After meticulously examining Booth's muscle-bound lower extremities with her flashlight, Brennan was relieved to report that other than what would decidedly turn out to be nasty bruises and a badly sprained ankle, everything else looked fine.
Fine indeed.
She willed her eyes to shut briefly in a sharp rejoinder that she was supposed to be perusing Booth's body with the hands and eyes of a physician, not those of a female in estrus. Ogling a patient while harboring prurient thoughts about them was exceedingly unprofessional behavior, no matter how attracted to the patient one happened to be.
Besides, she hadn't actually finished checking him over; for all she knew, Booth could have sustained serious injuries to his upper half which would make her inattention even more unforgivable.
Taking the antibiotic ointment out of the first aid kit, the scientist slathered a generous dollop of the gelatinous goo over Booth's scraped knees before an idea came to her. She stood up without a word, grabbed her purse, and dumped the contents on top of the sofa as her partner looked on. His eyes immediately widened.
"Where are you going?" he asked nervously when Brennan headed towards the door with the empty purse.
She kept walking and the agent felt duty-bound to intercept her, just in case she was planning on doing something completely crazy like she was occasionally known to do.
God, Bones, he thought angrily, having lost much of the comforting warmth that had only just started bringing his numb backside to life.
With her fingers already wrapped around the shaky doorknob, the anthropologist glanced back over her shoulder.
"Booth, I know you're probably still somewhat traumatized by your accident, but please try not to be so excitable" she chastised. "I'm just going outside to put some snow inside my purse to use as an icepack. You need a cold compress on your ankle; you have a very large contusion on your lateral malleolus which has already caused several of the surrounding ligaments to swell rather alarmingly."
The offer immediately threw Booth into a tizzy. He pushed a hand into the door to make certain it stayed closed while the other remained glued to the two paired edges of Brennan's coat.
"No-no more cold stuff anywhere, Bones. I don't care if I end up looking like the hunchback of Notre Dame tomorrow. I'm already afraid I might be losing some really vital components to frostbite as it is."
"Your toes seem fine."
"Those aren't the vital components I'm worried about," he sniffed. "No ice."
Brennan frowned as she studied her stubborn charge.
"You can be an extremely difficult person sometimes."
"Just give me some aspirin or something. I'm sure I'll be fine," he retorted feebly.
"I can't do that, Booth; if you suffered any significant internal injuries, anti-inflammatories could trigger a fatal hemorrhage."
"Has anyone told you that you're no Florence Nightingale, Bones? If we live through this, please promise me you won't take up nursing as a side career anytime soon; your bedside manner sucks. Are we done here?"
Her partner suddenly looked so helpless with his soaked, debris-riddled hair, downcast eyes and childish pout, Brennan was briefly tempted to put her arms around him and give him a reassuring hug, much as he so often did with her.
She ruthlessly stomped the impulse out.
Neither she nor Booth could afford to fall prey to the effects of rampant sentimentality during a life or death situation like they were currently facing. Besides, he was a capable adult, not a child.
Booth could soothe himself.
"No, we are not done," Brennan answered curtly. "Now please take off the coat and wrap it around your waist so I can examine your torso, unless you're going to also allow me to inspect your groin area, in which case you can put it on the floor."
"No one is going near my groin area but me," he threw back.
He gave that supposed zinger a little more thought before declaring sheepishly, "never mind. You know what I meant."
Even when Booth's watery brown eyes were squinting back uncomfortably, Brennan showed few signs of pity. She continued waiving her flashlight in front of his face with what he was sure was way too much enthusiasm.
Payback, no doubt, for what a pill he'd been towards her all day.
An ugly gash under the chin merited a dab of ointment, as did a smaller one over his right cheekbone. A scan of his neck brought with it the need for another layer of milky-white gel.
Booth submitted to his partner's ministrations with a tidal wave of misgivings arising from somewhere in the most primitive parts of his brain. Everything about what she was doing was causing alarms to go off all over his body, and things only went from bad to worse when the Jeffersonian's most valued employee switched her focus from his shoulders to his throbbing ribcage.
She sure was taking her own sweet time on those ribs, Booth thought moodily. No doubt checking every single one of the curving bones for signs of breakage-front and back-while he did his best to stand still as a statue, his breath frozen in place just like the rest of him in the hopes that cooperating would somehow speed things along.
Brennan's frazzled patient would have been the first to admit that his newfound meekness wasn't entirely voluntary. He just couldn't remember for the life of him the last time a woman had run her fingers over his skin so gently, so thoroughly-hell, so lovingly-and for some unknown reason it was making his heart ache in the worst possible way.
In fact, he acknowledged sadly, it was pretty much a certainty that he'd never really been touched in quite such an intimate, caring manner before.
How pathetic is that, Booth reflected, doing a quick mental tally of his past relationships. Rebecca, Cam, Tessa, Hannah, high school and college sweethearts; none of those women had ever made him feel the way he was feeling now-totally gutted, dizzy, aroused, madly, stupidly in love.
Even more pathetic? That there was absolutely zero going on between him and Bones in the romance department, and therefore no reason for him to be at all invested in what those two capable, angel-soft hands were unknowingly doing to him.
Nada.
This little drill was just business-as-usual for Bones, nothing more, nothing less. What he needed to do ASAP was stop being such a huge wuss already and let his companion finish her work in peace.
While Booth was performing his latest act of penance, Brennan happened to be doing a little soul-searching of her own. Her thoughts, it turned out, were no less conflicted-or contrite-than his.
With her fingers gingerly going over Booth's aggrieved form-the slightly dislocated left shoulder, the bruised and battered slab of ribs, upper arms and abs that were hours away from turning first an ugly shade of burgundy and then a dark, unsightly puce, the large knot already forming on one of his hips-the scientist was forcibly reminded of the gravity of Booths's recent travails. She could envision with perfect clarity the bridge's stressed first plank straining repeatedly under the combined weight of his large frame and the load he was carrying and then finally giving way under his feet, with the nearby ones following suit almost immediately in an unavoidable chain reaction.
She saw him flying, flailing, grasping at air, the logs exploding outwards from his hands in all directions until, finally slamming painfully into one of the sides of the hill, his body began a downward slide and a series of cartwheels that ended only when it crashed into the thin sheet of ice on the creek below and finally the hard, polished stones waiting treacherously underneath.
Such a close, close call she whispered to herself guiltily, her blood suddenly running cold at the prospect of what she'd almost lost.
In hindsight, it was truly something of a miracle his injuries hadn't been worse. He could have easily impaled himself on a jutting tree branch, broken his back or neck, or smashed his skull on the rocks littering the bottom of the ravine.
With each welt she touched Brennan became more and more acutely aware that it could have been her, that it should have been her, but that in his quietly heroic, typically selfless way, her ever-watchful partner had made sure it wasn't. Even when she was all but certain that he was still massively annoyed at her over the whole trip to Snell's with the loss of two expensive hockey tickets, and that it would have probably been somewhat morally gratifying to make her go out and do the dirty work of bringing all those logs back to the cabin by herself.
Momentarily forgetting all about professional deportment and the pressing need for emotional detachment, Brennan leaned forward and impulsively kissed Booth's right cheek. A few bristly hairs were starting to fill in the formerly smooth plane, and she wondered curiously what the spot would feel like if she touched her lips to it in the morning.
Prickly-tickly, rough. Something.
The image made her shiver.
"What was that for?" the stunned agent asked, caught completely off-guard by his partner's unexpected gesture.
"To thank you for your foolish, selfless act of bravado this afternoon."
Booth's eyebrows came together in that perfect amalgamation of surprise, amusement, complete confusion and disbelief Brennan knew so well.
"Huh?"
"You insisted on going by yourself to the shed because you were afraid I would fall on the bridge and hurt myself. Instead, it was you who fell."
Yeah, Booth agreed in total silence. He had sure fallen fast and hard-but what the woman in front of him didn't know was that the tumble had come about way earlier than today, and that it wasn't something he could ever hope to recover from.
There wasn't enough antibiotic ointment in the world to blanket that mile-long wound.
"And also to attempt to reset our current conversational pattern," Brennan added quietly.
The agent's face continued its contorted dance. Now he'd absolutely lost her.
"Our verbal interchanges today have been rather negative," she clarified. "In fact, it seems they've been that way for a while. Why do you think we've been arguing so much lately?"
She flicked her eyes in Booth's direction before shifting her gaze to the hissing and popping in the fireplace when he didn't answer.
"I would have thought that after our last conversation in your apartment when we burned those dates to nurse some sort of superstitious yearning of yours, things would have gotten easier between us, not harder."
Booth puffed out his cheeks, eventually letting out a long, unhurried breath.
"Oh, I don't know," he answered slowly. "Avoidance, probably. To keep us from saying the things we really want to say."
"That makes no sense whatsoever; why wouldn't we just go ahead and say those things, instead of engaging in all this incessant verbal sparring? Aren't we simply wasting time? It's completely irrational behavior, even for you."
Booth caught his companion's eyes for a brief moment and then looked away.
"Maybe because we're afraid the other person is still not ready to hear them."
"You sound like Sweets."
Cocking his head at his flustered companion, Booth gave her a lopsided grin. "Yeah, but the kid's been known to be right sometimes."
"Do you think we'll ever get around to saying those things?" Brennan asked hopefully.
He nodded slowly, smiling still.
"Yeah-I do, Bones. When the time is right, we will."
