This Must Be The Place

A/N: The song playing as season five opens (over Robin's sketch of two figures standing smiling on a beach under a blazing sun) is 'This Must Be The Place' by Talking Heads, a song ostensibly about a man with a weak heart wishing to spend what time he has with a woman he loves.

The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground, head in the sky
It's okay, I know nothing's wrong, nothing

'This Must Be The Place' – Talking Heads

He wakes into an early morning blushed pink by a rising sun. The pale light has crept in around the shutters and is inching its way across the white coverlet, a brighter kind of tide rolling in with the new day. He lies still, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling, hearing the wash and ripple of the ocean outside. For a moment Phil Coulson thinks he may still be dreaming, that any second now he'll wake for real and find himself in his cramped bunk at the lighthouse, or else in his other cramped bunk on the bus. But a moment passes, then another and yet another and he's still there. He's lying on the most comfortable mattress his middle-aged bones have enjoyed for more years than is strictly fair.

And this, he realises: this is how the first day of the rest of his life begins.

Coulson shifts on to his side and there she is. May is still asleep, lying curled in his direction, though there is more than the reach of his arm between them. The night was warm and she's pushed back the covers to her hip. She's wearing a faded black tank top – an old band T that she's at some point slashed the arms from, probably, he thinks, to make it easier to wear while sparring. It was a habit she'd developed at the Academy, when they'd all been on tight student budgets: thrift store purchases co-opted as training gear. He hadn't realised she still did that, and something in his chest tightens to re-learn this tiny thing. On her lower half she's wearing plain black panties and his breath catches, not at her attire, not even at the fact that she's here at all, but that she's here as herself and because she has chosen to be.

It is not the first time he's woken up in a bed beside Melinda May. It would take more than the fingers of his two hands together to enumerate the times they have slept beside one another over the years. But none of those times have they ever done so as just themselves, just because it was what they wanted to do.

He can recall the first assignment as if it were yesterday even though it had happened more than twenty years previously. That's not only because May doesn't seem to have aged a day – her skin and hair are as luminous against the white sheets as they were on that morning, as if it were just a week in the past rather than two decades hence. He can remember it clearly because it's a memory that became a fixed point in time for him, though he never meant for that to happen. He'd just never quite managed to move past it, somehow: the first time he'd woken up in a hotel bed with Melinda May as his wife.

She'd been wearing black panties then, too, as well as a matching bra, although in that case they had both been made of soft lace, which fitted her cover character perfectly but at that moment threatened to derail him in the worst way. He'd opened his eyes, seen her and immediately rolled himself in the other direction, because he'd been a lot younger then and his body had reacted even if his mind was trained in restraint. On the table beside his head his pager (oh, those were the days) had been flashing with a message. It was disguised as a stock market advice update but held troubling information for those in the know, namely them.

They were under counter-surveillance and their cover was in question.

Sell advised the message as its conclusion. Sell, sell, sell. Now.

An unbidden surge of anticipation was quickly subsumed by guilt as Coulson stared at the implied suggestion blinking on the ticker-tape line. Here were his superiors giving him permission – ordering him – to make it clear to the voyeurs with eyes in the room that the woman beside him was actually his wife.

The guilt would not have existed if he hadn't already been aware that he had liked the idea of sharing a bed with Melinda May far more than was appropriate for a work colleague. Following such an order seemed like taking advantage of a situation in which she had no willing part. He thought she was gorgeous, had had more than one idle thought about quenching that cute little smirk of hers with a serious kiss: more, if he was really honest with himself. But there was nothing to indicate the attraction was mutual, unless you counted the relish she seemed to take in teasing him, not to mention in laying him out flat on his back on the mat every time they trained together. (He didn't.)

He'd put down the pager and rolled over again to find that she was awake. May's eyes were fixed on his face and there was a smile on her lips.

"Hey, you," she'd said, softly.

"Hey, yourself."

"Was that a message?"

He'd made a dismissive expression. "Just my broker, giving advice."

She'd raised one eyebrow. He'd realised then, with a jolt, that he loved her face. Loved it.

"At this time on a Sunday morning?" she'd asked, archly, and Coulson saw that she hadn't let her cover slip, not one bit, not for a second, because Agent May was so damn good that she probably even dreamed the way her cover would. "That important, was it?"

"There's some stock he wants me to sell, that's all. He doesn't think it can wait."

"Well, it had better," she'd said, in a low, slow voice that thrummed something low in his belly. "Because right now your wife has plans for you, and they won't wait."

She'd shifted quickly towards him, rising up on her elbows and moving to press her lips to his, and Coulson had found himself holding her back. Something had flared in May's eyes as he'd lain there on his back and cupped her face in both hands, keeping their bodies apart. It was folly, he knew, to deflect her – whoever was watching them would be doing so closely, looking for any evidence that they were not all they seemed – but he couldn't just leap into it. Not just like that. He just wasn't as good at this as she was.

Instead he'd run his left hand from her jaw down her neck to her shoulder, stroking the strap of her bra down her arm. He'd done it slowly, gently, just feeling her skin under his hands, keeping his eyes on hers. May had drawn in a sharp breath, her lips parting, her eyes wider than they had been a second previously, and suddenly something was different. Goosebumps rose on her skin in the wake of his touch. Her saw her nipples hardening through the lace of her bra. His hand left her arm and traced across her back, reaching for the fastening, and his fingers shook, because suddenly this seemed real, this seemed very, very real, and he wanted to kiss her, God he wanted to-

His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn't undo the hooks on her bra. That was the part she'd fixated on later, what she had teased him about relentlessly. They'd still sold it well enough to restore their cover – and for years he'd woken in a sweat, the sound of her faked orgasm echoing in his mind, the image of her above him so unbelievably arousing that it was painful in more ways than one.

They'd never spoken about that strange moment when they both seemed to be other people – or maybe, just maybe, they were being themselves. Thinking about it now, he wonders if they'd both just been too afraid, too fearful of that moment. Too fearful of how real it had felt to confront the possibility that it was.

"Hey, you."

Her voice is soft and low. May is lying beside him with her eyes open, a smile on her lips. His heart, as battered, slow and dying as it is, thumps harder. She is so beautiful.

"Hey yourself," he says.

They lie there, on this new day of new days that is both a beginning and the beginning of the end, just looking at each other. Being themselves. there because they both want to be. He reaches out and cups her face in both hands, bringing her closer. She smiles down at him, and he wants to kiss her. God he wants to kiss her.

"Do you remember the first time we ever woke up together?" she whispers.

He grins. "Little bit."

"I thought about that morning for a long time."

"So did I."

"Do you know what sold it? Do you know what saved us?"

He strokes one thumb across her cheek. "We did a pretty good impression of a married couple, as I recall."

"We did. But it wasn't the sex," she says, her voice still quiet. "You know that, right? It was that look you gave me. The way you touched me. As if I… was a place you'd been searching for forever. As if I was everything."

He can't hold back any more. Coulson pulls her mouth down to his. He slides his hands down her back over the shirt, then back up beneath it. Her skin feels like warm silk. He flips them over, pressing her into the mattress. Outside, the ocean washes against the shore. The sun gleams into their little space. He has no idea what the time is. He doesn't care: doesn't ever have to care again.

He pulls back and looks down at her.

"You are everything," he says. "You always have been."

[END]