The first night she'd kissed him she'd been clear-headed. She knew what she was doing, but she hadn't thought of what it would cause - the awkwardness, the pulling away, the pretending to have a friendship that had been shattered after that night. She hadn't thought through the consequences of that small lapse, she'd been so caught up in his scent and his hands on her.
So the next time she'd been drunk, to the point where all she could remember the next morning was the smell of booze and Sam's lips on hers.
It was the first time she'd had a drink in four years.
That made it easier, to pretend she hadn't wanted it so badly it hurt, to look past Sam the next day instead of at him even when she felt his eyes following her. To make the stammered excuses of I didn't mean it, I was drunk, it was a mistake.
God, but what a mistake.
And then they took on a mission together because Sam had wanted to and because she couldn't stand to have another minute on that plane with just them and the silence and the wanting. And she hadn't even realized it went wrong until the bullets were firing and the screaming started and Sam was slipping, falling onto the grass beside her. And then the firing died down and it was just her and the forest and the blood seeping through his shirt.
She couldn't think, at first. Couldn't realize because Sam couldn't be dead he couldn't the world could not possibly exist without him in it. And the blood was seeping into her hands and her shirt and she couldn't get away from it and she couldn't find a pulse and the world was frozen, warped because there was no way this was real.
And suddenly the world was too small, too silent. Too empty.
She couldn't breathe. Didn't want to. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare and have him lying beside her, laughing. Because there was a black hole opening up inside her and she couldn't think or move or breathe and his smile was the only thing that could stop it.
But she was never going to see it again.
And as she stayed there, crouched in a pool of blood with her head on his chest, breathing in his scent, sobbing not as if her heart would break but as if it had never existed, as if it had died with the man who carried it.
When she'd gotten back after the mission she'd locked herself in the bathroom, washing away the blood and grime. But no matter how hard she scrubbed the lingering image of it remained, the pool of red soaking into her skin. She broke down then, surrounded by the sterile scent of a hospital and the glaring of flourescent lights with dirt in her hair and blood underneath her fingernails.
That was the last time she cried.