Then his eyes were open and the fear was gone, replaced by the quiet, focused intensity that she had spent her time in 2012 learning he was capable of. She’d seen the beginnings of it through a haze of pain and fear as she’d lain in a battered heap on the steps of the complex and she’d watched it grow with each new test the past had subjected them to. The hurt on her face was shuttered away in the time it took to blink, maybe before he’d had the chance to see it, but not forgotten. She wavered, on the point of taking another step forward, of disappearing altogether, but unable to move her feet or to make herself leave. I could do that again, she thought, I could make him look like that again. Tessa knew she was selfish and capricious and sometimes, through sheer carelessness, cruel. She had never much cared before, but now she felt it like a weight in her stomach, a pit of dread. And if he did, or if he didn’t want… I couldn’t… the thought trailed off, and she was left uncertain of everything but that she could spend the rest of even her very long life trying to be equal to the person he saw when he looked at her.
It was the moment he put down the guitar that did it. Something about it, the deliberate movement, the desperate intensity compacted into quiet determination, encapsulated everything she had always loved about her best friend along with everything she could see promised in the person that he was becoming without even realizing it. Maybe it was the way he plainly had no idea what was coming next, didn’t have much hope for anything good, but squared up to face it anyway without bitterness.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she snapped suddenly, breaking the silence, “stop looking at me like I’m about to shove you off the roof before I just do it.”
Then she was closing the distance between them to nothing and she was kissing him, one hand at the nape of his neck, her fingers curling in and tangling in the longer strands of hair that fell there for leverage to pull herself closer.
When she broke away, flushed and breathless with her heart pounding in response to an instinct much less noble than realizing his personal potential, she laughed quietly and looked down for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, letting her hand trail down so that it rested on his shoulder, “so in case you need some clarification there…” this time when she kissed him it was gentler, the urgency slightly restrained, an implicit your move.