Author's Note: See End Notes for more information.
He doesn't remember what prompted it, what propelled him from passive attraction to acting on emotion he didn't think himself capable of anymore. They had pushed and pulled one another for months, and he had put off thinking about any of it for just as long. He had been married, after all, and highly devoted, even after his wife - God he still misses her - had passed away.
Passed away. It sounds so benign, like she simply gave in one day and ceased to live. It doesn't describe the pain she must have felt, the desperation, the fear. That thought more than any other still eats at him, still drives a wedge between him and the mission he doggedly pursues.
And then there is her, a woman so devoted to her own mission that she would go days without sleep, forget to eat, and sit quietly in dark corners when she thought no one was looking, crying for the failures and successes alike.
This is the woman he finds himself drowning in.
She is brutal and beautiful in her way, like the sea ravaging stone cliffs, or a storm that churns waves in the deep waters they sail on. She refuses to yield, refuses to accept the word "impossible", and that more than anything brought him into the maelstrom she created on his ship.
He had watched those cunning eyes of hers for signs of whatever emotion she would be throwing his way, but it wasn't until recently he wanted to see them closed in pleasure as his rough hands trailed her skin. He had rarely noticed her lips, not really, except to gauge if her words were tinted in sarcasm; he had found more and more he wanted to taste words of rapture as they are gasped from those lips. Her body had seemed small to him, capable and strong but never showing any of the smooth curves that had so attracted him to his wife.
He discovered recently that her thin frame brought out a desire set somewhere deep in his bones.
Somehow this back and forth they had played for longer than he cared to admit - guilt gnaws at him for his mental infidelity to his wife - has now reached a breaking point, unable to continue the subtle game between them. He doesn't recall the exact moment it happened, but something snapped like a tow rope unable to handle the unbearable tension between two ships, and abruptly those lips and that skin and her body was bare to him, just as volatile as the waters surrounding him.
Her touch scorches him, and he feels as though he understands the fever The Six underwent. The logic, the cool calm he prides himself in is gone in a delirium of flesh and half-spoken words, replaced by something far less inclined to think rationally. There isn't a perfect molding of their bodies, but rather a sort of seductive dissonance that leaves his hands unable to linger on one portion of her skin, or his lips to remain steady on her own.
Still, that guilt remains, but for now he can lose himself in this fragile, unbreakable thing, this woman who challenges his will and confronts his hard stubbornness.
She is drowning him, but he is willingly drinking her in.
Author's End Note: I don't normally ship these two (I ship Rachel with success and Chandler with happiness), but this idea came to me after a very long conversation about the two of them with a fellow writer. So while I would usually think them simply friends with a great deal of mutual respect, my friend made excellent points, so I might have more of these on the way. Well played, glassticket. Well played.