She paused. A wave broke larger than the others, soaking their ankles, the cold water sending a shock up her calves. Beside her, Lex stood still, her feet planted in the shifting sand, her faceturned toward Mara, listening with an intensity that Mara could feel like heat.
"I fell in love with you," Mara said. The words came out on a shaking breath. "I fell in love with you and I was too afraid to say it because saying it made it real and real things can be lost. And I have already lost so much, Lex: my career once, my sense of self, my belief that I could have both a job and a life. I was afraid that if I said the words out loud and then lost you, the loss would be so total I wouldn't survive it."
Her voice cracked on the last word. The tears she'd been fighting broke through, silent and warm on her cold cheeks. She turned to face Lex and the moonlight showed her everything: Lex's face, open and raw and streaming with tears of her own, her dark eyes bright with an emotion so intense it was almost too much to look at directly.
"I love you," Mara said. She said it clearly, with her whole voice, standing ankle-deep in the cold Atlantic Ocean under a sky full of stars, and the words that had terrified her for weeks came out steady and certain and true. "I am in love with you, Lex Landry. I want to be with you. Not in secret. Not behind locked doors. I want to stand next to you in front of Astoria and the team and the league and whoever else needs to know, and I want to tell them that this woman is mine and I am hers and I am done hiding."
Lex's face crumpled. Not with sadness. With relief. Relief that looked like pain because the tension it released had been held so long her body had forgotten what relaxation felt like. She pressed her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook and for a moment she couldn't speak, and Mara reached out and took her other hand and held it, their fingers interlacing, cold and wet from the ocean spray, gripping tight.
"I love you too," Lex said through her hand. Her voice was wrecked, broken, the most beautiful sound Mara had ever heard.She dropped her hand and her face was shining with tears and moonlight and relief and she was the most beautiful thing on this beach, more beautiful than the ocean, more beautiful than the stars. "I have loved you since your eyes went soft for the first time since I'd met you. I have loved you since you walked into a gym at eleven o'clock at night and pretended you were just there for deadlifts when we both knew you were waiting for me. I have loved you since you let me hold you in a hotel room in Boston and cried in my arms and fell asleep trusting me to still be there in the morning. I have loved you through every moment you were afraid to let me, and I will love you through every moment after."
Mara pulled Lex's hand away from her mouth and stepped closer, the water swirling around their ankles, the sand shifting beneath their feet. She reached up and took Lex's face in both hands, her thumbs tracing the strong jaw, the high cheekbones, the salt tracks of tears that the moonlight turned silver.
"I'm sorry I made you wait," Mara whispered. "I'm sorry I was afraid. I'm sorry I let you walk out of my office without telling you the truth."
"Don't be sorry. Just be here."
Mara kissed her. Standing ankle-deep in the Atlantic Ocean with the cold water numbing her feet and the cold air cutting through her coat and the warmth of Lex's mouth against hers burning away everything that wasn't this moment, this woman, this kiss. She kissed her with everything she had, with years of loneliness and days of grief and the wild, terrifying, glorious feeling of having finally chosen to be brave. Lex's arms came around her and pulled her close and Mara's hands were on Lex's face, holding her, anchoring herself to the reality of what was happening, and the kiss deepened, hungry and desperate and relieved, a kiss that held within it every moment of separation and fear and longing and turned them into a taste like beginning.
Lex kissed her back with a ferocity that was tender and desperate at once, her arms tight around Mara's waist, her mouth moving against Mara's with the desperate intensity of someone who had been afraid she would never get to do this again. Mara could taste salt. Tears, hers or Lex's, mixed with the ocean spray and the cold night air, and the taste of it was the taste of forgiveness and homecoming and the terrifying, exhilarating feeling of standing in the open with nothing between her and the world except the truth.
Lex pulled back just far enough to rest her forehead against Mara's. Their breath mingled in the cold air, visible plumes that tangled and dissolved. The ocean pulled at their ankles. The stars were bright and close and the moon painted the beach in silver.
"What happens now?" Lex asked.
"Tomorrow we talk to Astoria. We tell her together. Then we tell the team."
"And if it goes badly?" Lex's thumb moved in slow circles on Mara's wrist.
"Then we deal with it. Together. I'm done letting the worst-case scenario make my decisions for me."
Lex smiled. The first real smile Mara had seen on her face in ten days, wide and warm and slightly disbelieving, the smile of a woman who had been given what she'd been afraid to hope for. She pulled Mara closer and kissed her again, softer this time, slower, a kiss that was less about urgency and more about certainty.
They walked further along the beach, hand in hand, the cold water washing over their feet and retreating with each wave. The moon tracked across the sky above them. The beach stretched ahead, pale and empty, the lights of Phoenix Ridge glowing behind them like a constellation of their own. Mara's feet were numb now, the cold ocean having stolen all sensation below theankle, and she didn't care. She would have walked through ice for this. Through anything.
"I want you to know something," Mara said. "When I pulled you tonight, during the game. That was the hardest thing I've ever done behind those boards. Harder than any tactical decision, harder than any personnel move. Because I watched you hurting and I knew I was the cause and I couldn't reach you. I couldn't be the coach and the woman at the same time, and I've been trying to be both for weeks and it's been tearing me apart."
"I know," Lex said. Her arm tightened around Mara's waist. "I know it has."
"After tomorrow, I won't have to choose. I can be both. Openly. Honestly. And if the league has a problem with it, they can take it up with me and my track record and the playoff-contending team I built from scratch."
"There she is," Lex said softly. "There's my coach."
"I want to do this right," Mara said. Her hand was warm in Lex's despite the cold air. "I want to build a life with you. Not just the sex, though the sex is…” She laughed. A real laugh, the first in days, and the sound of it surprised her. "The sex is incredible."
"It really is." Lex's grin was wide enough to catch the moonlight.
"But more than that. I want the mornings. The coffee and the dog and the arguments about practice drills and the quiet evenings where we just exist in the same space. I want a life with you, Lex. A real one. The kind I stopped believing I'd ever have when I was thirty-something years old and thought my world was ending."
Lex squeezed her hand. "You can have all of it. Every part. The mornings and the evenings and the arguments and the sex and the dog who likes me better than you."
"Goldie does not like you better than me." Mara bumped her shoulder against Lex's.
"Goldie absolutely likes me better than you. She greets me at the door. She follows me to the kitchen. She sleeps on my side of the bed."
"She sleeps on your side because your side is closer to the heating vent."
"Keep telling yourself that."
