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“You still have them.”
Andy is in the walk-in closet, looking at something that Emily can’t see, busy as she is with the final touches on her makeup. After a moment, she stares in disapproval at a small mascara smudge, silently exasperated by that mistake. They’re supposed to leave in ten minutes for a benefit gala organised by the CFDA; Emily can’t exactly say she is looking forward to being there, but she’d never let her personal feelings interfere with work. Well, almost never.
“I still have what?” Emily asks, still focused on cleaning the smudge beneath her eye without ruining her efforts.
She hears some rustling in the closet, then the sound of a clothes rack being moved. “The clothes from Paris. The ones I gave you twenty years ago.”
Oh.
Emily puts down the mascara, stepping out from the bathroom, only to find Andy in her bedroom, looking at an elegant black coat with jewel-like buttons - a piece from Chanel, possibly one of her favourites. That collection had been truly stunning.
“Not all of them,” she admits. “I mainly kept Dior and Chanel, and a couple of Louis Vuitton. My wardrobe has yet to develop the ability to expand itself, despite my hopes.”
Andy shoots her a smile. “Might want to ask Mary Poppins for that.”
“Hilarious, Andrea. Just hilarious.”
Andy does seem to find it very funny, considering the grin she wears. “You still kept them.”
Emily could easily deflect with a small joke, or a dry reproach - but she’s learning, slowly, that there is no need to wear her armour in front of Andy. “They were a gift from you,” she says, low, as if that can explain everything. And maybe it does, because Andy’s gaze softens. Before she can say something horribly sentimental that will surely make Emily’s heart skip a beat, the redhead speaks again. “And well, who would give away Chanel?”
Her partner chuckles. “Think I heard that one before,” she groans, jokingly. “But I’m happy you liked them. It was the least I could do, after, well, everything,” she concludes with a small shrug.
There would be no point in reminding Andy that she had no obligation towards her, at the time. But there is something else Emily is curious about.
“You never told me what really happened there. With Miranda, I mean,” she clarifies. “When you quit Runway. I remember getting a call from Nigel - he ordered me to find a new assistant before Miranda was back and to clean up your desk. I thought you got fired, but he said you had just… walked away.”
“Ah, yes,” hums Andy, tilting her head. “You would have enjoyed the drama of it. Left Miranda in the middle of Paris without a single explanation and threw my phone into a fountain, if you can believe it.”
“Of course I can believe it, you’ve always been a bit of a nutcase,” comments Emily, a small jab that holds no bite. “But why exactly did you do it?”
Andy doesn’t immediately respond; a mix of different emotions dances in her eyes, and Emily waits, patiently. It doesn’t take long before her girlfriend speaks again.
“You know that Nigel was supposed to become the new creative director for Christian Holt, don’t you?”
Emily nods, wordlessly. “Well, then you also know that Miranda sacrificed him and made sure that Jacqueline Follet got that job so she could save her own ass,” says Andy, her gaze fixed far away, to a twenty-year-old memory. “I was disgusted. Couldn’t believe she would do that to someone she cared about - a friend. When I confronted her about it, she remarked I did the same thing to you.”
Oh, that…
Emily stops before her thoughts can trail off. Andy’s eyes seem to carry an old pain, a guilt she still hasn’t let go of, despite the decades. And that matters to Emily more than her own dislike for Miranda.
But Andy is not done - not yet. “I remember telling her that maybe that was not the life I wanted, then. And Miranda just saying that everybody wanted to be us, not even thinking for a second that it was just wrong,” she adds with a small sigh. “And… I don’t know. When I left the car and watched her walk away, surrounded by all those photographers and flashes, I could only think about Nigel’s face, and your expression when I told you about Paris. About all the justifications I gave you while you laid in a hospital bed, how they meant nothing.”
Another shrug. “You know the rest.”
Yes, Emily does know the rest. “You were never like her, Andy,” she says back, voice soft, warm. “She forced you to make an impossible choice. I never really resented you for it.”
And, surprisingly, it’s true. She might not have been capable of admitting that at the hospital, the wound too fresh and the humiliation burning too hot, but things had changed soon enough. Once she had understood Miranda’s little game - how she had pitted them against one another, how Andy had really found herself in an impossible position - she had stopped holding any real resentment toward her.
That was when she had called Andy, ready to be something that wasn’t quite friends but also wasn’t anything more than that - but her call had not been picked up.
“But I did have a choice,” says Andy, stubborn and unconvinced. “I could have refused her, told her that Paris was yours-”
“She would have fired you,” interrupts Emily, firm but not unkind. “Your career would have been sunk before it even started, and she would have never brought me anyway, not with my broken leg. There was never a version of the story where we both got what we wanted. Only what Miranda wanted.”
She cradles Andy’s face in her hands, staring at her girlfriend’s brown eyes. “So stop feeling guilty about that. Okay?”
Andy gives her something between a smile and a smirk, pressing a kiss to Emily’s lips before she can even react. “Well, since you asked so nicely…” she grins, then laughs when Emily grabs her by the collar into a deeper, more proper kiss.
“Now I’ll have to fix my lipstick,” grumbles Emily after a few seconds, tone filled with faux annoyance. Andy laughs against her lips, and steals one final kiss before pulling back. “Still,” adds Emily, almost as an afterthought. “You kind of quit Runway because of me. Such a romantic.”
Andy chuckles. “Maybe I was already a bit in love with you, even back then.”
The light tone and the wink that follows tell Emily that she’s just joking. It doesn’t hurt - they were not the same people they are today, and Emily knows she had not been the easiest person to be around, between her prickly personality and the constant barbs.
Still, things had been a bit different for her.
“I was.”
“Mh?”
“A bit in love with you,” she clarifies, feeling a rush of hot redness on her cheeks. Andy stares at her with a half-amazed expression; only then does Emily’s brain catch up with what she has said.
Oh, bloody hell.
“Well, not love-love - more like a crush,” she rushes to add, trying to salvage the situation. For heaven’s sake, they’ve been dating for barely three weeks and she’s already turning into some ridiculously gooey individual, or even worse, one of those u-haul lesbians. This is all Andy’s fault. “Just, a crush. A tiny one, not even that big-”
“Em,” interrupts Andy, then, after a beat: “I love you.”
It’s the first time she says it.
Of course, like most things Andy says, it comes out so naturally, so earnest and easy. And Emily has heard it before - from Frank, from Benji, from other men she dated, and it never meant even half of what it means now, from this ridiculously kind woman. This brilliant, warm woman, who has somehow chosen her for reasons she still finds faintly absurd.
A ridiculous woman that she loves with all her heart.
“Love you too,” she says back, barely more than a whisper.
And Andy just - well. Her face morphs into what could be defined as a smile, if Emily wanted to be polite about it, but it’s quite possibly the biggest grin she has ever seen.
“You love me,” repeats Andy after a pause, still with that stupidly blinding smile on her face. “Love-love me.”
Emily cannot help it - she just rolls her eyes. “Yes, you idiot, I’m in love with you,” she says, and before Andy can speak again: “I refuse to let the love-love become a thing. And we’re almost late, so can you please get ready?”
“Nope,” grins Andy, popping out the ‘p’. “I need at least five minutes to recover from the fact you confessed to love me.”
“You have three minutes.”
“Deal.”