A/N: Just a small piece that I wrote which was inspired by something that is going on in my life right now. It's nothing spectacular and there is no real timeline for this. It could pretty much happen in six years like it could happen in a couple of episodes, even though I hardly doubt it.
She had spent all night thinking about it in her sleep. His face had haunted her dreams so much that she had half expected him to be in her bed when she opened her eyes that morning. What she thought would have made more sense in the morning still didn't make any. She still had this nagging feeling of helplessness and confusion. She blamed him for that. She blamed everybody. But most of all, she blamed herself.
When they had first become partners, she hadn't expected things to get so complicated between them. Their relationship had gone from colleagues to partners, from partners to friends and then from friends to whatever the heck they had become. She hadn't felt the attraction that had supposedly been there from the start but had been commented on by others. She's not sure if he had felt it. Probably, since he was pretty intuitive.
She had liked what they had become once they had past the stage of pure friendship. She had enjoyed the moments of closeness, the moments where she felt just how close they had become. She hadn't thought much past that. To her, it was all there was to it. She liked the affection he sometimes gave her, she enjoyed the comfort he brought to her and rarely did she think of herself as in love with her partner. Love just wasn't part of her vocabulary. It was something that couldn't be measured and so didn't exist. It was simple logic.
She blamed him. She blamed him for admitting (sort of) how he truly felt about her, how what they had could turn into deep love if they only let it. She almost hated to tell him that what Angela had told him hadn't been right, that she did love him but just not in that way. She hated it when he told her that it was too bad. She hated that he hid his emotions so well she couldn't even read in his eyes what he was thinking (not that she would have been able to do so anyway). He asked her if she was scared. She told him no but deep down knew it was a lie. When she asked him if he liked her, he told he didn't exclude the possibility like she did.
He left soon after that, leaving her confused about their situation, leaving her confused about herself. All the way home, she thought. She replayed her conversation in her mind over and over again to reach the conclusion, when she got out of her car, that she was acting like a typical teenage girl and should snap out of it immediately. Her decision faltered the second she stepped inside her bedroom and collapsed on her bed. The truth hit her like a train and shook her up. She liked him. She had lied. She did like him.
Groaning, she had gotten up and gotten ready for bed. But even the comfort of her bed couldn't drag her to sleep. Instead she thought. She thought of him, of what he had said. She thought of all the reasons why they shouldn't be together: work would get to complicated for them if they were ever to see that a relationship between them couldn't work out; he could get tired of her ignorance in pop culture or her incapability of showing emotions; he could die and abandon her; he could prefer someone else because of the reasons listed above. So many things could go wrong, so many things were at risk in this that she wondered if maybe now the best thing would be to cut off their partnership.
Sleep claimed her soon after this. Before she even knew it, her internal alarm clock was dragging her out of bed and to the bathroom. A shower was unable to wash away the feeling of confusion. Coffee, though it cleared her foggy, asleep mind, didn't help either.
She stood at the mirror as she brushed her hair. From her nightstand, her cellphone vibrated. Dropping the brush, she immediately answered.
"Brennan."
"Yeah Bones, it's me. We have a case."
Her heart began to beat wildly in her chest at the sound of his voice. He almost sounded tired and... sad? Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. It all made sense.
"Okay."
"Want me to swing by to pick you up at the lab?"
"Sure."
He was about to hang up when she blurted out a question.
"Hey... if we're done by noon, feel like going out for lunch?"
She was pretty such she could feel him smile through the phone.
"I'd love that, Bones."