A/N: One of the B&B conversations I've always wanted to see continue is the S3 conversation with Sweets in which Booth and Brennan brew their relationship down to "coffee, just coffee." How could she be so quick to say she'd "probably not" have coffe with Booth? Here's my take on what they might have said to each other later that night. Spoilers for "The Secret in the Soil" / episode 3x04. Let me know what you think!
Also, just as an FYI, I'm going to reopen my short two-shot, "To Live Without Regrets" with more chapters, so check it out if you're curious! The next update will probably come along next week sometime.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bones or its characters, but I could use a nice mug with their pictures!
-.-.-.-
Their session with Sweets finally over, Booth and Brennan stood outside of his office. The partners and their psychologist were still getting used to each other. Sweets had threatened that the FBI might sever their partnership, something neither liked to hear, so Booth and Brennan each had felt defensive and anxious when the younger man said they had "issues" he needed to discuss with them.
"So, do you want to get our usual post-case drink, Bones?" Booth asked, trying to appear unfazed after the somewhat awkward conversation that taken place about halfway through the session.
"Of course I do, Booth, I'm not going to let a psychologist get between us and our after-case tradition," Brennan responded, also trying to sound unfazed. "Where should we go?"
"Founding Fathers," Booth responded quickly. The diner had coffee, after all, and he wasn't sure he felt like coffee just then, not after that particular beverage had figured so prominently in the strange conversation. "C'mon, let's go." He placed his hand at the small of her back and started to guide her out of the waiting room and thought back over what she'd said in Sweets' office.
"There's clearly a very deep emotional attachment between you two," Sweets said as he flipped through their questionnaires and looked back and forth at each partner in turn.
"We're just partners," Booth said quickly. How many times had people assumed differently? Too many to count, and his and his partner's psychologist seemed to be one of them.
"And why do you think I would have thought otherwise?"
"'Cause you're 12." Booth enjoyed taunting the younger man, even if he wasn't actually only twelve years old.
Brennan leaned forward in her chair. "Don't read into anything that Booth said. We're professionals. There's a line that doesn't even need to be there."
"Not at all, I mean, if there were no more murders, I would probably not even, you know, see her." He rushed to agree with his partner.
"That's very true." Brennan sounded quite certain of herself, Booth noticed, and he wasn't entirely sure he never wanted to see her again. If he'd been honest with himself, he would have been very much sure he wanted to see her time and again.
"Might have coffee." Booth suggested nonchalantly, as if it didn't really matter.
"Probably not." Brennan's reply was equally nonchalant, but Booth's face fell and he turned to her startled.
"What?" She didn't even want to have coffee with him? Did she really care that little for not only her partner, but her friend?
"What?" Brennan's face evidenced confusion over Booth's alarmed response. Sweets watched the exchange with a small smile on his face.
"You wouldn't even have coffee with me?" Now he sounded genuinely hurt, and he let it show.
Brennan tried to explain, to take that hurt look off of his face. "Well, in your scenario, we wouldn't even know each other because there are no murders."
"Were. I said no more murders." He shook his head. Of course they'd still know each other, because they'd been solving murders for years, pretty much. But if, by some miracle of God, there were no more murders in the world, he'd still know Bones; she wouldn't be out of his life entirely. He certainly hoped she'd have coffee with him, and probably dinners at the diner, too. As for anything else – well, that was all in the past. Brennan was his best friend, not his potential girlfriend in any hypothetical (and unlikely) "no more murders" scenario.
His partner seemed satisfied with his response. "Then fine. I mean, we could have a coffee. So that's clear, then? I mean, we'd have coffee and that's our relationship? Coffee."
"Yeah, let's move on." Booth felt tired of this conversation already; it made his head spin and he rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers.
-.-.-.-
The partners sat at their usual high table by the bar at the Founding Fathers. They clinked their beers together in celebration of another case closed. Booth didn't really want to talk about the case, however. Brennan's words in Sweets' office hung heavy in his mind.
"I just can't believe I had to prod it out of you that you'd have coffee with me. That hurt my feelings, Bones, those same feelings you were so quick to defend." He'd been impressed with the way Brennan called Sweets on his accusation that Booth couldn't "access his feelings." If Sweets couldn't already tell that it was his partner who had a lot of issues in that department, maybe they were both right not to put much stock in psychology.
"Sorry." Bones looked down at the table.
"So you really wouldn't want to have coffee with me?" Booth sounded almost petulant, the vocal version of the puppy-dog look that so often radiated from his features.
"Why are we talking about this?" Brennan asked.
"I don't know, maybe because, as you know, I have feelings?" The anger in Booth's voice surprised even him.
"What sort of feelings?" Brennan immediately tried to cover the fact that her voice had actually squeaked as she spoke.
Booth looked away, flustered. "You know. About whether I'd get to see you or not. Come on, Bones, we eat together pretty much every day. Are you going to tell me that if we had no reason to see each other for work, you'd drop out of my life just like that?" He flung his fingers open with a flourish and made slight "poof" sound.
Brennan peered at her partner from around her beer. "You mean if they'd severed our partnership?"
"No, I mean no matter what, we'd still see each other, right?" Booth paused. Why did his partner have to be so difficult sometimes? She could spout anthropological theories about practically any aspect of human life and culture, but trying to get her to put an "I" in front of those statements was like trying to lead a cat to swim in water on a leash. He tried again. "What if they severed our partnership?" he asked.
"But they didn't, Booth. Why speculate?" She looked back at him again.
"I don't know, I'm just asking. What if they did, what would happen next?"
"I suppose I wouldn't see you for a few days, and then you'd wonder if I was eating according to the schedule maintained by most individuals in Western cultures, so you would come to the lab and drag me away from my bones to some sort of greasy place to make me eat unhealthy food, just so you could be sure I was taking care of myself." She punctuated her words by waving her beer in the air as she made her points.
"So you wouldn't call me." Booth said, but he smiled, chuckling slightly at her essentially accurate depiction of what would probably happen. "Not even for coffee. Or breakfast."
"I wouldn't need to call you for coffee because you'd already be at my office with coffee, or you'd call me about breakfast at the diner. Didn't you hear what I just said, Booth? I know you'd still check up on me."
Booth wondered if this was Brennan's way of telling him she liked that he took care of her, her way of letting him know that she valued his presence in his life, and if their partnership had been severed, that she'd have wanted some of their habits to continue.
"Bones, for all your difficulties with interpersonal relationships, you have a pretty good read on my character." He flashed her a charm smile, his anger and frustration melting away slowly.
"I've had several years in which to study your habits, Booth, so my body of evidence is quite sufficient for me to draw accurate conclusions."
"You're welcome. I think. That was a thank you, right?" She nodded almost imperceptibly. He took a swig of his beer and looked at her closely. "I guess I just wanted to know if you'd call me, Bones." He looked away again. "Because you would, right? You wouldn't just leave me hanging? I might have told Sweets that we're just partners, but there's never been anything 'just' about our partnership."
"And Sweets knows that, Booth. I had to lead him away from the road."
"I think you mean 'put him off the trail,' Bones. It's 'put him off the trail.'" Booth interrupted out of long habit.
Brennan spoke again. "I had to 'put him off the trail,' then." She used little air-quotes around the phrase. "If I'd admitted to him that we could have coffee, he'd immediately think we'd sleep together."
"What?" Booth's jaw dropped and he nearly choked on his swallow of beer. He knew Brennan's mind worked quickly, but he wouldn't have thought that even her mind leap that fast. "Where do you get that hare-brained notion from? We have coffee all the time, and we've never, ever had sex." Booth tried to push out of his mind any further thoughts whatsoever, positive or negative, about that subject.
"Sweets would think that if we had coffee together outside of our working relationship, we must have feelings derived from biochemical reactions as well, and he would be very, very excited about the possibility. It would have been a distinctly uncomfortable experience for me, and given your reluctance to talk about sexual intercourse, for you as well." Brennan responded, looking for all the world like she spoke logic's own truth.
"Oh you're right it would have been uncomfortable!" Booth said, attempting to regain his composure. He glanced around them, looking to see how many heads had turned at this particular instance of his partner's use of the phrase sexual intercourse. Heads always turned, and he really, really found that uncomfortable. He'd have been hard pressed to say whether Sweets' scrutiny or his partner's odd choice of euphemisms in public places made him more uncomfortable.
"You should thank me, then, Booth, for making sure the rest of our session with Sweets lacked discomfort."
"Thank you," he grumbled.
"Say it like you mean it, Booth."
"Thank you, Bones, for making sure that Sweets doesn't think that our having coffee means you want to have sex with me!" More heads turned and Booth groaned again. Now he was causing it.
"That's better," she chirped brightly. "I accept your apology."
Both partners took long swallows from their beers.
"I still don't understand your reasoning," Booth said. "I get that you wanted to put Sweets off the trail, but my gut is telling me there's something else, too." He looked at her, trying to convey that despite his obvious discomfort, he really did want to understand.
"Well, there's the line." Brennan said, emphasizing her words. For himself, Booth wished, not for the first or last time, that he'd never mentioned a line—except that sometimes the line was a damned convenient way to avoid the twists and turns of Brennan's emotional geography. Right now the line as he imagined it looked more like one of Parker's scribbles from his first toddler drawings than the clear-cut divider he'd imagined when he first gave the line its name.
He waited for her to continue but it seemed she thought she'd been clear enough. "The line, yes. What about it, Bones?"
"Between work and personal life. Having coffee would cross it. It would imply the possibility that we could have—"
"Don't say it, Bones, I know what you're going to say." He shook his head. "You're afraid that any get together outside of the context of work might lead someone like Sweets to infer that we have feelings for each other, and coffee is just the first step."
"Yes, Booth, that's exactly what I meant." She used her "I can't believe you only figured that out now" tone of voice. Booth didn't like that tone of voice. It was impatient and it implied, he felt, that she thought she was better than everyone else, which, by her supposedly objective standards, she was—except that it had been a long time since she'd lorded it over him very often, and he wasn't used to it.
"Screw the line—metaphorically, Bones. Screw the line metaphorically. This is you and me we're talking about here, right? The line… that was a long time ago, and somehow I don't think we need to sleep together to cross it. There are shades of gray, not just black and white. Coffee doesn't mean sex, it just means coffee. Nice warm coffee, mmmm." He wafted his beer cup under their noses as if it were steaming hot. Brennan smiled and pretended to sniff his bottle.
Booth persisted. "You admit that you'd call me?"
"Of course I'd call you, Booth. We could have coffee. Or breakfast at the diner. That would be nice. I agreed to all of this at Sweets' office, Booth."
Booth only shook his head. Brennan's eyes flew wide with realization. "Oh. You actually want an apology, don't you, Booth, for my hurting your feelings, even if I had absolutely no intention to do so."
"Mmmph." He said with a nod.
"Booth, I am sorry that I hurt your feelings." She put her hand on his arm and squeezed gently. He looked at his arm in surprise. "I really am," she repeated. "Can we just enjoy our beers now?"
"That'd be very, very nice, Bones." He turned to her with a softer twinkle in his eyes as a wide smile erupted. "Just one more thing. Coffee at the diner tomorrow morning, partner?"
"You bet, partner," she responded, grinning back at Booth.