EARLY

H/N oneshot, follow up to She's Dancing With Another Man, but here's the basics of what happened if you haven't read it:

-Nikki married Aidan O'Connor, an Irish lawyer she'd been with for 2 years

-Harry gave her away at the altar, in place of Leo

-Harry struggled with the whole wedding and left early, as he thought Nikki looked happy

-Nikki had a daughter, Leanne, who she tells Harry will know him as Uncle Harry, she's his second chance

-This starts 5 years after the end of She's Dancing With Another Man

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

Spoilers: All aired, but only the majors: Harry leaving/Leo dying

It's been five years, and you'd think that would mean everything would have begun to sort itself out, but something's still niggling in his chest, especially whenever he goes over to see Leanne, which he does an awful lot. It's easier when he's at home, he can seem to distance himself from the whole situation, and act as if it's something happening thousands of miles away, and he supposes it is, really.

Everything in his life's as it's always been, when he was home (it's strange, he still thinks of London as home, it having been nearly ten years) with Nikki, before all of this, before she was married, before Leanne. He has numerous not-very-serious far-too-young girlfriends, and it never gets beyond a third or fourth date, it never gets anywhere near the dreaded commitment, and he's strangely content with that. It's as if anything actually developing into something would tell him with some finality that everything in his life's changed, and it's not going back.

And he's not ready for that, however long it's been.

He's heading to visit Leanne, he does it for a long weekend every couple of months, and he whisks her to various places little girls like, little farms in the country, pantomimes in the Christmas season, fairgrounds in the summer. He's taken Nikki up on what she asked of him back when Leanne was born, he's being as good as he can to her daughter, he's being the perfect 'Uncle Harry', he's not letting her ever see anything wrong with him, he's not ever doing anything in her vision that can't be construed as perfect. He did it all too wrong with her mother, that's not happening again.

The flight gets off the runway at JFK ten minutes earlier than planned, and he's lucky when he finally gets to Heathrow, his luggage is almost the first out, so he's through all the gates relatively quickly. He's on the road almost half an hour before he'd planned to be, in the end.

When Nikki answers her door, there are tears on her cheeks. She looks as if she's tried to have a hurried wipe of them, but they're still spilling from her eyes.

For a moment they stare at one another in silence, Harry wondering how on earth to breach the subject of how she's feeling, what's happened, and Nikki frozen in time for a moment, wishing she hadn't opened the door with such haste, wishing he'd chosen this one visit to be late, had given her time to dry her eyes and swallow everything that was going on, condemn it to the recesses of her mind, where it would safely be where no one could ever see it.

In the end, all she manages is: "You're early." Then she calls her daughter and 3 and a half feet of five year old girl come tearing down the stairs, shouting "Uncle Harry!" and jumping right up into his arms, and the moment's passed. There's nothing he can do or say, not now.

In the end, he plays with Leanne for a few hours, she shows him her newly decorated bedroom, introduces him with great formality to both her new goldfish, and very genuinely asks his opinion on immigration. She's always made him laugh; she's a right little character, but nothing she's saying right now, no laughs seem to take his mind off the look in Nikki's eyes when she opened the door. He puts the little girl to bed in the end, having to read her The Tale of Tom Kitten three times before her eyes have drifted closed and she's dead to the world for another day.

Then he takes a deep breath, because Nikki's downstairs in the kitchen, and they've hardly talked this evening.

And suddenly he's scared of what might be wrong, for both of them.

She's at the kitchen table when he gets down there, sitting with her head in her hands.

For a moment, in the doorway, before she's even looked at him, the words freeze in his throat, and he suddenly doesn't know what to say. Which is ridiculous, because they'll have known each other twenty years soon enough, and he's never not known what to say.

She notices him in the end, before he says anything, and gives him a small, forced smile. "Don't worry, it was nothing." There's something in her voice sounding almost resigned.

He shakes his head at her, suddenly feeling nearly twenty years of their friendship like a weight on his shoulders, for the first time in his life.

"I know you too well, Nikki," he shakes his head, "It's not nothing. You could have brushed me off, said it was a sad movie or something if you didn't want to talk about it, now… hell, you wouldn't be sitting here like this right now if you didn't have something you wanted to tell me, I-"

"You don't know me too well anymore, Harry, I don't want to hear that! You left, you disappeared from my life, I married another man… I had another man's…" she trails off there, clapping a hand to her mouth.

And for a moment, neither of them say anything.

She seems to decide that the silence has been long enough after a while, and she tilts her head on one side slightly, taking a deep breath.

"He's gone away for a few days. We're not happy, Harry. Not anymore."

It probably makes him an awful person, but there's at least a tiny ounce of his subconscious that wanted to hear that. There's that tiny jealous streak in there that wouldn't have her happy with someone else. And it's still there; as good as it's always been, despite the years.

But he swallows it, because that's the kind of person he is, and he sits beside her, and takes her hand. "I'm sure it's just a bad phase, Nikki, it's something you'll work through…"

She shakes her head, a sudden look of defeat on her face. "It's more than that. He loves Leanne, he does, but he always wanted a son, he's always told me that… and I… I can't have any more children, the doctor told me, something about having a limited number of eggs left or something…" she shakes her head again, almost as if in disapproval of herself. "I don't think he's going to get past it Harry… there's somewhere he wants to go in his life, and I was it, and now I'm not it anymore, and I don't really know what's happening…"

He wishes he had something to say to that, but he doesn't.

"I thought I was happy, Harry…"

He suddenly finds his tongue at that. "I know you did… That was why I left, that day, you looked so happy, in the right place, and the right place without me…"

She goes slightly grey, and she pulls her hand away from his. "What? Harry, don't do this now… You don't think I've been thinking enough about it…"

He shakes his head, "Why did you tell me, Nikki, if this wasn't something to do with me feeling how I feel? And don't tell me you had to explain why you were crying, I may have been away a long time, but do I still know you too well… you're the best liar there ever was, Nikki, you could have fed me anything…"

"I'd run out of lies, Harry. I've been telling them for too long."

Everything's a little bit of a blur, then. The next thing he knows they're both standing, and he's sure they're a little closer that they should have been, really, and there are fresh tears running down her cheeks, but somehow there's something quite alien to him in her eyes, and he's not sure it's a good thing at all. He's got a horrible feeling that if she keeps looking at him like that; he's not sure he ought to be trusted with another man's woman for much longer.

She gives him a small, half-hearted smile. "I suppose I've been lying to myself since the day you left, really, Harry… I told myself from day one that it was all alright, that you were just a friend that was leaving, that it was all going to be alright…"

"But it wasn't alright, was it?"

She shakes her head, a little laugh escaping, and she puts her hands on the sides of his arms, with a sudden sort of determination exuding from her. "It wasn't alright."

That's when it occurs to Harry. She knows what she's doing, she knows exactly what she's doing, and she's doing it anyway.

He's not sure he has it in him to argue. He lets her kiss him, through the tears, ignoring the ring on her finger, and the little girl sound asleep upstairs.

To start off with, they both seem to move like they're in slow motion. It's been a long time, and it's not quite how either of them remember it. And then her tongue snakes between his lips, and it's like someone's lit a match somewhere. Everything ignites, and before he can even start thinking, her arms are completely around his neck, his are on her waist, and he's backing her up against her breakfast bar, because he's been hungry for this for more than a decade, and once the fuse is lit, he doesn't suppose either of them wants to take it slowly.

There's a tiny voice somewhere in the back of his head, telling him she's married, telling him this is wrong, highlighting how this is everything he's always vowed he wouldn't stoop too, but somehow, he can't quite hear it. Because her hands are snaking their way down his chest, undoing each shirt button they go past, and his mouth, seemingly of its own accord, is travelling down her throat, and at some point after his last coherent thought she's lost her jumper. That's something close to a moan coming out of her mouth, with her head thrown back to maximise his attack on her neck.

And then her hands are finding the buckle of his jeans (he still hasn't started calling them pants, despite the number of Americanisms he's picked up), and everything's about to explode on them.

He'd like to say he resisted, he didn't want them to be like this when they finally happened, he wasn't into extra-marital affairs and quick, forbidden trysts in the kitchen, but her hands are on him, and her own jeans are around her ankles, and in moments she's hitched up with her legs around his waist, and suddenly everything's so much more complicated than it was when he got off the plane in Heathrow.

That's the start of the affair that characterises the next few months.

Really hope you liked/saw this as a plausible continuation of the Dances series/thought I kept with the tone of She's Dancing With Another Man, if in a different way.

Really really hope the end's alright, I can't write smut, so I didn't want to take it that far… just hoping it's alright.

Reviews are always very much appreciated. I am planning on writing some further parts to this story; I've got at least the next two planned.