A/N: This is my first Angela/Hodgins fic, so I hope I did the pairing justice. This was written for the ficathon at the angelahodgins livejournal community.
Disclaimer: No, I don't own them. Wish I could take that credit, but it all belongs to Hart Hanson, FOX, et al.
She'd never shown this side of her to a man before.
This wasn't the Angela Montenegro at the cheesy horror film, feigning gasps at images far less gruesome than what she saw on a daily basis just to get the cute guy to hold her hand. This wasn't the Angela Montenegro who had perfected acting afraid of bad Hollywood props and effects.
This was Angela Montenegro truly, completely frightened. The fuzzy, damaged, real clips of those kids in the woods scared her more than anything she'd ever seen before.
The feeling of his hand beneath her fingers and his arm around her shoulder felt more comforting – more genuine – than the touch of any random guy in a movie theater. She knew that Hodgins wasn't acting, that he wasn't actually trying to figure out how to get her into bed with him. She knew that he cared, that he didn't want her to be afraid.
And that evening, lying beneath his sheets with her back flush against the front of his body, she felt incredibly safe. She couldn't quite put her finger on exactly why that feeling had settled deep within her.
Maybe it had something to do with the warmth of his breath on her neck, or the weight of his arm across her stomach, or the rise and fall of his chest as he slept.
Maybe it was the slightly warm, cozy, used feel of the flannel (not silk, as she had first expected from someone of his caliber), or the soft glow the room held from the moonlight seeping through the slats of the blinds.
Maybe it was the unmistakable smell of Hodgins' cologne drifting from the shirt she was borrowing. Or maybe it was that the room seemed so familiar despite the fact that she hadn't really spent much time in there at all.
She decided that it didn't really matter why she felt the way she did, just that she was feeling it.
Because maybe that feeling was enough to hold them together.
End