author's note: I'm putting my own spin on Swan Queen week, so while you do get a week's worth of AUs, they will all be based on a Taylor Swift song and most likely in a teenaged/college-aged universe. Enjoy, my dears!
(the format is as follows:
Regina second person POV
Emma second person POV
Regina second person POV
Emma second person POV
Regina & Emma third person POV)

* You've got one hand on the steering wheel, the other on her knee and it's cheesy and spontaneous and you are neither of those things except when she is with you. You don't think that she's even noticed. She's pulled her hair out of her messy ponytail and half of it is hanging out the open window, blowing outside. Her eyes are closed, she's tapping her foot, the one that's not tucked up under herself, to the song on the radio and her head is cradled in the palm of her hand. You watch her and when the song is done playing, she opens her eyes and her forehead wrinkles the way it does when she is confused, which you tend to see a lot during your Algebra II class together. You think it's pretty endearing, though you've never told her that. You haven't told her a lot of things.

"Emma, what's wrong?"

She frowns over the shouting car saleman on the radio and turns the volume knob down. "Nothing." Emma purses her lips together thoughtfully. "I was just thinking how we don't have a song."

You don't answer her and she doesn't seem to expect one from you.

When you pull your hand away, she grabs it in hers and puts it back on her knee.

* You are walking down the sidewalk with your phone pressed to your ear because she's whispering. And you know it doesn't change a thing, but you don't tell her because you think it's cute how not only does she talk softly, but she draws her words out so each one comes out of her mouth slowly, into her phone and into your ear.

Even her laugh is different slowed down like this and she chides you for making her do it, warning for about the tenth time that it's late and she can't have her mother overhear your phone call.

"It's okay, Regina," you tell her, and toss some gravel up at a second floor window. "Look outside." It's dark, but there's enough orange light from the streetlight that you can see her when she opens the window and drops her phone out of it in surprise at seeing you there.

"You idiot!" she hisses.

You grin because you know what she actually means. "Worth it!" You cheer soundlessly and somehow manage to catch her phone before it hits the ground.

* You almost missed your curfew, but now that you're home and your mother is satisfied with your study date excuse and the adrenaline has all but rushed out of you and into your mattress, you close your eyes and even though you're not the praying type, you ask God for one more day with her.

Because it's young love and it won't last and she probably won't be forever, but you want her to be, you want to last and you want forever and most of all you want her and you want her again.

"Please" and "amen" fall from your lips and it's silly but you don't feel silly, you feel scared and brave and so in love and you think that if this could be a song, this feeling, it would be your song.

Yours and Emma's.

But you don't have a song.

* Your head aches and you've been trying not to cry all through last period. You hate the feeling of being about to cry almost more than the act of crying itself. You've slammed every door, until your palms and wrists and elbows sting and then tears are what are stinging your eyes and you walk right past them in the hallway, turning into your doorway.

You smell them first.

Roses.

You stop, turn, and use the hem of your t-shirt to wipe your eyes. There's a bunch of them in a vase on the floor in the hallway.

The fight, the words you said, the words she screamed and then later cried, they all seem so very long ago. And it seems so very late when you notice the note, written in her perfect cursive. Your heavy heart does not get lighter, but it feels the hope surging through your veins.

If she had a song, she'd write it, she says in her note, but she doesn't have a song for you and the way you make her feel when you're with her. And all you can think now is to tell her is that you're sorry and you do.

* Emma rolls down the window and closes her eyes against the wind whipping through her hair. Regina's got the radio blasting again, one hand on the wheel, the other draped out her open window, fingers tapping to the music. She turns down the music when the song is through and Emma slides open one lazy eye at her. She finds Regina with a half smile on her face and her right hand hovering in the space between their bodies. Emma smiles back, a full, wide, beaming grin and shuts her eyes again. A minute later, she feels Regina's hand settle atop her leg and she slides her own hand over to cover Regina's.

"You remember our first date," Regina says and she does say it, rather than ask, but Emma nods all the same. Remembers the butterflies tumbling in her stomach, remembers licking her dry lips, remembers awkward silences between jolting, bumbling conversation and remembers shy smiles at a front door and cool hands on hers in the darkness and thinking surely... Surely she was about to be kissed by Regina Mills and she didn't care one bit. No, she only cared because she wanted it to happen and then when it didn't, Emma remembers that, too.

"Yeah, I remember," Emma answers and slides her fingers along and then between Regina's.

"I didn't kiss you," Regina states.

"No, you didn't." Emma acknowledges, meeting her girlfriend's hesitant look with a broad smile, but allowing her the silence in which to finish presenting her train of thought. The only sound is the sound of the wind rushing in from the windows. Emma's listened to all of the radio songs and every album that she's owned and she has found nothing that sum up what this one girl makes her feel like.

"Well," Regina starts, with a nervous swipe of her tongue over her lips before she turns those liquid brown and brilliant eyes on Emma. "I should have."

Emma blushes and tries to let go of Regina's hand, but Regina doesn't let her let go. "Yeah, well... You made up for it later." Emma waits a beat and then pulls herself out of that deep gaze and opens the glovebox with her free hand and pulls out a folded napkin and fishes for a pen out of the side of the door.

Regina watches as her girlfriend uses her forearm to brush the loose hair from her face and then starts to scribble madly on the paper napkin she's spread out on her jeans-clad thigh.