Title: Touch the Moon
Pairing: Will/Emma
Rating: PG
Word Count: 500
Spoilers: None
She didn't normally like to touch people. At all. Ever since she was a little girl, she had shied away from human touch and…germs. Germs that were crawling all over people. People and the pencils that the students put into their mouths. And the cell phones that they touched with their hands, which had touched the toilets, and they put the phones next to their mouths, and-
But she wanted to touch him. Will. He was the first human that she had wanted to touch since she was a little girl. And she had almost done it! But his wife had come in, and he had gotten weird again, shut off, like he always did when she was around.
Just another reason that his wife was bad news.
But it was troubling, this desire to touch Will, who was married, whose hair was so curly, and looked so soft, that she actually wanted to feel it against her fingertips, and she didn't think he'd mind, either. He wouldn't mind if her fingers were in his hair. And she wouldn't mind. She wouldn't even wash her hands afterwards, because his germs didn't seem so bad to her. After all, they were from him.
And his shirts, always pressed so nicely. His wife probably pressed them; she seemed obsessed with domesticity like that. But after his wife pressed them, he put them on, and they were snug against his chest, his chest that she sometimes thought she saw ripple, with muscles, and she thought, maybe, if he took his shirt off, she would like to touch those muscles, too.
Suddenly he was in her office, leaning against her doorframe, smiling at her, his special Emma smile, and for a second, she had trouble bringing herself to reality, because there was his neat shirt and his curly hair and his lips, with the smile, and they looked soft, too.
But mouths were cesspools of germs. She knew this. Why, then, did she want to press her lips to his, something she hadn't done since she was in kindergarten? Why was he the only person she wanted to touch, his the only lips she wanted to press hers to, when the ring on his finger bound him and her promise to another, far inferior creature, was pulling her away?
"Will you help the glee kids, Emma?" he asked, and she was pulled into reality by his request. "They need you."
Help, need, Emma. Those words on his lips were as beautiful as the songs she caught him singing when he thought that only the janitor was left in the building. And she agreed without thinking, because she could not feel his hair, or his lips, or his freshly ironed shirts, and he could not press her against the wall of the teachers' lounge and kiss her until she couldn't breathe, but she could do this. She could touch his heart.
And maybe, one day, if she waited long enough, she could reach out and touch him, as well.
