Maybe
This story is the product of too much thinking post-ep (Girl in the Gator). Thanks to ani8/Katie for beta-reading.
Standard disclaimers apply.
b
She comes to him quietly, when the steady thrum of the case has faded into the background, when they have been separated by a week of new partners and therapy, when the threads holding him together finally snap.
He is standing at the door in his boxers with a beer in one hand and a particularly bad case of five o'clock shadow. She is on the other side with hands jammed into coat pockets and shoulders hunched. "Can I come in?"
He doesn't say anything, just takes a step back to allow her space and closes the door behind her.
b
She takes a seat on his couch without being asked and he wordlessly hands her a beer, which she looks at and finally takes. She looks as restless as he feels, not opening the bottle, just playing with the condensation as it drips to the floor.
"How was your psychologist?" she asks at length.
He wonders if she's being tactful about this or if he's just become numb to her abrasive nature. "Irritating," he says; when they play this game he knows he has to go first. "More so because he was right."
"That's good," she answers, and it is.
b
It's good but it's not why she's here. She is still too fidgety, too anxious. Something else is at work tonight. He can do nothing but wait for it, so he sits next to her, clinks his beer up against her own.
That is a signal to her, on some level. Her body relaxes; she stops maintaining that rigid boundary of personal space. Eventually she even leans a bit into his shoulder, close enough that he can smell her shampoo.
That's when he knows he's really in trouble.
Bones sighs almost against his arm. "I have something to tell you."
b
She forces herself to stop playing with the bottle, setting it down gently on the table; she purposely avoids using one of Booth's hot rod magazines as a coaster. She's only half-sure of where to start this conversation; as usual she knows what she has to say but the method eludes her.
After a few seconds of procrastinating Brennan squares her shoulders. "I'm going on a date," she says, less firmly than she would like. "With Agent Sullivan."
Okay. And, looking at his face, she knows she has only a few seconds to explain before the moment of openness is gone.
"You and I have this thing," Brennan tells him awkwardly. "Where you vaguely allude to this potential something and I pretend I don't know that you're talking about us. Right? But it's there, this understanding that someday..."
She trails off a little. "I wasn't ready. For a long time, Booth, I wasn't ready and you didn't wait for me. Now it's you who isn't ready."
She pauses. "I'm not going to wait for you. By the time you're ready I still may not be."
Booth is looking at her with an expression of incredulity now, like he doesn't know where the real world has gone. She takes his speechlessness as acceptance.
"I'm not going to wait for you. Take all the time you need." She gathers her purse, stands and heads for the door.
Somehow she can't just leave it at that. With one hand wrapped around the doorknob she turns back. "You'll catch up."