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Kara Danvers had faced Astra. She had faced the Kryptonian war council. She had, on one memorable Tuesday, faced a sentient weather balloon the size of a city block.
She had not, until this week, considered any of those things particularly difficult.
That was before Catherine Grant became a problem.
________________________________________
Six months into the promotion, the shape of things had changed.
Not dramatically. Not in ways that were easy to name at a staff meeting or explain to Alex over dinner. Just—the texture of every day was different now. Fuller. Like a frequency Kara had always been able to hear but had only recently learned was meant for her.
She had an office. Small, yes, and the previous occupant had left behind a truly criminal candle situation that had taken three weeks and a facilities request to fully resolve, but it was hers. Her name on the door in the same font as everyone else's. Her seat at the Tuesday meeting. Her byline on things that mattered.
And Cat—
Cat was different too. Or rather, Kara understood her differently now. Had earned, slowly and through genuine work, a version of Cat Grant that most people in this building didn't know existed. The one who ate lunch at her desk when she was actually interested in a problem. Who could be funny, quietly and without warning, in a way that didn't make the papers. Who occasionally said something so precisely true that Kara had to look away from it, the way you looked away from something bright.
"You see the room," Cat had told her once, six weeks into the new role, when the floor was empty and they'd stayed late pulling apart a story that wasn't working. "You understand why things matter, not just that they do. That's not teachable."
Kara had felt that sentence in her sternum for three days.
She hadn't done anything about it. Cat Grant said things like that and then moved on, efficient and unhesitating, and Kara had learned that the correct response was to receive them and keep working, because the alternative—letting herself linger in what it meant that Cat said you when she could have said the team, that she stayed late when she could have gone home—
The alternative was a door she wasn't sure she was allowed to open.
So she didn't.
She worked. She got better. She and Cat fell into a rhythm that felt, on good days, like something that had always been waiting to exist.
________________________________________
There were small things that accumulated.
The coffee appeared on her desk sometimes, from the good place around the corner, when Kara had been there since early and hadn't complained about it. Never announced. Just there.
Cat had given her a cardigan during a rainstorm—cashmere, soft and warm, in a color that happened to suit her—and said it was a spare, and Kara had later mentioned this to Alex who had laughed for an uncomfortable length of time.
At a gallery opening, they'd stood together near the back and Kara had said something about negative space and the subject being what you couldn't see directly, and Cat had looked at her with an expression that rearranged something in Kara's chest and said, "You continually revise my expectations." Then someone had arrived to discuss a donor event and the moment had dissolved and Kara had stood in front of a painting about gaps and thought: I don't know what to do with her.
In the Tuesday meeting, Cat backed her reads. Not always—Cat would disagree with God if she thought God was burying the lede—but consistently, in ways that said I trust your instincts without ever using those words, because Cat Grant didn't use words she didn't mean and didn't mean things she wasn't prepared to stand behind.
All of it added up to something Kara couldn't quite name and didn't let herself try.
She was very good at not acting on things.
She would, later, recognize this as the central problem.
________________________________________
The balcony happened on a Wednesday in March.
It had been a long day in the specific way that long days at CatCo became long—a story breaking sideways, a source going cold, two hours of controlled chaos that Kara had helped navigate with the focused clarity she'd borrowed from years of being the person a city called when things went wrong. By seven o'clock it was over, resolved cleanly, the piece filed and solid, and the floor had emptied out and it was just the two of them and the skyline and the leftover energy of a hard thing done well.
Cat had opened the balcony.
Not unusual. She did that sometimes in the evenings, when the building was quiet and the city felt like something that belonged to her, which Kara privately thought was fair because Cat Grant had, in several measurable ways, helped shape what this city talked about and cared about and understood about itself.
Kara had followed, because Cat had left the door open, which was also not unusual.
What was unusual was how quiet it was. Companionable quiet, the kind that had taken five months to build and felt, once you had it, like something worth protecting.
"Good day," Cat said, which from her was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
"Good day," Kara agreed.
The city spread out below them. The lights were doing what they did, which was be relentless and beautiful and indifferent, and the wind was the particular temperature it reached in March when winter was losing its argument, and Cat was standing close—not unusually close, the balcony was not large—but close enough that Kara was aware of it in the specific way she'd been trying not to be aware of it for several months.
Cat said something about the Henderson follow-up. Kara responded. There was a brief, comfortable argument about framing that resolved itself in the way their arguments usually did, which was that they were often making the same point from different angles and the resolution was just finding the place where the angles met.
And then Cat had said something—Kara could never afterward reconstruct exactly what, some dry observation about the publisher of a rival masthead—and Kara had laughed, and Cat had turned to look at her when she laughed the way she sometimes did, like it was a thing worth turning for, and they were standing close and the light was doing something blue and unreasonable and Kara had—
Leaned. Just slightly. The way you leaned when the distance had gotten too short and your body made a decision slightly ahead of your brain.
Cat had gone very still.
Not away. Not the stillness of someone stepping back. The stillness of someone who had stopped in place because something was happening and they were—waiting. To see. To let it.
Kara's phone had gone off.
Not her regular ring. The other one. The one that meant the city needed the other version of her, the one that didn't have feelings about Cat Grant on a balcony in March.
She'd stepped back. Said sorry. Said she had to—something, she'd given some explanation, she'd been mostly autopilot by then.
Cat had said, very evenly, "Go."
Kara had gone.
She'd stopped three separate crimes that night with the furious focus of someone doing physical labor to avoid having a feeling, and she had not spoken to Cat about the balcony afterward, and Cat had not raised it, and they had both, by apparent mutual agreement, acted as though a shared moment of not-quite hadn't dissolved into the March air and stayed there.
What Kara didn't know—
Was that Cat had stood on the balcony for a long time after she left.
And had made a decision.
________________________________________
The glasses appeared on a Monday, four weeks later.
Kara had walked into Cat's office with the morning brief, a green smoothie, and the quiet confidence of a woman who had recently bench-pressed a tectonic plate. She was doing well. She was composed. She had, over the course of four weeks, rebuilt her equilibrium regarding a certain balcony incident and arrived at a state that closely resembled functional.
Cat was standing at the window. Not reading, not reviewing anything—just looking out at the city, hands loosely clasped behind her back, the way she did sometimes when she was thinking through a problem. The glasses sat on her face doing nothing in particular except existing, which was, it turned out, entirely sufficient.
Kara stood there for slightly too long.
Cat didn't turn around.
"The brief is on my desk, I assume," Cat said, to the window.
"Yep," Kara said. "Right there. On your desk. Where I put it."
Cat turned then. Unhurried. The glasses caught the light. She looked at Kara with the particular patience of someone who had all the time in the world.
"Are you—" Kara started, and then stopped, because she needed to sound casual, and casual was a thing she was capable of, she was a journalist and a superhero and she had once talked down a man on a very tall ledge using nothing but patience and sincerity. "Are you wearing those all the time now?"
Cat made a small note on something.
"Mm," she said.
"Your glasses. You're wearing them. Just—generally. All the time."
"My optometrist has been recommending it for some time." Cat set her pen down. "I decided to take his advice." A brief pause. "I suppose I'll be wearing them all the time now. Like you." She glanced up, perfectly pleasant. "It'll take a little getting used to, I imagine."
Kara's brain did something it was not supposed to do on a Monday morning.
"Yes," she said. "Definitely. It will. Take getting used to."
Cat held her gaze for just a moment longer than necessary.
"For me," Cat clarified, very gently.
"Right," Kara said. "Obviously. For you. That's what I meant."
Cat looked back down at her notes.
"Was there something else, Kiera?"
There were, in fact, several things. None of them were appropriate for a Monday morning.
"Nope," Kara said. "All good. Great glasses."
She left.
She walked into the door on the way out.
________________________________________
By Wednesday, Kara had developed a system.
The system was: enter Cat's office only after confirming, via a quick supervision check, that Cat was not currently doing something devastating like reading, or thinking, or existing near a lamp that caught the frames just right.
The system failed immediately because Cat, it turned out, was always doing one of those things now.
"You're lurking," Cat said, without turning around from the window.
"I'm arriving," Kara corrected, stepping inside with great dignity. "There's a difference."
"Mmm." Cat turned, tablet in hand, glasses on, one eyebrow doing something that should have been illegal under international law. "Did you get the piece from Lombard?"
Kara's brain, which had survived contact with the Black Mercy, said: she's doing it on purpose.
Kara's mouth said: "Yep! Got it. It's very—yes. Words. In an order."
Cat stared at her.
"Great words," Kara clarified. "Good order."
Cat rolled her eyes. "...Send it to my tablet."
________________________________________
She called Alex from the parking garage.
"She's doing it on purpose," Kara said, without preamble.
"Good morning to you too—"
"Alex."
A pause. The sound of Alex setting something down. "Okay. What is she doing on purpose."
"The glasses."
Silence.
"Kara, I need more to work with—"
"She knows that I know she knows," Kara said, which made complete sense to her. "She knows everything, Alex, she figured out I was Supergirl by looking at me, she notices everything, and now she's just—wearing them—all the time—and looking at me over them sometimes—"
"Oh my god."
"—and I nearly flew into a helicopter yesterday because I was thinking about it, I had to course correct, Alex, I course corrected—"
"Kara." Alex's voice had taken on the specific tone she used when she was trying not to laugh at a federal level. "Are you telling me that the Maid of Might, Last Daughter of Krypton, has been defeated by reading glasses?"
"They're not reading glasses anymore, that's the point!"
Alex laughed. She laughed for quite a long time.
Kara hung up.
She called back forty seconds later.
"Also the cardigan," she said.
"The cashmere—"
"And the coffee. And the gallery. And the thing she said about my instincts. And—" she stopped. Pressed her lips together. "The balcony."
A very different kind of silence.
"Kara," Alex said carefully. "The balcony was four weeks ago."
"I'm aware of when the balcony was."
"And you didn't—"
"I got called away."
"And since then—"
"We haven't discussed it."
"So she—" Alex stopped. Started again with the exaggerated patience she deployed for the very complicated and the very oblivious. "Kara. She went to the optometrist, decided to start wearing her glasses full time, and this happened four weeks after the balcony."
Kara looked at the parking garage wall.
"You think she's—"
"I think," Alex said, very slowly, as though explaining something to someone who had been hit on the head, "that Cat Grant, who notices everything, who has been quietly making you coffee and handing over cashmere and saying things about your instincts for six months, who went very still on a balcony when you leaned toward her—"
"I barely leaned—"
"—decided that if you weren't going to act, she was going to make it extremely difficult for you not to." A pause. "The glasses aren't an accident, Kara. The glasses are a plan."
The parking garage was very quiet.
"She's Cat Grant," Alex said. "She doesn't do anything without a reason."
Kara stood there for a long moment.
"I have to go," she said. "There's a—thing. A city thing."
"There is absolutely no city—"
"Bye, Alex."
________________________________________
On Friday, Cat called her in at 6pm, when the floor was mostly empty.
She was sitting on the couch. Feet tucked under her, tablet in her lap.
The lamp was on.
The glasses were on.
Cat patted the cushion next to her without looking up.
Kara sat. Breathed. Looked at the coffee table like a person who was fine.
"You've been strange this week," Cat said.
"I've been completely normal."
"You apologized to my ficus."
"It was in my way."
"You told James that his photo composition was—" Cat glanced down at her notepad— "and I'm quoting here, 'a geometric symphony.' He came to ask me if you were having some kind of episode."
"It was a good photo."
"You also," Cat said, with the careful tone of someone saving the best for last, "told the IT department that their new server configuration was, and I have this in writing, 'heroically structured.'"
Kara opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"I was being encouraging," she said.
Cat looked up. Over the glasses. The lamp caught the frames. The whole thing happened again, the same way it had been happening all week and, if Kara was being honest, for considerably longer than a week.
Kara looked at the ceiling.
"Kara."
Her actual name. The way Cat only said it when the performance was over and she meant every syllable of it.
Kara kept looking at the ceiling. There was a very interesting light fixture up there. Very structural. Very not Cat Grant in lamplight with six months of small accumulated kindnesses and one unfinished balcony suddenly organizing themselves into a shape that was impossible to look at directly, like something too bright.
"Look at me," Cat said.
"I'm good."
A beat. "Kara."
Kara looked at her.
Cat held her gaze with the calm precision of a woman who had built an empire on never blinking first.
"I think," Cat said, setting her tablet down with great deliberateness, "that I owe you a small confession."
Kara's eyes narrowed. "How small."
"My optometrist suggested full-time wear six weeks ago." Cat folded her hands in her lap. Composed. Unreadable. "I had been resistant. Vanity, mostly—don't make a face, I'm self-aware enough to name it." A pause. "And then there was the balcony."
The word landed in the room like a stone into still water.
"Cat—"
"You leaned," Cat said simply. "And then you left. And I stood there for rather longer than I'm going to admit and I thought: she is extraordinarily good at not finishing things." Something crossed her expression—wry, and warm, and underneath it something that was neither. "I found that frustrating."
"I got called away—"
"I know. I know you did." A small pause, and in it, the acknowledgment of everything they'd agreed not to say out loud: what Kara was, what Cat knew, the trust that had been built in the negative space between them over six months. "That's not the point. The point is that it had already been—" Cat tilted her head slightly— "some time. And I had been patient."
"The coffee," Kara said slowly. "The cardigan. The gallery."
Cat said nothing. Which was its own answer.
"That was all—"
"You are remarkably good at not acting on things," Cat said, with some feeling.
"I thought I was imagining it!"
"You were not imagining it."
"You're Cat Grant—"
"Yes, I'm aware—"
"I thought I was projecting—"
"Kara." Cat's voice was very dry. "I gave you my cashmere."
"You said it was a spare—"
"It was not a spare."
The room was extremely quiet.
"I don't," Cat continued, with great and deliberate precision, "keep spare cashmere at the office. I'm not a hotel." A beat. "So I made a decision. My optometrist had been correct for some time. I'd been resistant. And then I thought about the glasses." The corner of her mouth moved. "You've always had a reaction to them. Did you think I hadn't noticed?"
Kara went very still.
"The reading glasses," Cat said, with the calm specificity of someone who had been paying attention for considerably longer than was strictly professional. "Whenever I wore them. You'd lose your place in a sentence. Stutter, sometimes, just slightly. You recovered quickly—you're good at that—but you'd get this—" she made a small gesture in Kara's direction— "look. Like you'd been briefly interrupted by something you weren't expecting." A pause. "I found it extremely useful information."
"You catalogued my reactions," Kara said.
"I'm an editor," Cat said. "I notice things."
"That is—"
"Strategic," Cat supplied.
"I was going to say diabolical."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." Cat held her gaze. "My optometrist had been correct for some time. I'd been resistant. And then I thought: well. She hasn't acted in six months. She almost acted, and then the city interrupted, and she came back and looked at me like nothing had happened, which was either very professional or very cowardly, and either way—I was going to need a different approach." A small pause. "I pushed them down my nose on Tuesday specifically because you'd walked in looking very sure of yourself and I was curious what would happen."
"I spilled my own coffee," Kara said. "On myself. A full cup."
"I know."
"You watched—"
"I found it very informative," Cat said, serenely.
Kara stood up.
She did this because sitting felt impossible and standing felt marginally more like being a person with a spine, which she technically had, even if it currently felt like something closer to warm bread.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. You want to do this, we're doing this. You want honesty? I have some. I have a lot." She was worked up.
Cat tilted her head. Waiting.
"I have faced down actual supervillains," Kara said. "I have thrown things into the sun. I have had conversations with my dead planet. There was a parasite, Cat, an actual psychic parasite, and I fought my way out of it through sheer determination, and I want you to understand that none of that—none of it—has been as difficult as this week."
Cat said nothing. Something moving through her expression that she wasn't bothering to control.
"Because you did it on purpose," Kara continued, and her voice had dropped now, lost the frantic edge, become something more honest than she'd planned when she stood up, "and I knew you did it on purpose, and it still worked, because—" she stopped. Pressed her lips together. Made herself finish. "Because it is the sexiest thing I have ever seen. You, in those glasses, in this office, looking at me like you're solving me—"
Kara laughed, a little helplessly.
"I have seen extraordinary things. I have watched stars from outside the atmosphere. And you're sitting there with corrective lenses and a lamp and I nearly clipped a helicopter, and I've been coming apart at the seams for six months over coffee and cashmere and the way you back my reads in a room full of people who've been here longer than me, and on the balcony I nearly—" she stopped. Steadied. "I nearly kissed you. And then I left. And I've been furious at myself ever since."
The room was completely quiet.
"Also," Kara added, because she had apparently committed fully to this, "the cashmere was incredibly soft and I wore it three times before I tried to give it back and I want that on record."
Cat looked at her for a long moment.
Then she stood up.
She reached up, slowly, and took the glasses off. Set them on the cushion beside her with a small, precise click.
"For the record," Cat said, and her voice was low and careful and completely, entirely real, "I wasn't only running an experiment." One step closer. "I was hoping."
"Hoping," Kara repeated.
"That you would do exactly what you just did." Another step. "That you'd stop being so terribly composed and just—" a small gesture— "say it. All of it."
"You could have said something," Kara said. "At any point. For six months."
"I did say things," Cat replied. "You continually revise my expectations. I said that to you in October."
"I thought that was a professional observation!"
"It was not only a professional observation."
"Cat—"
"I'm Cat Grant," Cat said, and there was something underneath the wryness now, something genuine and unhidden that Kara had seen in glimpses for six months and was now being shown directly. "I don't—announce myself. I show up. I leave the door open." A beat. "I give people my cashmere."
Kara looked at her. At the six months of it, the whole shape of it, visible now from this close.
"And on the balcony," she said quietly.
"On the balcony," Cat agreed, "I went very still. Because you were leaning, and I was—" the smallest pause— "I was rather hoping you'd finish."
"I'm sorry I didn't."
"You're going to make up for it," Cat said, with complete confidence.
Kara laughed. Warm and real and helpless, the kind of laugh that didn't leave room for anything except the fact that this woman was impossible and exact and had left doors open for six months waiting for her to walk through them, and Kara had been standing on the threshold the whole time calling it professionalism.
"Put the glasses back on," Kara said.
Cat's eyes lit with something brilliant and dangerous.
"Say please," she said.
Kara stepped forward and kissed her with the full and deliberate intent to devastate, which seemed only fair given the week she'd had.
It worked.
________________________________________
Epilogue
________________________________________
They didn't discuss where they were going when they left the office. They ended up at the penthouse, which felt, by that point, like the only logical place.
It was quiet in the way that expensive things were quiet—thoroughly, deliberately, as though the city below had agreed to keep its voice down.
Cat was on the couch. Her shoes were off, which Kara had privately catalogued as one of the rarest sights in National City, rarer than Supergirl, rarer than a parking spot on third avenue, rarer than a Tuesday meeting that ended on time. Shoes off, feet tucked under her, the particular looseness in her shoulders that meant the version of Cat Grant that didn't perform for anyone had decided to show up.
Kara was sitting close enough that their knees were touching.
She was twirling the glasses by one arm.
Slowly. Idly. The way you handled something you knew you had permission to touch.
Cat watched her do it.
"You're very pleased with yourself," Cat said.
"I'm not saying anything," Kara said.
"You don't have to." Cat's eyes tracked the slow rotation of the frames. "That's quite an expression for someone who isn't saying anything."
"I'm just thinking."
"About."
Kara smiled. Let the glasses spin once more. "About how you had a plan."
"I had a strategy," Cat corrected, with great dignity. "There's a difference."
"You catalogued my reactions."
"I'm thorough."
"You pushed them down your nose on purpose."
"I was conducting an experiment."
"I spilled a full cup of coffee on myself, Cat."
"The results were very conclusive," Cat said, serenely. And then, because she was Cat Grant and couldn't entirely help it: "You also told my IT department their server configuration was heroically structured."
"I was distracted—"
"Heroically structured, Kara."
Kara laughed. Cat's mouth curved in response, the way it did when she wasn't performing amusement but actually felt it, which Kara had spent six months learning to tell the difference between and was only now allowed to say so.
She stopped spinning the glasses.
Held them up, instead. Considered them.
"You know," Kara said, "I spent a week nearly flying into infrastructure over these."
"I know," Cat said. There was absolutely no remorse in her voice.
"A helicopter, Cat."
"You course corrected."
"I had to course correct."
"You're very capable," Cat said, and the warmth in it was so unguarded, so simply there, that Kara went quiet for a moment just holding it.
She looked at Cat. At the shoes-off, late-evening, penthouse version of her that very few people ever saw and that Kara was apparently now among the number of.
"Can I ask you something?" Kara said.
"You can ask me anything," Cat said. "I reserve the right to answer as obliquely as I see fit."
"How long." She held Cat's gaze. "Before the balcony. How long had you—"
Cat was quiet for a moment. The city murmured below them.
"A while," Cat said finally.
"How long is a while."
Another pause. Cat reached out and plucked the glasses from Kara's fingers with a precise, unhurried motion, and set them on the cushion beside her, and then looked back with an expression that was as close to undefended as Kara had ever seen on her face.
"You walked into my office," Cat said, "on your first day. You were terrified and you were trying very hard not to show it and you were only partially succeeding. And you looked at everything—the view, the awards, the photo of Carter—like it all mattered. Like it was worth paying attention to." A small pause. "I found that—notable."
Kara stared at her.
"That was almost three years ago," Kara said.
"I said a while," Cat said, with perfect composure.
"Cat—"
"I was your employer," Cat said, and there was something under the precision of it, something that had cost her something to hold. "I was careful. I am always careful with things that matter." She held Kara's gaze. "You matter."
The penthouse was very quiet.
Kara looked at her for a long moment. At three years of careful. At coffee and cashmere and you continually revise my expectations and a balcony in March and a week of devastating glasses-related warfare, all of it adding up to this.
"Can I ask you something else?" Kara said.
"You're on a roll," Cat said.
"Is there anything? About me. That does to you what—" she gestured vaguely at the glasses— "what those do to me."
Cat was very still for a moment.
"I'm asking," Kara continued, with the specific serenity of someone who had spent a week walking into doors and spilling coffee on themselves and nearly clipping municipal aircraft, "because I feel it's only fair."
"Fair," Cat said. The word came out slightly differently than she'd intended. Kara noticed. Of course she noticed.
"The suit, maybe?" Kara said, very innocently.
Cat said nothing.
Which was a complete answer.
"The cape," Cat said finally, with great restraint. "When you land. The way it—settles. And you stand there like—" a small, precise gesture— "like you know exactly what you are."
"Hm," Kara said.
"Don't," Cat said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have a look."
"I just think," Kara said quietly, "that it's only fair. Given the week I've had."
She stood up, stepped back, and changed.
It took less than a second. It always did. One moment Kara Danvers, the next—the suit, the cape, all of it, standing in the middle of Cat's penthouse in the low evening light like she'd always been there.
Cat had seen Supergirl hundreds of times.
She had never seen that.
The change. The absolute certainty of it. The way Kara stood afterward, shoulders back, the cape settling exactly the way Cat had apparently been cataloguing from a balcony for fourteen visits without ever quite admitting to herself why.
From approximately four feet away.
In her living room.
Cat said nothing.
She was very still.
Kara tilted her head. "You were saying?"
Cat closed her mouth.
Opened it.
"How," Cat said finally, "did you do that so fast."
"It's the suit," Kara said. "Kryptonian technology."
Cat's eyes tracked slowly down and back up in a way that was entirely unambiguous. "Were you wearing that. This whole time. Under—"
"Yes," Kara said.
"This entire evening."
"Yes."
"When you were sitting next to me."
"Yes."
"The balcony," Cat said, her voice dropping slightly. "In March. You were standing there in—"
"I'm always wearing it," Kara said.
Something shifted in Cat's expression. The composure was still there but it was doing considerably more work than usual.
"That," Cat said, "is a lot of information."
"You asked."
"I was processing," Cat said. And then, because three years of careful had apparently reached its natural limit: "Come here."
Kara raised an eyebrow. "That's very—"
"Kara." Cat's voice was low and even and left very little room for interpretation. "Come here."
Kara crossed to her.
Cat reached up and took the lapel of the cape in one hand, the way she'd straightened it on the balcony fourteen times in her imagination and never once in reality, and looked up at her with an expression that had nothing careful left in it at all.
"Three years," Cat said quietly.
"Three years," Kara agreed.
"I think," Cat said, "that we've been patient long enough."
Kara looked at her for one more moment—at the glasses on the cushion and the city light and three years of careful and the whole shape of it—and then she picked her up.
Effortlessly. One arm around her waist, one hand at her thigh, like Cat Grant weighed nothing at all, which to Kara she didn't, which was information Cat's entire nervous system appeared to receive simultaneously.
Cat's breath left her.
Her legs wrapped around Kara's waist—not a decision exactly, more like inevitability—and her hands found Kara's shoulders and she was eye level with her now, held there without any effort whatsoever, and the expression on Cat Grant's face was one that had never made the papers and never would.
"You're very strong," Cat said. Her voice was considerably lower than usual.
"Yes," Kara said.
"I'm just—"
"Noting it," Kara said. "I know."
She wasn't smiling anymore. She was looking at Cat the way she'd been carefully not looking at her for six months, close and unhidden and entirely direct, and Cat who had been looked at by everyone and found most of it wanting went very still in her arms.
Then Cat took her face in both hands and kissed her like she'd been thinking about it for three years, which she had, and Kara kissed her back like she had absolutely nowhere else to be, which she didn't, and the city murmured far below them and National City got along fine without Supergirl for the rest of the evening.
________________________________________
end.