It had been far from intentionally momentous. In fact, any other day... maybe it would have just been normal.

(Because it hadn't been the first time he'd managed to miss a lick of something from his lips while chewing, swallowing and breathing and excitedly talking to her about something all at once.)

But it hadn't been any other day, not really. It'd been the second anniversary of her divorce.

(And he'd playfully insisted on celebrating it, on buying her dinner, buying her – unheard of, the entire bottle of wine - and a portion of every chocolate-ish dessert available in the restaurant.)

"This really wasn't necessary." And she'd thoughtlessly lifted her left hand, fork full of chocolate cheesecake in her right and suddenly she'd bemusedly wiped a drizzle of chocolate from the side of his lips.

And he had seemed the nearest to blushing that she had ever, honestly, ever seen him.

"Food is necessary, Foster." He lifted his napkin and scuffed it over his lips, roughed it down his stubbled chin before lifting his head into her watching. "S'called a 'necessity', actually."

Gill let her hand slowly and gently fall to the table, lifting the fork full of nearly painfully sweet cheesecake toward her lips with the other. "This isn't food, Cal. It's edible sex."

He actually (adorably) gulped in response, staring down at his mostly empty scotch glass as though he could wish it refilled by mere mental capacity.

And, Good God, was it delightful - she so rarely managed to actually stutter him up.

"Look at me," she murmured softly, letting the fork set quietly to the plate, shifting her hand so that she was patiently rubbing around the circular base of the wine glass. He seethed a little before huffing a noise through his nose and lifting his jaw, brows high and eyes wide as he let her search over his expectant face. "You know what I mean. Thank you."

She watched him squint into studying her judiciously, saw the minutely shifted angling of his jaw and searching in his eyes as he looked over her features.

So she smiled, honestly and brightly and entirely for him.

The right side of his mouth twitched on an uncontrollable smirk before he shrugged both shoulders like a young and embarrassed boy. "Of course."

Not 'you're welcome' but 'of course'. As though it were expected of him (but he truly didn't mind so much). As though this was nothing out of the ordinary (and really... it wasn't... they had dinner together all the time). As though it was his place to be the man who assured her happiness on the anniversary of her divorce (was it now, actually?).

She decided, as she lifted another forkful of decadently sweet dessert, she was actually especially fine with that particular assumption.

Because he was the man who, generally selflessly and without guile, tried to assure her happiness.

Edible.

Sex.

Edible and sex.

She was edible sex for all he was concerned, bloody hell.

And, of course, she'd just had to use both those words in combination and mingled within the same breath. Both of them wrapped warmly together by the lulling hush of her relaxed and inexplicably adoring tone.

How in the hell did she do that?

"Earth to Lightman? Where did you go?"

Well, most of him was still focused back an hour or so before and trapped in the echoing of those particular words brushing past lipstick on her seemingly kissable lips while the toe of her expensive shoe had taken an 'accidental' run against his shin.

The rest was thoroughly enjoying how tightly she was curled around his right arm, one of her arms wedged between his ribs and his elbow, both hands curled on him. One palm was loosely linked along his wrist right above where he'd forced himself to stuff his hand into his pocket to keep from pawing at her. The other slim hand was raised up and curled around his bicep, the heat of her palm radiating past fabric as they slowly swayed their intentional snail pace down the sidewalk.

"Cal?"

He sucked in a quick breath and nodded as he distractedly responded, "You remember our first meal together?"

A laugh, bubblier and lighter than he expected, brushed past her lips. "It was mostly a liquid dinner, from what I remember."

He felt the frown twitch his eyes as he reflexively shook his head. "No, before that."

Her eyes slimmed a moment, jaw lifting up as she reached back in her memory and tried to sort exactly what he was referring to, looking lost until a sudden smile of acknowledgment flashed her teeth at him. "I do."

A shared turkey sandwich on one of the benches outside the Department of Defense, in cold sunshine and dry because he hadn't a drink to share as well. Her hair had been darker then and the sun had turned it to flaxen silk and he'd disregarded noticing because that was specifically the sort of thing about her that he was not supposed to notice (nor still remember a decade later). Cal shrugged into how much closer she leaned on the memory of that moment, that surprise moment he'd dropped on her a few hours before their appointment when he'd been searching for solace and found her instead (though... not that the two things were all that separate anymore).

"You were so worried I'd do something utterly inappropriate just out the front doors of the Pentagon, eh? You were mortified to be seen with me."

"I was mystified by you," she corrected quietly. "Completely. Charming while defensive and paranoid. So honest and just... terrified that you'd done something... ethically immoral."

She was mystified? Bloody hell, he still sometimes understood the random inconsistencies of the universe better than he could possibly understand her.

She was mystified? Then, fuck... he was absolutely befuddled, bumfuzzled.

"Foster - "

"You couldn't be real," she mused at him, purposefully dipping her head away so that he couldn't see her eyes. "A man so brilliant and brash and just... noble. What you'd done, no matter the reason, it was taking you apart. But it was..."

Was... what?!

Christ, he couldn't breathe without an end.

"I needed to help you and you fought that too, fought me every step of the way." She finally looked back at him, turned her head far enough that he could see sweetened affection over her features, if a little wistful.

"Sins of the father, huh?" Cal felt his face fall into reproach, shrugging the opposite shoulder of the one she was still curled into. "Apples falling from trees, love."

"Cal, you're nothing like him."

Easy for her to say on a nighttime sidewalk, eh? Easy for her to deduce when she hadn't been the one living his childhood. But then, she had been the recipient of most of its echoed repercussions for a decade. She was the welcome eyes and soft voice and gently accepting ear he'd told the stories to when he'd finally loosed them out of a locked up chest and tightened shoulders.

She knew his mother's birthday and deathday (she'd seen the film flickering in his office, right?).

She knew his father's penchant for whiskey fists (had ghosts of her own there, didn't she?).

She knew he'd intentionally driven his own wife out of his life because she was a woman he just could not trust himself to trust entirely (and what did that make her then, huh?).

"Gill - "

"You're not like him. Or my father. You're not like Alec." Her voice had landed smack between forthright and accusatory and it tamped his jaw closed against responding. She was right, in a way. He wasn't any of them. Terrifying thing to him was the possibility that he could, at any given moment and without realization, hurt her just as much as they could – probably more, considering the close proximity of their friendship. "If you were any other man I've ever known then I wouldn't still be here."

It was the swinging door, the wide gaping space, the opening he needed to tell her that he was (still and still and still) completely mad about her.

Couldn't find the words though, not with a compass and GPS, not with his own head so far up his own arse... not when her eyes were so pretty in expectation. When she looked at him like he was such a silly little thing for not being able to admit to something she already knew.

"Gill..." Still couldn't manage it, could he?

She rolled her glance into a sweetened smile of endurance, a prolonged patience along with the silent realization that he still couldn't manage to stutter it out. "Walk me home, Cal?"

Walk her home? It was, at the very least, sixteen city blocks.

That was nothin', really.

"Every night." He amiably looped his arm along her waist, tugged her up into his side and felt a grin of relief crash his lips as she curled up into the shifting movement. "If that's what'll keep you around."

Gill snorted off a dry laugh, letting her shoulder rest into him as she shook her glance toward the street and let him lead their steps. "Where else would I go?"

"Don't go anywhere, darling," he kissed chastely into her hair, caught the way she leaned her head closer to the movement and took advantage of it, inhaled the smell of her into his chest. "I'll keep y'up to your ears in wine and chocolate, huh? Need you with me or it falls apart."

"You think I stick around for your generosity at dinner?" Her accusation seemed less like any accusation at all when she said it through laughter, her head raised to people watch as they continued down the busy street. "The man's who's credit card has been publicly destroyed and dumped in my lap no fewer than three times?"

And he couldn't help the impish little grin and the way his nose wrinkled into amusement as he tugged her up tighter and squeezed, "Still haven't learned to demand cash when I send y'off to dinner as a distraction? Guess that's your lesson t'learn, love."

"How many more lessons do I have, Cal?"

Shit. Oh... shit.

He told himself to be aloof and natural and, also, instantly told himself that she sure as hell wasn't going to fall for it. "Before what then?"

"Before you can just say it?" Gill's voice was surprisingly patient in the face of his denial, far calmer than he'd expected and her eyes matched that gentleness when she looked over him again. "Before you can tell me?"

He gulped so hard his throat nearly protested his saliva back into his mouth.

Did she just? Fucking hell... this woman. God, he loved this woman.

"I don't know."

"Maybe you can't say it because it isn't true." Her voice didn't waver while saying it but he heard the trickling of self reproach, the disappointment."Maybe... maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've always been wrong - "

Not in the least. "You're not."

" - about you," she finished over top of his terse protest.

And he snagged her roughly still, caught into the way he'd tipped her off balance and brought her into him with both hands gripped up on her ribs. "You're not wrong, Gill."

Her eyes did a beautiful dipping, all long lashes as she smiled and sighed out slowly. "No?"

"Not at all," he confessed, lost to anything but giving her the truth.

Her head lifted minutely and at a slight angle, eyes slimming up gorgeously as she studied him and pursed her lips together before breathing out slowly. "Was this a date?"

He couldn't help himself, couldn't engage a filter between his brain and his mouth before he slipped out the first thought he had with a breathy sound that was almost a laugh. "Over already, is it?"

"Did you mean for this to be a date?" Gill asked shrewdly, forcing him back into seriousness just by the sincerity and nervous caution in her tone.

Jesus Fuck, she was a sort of insurmountable Everest to him. Impossible to imagine unless in its glorious shadow, nearly as impossible to conquer without wits and risk and balls and brains.

So, of course, cue the idiotic rambling.

He knew it was coming on before he even opened his mouth. "Not entirely... guess maybe the idea was... I mean, while it may seem like a date, I didn't mean to imply that I - "

"That you'd actually want to date me?" she nodded at him, brow arched as she held his glance.

"Now, y'know that's not what I meant," Cal shot back as he gripped his fingers up in her coat to add force to the response. She looked away from him for a moment and he dug in tighter, tried to draw her back with a leaning look.

"So you do?" Her eyes were happier than he expected when he caught sight of them, bright in their blue and terrifically pleased, near as smugly amused as the set of her mouth. "Want to date me?"

Cal cocked her an intentionally wry looking glare, letting the breath out of his lungs all at once and along with rushed up words, "Wanna do more than that and you know it."

And she smiled wider, full pleasure and humor and it utterly wrecked the rhythm of his pulse for a moment, "Then for the sake of conversational clarity, can we refer to it as a 'date'?"

"You're an extraordinarily annoying woman, y'know that?" he accused with full affection as he pressed at her hip, playfully nudged her back into walking so that he could catch up along her side. "You annoy me often."

A smile curled her lips as she lifted her jaw into casual confidence, shrugging her shoulders higher as his hand went caressing against her lower back and stayed warmly pressed there. "So can I assume there will be a kiss good night?"

"I make no assumptions about events that may or may not occur on your doorstep and nor should you."

"You're an extraordinarily annoying man," she answered repetition into the way he'd suggestively murmured the response along her shoulder, catching his grin and giving back her own as they continued down the sidewalk. "You know that?"

"Shoulda brought you flowers," he playfully groused, pursed his lips up at her in supposed annoyance while his eyes went brighter in mirth, his hand soothing around her waist to intentionally tuck her close again. "Maybe you'd be takin' it a little easier on me."

Her head dipped along his shoulder, chin digging into him as her response whispered against the fabric of his overcoat. "Doubtful."

Note: The peak of Mount Everest is 29,029 feet (8,848 metres) above sea level.