The prompt that (very backhandedly) created this fic: "Am I dead?" "No, but you're going to wish you were."

I'd like to apologize right now for the fact that I've been binging some weird crap on Hulu lately. May or may not have influenced a certain portion of this fic. Also, this story is a major fast-forward from where we're currently at in canon. Enjoy!

"Absence, the highest form of presence."
- James Joyce -

Lucy's head was throbbing, eyes straining through the unbearable darkness for anything that was even remotely recognizable. For every second that passed without deliverance, she felt more lost. More alone. More confused. She was in a shadowy vacuum of nothingness, and it gradually became clear to her that it felt better to not think or move, to just accept whatever this was and not fight back.

But for as much as she sought to quiet her mind, there was one persistent idea that wouldn't quit nipping around in her head. She tested it aloud, letting her voice echo luridly into the barren void. "Am I dead?"

"No," a calm voice - one that she'd know anywhere - returned just a beat later, "but you're going to wish you were."

"Wyatt...is that you?"

Footsteps circled around her, but there was no immediate answer.

"Wyatt?" she persisted, searching blindly with shaking hands but coming back with nothing but stale air.

Was he really there? How was that possible? He was supposed to be somewhere else, wasn't he? But for some reason she couldn't remember where he was or what he was doing, just that was supposed to be absent for the time being...right?

It didn't matter. If he was here too - and that had definitely been him, there was no mistaking it - then Lucy knew they would find a way back to reality. He'd never let her down before.

With renewed determination, she balled her fists against her eyes and rubbed until there were fuzzy stars dancing across the blackened room. "Wyatt, please, if you're here - "

"We're all here, Lucy."

A switch flipped from just over shoulder. Dazzling white light permeated the room, knocking her backwards with its unremitting glare. She blinked several times until she could finally focus her vision.

Wyatt stood there, only inches away, but as he'd warned, there were others too. A long table stretched out behind him, a panel of familiar faces sitting at it with their full attention focused on her. Lucy scrambled to her feet, staring back at the unlikely assembly with a gasp scratching up into her throat.

Garcia Flynn sat at the center of the table with Amy on one side of him and Rufus on the other. Emma Whitmore sat beside Amy, and the two of them were dressed in identical flapper costumes. To Emma's right was Jiya, typing away on a laptop with a sour look twisting across her face. Lucy's mother was stationed just to the left of Rufus, and she regarded Lucy coldly with her hands folded primly over the tabletop. Denise Christopher was the last one to round out the group despite the extra chairs on each end, and there was a pen poised in her hand and several legal pads spread out before her.

Lucy tried to speak, but couldn't manage much more than a strangled noise of confusion as her eyes flicked back and forth over the group of them.

A door flew open from behind her, and she spun around to watch as Noah came ambling into the room in a set of pristine surgical scrubs. Jesse James trailed behind him with spurs on, shaking an angry finger in Lucy's direction as soon as he'd cleared the doorway.

"She's the one. Killed me like a coward. Reckon she's a coldblooded murderer if I've ever known one."

"Take it easy, Mr. James," Noah soothed him patiently, "you're all patched up now, good as new."

He nodded with a brash grin, tipping his hat in reply. "All thanks to you, Doc. I owe you my life. Don't know what you ever saw in this broad, though. You could do much better, fella."

Noah shrugged, then looked Lucy over with a slow grin. "You know what they say. No accounting for the mysteries of the heart."

Flynn cleared his throat from his place at the middle of the table. "Gentlemen, your seats please?"

They did as asked, flocking to either end of the table without another word. Lucy raised a trembling hand over her mouth, but a sob still wracked through her as she took a step backward. Wyatt shook his head with a cruel smirk, hands reaching for her before she could get any further.

"Sorry, professor. Everyone's waiting on you."

He led her forward, presenting her to the absurd committee with a quick nod to Flynn. At that signal, Flynn reached beneath the table and produced a weathered journal, the initials LP stamped into the crinkled leather cover just as she remembered it.

"Lucy Preston," Flynn began sternly, "do you know why you're here today?"

She shook her head, lips pressed together to withhold another billowing sob.

"I think you and I both know that's a lie, but I've come to expect as much from you," he said with a sigh of resignation. "Master Sergeant, would you please do the honors?"

Wyatt took the journal from the table and flipped through it causally. "I really thought you'd write about me more, Lucy. Kinda disappointed about that."

"You...you've read it?" she asked in nothing more than a whisper.

He barked out a laugh, and it wasn't long before the rest of the room was chuckling along with him.

Rufus spoke up, nodding at Carol with a knowing look. "We've all read it, Lucy."

"What?" Her gaze swept up and down the table, a trickle of sweat running down her spine. "But...I-I haven't even read it."

Amy scoffed with narrowed eyes. "You wrote it, Lucy. You know what's in there."

"No, I - "

"Here we go," Wyatt cut off her stammering response, his face lighting up as he found what he was looking for. "My favorite entry - the day you learned the truth."

She tried to examine the page he'd landed on, but he twisted away from her before she could see anything of value. "The truth about what?"

"About us," Jiya answered, glancing up from the laptop with a shrug. "Remember? The day you found out about our real identities."

Agent Christopher steepled her fingers together and smiled dully. "The day we asked you to join us, Lucy."

Wyatt thrust the book into her hands, pointing at the picture that had been pasted into place on the last page of the journal.

"Oh my God," she whimpered with tears stinging her eyes, dropping the journal and crumbling to her knees as she tried to comprehend what she'd seen. "How...how...?"

The picture was of all of them dated from today, everyone positioned just as they were at the table - Noah, Agent Christopher, her mother, Rufus, Flynn, Amy, Emma, Jiya, and Jesse James. Wyatt and Lucy stood together in front of them, the journal on display in Wyatt's hands as he held it out to Lucy. In scrawling cursive - cursive she recognized as her own - two words were written on the page, succinctly captioning the photo with a label that made bile churn up from her stomach.

Rittenhouse Summit.

"We're so glad you're finally accepting our offer, sweetheart," her mother said cheerfully. "It took some convincing for certain members of the panel, but we are finally in agreement. You're one of us now."

Jesse James made a grumbling noise, then hefted his boots up onto the table. "Just no more funny business with the bullets, okay princess?"

"Yeah, what he said," Emma agreed with a snarl. "One step out of line and you'll be the one who gets sidelined in 1882 this time."

Lucy slid backward across the floor, eyes flitting over to the door that Noah and Jesse James had come through just a minute ago, but the door had vanished. There was nothing back there at all really, just an infinite whiteness, inescapable and unending.

"No," she cried out brokenly, "no, no..."

Wyatt knelt next to her, his blue eyes clouded with a foreign look of apathy as he watched her struggle. "It's all over now, no use in fighting it."

She shivered, pressing her palms against the floor but going nowhere. "But...you - you said I could rewrite it, Wyatt. You told me I had a choice."

"I was wrong." He shook his head with a crooked grin. "Welcome to Rittenhouse, ma'am."

"No!"

Lucy sat straight up, and the momentum was so fierce that her body just kept on going until she was falling off of the couch and landing in a jumbled heap on the floor. The rug beneath her cushioned the impact enough to provide some reprieve from the jarring crash, but she was still in a panic, kicking wildly until her foot collided with the coffee table and nearly overturned the sloshing glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks.

That got her attention. There hadn't been any Johnnie Walker in Rittenhouse hell. No rug either, or couches or coffee tables for that matter.

She scanned the room with her heart drumming in overtime, taking note of the stark white walls and simple furnishings. It was comfortable but impersonal, something she'd planned to fix in Wyatt's absence but still hadn't gotten around to despite her better intentions.

It was home.

Which meant that ghastly room with glaring white lights and a single long table had been a figment of her rampant imagination; a nightmare, nothing more.

"Shit," she exhaled in a quivering breath, curling her knees up into her chest as she glanced around again. Soft light filtered in from the little galley kitchen, and an old movie played nearly inaudibly from the entertainment center in the corner. Everything else was completely still. It was just her sprawled out on the floor, Humphrey Bogart delivering his lines onscreen, and Johnnie Walker waiting patiently at eye-level on the table in front of her.

"Only a dream, Lucy...only a dream," she muttered to herself, clenching her fists in an effort to still their insistent shaking.

But it wasn't working. Her heart was still trotting along at an inhuman pace and she couldn't draw a full breath. She reached for the little glass tumbler on the table with the hope that it would help calm her ruffled nerves, but then maybe that had been the issue in the first place. Raiding Wyatt's alcohol cabinet had been a desperate move on her part, and on the off chance that her sadistic dream had somehow been the result of that damn bottle of Black Label - the one that reminded her so much of him that it hurt - then that was the last thing she needed more of...

Tears - whether delayed from the nightmare or triggered by the more recent thought of missing Wyatt, she couldn't really say - began to stream down her face, and before she had spent even an instant thinking about the wisdom of her actions, she was freeing her cellphone from her pocket and racing for his name in the list of recent calls.

As soon as the dialing noise began to hum against her ear, she realized the stupidity of what she'd done and pulled the phone away with a rattling exhale, cursing under her breath as she hastily ended the call before it was too late to do so. She closed her eyes, willing herself to pull it together before this spectacle she was making could become truly pathetic.

Probably too late for that, she silently acknowledged with a measly sniffle.

It was then that the phone clasped so tightly in her hands rumbled to life, vibrating with such a ferocity that it made her gasp and drop it clumsily to the floor.

"Damn it..."

Once she'd recovered the device once more, the name that flashed across the caller ID almost had her dropping it again.

Wyatt Logan.

How funny to think that she'd primly entered his first and last name when they first exchanged numbers with the expectation that he'd be nothing more than an impersonal colleague, someone who was meant to exit her life just as randomly and abruptly as he'd entered it.

She swiped at the fragments of saltwater on her cheeks and tried to clear the leftover agitation from her voice before accepting the call. "Hello?"

"Hey," he returned lightly, "look who's up awfully late on a school night."

She rolled her eyes at that, but it was nothing more than a reflex to his teasing when she was so unbelievably relieved to hear his voice. As it stood, he could have read a takeout menu over the phone and she would have been thrilled to do nothing but listen.

"That's because it's not a school night. Spring Break started today, so obviously I'm taking advantage of my time off and partying hard for the next week."

He made a clucking noise into the phone, and she could imagine the usual smirk on his face with perfect clarity. "You've got to be kidding me. I'm missing an entire week of body shots and bikinis? Damn."

She smiled at the conviction in his deep voice, biting down on her lip and trying not to break into weepy laughter. "That's right. I heard there might even be a wet t-shirt contest later on. Your loss."

"My loss indeed," he answered warmly, the grin evident in his words even if she wasn't there to see it for herself.

Lucy eyed the tumbler of whiskey on the coffee table and then couldn't muster another round of banter, because she was suddenly picturing Jesse James in that eerie white room, his face stony as he accused her of being a coldblooded murderer.

"Luce?" Wyatt's voice dipped even lower than normal. "What's up? For real, I mean."

"You...you don't think the wet t-shirt contest sounded real enough?"

He sighed, the sound of whooshing through the speaker like he was coming at her from a wind tunnel. "I think you're upset and you're trying to cover it up."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to shake off the last remnants of the dream. "Sorry, I know it's late and I'm not really supposed to call you out of the blue like this. It can wait until - "

"No," he said quickly, his voice firm. "I don't care that you called, okay? I was awake anyway, and you weren't interrupting anything. Just tell me what's wrong."

"But there's a rule in place for a reason. You call me when you have the chance, not the other way around. I didn't mean to do it, I promise, and I tried to hang up before it would actually go through but - "

"Lucy, I swear to God I do not care about that shitty rule. Stop apologizing and tell me the truth."

That tone of his - the one that was equally commanding and mollifying - squeezed right around her heart, instantly reminding her of the days where his assignment was to be at her side. It was the tone he implemented when he needed to keep her clearheaded and at ease even when the stakes were impossibly high. If he could inspire confidence in someone as unqualified as her, it was no surprise that he was so respected among his peers.

She never thought she'd have such an intense physical ache over the loss of her time traveling career, but there it was. She didn't just miss him, she also missed working with him.

"I...I don't know. I had a weird dream and couldn't snap out of it once I woke up...stupid, right? Everything's fine. False alarm."

"Was it a dream or a nightmare?"

She blinked at the unflinching cadence of his question. "Uh...more of a nightmare, I guess."

"One I've heard about before?"

"No," she breathed out immediately. "I've never...this was not normal. I don't...I don't really want to talk about it, okay? It just helps to hear your voice."

There was a slow lull on his end, almost as if he was weighing out his options. "I was in it, wasn't I?"

Under any other circumstances he would have asked that question with a cheeky accusation, turned it into something flirty and indecent. The fact that he'd completely skipped over the obvious punchline told Lucy that she must sound even worse than she'd realized.

"Um, yeah. You were."

"Lucy..." he dragged her name out, practically caressing those two syllables as he spoke them. "Just shoot straight with me, please."

She nodded reluctantly, gathering her courage and then blurting it out before she could dwell on the words for too long. "I was in this strange place, I don't know where, and you were there first, but then the lights came on and it was actually a whole bunch of people. Rufus, Jiya, Amy, Flynn and Emma both, my mom - oh and get this - Jesse James too."

He let out a low whistle. "Quite the assortment you have there."

"Uh huh. Plus Denise Christopher and Noah."

"Dr. Noah Rittenhouse was there?" he asked with a crackle of disdain.

"We've been over this, Wyatt. His last name is not Rittenhouse. His mother was the direct descendant, not his dad."

He grunted indifferently. "Oh right, his last name is Dead Meat If I Ever See Him Again. Thanks for reminding me."

"No problem," she answered with a weak smile. "So I couldn't figure out why all of these people were lined up together at a table facing me. Long story short, all of you were...were um, basically Team Rittenhouse. And I guess I'd finally learned the truth, which meant I'd been recruited into the club for real this time. Plus there was some freaky stuff with a picture of everyone in the journal. An exact replica of the scene in my dream was glued into the journal even though the whole thing was unraveling right then and there. It was like something out of The Shining or Twin Peaks, just less backwards talking. Not cool at all."

He hummed his agreement. "So how did it end?"

"Oh, with the typical horror movie cliche. The exit had somehow disappeared and there was no way out. And then you told me to stop fighting against it and officially welcomed me into Rittenhouse."

"Ugh, I hate dream-Wyatt. He sounds like a real bastard."

Laughter fizzed unexpectedly out of Lucy, causing a renegade tear to slip from the corner of her eye at the same time. "He even called me ma'am."

"No, that's so unoriginal of him."

"Tell me about it," she said with a chuckle. "He was all, 'Welcome to Rittenhouse, ma'am.'"

Wyatt groaned. "I want you to know that I'd totally kick dream-Wyatt's ass if that was an option."

"The notion is appreciated," she retorted with a grin, finally reaching for the whiskey and downing a bitter gulp before grimacing down at it with resentment. "The whole thing sounds pretty dumb once I say it all out loud. Shitty rule aside, I still feel silly for bugging you about this."

"You're not bugging me. That's impossible."

She laughed again, the sound of it bouncing even more heartily against the empty walls of the townhouse. "I can come up with approximately 12 examples of incidents where I was most definitely bugging you. And that's without even trying to be thorough about it. I'm sure there are way more than that."

"So that's the downside of romancing an anthropologist. She remembers everything. Documents it even."

"Don't talk about documentation, please," she said with a frown. "Dream-Wyatt complained that I didn't write about him enough in the damn journal."

"Have I mentioned how much I don't like that guy? Your subconscious seriously turned me into an insufferable little bitch."

"Trust me, I definitely prefer the real deal."

She hadn't meant to do so, but a bit of longing had crept into her voice, which meant she'd broken one of her cardinal rules regarding their scarce phone calls - never say anything to make him feel bad about the separation. It was awful enough that they were forced to be apart, and that sentiment clearly went both ways. He knew she hated it without her actually laying on some kind of unfair guilt trip, because he hated it too. The mention of heartache was something she'd promised herself to avoid at all costs, but she was feeling all kinds of lousy tonight and it had snuck its way in without her permission.

"Hey, are you..." he drifted off for a moment, muffled the phone against something for just long enough to make her feel crippled with concern.

"Wyatt? Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, just a second..." he said at some distance from the speaker.

Lucy dropped her head back against the arm of the couch and took a long, measured breath. There was no sense in jumping to the worst possible conclusion. There were a million reasons why he might be distracted from their conversation, many of which had nothing to do with the threat of impending danger.

But the silence on his end lasted for several more intolerable seconds and her imagination did her no favors. She knew the call hadn't been dropped because there were muted noises in the background, a quiet clicking and a shuffle of movement, but that was it. Against her better judgement, she reached for her glass of whiskey again. Even if it tasted about as good as sewer water to her, she still needed something to -

"Hey, Lucy? You still there?"

Relief flooded her bloodstream. "Yeah, but if you need to go that's - "

"No, well..." he cut back in smoothly, "...listen, it's not what you think."

She threw back another mouthful of the amber liquid before trying to make sense of his response. "You don't have to explain, Wyatt. I get it. Hush-hush military secrets and all that jazz."

"Actually it's more like hush-hush boyfriend secrets this time."

Lucy set the glass down with a heavy clunk. "What?"

"Let's just say that if dream-Wyatt shows up again later tonight, I'll be close enough to fight him off with my bare hands."

"You..." she fumbled her way to her feet and flew to the door, "...you mean - "

And there he was, as real as could be, causally striding up the front walk with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

She dropped her phone for the second time that night, was pretty sure that she actually heard something shattering this time, but she would have gladly flung her phone into outer space for all the more she cared about that right now.

"Wyatt," she murmured mostly to herself, her bare feet slapping against concrete until she was crashing into him with the force of an avalanche. His arms readily trapped her against his body, swinging her around and around until she was squealing and laughing and crying all at once. "Oh my God, Wyatt..."

"Honey, I'm home," he rumbled playfully against her ear before his lips began marking every inch of exposed skin along her neck and jaw. She ducked down with her hands scraping over his whisker-laden cheeks, turning his face up until their mouths were locked together for a devouring kiss that left her gasping for air. He lowered her back to the sidewalk and dropped his bag into the grass, then scooped her fully against him once more and reintroduced their tongues with such zealous diligence that she felt like she'd been zapped by a live wire. He slid his hands down to her waist as she crumpled his jacket in her hands, and she could feel the individual imprint of each of his fingers through her thin cotton top.

He broke the kiss with a sharp pop, his eyes dark and dilated as he gazed down at her with a look of disbelief. "Someone tastes like whiskey tonight, and I can guarantee that for once it's not me."

"I told you I was partying hard tonight, didn't I?" she retorted glibly, her mouth still pulling up at the corners despite his suspicious expression.

His hand rose to curve up into her hair and cup the back of her head resolutely. "I thought you were joking."

She brushed her nose against his and closed her eyes as she inhaled the misplaced scent of him that she'd been craving for weeks. "I wasn't. Except the only party I was interested in throwing was more of a pity party than anything else."

Wyatt kissed her forehead, her nose, her chin. "I've been known to throw a few of those myself from time to time."

"Yeah, well the company at mine was rotten," she replied quietly. "I...I just wanted to drink something that was...well, you."

His mouth was back on hers with a sweet vengeance, and he swept her body upward until her legs were circling his hips, the tangible evidence of just how much he wanted her beginning to make itself known as she clung to him. He was on the move, carrying her toward the house without parting their lips, but she yanked on his shoulders until he got the message and released her mouth with a grudging sigh.

"Your bag," she said breathlessly, "in the grass..."

He pressed her spine into the frame of their front door and left several sultry kisses down the line of her neck. "Don't move."

She watched him with misty eyes once he'd set her down again, studying everything from his slouchy jeans to his easy gait, soaking up every last detail of him while he was still at some distance away. He snatched up the duffel in a hurry and tossed it through the gaping doorway, then opened his arms to her in invitation. Lucy leaned in - to him, to the moment, to everything about this astonishing surprise reunion. She hugged him firmly around his middle, noting that he was just as whole and solid as he'd been on the far-off morning when she'd last held onto him like this.

"I missed you so much," she confessed into his jacket, "I know it wasn't really that long, but - "

"It was 53 days, and every single one of them sucked."

She chuckled bitterly, nudging her forehead further into him. "But that's short for you, isn't it? Our assignment with Mason Industries ran way longer than that. And don't you dare sugarcoat it. Tell me if I should normally be expecting worse than this."

He ushered her into their townhouse, swinging the door shut behind them before kissing her slowly, gently, fondly. "Yes and no," he said eventually. "The difference between this gig and regular deployment is that these special unit stints are far more unpredictable. Sometimes it's shorter than a week, and sometimes - "

"Sometimes it's almost two years before you can obliterate an entire secret society from the inside out?"

He framed her face in his hands with a rueful look. "Sometimes it could be even longer than that. But depending on the circumstances, there are some assignments where you could come with me if you wanted to."

Lucy perked up at that, dislodging his hands and pulling him with her as she nearly bounced into the living room. "Really!?"

"Yeah," he said, chuckling at her abundant enthusiasm, "think about it - we were allowed to be together in our free time while I was working for Agent Christopher. Now obviously it would be different since I wouldn't be able to talk to you about what I was doing, but - "

She hurtled herself at him, arms flying up around his neck as she pressed herself to him. "But nothing. I'd take whatever I could get."

Wyatt plopped the both of them down onto the couch, hands roaming up and down her back as he settled her on his lap. "I know it's not easy. I'm sorry, Luce."

She tucked her head against his neck and tried to keep her tears at bay. "It's okay."

"Is it?"

Lucy pulled back to catch his gaze, but his stormy blue eyes were trained on the bottle of Black Label that sat cockeyed on the coffee table. She let her fingers sketch across the planes of his face, caressing his skin with feathery little touches. She threatened to break her own heart if she thought too much about what he'd seen and done while they'd been apart, but she knew it was there whether she acknowledged it or not; this had been their first real separation since he'd gone back to work, and for as miserable as she'd been without him, he definitely had the shorter end of the stick. He wasn't just missing her. He was also dealing with God only knows what type of high-stress situation while she'd been comfortably giving lectures and grading term papers.

"I survived, didn't I? You're worth the wait, Wyatt."

He turned his eyes up to hers with a pained smirk. "Tell me what you're really thinking."

She stared back at him, her hands sifting through his short hair before moving down to his shoulders. "I'm thinking that I've never felt like this with anyone else. I've never been the type of woman to carry on like a nutcase out on the sidewalk for the whole world to see...crying and shrieking at almost midnight, putting on a real show for the neighbors I'm sure..."

His smirk melted into a more genuine grin. "Who doesn't love a good late night make out session in the front yard? Why pay for cable when you can just live next to us?"

Lucy grinned right back at him, giving his shoulders an affectionate squeeze as she pondered her next words carefully. "I missed you every day, Wyatt. More than I can even say, but I don't think I have to explain that to you. But for all of the worst parts of being away from you, this...this feels like you're giving me a piece of myself that never existed before I met you."

He leveraged a hand into her messy curls and brought her forward for a sweet kiss that was all too quick for her liking. "And you're giving me a piece of myself that I thought I'd lost forever...until I met you."

"I'm so glad you're home," she whispered, a solitary tear cascading down her face.

Wyatt chased that tear with his mouth, then kissed her soundly on the lips, keeping her so close that her chest heaved against his with every wobbling breath she took.

"Still prefer the real deal?" he murmured between kisses.

"Hmm?"

He smiled against her lips, aligning their foreheads together and inhaling deeply. "On the phone...you said that you preferred the real deal over that rascally dream-Wyatt. I'm just checking in to make sure I'm living up to those expectations."

"Oh definitely," she answered with a contented smile, "no comparison at all."

"Good. I've been having some interesting dreams too, you know..."

She laughed at his waggling eyebrows. "I'm guessing your dreams were far more enjoyable than mine."

"Enjoyable?" He tilted his head with faux consideration. "Yes. But believe me when I say that I was always very disappointed when I woke up and you weren't actually there to finish the job."

Lucy hid her face against his shoulder with a buzz of laughter. "I'm sorry that dream-Lucy was such a tease. She should have known better than to frustrate you like that. I'll have a talk with her about that bad behavior of hers."

"Don't bother," he said with a warm hand kneading against her neck. "I envision a very dreamless sleep for both of us tonight. No chance of dream-Lucy or dream-Wyatt turning up."

She wriggled provokingly against him and was rewarded with a decisively aroused groan. "Is that right?"

"Mmhmm. We'll be too exhausted for any of their nonsense. Either that, or we won't ever get around to sleeping at all."

"Happy Spring Break to me," she returned with a shot of pure joy, her hands threading up into his hair, connecting their lips once more for a kiss that had her heart drumming in overtime all over again.

Wyatt's prediction - as per the usual - proved to be overwhelmingly accurate. By the time he was done with her, the sun was just starting to peek up over the horizon and her earlier nightmare was a very distant memory, all but forgotten along with the remainder of her whiskey, the neglected TV that still played on well into the night, and the entire rest of the world for that matter.

When he was in her presence, everything else just so happened to become blissfully absent.