Those Two Words

A/N: I know it took forever, but I couldn't quite get the ending right, and then I was woken up at five o'clock this morning by a three legged dog (yes, an actual three legged dog) and it suddenly came to me how to end this, and I wrote it down, went back to sleep and then was surprised to find that despite semi-darkness and sleepiness I'd actually managed to write quite legibly and between the lines, just upside down, which I think is quite a feat. And this finally! had an ending.

Disclaimer: I do not own Make It or Break It.

Forever

"I thought you were staying?" Aurel frowned as Sasha gathered the few personal touches he had in the office into a cardboard box. It was just days since Payson had left Boulder, and already Sasha was feeling her absence. Someone, this quiet corner of suburbia nestled at the base of the Rocky Mountains seemed so much colder without her.

"I was and then I wasn't," Sasha answered plainly. "It's complicated," he sighed.

Aurel shook his head and handed over a picture of Sasha and his gymnasts. "It is not," Aurel disagreed. "It is actually very simplu. You love her. You go find her," he said, pointing to the blonde gymnast standing closest to Sasha in the picture.

"This is not like you, Sandu," he continued. "Why won't you fight for her?"

"It's not that easy, Aurel," Sasha protested. "Do you really think I don't want to go after her? Payson is . . ." he began passionately, trailing off as he spoke her name.

"She's all I can think about," he said sadly. "I can barely breath when I'm near her and it broke my heart to see her leave.

"She thinks she loves me," he admitted, finally saying it aloud. "And maybe she does," he conceded with a shake of his head. "A small part of me hopes that it's true, but it's wrong. I'm wrong. I'm the worst person in the world for her and I won't let myself hurt her."

"So you let her leave?" Aurel questioned. "That is your solution. You hurt her now instead of hurt later?

"You do not know that you will hurt her, Sandu. Not unless in our time apart you have discovered the ghicitor?" he asked almost derisively, the word taken from the language of the Romany (gypsies) rather than their native tongue.

"You don't understand," Sasha said, trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Aurel. "She's still so young and she has the world at her fingertips.

"She deserves so much more than what I can give her," he finished sadly, his body sagging as he finally faced the reason for his inaction.

"I think it is you who does not understand, Sandu," Aurel said sympathetically. "She is not wanting the world. Only you. I do not think you can deny her so much."

"It's the one thing I will deny her," Sasha responded, his lips set in a thin determined line. "It's for her own good.

"She'll realize that. One day," he assured himself.

"She's so good," he said softly, his voice choked with emotion. "And some day she'll realize that . . . she's better off without me."

And so months went by, months he spent doing everything in his power to keep his mind off Payson Keeler. Months he spent desperately trying to convince himself that he didn't love her, and when that failed, that she didn't love him. Months he spent assuring himself that he'd done the right thing in leaving Boulder and staying out of her life – that is was, as Aurel said, better to hurt her now than later.

But none of it worked. No matter how many fish he tried to catch; no matter how many books he tried to read; no matter how many dishes he tried (unsuccessfully) to learn how to prepare from cable TV; no matter how many rooms of his house he tried to redecorate, she wouldn't leave his mind or his heart. It was too hard to deny his own feelings – he'd known the moment he returned to The Rock that his feelings for Payson were well beyond the platonic coach-athlete relationship they were meant to be confined to – and the more he thought about her, the harder it got to deny hers as well.

There were little things that gave her away and that he should have seen sooner. He thought about the way she had smiled at him every morning as he opened the gym and the way she had lingered in the evenings until she had no legitimate excuse left for being there. And then there were th little things she'd done that made his day – little nuances that made him fall more hopelessly in love with her. It was in the way their eyes would meet, and the way she always held his gaze longer than appropriate.

He couldn't deny it any longer. She loved him, and that realization broke his heart.

Which only made his decision that much harder to accept. It was easier, but not easy, to believe he'd made the right decision in letting her go and moving on when he was sure that she was wrong when she said she loved him. Knowing that she loved him only made it so much harder.

Because he did love her – more than anything in this world – and it killed him to be away from her. And because he loved her – and because he knew she loved him – he couldn't inflict that pain upon her.

It was time to ask Aurel a favour.

"So?" he asked, standing casually at the door of his old office.

She gasped at the sound of his voice, turning in her chair with her hand to her mouth and her eyes glistening with emotions.

"W-what are you doing here?" she asked him and rose shakily to her feet. She looked as though she wasn't sure he was real, wringing her hands together to keep from reaching and touching him to test.

"I had to make sure you got my message," he said casually, as though those two words on a yellow piece of paper were as simple and insignificant as an obligatory 'What's up'.

"So?" he asked again, unable to stand the silence.

She stared at him for a few moments, unable to fully absorb the fact that he was truly there. "Say it," she said finally, looking as close to tears as he had ever seen her. She moved closer and he did the same, meeting her somewhere in the middle. "I need to hear you say it."

He nodded, knowing he had to give her that much. Saying those words hadn't served him well in the past, and perhaps that was rightly so. He hadn't meant it then, although he thought he did at the time. But how could it be true then when those feelings were like a drop in the ocean compared to what he felt for the young woman standing before him, a woman who had stolen his heart without even meaning to.

He bent his head towards her, pressing a feather light caress to her lips before pulling back just far enough to speak the words she longed to hear. "I love you, Payson Keeler," he told her, his lips brushing slightly against hers as he spoke. "Te iubesc," he repeated. "I lo – "

She cut off his final pronouncement, wrapping her arms around his neck and pushing forward to eliminate the tiny millimetre of space between them. It was unlike any of the kisses that preceded it – nothing like their not-quite-one-sided first kiss, or the sorrowful kiss they had shared last September that felt too much like a good bye to be truly enjoyable, or the chaste kiss he had stolen from her moments earlier. This kiss was passionate, mutual, and anything but chaste. They kissed like their whole world depended upon it and they couldn't exist without the other.

"Te iubesc," she replied as they pulled apart, the tears she had been fighting finally beating her. She smiled despite them, looking more beautiful than he had words to describe.

He kissed her again, cupping her face in his hands as he did so, before pulling back so she could answer his question. He dropped his hands from her face and placed them on her waist. "So you'll come with me?"

She nodded happily. "I'd follow you to the ends of the earth, Sasha," she told him. "I love you."

"I love you too," he responded immediately. "And I'm so sorry, Payson, for letting you think otherwise. I -"

"It doesn't matter," she said cutting him off before he could explain himself. His reasons for taking so long didn't matter, just so long as he was here with her now, and she told him as much in her own, concise way.

"I'm here for as long as you'll have me, Payson," he responded lowly, his arms circling her tightly.

"So forever?" she suggested cheekily, her eyes bright with hope.

Sasha nodded his sincerity. "Pe vecie."

Te iubesc pe vecie

~ FIN~

Translation:

I don't think ghicitor is Romany unless I accidentally guessed its etymology. I was hoping to find such a word and I liked the line that followed it, so it stayed. Ghicitor means 'soothsayer' in Romanian.