"About time you got here. We have to hurry. My husband will be home soon."

"Wiseass woman. Just look at the wiseass I married." Jay definitely was looking. Half-awake, hair corkscrewed ten directions, wearing one of his old shirts...and he wanted her so badly that it felt like pain.

"That's what you get for waking me up. What do I get for you waking me up?"

"You don't want to go back to sleep?"

"Nuh uh. Gimme sleepy sex."

"Won't your husband be mad?"

"Completely insane, if I do it right."

Oh, damn. He couldn't get rid of his clothes fast enough, including what of them she had on.

Sometimes, he just wanted slow and lazy and...yeah, sleepy. Just to feel her being soft and warm and close and here. Nearly losing her wasn't wearing off very quickly at all. Blood and blades and nails in his back could be for another time. Right now, he wanted to hear the tiny gasps and sighs that bubbled from her like a spring when he got this way just right.

She wasn't joking about sleepy sex, either. They finished, dozed, tangled together again, catnapped more, until the sun made the sleeping part too difficult. They talked instead then, neither willing to get out of bed quite yet.

April stretched with a happy groan, enjoying the crackle of little things in her lower back. "God, I'm going to learn to hate this time of year so fast. It's already pissing me off pretty well."

The G1 meant he was going to be away for a very long stretch, the longest by far they'd had to face to this point, with a bonus trip overseas for the first day. He'd tried floating the idea of her going along for that; she hadn't even let him get the whole sentence out. All things considered, he'd let it go at that. "We still need to find you a hobby. One you can still do when I'm not here."

"Well, there goes my first idea." She dug herself back into the tangle of pillows, blankets, and him. "You do know I'm fine as is, right? That's a big library. Lots of books. And I go out by the water and look at boats and do the horn thing like a big goof."

"Horn thing?"

Her arm appeared from under the sheet and she made a cord-pulling gesture that was unmistakable. "And only about half of them do the show me your tits thing." She pulled the top of the sheet up and back down in an also unmistakable gesture.

"All solitary things. Including flashing ship pilots."

"No, that takes two. People. And tits, preferably. Stop fretting over me. I'm pretty solitary even on my most social day. Always have been, since I was a kid. This isn't new, and it isn't involuntary. So tell your mom to stop worrying. Okay?"

He laughed. "Apparently neither of us is as sly as we think we are."

"I'm just not into oceans of people around without you there being my snarly breakwater."

He laughed. "Mum's not an ocean. If you'd go shopping with her now and again, have lunch once in a while, she wouldn't think I married a hermit."

"And she'd get off your back."

"Well...yes, there's that, too."

She sighed. "Okay. But I suck at this stuff, and it's your job to make sure she knows that going in."

"You don't, that's the thing. You know what Tama thinks of you, and Robbie would follow you straight into the middle of Hell, kinky new girlfriend or not. You don't get that from being terrible at people."

"What's going on there, anyway?"

"With him and his girlfriend? You should probably ask him that."

She mock-punched him in the arm. "No."

He sighed. He'd been aching to talk with her about all this, like he did with so many things, but it was something he also didn't want to burden her with. It was all going to upset her, no doubt about that. "Robbie apparently didn't do his homework where we're concerned. He joined a pack of assholes, and he just isn't one."

"And if it doesn't gel?"

"Then he's going out the way everyone goes out. But I'll make certain that's all, so long as he doesn't play any games on his way out. Which I doubt he would."

"And Tama and Tanga?"

"It's that obvious even from a distance, hmm? I don't know. They may not have decided what's happening yet, or they may have decided not to tell me. All I can do is wait. I owe them that." He paused, eyes closed. "Robbie might not be the only one who stepped into something he doesn't really belong in. I'm definitely the least leaderly boss they've had in a while."

"It's not like any of them are fans of authority, anyway. It seems like it was always everyone does their own thing and just gets together on what takes group work."

"The problem being, I'm not a rally the troops sort of person."

"Try sex. It works on me."

"Oh, and where do you think I should start with that?"

"Robbie, definitely. But I want video and you both have to talk dirty the whole time."

Sometimes, all he could do was stare.

She laughed softly and took his hand, pulling it up against her cheek. "Want to know what the past couple of years have taught me? Shit not only happens, but if you try to fuck it over so it doesn't, it'll rearrange its schedule so it can happen some worse way. Letting things just kind of do what they're going to do when you can't control them anyway is a lot less stressful. Look at how nice the month leading up to New York would have been if I'd just stopped digging my heels in and gotten ready for it instead. Let change happen, deal with the aftermath. The whole universe is made of change. You can't fight all of it."

"And that's why you're going reassurance-shopping with my Mum next week?"

She gave his hand a squeeze and then let it go so he could decide where he wanted it to be. "Yes, that's why I'm going. And that's why you're not going to take a tag match where you had to ride herd on the bottom tier of the group as overall judgement on how you're doing."

This was why he missed her being with him, maybe even more than the sex. He'd gotten into the habit of bouncing ideas, thoughts, plans, just everything off her and watching the different angles she sent them back in. He could and did do it over the phone, but it wasn't the same as this, with her relaxed and neither of them thinking about how the other wasn't there. She could light up corners of things that he didn't even know were there. Never mind stupid movie babbling, this is what someone completing you really means. "Well, we did lose in the most brainless and awkward way possible."

"You still did all right. Most people couldn't organize those two into a straight line, let alone into a team."

It took a moment of flashback to geometry for the laughter to hit him. "Make me breakfast, evil wench."

"Okay. You want me to fry you, scramble you, or just eat you like you are?" She got up, though, and grabbed the shirt she'd had on when he arrived. He would much rather have watched naked breakfast-making, but when he'd raised the idea once, she'd sung him a song that had made him laugh the idea out of existence. At least the shirt was just short enough on her that when she reached up to the second shelf of the cupboard, interesting things happened.

"I need a horn to blow."

"You need an anatomy lesson. My tits are in front. And they aren't going to be down there for at least another 60 years."

He managed not to fall out of bed laughing, but only just. I'd like someone to tell me why this doesn't get to be my morning every morning. That's all, just why.