Oops! Very sorry, I uploaded the wrong chapter! This is the new one. Thanks to DarkHunter for pointing that out to me!

A/N: Hiya! Thanks for waiting so patiently for this chapter. I'm afraid I got back from holidays and hit major writers block. I remember where I want this story to get to but not how I was planning on getting it there so I'm improvising plot wise at the moment.

Here's a short but hopefully cute little chapter to get me back in the game. Encouragement would help me get the next one out must faster, pretty pretty please!

Chapter 12

For the first time in a long time, Shane Schofield was awoken neither by the sudden jolt of a nightmare nor the incessant buzzing of the alarm. He savoured the slow return to consciousness. With his eyes still shut he tried to bury a little deeper into the warm bed, noting as he did so the slow pleasant crawl of something soft trailing across his shoulder and that his pillow seemed a rather a bit harder than he recalled.

He opened his eyes slowly, blinking in the bright morning sunlight. As they cleared, without moving his head at all, he found he was looking at an unmistakably sculpted chest with his own hand lying in the middle of it, fingers tangled gently in the downy light-brown hair between the pectorals. He ran his hand down the side of the body coming to rest in the crook of the waist, as he looked up and found Jack's clear blue eyes clouded only slightly with the remnants of sleep.

"Good morning," he said sleepily, propping himself up on one elbow. The shy touch on his shoulder retreated instantly.

"Did I wake you?" Jack asked bashfully. In the light of the morning he seemed unsure, shy even, of how to proceed. "It's just, you were lying on my arm and it was going dead, I tried not to move but-"

Shane cut him off with a lingering press of his lips in a slow but chaste kiss.
"Sorry," he said with a lazy grin as he pulled away.

"For what?" Jack replied quietly, not quite meeting his eye. He seemed nervous. Having reached the crux he most wanted to discuss but not knowing if he wanted to hear the answer. He watched the expression on Shane's face flick rapidly from amused affection to confusion, lines appearing above his brow but not losing his smile.

"For sleeping on your arm dumbass," Shane shot back playfully as though it was obvious and relief flooded through Jack. He was suddenly able to much better appreciate the warmth of Schofield's body against him, their legs tangled together beneath the sheets. The way he smiled at him, completely relaxed, with his hair messed up but his eyes shining bright blue in the morning sun. As the old adage goes – and his mother had always set a lot in store by old adages – they say you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because your reality is finally better than dreams. Funny then that they never mentioned how waking up is even better.

"So not for last night? No regrets?" He asked anyway to banish any lingering doubts for good, tangling their fingers together and not quite meeting his eyes.

Schofield didn't say anything in response immediately. Instead he wrapped both of Jack's hands in his and brought them to his lips, leaning on his elbows with his chest almost flush against Jack's. Looking up at him under his dark eyelashes until he looked back, he said mock seriously, "Not that I can think of."

Jack suspected that using the word 'adorable' in front of Schofield might be a fairly sure way of losing vital body parts but he reserved the right to think it.

He wrested one of his hands back and brought it up to cup the line of Shane's jaw, running his thumb absentmindedly across the slight stubble. As he turned his head to press a kiss into the palm, a look of sudden alarm crossed Schofield's face and he sat up abruptly.
"Wait, last night, we didn't-?" He began to ask slightly awkwardly but cut himself off, gesturing between their bodies to make his point clear.

Then it was Jack's turn to laugh at the blush creeping up Shane's cheeks. "No," he said with a smile, "we talked until you fell asleep."

"Ah," was all he managed to say, he wasn't quite sure if falling asleep had been a good or bad thing. Either way, it didn't seem to have done any harm.

As Shane resettled himself in the small bed, pressed against Jack's side, they suddenly heard just outside the door the unmistakable heavy tread of a combat boot going down the stairs. They both startled as the noise brought reality crashing down around their ears. No matter how much at ease they were they couldn't forget they were marines in a marine base where this sort of cavorting was still against the rules, they had been talking far too loud. If they were caught…

For the first time that morning, the smile fell completely from Schofield's face.
Jack began to get up; throwing the sheets off and trying to wriggle out but Shane wrapped one firm arm around his chest.
"Stay," he said softly, almost breathing the word against Jack's neck. "There are fourteen marines on this floor including you and me, so you've got to at least wait for eleven more to go past before you can sneak out safely anyway. Stay."

He kissed him gently and it was everything he had never thought kissing a guy would be like, soft – minus the stubble – careful and tender. Whatever trouble this was bound to bring upon them, at this present point in time, he really didn't care.

They lay there in silence. Shane pressed against his chest with his head resting in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent that was Jack – like fresh mown grass still with the tang of dew. His own arm stretched protectively across Jack's chest, while Jack's arm was curled around his back, fingers splaying gently below his shoulder blade. He could get used to this, he decided. The feel of the muscular chest beneath his own - nothing soft or curvy, just raw, hard, strength. He even liked the fact that Jack was taller and broader than he was, how they fit together. He'd never been held like that before because any woman in his bed had been the one in his arms and any man that got close enough to get a hold of him usually had murderous intentions. He had been worried he would feel threatened, or worse, nothing; that it would feel just like holding a woman, that he had made a terrifying mistake and that really was as good as it was ever going to get. But his skin buzzed at the contact and he felt safe and comfortable, enveloped in the larger man's frame, so reluctant to get up and so damn right as he pressed a kiss to the nearest part of Jack he could reach – his collarbone. Really, he could get used to this.

As the eleventh and final pair of boots clomped their way down the stairs they started to stir, knowing they had to get up but wanting to hold on to the morning for as long as possible. Where before they had been absolutely still and silent, Jack's hand began to trace small circles across Shane's back and Shane sighed a little against his chest before retrieving his feet from where they were tangled between Jack's warm ones to hit the cool wooden floor. As they sat up simultaneously, Jack slumped against his shoulder. Schofield looked at him affectionately and kissed his forehead, as he patted his thigh and said with as much enthusiasm – and a little extra mischievousness – as he could muster, "Come on sunshine, gotta face the day."

He managed to solicit a small laugh and a smile out of Jack, who looked up at him and tried to hold a straight face.
"Don't call me sunshine."

By which point, Schofield, having managed to get up and stay up, was rummaging through a pile of clothed tossed haphazardly over the back of a desk chair. He found the shirt he was looking for, a – hopefully clean – khaki utility t-shirt. As he pulled it on, he quickly shot back,
"Sure babe."

What he didn't realise though was that as the shirt slipped over his head, Jack had sauntered up behind him. He nearly jumped when he felt, rather than saw, two hands on his waist.
"And here I was," Jack's voice said huskily in his ear, "thinking that you were all quiet and serious. You're gonna be trouble aren't you."

He felt Schofield lean back against him as he swayed their bodies just a tiny amount. He pressed his lips against Shane's temple before dropping to his neck, and again slightly lower. He sank his teeth as hard as he dared into his collarbone. Not wanting to actually hurt him, much, but just enough to leave a nice looking bruise. His placement was good and he knew it. The mark would be below the neckline of Schofield's t-shirt – but only just. He kissed him once more, far gentler, in the spot below his ear before slipping rapidly from the room with a little smirk.

Waiting outside the door, Jack was immensely satisfied to hear only a moment later, as Shane ducked into the bathroom and saw his handiwork in the mirror, a loudly exclaimed "Bastard."