinky, because how else would they seal it? 

“Such a grown up,” she teases, hooking hers around his and laughing when they both lean in to kiss their clasped fists.

“Done deal,” he announces, releasing her hand with a beaming smile that takes over his whole face.

Emma smiles back at him automatically because the answer to Alex smiling has only ever been to smile back, no matter what. For the first time since he walked out of her office two weeks ago, she thinks she might finally be done with the tears.

She wipes her eyes, coming away with mascara stained fingertips. 

“Right,” she says, feeling just about back in control. “I’m going to wash away this mess,” she gestures to her tear stained face, “and put my beautiful flowers in some water. You are going to stay right there–” 

Alex nods his consent.

“And when I come back...” She leaves the sentence hanging, leaning over to brush her lips ever so slightly against his as she stands, the barest promise of a kiss.

He watches her go with a punch drunk expression on his face. She backs away towards the door, keeping him in her sights just to be sure that he’s really there, that this whole thing isn’t a hallucination brought on by too much ice cream and wishful thinking.

She gets all the way to the doorway before she realises something that almost makes her drop the flowers. She stops in her tracks, running back over the past few minutes quickly in her head and wow, really, has it only been a few minutes since he put these flowers in her hand?  

“I forgot to say,” she says, mouth falling open in surprise. Did she really not say it? The one thing that’s been screaming inside her head on a loop for days and she didn’t say it the first chance she got? “Oh my god.”

“What?” Alex starts to look panicked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she assures him quickly. “I didn’t–” She takes a breath, lets it out. Smiles so wide he can probably see every tooth. “I love you too, Alex.”

He’s out of the chair in about one second flat and then she’s in his arms, her feet actually leaving the floor. She locks her hands around him, just about keeping hold of the flowers as he spins her in a half circle. It’s one of those ridiculous swinging hugs that only seem to happen in romantic comedies and made-for-tv specials, when the main character appears at the last second, just when all seems lost. She squeals in a very un-Emma Woodhouse way and feels him laugh at the sound, feels it rumble through his chest and work it’s way into hers, until she’s laughing too. 

He sets her down, unlocking his arms from behind her. His hands settle on her hips and jesus, if his hands on her face was her favourite thing five minutes ago, that’s only because she hadn’t felt this yet. His hands seem to span more than half of her waist, heavy and solidly there; she feels the light pressure of every fingertip through the thin fabric of her dress.

He pulls her closer to him with a tug of his hands. In her heels she’s almost as tall as he is so all she has to do is tilt her head up a fraction and they’re kissing again. Only this time they’re standing and it’s better, so much better, because now there’s no space at all between them and she can feel every line of him, pressed against her. Her heartbeat, or maybe it’s his, thunders in her ears. 

“You love me?” he asks when they part, almost shy and his face, god, his face is a picture. She could fall in love with him all over again, just for this look. She can’t believe they’re not in sight of one of her cameras right now, because if they were she’d have this moment screen-capped and in a frame by tomorrow morning so she could look at him forever, smiling at her like she’s a thousand Christmas mornings, half her peach lipstick smeared across his lips.

“Of course,” she says, simply. 

“Of course,” he repeats, his voice taking on a familiar teasing lilt. He rolls his eyes. “Now you tell me.”

She laughs. “Excuse me? Pot. Kettle, Mr Knightley.”

“Fair point,” he concedes. “Better late than never though, right?” 

“Hell yes,” she agrees, pulling free one of her hands to brush the lipstick from his lips. 

“Is it my colour?” he asks, seeing the stain on her thumb.

“Let’s see,” she says, closing the gap to kiss some more colour back on.

“At least it’s not bright red,” he shrugs, laughing against her lips.

“There’s always tomorrow,” she warns.

“Tomorrow,” he repeats, his voice suddenly rough around the edges again. “Is that a promise, Emma Woodhouse?”

And the really crazy thing is, he says her name exactly the same way he always has. She’s just never really heard it before now. The tell. The way her name falls from his lips like it’s his favourite sound in the universe. 

“Absolutely, Alex Knightley.”

And there it is. 

Her tell.

Alex Knightley.

She hears it now. At last.

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