In the middle of the night, Emily was woken from a fitful sleep by a knock on her bedroom door. "Emily?" came Alex's timid voice, sounding completely unlike herself.

Sitting up with a yawn, Emily called out, "Is everything okay?"

"No... Maybe..." She sighed. "I don't know. Can I come in?"

"Of course," Emily said, concern knitting her brows as Alex's unsure face peered through the open door. "Are you sick?"

"No," she whispered, tiptoeing into the room. "I was just..." She choked on a sob, trailing off. "Can I stay here tonight? I can't fall asleep."

"Of course," she said again, moving over to make room in the bed. In the hint of moonlight gleaming in through the window, she could see that Alex had been crying and felt a surge of guilt that she hadn't been there to help quell her fears. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked softly.

"Not really," she mumbled, laying back and staring at the ceiling. For a few moments, Emily just stared at her in silence, concerned. "But you could hold me..." Alex whispered, barely breaking the silence.

Smiling faintly, Emily snuggled next to her – close enough to kiss her cheek, with only emotional distance preventing it. She wanted to say that she'd missed her, missed this closeness, but now was not the time. She wasn't sure that time would ever arrive again...

"What would you do?" Alex asked at length. She didn't need to specify further what she meant, the matter all too obvious to the both of them.

"Alex, I can't..." she started to protest.

"Please," she begged, "I feel like I'm drowning here..."

Emily sighed. "Could I afford a kid? If I used my trust fund. Could I raise a kid? Probably not on my own. Would my mother kill me? Absolutely." None of those was technically an answer to the question that had been asked, but they were the only answers she had to offer.

"Do you want a kid?" she pressed, refusing to settle for Emily's deliberate non-answers.

"I don't know," she admitted. It was the best she could do in that moment, even if it felt horribly inadequate to say so.

Alex heaved a sigh. "I don't know either..." She chewed her lip. "How could I not know? Shouldn't I have some sort of maternal instinct or something?"

"Alex, it's barely an embryo right now, it makes sense that you don't feel a connection yet," Emily assured her. "I know that if you choose to go forward with this pregnancy, you absolutely will find that connection inside you. But right now...its absolutely okay not to feel anything."

Swallowing thickly, Alex sought out Emily's hand, squeezing it tightly when she found it. "I feel like... I feel like if I keep it, it's giving him some kind of ownership over me – over my body, over my life."

"Alex..."

"And does that mean I've doomed the baby to a rapist for a father?"

"Oh, Alex, no!" Emily declared firmly. "I'd spend my whole trust fund on lawyers to make sure he never sees that baby." A pause. "Assuming that's what you want to do."

"I don't want to talk about it anymore," she dismissed quietly then, as she threw up a wall to keep Emily from seeing something she wasn't sure she wanted anyone to see.

Emily knew she was trying to ignore the issue, pretend it wasn't happening...not that she could blame her. She knew better than to push too hard, though, simply letting the issue lie. It wasn't worth the damage that would come from digging.

"Just close your eyes," she murmured. "Close your eyes and try to fall asleep." She tenderly stroked Alex's hair, twisting her fingers in the soft chocolate locks.

"How can I possibly fall asleep?" Alex asked, rather petulantly.

"Close your eyes," she repeated. "I'll tell you a story."

Alex cracked one eye open, looking at her skeptically.

"Just trust me, okay?"

Reluctantly, she let her eye fall closed again.

"Do you remember our first date?" Emily asked in a whisper once she'd obeyed. "I felt so awkward and ridiculous... I really wanted to impress you, so I dressed way too fancy and you weren't even sure it was a date, so you wore jeans."

She paused, giggled. "You still looked so cute, you gave me butterflies. I took you to my favourite little indie bookstore and told you to pick out your favourite book in the whole world and I'd do the same, then we'd trade. I was worried you'd think it was a stupid idea or that I'm a big dork or something, but the way your eyes lit up when I explained it...

"Afterwards, I took you to a nearby bistro for lunch because they serve this chocolate cheesecake and every Friday, you brought a brownie for lunch so I knew you liked chocolate. I'll never forget that smile when you tried it – you had chocolate on the corner of your mouth...I wanted to kiss you so badly."

She paused her story, glanced down at Alex who was nuzzled into her side, eyes closed, breathing soft and even. She smiled softly and, trying not to disturb her, moved to lie down and go to sleep.

"Why didn't you?" a faint voice asked the darkness.

"Why didn't I what?" Emily asked.

"Why didn't you kiss me?"

"Because what could someone like you possibly see in someone like me?" she asked, though it was rhetorical and had long since been answered...even if the answer seemed to be under debate at the moment.

Silence fell once again and Emily wrapped her arms around Alex, keeping her close, as if for the last time. She couldn't fall asleep, though, not after the day's events, not when she had everything that mattered in her arms and yet still so far away. She lay there staring up at the ceiling, wishing for things she couldn't have.

Alex broke the silence again, answering the rhetorical questions with a soft, "Everything."