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Sugar powders Kara’s upper lip, and Lena can’t look away.
“You have…” She trails off. Gestures.
“What?” Kara freezes, one hand stuck in the box of donuts between them. “What is it?” She licks her lips, and Lena flushes hot-cold.
The sugar is gone.
“Nevermind.” Hiding her dismay behind her coffee, she takes a long sip. The liquid is hot. It burns the roof of her mouth. Lena welcomes the sting. “It was nothing.”
“If you’re sure…”
“Positive.” Her second sip of coffee goes down the wrong way, and she nearly chokes on the round nutty taste of the roast. “Just— Nothing important.”
“Okay.” Kara pulls out an old fashioned and as she takes a first, enormous bite of it, Lena holds her breath. Waits for the light dusting of sugar to reappear.
Mourns when it doesn’t.
***
It becomes some sort of obsession, watching Kara eat sugary foods. Whenever it happens, and it happens often, Lena finds herself hoping that residue will cling to Kara’s lips. If she feels particularly daring, she imagines herself reaching out to wipe it off. With a napkin, her thumb, her own mouth.
It’s stupid. It’s probably disgusting. Lena can’t put a stop to it.
She feeds into the obsession too, feeding Kara in the process. Donuts, pastries, melty ice cream in July. Anything and everything to fuel her own addiction. Kara doesn’t seem to notice, and accepts impromptu coffee runs and late-night cups of hot cocoa with equanimous enthusiasm.
And, besides, Lena is careful.
The offer of food is never forced. It just so happens that there are fresh donuts at the Tower everyday — for everyone who may want them, provided Kara and her (in)famous appetite don’t get to them first. That Lena makes sure to keep the freezer stacked with Kara’s favorite gelato, that there’s hot cocoa ready to go after a long night spent patrolling the city, is part of being thoughtful.
Nothing Lena could be faulted for.
It goes on for weeks. Lena fantasizes. Gets complacent. Slips on a sleepy afternoon at the tail end of summer and is almost discovered.
They have Esme for a few days, while Alex and Kelly take a long-deserved vacation on the coast. It’s fun, if a bit exhausting, and even Kara seems to be running on fumes by the time they wrap up a visit to the zoo.
“Can we get ice cream, Aunt Lena?” Esme begs, pointing to a kiosk selling a variety of snacks. “Please?”
“Yeah.” Kara joins in. “Pretty please, Aunt Lena?”
It’s sweltering. A heat wave has the city firmly in its grip, and as she agrees, Lena’s mind isn’t on Kara. She is craving ice cream too, its coolness on the tongue. A fleeting, but much needed respite.
In the time it takes Kara to walk back from the kiosk, ice cream cones in hand, Lena realizes she’s made a mistake. A big one.
Because despite ice cream being a great way to ward off the unbearable heat, said heat makes it melt quicker than they can eat it, and vanilla drips, enticingly sticky, down Kara’s chin.
“You’ve got—” Lena bites the inside of her cheek. These same words, weeks ago, set current events into motion.
“What?” Kara stops, mid-lick, and the scoop of ice cream precariously balanced on top of her cone tilts sideways like an edible tower of Pisa. “What have I got, Lena?”
She says nothing, wishing she’d melt too. Straight onto the pavement — deeper. Down to the center of the earth. Her eyes are locked onto Kara’s mouth, and the droplets of ice cream that will soon ruin her shirt. She’s wearing a black t-shirt, the absolute madwoman, and the stain is going to be a bitch and a half to get out.
That’s why, ultimately, Lena decides that slowly cleaning the ice cream away with the pad of her thumb, tracing the pliant curve of Kara’s lips, is the lesser of two evils.
Or so she tells herself.
“ That .” Lena lifts her now sticky finger for Kara to see. “You had ice cream on your chin.”
And then, since Kara forgot to grab some napkins, Lena pops her thumb straight into her mouth.
Kara’s eyes go round.
Oh .
Oh, no.
They don’t mention it. On the way back to Kara’s Jeep they barely talk at all. Esme fills up the silence for them both, ecstatic about all the animals they’ve seen, and already asking if they can come back in the winter to feed sardines to the penguins.
“Aunt Lena?” Lena is bending across the back seat to fasten Esme in, while Kara puts their daypack in the trunk. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, darling.” She figures it’ll be something about birds. Esme has been talking about the raptors they saw non-stop. “What do you want to know?”
“Are you and Aunt Kara in love?”
Lena jerks back, head smacking hard against the roof of the car.
Ouch.
“Wha— uhm. Why would you think that?”
“Because my moms do it too.” Esme mimics the gesture Lena made with her thumb. “Although mom Kelly told me it’s not polite to clean your mouth using your hands.”
“Kelly is right,” says Lena, weakly. “We should make sure to carry tissues with us on our next trip, right?”
She hands Esme the plushie they bought her at the zoo’s store, and ruffles her hair, completely oblivious to the speculative light in Kara’s eyes.
***
“Here.” Lena’s favorite mug enters her field of vision, and she grabs it on autopilot. “I made us some cocoa.” Instead of pulling up a second stool, Kara plops down to the floor at Lena’s feet and crosses her legs, matching mug in hand. “Any luck?”
“No.” Lena sips at the sweet liquid, letting the warmth travel from the tip of her tongue down into her chest. “I can’t make sense of these numbers.” She shakes her head. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
It has been a grueling week. Portals keep popping up across the city, spilling all manner of alien creatures into rush hour traffic. Just three days ago, Kara had to subdue a purple, acid-spitting lizard. A week in, and they’re no close to figuring out who’s doing this, or why. Most crucially, neither Lena nor Brainy have any idea how to stop more portals from appearing.
The usual suspects — Lex, Cadmus, Leviathan — are either jailed or disbanded for good, and Mxy’s been making inquiries too. No imps, no interdimensional beings seem to be involved.
“Maybe you should take a break.” Kara nuzzles at Lena’s knee briefly. “You’ve been at that all day. Maybe it’s not that you can’t see a pattern, it’s that you’re too tired to.”
“I can’t stop.” Lena wants to. Lay her head down on the cushion of her arms and go to sleep for an undetermined amount of time. Knows she wouldn’t rest, with the city still in danger. “Suppose I go to sleep. What if another portal opens?”
“I’ll deal with whatever comes through it, like I did the other times?”
“But what if you can’t?”
“Lena.” Kara sets her half-empty mug aside and shifts on her knees. “Exhausting yourself over this isn’t the solution. Sleep on it, for a couple of hours, and—” A slow grin blooms on her face.
“What?” Lena frowns. “What are you grinning at?”
“You’ve got a mustache.” Kara’s smile is so wide her eyes crinkle at the edges. “A hot chocolate mustache.”
“Oh.” A tingle of embarrassment spreads from Lena’s cheeks to the rest of her. “Let me just—” She paws, frantic, through the mess on her desk. “ I swear I had some tissues laying around here—”
Of course, she can’t find any.
“Lena.” Something in the way Kara says her name stops her in her tracks. Lena looks down to find Kara crouching, face impossibly close to her own. “I think I can help.”
And before Lena knows what’s happening, Kara’s hand has curled around the collar of her sweater, and she’s being tugged out of her stool, or Kara’s surging up, but the direction of their body doesn’t matter. Not when Kara’s lips are pressing against her own, already slightly parted, her tongue flicking out to gently clean the streak of cocoa that coats Lena’s upper lip. Licking into her mouth to get a taste.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day at the zoo, over the summer.” Kara confesses in hushed tones, after the lack of oxygen forces them apart. “When Esme asked if we were in love with one another. You remember?”
“How could I forget?” Lena laughs, a little breathless. A little shaky. “I wasn’t sure you’d heard.”
“Oh, I heard.” Kara pulls her down the rest of the way, and she ends up in her lap without somehow spilling cocoa on them both. “I also started to pay more attention after. The way you stare at me sometimes while I eat sugary things, it’s— er— it’s kind of intense.”
“I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a long time, too.” Lena hides her face in the hollow of Kara’s throat. It’s safe there. Dark. Kara can’t see her blush. “Longer than the zoo.”
“Yeah, I figured that out too. You never did, though, so.”
“I’m glad you did.” Lena shoots her a careful look. Kara is still smiling, softer, her eyes burning with blue fire as her gaze strays to Lena’s lips. Her pupils stretch, reflecting the light from the monitors, hungry and bottomless. “I wouldn’t mind if you kissed me again.”
“I have to know.” Kara says, leaning in, so that her next exhale washes warm across the slope of Lena’s cheek. “Does this mean you’ll stop feeding me sweet things?”
“No.” Lena fails to keep a laugh out of her voice. “You’ll still get your sugar rush, promise.”
“Good.”
Kara runs a finger over the seam of Lena’s lips, her stomach rumbling right on cue.