Do You Realize? – The Flaming Lips
"I love you." Tara blurted it out, and then flinched. It wasn't the best of ways to say that, though the circumstances didn't make it any less true. Denise had frozen for a moment, as soon as the words had come out, and she looked at Tara intently.
"You aren't just saying that because you're about to leave on a dangerous mission with Rick?" Denise continued to stare at her, not letting her reaction to Tara's statement show yet.
Tara hesitated, "Well, it is true, but the mission is part of the reason I wanted to say it now." She shrugged and turned to the weapons she had laid out, "If Heath and I leave for the scavenging run after this all goes down, I won't see you for a while. If anything happened? I want you to know how I felt. Everyone I have ever known in my life, before a couple months ago, is dead. Sometimes I let the moment pass when I should have said something and now it's too late to ever tell them how I felt about them. I didn't want to waste the moment this time."
Denise was quiet for a moment, "I love you too." She touched one of Tara's knives, "And you will come back. I know it."
"I'll make sure someone tells you that I was fine before we split from the group, just so you know, for sure." Tara gave her girlfriend a crooked smiled and shrugged, "I'd want to hear that if you were the one on the road. Though, for the record, I'm glad that you are not going out there."
"For the record, so am I, though I'm going to worry about you the entire time you are gone." Denise frowned, "These people sound dangerous."
"They are, but so are we." Tara turned away from her preparations and opened her arms for a hug, "I promise that I'll do everything that I can to come back."