But I believe it will someday. I have to.
God, the man couldn't just say something forgettable. After they had gotten back, Emma had managed to fall asleep without too much trouble, but she had woken just past five and by some miracle Killian wasn't already awake and working, so she was alone on his porch with nothing to think about but his words and what they could mean. Well, she didn't have to think to hard about what they could mean - she was on his porch, living in his house, legs drawn up onto his chair, his bathrobe wrapped around her knees, her hands curled around a cup of coffee from his kitchen.
She didn't have to be a genius to realized how tangled their lives already were in one another's.
But still, for him to say he hadn't been paid back for the wrongs the world had done him and then look at her the way he had in the moments following, like she was the answer to a question he didn't know how to ask, felt dangerous - like she could blink and suddenly find that lazy mornings on the porch and Killian Jones' bathrobe were her forever.
More dangerous was the fact that when she thought of that forever, something about it thrilled her.
The screen door creaked behind her and her gaze snapped up to Killian, slightly frantic as if he had caught her in the middle of something. He either didn't see or pretended to ignore it if he did, but simply offered her a grin that was as sleep-rumpled as the rest of him and sank down into the chair beside her with a cup of his own.
"Morning, Swan." He said. "I didn't hear you get up."
"I skipped the squeaky floorboard." She tapped his coffee mug with hers in greeting and let her gaze settle back on the grass rippling gently in the early breeze, a moving field stretching all the way to the road. She wanted him to bring up what he had said, and she was dreading it. She wanted him to ask her again Do you want it to?but she didn't know how she would answer if he did.
He cleared his throat lightly and her heart leapt into hers.
"Would you mind picking up a car in town this morning?" He asked. "I want to finish up that Explorer I started yesterday and it's scheduled to be picked up before noon."
"Yeah, I'll go." She spared a glance at him to roll her eyes. "But honestly, you think you would have learned to schedule your work by now."
"I have you for that, now don't I?" His returning smile was mischievous and banished the last hints of sleep from his expression. She whacked him in the arm but let a small laugh escape at the exchange, and while she could still feel Do you want it to?simmering in her chest, teasing him was familiar ground she was only too happy to get back to.
Killian gave her a crudely drawn map to the address in town where she was supposed to pick the car up and she left the garage to walk into town feeling strangely out of sorts as she did. She had gotten used to slipping on her (his) coveralls after breakfast and waking up properly over a second cup of coffee and whatever job was at the top of the service list that day, talking to Killian over the soft hum of the ever-present radio, and starting out the day any other way felt almost wrong.
Small as the town was, it only took her twenty minutes to reach the small apartment building a few blocks off the main street where a petite woman was out front and leaning against an old truck. She met Emma with a wide smile, and pulled her into a tight hug before Emma had a chance to ask if she was the one with the car that needed work.
"You must be Emma - Killian told me you were on your way." The woman pulled back and waved her phone in explanation. "I'm Mary Margaret - I think you've met my husband David already."
It took Emma a moment to remember the sheriff she and Killian had met at the accident site, and even when she did she couldn't reconcile the image she had of the man talking to Killian in a low, serious voice with the bubbly woman standing before her. "Yeah, briefly." She waited for the conversation to take off again, but Mary Margaret was just standing there beaming at her, so Emma gestured to the truck. "There's something wrong with the truck, I take it?"
"Nothing serious - it just hit 200K and Killian said he'd look it over. David had to go to the station early and I have to teach a class in..." She glanced at her watch and made a face. "Half an hour, so he said he'd pick it up."
"I won't keep you, then. Do you have the keys?"
Even handing over the keys, Mary Margaret's smile was splitting her face, and then she said, "What are you doing for dinner tonight?"
"Excuse me?"
"David and I have dinner at 7, and you and Killian should come. It's been a while since he's been over." She nodded her head resolutely even though Emma hadn't said anything, then glanced back down at her watch. "I've got to go if I'm going to get to work on time. See you at 7!" And she was gone, rushing down the street with a wave over her shoulder. Emma just stared after her a moment, feeling like she had just come out the other side of a very perky hurricane. And now she and Killian had dinner plans.
He laughed when she told him - a full, hearty thing that surprised her for a fraction of a second when she heard it. Bent under the hood of the truck, he couldn't see the smile that spread across her face a moment later, so she let it. It wasn't that he didn't laugh, but this was something else - and she suspected that it was nearly as foreign to him as it was to her.
"I didn't really get a chance to tell her if we were coming either way, so I hope you didn't have plans." She told his back. That just prompted another round of laughter from him, and she was beginning to think he had hit his head while she was out because he was never this cheerful.
"Mary Margaret is not the type to give you the option of declining a dinner invitation." He took a deep breath and the face that popped out from beneath the hood was red with laughter. "I'm sure you gathered that, even from your short conversation."
"I kind of got the idea, yeah."
"I'll need to make something to bring before then, so would you mind getting a start on your car now?"
"I don't know a thing about injector conversions so I don't know what you expect." She said with a hint of regret.
"Figured as much, but that's not what I'm after." He pointed at her car and waited until she followed his finger to the slash of a dent in the middle of her bumper. "I was going to straighten that out for you, but if you wouldn't mind doing that, I can finish the last little bit on the Explorer."
"You sure there's nothing else in line before this?"
"Nothing that can't wait." He gestured at the car again, and offered her a smile like he knew exactly how little every other car mattered to her compared to the Bug.
"Thanks." She said with an answering grin.
"It deserves our attention as much as any other, Swan." He called after her as she went to pull on her coveralls and grab the tools from the back bench. "Though I did notice that your license plate's bent too - I can call up a contact and get you a new one, if you'd like."
"It's a Massachusetts plate, Killian. But thanks."
"We could get you a nice Maine one, if you wanted."
Now that was a surprise. He said it with the light, teasing lilt she had gotten used to, but there was something honest behind it - something that said if she agreed, he might actually call someone and produce a license plate that would tell the world that thiswas where she belonged. She forced a laugh instead, because of course he was kidding, and said, "I bet you say that to all the girls."
His laugh rang out alongside hers and when she glanced over at him he just shrugged dramatically with that same - though slightly less brilliant - smile frozen on his face. She wasn't sure if she was relieved that he didn't contradict her, or disappointed.
If she had kept her eyes on his a moment longer she would have seen on his lips the shape of the words that didn't carry across the garage as he said, the smile gone, "Not all of them."
Straightening her own bumper took less than an hour, but between David's truck and Killian's dwindling service list, it was six o'clock before Emma knew it and she realized quite suddenly, while she was wiping her dirty hands on the legs of her borrowed coveralls, that she had absolutely nothing dinner-worthy to wear, and also that she should probably bring something to the party. That state was exactly how Killian found her when he knocked lightly on her door frame at half past six: in a white tank top with his coveralls tied at her waist, hands clean but the rest of her still a mess, with the meagre selection of clothes from her duffel spread across the bed and looking even less acceptable than they had in her memory.
"I was going to ask if you're about ready to head out, Swan, but I'd wager you're not."
"We can't go." She said, well aware that this was an overreaction and that she was not the kind of person who stared at their own clothes for half an hour before declaring they had nothing to wear, but still slightly frantic because these were his friends and some visceral reaction to that fact made her need them to like her. "I literally have nothing appropriate to wear and I should bring a bottle of wine or something, shouldn't I? And now it's six thirty and there is no timefor any of this."
"Granted, I did tell you at five to leave that Buick for tomorrow, but you'rethe one who insisted-"
"Now is really not the time." She held one hand up in his direction and scraped the other through her hair as she regarded her options for what had to br the hundredth time, an errant hope in her mind that somehow a dress or a skirt or even a remotely fancy top would have appeared.
"Emma." Killian came to stand in front of her and grabbed both of her wrists, holding them close between the two of them as he looked at her with that very clear, very serious expression he sometimes had. "Breathe, love."
"You breathe." She said, but caught his gaze regardless and the steady blue of it calmed her a fraction, despite herself.
"I am." An eyebrow drifted up and he grinned, dropping her wrists and taking a step back. "What's wrong with what you usually wear?"
"This is dinner."
"We have dinner."
"This is not dinner on the porch with you. This is dinner with your friends, one of whom was wearing a butterfly cardigan this morning, and it's just...dinner!"
"I didn't know Dave owned a butterfly cardigan." He said drily. "But as for you, wear what you normally wear. Dinner is usually casual and you look nice in anything."
"Oh yeah, I'm a real stunner?" She spread her arms wide and rolled her eyes, displaying the full complement of grease stains on her coveralls and rips at the bottom of her tank top from washing it over and over.
Killian's eyes travelled from her head to her feet, and his hand drifted to rub behind his ear, his gaze still on the ground as he said, "Be ready in ten, eh Swan? We'll stop in town if you want to pick something up."
"Thanks." She pulled a pair of jeans from the pile on the bed as Killian shuffled towards the door, regarding them critically but realizing as she did that even if dinner wasn'tcasual she was out of options and out of time.
She ended up in the jeans and plain white sweater, combing out her hair and letting it hang loose in the soft curls that came from working all day in the heat of the garage. Killian was leaning up against the front door reading a section of the newspaper when she came down, and it was just jeans and a sweater but when he looked up, a look crossed his face like she was everything, and the felt again as though she could look away for one moment and turn back to this life being hers.
"We're going to be late." She mumbled, opening the door and brushing past him out to the porch, but he caught her arm and she spun to face him, and for a moment the two of them just stared at each other in the soft light seeping onto the porch, and forever was still a whisper in the cool evening air, and as his hand drifted up to cup her cheek gently she leaned into it without thinking. Then he took one step towards her and without him in the threshold, the door slammed shut and suddenly the entire world was dusk-blue and absolutely silent and himwith his hand on her face and his nose inches from hers, and then their foreheads pressed together and their breath swirling in the space between them, and for a formless moment she forgot that they were once two people.
His thumb rubbed a line across her cheekbone, and as he pulled that hand from her face he turned his head to look at it, and she turned with him until they were temple-to-temple and both looking at his thumb with a faint dark smudge across the whorl of his fingerprint that she knew was a streak of grease like she had on her face, somehow, after work. He cracked a grin and she could feel it manifest as his cheek shifted, still so close, so when he pulled away to smile at her with eyes that sparkled in the muted light, it felt inevitable.
"It's called a facecloth, Swan." He said, but his voice was uncertain behind the teasing lilt as though the world had shifted in those moments and he hadn't caught up yet. She couldn't really blame him for it. She hadn't caught up yet, either.
True to his word, Killian stopped at Granny's on the way to dinner, even though he told her that the mysterious dish that had already been sitting on the bench seat of David's truck when they got in could be from both of them. She'd had no part in it and didn't even know what it was,so her pride insisted that she pick something up anyways. Even though she ordered the fasted thing on the menu - four orders of onion rings, to go - they ended up being five minutes late to dinner.
By the look on Mary Margaret's face when she opened the door, the five minutes were the farthest thing from a problem.
"Come in, come in." She bundled the two of them through the door, practically at the same time, and her smile was absolutely brilliant as she did. "I'm so glad you could come."
"For you, Maggie, anything." Killian dropped a casual kiss on her cheek as he shrugged off his jacket, handing the pot of his mysterious dish off to a hovering David at the same time, and Emma just watched it all from a step behind him with a dawning realization that this was familiar enough territory for all of them for this routine to be seamless.
"And Emma, lovely to see you again." Mary Margaret had Emma captured in a gentle hug soon after, shooing Killian into the kitchen after David, and somehow had Emma's red leather jacket off and onto the coat rack with Emma herself held at arm's length, before Emma had a chance to say hello. "And I love your sweater."
"Uh...thanks." For lack of a better idea, Emma held up her bag of onion rings and offered a smile. "I brought food."
"Beautiful! Dinner's ready to go so just let me get this on a plate and we'll eat."
Emma followed Mary Margaret into the kitchen, drifting over to stand beside Killian at the kitchen island. He handed her a glass of wine and grinned.
"She's quite something, isn't she?" He said, gesturing to the brunette. Then he eyes shifted to David, stirring something in Killian's pot on the stove. "Dave, you remember Emma."
"Of course. Hi, Emma." David nodded and waved his wooden spoon at her, dripping something white onto the counter.
"Honestly, mate. I madethat - endeavour not to waste it, would you?"
"You know my wife, Killian. Are you really scared we're going to run out of food?"
"If she cooked, no. If you made that godawful meatloaf again, I'm more scared that we'll run out of edible food."
"One time." David said, turning back to the pot. "You make a meatloaf one time..."
"That was an abomination and you know it." Killian said.
"The two of you could go on all night." Mary Margaret said, walking between the two of them with a bowl of Emma's onion rings, on her way to the table. "But we're ready to eat so if you wouldn't mind..."
"Yes, Dave. Serve that up, will you, and stop making a scene."
"I could have you arrested, you know." David said, but Emma saw him smile as he pulled the pot off the stove.
They all sat down at a perfectly set table that held enough food for entire whole town. Between macaroni and cheese, a plate of grilled chicken, salad, green beans, the onion rings, and the pot of what looked like clam chowder that David set down, Emma wasn't sure that she would be able to walk out of this house under her own power.
"You made mac and cheese." Killian said, his expression pure and hungry as he eyed it.
"It's your favourite." Mary Margaret said simply, pushing the dish towards him. "And you made clam chowder."
"It's tradition."
"Who made onion rings?" David cut in, and Emma could feel her face heat up as all eyes fell on the bowl.
"Emma brought those." Mary Margaret said, another winning smile shot down the table.
"Really, Swan?" Killian arched an eyebrow at her, his teasing smile already in place. "I slave over a hot stove to provide clam chowder for this family, and you bring onion rings?"
"Excuse me if I didn't have time to prepare a four course meal while running the whole shop while you disappear into the kitchen for the entire afternoon." She shot back, her smile wide.
"One of us has to be the housewife, but if you'd prefer the job..."
"Housewife." Emma snorted. "Have you seenyour house?"
"She's right." David put in, shrugging at Killian's betrayed expression.
"Fine, if everyone's against me." Killian said, passing the mac and cheese to Emma dramatically.
"Did Killian's feelings get hurt?" David gave Killian a wicked grin as he slid the beans across the table to Mary Margaret, who was completely silent but regarding them all with the gentlest smile on her face.
"Sorry, Dave - I can't hear you, so taken am I with these beautiful onion rings Emma has so lovingly prepared for us. Hours and hours of preparation, tears shed as each onion is hand-cut with painstaking precision..." Killian broke into a laugh as Emma elbowed him hard in the side.
"You're such an asshole." She muttered, then cut a glance over to Mary Margaret. "Sorry."
"Don't be." The brunette said, that strange happy smile still on her face. "This is nice."
"What, Killian's complex about his clam chowder?" David asked.
"No." Mary Margaret's hand came to rest on Killian's arm, and there was something meaningful about it that made the tips of Killian's ears redden. Even though her next words answered David's question, her voice was pitched low and her eyes were only on Killian as she said, "It's been too long since I've seen that smile."
The rest of dinner was much the same, casual banter traded back and forth across the table and dissolving quickly into easy conversation over desert about David and Killian's days in high school, Mary Margaret and David's wedding where Killian had pretended to lose the rings right up until an hour before the ceremony, and even a (very) vague story about Emma's life in Boston. By the time dessert was over and Mary Margaret wrapped both Killian and Emma in another hug on their way out the door, Emma felt like she, too, had known both Mary Margaret and David for years.
There was something...light in the air as the two of them walked down the main street on their way home, the truck having been left at the apartment. Emma hadn't laughed that much at a dinner in years, and now Mary Margaret and David felt like two more people she would miss when she left.
There was something different about Killian, too. His smile came so much more easily, like he didn't have to dig it out from somewhere to wear it, like it was ready and waiting because it knew he would need it often. He kept bumping her shoulder with his as they walked, and part of her attributed it to the three (four?) bottles of beer he had consumed over the course of the evening, but part of her also saw that this casual gesture came along with that easy smile, with the jokes that had fallen from his lips all evening, with the way his eyes looked like they were gazing into the sun even though the road was dark with the late hour.
It was so noticeable and so welcome that when it disappeared, she stopped dead in her tracks. And it was a good thing that she did, because if she hadn't he would have been several steps behind her because he, too, was frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, feet spread like he was ready to fight the world.
The world, or the man who said, "Mr. Jones. It's nice to see you out this evening." Mr. Gold nodded a greeting at Emma, but his eyes never left Killian's face.
"I'd like to say the same." Killian ground out, but left it at that.
"You never were the diplomat of the family." Gold's face changed and Emma wasn't sure what the expression was that he wore, but it was half shark and half a smile that was the farthest thing from pleasant. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a sheaf of papers, letting them unfurl like an accordion as he held them out to Killian. "It's quite opportune that I ran into you, though. You see, I've just come from Sidney Glass's office."
Emma darted a glance at Killian, and his face pale and tight with both fear and fury.
"He's written me up a contract." Gold continued, watching Killian's eyes scan the topmost page. He saw, as Emma did, the moment Killian understood what he was reading because his eyes snapped up to Gold's face with such an expression in them that Emma rested a hand on Killian's forearm as a warning, all the while painfully aware that if he wanted to put his fist in that man's face, she couldn't stop him.
Frankly, she didn't know if she wanted to.
"I have a meeting with Mr. Johnson tomorrow." Gold said, and his smile was so smug Emma wanted to punch him herself. "He's agreed to go into business together."
They had been home for hours, but Emma was far from sleep. She couldn't stop seeing the look Gold had given Killian as he held out the contract, or the way Killian's face had turned from pure rage to just...nothing the minute Gold had left. It didn't help that Killian had been in the house for little more than an hour after they had gotten home before heading to down to the garage, the front door slamming so forcefully behind him that she had felt it shake the house even from her room.
It had been hours since then, and she was surprised she hadn't worn a rut in the floor, walking back and forth between the bed and the window so often, the light in the garage calling her back again and again.
One more hour. She told herself. If he's not back in an hour, you can go down.
Ten minutes and three trips to the window later, she was padding into the garage in bare feet, reasoning that time was running slow and that ten minutes was close to an hour, if you really needed it to be.
Only his legs were sticking out from the underside of her car, but she could tell that he wasn't working on it as much as he was just lying beneath it. She sat down on the ground next to it, the cold seeping through the flannel of her pajamas almost immediately, and leaned back against the front tire.
"You know how late it is, right?"
"I do." He said, but didn't move.
"You know the car's not going anywhere, right?"
"Isn't it?"
This was a strange turn, but there was nothing she could say that would make what they both knew any less true. "Killian..."
"Don't, Emma." She heard him sigh. "That was out of line. I know."
A few halfhearted noises came from underneath the car as he pretended to work in the silence that followed. She wanted to say something that would bring him back from...wherever he was that she couldn't seem to reach, but every turn she could see the conversation taking led somewhere she didn't want to go. Instead, she shifted until she was on her back against the cold concrete, so when she turned her head she could see the shadowed lines of his profile. He was looking at the undercarriage, but she could tell he wasn't really seeing it.
"Why are you always out here so late?" She asked quietly. "And don't say it's because there's too much to do, because I know that's not it."
"You're perceptive, Swan. I'll give you that much." She saw the whites of his eyes flash as his gaze tracked the line of the exhaust pipe, and he tapped it gently with one finger. "But you've heard enough of my story - you don't need to bother with the rest." His voice dipped low. "It doesn't much matter now, anyways."
"This is about the garage, isn't it." She didn't say it as a question because it wasn't one - not to either of them.
His head jerked in a nod and the crooked line of a smile cut over half of his mouth. It wasn't a pleasant expression. "When Gold runs this shop into the ground," He said, the words ragged. "What do you think will be the next thing to go?"
Suddenly his fingers still resting gently on the curve of the exhaust pipe turned into the ghost of his hand curved around the stair railing that first night she had spent in the house, and she knew why he was out here.
"The house." She said quietly. Even though he had put the words in her mouth, his breath still caught as she said them.
"Aye." His hand fell to rest on his stomach, fingers tapping a frantic rhythm there. "The house is mortgaged to the hilt to keep this place going, and that is not a hole I will ever be able to dig myself out of if I lose the business."
"You could get another job. Pay it off."
"In this town, where everyone knows how Gold feels about me? Gold, who is their landlord as much as he is mine?" Killian barked out a harsh laugh. "Not in this lifetime."
"You could work somewhere else. Earn enough to keep it."
"I've tried, love." He rubbed a hand over his face. "For a few months after Liam passed. I went to Portland and bartended and tried to lose myself in a city that had never known him - and I did. But the pieces of myself I lost..." His eyes got a faraway look then, and she knew the feeling he couldn't seem to describe.
"Killian..."
"I'm someone else here." He said. "A better someone. And out here...I know who I am here, in this garage, in this house." Even though it was tight and close in the space between his mouth and the car, his voice sounded so, so small.
She studied his profile a moment, and suddenly the late nights in the garage all made sense - she barely knew him, but she knew about needing a place to go to remind yourself of the person you were meant to be. Then she pulled her gaze from him and turned it up towards the ceiling of the garage, following a faint crack in the stark white of the plaster to where it met the corner where the back wall met the office, running a jagged line down the concrete block wall.
"I was left on the side of a road as a baby." She said, voice barely there because nobody in the world had ever heard this story. "And I had been in thirteen foster homes by the time I ran away at sixteen, and landed in jail at seventeen. And through all thirteen - some families I couldn't wait to leave, some families I begged to keep - I never got what you're describing. None of them were home." She started as his fingers drifted over to dance along the back of her hand, patient until she laced her fingers with his, and then his thumb was tracing a gentle circle on her skin as she continued.
"I don't know a lot about home, Killian." She said. "But it's something you carry with you, no matter if the physical place exists or not. It's the place, but it's also the memories you've made here, and the way it's built you even if you have to lay a new foundation somewhere else, eventually." She turned back towards him, and the blue of his eyes was lost in the dark but what she could see of his gaze was so, so gentle. "Even if the worst happens, even if Gold takes all this...you won't lose it. Not really."
His mouth twitched as his eyes shut heavily. He tugged her hand towards him until his lips were pressed against her knuckles, and she could feel her heartbeat pound hard against that spot in a sudden rush of heat, once, twice. Then his lips were moving and he was whispering against her skin, "This is the only place I can still feel them, Emma."
Her stomach dropped. She didn't know a thing about home or a thing about family, but she knew more than she was willing to admit about the particular brand of loneliness that seeped from his voice just then.
She had lived with that hollow wanting need for so long, and she didn't want it for him.
"Okay." She said quietly, extracting her thumb from their clasped hands and stroking a short, soft line along the edge of his jaw. He didn't open his eyes and he didn't move, but she could feel the soft breath that he let out. "We'll figure out something."
She didn't know if they could, but as he breathed a soft Thank youagainst her palm, she vowed that they would.