Chapter thirteen

"I told Regina that I have low EQ," Emma announced a few moments after she sat down opposite Archie.

The therapist's eyebrows shot up. It had been a few days since her panic attack and he had been assured that the remainder of the school week had seemingly gone off without a hitch. He naturally assumed that Regina had been more attentive to Emma since she was so obviously more comfortable with herself than she had been when he saw her that day. She had also never started a session with being the first one to speak, which surprised him more than anything.

"And how did she react?" he asked, trying to keep the surprise off his face, he didn't want her to take his shock for a bad reaction, in fact, he was trying to think of a way to show her just how proud he was that she had taken the step that he knew she had been afraid of. As far as he knew, her only peer who knew about her Emotional Quotient was Lily.

Emma shrugged and turned her attention to Pongo as she lightly stroked his head. Archie had long since realised that eye contact became more difficult for her when she was discussing something involving feelings, so he never pushed for it and the dog certainly loved the attention.

After a moment, she replied, "she asked me some questions."

"Could you give me an example of one of the questions?" he asked.

"She kind of asked me how I experience emotions," Emma replied, there was a smile tugging at the corner of her lips as she recalled how Regina had spent over a minute trying to phrase the question correctly. She had literally just told her that she didn't experience emotions properly and the cheerleader was still worried about hurting her feelings, it may have been one of the cutest things she had ever seen.

Archie quirked his eyebrow at the smile and wondered briefly if there was another reason why she was refusing eye contact. Despite her facade of being emotionless and everything that she had been through, Emma was still very much a teenage girl. And if his suspicions were correct, then she was a teenage girl with a rather strong crush.

He once again decided to push past the possibility that she had a crush on Regina, for now it didn't seem that it would be an issue. It also proved that Regina was more than likely trying more than Cora thought she was, if she was being horrible to her foster sister, it seemed very unlikely that she would like her, or at least he hoped that was the case.

"And how did you answer that question?" Archie asked, leaning forward slightly.

The blonde said, "I guess I just said that I understand emotions in theory, but in practice they really confuse me…"

"And did she understand?" he asked.

Emma shrugged more slowly this time as she considered the question. Regina had just nodded along, but that didn't mean that she understood and it wasn't as if they went too much in depth with everything. If they had, they would have been there for hours, but she was still pretty sure that it was the most she had ever told anyone other than Lily and she had been pretty shocked when she found that she was pretty comfortable sharing something that she had spent the majority of her life hiding from everyone.

Archie considered whether he should press for more, but she had already told him more than he had expected her to, in fact, she had told Regina more than he had expected her to so he figured that he could just give her more time to think about it.

"It's good that you could express it," he replied, "but perhaps if you continue your work with your journal you will be able to explain more specifically when you feel able to?"

"I guess so," Emma said, still playing with Pongo, though she was noticeably not as tense as she usually was during their sessions.

"Would you mind giving me the journal so that we can go through it?" the therapist asked.

Emma sighed and reached down into her bag to pull out the book that she had written in once a day. She had found the experience oddly calming, but she wasn't too convinced that there was anything groundbreaking in there. It was mostly just a physical description of every anxiety-filled moment she'd had that week, though none of them had been quite as bad as her first day of school thankfully.

"Sure," she said and handed the book over to the man who she was sure would use it to come up with some great theory about how he could help her. That thought would have bothered her when she first came to Storybrooke, but now she found the thought that he could help her rather exciting. She wanted to figure out exactly what her feelings for Regina meant since she was getting the sense that they were somehow different to every other crush she'd had. She understood the biological chemistry of attraction very well, but she wasn't sure that she understood the intensity of what she felt when the cheerleader sat down and spent time trying to understand her better.

s

A week passed.

Emma found school became marginally easier the longer she attended since Regina seemed far more interested in being her buddy rather than spending time with her other friends. Plus, when Regina wasn't around for whatever reason, she sent Killian to make sure that she was never in the same position that she had been on her first day.

Also, Alice was in most of her AP classes which meant that she at the very least always had someone to talk to and Lily had taken to teasing her that she was now in some kind of love triangle. Of course, Emma found it hard to believe that there was any world in which Regina Mills could like her back and even if she was definitely attracted to Alice she didn't really think that there was any chance that they would be anything more than friends. Alice didn't really give off any signs that she liked her either, and Emma tried to ignore Lily's argument that she wouldn't know what someone looked like when they liked her anyway.

Whenever the subject came up, Emma just let out an exasperated sigh and tried to move the conversation onto something else.

It was for this reason that she was determined that she didn't need to tell Lily that she was currently in Alice's bedroom. The British girl had suggested that she could help her to make sure that she was up-to-date with all of her classes even though they both knew that she was. But the moment she entered the room, it became clear that she wasn't here to study since Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was loaded up on the TV.

The blonde smiled over to the girl sat at her desk and knocked at the open door to alert her that she was here.

Alice looked away from her computer screen and smiled at the other teen who had quickly become her close friend and she stood from her chair as she gestured over to the couch in front of the TV (Emma would later learn that her dad was rather rich thanks to his trading company which explained why her room was bigger than some of the apartments that Emma had lived in).

"I guess we're not studying?" Emma asked with a raised eyebrow as she went over to the couch with no hesitation. She had found quickly that she was more than comfortable around Alice than she was around most people (other than Lily of course). She wasn't constantly wondering what she thought about her and she didn't feel the excess nervousness that she felt around Regina.

"We both know that you don't need help to study and some things are more important," Alice shrugged as she fell into the seat next to her friend and reached over to grab one of the soda cans that she must have placed one the coffee table in advance of this.

"Isn't this a single player game?" Emma shot back as a controller was also placed into her hands and she instinctively started following the prompts on the screen to start a new game.

"I've completed it at least five times, I figured that we could see if you're as smart as you seem," Alice shrugged as the blonde next to her started skipping through the Great Deku Tree's exposition.

"So this is an IQ test?" the eidetic teen asked.

"If you want to see that way I guess it is," Alice shrugged again and Emma just shook her head with a little smile. If she was being honest, she had wanted to play this game for a while and she pretty much knew exactly how to complete it from playthroughs online which allowed her to basically memorise the game, but she figured that playing and watching were entirely different matters. This was especially because this was not something that she had ever expected to be able to do. As grateful as she was to the families who had fostered her and actually been caring, she had never before been fostered in a town of more well off people like Storybrooke.

"If you can get the Ocarina of Time before you have to go, I'll buy you lunch on Saturday," Alice said after a few moments of silence.

"You're on," Emma shot back.

S

"Are you sure your friend won't mind?" Henry asked as he walked beside Emma towards the diner.

"I asked her and she said it's fine," Emma shrugged, there was something in the tone of Henry's voice that was suggesting there was something she wasn't getting but she decided to just ignore it since she couldn't be bothered to decipher.

Henry, on the other hand, was wondering if he was about to sit in on a date because Emma was too dense to to realise what this was. Since she had become friends with Alice, she had seemed more at ease in Storybrooke, especially when it came to school, which Cora seemed thrilled about. Her smile the other day when Emma asked if she could go and study with the British girl was massive in spite of her attempts to act casual.

Of course, he knew that it was very possible that they were just friends, but he was determined to use the opportunity of having lunch with them to discover the nature of their relationship. Him and Zelena had a bet going whether they liked each other, they tried to ask Regina about it since she would have most likely already seen them spending time together, but she adamantly refused to engage in the debate. If Henry didn't know any better, he would have thought that she was jealous.

The sound of the bell over the diner's door reminded him that he was supposed to be moving and he promptly followed his foster sister into the diner and over to one of the far booths.

"Hey," Alice said with a wide smile and Henry's gaze cut over to Emma to inspect how she would react to the British teen's welcome, but she just smiled back rather normally with a small wave as she slid into the booth opposite her. The boy then looked back over to Alice and offered his own smile before he sat down next to Emma.

"You must be Henry Mills," Alice said after a moment of silence and Henry nodded, before she added, "Emma tells me that celebrations are in order."

Henry instantly blushed as he looked over to the smirking blonde next to him. He'd originally asked if Emma wanted to go out to diner to thank her for tutoring him.

"I guess so…I got a B in my English essay…" he replied awkwardly, he would honestly be a little mad at Emma for telling Alice why she wanted to invite him if the blonde didn't look so proud of him, there was the fact that Cora had stuck the essay to the fridge.

"That's amazing," Alice said enthusiastically.

Henry smiled in appreciation at her but allowed his gaze to fall over to Emma who was staring at the menu intently, he'd come to recognise that she wasn't big on eye contact and he could guess that she wasn't used to interacting with more than one person at a time. He looked back over to the British girl and noticed that she was looking at the other blonde as well and he had to stop himself from smiling. She had a very distinctive little smirk on her face and he had to imagine that she was thinking about how cute Emma was.

A few minutes later, they had all ordered and Alice announced, "so Swan, I have another challenge for you."

"Majora's Mask?" Emma asked with no hesitation and Henry could swear that he could see a little twinkle in Alice's eyes. He was now fairly certain that he was interrupting what was supposed to be a date.

Before the Brit could reply, the sound of the diner's bell sounding out interrupted as they all looked over to see Regina walking in staring at her phone, closely followed by Daniel. The cheerleader didn't even notice her brother's presence as she made a beeline to her and her boyfriend's usual booth and Henry was sure that he saw Emma deflate slightly when it became clear that they hadn't been noticed.

Henry bit the inside of his cheek and made a snap decision as he jumped out of the booth and announced, "I just need to go and ask Regina something…"

Emma didn't even get a chance to nod before he made his way over to his sister and Daniel looked up from his own phone when he noticed someone was approaching.

"Oh hey Hen, what's up buddy?" Daniel asked.

The boy smiled easily at Daniel, he may not have thought that they made a particularly good couple but he could tell that the teen cared about his sister, so that was good enough for him to not go into 'protective brother mode' which would probably just get him laughed at anyway.

Regina looked up from her own phone and raised her eyebrows at her brother.

"I think that Emma may have accidentally invited me on a date so can you come up with some reason that I have to leave?" he asked.

The cheerleader stared at him blankly for a second before her attention shot over to Emma sat in a booth across the diner with Alice, looking as though she was excitedly discussing something. Her gaze seemed to have been detected as Emma caught her eyeline and offered her a little, very adorable, wave.

Regina returned the motion and tried to swallow hard against the bile raising in her throat as she looked back over to her brother. He couldn't know that she was jealous since he thought that she was in love with the teen sat across from her, who was most likely texting his boyfriend right now.

"I'm sure we can think of something," she managed to say, though she couldn't be completely sure that the words weren't laced with venom.