#this is the single most sappy 1600 words i've ever written

[sirandking]

For @redbookpanda for the @tfcfemslashnet gift exchange - this is roughly based on the idea of Lailvarez and the worst first date ever, but also...pretty much nothing like that at all? Anyway, hope you enjoy!

“Man, I haven’t been down this way in so long,” Alvarez commented, watching crowds of people push past each other on the sidewalk in their rush to get home. She paused at a hot dog stand, watching with intrigue as a woman fed a piece of her sausage to an excited golden retriever. The dog tracked the woman’s hand with its entire head, panting from the summer heat, ear twitching and tail wagging.

Laila looked up at her voice and sighed. “Eyes on the prize, babe,” she said, gently tugging Alvarez back on track. “There’ll be plenty of dogs to pet later.”

Alvarez grinned and let herself be led through the crowds of people rushing home from work, pressing up against her girlfriend to avoid getting trampled. “I’m serious, though. I haven’t been here since, what? That time at Green Door when Jeremy tried to push all the tables together and go sock-sliding on them? Hey, is that where we’re going now? Because I am one hundred percent down for their nachos, babe. I have been deprived of good nachos for way too long.”

“Hush,” Laila said, leading them onto a side street. The sidewalks were noticeably emptier than on the main road, although the street was packed with cars trying to avoid the traffic. Alvarez kept her arm pressed against Laila’s. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

As it turned out, they did end up at Green Door, and Alvarez immediately abandoned Laila with a delighted cheer to wander around the bar and examine the decorations.

“Look, babe, they kept it!” she called, pointing at a set of bagpipes on a ledge. Laila looked up from where she was chatting quietly with a waitress and raised her eyebrows.

“We’re not stealing it,” she said. “Do you want to give Old Woman Candice another reason to have us kicked out?”

“We wouldn’t have to play it,” Alvarez said. “Just hang it on a wall somewhere. Show off your Scottish heritage.”

“I’m sure my one Scottish ancestor would be thrilled,” Laila said drily, leaving the waitress with a nod and making her way to a table near the back. “Now come on, I ordered ahead.”

“I love you,” Alvarez said, several minutes later, after their dinner had been brought out. The romance was diminished slightly by the mouthful of nachos she was speaking through, spewing crumbs all over the table. A glob of salsa dripped from the corner of her mouth, and Laila wiped it away with a thumb. She smiled fondly for a couple seconds too long, prompting Alvarez to ask, “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Laila responded, still smiling. “Just…I love you, too.”

“Okay, weirdo.”

Laila snorted and fished out another chip, twirling it to get as much cheese as possible. “Do you remember on our first date?” she asked. “When you had cheese all over your face and I was too embarrassed to tell you?”

“No, I don’t remember that,” Alvarez said, “because I was too distracted by the way you managed to knock the entire plate onto the floor and cover your dress in tomato.”

“And then you told me I looked like a fish?”

“It was a compliment! I had just gone scuba diving in Australia, I can’t help it that fish were the first thing I thought of.”

“You came back from Australia an entire month before asking me out,” Laila said, pointing a chip at Alvarez in accusation. Alvarez leaned across the table and bit off the end, causing the rest to break apart and fall toppings-first onto the table. Laila batted her girlfriend’s head away in mock-annoyance. “You just didn’t want to tell me my dress was ugly.”

“I loved that dress! I’ll never forgive you for throwing it out.”

“Where could I possibly have worn it? My mother wouldn’t even take it for her sewing projects, and her taste in fabrics is nightmarish.”

“Are you saying I have worse taste than your mother?” Alvarez asked, and Laila giggled.

“Hey,” she said, reaching across the table and threading her fingers through Alvarez’s. “Hey. You have some pretty amazing taste. And I thank the universe every day of my life that I was lucky enough to convince you to fall in love with me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Alvarez rolled with the change in tone easily, pulling their joined hands up to her lips for a kiss. “With any luck,” she said softly, “you won’t ever have to find out.”

Laila responded with a faint smile. For a second, Alvarez got lost in the contours of it, the gentle curves, the way it betrayed more emotion the longer she looked. Laila had never been one to open up easily, but Alvarez had ten years of experience reading her by now, and she knew exactly where to look to hear what Laila wasn’t saying. They would never have worked so well together, otherwise.

Then Laila glanced away, towards the bar, and then down at the table. She bit her lip and reached for another nacho, avoiding Alvarez’s questioning stare.

“So,” Laila said, staring resolutely at a poster advertising a ceilidh at a nearby Irish pub. “Do you think they changed the recipe on the salsa? Because I don’t remember it having so much salt.”

Alvarez frowned at the blatant topic change. “Laila?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine, just wondering about this salsa. Maybe I’m just more attuned to it after so many years on nutrition plans?”

Alvarez almost could have believed it, if it weren’t for the subtle quiver in Laila’s voice and the completely obvious lie. “Is something going on?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

Alvarez narrowed her eyes, suspicion growing. “You take me to my favorite pub, the place where we had our first date, you make it a big surprise, you order ahead –”

“Can’t I just do something nice for my girlfriend while we’re back in town –?”

“You’re acting all shifty –”

“I’m not acting shifty –”

“You are –”

“And if I did have some big surprise lined up, I sure wouldn’t want to ruin it for you just because you think I’m acting shifty.”

Alvarez opened her mouth to respond and then paused, searching Laila’s face. After a few seconds of deliberation, wherein Laila put on her best puppy-dog eyes, she sighed. “Fine,” she conceded. “Fine, I’ll play along. But only because I love you, and I know how much work you put into these things.”

Laila grinned. “Thank you.”

“But you realize that if you don’t have a surprise planned, you’ve just set me up for disappointment.”

Laila leaned forward to scoop up some of the leftover nacho toppings with a fork. “I’ll just have to make something up quickly, then, won’t I?” she said, holding the fork out to Alvarez, who snorted but allowed herself to be spoon-fed nonetheless. They locked eyes with each other across the table while Alvarez licked the fork clean, and then both broke into giggles at the same time.

“Hey,” Laila whispered, giddy from inside jokes they’d long since forgotten. “Close your eyes.”

Alvarez did without question, expecting either a kiss or a faceful of salsa. Instead, she hears a slow exhale, and then a box is pressed into her hand. It’s soft, like it’s coated in velvet, small and hard, like –

“Open your eyes,” Laila breathes.

Alvarez almost doesn’t, almost just goes the rest of her life without ever opening her eyes again, because that would be better than the disappointment if it’s not what she thinks it is. But she trusts Laila, trusts her with her life and her back and definitely with her heart, so she looks up.

The ring itself is beautiful, a simple band with a clear gemstone that refracts rainbows where the light hits it, but Alvarez is much more fascinated by Laila’s face. She’s got the little pout on that she always gets when she’s nervous and a set to her jaw that says she’s going to be confident anyways, and a look in her eyes that Alvarez has never seen before, even after ten years.

Alvarez says yes before Laila even has time to ask, before she’s even realizes she’s said it.

“Bitch,” Laila says, but the pout relaxes into the clearest display of love Alvarez has ever seen on her face. “You could at least wait for me to ask.”

Alvarez shakes her head. “Yes,” she says again, wonders if it’s the only thing she’ll ever be able to say again.

“God,” Laila says, and she reaches over and takes the ring and all but shoves it onto Alvarez’s finger. “There. God.”

Alvarez grins, soppy and infatuated, like everything she hated when she was younger and didn’t know any better, but right now she can’t bring herself to care. She was going to make a spectacle in her favorite pub; she’d resigned herself to that the moment she realized what the weight in her hand meant. If there was any time when it was acceptable to start crying at a bar before 8 pm, it was now.

“Not God,” Alvarez said, and the way the light plays off Laila’s eyes is a thousand times more captivating than any ring, “but pretty damn close.”

Later that night, after the waitress has brought out celebratory dessert and they’ve sent ecstatic messages to all their friends, Laila and Alvarez sit curled up on the couch in their hotel, playing with the ring. They’d been sitting in the same position for the past two hours, occasionally dissolving into overwhelmed giggling, occasionally exchanging long, soft kisses.

“You know,” Alvarez said, holding the ring up to the light again and trying to see how many different rainbows she could count, “you never actually asked me.”

“Fuck you,” Laila said, lifting her head off Alvarez’s shoulder so she could swat at her indignantly. “Ask me yourself.”

“Will you m–?”

Laila kissed her before she could finish, but Alvarez was too in love to complain.