Fic: What About Now (GHTNG, Jake/Lana)
TITLE: What About Now
AUTHOR: empressearwig
PAIRING: Lana/Jake
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: He'd been all her important firsts, and he was almost positive now that he wanted to be all her lasts.
SPOILERS: Part of the Lanaverse.
DISCLAIMER: All characters first appearing on General Hospital belong to their respective owners. All original characters belong to me.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Yes, I wrote songfic. I can’t quite believe it either. If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t recognize the lyrics or title, the song in question is Daughtry’s, “What About Now.”
Shadows fill an empty heart
As love is fading,
From all the things that we are
But are not saying.
Can we see beyond the scars
And make it to the dawn?
After his epiphany on New Year's Eve, Jake spent the rest of his winter break brooding.
His mother fretted, Cameron gave him knowing smirks every time he saw him, Spencer had offered a pithy "I told you so" before fleeing back to London, and his father tried to guilt what was wrong out of him by siccing Gia on him.
His little sister could wheedle with the best of them. If it weren't so damned annoying when used against him, he'd be extremely proud of her.
He avoided Lana like the plague, which was made easier by the fact that she was just as studiously avoiding him.
It pissed him off and reassured him at the same time. If she'd been unaffected, if she hadn't felt anything, she wouldn't be avoiding him. She'd be acting like nothing happened, which meant they'd be hanging out, doing friend things, like they'd done since they decided to try to be just friends all those years ago. It had been crap then and it was crap now. They weren't friends, had maybe never been friends, not since that day when they were just kids and he'd conned her into giving him her first kiss.
He'd been all her important firsts, and he was almost positive now that he wanted to be all her lasts.
He just wasn't sure she felt that way anymore.
Or that he could make her feel that way again.
Hence the brooding.
When he left to go back to California it was almost a relief. He could be alone with what he was thinking and feeling, away from everyone who still thought of them as one word, as Jake&Lana, away from their past.
What mattered now was the future.
He just needed to figure out what he wanted that to be.
Change the colors of the sky.
And open up to
The ways you made me feel alive,
The ways I loved you.
For all the things that never died,
To make it through the night,
Love will find you.
The trouble was that when he got back to California he couldn't stop thinking about her.
Couldn't stop thinking about her smile, the way her chocolate brown eyes expressed everything she was feeling, the way it had felt to hold her curvy little body against his again, the way that she flooded his senses, his desperate need for her that had reignited the moment their lips had touched again for the first time in over two years.
For such a tiny thing, she packed a hell of a punch.
And she'd knocked him flat on his ass.
But that didn't mean he was down and out. If he was going down, and he was willing to admit he was, she'd be going down with him.
He just needed a strategy to make it happen.
Since going directly to the source for information wasn't a viable option, he settled for the next best thing.
Molly.
He knew she'd razz him about it, getting well deserved jabs in about how if he hadn't been an asshole two and a half years ago he wouldn't find himself in this position now and how she wasn't even sure he even deserved Lana. He'd let her take them, because he wasn't even sure he deserved Lana and he knew he'd been an asshole.
And the information she could give him was better than anyone else's.
It was from Molly that he learned that Lana's relationship with her boyfriend, David, was still going strong.
He couldn't help it, it pissed him off. He knew he was being a hypocrite, he'd dated and had girlfriends since they broke up (and it hadn't escaped his attention that most of them had been tiny brunettes), and he knew she'd had boyfriends. It's what he'd wanted, for christ's sake, for them to be able to live their lives and that meant dating other people. But then he thought about someone else touching her, kissing her, making love to her, and he saw red.
Lana was his. He was hers.
He just needed to convince her of that, and the sooner the better. Or so help him, if he ever actually met David, he was pretty sure it would end with his father, the police commissioner, booking him for assault.
He knew his woman well enough to know that wasn't going to help him get her back.
He'd be damned if he wouldn't enjoy it, though.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
Whatever he did was going to have to wait till summer.
He'd made that determination early on. Having a long distance relationship would be hard, trying to have a long distance courtship, when she already had a boyfriend was going to be almost impossible.
So in the meantime, he was going to be her friend.
A slightly more curious, more involved friend, but her friend.
They already emailed each other several times a week, chatted on messenger when possible, and talked on the phone every other week or so. When he started up their normal routine after they both got back to school, with no mentions of what had happened on New Year's, he could practically feel the waves of relief flowing his way from Cambridge.
He was alright with that. It meant that when he did start his full scale frontal assault on her heart he'd have the element of surprise.
He was too much his father's son, too much his grandfather's grandson, not to value the element of surprise.
Especially when your opponent was smarter than you.
His plan was coming together. He thought it was particularly devious, since all it really consisted of was being himself. Of reminding her that no one knew her better, of what they were like together. Okay, so he'd have to be a slightly more considerate version of himself, which would probably tip her off because she knew him too well, but he figured when you were trying to get the girl of your dreams you couldn't be an asshole, even if she already knew you were one.
He couldn't wait for the summer.
The sun is breaking in your eyes
To start a new day.
This broken heart can still survive
With a touch of your grace.
Shadows fade into the light.
I am by your side,
Where love will find you.
He couldn't wait to see her.
He got back to Port Charles a week before she did, and with each day that passed he grew more and more anxious. He wanted to camp out on her front steps waiting for her to get there, but he figured that Dr. Drake would file for a restraining order, and besides it would go against the plan. The plan involved groveling, but later down the road, not the instant he laid eyes on her.
He settled for pumping Dr. Scorpio=Drake for information.
He hung out at his dad's a lot that week, annoying the crap out of Gia, who'd moved out of her hero worship phase and into the annoying pest one. But where Gia could be found, Matt usually could be found, and where Matt could be found, one of his parents usually followed.
Jake infinitely preferred when it was Dr. Scorpio-Drake.
She didn't look at him like she still held him responsible for breaking her daughter's heart.
When she came to pick Matt up, he tried to subtly ask questions about Lana, and she answered them, but as she did, he saw a twinkle in her eyes that revealed she knew exactly what he was up to. And that she approved.
At least he had one parent in his corner.
He didn't see Lana till four days after she got home. He'd refused to go see her, hadn't wanted to give her that advantage. She already held most of the cards, she didn't need all of his too.
Like he had for most of the rest of the week he'd had to prepare, he was hanging out at his dad's, trying to ignore his sister and her friends.
Then she walked through the door to pick up Matt, and he swore the world stopped.
The sight of her, dressed in simple jeans and a tank top, strappy sandals showing off her bright pink toenails, long dark hair tumbling over her back, left him wanting to devour her in big, greedy bites. The fact that she could have this kind of effect on him when she wasn't even trying was more than a little humbling.
And had him mentally revising his carefully thought out plans, because he didn't know if he had the patience for a protracted siege. The urge to take and plunder was far too great.
He was gratified to see that her eyes lit up when she saw him, though she tried to smother the light just as quickly.
He frowned. Had someone tipped her off? He was still trying to decide, when she came to sit next to him on the sofa and punched him lightly in the side.
"What, are you too good for me now?" she demanded, eyes twinkling with mirth. "I've been home for days and haven't seen you once."
"The phone works both ways, sweetheart," he pointed out, elbowing her back. God, it felt good to be able to do this with her again.
She pouted, which made him want to groan. When they'd dated, he’s sworn she did that just to get a rise out of him, because every time she did it, it made him want to kiss the pout away. "I don't care for the fact that you have a point," she sniffed.
He patted her on the knee, resisting the urge to leave his hand there and see what she'd do. "There, there. You can't be right all the time."
"Want to bet?" she countered. As quickly as she'd sat down, she stood again. "Matt!" she yelled. "Get your butt in here now! Mom wants us home for dinner!"
He stood too, jamming his hands into his pockets so that he wouldn't be tempted to touch. "They already have you playing chauffer?"
She nodded, rolling her eyes. "Four days I've been home!"
"The life of an older sibling."
They grinned at each other in a moment of rare agreement.
"Matt!" she called out again. "If you're not out here in two minutes I'm leaving and you're walking home!"
"Wow," he said with admiration. "You know you have a pretty perfect mom voice already?"
She looked horrified. "You take that back right now, Jake Spencer," she demanded. "Right now."
He couldn't help it, he laughed. "And if I don't?"
"Then I'll beat you up," she said promptly. "I'm little, but I'm tough."
"Believe me, I know. Is there an alternative to beating me up?"
She narrowed her eyes at him. "You can promise to come with when we go to the movies tonight." She crossed her arms over her chest. "Take it or leave it."
And that was exactly the opening he'd been waiting for. "I'll take the movies. What time?"
Matt came running into the living room. "I'm here, I'm here." He looked at his sister impatiently. "Are we going, or what?"
"I'll give you or what," Lana threatened her little brother, who at 12, already towered over her. She shot Jake an apologetic smile. "I've got to run. The movie's at 8. You can get the details from Cam. Bye!" She punched him in the arm as she shuffled Matt out of the room.
He grinned after her retreating back.
He was back in the game.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love, it never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
After that, he got in her face and never really left.
He managed to time his breaks at ELQ to hers at the hospital so that he could take her coffee. He took her to movies, careful to use the cover of their friends when he could. He shamelessly used his sister and her brother to score more face time with her.
He bought her tickets to go see a dance troupe from New York at PCU.
That was probably when she figured out for certain that he was up to something.
They went, and when they left, she had the biggest smile on her face and she'd stretched up on her toes to kiss his cheek. He hadn't been able to stop his sharp inhalation of breath at the sensation of her lips on his skin, and when she dropped back to her heels, something had shifted in her eyes.
There was an awareness, a confusion, and god, he hoped he wasn't wrong, a flare of interest.
She smothered them quickly, glancing down at her toes to compose herself, and he allowed himself a quick triumphant smile.
Finally the girl was catching on. For as impossibly bright as she was, she'd been remarkably slow at figuring out what was going on.
She started trying to avoid him after that.
He knew his woman, and he'd expected that.
He was just glad the timing had worked out so that Molly and Cameron were newly arrived at home after their trip to Greece.
Without an ounce of shame, he went to Molly and begged for an update. He knew he was getting to Lana, but he needed the confirmation. He needed to know for sure before he took the last step of laying his heart bare at her feet.
To her credit, Molly didn't make him work for the information.
Instead she told him matter-of-factly that Lana and her boyfriend had taken a "break" and that Lana was confused, off her game, and far more interested than she was letting on.
To his eternal surprise, as she left, she patted him on the shoulder and told him to keep up the good work.
Make that two people on his side.
Now that we're here,
Now that we've come this far,
Just hold on.
There is nothing to fear,
For I am right beside you.
For all my life,
I am yours.
And one night, he simply couldn’t take it any longer.
He went to her house and let himself in the back gate, knowing her predilection for sitting by the pool and looking up at the stars. As usual, the sight of her took his breath away. She was and always would be the only girl for him. The only thing left to do was convince her of that.
Before he could make any move of his own, she was calling out to him, anticipating him in the way that she always had.
He sat down next to her, and tried to banter with her, to ease into what he had to say. His nerves were bubbling under the surface, and he was terrified that one wrong word, one wrong move, would ruin everything he’d tried so hard to rebuild.
But she wasn’t having any of it. She looked up at him with her big brown eyes, filled with so many questions, something akin to pain in her voice and asked him to tell her what it was. Whatever it was.
He knew he was close to snapping, but hadn’t realized she was at a breaking point too.
He sighed, and tried to brace himself for the possibility of getting his heart broken.
“I’m sorry.”
Confusion crossed her pretty face. “Sorry for what?”
“Just let me get through this, okay?”
She nodded, and didn’t say anything more.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m sorry that three years ago I was too stupid to know what I wanted, and that I left. I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to realize that I couldn’t run away from you, from us, even if I tried.” He hazarded a glance at Lana and found her staring back at him agape, eyes wide. He took a risk and reached out for her hand, twining their fingers together. When she let him without protest he gave a mental sigh of relief. More confident now, he continued. “I still love you, you know that.” At that her eyes went wider and the expression shifted to shock. “And if you didn’t, well that’s another thing for me to be sorry for.”
She shook her head, and opened her mouth to speak, but he pressed a finger to her lips to silence her.
“I have loved you for what seems like forever, and whether or not you’ll let me or even if you want me to, I understand now that I’m going to love you forever.”
A few tears trickled down her cheeks, and he rushed to brush them away.
He smiled now, sensing that he was about to get his heart’s desire. “So Lana, what I’m hoping you’ll say, what I need you to say, is that it’s not too late. That you can forgive me for being stubborn and slow and that you’ll - ”
His arms were suddenly filled with the girl he loved, had always loved. She pressed her lips to his, kissing him urgently, frantically, as she tried to move even closer to him, trying to merge their separate bodies into a single unified whole.
When they needed to breathe, they peppered kisses across the others face, neither being willing to give up the contact. To give up the other.
He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in.
She was his. He was hers.
This was right.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
Baby, before it's too late,
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
When he finally left her that night, hours later, hundreds of kisses later, he couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t quite believe it was real, and he was afraid that if he closed his eyes and slipped into dreams, now that all his dreams had come true, he’d find that the entire night had been a dream.
That he’d wake up and find out that she didn’t love him. Didn’t want to be with him.
He thought he could bear almost anything but that.
He’d been there, he never wanted to go back.
He rolled over and mashed down his pillow trying to force his eyes to shut, will his body to sleep. The sooner he slept, the sooner he could get up and see her again, because with only a few short weeks before they had to leave to go back to their respective schools, he wasn’t going to waste any damn time.
From somewhere in the room, he heard the insistent buzzing sound of his cell phone vibrating.
He reached down to the ground and snagged his jeans, digging the phone out of the pocket. He squinted at the display, and saw Lana’s number flashing at him.
He smiled foolishly, and answered. “Hello?”
She sounded almost shy. Like they hadn’t spent the last few hours wrapped in each other’s arms. “Hi.”
He leaned back against his pillow. “Why aren’t you asleep, baby?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He chuckled, low in his throat. “Neither could I.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I wish I were there, too.”
They fell silent, the only sound their breathing.
He could hear her breathing level off, her slipping into sleep. “Lana?”
“Yeah?” she mumbled, on the precipice of falling into dreams.
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
He listened to her breathe.
And fell asleep with a smile on his face.
AUTHOR: empressearwig
PAIRING: Lana/Jake
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: He'd been all her important firsts, and he was almost positive now that he wanted to be all her lasts.
SPOILERS: Part of the Lanaverse.
DISCLAIMER: All characters first appearing on General Hospital belong to their respective owners. All original characters belong to me.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Yes, I wrote songfic. I can’t quite believe it either. If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t recognize the lyrics or title, the song in question is Daughtry’s, “What About Now.”
Shadows fill an empty heart
As love is fading,
From all the things that we are
But are not saying.
Can we see beyond the scars
And make it to the dawn?
After his epiphany on New Year's Eve, Jake spent the rest of his winter break brooding.
His mother fretted, Cameron gave him knowing smirks every time he saw him, Spencer had offered a pithy "I told you so" before fleeing back to London, and his father tried to guilt what was wrong out of him by siccing Gia on him.
His little sister could wheedle with the best of them. If it weren't so damned annoying when used against him, he'd be extremely proud of her.
He avoided Lana like the plague, which was made easier by the fact that she was just as studiously avoiding him.
It pissed him off and reassured him at the same time. If she'd been unaffected, if she hadn't felt anything, she wouldn't be avoiding him. She'd be acting like nothing happened, which meant they'd be hanging out, doing friend things, like they'd done since they decided to try to be just friends all those years ago. It had been crap then and it was crap now. They weren't friends, had maybe never been friends, not since that day when they were just kids and he'd conned her into giving him her first kiss.
He'd been all her important firsts, and he was almost positive now that he wanted to be all her lasts.
He just wasn't sure she felt that way anymore.
Or that he could make her feel that way again.
Hence the brooding.
When he left to go back to California it was almost a relief. He could be alone with what he was thinking and feeling, away from everyone who still thought of them as one word, as Jake&Lana, away from their past.
What mattered now was the future.
He just needed to figure out what he wanted that to be.
Change the colors of the sky.
And open up to
The ways you made me feel alive,
The ways I loved you.
For all the things that never died,
To make it through the night,
Love will find you.
The trouble was that when he got back to California he couldn't stop thinking about her.
Couldn't stop thinking about her smile, the way her chocolate brown eyes expressed everything she was feeling, the way it had felt to hold her curvy little body against his again, the way that she flooded his senses, his desperate need for her that had reignited the moment their lips had touched again for the first time in over two years.
For such a tiny thing, she packed a hell of a punch.
And she'd knocked him flat on his ass.
But that didn't mean he was down and out. If he was going down, and he was willing to admit he was, she'd be going down with him.
He just needed a strategy to make it happen.
Since going directly to the source for information wasn't a viable option, he settled for the next best thing.
Molly.
He knew she'd razz him about it, getting well deserved jabs in about how if he hadn't been an asshole two and a half years ago he wouldn't find himself in this position now and how she wasn't even sure he even deserved Lana. He'd let her take them, because he wasn't even sure he deserved Lana and he knew he'd been an asshole.
And the information she could give him was better than anyone else's.
It was from Molly that he learned that Lana's relationship with her boyfriend, David, was still going strong.
He couldn't help it, it pissed him off. He knew he was being a hypocrite, he'd dated and had girlfriends since they broke up (and it hadn't escaped his attention that most of them had been tiny brunettes), and he knew she'd had boyfriends. It's what he'd wanted, for christ's sake, for them to be able to live their lives and that meant dating other people. But then he thought about someone else touching her, kissing her, making love to her, and he saw red.
Lana was his. He was hers.
He just needed to convince her of that, and the sooner the better. Or so help him, if he ever actually met David, he was pretty sure it would end with his father, the police commissioner, booking him for assault.
He knew his woman well enough to know that wasn't going to help him get her back.
He'd be damned if he wouldn't enjoy it, though.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
Whatever he did was going to have to wait till summer.
He'd made that determination early on. Having a long distance relationship would be hard, trying to have a long distance courtship, when she already had a boyfriend was going to be almost impossible.
So in the meantime, he was going to be her friend.
A slightly more curious, more involved friend, but her friend.
They already emailed each other several times a week, chatted on messenger when possible, and talked on the phone every other week or so. When he started up their normal routine after they both got back to school, with no mentions of what had happened on New Year's, he could practically feel the waves of relief flowing his way from Cambridge.
He was alright with that. It meant that when he did start his full scale frontal assault on her heart he'd have the element of surprise.
He was too much his father's son, too much his grandfather's grandson, not to value the element of surprise.
Especially when your opponent was smarter than you.
His plan was coming together. He thought it was particularly devious, since all it really consisted of was being himself. Of reminding her that no one knew her better, of what they were like together. Okay, so he'd have to be a slightly more considerate version of himself, which would probably tip her off because she knew him too well, but he figured when you were trying to get the girl of your dreams you couldn't be an asshole, even if she already knew you were one.
He couldn't wait for the summer.
The sun is breaking in your eyes
To start a new day.
This broken heart can still survive
With a touch of your grace.
Shadows fade into the light.
I am by your side,
Where love will find you.
He couldn't wait to see her.
He got back to Port Charles a week before she did, and with each day that passed he grew more and more anxious. He wanted to camp out on her front steps waiting for her to get there, but he figured that Dr. Drake would file for a restraining order, and besides it would go against the plan. The plan involved groveling, but later down the road, not the instant he laid eyes on her.
He settled for pumping Dr. Scorpio=Drake for information.
He hung out at his dad's a lot that week, annoying the crap out of Gia, who'd moved out of her hero worship phase and into the annoying pest one. But where Gia could be found, Matt usually could be found, and where Matt could be found, one of his parents usually followed.
Jake infinitely preferred when it was Dr. Scorpio-Drake.
She didn't look at him like she still held him responsible for breaking her daughter's heart.
When she came to pick Matt up, he tried to subtly ask questions about Lana, and she answered them, but as she did, he saw a twinkle in her eyes that revealed she knew exactly what he was up to. And that she approved.
At least he had one parent in his corner.
He didn't see Lana till four days after she got home. He'd refused to go see her, hadn't wanted to give her that advantage. She already held most of the cards, she didn't need all of his too.
Like he had for most of the rest of the week he'd had to prepare, he was hanging out at his dad's, trying to ignore his sister and her friends.
Then she walked through the door to pick up Matt, and he swore the world stopped.
The sight of her, dressed in simple jeans and a tank top, strappy sandals showing off her bright pink toenails, long dark hair tumbling over her back, left him wanting to devour her in big, greedy bites. The fact that she could have this kind of effect on him when she wasn't even trying was more than a little humbling.
And had him mentally revising his carefully thought out plans, because he didn't know if he had the patience for a protracted siege. The urge to take and plunder was far too great.
He was gratified to see that her eyes lit up when she saw him, though she tried to smother the light just as quickly.
He frowned. Had someone tipped her off? He was still trying to decide, when she came to sit next to him on the sofa and punched him lightly in the side.
"What, are you too good for me now?" she demanded, eyes twinkling with mirth. "I've been home for days and haven't seen you once."
"The phone works both ways, sweetheart," he pointed out, elbowing her back. God, it felt good to be able to do this with her again.
She pouted, which made him want to groan. When they'd dated, he’s sworn she did that just to get a rise out of him, because every time she did it, it made him want to kiss the pout away. "I don't care for the fact that you have a point," she sniffed.
He patted her on the knee, resisting the urge to leave his hand there and see what she'd do. "There, there. You can't be right all the time."
"Want to bet?" she countered. As quickly as she'd sat down, she stood again. "Matt!" she yelled. "Get your butt in here now! Mom wants us home for dinner!"
He stood too, jamming his hands into his pockets so that he wouldn't be tempted to touch. "They already have you playing chauffer?"
She nodded, rolling her eyes. "Four days I've been home!"
"The life of an older sibling."
They grinned at each other in a moment of rare agreement.
"Matt!" she called out again. "If you're not out here in two minutes I'm leaving and you're walking home!"
"Wow," he said with admiration. "You know you have a pretty perfect mom voice already?"
She looked horrified. "You take that back right now, Jake Spencer," she demanded. "Right now."
He couldn't help it, he laughed. "And if I don't?"
"Then I'll beat you up," she said promptly. "I'm little, but I'm tough."
"Believe me, I know. Is there an alternative to beating me up?"
She narrowed her eyes at him. "You can promise to come with when we go to the movies tonight." She crossed her arms over her chest. "Take it or leave it."
And that was exactly the opening he'd been waiting for. "I'll take the movies. What time?"
Matt came running into the living room. "I'm here, I'm here." He looked at his sister impatiently. "Are we going, or what?"
"I'll give you or what," Lana threatened her little brother, who at 12, already towered over her. She shot Jake an apologetic smile. "I've got to run. The movie's at 8. You can get the details from Cam. Bye!" She punched him in the arm as she shuffled Matt out of the room.
He grinned after her retreating back.
He was back in the game.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love, it never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
After that, he got in her face and never really left.
He managed to time his breaks at ELQ to hers at the hospital so that he could take her coffee. He took her to movies, careful to use the cover of their friends when he could. He shamelessly used his sister and her brother to score more face time with her.
He bought her tickets to go see a dance troupe from New York at PCU.
That was probably when she figured out for certain that he was up to something.
They went, and when they left, she had the biggest smile on her face and she'd stretched up on her toes to kiss his cheek. He hadn't been able to stop his sharp inhalation of breath at the sensation of her lips on his skin, and when she dropped back to her heels, something had shifted in her eyes.
There was an awareness, a confusion, and god, he hoped he wasn't wrong, a flare of interest.
She smothered them quickly, glancing down at her toes to compose herself, and he allowed himself a quick triumphant smile.
Finally the girl was catching on. For as impossibly bright as she was, she'd been remarkably slow at figuring out what was going on.
She started trying to avoid him after that.
He knew his woman, and he'd expected that.
He was just glad the timing had worked out so that Molly and Cameron were newly arrived at home after their trip to Greece.
Without an ounce of shame, he went to Molly and begged for an update. He knew he was getting to Lana, but he needed the confirmation. He needed to know for sure before he took the last step of laying his heart bare at her feet.
To her credit, Molly didn't make him work for the information.
Instead she told him matter-of-factly that Lana and her boyfriend had taken a "break" and that Lana was confused, off her game, and far more interested than she was letting on.
To his eternal surprise, as she left, she patted him on the shoulder and told him to keep up the good work.
Make that two people on his side.
Now that we're here,
Now that we've come this far,
Just hold on.
There is nothing to fear,
For I am right beside you.
For all my life,
I am yours.
And one night, he simply couldn’t take it any longer.
He went to her house and let himself in the back gate, knowing her predilection for sitting by the pool and looking up at the stars. As usual, the sight of her took his breath away. She was and always would be the only girl for him. The only thing left to do was convince her of that.
Before he could make any move of his own, she was calling out to him, anticipating him in the way that she always had.
He sat down next to her, and tried to banter with her, to ease into what he had to say. His nerves were bubbling under the surface, and he was terrified that one wrong word, one wrong move, would ruin everything he’d tried so hard to rebuild.
But she wasn’t having any of it. She looked up at him with her big brown eyes, filled with so many questions, something akin to pain in her voice and asked him to tell her what it was. Whatever it was.
He knew he was close to snapping, but hadn’t realized she was at a breaking point too.
He sighed, and tried to brace himself for the possibility of getting his heart broken.
“I’m sorry.”
Confusion crossed her pretty face. “Sorry for what?”
“Just let me get through this, okay?”
She nodded, and didn’t say anything more.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m sorry that three years ago I was too stupid to know what I wanted, and that I left. I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to realize that I couldn’t run away from you, from us, even if I tried.” He hazarded a glance at Lana and found her staring back at him agape, eyes wide. He took a risk and reached out for her hand, twining their fingers together. When she let him without protest he gave a mental sigh of relief. More confident now, he continued. “I still love you, you know that.” At that her eyes went wider and the expression shifted to shock. “And if you didn’t, well that’s another thing for me to be sorry for.”
She shook her head, and opened her mouth to speak, but he pressed a finger to her lips to silence her.
“I have loved you for what seems like forever, and whether or not you’ll let me or even if you want me to, I understand now that I’m going to love you forever.”
A few tears trickled down her cheeks, and he rushed to brush them away.
He smiled now, sensing that he was about to get his heart’s desire. “So Lana, what I’m hoping you’ll say, what I need you to say, is that it’s not too late. That you can forgive me for being stubborn and slow and that you’ll - ”
His arms were suddenly filled with the girl he loved, had always loved. She pressed her lips to his, kissing him urgently, frantically, as she tried to move even closer to him, trying to merge their separate bodies into a single unified whole.
When they needed to breathe, they peppered kisses across the others face, neither being willing to give up the contact. To give up the other.
He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in.
She was his. He was hers.
This was right.
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
What about now?
What about today?
What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?
What if it's lost behind words we could never find?
Baby, before it's too late,
Baby, before it's too late,
Baby, before it's too late,
What about now?
When he finally left her that night, hours later, hundreds of kisses later, he couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t quite believe it was real, and he was afraid that if he closed his eyes and slipped into dreams, now that all his dreams had come true, he’d find that the entire night had been a dream.
That he’d wake up and find out that she didn’t love him. Didn’t want to be with him.
He thought he could bear almost anything but that.
He’d been there, he never wanted to go back.
He rolled over and mashed down his pillow trying to force his eyes to shut, will his body to sleep. The sooner he slept, the sooner he could get up and see her again, because with only a few short weeks before they had to leave to go back to their respective schools, he wasn’t going to waste any damn time.
From somewhere in the room, he heard the insistent buzzing sound of his cell phone vibrating.
He reached down to the ground and snagged his jeans, digging the phone out of the pocket. He squinted at the display, and saw Lana’s number flashing at him.
He smiled foolishly, and answered. “Hello?”
She sounded almost shy. Like they hadn’t spent the last few hours wrapped in each other’s arms. “Hi.”
He leaned back against his pillow. “Why aren’t you asleep, baby?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He chuckled, low in his throat. “Neither could I.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I wish I were there, too.”
They fell silent, the only sound their breathing.
He could hear her breathing level off, her slipping into sleep. “Lana?”
“Yeah?” she mumbled, on the precipice of falling into dreams.
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
He listened to her breathe.
And fell asleep with a smile on his face.