A/N: This one is a little shorter, but here is your double date chapter. The next two are written, one is ready, but I'm keeping it hostage as my buffer. It's probably the one I've most anticipated posting so I'll try to hammer out the next buffer chapter so I can post that one.
Brennan was grumpy. She was in a foul mood, and she hoped she'd find enough mercy not to murder anyone who got in her way today. She knew she'd get away with it, too and that was almost too tempting.
"Doctor Brennan, it was an understandable error. She's only a first year." Cam commented as the young student sniffled and scurried off of the platform. Brennan glared at her friend and colleague with disdain but refrained from commenting. Any response she'd have would likely get her fired. "What is wrong with her?" She heard Cam whisper across the table to Angela and Hodgins.
Brennan chose to ignore them, instead examining the horrible mess of the bones her intern had left for her. "Deputy Dick cashed in his v-card with Bren, but when it came to taking his weapon out of target practice and into the field, he misfired… repeatedly. Shot Bren in the leg." Angela said quietly.
"You were shot?!" Booth's concerned voice carried as he strode up the forensics steps. "Are you–"
"Where are my fucking interns?!" Brennan shouted, slamming her palms against the exam table and startling her co-workers. She was blunt, yes, but she'd never been this unprofessional, and she fumed internally at the thought of what she'd just said.
"Are you hurt?" Booth asked, and she wanted to laugh out loud because yes, she was in agony. "Who is Deputy Dick?" He asked under his breath. "Who was shot?"
"Seeley…" Cam's voice was a quiet warning, of which Brennan hoped Booth would take seriously as she glared at the bones in front of her, silently seething until she felt her breaking point boil over.
"I can hear you, you know." She glowered at them as she stomped toward the railing. Wasn't she the one who was supposed to be socially inept? "Any intern on the schedule today had better be on the forensics platform in twenty minutes for a lesson in proper skeleton rearticulation or they will be dismissed from their internship and any of my classes on their current roster." She shouted, her voice echoing satisfyingly throughout the lab.
"Deputy Dick is Andrew Hacker." She heard Hodgins mutter under his breath with amusement. Traitor.
"He shot her in the leg?" Booth asked incredulously, and she heard Angela huff with frustration. If this were anyone else, she'd be the first one telling Booth all about what had happened. At least she took Brennan's confidence seriously. "His… v-card?"
"Uh huh…" Hodgins said slowly, as if they were dealing with a moron. At the moment, she felt like everyone around her was a complete moron. Why the hell was the sternum in the place of the femur on this rearticulated skeleton?
"I can still hear you!" Brennan growled, snapping off her gloves and whipping them in the general direction of the waste basket before stomping down the stairs and heading for her office. She'd had enough of this. She couldn't focus.
"Oh." Booth finally said, his throat clearing carrying to her ears as she turned and slammed her office door.
Brennan thought her day could only get better after her interns proved they weren't all entirely incompetent. She was already dreading having dinner with Booth and Hannah when the text message from Hannah came through telling her that the restaurant had a flood and had to close for a few weeks. Her follow up message was a suggestion that they just move dinner to their apartment and order in. Brennan had wanted to cancel all together and avoid Booth after her temper tantrum earlier in the day on the forensics platform, but instead she'd sent a quick confirmation to Hannah and then another text to update Andrew.
She glanced at the stack of magazines that Angela and Cam had provided her as a way to educate her inexperienced lover and wondered why they printed articles like Ten Ways to Make Her Scream in a women's magazine when the larger demographic needing this brand of literature would be men like Andrew. In fact, she was already on the verge of screaming, though it had nothing to do with nearing orgasm.
At 5:30 she packed her laptop and her magazines into her messenger bag and headed out to her car. She drove home on autopilot, rehearsing the tactful way that Cam and Angela had demonstrated she should approach the problem with Andrew. She had wanted to address it immediately, but they had both insisted she wait until after dinner and ensure they both had had a few drinks first.
"I feel I should be direct and simply tell him he is sexually inept." she'd suggested, gazing over the magazines on her desk.
"No."
"Absolutely not."
Cam and Angela had spoken simultaneously. "If you have any hope of him ever overcoming his ineptitudes, telling him he's crap in the sack, is not the way. Men are fragile. You have to be gentle with things like this." Angela had further explained, and Brennan shook her head. If she was personally lacking in some aspect of her life, especially sexually, she would want to know immediately to make the appropriate adjustments.
As she slid into the passenger seat of Andrew's car two hours later, she had taken the edge off of her mood by way of a high pressure shower head and was feeling much more charitable about spending time with him.
They exchanged small talk on the drive over to Booth's, and the closer they got to his apartment, the more she felt uneasy. She had already weighed the options and had come to the conclusion that if she and Andrew couldn't become more sexually in sync after tonight, she would suggest they end their romantic relationship. When she'd texted Angela about her decision, her best friend had said she felt bad for Andrew. He was a 'dead man walking' and didn't even know it.
Andrew held her door open for her, offering her his hand as he helped her out of the car, and slid his other hand over the small of her back. "You look positively sinful, tonight." He murmured against her ear, showing a new boldness he'd previously not shown. Perhaps it was the prospect of flaunting their relationship in a social setting with an alpha male.
Brennan felt a little silly, standing outside of Booth's apartment, waiting for him to come open the door. Before they'd parted ways, she'd have just knocked loudly as a warning and let herself in. It was equally foreign to her to see Booth answer the door with a woman next to him, greeting her as a man, who wasn't Booth, ushered her through the entry with his hand placed possessively on the small of her back.
"Welcome!" Hannah said cheerily. "Andrew, right? Temperance hasn't stopped gushing about you." she added, and Brennan wondered why Hannah was being so factitious.
"Booth." Andrew greeted him awkwardly, holding out the bottle of wine they'd selected from his personal collection. This was going to be an interesting evening.
"Deputy–"
"No, no, no. We're in your home on a social occasion, please, call me Andrew." Andrew insisted, and Brennan watched as Booth's jaw clenched through a fake smile. "And maybe I'll call you Seeley!" Andrew suggested, and the jaw clenched even tighter.
"Nobody calls him that." Brennan pointed out, trying to diffuse the tension, but Hannah's voice piped in, claiming that those closest to him could get away with, rhyming off examples like herself, Pops, Rebecca and even Cam. "Yes, of course." Brennan agreed, silently fuming that Hannah didn't consider her close to Booth simply because she respected his disdain for his given name.
"Let's keep it borderline casual." Andrew chimed in as they were led into the dining room. "Booth and Hacker. I'm not entirely fond of my first name either." Andrew noted, and Brennan wondered why he'd never mentioned that to her. Perhaps he was doing that thing where someone lies in order to put another person at ease.
"The food should be here any minute." Hannah spoke up as they approached the table. "Sorry, I'm not really a host." She added as she waved over the bare table. "Not like Temperance! She had a few of us over recently and decked her dining room out to the nines. Candles, and she cooked! She even determined the cause of death on the chicken." She added, nudging Andrew's arm playfully. "You got a keeper, Andrew. Better lock this one down with a ring before someone else does." She teased.
"Bones doesn't believe in marriage."
"Marriage is an archaic and meaningless institution."
She and Booth spoke at the same time, and shared a smile. Perhaps, not being a part of the 'Seeley in-crowd' wasn't really all that important. He understood her.
"Well, me neither." Hannah replied as she took her seat next to Booth.
"What? Yes, you have to." Brennan said more forcefully than she'd intended, and tried to recover under the glare of the awkward expressions around her. She had given up Booth specifically because she was not good for him, because he wanted things like marriage that she simply couldn't give. "I just mean, Booth is traditional. He believes very firmly in the institution of marriage. He—he's Catholic…" she tried to reason, but every word that came out of her mouth seemed just as ludicrous as the one before it.
The sound of the delivery driver knocking on the door saved her, and she smiled awkwardly as Booth and Hannah left together to get it.
The dinner conversation had thus far been mostly work related after Bones stumbled over marriage and his religion at the beginning of the night. Shop talk all around was a safe topic, though. Booth would have done just about anything to not have to have Hacker sitting in his apartment making small talk, let alone getting into anything personal. The guy probably lived in a fucking mansion, and here he was, sitting at Booth's second had dining room table, given to him by Pops when he moved into the retirement home. It was a solid table, he wasn't' just going to see it get tossed.
Hacker was the kind of douche who probably had some imported marble slab on glass legs that nobody was even allowed to eat at. This table had character. It had seen meals with family and friends. He was even pretty confident that Parker was conceived on that far edge where Hacker was seated, too.
The thought of that made Booth smile to himself, as he nodded along to the conversation, pretending he was following what Hacker was saying.
"Temperance, you have to try the basil beef." Hannah told Bones, reaching across the table with the takeout container.
"She's a vegetarian"
"She doesn't eat meat."
Booth and Hacker both spoke up before Bones had a chance to open her mouth. Bones seemed to smiled, politely declining the beed, and Booth wondered how Hannah hadn't known this very well known fact about his best friend. Had he really kept her at such a distance that his girlfriend and his partner were still practically strangers? "Try this one, Bones." He suggested, handing her the carton near him that held the very last dumpling. It was a sacrifice he was willing to make after that cold wake-up call.
"What a sacrifice you have made." She said with a knowing grin as she speared her prize with one of her chopsticks. "I have nearly lost a phalange on more than one occasion racing Booth to the last dumpling." she laughed, and she couldn't help but join in. "Of course, I'm speaking metaphorically because Booth is not a cannibal." she added. Hannah cringed, but Hacker seemed to eat up her jokes like they were the funniest things he'd ever heard.
"A dumplin' for my dumplin'." Hacker said with a grin, reaching his arm around Bones' shoulders and stroking his fingertips up and down her arm. For a guy who was apparently crap in bed, he'd sure been making a ton of sexually charged gestures throughout the evening.
Booth wanted to deck the prick. Bones wasn't his. Except she was smiling at him, and leaning into his touch, and maybe she was actually his dumplin'. And since when did Temperance Brennan allow anyone to call her an annoying little nickname? Well, anyone but him.
"You guys are adorable. Match made in heaven." Hannah was gushing, and he remembered that he had her, this gorgeous, brilliant, woman, who loved him and whom he loved right back.
It was that exact thought that he'd repeated to himself like a mantra the rest of the evening. Every time Hacker touched Bones, or flirted with her in his dorky way, or whispered something private to her. He'd almost had to leave the table when he watched Hacker's hand slip none-too-discreetly beneath the table, followed by Bones' eyes widened and she flashed a heated look at him before her hand slipped under the table to retrieve his. She placed it on the table next to his plate, and patted it with a promising smirk.
It made him sick until Booth remembered the conversation he'd walked in on at the lab, and he felt a different kind of sick— the sick satisfaction that Hacker was a 40 year old virgin who blew his load all over Bones' leg. No wonder she was in such a shitty mood. He'd seen her dump guys for much less, though. Maybe she really was into Hacker.
That thought made him feel sick all over again. It didn't matter that she didn't believe in marriage. All he kept picturing was him standing there, as Bones' best man, while she married Andrew fucking Hacker. Temperance Hacker sounded like shit, and all the little curly haired Hacker spawns they had would probably be just as smarmy as their father. Not that she'd take a man's name any sooner than she'd marry him, and he wasn't even sure about her position on kids anymore, not since she'd asked him to donate his swimmers.
Maybe he should have let her go through with it after all. Then he'd have his own little Bones running around, spilling grape juice on Hacker's white carpets. On the downside, his little Bones would have Hacker as a step-dad and a bunch of Hacker siblings, and he couldn't wrap his head around that either.
In reality, any kid Bones had, he'd probably dote on just as much as she doted on Parker. Would he be able to live with a baby Hacker calling him Uncle Booth? He wouldn't eve admit it, but he didn't like the idea of any baby that Bones had calling him anything but 'Daddy', but that was a thought better left in the past.
As Booth got ready for bed, he listened to Hannah ramble on and on about how great Bones and Hacker were for each other. "They're basically the same person, don't you think?" Booth simply nodded because he couldn't see it, but he wasn't about to get into it tonight. He'd had enough Hacker for a lifetime. Bones seemed to be really happy, and that's all he could hope for. He wanted her to find the same happiness he'd found– to be able to move on and feel like herself again.
"C'mere." He said, grabbing Hannah around the waist and tugging her into his chest. He stopped her babbling abruptly in the best way he knew how: kissing her until she melted against him.
Dinner at Booth's had been pleasant, to say the least, once the initial awkwardness had worn off. Booth, to his credit, was polite, if a little tense, but Brennan credited that to the fact that he was being forced into a social setting with his superior. Andrew had been more affectionately tactile than ever before, finding reasons to touch her, which only contributed to her irritation about her unsatisfied sexual desires.
As they entered her apartment, she held his hand and guided him over to the couch. "Andrew, we need to have an uncomfortable conversation." She told him matter-of-factly. He seemed nervous as he sat next to her, and she reached behind the sofa on the side table to retrieve the magazines. "We haven't been having very compatible sexual intercourse, and I fear if we don't correct this immediately, it will only remain unsatisfying." She told him bluntly.
He seemed to take a long moment to process what she was telling him before he nodded, looking down at the cover of the magazine in her hand. "You haven't been… satisfied by our encounters." He stated, and she nodded. "Okay." His face seemed flushed and she understood this was going to be a very awkward, but entirely necessary discussion.
"I would like for us to try again; however, perhaps you would allow me to provide some helpful instruction?" She suggested. He nodded eagerly, clearly glad to be given another chance. For both of their sakes, she truly hoped he'd have a steep learning curve.
Lying alone in her cooling bed, Brennan reached for her phone, deciding she'd reply to Angela's text message now rather than later.
'Not even with a hand-drawn diagram' she typed out and hit send. As an after-thought, she snapped a photo of the crudely drawn diagram she'd sketched out and labeled while lying in her bed next to Andrew, having stopped him several moments into his actions to regroup.
Andrew had tried; he truly did, and she recognized his efforts. He did not, however, show any improvement, save for the fact that he didn't ejaculate in the first 60 seconds this time.
"I don't think this is going to work, Andrew." She'd told him quietly, stopping him with her hand on his shoulder as he lapped at her throbbing apex like a cat at a saucer of milk, missing any and all instruction she provided.
"Should we try something else?" he'd suggested, and she felt so foreign being on the other side of a misunderstood context.
"No… I didn't mean the sex." she clarified. "Though, that is also unlikely to work either right now." she added.
To his credit, he had taken it in stride, nodding silently and extricating himself from her bed. He'd excused himself to the bathroom to get dressed, and she walked him to the door.
"I hope that we can maintain a professional working relationship." She'd told him, and he smiled tightly, assuring her that he understood and did not hold this against her.
"I've really enjoyed getting to know you better, Temperance." he told her. "Perhaps, when your heart is more open to someone other than Booth, you'll find the right chemistry with someone again." he'd told her, and she wanted to be offended by his words. She'd been open to this relationship. She'd tried to be, anyway. "To be fair, I don't think Agent Booth is quite as over you as he claims, if the daggers he was glaring at me all evening were any indication."
Her phone beeped at her, drawing her from her thoughts as she lifted it from her chest to look at the screen.
'Sorry, Sweetie. I'm on it.' Angela had replied to her text, and Brennan laughed sardonically. She believed whole-heartedly that Angela would find her someone to engage in meaningless sex with. Sex didn't fix lonely though, and she was back to being all alone.
Andrew had been a welcome distraction. Between work, writing, and spending time with him, she'd had very little spare time to be lost in thoughts of Booth and the dull ache she still experienced when she contemplated his long and happy life with Hannah. She'd thought having a happy life of her own would be a worthwhile distraction, but the evidence proved otherwise.
Perhaps, the only way to truly move on was first to heal the metaphorical broken heart. She needed to find a way to be comfortable alone again before she could cope with becoming comfortable with another person.
