The Grownup in the Room (by Sexghosts)

Fandom: Supergirl
Author: Sexghosts (Archive of Our Own author, this work is merely copied to get more publicity for them)

Rating: M

When Cat woke up the next day and found her bed empty and the note from Kara on the bedside table, she at first refused to process it. First, she called her phone several times. Then she sent a series of increasingly irritable texts explaining that this wasn't fucking funny and demanding to know where the hell she was. By the time she'd arrived at the office, though, and Kara wasn't there, already getting things ready for her, the reality had set in. She had to go downstairs and get her own latte, and had the experience of losing her temper with the barista who insisted on getting her order just slightly wrong enough to warrant remaking the damn thing three times. She was going to have to go and dig up phone numbers in order to make her own phone calls. Everything took twice as long and made her three times as angry.

What the fuck, Kara? What the ever loving fuck?

She had to call that little hobbit six times before he came running, and she demanded that he call Dr. Rosensweig for an appointment and clear her calendar for the afternoon. He had absolutely no idea who that was or how he was supposed to go about clearing her calendar. She dropped the single instruction, "You're supposed to be smart, figure it out," on him and marched away to have three fingers of scotch. At ten thirty in the morning. And there had better not be anyone with a damn thing to say about it.

"Miss Grant," he had stammered about forty five minutes later, "it would really help if I knew which Dr. Rosensweig you wanted… there are about twenty Dr. Rosensweigs in National City and they're all different, uh specialties, you know, so, uh…?"

She'd rolled her eyes. "The psychologist in the Coast District."

Twenty emails, ten spread approvals (which she'd had to march down to the art department to demand in person), and three incorrectly made lattes later, Wick had finally managed to do what she'd asked of him; clear her calendar and schedule an appointment with Rosensweig. And then she noticed that she still had a pile of unopened mail.

This would not do. She leaned down to where he sat quaking at his desk, and said very quietly, "Wick… Listen to me very closely. You need to get hold of Kara, and you need to get her to come back to work."

He had smiled that nervous, jittery smile and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, "Well, but you know, Miss Grant, I uh, I don't know why she's not here and you know, I can't MAKE her do anything, and uh-"

"Wick. Get her back in this office, or I am going to begin firing people, starting with you."

She stalked away. Cat wasn't likely to fire anyone, but Witt didn't need to know that. As long as he conveyed it to Kara, that was enough. Kara was infinitely more motivated when someone else's needs were at stake. Meanwhile she figured she'd walk through the cubicles spreading criticism and abject fear. In other words, a Tuesday, she thought with a black little internal chuckle.

Rosensweig hadn't said a word. Cat had been venting about Kara for the last ten minutes without taking a breath: this is why getting involved with younger women was a stupid idea, they didn't know what they wanted, and she'd given the girl a world of experiences she'd never have, and she'd been exceedingly patient with her sexual dysfunctions, and she had half a mind to wonder whether she even really cared for her in the first place, and damnit maybe Kara was taking advantage of her all this time, and even if it wasn't working out, who the hell breaks up this way, and what kind of adult was she anyway?

Rosensweig waited until Cat paused, her breathing a little shallow from ranting and pacing back and forth on the Persian rug.

"You sound hurt," she finally observed.

"Do you think?" Cat snapped.

"Why do you think she did this?"

"How the hell do I know? I just spent the last ten minutes telling you that I don't understand why." Cat crossed her arms and walked to the window. Rosensweig's window looked out onto the low-slung, modern-style ranch houses of the Coast District, beyond which she could see a sliver of dark blue ocean.

Rosensweig shook her head. "No, you spent the last ten minutes being pissed off. And you're not wrong to feel that way. But we need to get you far enough past it that you can actually think this through."

Cat paced between the window and the couch a couple of times, flirting with sitting down but feeling too agitated to actually do it.

"What happened right before that?"

Cat sighed. "She watched Carter for me. I came home late. She made me a hamburger. We argued about politics."

"You argued about politics?"

Cat waved a hand. "It's foreplay." She thought a little more. "We had sex…"

"And how was that?"

"It was fine," Cat answered reflexively. Then she paused. "Well, it was a little…" She paused again. "It was only our second time. She has some dysfunctions, but we worked around them, and it was… it was nice." She remembered last night, kissing Kara's stomach and ribs, running her tongue along her inner thighs, feeling Kara's hands combing through her hair, hearing her voice sighing in the dark… Cat, this is everything I want… It's so nice to be close to you like this… "It was more than nice," she admitted after a moment. "It was intimate... emotionally."

Rosensweig nodded. "So you had emotionally intimate sex and then she ran away."

Cat sighed. "That.. is what happened, yes," she confirmed with a slight roll of her eyes.

"Well, it seems like that's what scared her."

Cat stopped and stared at her.

Rosensweig sat, looking back at her with a raised eyebrow, and let that sink in for a minute. "Well? Don't tell me this hasn't occurred to you already, you're too smart for that."

Cat spent a moment absorbing this. Then she placed her hands on her hips. "No no, I am the one with intimacy issues."

Rosensweig sighed that indulgent sigh. "Catherine, has it by any chance occurred to you that you are actually not the only one on planet Earth with this particular problem?"

Cat huffed. "No, Vera, I believed myself to be a special little snowflake in that regard."

Rosensweig gave her a slow clap. "Good. Now, don't make me connect these dots for you."

Cat paced back and forth again once more before settling uneasily on the edge of the couch. "She has foster parents… so maybe some abandonment issues …"

"And?"

"And the age difference?"

"And?"

"And the imbalance of our relationship, which I've really tried to keep out of our private time, but it's probably something she's still conscious of, and…."

"And?"

Cat punched the arm of the couch. "And she should have spoken to me like an adult instead of flitting away in the middle of the night!"

Rosensweig nodded. "Well, there's no argument there, but … clearly, Catherine, you scare the shit out of this girl."

Cat looked at her crossly.

"Don't give me that look, you know I'm right," Rosensweig chuckled. "Look, if I were some fresh-faced, twenty-four-year-old girl from Minnesota, you'd scare the shit out of me too!"

"You're defending her," Cat grumped.

"I'm not! She pretty much handled things in the worst way possible, but… you know Catherine, how we've talked about the anger behind the anger?"

Cat sighed, sulking slightly. "Yes."

"Well, now you're going to have to look at the fear behind the fear. And–" She tugged on her necklace for a moment. "–if you want something with her, still, and I'm assuming you do, judgding by the, uh, hole you've been wearing in my carpet–"

"Send me a bill," Cat retorted.

"See if I don't," the old hippie parried. "Anyway, if you want something with her, if you want to try and fix this, you're going to have to be the grownup in the room for a little while."

There was only way to approach this, and it involved showing up at Kara's door. She'd walked up the tidy little block in the Estrella District. Kara had been right, it really wasn't bad. Working-class arty, a little rough around the edges, but not dirty and not uninteresting. Not too different from Kara herself, Cat thought.

She could hear the television inside, blaring what sounded like MSNBC. She knocked and knocked and rang the bell. "Kara, I hear the damn television, I know you're in there. You owe me an explanation."

She pounded again several times more and got no answer.

She really hoped that this is what "being the grownup in the room" meant. She wasn't at all convinced that this was the right thing, but she needed more than that sad, sorry little slip of paper. She needed to find the fear behind Kara's fear. Probably, she reflected, yelling at her was not the best way to achieve this.

"Kara," she called through the door, softening her tone. "I need us to discuss what happened. You need to discuss it. If I don't know what scared you, I can't... I can't do anything to change it. I can try to make you more comfortable, but I don't know how to do that unless you talk to me."

She paused, her palm laid against the door, listening for any sign of life inside apart from the television. After a few moments, she heard soft footsteps padding toward the door. After another moment, the locks scraped open, and then the door swung inward. Kara was standing behind it, in exceedingly comfortable clothes that looked as though she'd slept in them and been, in fact, wearing them all day. Her face was pale and her eyes, behind her glasses, had that glazed, slightly sunken look that said she'd probably been crying off and on for the last several hours.

"You look like hell," Cat remarked with mild surprise.

"Thanks." Kara looked at her, then at the floor for several moments, then back at her. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here because we need to talk, and you're not answering your phone. Leaving little notes on someone's bedside table isn't the way adults deal with each other when something isn't working out."

Kara's lip trembled, but she stood aside and let her in.

Cat looked around. It was a little place, she mused, but Kara had done a decent job with making it feel comfortable despite its size. She wondered if her parents helped her with the rent. She'd never asked. It occurred to her that in two months of dating, she'd never actually come to Kara's apartment before. And that, she realized, was probably part of the problem.

Of course, all that came out of her mouth was, "Cute place."

"Not really, but thanks," Kara answered, dejected.

They stood there awkwardly for a minute, then Cat put her confidence back together and walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. Kara trailed behind her and stood looking at her for a moment before picking up the remote and muting the television.

"So," Cat began after another moment of uncomfortable staring. "What the fuck happened, Kara? You don't just leave in the middle of the night like that, and quit on top of it. If you have problems, you talk to me about them. Honestly, you left me with very few plays, here. I had to resort to threatening Witt."

"Wynn," Kara mumbled. "Anyway, I know about that, I heard about ten of the twenty messages he left on my phone."

"So? What happened? Why did you just run off like that?"

Kara sniffed and bit down on her lip. "It's hard to explain…" She trailed off, her eyes welling up a little.

"I woke up to a cold, empty bed."

"I know, I'm - sorry…" Kara's voice broke.

"And Witt had no idea what the fuck to do when I told him to clear my calendar."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"That was a joke, Kara." She corrected herself. "I mean, he didn't have any idea what to do, but I'm not as upset about that as I am about waking up without you."

Kara's eyes welled up. "I… I know, and… and it's been hard not being around you today, more than I even knew it would be… and I knew it would be bad…"

"Well," Cat said softly, "I missed you. And not just because I had to get my own lattes or dig up my own phone numbers or march down to the art department myself. I missed you. I missed your beautiful, stupid face, you idiot."

Kara seemed to want to laugh at that, but instead, her lower lip just trembled, and her toes dug into the carpet. "I missed your stupid face too."

"So, why?"

Kara shuffled in front of her, and then looked away, out the window, evading Cat's eyes. Finally she sighed heavily. "Cat, I don't … I don't belong with you. I don't belong anywhere, really, and I never have, but I really don't belong with you. I'm not …" She struggled.

Cat sighed. Was this all about some deep insecurity, some impostor syndrome, Kara feeling that she simply wasn't in the same league, and didn't belong with her? She wanted to put her arms around her, comfort her and tell her she was more than enough, but she was still too frustrated. "Kara, I thought that we understood each other. I know you're not where you want to be yet, but I can help you get there. We can grow together."

Kara squeezed her eyes shut. "Cat," she began, and her voice shook, "there are… there are things you don't know about me, okay?"

Cat gave her a sad smile. "And there are things you don't know about me. We have to learn each other. That's how this whole thing works."

"But no, you don't understand," Kara answered, trying to keep her voice under control and not exactly succeeding. "They're things I'm not sure you'll accept."

Cat looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "What, you're gay? I suspected that."

Kara shook her head, smiling a pained smile.

"I've been around the block, Kara. I hate to think you're not giving me credit for being able to handle whatever your deep dark secrets are."

Kara's face grew even more miserable, if that was possible.

Cat took both of Kara's hands, looking up at her. "Kara, your note … it was so bad, I refused to believe it at first. I couldn't. I couldn't accept that you were walking out of my life. It… it physically hurt to think that I wasn't going to be able to be near you again. It physically hurt. You're important, Kara. Did you realize that?"

Kara collapsed to her knees in front of the couch, rested her head on Cat's chest, and started to sob quietly. "Cat," she sniffled. "Cat, I'm so sorry… I can't be away from you either, I hate it. I'm so sorry…" Her voice was choked as she wept on Cat's chest. She felt Kara's hot tears through the thin fabric of her blouse, felt the hot breath of her sobs, the weight of her head against her… God, she wondered, what weight must be on this girl's shoulders that she didn't imagine herself good enough to be in this relationship? She couldn't refrain from instinct, and put one arm around Kara, her other hand stroking her hair.

"It's alright, Kara, it's alright. Whatever it is, you can tell me, and whatever the fallout is, we can work it out." She kissed the top of Kara's golden head. "It's alright, Kara, you just have to talk to me."

Kara's mouth began to kiss Cat's chest where the collar of her shirt hung slightly open, showing a little bit of skin. The touch of her mouth was a soft, gentle brushing, the soft press on skin that was dampened by Kara's tears. "Cat, I'm so sorry, I didn't want to hurt you… I didn't think you could possibly feel the way I did…"

Cat felt her breath pick up. She continued to cradle Kara's head against her chest. Her other hand reached down and undid the top button, letting the shirt fall open a little more. Hungrily, gratefully, Kara's kisses followed down the pale strip of exposed skin. She gave a deep sigh that carried Kara's name on it. Kara, still kneeling between her knees, hurriedly undid the rest of the buttons and kissed Cat's chest, hungry and tender, still shedding salty tears as she did, sighing, "Cat, I'm so sorry, please…"

Cat hooked her fingers under Kara's arms and pulled her up onto the couch so that she straddled Cat's lap, and they kissed sweet kisses, hot and deep kisses that demanded the breath from each other's mouths. Cat knew she was probably weak, letting herself get tangled in Kara's body again before she'd gotten real answers from Kara, but maybe it was alright. Maybe it would be easier to get the answers this way. All she knew was how glad she was to have Kara in her hands again, how right it felt. She slipped her hands under the soft, white stretchy shirt Kara wore, and pushed it up over her head. She wanted to look at her, finally just look at her.

Kara didn't fight her. She lifted her arms and let Cat undress her, shirt and then sport bra. She sat in Cat's lap, looking intently into her face. She sat still for a moment, letting Cat grip her waist and just take in the sight of her. For once, to just look at her, the perfect curve from her hip to waist to ribs, the firm roundness of her breasts, the stiffness of her pale pink nipples, her broad shoulders, her toned biceps. She was beautiful. It was one thing to feel these things in the dark, but God, to look them… She drew Kara close and placed one of Kara's breasts in her mouth, kissing and sucking at it.

She felt Kara shiver, and then to her surprise, heard her moan. Cat pushed back again and looked up. She needed those damn glasses off. She reached up, plucked them off, laid them aside. She tugged Kara's hair out of its ponytail and watched her blond hair tumble down her shoulders. It had felt luxurious in the dark, but it was the sight of it that really made her ache. Kara was looking at her now, eyes wide, looking expectant.

Cat drew her into another hot kiss, and then looked at her again. It was funny. Maybe it was just in this light, but... with her glasses off and her hair down, the resemblance was…

"What?" Kara asked nervously.

"Nothing," Cat sighed. "It's silly. I was just thinking… how much Supergirl looks like you."

Kara pressed into her kiss again, harder, more passionate, hungrier than she could remember it having felt before. "Cat," she mumbled in between kisses. She felt Kara's hand slide up her skirt, fumbling fingers pushing her panties out of the way. "Cat, I want you," she was mumbling against Cat's lips.

Cat gasped, shifted against her to give her more room, and then exhaled heavily when Kara's fingers slid into her. It was easy. She was already wet.

On instinct, she pulled down the waistband of Kara's sweatpants, and slipped her fingers into her. Orgasm or no orgasm, she needed to feel her. She needed to touch her in that way that she didn't touch anyone else. Kara moaned. "Are you okay?" Cat asked.

Kara couldn't speak, she only nodded. And they stayed this way, pressed together, half undressed, moving against each other, fingers hooked inside each other, moaning each other's names. Kara was thrashing and rocking her hips with an urgency that Cat hadn't seen her do.

"Are you alright?" she asked again.

"Yes," she panted. "I'm just… I'm just… feeling a lot … I…" She broke off, moving against Cat's fingers.

Cat, through her own pleasure, was able to take a look at Kara's face and see something in it that she'd dearly wished to see. "You're getting somewhere, aren't you?"

Kara nodded.

"I thought that didn't happen," Cat remarked in wonder.

"It's happening now," Kara moaned.

Their mouths delved hotly into each other, and they remained a few moments more, moving together. She could feel something escalating in Kara's body, but it was hard to read exactly. It felt like something more, or something different, than just an impending orgasm.

"It's too much, it's too much," Kara was panting.

"Sssh," Cat soothed. "Do we need to stop?"

"It's too much," was all Kara could say.

And then she was pulling away, pulling her mouth away, pulling her fingers away, pulling her body away, stumbling to the bathroom in tears with her hands over her ears, eyes squinted shut, sobbing, "It's too much, it's too much…"

Cat groaned, and slumped down into the couch. Not again.