i must say, i personally hate it when i can't see the end of a fic coming, when it's suddenly sprung on me. one of the advantages of reading a hard copy of a book, or even an ebook that has a determinate length is that you have a rough idea of how far you have to go. kinda lets you get your mind set up for the progression of the arc. so, with that in mind, my sketch is getting more and more solid as we go and the current estimate is about 28-29 chapters. certainly no fewer.

i've said it before, repetition doesn't make it any less true. your reviews are so wonderful. i can't always reply to every one, with a full time job and two ongoing fics, but they are ALL appreciated. they keep me writing and they make me want to do an extra good job for all the wonderful people i know are following me on this crazy road.

It was two glasses of water later that she found herself groping her way down the hallway with Booth. Jackets, tops, and her bra had fallen to the floor en route. She fell on top of him on the bed, frowned, and whined a little.

"What?"

Brennan pouted. "I want to be on top."

Did she just pout? "I hate to break this to you, Bones, but you are on top."

"I mean for sex."

He shrugged and smirked. "Works for me."

"But I'm not supposed to be doing any heavy lifting."

"I'd hardly call you 'heavy'..."

"Booth..."

"I know what you mean. Look, you just relax and," kiss, "I'll take care of the heavy lifting for now," he took a breath, "and we'll expand our repertoire when you're feeling more up to it." He dropped his chin and ran his nose up to nuzzle just above hers while he kissed her upper lip.

She supposed that was acceptable.

His kiss was reeling her in, she felt helpless to its pull. Then he broke their lips apart abruptly.

"Unless, of course, you want to wait until you're feeling all better to do anything at all," he teased.

She growled and pulled him back up to her.

"Easy, Bones. Recovering, remember?" he muttered into her mouth.

"God, Booth, I want you," she said back into his.

"Me too."

"You want yourself?"

He pulled back and looked at her. "Yes, Bones, I want you to scram on up outta here so I can rock my own world."

The prevailing joking winds caught her. She shrugged and stood up.

Booth sprang to the side of the bed, snagged her around the belly and began placing kisses there, letting his hands slide to cup her round ass over the gauzy fabric of her skirt. His fingers took advantage of the slack in the material and ran along the inside of her legs, tracing her bikini line.

"So not yourself, then," she said.

"No. I want you. I want all of you."

He let his right hand slide to her hip and hooked a thumb into the top of her skirt. At the same time his mouth moved to her other hip and he snagged the skirt there with his teeth. Mouth and thumb trailed the fabric from her hips.

He paused his movement. "You have a birthmark," he noted.

"Astute observation, Agent Booth." Breathy, hands in his hair.

He kissed it and let out a low laugh. "It looks like a rutabaga."

"It does not!" she squeaked.

He stripped her of her skirt, unbuttoned his slacks and moved his hands back up to her hip.

"I'm looking right at it, Bones, and I'm telling you, that's a rutabaga."

His hands slid around to her backside again and she exhaled, "It's a birthmark."

"Which looks like a tuberous root." He stood and moved close to her, letting the heat of his bare chest warm the small space between them. His face tilted down toward hers, close. She felt his exhale against her lips.

It's an evolutionary response necessary to the survival of the species, she thought when her knees nearly buckled at his very masculine stance hovering over her. That's all it is, she reasoned when his hungry eyes caused her stomach to flutter. But when he wrapped her in his arms and husked her name, her brain shut off and she threw her lips into his.

She finally sent her hands to release him from his remaining clothing. It really only took a nudge for his already unbuttoned and unzipped slacks to fall to the floor and his boxers soon followed.

Her movements were still forward, but had somehow become coy as well now, which surprised Booth. It was not what he expected after that racy interlude she'd concocted in the back of his truck. He was beginning to get a grasp of his partner as a lover, and she seemed to vary in different sexual situations. It was allowing him to vary his actions. And it was exactly the kind of thing that he suspected might never grow old. He was gobsmacked by the hint of a future it laid open for him.

He pressed her back on the bed and was hovering between her legs, kissing her full breasts. The heat from their hips agitated the air between them and Booth was beginning to feel a very strong need to be inside her. But what his instinct spurred him to do next surprised even him.

He sat back on his heels. He could see the disappointment in her face when he moved further away. And he watched it turn to outright desire as he caught her lower back with both hands and pulled her hips up into his lap.

She was feeling a bit helpless in the face of her lust at the moment, which was fitting as she didn't have a whole lot of control in this position. She wrapped her legs around his torso. Okay, that was what control she had. Normally, she might have complained, but the arousing man holding her hips so close to heaven was making her feel downright weak. She wanted to be removed from the tension. She desperately wanted him to finally fill her and make her come. She said so.

He looked down at where they nearly met and laughed.

"You know," she breathed in frustration, "in our society, laughing is not considered an appropriate response in this situation."

He looked back to her face with sparkling eyes. "Turnip hip."

She rolled her eyes at him, but couldn't help but find his drunken silliness adorable. Then, without warning, he was filling her as requested. More than requested. Her eyes rolled back in her head again, an entirely different reaction, and moans echoed through her apartment.

Fingers gripped her lower back, palms cradled the sides of her hips and thumbs reached as far as they could around her waist. He held her off the bed as he simultaneously thrust and pulled her onto his hard length. Brennan's back arched and the chill air surrounded her increasingly damp skin.

She was wrong about expecting the anticipation to end when he entered her. His cock sweating inside her was building a new tension. It grew steadily, it grew slowly. She groaned a shudder at a particularly deep thrust and let her hands loose.

Booth was just realizing that in this (admittedly very hot) position, he had no recourse to kiss her, to touch her, to do anything but watch her body gather beads of sweat before him. Before he had even a moment to think on it, though, Brennan had taken matters, quite literally, into her own hands.

The skin of her breasts felt silky to her fingers and digits roved across the slick skin. She pinched a nipple and the other hand dipped lower, snaking slowly downwards, taking its time. She caressed her hips, relishing the added pressure inside when she pressed on her abdomen. For some reason, she regularly veered near but stayed clear of the sensitive nub.

When she looked at her partner's face, noticed his rapt attention to her hand's deliberate torture.

"Why aren't you touching yourself?"

"I think this counts pretty conclusively as touching myself," she sighed as her hands switched places to give the other breast the same attention.

"Not your..." she pressed on her abdomen again and he grunted. "You're not touching your clit."

"I don't want to come just yet."

"You were begging for it just a bit ago."

"I changed my mind. I want to wait."

"You do realize you can have multiple orgasms, don't you? I feel like we're on the wrong sides of this discussion."

"It's building," she moaned. "When I touch my clit, I'm gonna come hard." Heavy exhale. "So hard."

He shuddered and gripped her tighter. "It makes me crazy when you come."

That did it. The thought of Booth out-of-control made her hurtle toward the edge, and she finally began to draw circles on her swollen clit. "Boooooth, fuck me hard," she cried long and he obliged, stroking harder and faster. Her legs clung to him for dear life and she left her mind for a brief moment, floating on the feeling of safety before rocketing downwards into spasms.

She arched her back away from the bed, as though the heat would set the sheets on fire. Some part of her knew it was illogical, but when she got her up and down confused, when she could smell his heartbeat, when she tasted the color blue, she was far from certain about things like pyrolysis or combustion. She couldn't place any faith in the normal laws of physics when Seeley Booth was in her bedroom.

He was still moving inside her when she finally came down. She'd barely been able to think how much she wanted to be pressed close to him when his arms looped beneath her shoulder blades and pulled her upright into his hard body. Their tongues tangled together fluidly as though they'd been doing this dance for a long time.

He'd been planning to keep her from overexerting herself by holding her tightly to him while he re-established his rhythm, but he got more than he bargained for. Once he was in reach, she loosed her hands, touching, caressing every bit of him she could reach. Brennan's lips soon found their way to his ear, where she sucked and moaned. Her low voice resonated straight through him.

Any one of the elements he could have handled individually, but the combination spurred the tightly wound storm. His desire overwhelmed him, he was drowning in her. He felt her pressing in on him from all sides.

I'm gonna come.

He wasn't certain he'd actually said it out loud, but she replied, "Yes, Booth. Oh, God, yes. Come for me."

His thrusting was erratic when he finally lost control and let the storm flow. He could hear her crying his name into his ear and feel her clutching at him, clamping down inside again. Booth buried his face in her neck and bit lightly at her collarbone.

When both their orgasms were spent, they fell sideways to the mattress, heads mostly toward the foot of the bed and lay there quietly, stroking each other.

"I don't like turnips, Booth."

"Well, of course not, you've always got one on you. Probably sick of them by now," he spoke into her skin.

His hands traced her curves like an old lover. If she'd believed in reincarnation, she would have been tempted to think that they'd been together in another life. He kissed her wetly just beneath her ear and she melted. Okay, several other lives. It felt too right to have been only a few days.

She'd been with men before who knew all of the secrets of a woman's body. They had been strictly physical partners. Angela had called them players, men who knew how to pleasure a woman and who would use their knowledge to acquire permission for what became one-night-stands. It had been fine with her, she usually preferred strings-free sex herself, but she'd agreed with Angela that when it came to relationships, even supposedly retired players weren't the way to go.

So when she closed her eyes and felt Booth move as though he'd lived lifetimes touching her body, when she felt that he knew infinitely more about her anatomy than anyone she'd ever been with, she was reminded momentarily of men who were so skilled that they weren't to be trusted with one's heart.

But then she opened her eyes.

And saw the man she knew, who was looking as deeply into her eyes as he had since the day she'd met him. Booth had proven himself trustworthy time after time. With her secrets, her fears, her life. He had fought with her, he had challenged her, and he had never once let her down. They had grown into discourse that consisted of more than verbal communication, more than body language. They had learned to think together, to be within each others' heads. So when it came to trusting him with her heart, it wasn't even a shift, they were already there. She decided that it was merely a matter of looking at each other differently.

And she was quite content to look at him differently, she thought as she craned her neck and let her eyes tumble down the long, long expanse of back to his chiseled ass.

Being one, breaking the laws of physics, didn't seem to be making two objects occupy the same space as one, it was expanding the two objects so that each also occupied the space of the other. Two didn't become one, two became so much more than the original two.

Equally physically impossible.

Was that the meaning of love? To incorporate another into oneself? A great emotional venn diagram? If so, they had been in love for a very long time.

She'd once told Dr. Gordon "Gordon" Wyatt that she wanted to observe from inside Booth's head, and he had interpreted that as wanting to "be one" with him.

She was suddenly pressed with the need to know.

"Booth, what does it feel like to be inside of me?"

"What?" he asked, suddenly very confused. He was clearly not in her head at the moment.

"Tell me how if feels when we're making love."

Booth was suddenly very aware of every molecule of air that entered and left his lungs. He was certain that if he focused hard enough, he could have given a count of how many molecules of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen had passed his voicebox unused since she'd asked.

But he couldn't answer. If it were any other woman he'd think she was fishing for compliments, but she had an expression of utter curiosity on her face. He wanted to oblige, but he was having a hard time describing how making love to her was different from every other woman he'd been with.

"It feels like... well i didn't realize it was possible to feel so close to someone."

She rubbed up against him, "Okay, I know you've been close to other women before."

"I don't mean physically close. Look, Bones, you know the way we think together?"

"How we follow the same chain of reasoning."

"Yes. And sometimes we barely need to even look at each other."

"Right."

"What does that feel like to you?"

She paused and smiled. "It's like we're inside each other's heads."

"Exactly. Making love to you is being in your body," he pulled her hips to his, "and in your head, and in your heart. I haven't experienced that combination before. Body, yes. Body and heart, yes. Body, heart, and head? Never."

"And it's good?"

He kissed her deeply as they drifted toward sleep. "The combination is mind-blowing."

"Hurry up, Bones. We're going to be late," Booth said from the kitchen as he straightened the tie of the spare suit he'd retrieved from his car.

"Just go and I'll drive myself," she called from down the hallway.

"Your car is at work."

"Damn." There was a pause and a clatter. "Okay, I'll be just a minute."

They were rushing so quickly that Booth almost didn't notice the little glass globe in the lobby that was now lying broken on the floor.

"Did I do that stumbling in here last night?"

Brennan looked down and pulled on her jacket. "No, there must have been some other drunken fools coming through."

"Hope they had even half as good a time as we did." He stopped next to the table, debating whether he should clean it up.

"Leave it, the caretaker will be by soon, he'll get it. And I thought you were in a hurry."

Booth managed to make it to the Jeffersonian in good time.

"And without even using your siren," Brennan said pointedly.

"I thought the traffic would be worse," he said defensively. "I'll talk to you later."

She looked around for a moment and then leaned in to place a soft kiss on his lips. "Talk to you later."

He'd developed a very easy, regular pattern to getting ready in the morning. It was focused around a simple and efficient procedure, and it centered him for his day. This morning had been utter chaos, the kind of thing that should have made him off-balance, but as he watched her walk up the steps, he felt more peaceful than he had in a long time.

my muse had some trouble with this chapter. what do you think? she's been a little flighty lately. let's all send her love and chocolate. each click of the button sends her a little foil wrapped kiss.