A/N: I began this oneshot about halfway through season four, so it may not fit well with the current developments in the show. I thought I'd go ahead and publish anyway. Let me know if anything seems way off base.
Disclaimer: If I owned Bones, this season would be progressing a lot differently! Don't sue.
If insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different outcome, why are they still working together every day and pretending they don't feel anything?
She wants him so badly her skin crawls. She'll be writing a particularly graphic scene from her novel, and suddenly she's replaced Cathy and he's Andy, and it's all she can do to keep from trembling. Sometimes she'll add particularly salacious details simply because she knows Booth reads every word.
They leave a room and his hand just grazes her back and she has to bite her lip to keep from leaning forcefully back into his touch. Sometimes she slows her pace by just a fraction in the hope that the ghost of his hand will become just a bit more detectable on her over-sensitized skin. And it doesn't matter that he has a girlfriend or that she's not supposed to want him anymore. She still feels this need to touch him, and she still finds herself pushing the boundaries.
Winter has become both her favorite and her most dreaded season; riding in an enclosed car with the heat on full blast and his scent permeating the air does not do wonders for her self-control. Sometimes it's all she can do not to lean far into his personal space and simply breathe him in.
Winter, however, is nothing compared to sharing a bed with the man. They've gone undercover a couple of times, and she both loves it and can't stand it. Seeing him truly in his element as he puts on airs just to get his answers, pretending to be a sexy Vegas vixen or a mysterious circus performer, stepping out of herself but still being able to do her job…it's everything she could ask for. But she's afraid if they pretend to be a couple in love one more time, she'll forget to leave the fantasy with the tight red dresses and knife throwing acts; she's afraid she won't stop playing his lover. Sharing a bed with him only served to exacerbate the problem. God, she was so turned on during those nights that she had to mentally recite every single bone in the human body just to calm her racing heart.
She's worried her objectivity is becoming compromised. Intellectually, she knows kissing Booth under mistletoe in front of Caroline Julian wasn't one of the most erotic kisses she's ever had. Her mouth had been stinging from all the minty gun she'd chewed, she was so preoccupied with keeping the kiss within the five steamboat time limit that she'd barely gotten to enjoy the feel of her lips on his, and Booth was far too stunned and uncomfortable to reciprocate properly. But she's kissed several well-structured, virile men since then, and she just can't seem to attain that feeling of absolute madness that came from kissing her partner. Logically, this shouldn't be true. But it doesn't stop her panties from becoming damp at the thought of tasting him again. She still cannot believe that when he finally did kiss her, she froze and promptly rejected him. She had not known before that moment the extent of her fear.
Probably she should stop mixing Seeley Booth with alcohol. They've made that mistake already, and she has no desire to compromise her judgment with a bottle of scotch ever again. After all, she'd merely get a fleeting taste of what they could have been, only to have it stolen away from her, replaced by a painful hangover in the morning.
She could analyze her attraction to him. She could tell herself (and often has) that he has pleasing facial symmetry and a well-maintained body. She could argue that her emotional attachment to him makes her want him more, but that it should serve as a stop to her increasingly graphic fantasies about him. She shouldn't cheapen what they have. For God's sake, he isn't even single anymore. Fantasizing about what he'd do to her in bed will certainly not help her adjust to a world in which he does not actually want her. But when she's writing erotic scenes for her books, or when he touches her back, or when it's winter, or when they're undercover, or when she thinks about how his kisses make her weak at the knees (which should not even be possible), or when she gets a little tipsy, or simply when she stops to think about Booth at all, she somehow finds a way to push her logic and reasoning to a very small corner of her mind.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, why is she still working with him and trying to stop imagining him naked? Why is she pretending she doesn't wish she was the one he came home to each evening? Why does she even bother trying to adapt to a reality in which he no longer loves her? Because damn it, she wants him.