Title: Steamboats

Author: cardiogod

Rating: PG

Word Count: 608

Pairing: Booth/Brennan

Spoilers: Set during "The Santa in the Slush."

Summary: "She doesn't mean to kiss him past five steamboats."

Disclaimer: FOX and their people own Bones, not me. I'm just borrowing Booth and Brennan for fun.

Author's Note: First time Bones fic. Just discovered the series a week ago and went immediately to Blockbuster to catch myself up. I watching Santa in the Slush and I had to write something. Still learning the characters, so please forgive anything that seems out of place.

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She doesn't mean to kiss him past five steamboats.

At the first steamboat, she feels anxiety: a sympathetic neurological response in the amygalda area of the limbic system brought on by the reality that she is kissing Booth and that just might ruin everything.

The second steamboat, she feels excitement: the adrenal glands release epinephrine and the hormonal surge makes her stomach feel tingly as her lips receive the slightest bit of pressure from his and she realizes he is kissing her back.

By the third steamboat she has stopped counting steamboats and is just focused on the way he tastes when he opens his mouth to her and the slight increase in her heartrate when her tongue touches his so lightly that she almost thinks she imagined it, if not for the fact that he does it again, one steamboat later. Cataloguing these factors takes at least two more steamboats because her brain is functioning at a slower rate than normal, which she attributes to the fact that his body is pressed close to her own and she's not entirely sure which one of them closed the distance between them.

On the sixth steamboat, she tugs at his lapel and smiles because the sprig of mistletoe knocks her in the forehead and it is Christmas. Her basal ganglia focus her attention so that she doesn't noticed Caroline Julian staring at them and so all she can feel, hear, smell is him.

On the seventh steamboat, she is turned on.

On the eighth, she almost laughs.

On the ninth, she is happy.

On the tenth steamboat, before she pulls away, she knows she wants to do this again and she wonders when the next culturally sanctioned holiday kissing tradition falls and whether or not she'll be with him then or with a pile of bones in Peru. She wonders about December 31st because she remembers Angela saying something once about kissing six men at midnight after too many glasses of eggnog.

Eleven steamboats and she lets him go, settling into an uncomfortable moment as she looks back and forth between him and Caroline, wondering how his limbic system responded and how her gum migrated to his mouth.

They make awkward small talk and she stumbles over her words and her thoughts and her life before she sits and turns away from him, staring at her computer screen without actually seeing what was on it.

She hears him open the door again and her body stiffens slightly in anticipation as she turns around, a nervous response that she tries to suppress but can't.

"Hey Bones," he says, almost nonchalant but not quite, "what are you doing New Years?"

It is then, the sixty seventh steamboat, that she thinks she might want to seek companionship with him – Angela would call it love, but Brennan isn't so quick to apply socially antiquated labels to such things – and so she responds favorably to his invitation, offers him a smile, and turns back to her work.

She hadn't intended to kiss him past five steamboats but she's glad she did.