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Before Nancy puts her hand on that knife, before Ace blips back into existence and she wraps her arms tight around him, before all of that, Nancy feels the faint tapping again.
It’s not Ace’s name this time or even a foggy explanation of what happened to him.
It’s just dot-dot, then a pause. Enough time for Nancy to fill in the letter. I.
Then, dot-dash-dot-dot. L.
Ill? Illegal? Illegitimate?
Three dashes, and her heart is in her throat. That’s an O.
I-L-O, what starts with I-L-O besides…
Dot-dot-dot-dash gives her a V and ILOV.
Nancy turns her head, touches her shoulder. Beneath the heat of her own hand she can still feel his touch, fainter now. A dot. A pause.
E.
Then dot-dot-dash. U.
And Nancy’s not an idiot.
She reaches forward, wrapping her hand around her knife, and the tapping on her shoulder starts again with the letter I.
ILOVEU, ILOVEU, ILOVEU.
“I know,” Nancy says out loud. Bess gives her a confused look. “What?” she mouths across the circle. Nancy shakes her head slightly. The knife slides through her fingers.
Nancy can’t think about what she’s chanting, but wind gushes through the room. The lights flicker, then pop off.
The tap-tap-tapping on her shoulder stops. Her heart drops back down into her chest, feeling like a heavy lump. They were too late.
They were too late and he’s gone and—
She feels it half a second later. Someone behind her. The same presence at the ballroom, the same presence back from a few moments ago when she felt the pressure on her arm.
There’s no time to process any more; she reacts.
Their arms are around each other a second later, a breathy hi barely escaping her lips. His embrace is warm and gentle.
It’s like him, she realizes, and she holds on even tighter.
When they reluctantly draw back, Ace says, “Figured it I was going to get obliterated from existence, it might as well happen while I was looking at a friend.”
A friend. A friend that he just told that he lo—
Nancy quickly shuts down the thought.
They run into each other again before the night is through. She’s standing in the parler of the historical society when he comes back for his coat. He passes Agent Park on his way out.
“Why didn’t you go to Bess?” Nancy asks.
“Hm?” Ace says, reaching down to pick up the brown jacket draped over the chair.
“When you were trying to get help,” she clarifies. “Why did you go to me? And not to Bess?”
He looks down at the coat in his hands, then back up at her. “You know why,” is all he says.
He’s right. She’s not stupid. She knows. The same way she knows what ILOVU means.
“About what you said,” she starts. “On my shoulder, I—
“Doesn’t matter,” he tells her, about to move past her, but she grabs his wrist and holds on tight. She probably doesn’t need to apply so much pressure, because at her slightest touch he goes completely still.
There are too many words inside her for what she wants to say.
“You said you knew,” he says when her silence stretches on too long. “You said I know, so I just figured we…”
She hears him sigh.
“I figured we didn’t have to talk about it,” he finishes. “It doesn’t have to change anything, Nance.”
She turns her head to try to read his expression, but he’s staring at the far wall, like he can’t bear to look at her. It makes her heart twist. How does she tell him he was in her dreamscape? How does she tell him he was the one she trusted with herself? How does she undo all of this? How—
“I wanted you to know that I heard you,” Nancy says. “I wanted you to know that I was there, that I understood. That just in case it didn’t work, you wouldn’t still be wondering if I knew.”
She tightens her grip on his wrist and feels his arm flex under her touch. She can’t read this situation at all. She just has to leap. Trust that maybe he’ll catch her. Trust that he won’t let her fall onto the rocks and waves below.
Nancy moves closer to Ace. “If I could do it over again,” she says. “I’d tell you—I’d tell you—”
Her breath catches in her throat, and using two fingers she taps out her own message onto his shoulder. Dots and dashes fill the emptiness between them.
I. L.O.V.E. Y.O.U. A.C.E.
There’s a heartbeat before he responds.
“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
“Will you hold me?” was what she’d asked him on the cliff in her dreamscape, and she asks him again now.
He moves towards her, almost smiling. “Thought you’d never ask.”
In one perfect moment, they fall into each other’s arms.
He doesn’t kiss her. She doesn’t kiss him. Maybe they should. Maybe they’re supposed to.
Maybe if this is the moment in every movie about love where the feelings are finally admitted, spoken, out in the open, they’re supposed to kiss deeply and passionately while upbeat music plays.
There is no music. Just the quiet of the old building, and the sound of Ace’s breath close to hers.
It’s enough.
They have a lot to talk about, but in the end, they do very little talking. Once the basics, like their mutual feelings for one another—and the fact that yes, Nancy did have a moment with Agent Park, but they’d already called it a bad idea and moved on—have been covered, talking is a little unnecessary.
There’s so much they could say, but instead they find themselves in silence. It’s been such a long day. Nancy curls up beside Ace on the couch in her living room, her legs draped over his lap. She rests her arm on his shoulder and lifts her hand to play with the soft locks of his hair right behind his ear.
She’s sleepy, but she doesn’t want to leave him. She doesn’t want him to let her go. She falls asleep with him holding her.
In the morning she wakes to the smell of coffee and the sound of her dad—Carson—clearing his throat loudly.
Nancy stirs, then realizes that she is in fact sprawled out across the living room couch beside Ace. Where she fell asleep the night before. Where her dad—the Lawyer One—just found her. Ace’s arms are wrapped tightly around her, and their legs are so intertwined Nancy isn’t even sure how to extricate herself. Not that she really wants to.
“Nancy,” Carson says. Nancy turns her head just enough to look up at him.
“I made pancakes,” he says. “Tell Ace to stay for breakfast.”
She makes a quiet mmhmm in the back of her throat and closes her eyes, snuggling back into Ace’s shoulder.
“What’d he want?” Ace mumbles a few moments later.
“You to stay for pancakes,” she answers.
“You want me to?”
Does she want him to?
“Ace,” she says, significantly more awake by now. “I want you to stay forever.”
“Oh,” he says. He clears his throat as if to dislodge the sleep from his voice. “Okay then.”
He holds her tighter. Nancy closes her eyes again.
The pancakes can wait.
As she drifts back to sleep, she feels it. The pressure of fingers against the small of her back.
Dot. Dot.
Dot. Dash. Dot. Dot.
Dash. Dash. Dash.
Dot. Dot…
She waits for him to finish telling her he loves her before she sends the same message back.