Sully.
Not Booth.
Sully.
Brennan scanned the cabin groggily, half-expecting to find her former partner naked beside her looking as visibly frazzled as she felt, her dream had been so very, very real.
But of course he wasn't there. A cold, heavy weight suddenly made itself right at home in the pit of her stomach.
She sat up with the sheet carefully tucked under her arms and rubbed her eyes, trying to make sense of what was happening.
"Charter?" she replied dumbly.
"Babe-you okay?" Sully asked. "I'm sorry-I shouldn't have gotten you up like that. I didn't think you'd be so out of it. You slept alright?"
"Yes, of course" Brennan answered defensively, unfairly feeling like Sully was trying to pry into her inner thoughts when of course, he wasn't. What motive would he even have to want to do a thing like that? Still, she couldn't help the slight resentment she felt towards him-and the guilt.
Because her companion had interrupted that charged, incredibly detailed dream, and because she had no business having it in the first place.
She groped around in her brain's vast storeroom of knowledge, looking for something to explain away her strange behavior.
"I'm fine. I was just in the middle of a dream cycle. REM periods are harder to wake up from, that's all."
"Anything good?" he asked, and she immediately felt a maelstrom of fire rise up from her belly and go straight to her face. The heat made her cheeks tingle.
"Must have been pretty intense. You look like you ran a marathon."
"I can't remember all of it," she lied. "I think it involved some sort of criminal investigation, maybe some experiment."
"That's my Temperance. You can take the girl out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the girl."
Sully was talking with a mouthful of toast, and Brennan suddenly found herself taking an intense dislike to that particular habit of his. It was truly inexplicable that it should be bothering her so much right now, when she'd already been dating him for close to three months-it's not like he hadn't done it before in her presence. What the hell was wrong with her?
Bluntly put, this was not turning out to be a very pleasant morning.
She placed the blame for her moodiness squarely on how tired she felt. It wasn't anyone's fault, least of all poor Sully's. Late night, too much wine, too hot to sleep well; not a good combination, even in an idyllic tropical setting.
After she managed to catch her breath somewhat, Brennan got out of bed slowly, the cobwebs of that unnerving dream still draped all over her mind like a heavy shroud. Her eyes came into focus and she noticed that Sully was looking at her with the eyes of a man on the prowl.
She looked down at herself. In a weird coincidence that caused her confidence to fall even further, she was wearing the same white tank top she had on in her nighttime escapade; given how little it hid and the sexual nature of her relationship with Sully, it was only logical that his male interest would be piqued as the sheet fell away.
"Maybe it's not too late for a little something extra" he said, waggling his eyebrows at her.
That was the final straw. Temperance Brennan, who normally didn't possess an ounce of modesty, feeling embarrassed by the fact that the man she was dating was openly staring at her body. Modesty was unnatural, a learned behavior meant to keep perfectly normal impulses in check; she knew that. So why was she suddenly feeling so exposed?
More blame went to the wine and the heat.
Grabbing the nearest cover-up, she pulled a dirty t-shirt over her head and forced herself to smile.
"I really need to get going. Professor Ayamii from the Caribbean Anthropological Institute is waiting for me at his office. He and his students are excavating a pre-Columbian site in the western part of the island. They're in the process of uncovering human remains and artifacts which were partially unearthed during the last hurricane, and he wants me to accompany him to the dig this morning. I mentioned it to you yesterday."
"Yeah, I remember you telling me something about that. Guess the black bikini you were wearing at the time completely wiped it off my mind."
She looked at the bedside clock in a manner she hoped might pass for surprise.
"I overslept; I have to be there in less than an hour and I still have to get dressed. I can't be late-I'm sorry."
The list of fabrications kept growing.
The meeting wasn't in an hour; more like two, but she absolutely had to get off this boat as soon as possible-she felt like she was suffocating.
"Your call," Sully answered, not sounding terribly disappointed. "It was a long-shot anyway. After the charter, then?"
She nodded on her sprint to the cabin's lone bathroom.
"Maybe," she answered noncommitally. She closed the door behind her just as the sound of blood thumping in her ears was starting to reach a deafening crescendo.
Only when she was safely locked inside the tiny bathroom did she feel like she could finally loosen up even a little. She splashed bottled water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror.
She was a wreck. Startled eyes, pink cheeks, tangled hair, and an overall look of complete shock that no bottled water could erase.
Fitting too, because she felt like a wreck.
It had all been so real she thought, as her heart kept racing. She had been with Booth. Been with him in that way. His breath had warmed her neck and shoulders, her breasts, the dip just below her ribcage; his tongue had probed the inside of her mouth with soft insistence, his hands had been all over every inch of her body. He'd been pulsing within her, and she had wrapped her arms and legs around him in return to keep him exactly where he was because it had felt so good to have him inside her.
She blinked several times in quick succession, trying to make the disorientation and the sudden throbbing between her legs go away. No, not real, she told herself, no matter how it felt. None of it was real, especially not the strange sensation of emptiness, the giant void in the center of her chest that only seemed to increase as she became more and more attuned to her surroundings.
Absolutely not real; none of it. The images, the feelings, were simply an illusion. She was with Sully in Sully's boat, at least 1,500 miles and more than four weeks away from Booth. This was Anguilla, not D.C.; the Caribbean Sea, not the Potomac. There was no jasmine, only the smell of diesel fuel and of aging seaweed floating in the warm oily water of the picturesque harbor.
And the dream meant nothing; probably just her psyche's way of processing the fact that after years of working with him, she was no longer Booth's partner.
Of course she was bound to miss him a little after they'd spent all that time working together.
It would all pass soon enough, she said to herself. Today's field trip would keep her busy and mentally engaged, and she would return to Sully's boat later this afternoon in exactly the same frame of mind that had possessed her last night, before the appearance of this morning's awkward, highly inconvenient chimera.
Dreams were funny that way; they came and went with equal ease, and no matter how solid they seemed upon first waking, by the end of the day little if anything of them was left behind for the dreamer to interpret.
When she finally dug up the courage to emerge from the bathroom to get dressed, Sully had already gone topside to prepare for his group of businessmen and she breathed a sigh of relief. She really didn't want to change in front of him-not right now, not next to those same sheets that seemed to hold something of what Booth and her had definitely not been doing on them.
For a moment, she seriously considered laying down on the bed one more time to experience some of the more lively aspects of the dream in her head before the whole thing completely faded away, but she decided right on the spot that indulging her fancy that way was a terrible idea, for reasons any intelligent person really didn't need spelled out. So after putting on her clothes and avoiding the temptation of the suddenly illicit satin sheets, she went upstairs and gave Sully a quick kiss on the cheek, ignoring the fact that he was probably expecting something much more substantial by way of goodbye.
"Don't forget that you can stop at my friend John's tennis club if you want a real, fresh water shower. I know you don't like how the water from the tank smells. Sure you can't take a 10 minute break?" he added, squinting in the bright sun and smiling at her in his most winning way.
"I'm sorry-I really have to go" she replied, already running down the ramp on her way to hail a taxi at the far end of the dock. Sully shrugged and waved her off before turning his attention back to his fishing rods.
She was relieved-and grateful-that he didn't seem too hung up on her hasty farewell.
A break, she definitely needed a break, but not of the variety that her companion had in mind. Just a little time to think, or maybe not to think, and everything should be fine.
