Ed Sheeran's "Divide" was playing all through the apartment's surround sound speakers. Rick had discovered the song 'Dive' and it quickly became the soundtrack for pining away after Michonne. Now, content in their reunion, they relaxed cuddled on the sofa after eating the food Deanna left. As usual, in his gray basketball shorts and navy tee, Rick felt underdressed next to her- though he was considerably more covered.

She was wearing only a bra and panty set. He wasn't sure how many bra and panty sets the average woman had. He could only remember Lori having maybe two or three actual sets. Michonne had to have over 40. Whenever she went shopping she came back with a new bra and panty set. Rick wasn't sure if that was normal. It seemed kind of excessive, especially to his low-key frame of mind. But that was Michonne: excessive.

She made sure he couldn't complain. She always looked gorgeous, like a work of art traipsing around the house in nearly nothing. She'd laugh at his predilection to stare as though it should be a normal site for him by now. But the coral and mint floral print she had racked over her curves today, looked like fireworks in the night sky against her ochre skin, Rick was pretty much zombified at the sight of her.

She rested at his side and from his angle above her slouching posture, the fare of her petite breasts was on full display above her flat belly. Her pedicured feet, resting on the coffee table, the cross of her perfectly-toned legs and voluptuous crowding of her thighs disordered every thought he had. One way or another, all her stunning features led to what he couldn't see from this vantage: the masterpiece between her thighs and the happy fat ass she sat on.

They were catching up on the events of each other's lives since they'd been apart, when Michonne mentioned her sister's due date and he finally remembered to tell her that Sasha called. He thanked the Lord he'd remembered before Sasha had to call back. The man who had been ordered to 'tell her to call me and then make sure she does' thought he had escaped the pregnant lady's wrath- if only Michonne would cooperate and make the call.

He handed her phone to her.

"I don't feel like doing a phone call with her right now, Rick." She tossed the phone back on the coffee table and wiggled further down into the nook under his arm. "I'll call her later. When you go to work tonight, I'll have plenty of time to talk. I just want to focus on you right now." She crawled into his lap, mounting him like a saddle and giving him slow plush kisses with her pretty lips. In this new position, he could finally see her other plump little lips through the smooth cling of her microfiber bikini-cut bottoms and his manhood quickly paid homage.

He kissed her back a little, but quickly pulled away, recognizing her familiar technique for distraction. Rick set his mind back to purpose, "You don't feel like talkin' to her..." he acknowledged. "I don't feel like gettin' yelled at." He stretched forward and she dipped backwards with him. Michonne kissed his neck even more shamelessly with her hands gliding through his, still uncombed, mop. He picked the phone back up and put it in her hands. "Stop it." He reprimanded, trying to ignore the humor he found in her natural inclination to be difficult and non-compliant. He gestured to the phone, "Call."

Michonne sucked her teeth, sighed and grumbled, "She's so damn nosey! She's cooped up in the house with all those kids and she's bored." She looked at him now, hoping his usual (and commonly ignored) request for privacy in their relationship would get her off the hook, "All she wants is to hear about what we did last night."

Rick simply looked at her, unfazed by any argument she made. "I'll be glad when she can go back to work and have some business of her own. I don't care. I'm not calling her." She shook her head critically as she went to their text messages and started typing. "I told you, I have to go over there tomorrow anyway to get this baby shower and nursery straight." She said with her characteristic stubbornness, "I'll send her this text and she can love it or leave it."

Hey little big sis. Rick told me you called. Don't worry. I'm ok. I'll be over there around six tomorrow.

Michonne concentrated on what to type as Rick replied to her rant,

"Sasha's got a lot of business, trust me." Rick piped up, knowing how hard motherhood was, seeing Lori struggle with just one kid. "She may be cooped up, but she is nowhere near bored." He recalled the battle of breakfast he'd listened in on earlier. "When I talked to her this mornin', it sounded like she was back on the front lines... and the kids were winnin'." He chuckled glad to be done with that part of parenting but also looking forward to doing it again, at some point, with the lady on his lap.

They had talked about it seriously before the whole debacle with Mike and agreed it was something they both wanted. Michonne was determined to walk down the aisle with a pre-baby body in a slinky lace wedding dress. She'd felt like he might pop the question soon and then maybe once Rick sold his house they'd try for a baby. She wasn't sure if all the drama of the past three weeks had changed that timeframe though.

Rick knew he had to have his money more than right for that next step, with all the money going out every month for Carl. Wanting to get on with their life had set a fire under Rick. And now that he was home, he was ready to grind. Ever since he had a family, he'd been proud to be a provider. So, he was plotting all kinds of ways to make and stack money.

"I'll be glad when she can get back to work, too." Rick agreed. It was beyond lucky that Sasha and her husband had military backgrounds. Rick was in the process of expanding his business model and the Ford's would make a great addition to his crew. "Her and Abe said when she's ready they would moonlight some clubs with me. Daryl never wants to work past midnight and he's always cryin' about how loud the music is."

"She always did think she was Lara Croft." Michonne scoffed fondly at childhood memories. "I know that she's anxious to replace that baby on her hip with her .45."

"From what I heard this morning, she needs to wear the .45 around the house anyway." Rick joked, touching her along her collarbone, just because.

Sasha returned her text,

Bitch don't even try. You better call me right RIGHT now.

She showed the message to Rick and he shook his head.

"You see what I have to put up with?" Michonne giggled devilishly, keeping the phone angled to Rick's view so he could read her reply as she clicked away,

Tomorrow daaaaaaaamn! If you leave us alone. I'll have MORE to tell you when I see you.

She added a few provocative emojis. Pretending to be put out by the whole conversation, she whispered to herself, "Thirsty ass."

"I get the little tongue, but what's the eggplant mean." Rick asked still looking at the text and trying to guess before she told him.

"It means DICK, Richard!" Michonne said as brashly as she could, trying to shame him for forcing her to text her sister in the first place. Rick was again unfazed by her attempts to rattle him. All his brainpower was trying to figure out how an eggplant could mean dick. They both waited to see if this reasoning would calm her fiery, fertile sister.

With Rick looking on, Sasha's reply came in. But before they could read it an unsaved number showed up on the screen with the option to answer or decline. Michonne nervously hit decline and went back to Sasha's text. Now angled away from Rick, she read what the foulmouthed mother of three sent,

Ok. But I want a full fucking report soldier!

Michonne disclosed the message without her normal amusement and the mood in the room stiffened. Distractedly, she moved out of Rick's lap, still staring at her phone. When it buzzed, ringing again, it startled her and she declined the call for a second time.

"Ev'rythang alright?" Rick asked her, trying not to give away how easily he read her. The answer to that question was written all over her face.

She looked at him and parted her lips to speak, then looked back at her phone. "Hold on." She begged a little patience and went to her voicemail. 16 new messages: one from Maggie, one from Deanna, two were work-related and the other 12 messages were from Mike. She had blocked his number but apparently, he'd been leaving her messages all night and this morning. Now he was calling from another number- presumably work.

Michonne so did not want to deal with this right now, but she knew she had to. Her heart dropped when she realized Rick could have answered one of Mike's calls when he had her phone earlier. She pressed her eyes closed and slowly rolled her head around her neck, feeling fatigued at the entire situation.

Rick was waiting quietly, rubbing the foot still resting on his thigh. Her other foot was tucked under her as she went through and deleted each message. He couldn't hear any of them but, by her demeanor, he could pretty much tell who the calls were from.

Normally, this would be when Michonne would swerve a conversation. She'd throw pussy at Rick and he, of course, would catch it. If she just did that, she could continue to enjoy having him back and forget all about who was calling and everything she did leading up to and after that night in the restaurant. She could forget how unbelievably messy she had been. All she wanted to do was ride her boyfriend's big eggplant dick, cum a few times, hear him say how much he loved her and fall asleep wrapped around him on the couch. She wished one phone call could get her out of this mess, just like one phone call had gotten her into it. Fuck! But she promised to be good.

Moment of truth.

Fidgeting with her phone, she stared at her lap. "I gotta tell you something." she started, after a deep breath.

"Yeah?" He tilted her chin up so they could make eye contact. Her gorgeous eyes said a lot: worry, regret, love, reluctance. Rick traced her jawline gently with his thumb and acknowledged as he gazed sweetly at her forlorn face, "Yeah. Looks like it."

She sat up straighter and her phone buzzed again. She hit decline, silenced it completely and threw it on the table in frustration. "I'm sorry. Okay?"

"Okay." Rick accepted her preemptive apology. "Go ahead and tell me."

She bit the bullet. "I've been talking to Mike."

Rick imperceptibly ground his teeth then huffed out a dry, disappointed chuckle. He kept massaging her foot and added rubbing her smooth dark leg, hoping to relax her obviously tense frame so she'd feel safe to talk.

The next part was stuck on her tongue like road tar but she spit it out. "I went out with him a few times too, like, the first week you left." When she didn't hear a reaction, she looked to Rick.

"Where'd y'all go?" He inquired casually, like he was talking about an outing with her nephews.

She confessed, repulsed by the recollection, "He took me to lunch a couple times and we went to the movies."

"Did you have a good time?"

"No." Michonne was becoming agitated by his poise.

She thought back to the night everything went down. If he'd blow up like that from seeing her at dinner with Mike in a group setting, he should be on the edge right now, knowing they were together alone and more than once. She could only imagine how bad it would be when he finally snapped at this new information. Maybe she could explain herself, lessen the fallout. He promised he wouldn't leave.

"I did it to get back at you for walking out." She met his eyes, then retreated immediately at not being able to read him. She started to ramble like she had last night when she called him. If she was going to upset him, it was easier to pour it all out rather than a drip here, a trickle there. "At first I was really mad at you but then I was just really mad at me. When we went to the movies, Mike started rubbing my thigh and kissing my neck. It felt so... strange... wrong!" Her body tightened trying to make him understand. "I told him to stop and when he wouldn't I just got up and left. He followed me out to the lobby and kept telling me how much he missed me and loved me..."

That same anger from last night began to rise inside her. "I just wanted to hear you say that!" Once she told that truth, her anger fizzled quickly. She continued in a more subdued tone, "I wished it was you, so bad, Rick." She looked at him again for a read. Nothing. Just his eyes, a solid ice blue, staring. "I tried to walk away but he grabbed me and I did the throat strike you taught me. I cussed him out in the theater lobby until security came over. They kept him there while one of the guards walked me to my car."

"What else?" Rick asked in a low baritone, still rubbing her gently. "You see him again after that?"

"Not on purpose, but he showed up at my job a couple times." She sighed, "I kept talking to him on the phone whenever he reached out, apologizing. I was just lonely and I wanted to hear the stuff he was saying. I was just using him to stroke my ego. Nobody ever cut me off like you did and I was hurt."

"So, he made you feel better?"

"No, Rick, no. He did not make feel better. There's no substitute for you. Before I called you last night, I called him... told him to lose my number and blocked him. But he's been leaving messages and now he's calling from another number."

"What else?"

"That's it."

Rick studied her intensely. She could feel him making determinations, measuring his response. This was one of the reasons she loved him so much. She wouldn't have thought his calm would excite her like it did. His calculating manner was like a blanket he wrapped her in, sometimes it got a little hot, but she felt so secure with him. The longer he took to speak, the more she realized how gutted he must've been that night in the restaurant to go off like he did. He was still thinking, still caressing her calf and the sole of her foot like she was his prized possession.

Finally, he spoke. "Okay. Answer it if he calls again. Tell him to come over here so y'all can talk."

"What?! Why?!" Michonne did not expect that. Is he breaking his promise? Is he going to leave? Just concede? She made her position clear, "I don't want to talk to him."

"I'm going to be here. Don't worry. Just tell him. He ain't gonna leave you alone unless he has a reason to. And he ain't gonna listen to you now. You proved that your words and actions don't match. So, I have to get involved... if you want me to... if you want him to leave you alone."

"Yeah, I do. But..."

"Don't say but." Rick threw his chin to the phone lighting up on the table. "That him?"

She looked at her phone and another call was coming in from the same number. She picked it up and followed Rick's instructions. While she spoke to her ex, Rick put in a call to Carol. It was rare that his assistant didn't know what he was up to, but this was one of those times. Still, the gray-haired dynamo, on her third cup of coffee, was sending all the pertinent info to Tara before Rick even hung up.

As he ended his call, Rick heard Michonne give Mike their address. She hung up. "He said he'll be here around noon."

"He don't know where you live?" Rick asked, confused.

Michonne twisted the ponytail of her locs nervously and explained, "I never let guys come here."

"But I thought you said you guys were together for a year?" Rick continued to question as things didn't add up.

"We were." She confirmed. "But I. Never. Let. Guys. Come. Here."

"Chonne, I came here and spent the night after we dated for two months."

"I didn't trust him to know me like that. He was just... some guy I found."

"Iwas just some guy you found." Rick compared.

"You were?" She squinted pretending to mull it over. "Must've been something else then." She shrugged, then timidly met his eyes, blue and cool like creek water. "Are you mad... about what I told you?" She knew he was, she just wanted to know the extent of the damage done to what they were already repairing.

Rick looked at her again for what felt uncomfortably long to Michonne. She was just about to apologize and explain again, when he pulled her back into his lap and brought his hands to rest on her backside.

"I'm proud of you for that throat strike." He said with an impressed smile that made her laugh. "Chonne, I know you." He modestly kissed her lips and continued. "You know what I did for three weeks while I was gone?"

She shook her head no as Rick relaxed deeper into the couch, adjusting her closer to him, positioning her sex perfectly over his own. He laid his head back on the couch with a deep resigned sigh, looking at her over the tip of his nose.

"I thought about you. I thought about you all day, on every job I had, in my meetin's... even when you finally called me- my eyes were on the game but I was thinkin' 'bout you." His voice rasped so exquisitely in the short space between them. He had her hanging on every word and a spotlight seemed to settle on those soft enigmatic lips, outlined by the gray of his facial hair. Unlike her, he never moved his lips without a purpose. She wanted to take in everything he said and lay it deep in her heart like a treasure.

"Thinkin' 'bout who you are and who you are to me and the fucked up shit you do and why you do the fucked up shit you do." He chuckled, but his face held a serious expression. "I thought about how growin' up in foster care must have affected you and how comin' from that to the woman you are today must make you feel about yourself, about me. I'd think about how you are with my son and with Roe. How you make messes out of the simplest thangs or turn the simplest thangs into art. I was thinkin' 'bout how creative you are, how beautiful you are. What it must be like to have this body..."

He slid his palms up onto her hips and tightened his hold, pulling her down firmly on his hardness. He pulled her hips forward and pushed them back until she leaned into his chest, heart to heart with him, and took over the pace he set. Rubbing her soft cheek against the scratch of his face, she brought her ear right to the source of his masculine country timbre and collapsed over him as he spoke,

"...this color skin, this hair, this wild spirit. I saw how angry you were with yourself that you had hurt me that night and how you tried to make it my fault. You thought it was my fault because you don't know yourself... not like I do. I know you, woman. And I know you weren't sittin' in the house cryin' over me all that time."

"I did. I was a mess." Michonne swore.

"Yeah, eventually, maybe. But first, you had to prove a lie to yourself. You were out tryin' to distract yourself, so you wouldn't cry or care. I know. I'm surprised that you didn't sleep with this guy, but now that I think about it, that makes sense, too. You play your games..."

"Not anymore." She interjected breathlessly over his mouth.

"But you know deep in here..." He brought his hand to her belly, right above the swell of her thighs, his thumb dangerously close to her lower lips under the fabric of her soaked panties, "you belong to me."

She rose from his chest, rushing to unfasten her bra and slip the straps off her shoulders.

Rick had said enough and his mouth found a new occupation in the contact of her naked ebony nipples peaked in arousal. He grappled both her breasts squeezing them in his untamed hands.

Michonne quickly moved her hands to his, instinctively easing his grip on her breasts. She hissed at the pressure, "Easy." she whispered, smiling at his bearish behavior. He smiled back, but unable to ensure any civility, he let go to up the ante.

He pulled himself thick and ready from his elastic waist band and pulled her panties to the side. Rick brought her tight slick canal over him with the corner of his bottom lip clenched between his teeth. He filled her body with the warm width of his shaft. Michonne swooned and both of them broke over the forgotten music with a satisfied cry. Michonne moved with such ferocity that she was already seconds away from release. Sharp shallow breaths devolved into greedy moans as she leaned forward, latching onto his lips. Her clit found the right amount of friction against his pelvic bone. Her fists gripped the cotton of his t-shirt and she came like thunder, lightning and rain, all at once.

"Damn, 'Chonne. You gotta catch a flight or someth'n?" He chuckled underneath her and she blushed, burying her face in his shoulder joining him with an exhausted giggle.

"I'm just happy you're home." she declared for the umpteenth time since he'd walked through the door. "I gotta make up for lost time." she said struggling to catch her breath. "You owe me 32 more orgasms. I did the math.

"32?! We do not have sex that much in three weeks." Rick said in disbelief as he started to move her onto her back into the coziness of the couch cushions.

She smiled gloriously at him, feeling free now with every weight on her mind set aside. "You did accrue some late fees and penalties." she teased him.

"Late fees and penalties, huh?" he repeated with a similar carefree expression as he took his place on top of her still-heaving body. She nodded, more in response to the delicious weight of him securing her in place than to the question he posed. Rick could see he'd lost her already and he drank in the sight of her plunge into passion. Lifting himself up on his forearms, he began to move and watched her breasts react in rhythm with each thrust.

Her eyes traveled his face remembering all the times she'd made him laugh until tears came out of those coercing eyes. All the times they'd laid together exchanging whispers, talking about what the future could be and regretting the years they hadn't known each other.

Michonne pulled his face closer to overdose on his scent. She suckled at his bottom lip until his tongue chased hers for a dance. She felt his dominating drive shrinking her control. Wrapping her legs around his body, she lodged him deeper inside her. His body was solid like an oak and his buried length like a strong hidden root racing to find her moisture in the dark.

She slipped her hands under his shirt and rode the shifting of his back muscles with her palms. Her intricately designed nails left red welts across his back when she came again. Her quiet explosion and the mix of frenzy and serenity in her release sent Rick gushing his hot seed thick inside her until she dropped her limbs lazily off the side of the couch.

He laid a heavy kiss at her lips and when he pulled away, Michonne slid completely off the couch to the floor. For his patience and his loyal-love she simply uttered, "Thank you." as he walked away, dialing Carol to check Tara's progress.

He came back and pressed a kiss to her forehead, "I gotta do some thangs before this guy gets here. You alright?"

She rolled her head back to rest against the seat of the couch and regarded him adoringly, "Yeah. I'm good babe."