This is a short one-shot I wrote this afternoon during a week meeting (being the boss has its perks!) so no guarantees on quality/coherence/etc. I'm hoping to have an update to The Search for Something More fairly soon, but I'm currently struggling with a case of writer's block in regards to that story. Hopefully this quick one-shot will help.

Thanks so much to everyone for their reviews! I really, really do appreciate them, more than you know.

Why is it that we don't always recognize the moment love begins... - Anonymous

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary. – Maurice Baring

She can't pinpoint the moment she fell in love with him. She never has been able to, although in her more fanciful moments, she thinks it's because she's always loved him. That even before she knew there would be a Nathan Scott in her life, she loved him, the mythical man in her dreams of the future. Then Nathan stormed into her life, bringing with him a whirlwind of emotions she had never experienced before, and suddenly, the love she had always dreamed of was within her reach.

So when her son asks when she fell in love with Daddy, she can't give Jaime a specific moment. She wishes she could, but it's as if the immense love she feels for Nathan has always been with her. She can't imagine a time when she didn't love him, although she knows that's not true. Back when Nathan hated Lucas and Lucas hated Nathan, when she was merely Lucas's best friend and staunch defender, Haley knows there were no feelings between her and Nathan, except maybe dislike and a strange curiosity about the other. But then they fell for one another, and the time before faded like an old photograph, delicate and worn around the edges. Time softened the past, turned the not so pleasant memories of selfishness and hatred into hazy, distant remembrances that appeared gentler than they were. She supposes love does that, twists and turns and colors every memory until the past and present are so intertwined, it's impossible to remember not always loving Nathan Scott.

She wishes she had a moment. She wishes that she can point to a specific day, or a particular instance, and say that is when she knows she fell in love with him. That she had a moment of clarity where everything she had been feeling, the rush of emotions that left her as breathless as if she had just stepped off a rollercoaster, clicked together and she knew, this is love. Nathan has that moment, and sometimes she is so jealous he has that certainty that he can point to and say, this is when I knew I loved you. So many of the important events in her life—her friendship with Lucas, Nathan's proposal, the day she found out she was pregnant—are firm milestones in her mind. She can recite the conversation she and Lucas had the first day they met; she can still taste the rain she kissed off Nathan's neck as they rolled around in his bed after he asked her to marry him; she can recall with perfect detail the fearjoyexcitementdread that clutched her belly when she saw the two pink lines that forever changed her life. It seems strange to Haley that the most important event, the one that sent her hurtling through the greatest adventure she never expected, is one she can't remember. Shouldn't something so meaningful, so life-alternating, warrant more?

It still surprises her the moment Nathan says he first fell in love with her. Newly dating, and still battling the insecurities his oft-mentioned past brought forth, Haley was busy negotiating the emotional minefield of her first true relationship while Nathan was dealing with a hellish home life. He had never been much of one for emotional declarations; having lived with Dan Scott for the first sixteen years of life, he had learned that giving voice to emotions made one weak. Even during their short relationship, Haley had already discovered that Nathan was not used to being vulnerable and never willingly opened up to someone. He was closed off, seemingly unable to break free from Dan's unwavering control, and hesitant to break the façade of Nathan Scott, Basketball God.

Their relationship was just starting, something delicate and fragile and yet already surprisingly powerful, when Nathan took drugs. It was a stupid move, one that pushed him closer to being Dan Scott than ever before, that nearly derailed their story before it hardly began. Their earlier arguments, her growing concern that perhaps dating Nathan was too much for her, all of that faded when he collapsed on the court that night, and Haley can still feel the fear that swept through her as she saw the boy she was falling for rushed to the hospital. When he came to her house later that night, shaking and pale, her heart nearly shattered at his whispered plea for forgiveness; his revelation years later that that moment in her bedroom was when he fell in love with her smoothes the rough, painful edges of the memory that still haunt her at times.

If she's honest with herself, she's jealous Nathan has that moment, that specific instant where he can say, yes, this is when I fell in love with you. It's rather silly, to be jealous of a memory, and she can laugh at the absurdity, but sometimes she wonders if the struggles in the early months of their marriage would have been slightly less difficult if she had had such a moment to give her comfort and assurance that they hadn't made a mistake in marrying so young. She has never doubted her love for Nathan, but she can't deny that having such surety may have made their path easier. Maybe she could have used it to reassure him of her love when she left for the tour. Maybe the months during his depression wouldn't have been as hard if she had a memory she could reflect on during the lonely nights she cried herself to sleep. Maybe, maybe, maybe. . .

But then she knows that no matter what, no matter if she had a moment like Nathan's or not, their path would have been just as turbulent, amazing, heartbreaking, and wonderful as it was, because regardless of whether she can point to a particular instant, she knows one thing with absolute certainty:

She will always be in love with Nathan Scott.

fin