A/N-Don't own them...however this was recently edited because I came up with about another 4 one-shots and figured I'd put them all together, rather than have them each be separate

The hospital smell came back to her with a vengeance as she walked through the double doors. It was the thing she had hated most, the awful smell of antiseptic that wormed it's way into your very bones, a smell that no matter how much you shower you can't erase it. At least the dead had a smell that you could get used to after a while, but the hospital smell was something that she never could get used to being around.

It didn't take long to find his room, and she walked in, to find him, thankfully, asleep. She didn't want to be here, she didn't want another thing to hamper her, not now, not when she had two people vying for her, two people wanting her, tearing her in two different directions. She sat in the stiff chair next to his bed and looked at him.

He was looking better, stronger than he had before, no longer so weak and frail and on the verge of death as he had when he had sent her forcefully out of his room almost two weeks prior. He slowly stirred awake and the first thing he reached for was the morphine pump to keep it close at hand. He saw her sitting there and smiled. "Hey." She told him and he grinned.

"Hey." He replied, and he looked a little sheepish. "Look, Jordan, about what I said-" He looked down at the sheets finding them to be infinitely more interesting and distracting.

"Woody, it's OK-" she started, but he cut her off.

"No, it's not, and I've heard nothing but hell about it since, and they're all right, I'm sorry about it, I never meant to hurt you." He was being heartfelt, but that was the last thing that she wanted him to be at the moment. "I never meant to doubt you." The last sentence was spoken softly, so that she could just barely hear it.

She smiled at the irony of it, knowing full well he'd misinterpret it. He told her he never meant to doubt her, yet he had every right to, she had spent the whole week trying to figure out if she had meant it and wound up just making her life even more complicated. "Woody-" She tried again, but he continued his ramble.

"It's just that if you were going to love me, I wanted to know it wouldn't be out of pity, that you wouldn't be loving me because I'd be some guy in a wheelchair for the rest of his life or some guy with a limp for the rest of his life, I'd want to know that you'd be doing it for me, not because you felt sorry for me, understandable, right?" She nodded.

"What have the doctors been saying?" She asked and he shook his head.

"They don't know yet. I've got feeling in my feet but they don't know if I'll be able to walk on them or if I'll limp or what. It's going to be I have to get up and walk to find out. Don't know what's going to happen til I go out there and try." She nodded. He seemed hopeful. The fact that he had feeling seemed to bolster his spirits quite a lot.

They lapsed into an awkward silence, not wanting to speak. She was in too much turmoil to do much of anything, she didn't want to have to think of what was going to happen if he couldn't walk, and she didn't want to think of what was going to happen if he could. Her brain kept telling her to go for him, that he was the one, standard All-American White Bread, the good looking blue-eyed well rounded guy that would her stability, and she needed something stable in her life.

But at the same time, in her heart, she couldn't bring herself to fully give herself to him, there was something blocking her from doing so. She knew that part of it was her fear of commitment, Garret had been right about that, even though she tried not to admit it, she really was afraid of getting hurt.

It's why her brain was telling her that Woody was the right choice, that he would always be there, that' he was dependable you can count on my Woody, that he would never leave her, that he was the one thing that would be a constant in her tumultuous life. But he was too constant, too steady.

She wanted something that would be exiting as well as steady, she didn't want to be locked into the bland suburbia that she knew she would wind up in, the same place that she had grown up, right on the outskirts of the city, close enough to say that she still lived in Boston, but on one of those streets in a good neighborhood where her kids would go to a good school and there'd she be, the model wife of a detective, successful in her own right, but all the same, the person the public wanted her to be.

She didn't want to be that person, she wanted to be her own person, Hurricane Jordan as she had been dubbed. The devil-may-care person who let nothing stand in her way. She had said that she never was that person, and she was right, it was merely an ideal to her, something that she craved, but she wanted to be accepted to be loved and she was willing to sacrifice a part of herself for that.

He had started speaking again, and she had completely not noticed it. "Jordan-Jordan-Earth to Jordan." She snapped out of her thoughts.

"Sorry, just thinking, got a lot on my mind." He grinned.

"What, about how soon you can go back to the beach?" She grinned back, subconsciously rubbing the spot on her hip where the dark henna tattoo sat.

"Warm sun, tanning, the ocean, the boardwalk..."

"All great things. We'll have to go as soon as I'm out of here." The smile faded, but she fought to keep it on her face.

"Sounds great." She lied, and he stifled a yawn as the morphine pump dripped a few drops of the clear liquid into the IV, and he felt it kicking in. "I should get going." She told him, standing up. "Feel better."

"Jordan-" He called as she reached the door. She turned around to face him. "I love you." The words were plain, unadorned, simple. She could see on his face that he really meant what he was saying, it was something that she had known, she knew that he loved her.

"I love you too." She told him, but her heart wasn't in it.