After a moment, she takes her glasses off and puts them on the counter. She seems so vulnerable like this: her armor gone, her eyes wide. The faint pink marks on the sides of her nose where they usually sit. The smooth gold of her skin. The heavy silk of her hair.
“Can you see?” I murmur.
“From here, yeah,” she murmurs back, and she’s looking at me. Skimming her fingers along my jaw, up over my cheeks, across the bridge of my nose. She ruffles them through my hair and my eyes close.
“Don’t,” she says, and I force them open again.
“Kat,” I say, barely aware I’m saying it.
She says, so softly, “I’m glad it wasn’t you,” and she takes my face in her hands and kisses the tip of my nose.
And I want to say, this is why it wasn’t. I want to say, I didn’t know it but I held on so we could be exactly here, doing exactly this.
I want to say, for so long I didn’t think this feeling existed.
But I don’t say any of that, because how could I? Ridiculous, probably, to feel like this, so instead I take her face in my hands, too. I kiss the tip of her nose, soft and sweet as anything.
I say, “Me too,” and we kiss in my sunlit kitchen.