A/N: OK, I've gotten in one more update before I have to take a little break from this story for RL maintenance. Huzza! This chapter needs some disclaiming. First: for those who've read my story "After the Night," you'll see some replay of an event written originally for Chapter 10 of AtN, but here it's from Rachel's pov and therefore, slightly altered. Second: this chapter is probably more safely rated M than T for a sexual encounter. It came out a little sexier than intended. I blame Miles.

The Past

"Miles," Bass's familiar but far off sounding voice said through the phone.

Miles found that he actually had to take a deep breath before he could muster, "Hey." Even then his voice sounded shakier than he cared to admit. There was something about talking to this person who knew him better than anyone on earth that made Miles afraid he'd just come apart. So he waited for Bass to say something.

Bass, for his part, always found it difficult to speak to Miles on the phone under the best of circumstances. Miles was not the world's chattiest person. This particular circumstance - in which Bass was still in Afghanistan and Miles was home in Chicago - was achingly weird. And that was before you even considered the shit Miles was dealing with.

"How ya feeling, buddy?" Bass asked caringly.

"Um…ok. I'm fine – all healed up," Miles said. And it was true that he bore no physical marks from his internment except the weight loss and atrophied muscles. When Miles stopped to reflect on it, it was actually quite miraculous. He'd felt like pulp rather than human when Bass and the LT had scraped him off the floor of his cell.

Suddenly, it was happening – Miles was being transported back to the prison, feeling the dirt of the floor grinding into his cheeks and smelling his own feces. The hand holding the phone shook. He almost dropped it.

The prolonged silence was making Bass nervous, so he tried to be playful. "You getting any tail in Chicago?"

Miles stared out the kitchen window at the frosty morning. "Um…" his voice cracked. He was still terrified by what had happened to him last night in Sheila's apartment. "I went out but…I dunno, things just aren't…" he didn't know what he was trying to tell Bass. It was just a feeling he'd had. A feeling like he'd never be able to physically experience sexual attraction again. He knew it was crazy, but the thought was controlling him.

Somehow Bass knew. "Hey, man. This kind of stuff happens sometimes when you come back from a tour. Give it time, and you'll be right again."

"Are things in Afghanistan…?" Miles didn't know why his words were coming out all jumbled up, like he didn't know how to form coherent sentences. But again Bass seemed to understand what he was trying to say, and Miles was so grateful to his best friend that it actually hurt his chest.

"We're all safe here. We're basically laying low at base. Have a patrol coming up, but it's no big deal…"

"Let me know how it goes."

"We'll be fine, but I'll let you know. Look I'd better - "

Miles knew that Bass was signaling the end of this conversation, but he suddenly feared that when Bass's voice stopped coming through the phone, he'd crumble. Miles was frustrated by his own fickleness: one moment talking to Bass was upsetting and the next letting him go was torture. Miles said quickly to preserve the connection: "Thank you, Bass."

"What, man? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Spotty connection."

"Thank you."

"Oh. For what?"

"For saving my sorry ass."

"Miles," and now Bass's voice was wavering with emotion. "Any time, brother. Any time."

"Be safe."

"Ok," Bass said, followed by a click of finality.

A small sound escaped from Miles that verged on a whimper. He suddenly felt a minute hand grab onto his pants leg and looked down to see Charlie. Miles's eyes felt unnaturally wet as he gazed down at the child's startlingly blue eyes.

"Sad Miles," Charlie announced, hugging his leg tight as a teddy bear.

Miles let his hand fall on her head. Yes, he thought. I am sad. I am really fucking sad. He covered his face with his other hand, and that's how Rachel found her brother-in-law and his niece, so tiny against his long leg, when she entered the kitchen. It broke her heart.

Rachel put her hand on Miles's shoulder, and he jumped a little. Miles looked at her hand like it was a foreign object until she removed it. She saw something frightening in his eyes – some emotion she couldn't identify. Miles walked out of the room, audibly tussling with the coat rack, and she heard the front door close.

The temperature kept falling all day until it was nearly ten below with the wind chill. Miles still wasn't home six hours later, and Rachel gave in to full panic. She hadn't gone into work to distract herself; she sat home stewing about Miles all day. Could it be that what she'd seen in Miles's eyes was him quitting?

She finally called Ben, and as soon as she heard his familiar, "Hello?" she began crying.

"Rachel, what it is?" Ben asked with concern. "I'm sorry, let me just slip out of this meeting. Ok, talk to me. What's going on? Is it Danny? Miles?"

Rachel swallowed and stabilized her voice. "I haven't seen Miles in hours, and I'm afraid…"

"Afraid of what?"

"Afraid he'll hurt himself."

"Do you want to call the police?" Ben asked in alarm.

"No…not yet. I might be overreacting. I just want to find him, but the kids…"

"Ok, listen. Take the kids to Jeanie next door – she loves to watch them. And then…let's see. Where would Miles go? I wish we could talk to Bass," Ben said in frustration. Rachel could hear him drumming his fingers. "Maybe check some of the bars? Or…sometimes when we were kids and hanging out in the city, Mom would take us to look at the river. She loved the water – so does Miles. It calms them. That's all I can think of for now. But call me if you don't find him. Or call me the second you do."

"Ok. I'd better go."

"I love you," Ben said.

Rachel actually had a hard time replying, "I love you, too." If she was honest with herself, she was angry that Ben had gone to Stanford, leaving her with their sickly baby, Danny, who had acute asthma. And how could he justify leaving Miles? They had almost lost him – it was astounding that he was still alive. She was frankly a little afraid of being left alone with this intimidatingly broken Miles…or perhaps, a little afraid of her feelings for him.

There was a part of marriage that no one had warned her about: that you didn't stop being attracted to other people just because you made a life commitment. You just chose not to think about it and certainly not to act on it. Unfortunately, she had always been intrigued by Ben's little brother. He was handsome, and his life as a Marine was dangerous and mysterious to her. Miles and Ben were different in almost every way possible. Where Ben was all warm communicator, Miles was distant and pensive. Where Ben was intellectual, Miles was all action. And here was the rub: Ben was a lovely, caring partner and her best friend in the world, but he had never excited her, especially not in the bedroom. Rachel was often strangled by her own throbbing passion, which she struggled to push down so that she wouldn't feel constantly disappointed.

This past year had put Rachel's and Ben's marriage under tremendous strain. The pregnancy with Danny had been hellacious and expensive, and they had already spent most of their meager savings on the startup company to build a device they didn't even entirely understand. Ben had brought on the Department of Defense to curtail their financial tailspin without asking her first, and the wonderful friendship at the center of her marriage had cracked. To top it off, Rachel was in the throws of extended postpartum depression. She'd had it with Charlie, and she had it now with Danny – and Ben didn't even ask about it. Perhaps he didn't want to deal with her emotional fragility all over again. So, she thought, he just ran away.

With all of this heavy on her mind, Rachel dropped the kids off with Jeanie, and got into her old, rusty Honda to roam the streets looking for Miles. It was terrible out, and even gloved, Rachel's fingers felt like unthawed link sausages from the freezer. She hoped to God Miles wasn't outside. Just in case, she decided to start looking along the river, where Ben had suggested. To her relief but also instant concern, there he was, a dark black smear against the crusty, gray river. She turned off the car and ran over.

"Miles," Rachel said. "I've been looking for you. You have to come home. It's freezing."

Miles tore his eyes away from the chunks of ice on the water to look at her, unblinking.

Rachel was positively desperate to get Miles into the car. She felt like her veins were filling with ice water just being out in the cold for a minute. "Miles. Talk to me. You've got to talk to someone about what happened. You don't have to bear it alone."

Miles lips shuddered. "Bass…" was all he could get out.

"Bass isn't here, honey. I know you miss him. You got to talk to him today. Did that help?" She didn't know why she even asking. It was obvious that talking to Bass had contributed to his current fragile state.

She saw Miles shiver violently against the cold.

Finally he spoke: "I…how can I tell you when I can't…Words don't…they don't help to make sense of this."

Rachel took it as a good sign that Miles could admit to having feelings that he couldn't properly process. So she decided to push…a little. Maybe he just needed the opportunity to think aloud. "Try," she urged.

"I don't know, Rachel. Sick, perverse things happened in that prison. Things calculated to make me crazy. People think saying them aloud will help them go away. But it just makes them real. It makes them real!" Miles shouted the last bit very loudly. So loudly a bundled woman walking by visibly jumped in her tracks and then hurried on.

Rachel decided that even saying this very little was a kind of breakthrough for Miles. She gathered him into her arms and pressed him tightly to her body. Miles shook and shook. When she looked at him again, she could see that he'd bitten his own lip; a tiny smear of red bloomed against his blue lips. The sight alarmed her.

"Miles, we've got to get out of the cold. Come into the car, and we'll turn on the heat," Rachel said. God, he might even be hypothermic at this point. She wondered if she should take him to the hospital. She got him into the car and drove around aimlessly to get the heat blasting.

She found herself muttering platitudes, mostly to make sure that Miles was still with her. "Listen, Miles, I know Ben and I haven't always been supportive of your decision to join the Marines, but it takes one hell of a strong person to even make it through the training, let alone three tours. This one ended especially badly. But you are going to survive it. You must!"

Rachel's breasts began leaking milk through her sweater. She needed to pump and had to get home soon. She looked sideways at Miles to ascertain if he needed medical attention. She saw that he was looking at her breasts and felt instant shame, trying to reclose the folds of her coat.

She decided that Miles's color did look a little better, so she continued talking and made a left turn toward home. "We need you to survive this, Miles."

"Why?" Miles choked.

"You're our family." She gripped Miles' hand, which felt dead in his glove. "We…I love you." She felt her cheeks burn, because it came out like an admission of her own confused feelings for Miles.

Rachel decided not to pick up the kids right away. Jeanie, the perpetual bachelorette, had practically begged to keep them for dinner anyway. Besides the fact that Rachel really needed to relieve her aching breasts, she thought it best to settle Miles before unleashing the chaos of the youngsters.

Miles stood in the doorway, trying to undo the buttons of his coat, but his fingers were shaking too badly. Finally he made a grunt of defeated frustration that Rachel took as a signal to intervene. Like a child, she led Miles to the bathroom and drew him a warm bath, helping him to undress - tenderly, carefully. She helped him into the tub and then sat on the cold tiles of the floor, leaning against the toilet. His naked body transfixed her, and even though it was rude to stare, she lapsed into scientific observation.

"Your body," she said aloud, willing Miles to tell her the stories of his scars, his tattoos – the many mysteries imbedded in his skin.

"Hm?" Miles asked, still shivering in the warm water.

"Looks like it's been through a meat grinder." Again she failed to consider that she was being impolite.

Miles steadily met her eyes and then sank further down into the water. She didn't know if this meant that he felt self-conscious or resigned. Presently, she grew aware that she had been staring at her brother-in-law in the bathtub for the better part of five minutes.

"I've got to go pump," she blurted and exited the bathroom.

As Rachel was putting the bottles of milk into the fridge thirty minutes later, she heard the door of the bathroom open. Miles emerged with a towel around his waist. Seeing him there - the grief on his face, his beautiful, battered body - a terrible sense of inevitability gripped her. She crossed the room against her good judgment and stood before him.

Miles loomed in the hallway staring at Rachel, wondering what the hell was happening between them. Then she crossed the room and stood so close to him, and there was so little fabric between him and her…that all the things that hadn't happened last night with Sheila were suddenly, embarrassingly happening to his body. Miles wanted Rachel so badly and had so little will to stop himself that he reached out and smoothed a strand of golden hair from her face. And that was the moment of betrayal to Ben: so innocent a gesture but one that should never occur between a man and his brother's wife. Miles allowed his hand to rest on Rachel's cheek, and then they were kissing. Ravenously.

Miles had never experienced this all-consuming, overwhelming passion with anyone. He practically slammed Rachel into the wall and in doing so dropped his towel. Again, they could have stopped themselves, but there was Miles - stark naked and hard as a teenager - and they just couldn't. His hands were down her pants, and then her pants were no more, and then they fucked right there on the floor.

Rachel's mind had completely short-circuited with desire. Her body was burning. Everywhere Miles touched her, she felt like screaming in passion. She had never felt anything like this – nothing even remotely close. And when they were lying in a heap on the scratchy carpet of the hallway afterward - panting, aching – she couldn't believe the control she'd lost. Not only had she just cheated on her husband with her husband's little brother, but they hadn't even used protection, and she had never had unplanned, unprotected sex in her life. Thank God she hadn't yet gotten her period again after Danny's birth, but she'd better get a pregnancy test from the Rite Aid just to be sure. How could this have happened? This was almost completely her fault. She had undressed Miles and bathed him, for God's sake…what did she think was going to happen? Part of her was simply amazed that he had wanted her too. But she should have known that from the minute she caught him looking at her breasts in the car. No, she should have known that from the minute she had seen the terror on his face when he had refused to hug her that first night home.

The worst part was that she already wanted him again. She had never wanted anything so badly in her life. She forced herself to get up off the floor and stumble back into her clothes.

"I've got to pick up the kids!" she cried desperately, propelling herself out the front door. But she didn't go to Jeanie's right away. She slumped down on the front stairs completely stricken. She couldn't even cry – she didn't deserve to. She had violated her contract with Ben. There was no feeling sorry for herself; there was no forgiveness for people like her. Now she was going to have to face her children, her underwear still wet from Miles. She felt sick.

After Rachel had careened out the front door, Miles rose to his knees in the hallway, wiping himself off with his towel. He was filled with wretched terror at what he'd just done. It was his fault. He'd started it. For a moment, he almost feared he had forced Rachel, since he'd had so little control over himself, but no…she had been just as rapacious with his body as he had been with hers.

Ben had taken in Miles when he was lost, and this was Miles's repayment. Fucking his brother's wife in the hallway of their house. Miles went upstairs and got into Charlie's bed, pulling up the sheets over his face. He wished he could call his best friend and ask him for advice, but it was impossible. Besides, Miles could never utter this out loud. Admitting it would make it true.