Things were different tonight; she couldn't put her finger on it.
Sharon propped herself up on her elbow and gazed down at the dozing man beside her. Pulling the sheet closer to her naked skin, she gave herself a moment to admire the strong planes of his body. Her eyes swept over the firm muscles of his chest and she smiled lightly and bit her lower lip as she caught sight of the tiny scratches she had left on him in her desperation for release.
Moving up to his face she saw that he looked peaceful, the frown lines he wore during the day erased while he slept. She ran her fingers slowly through his silver hair, mussed from both sleep and her own fevered caresses. He sighed quietly at her touch and continued snoring gently, oblivious to her gaze.
Her eyes moved past him to the luminous numbers of the alarm clock on her bedside table. 1:45am. She felt a familiar clenching in the pit of her stomach as she thought about what that meant. He would be leaving soon.
This had become their routine over the past three months. A hard case and he would come to her. She glanced at him and laughed quietly, bitterly. A quick fuck to get the anger out of his system before he left. He had never stayed the whole night.
She had understood at first. The first time had been just as much as about shrugging off the remnants of a difficult day for her as it had been for him, but now, she was starting to believe that it was slowly killing her. But she couldn't hate him for it.
She ran her fingers through his hair again, straightening the errant strands into some semblance of order while he slept. He was never selfish; always made sure she was satisfied, it seemed to be an obsession for him. Make her come before he sought his own pleasure. Even if he couldn't help himself and finished first, he never left her hanging on the edge. But he never stayed.
Right now things were simple for him. She knew she could be there for him when he needed her, could give him exactly what he needed without attaching strings. There had been times when he was content to simply hold her and caress her hair, the need for a simple human connection overruling the need for anything else. Those were the times she hated the most. The times when she knew that she loved him but he wouldn't be staying. The times when she knew she couldn't ask him to stay.
Feeling the burn of unshed tears, she laid back down beside him and turned away from him, ready to hide her emotions from him when he woke, ready to pull back up the shield around her heart that he had somehow found a crack in.
The more she thought about it, the more she realised that tonight had been different. Something had changed.
When he had turned up on her doorstep tonight, she had believed this would be one of the times he just needed to be held. Even locked away in her office down in FID she heard things. A young boy murdered by his father for the sole purpose of getting back at his mother.
Even though she didn't know the details of the case, hadn't worked on it like he had, it had affected her too. She had looked at the photograph on her desk of her laughing children and imagined her ex-husband hurting one of them to hurt her. She hadn't been able to stop the tears that had tracked down her cheeks, had picked up the phone on her desk and called each of them, just to hear the sounds of their voices, to make sure they were okay, to tell them she loved them.
No, tonight was something else. He had held her, ran his fingers through her hair, touched her face reverently, tracing the outline of her lips with his fingertips. He had taken things slow tonight. Lavished her with gentle but desperate kisses, all the while stoking the fire within her to almost unbearable proportions before indulging himself.
He had never been that way with her before; tender, openly attentive, whispering sweet nothings to her as he mapped her body with his skilled hands, using every one of the sweet spots he had discovered to give her that ultimate blissful high.
Thinking of it now was too much for her; cool tears escaped the barricades of her tightly closed lashes and she chewed on her lower lip in a vain to keep it from trembling.
She felt him shift behind her, felt his strong arm pull her close and his fingers run over the bare skin of her shoulder and down the gentle slope of her spine making her shiver.
Taking a deep breath and biting back her emotions she barely managed to speak around the lump in her throat, "Are you leaving?" she asked quietly.
He tightened his grasp on her waist and pressed a kiss against her the back of her neck, he could hear the sadness in her voice. "No," he dropped another kiss onto her shoulder, "I'm not leaving you again."
A tiny sob escaped her. He hated himself for hurting her; she didn't think he knew how she felt, but he did. He never wanted to do that to her again. He buried his face into her hair and breathed in the inviting scent of her shampoo, "I love you, Sharon." He whispered, waiting for her to tense and push him away.
She didn't say a word, simply rolled over and hid her face against his chest, tangling her legs with his as her hand reached up to cup his neck, clutching at him as if he could simply disappear any second. He could feel the coolness of her tears against the warm skin of his torso, the knowledge that he had made her cry cutting him to the core. He threaded his fingers into the tresses that he loved so much and rested his chin on the crown of her head, and held her as she wept against him, silently promising her that things were going to change if it was the last thing he did.