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You see it - clearly, often - the way people fall in love with her.
Beatrice is perfect: a strategist, a badass, a gift. She enthralls unknowingly, charms with that startling combination of manners and poise and kindness and sincerity that leaves so many blinking, breathless. You’re supposed to be incognito and she reminds you of this at every turn but you kinda want to shake her and point out that the trail of heart eyes she leaves in her wake is the least incognito thing ever.
Case in point: you can barely hold back a laugh when it happens at the register of a convenience store, buying toothpaste (shared), chips (yours), and a bottle of ginger beer (hers but she pretends she’s buying it for you even though you end up drinking far less than half because you like the way her mouth wraps around the lip of the bottle). Beatrice glances between the two of you - the cashier agape and starry eyed, you with whatever adoring look is probably plastered on your face - and settles on a sigh and a set of her shoulders that says I don’t want to know.
(I do, you think to yourself, because you want to know everything about her, and you want her to know, eventually, when she’s ready, how much you think of her, how you think of her, how you want her and want her to think of you -)
“She gave you her number, didn’t she,” you say, gleeful as you both exit a restaurant and take in the cool evening air. It’s not cold enough to warrant the blush on Beatrice’s cheeks and you jostle her arm and grin; she’s trying subtly to pocket the receipt that you know has a phone number with a name written on it and quite possibly the press of lipstick but Beatrice had snatched it away before you could really make it out.
(And now you’re thinking of making out, which admittedly you’ve thought of before, but now you’re thinking of Beatrice making out not with you but with the waitress who had served your table, tall and dark and so so fine, more refined than you could ever wish to be and now the evening air has become stale and stifling -)
Beatrice has already started walking and you wonder - briefly, but you still hate yourself for it - if this is what it’ll look like when she finds someone else, in the end: Her, with the moon on her shoulders and the stars in her hair, walking away from you, to some place you can’t follow.
You’d come here together and you’ll leave here together, and you know you’ll follow her to the ends of the earth, to whatever end there is, but you’re increasingly unsure if you want her to follow you. She goes along with most of your ideas - the ones that aren’t too dangerous and even then, she always finds a way to pare it down to something manageable, a dream made tangible (flying, climbing, cooking semi-decent eggs, laundry, walking on water - there’s nothing Bea won’t teach you, nothing that she doesn’t believe you can’t learn to do, and you’re not sure if you should be charmed or scared, but you’re certainly in -).
In the distance, the Alps loom high and silent and they’ve been here since prehistoric times, which you’d read in a second-hand tourist book you’d found when you both had first arrived, they’ve been here through everything and will continue to be here after, well, after - whatever after means for this fight, for the OCS, for her, for you, for the world. This is Beatrice’s second time to see them, your first, and you want Beatrice to be able to come here again, on better terms with the world and her heart, make better memories. With you or without you. (You hope for the former and while the idea of the latter still makes you panic, you’re also starting to be okay with that too.)
“Ava?”
You physically shake yourself and the Alps, the moon, and Beatrice settle back in their places as you tuck those thoughts away - warm, determined, and with a definite, deep ache. You bound towards her because how can you help yourself when she looks at you like that, when she looks at you at all, and you’re at her side and you take her hand because she lets you, lets you ramble about the meal you’d just shared, the ice cream you want now to end things on an even better note (she argues with you but lets you buy a single scoop on a cone, lets you watch her lick a taste and you let her blush in silence). She lets you take the first shower, lets you take her sleep shirt - like always - lets you curl up into her side as you fall asleep.
(She lets you take and take and take and sometimes you wake up in the morning before her just so you can see her face, soft, relaxed, and wonder when, what it will take, for her to let you be the one to give.)
*
You give your all, your freedom, your life. She gives you her love.
*
Nothing changes when you come back. At least, not about the way people fall in love with her.
Beatrice is both more solemn and more joyful, more grounded and yet untethered - you wonder if it’s her or you or the two of you together - all of it just adds to her ‘mystique’ (you’d added that word to your growing vocabulary list last week, translated it into Portuguese, German, and Cantonese, looking into Arabic next because you remembered while on the other side hearing her speaking it one time when she was exhausted).
You’re together buying groceries and it’s a scene you’ve seen play out dozens of times before: Beatrice with her polite smile and her long fingers handling her wallet, her long sleeve shirt fitted around her shoulders, her arms, buttoned up to the hollow of her throat - you don’t blame the woman at the register for falling breathless. “You still got it, I see,” you say as you leave and you laugh at the confused look on her face.
Nothing’s changed, you think as you loop your arm through hers - though the fact that she tugs you just a bit closer tells you how much actually has.
You amend the statement in your mind: Nothing’s changed about the way you’ve fallen, will continue to fall, in love with her.
*
She tells you about the women she was with when you were gone.
The list is short and “with” is loosely defined - loose lips sink cars or at least something of that sort, you think and it’s fitting because you’re the one who’s sinking deeper still, even while she’s talking about other women. She tried because you asked her to; tried holding hands, tried long walks on the beach, the whole shebang - she didn’t though, bang. And you’re not surprised that there were things that she couldn’t do, things you suspect, things you hope she had wanted to do with you - she doesn’t say it in words but you know.
It’s written in the way she always cooks eggs sunny side up even though she prefers over-medium (she prefers to make them at home because, in her words, it takes a patience that line cooks often don’t have; you’re just glad to see her take some time for herself); the way she started learning Portuguese the moment she learned it was your native tongue (you learn her mother tongue as well though you both have no intention of speaking it - or speaking at all - with her mother; you have some ideas of how that would go, all of them ending in either a misdemeanor or a felony); the way she traces what feels like the outline of the Alps onto your back while you’re curled up together on the couch watching tv.
Some evenings you wake up in the middle of the night and the silence reminds you too much of the other side and you turn over in the bed she’s allowed you to share again and curl up into her side. She stirs briefly but lets you place your cheek on her shoulder and you feel her breath, even and warm on your brow, and you feel the muscles in her hands, her feet twitch as she falls back into slumber, unconscious things she can’t control (just like the curve of her lips before she tells you a new pun, a new joke; the clenching of her hands before she finally reaches out to hold your hand, brush a crumb from your cheek).
She tried to live and has become what she is now, who she is now - it’s not failure to focus solely on survival. She tried and you both survived and you’re back and you both have time. Your only job, the only mission worth anything, now, in this life, is to convince her that the time you have is not borrowed.
*
You watch people fall in love with her everyday and sometimes you want to rub it in their faces, the fact that she’s in love with you.
You don’t know, you think, smug, at the teammate whose eyes linger a little too long on Beatrice during a demonstration at a morning aikido session; you’re watching from the corner of the dojo and you know that though your back is aching today even you could take all of these people on all by yourself, which is to say that Beatrice wouldn’t even break a sweat - you don’t know how much she holds back here, even in this place where she lets her shoulders settle. It’s nothing like when she’s alone with you or with your sisters, when there’s a release, a looseness that comes with pride, that comes with trust; it loosens her limbs, her lips, her laugh.
You don’t know, you think, flushed and burning, at the photographer taking Bea’s picture to help out a friend with a new clothing line, outfits showcasing her various and wondrous features, along with a generous yet tasteful amount of skin - you don’t know what her smile really looks like. It’s one thing for her to hold a pose and look into a camera, into someone else’s eyes and not waver; it’s a completely different thing for her to stare down death and beyond with nothing but her body and faith and love.
You don’t know, you think, proud, at the server who watches with a tinge of awe and adoration when Bea cuts down a rude customer then helps you into your seat, confident and unburdened and free - you don’t know how far she’s come. It’s who she is, the way she keeps you in her sight, in her thoughts, with a depth and breadth that leaves you breathless and wondering as she leads you both further into a happiness neither of you had thought possible.
You don’t know, you think, equal parts desperate and reverent, at Beatrice herself when she finally touches you. It’s in the fading gold of sunset and in the warmth of the home you’ve built together when she carefully, joyfully lets herself go and coaxes you to follow. You don’t know how much I love you, do you?
“I do,” she whispers, into the dark, into the curve of your neck as you’re gasping for breath, heart still racing, skin still sensitive, everything alight and full, “I love you too,” she says.
(Years from now, she’ll repeat herself and you will echo her I do while standing in front of your friends, your sisters, your family with the Alps over your shoulders and a sureness in your heart. You see her now, you remember her then, you dream of her future - with you, with you, with you, and you fall in love with her all over again. Beatrice is everything. And she is yours.)