title from "hold you in my arms" by ray lamontagne.
It started with a single drop of rain, in the way that it usually does.
/ / /
She spends the night at your apartment because she's afraid of being alone, and she emerges from your bedroom with tear stains on her face.
(There's a reason Hetty banned the entire team from going to work today, because sometimes good people die and sometimes too many do, and sometimes the bad guys get away no matter how hard the good ones are chasing them.)
She doesn't want to talk about it, and you don't either, so you make her pancakes for breakfast and you keep burning them until she smiles. (She smiles because she's seen you make pancakes before and you've never burned a single one, and you must [secretly] love her an awful lot if you're willing to waste a perfectly good batch of pancakes to make her feel better. But you only notice the smile, and that's good enough for you.)
You end up just eating strawberry ice cream instead, her favorite.
/ / /
"Teach me how to surf," she said.
"I'm sure it won't rain until this afternoon," she said, "If we leave early we'll have a few hours."
"Come on, Eric, you promised to teach me some time," she said, and she looked up at you from her place in the farthest corner of your couch with those eyes, and you stopped knowing how to say no to her a long time ago.
/ / /
You learn things about her when you're teaching her new things. Like right now, you're learning that she loves the way the sand feels beneath her feet but she hates the way it sticks once you've gotten wet. That she fell in love with the smell of the ocean the moment she set foot in Los Angeles, just like you did. That she's really, really small - at least, she's too small for your surfboard to be a reasonable choice for her first lesson on the water.
The lifeguards are waving red flags; the ocean is off limits today. The waves are too choppy and the clouds are too dark, and honestly you care too much about her to let her try the water anyway, but it doesn't mean you can't teach her a few things about balance. You show her how to place her feet so the board won't flip her over, the whole time with your hands on her bare skin, and you swear you catch her tripping over her words at least twice. (You've had a lot more practice with the whole hiding your feelings thing, and your heart could be threatening to break your ribs but she would still count it at seventy two.)
"We should probably head back now," you say, just a bit too low, just a bit too close to her ear, and she nods sharply. (You smile in a quiet sort of way, just a bit too quickly.) "It looks like it's going to rain soon."
/ / /
The first raindrop splashes against her shoulder, and she looks up at the sky in slow motion. When she looks back at you, she's smiling that smile that you only see once in awhile, the one you saw when you took her stargazing for the first time. Later, you're going to call it her devastatingly-in-love smile.
And suddenly it's pouring in sheets, and she's laughing - a whole-hearted laugh that you've never heard before - and it's gorgeous and she's gorgeous and you just don't know what to do with yourself. So you laugh too. And before you know it, her body is plastered against your body (her skin against your skin) and her lips are capturing your lips in hyperspeed and you don't know why this is happening but you don't care. You're kissing Nell Jones. You couldn't possibly care about anything else.
The sand gets between your toes as they curl into the shore, and she's still laughing against your mouth. And soon, your arms tighten around her waist and her arms slide around your neck and her feet aren't even touching the ground.
(She's not afraid like you thought she would be. At least, not right now. Right now, she's fearless and she's smiling, and she might not be so brave tomorrow but she's brave today.)
/ / /
You take up a rainy day Star Wars marathon when you get back to your apartment, after you make sure that she takes a hot shower, and you start with Episode IV because you agreed when you first met that the original trilogy should always come first. She smiles when she sees the DVD case sitting on top of the TV, and she gathers every blanket she can find to cocoon herself in (but she still uses you as her primary source of warmth and she's wearing one of your hoodies and you want to know if that makes her yours but you don't want to ask yet.)
And she matches you line-for-line in the quoting game until you miss one, and she laughs because she's never won before.
/ / /
She kisses you again, half way through The Empire Strikes Back, because her arm is wrapped around your stomach and she's using your shoulder as a pillow, and her lips are incredibly close to yours. (And you don't actually know just yet, that she's wanted to kiss you for a very long time, and now that she's started she's not sure she'll ever stop). So she kisses you, and she grins when you kiss her back.
"Hey, Nell," you whisper, your lips brushing against hers as you speak. Just say it, I love you. I love you. I'm in love with you. It's really not that difficult, but it is. Because what if she doesn't love you back? What if you scare her, and she decides to stop being brave and she runs and you lose her? You're starting to second guess yourself but the words won't stop turning themselves over in the back of your skull, I love you.
And she only smiles slightly as she replies, "Me too," and you think that this might be the thousandth sentence of yours that she's finished.