:P
One of the good things about Sasuke being locked up, Sakura decided, was that she and Ino no longer had anything major to fight over. They still squabbled over silly, simple things—a hairband, who got to work with which novices on what day—but Sakura's outreach had mended any leftover hostilities between them.
Ino had been depressed after the breakup of her team, but Sakura hadn't known how bad it was until a couple days after her chuunin exam, when she found Ino on a park bench with her head in her hands, too silent, too still.
"Hey, Ino-pig," she tried, jovially. "Whatcha doin'?"
Nothing. Not even a twitch to indicate that she'd heard.
Disturbed, Sakura sat beside her, a hand hovering over the other girl's back cautiously. Ino's voice made her jump.
"Do you think . . . they'd think less of me? Shikamaru and . . . and Chouji?"
"What are you talking about?" Her hand pulled back a little but continued to hover.
"If I quit being a ninja."
"What?"
"I'm no good at it. I barely made it out of the forest the first time, and I didn't make it this time, and I don't think I'll make it out alive next time, so what's the point in continuing?" The blonde girl's head shot up, fierce expression locked on to keep the tears at bay.
Sakura blinked, shocked. "Ino . . ."
"I mean, I can't even keep up with you."
The insult hadn't been meant to bite, and Sakura smiled, hooked her arm around Ino's neck. "Sure you could."
"You made it, didn't you?"
"Yeah." She'd just found out that she and Lee had passed their exam the day before. "They said that Lee and I both need to work on our strategy development, though."
Tension slowly slipped away from the other girl's body. "The others?"
"Temari passed, of course. Kankurou didn't. Neither did any of the Grass or Rain genin."
She paused deliberately, forcing Ino to react, to ask: "And?"
"And Naruto and Gaara got a two-hour lecture from just about every authority figure from Gai on up about precedents and setting examples for genin to come." She sighed. "I don't think it would have been nearly that long if Naruto hadn't gone to sleep, though."
I knew a bit of good gossip could get her going. Sakura inwardly grinned as the wounded look started to fade from Ino's eyes. "He went to sleep in front of a group of—"
"A seriously pissed-off group, at that. Don't forget that part."
"Oh, no. So what happened?"
Sakura rolled her eyes skyward, doing her best to look bored, drawling every word. "Oh, after the lecturing and the grumbling and Naruto yelling at the Hokage again and trying to wake Naruto up again because Gaara blindsided him for being annoying and Naruto threatening Gaara and the instructors jumping in to defuse that since for all intents and purposes it looked like they were gonna have a rematch right there . . . Yeah, they made it. Both of them."
Ino laughed, delighted. It gave Sakura an opening. "Hey, about training. The guys want to start working on grappling, and . . . Well, you know, I'm not really comfortable with . . ."
The blonde girl's look sharpened to cheerfully predatory. "Don't feel like rolling around on the grass with Lee? Or even—"
"Don't even say it!" Sakura gave the short ponytail a sharp tug.
The eyes that met hers were full of viciously cheery speculation. "Whatever you say, Forehead-girl."
So Ino had come to train with her when their breaks from missions gave them time. They'd picked and sparred, bickered and drilled, quarreled and did groundwork with each other so intensely that they could sometimes pretend the three guys watching them were interested only in technique.
Sometimes, though, the watching was too blatant, and they had to leave off with each other to chase down and batter Lee and Naruto. When they focused on Gaara, though, he would give them a completely innocent expression that'd be almost as much of a deterrent as his reputation. And watching him try to control his sand for long enough to not smother his opponent at the same time as he tried to provide decent offense was amusing, to say the least.
"I know that I could kill an attacker that got that close to me," he said to them later, after Lee and Naruto had departed. His voice was flat, toneless, and from the look on Ino's face, still disturbing to those not used to it. "It would really just be a matter of how. But this is a good exercise in control."
Sakura looked up at him from where she and Ino sat, resting. "At the tournament, you didn't have the same problem when you and Naruto fought."
He shrugged. "We'd mostly tired ourselves out first. The combinations at the end . . . That was us being stubborn."
Eventually Ino would go, and Sakura would once again end up with her lap occupied. More and more often, he would lay on his back so he could look up at her, talk to her. It was always little, silly things: a joke he'd heard somewhere, a recounting of that day's work with Naruto or Lee, the horrors of his first group of genin. And she'd laugh, her fingers smoothing his hair back, grazing over the kanji on his forehead.
It was strange to see him try so hard, to see him use phrases he had to have picked up from her teammates in an attempt to amuse her, but she didn't complain and wouldn't mention it lest he stop.
She eventually told Ino about what had become habit between herself and the Sand ninja. Ino had pursed her lips, chewed on a cuticle thoughtfully. "What about Lee?" she finally responded.
"We go out every once in a while. He's a gentleman." He's not the one that Sand sends out as their one-man execution squad, she thought, then immediately chided herself: Damn you, do you still think less of him for it?
"Don't you think you should stick with just one?"
Sakura blushed. "It's not like that. We're just friends."
"Uh-huh." The sound was delivered with no inflection that she could read. "Since you're just friends, does Lee know about the lap thing?"
She cringed. "No."
"Why not?"
Because half of the time it's a secret, a precious secret that I regret telling even you about, and the rest of the time I'm not sure what to think of it myself. Hell, I couldn't tell you without stammering and stuttering. Some part of me, I'm sure, is even ashamed of it.
"Dunno," she murmured.
In only a few months, she had stood between Lee and Gaara as they watched Ino lose her second chuunin finals match after a good fight. She'd also stood and waited as Ino found out the results, and had shrieked along and hugged her friend back at the good news.
"Sasuke wasn't at this one," Ino noted afterward.
"Yeah," she agreed, attention diverted to where one particular Sand ninja was talking to Hinata. Gaara was getting both taller and heavier, and he loomed over the shyly smiling girl by more than a head. Sakura forced herself to look away, rolled her eyes. "He said something about not wanting to see anyone else make a mockery of the matches, like some people did the last time."
A soft sniff. "You still visit him?"
"Sometimes, when he feels like having a visitor. He's gotten better, some. We even had a nice quiet game of Go the last time I was there." And the time before that, he accused me of servicing Lee, Gaara, and Naruto, all at once. Every time I see him he's both more and less like the person I knew before, and I can't quite shake the feeling that he's playing to a crowd. "The Hokage's thinking of relaxing his guard a little. Maybe even letting him out sometimes."
"Ah."
Against her will, her eyes wandered back to Gaara and Hinata. The Hyuuga nodded, smiling. Gaara nodded back, returning a faint smile of his own, then turned and walked away.
"Admit it, Sakura," Ino murmured.
"No," she snarled. I will not, can not, refuse to! Nothing good can come of it! She forced her tone to calm. "I'm . . . just curious. The Hokage likes to know how he's doing with things, too. So I'm keeping track of him for her."
"You're hopeless," her friend grinned.
To their side, Gaara approached Naruto. The blond fidgeted relentlessly, nearly beside himself with anxiety over something. Both of the girls paused to watch as Gaara gave the other boy a patient, much-abused look that stilled his squirming. "She passed. And she said yes."
Naruto whooped, dashed in a small circle, then, noticing Sakura and Ino standing nearby, darted over to them ecstatically. "I'm gonna go out with Hinata! I've got a date with Hinata! I—" He crumbled, bit his fingertips, looked frantically from side to side. "What do I— What if she— What—"
"Go ask Jiraiya," Sakura offered.
"Good idea! He knows more about women than anyone!"
He bolted hard enough to leave a dust trail behind. A distance away, Gaara shook his head, ran a hand through his hair, and wandered off towards an almost identical pair of green-clad individuals further down the street.
"Besides," Sakura said, almost to herself. "Lee's really the important person in his life. He and Naruto are the ones that he really talks to. For the most part, I'm just his pillow. And if he talks to his pillow sometimes, so what, it's still only a pillow. It doesn't mean anything."
Ino rested a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, but said nothing else.
ooo
Spring shifted to summer, summer to fall. Sakura's mother, battling what she thought was a persistent winter cough, found Gaara sitting on the doorstep in the snow and threw a polite tantrum that resulted in him having his own key to their home. Albeit disturbed, Sakura decided that her mother was an unbelievably understanding individual.
On a walk home from a movie one day with Lee, he shyly took her hand. He's nice to hug, she decided in front of her house, cheek contentedly pressed against his chest. He's warm and kind and perfectly, completely safe. He really is a good person.
With spring, Lee's hand-holding became more frequent, but he never pressed for anything more. Things in Konoha settled into a sort of calm, a kind of routine, to the point that she knew that something was going to happen, had to happen to shatter the calm like a stone thrown into an icy pool. And mid-spring, it did.
The weight of an additional body sinking into and stretching out on the mattress beside her almost didn't bring her up from sleep. What she saw when she rolled over to find out what the disturbance was caused by, though, drove the air from her lungs, rendering her incapable of making a noise even before the hand clamped down over her mouth. Gaara's eyes caught the barest glimmers of light like an animal's, the eerie shine unnerving her as much as the set of his jaw, more so than his presence in her bed.
"Shh. Hush. It's me."
She gulped air, then squeaked when he hooked an arm and leg around her to pull her against him. Don't show fear, a still, rational something in her head said. Whatever you do, don't show fear.
It was like telling a drowning person not to flail.
"They did it," he rasped, voice hoarse, face inches from hers. "They left me, and after they left me they tried to kill me. They all do that, after a while."
"What . . . What are you talking about?"
His eyes widened to an impossible size, teeth gleaming in what could never be called a smile. All of unholy hell, right in front of her.
He's going up, she realized. He's going up and there's no one here but me to try and stop him.
If you try to run, Inner Sakura whispered, or try to get away, he'll rip you apart. And he won't even think twice about it, and you know it.
One of his hands crept across her shoulder, covered her throat. It didn't tighten until she grasped at it. His upper lip curled back in disgust. "You'll leave me too, some day. You all will."
Can't run. Can't hide. Can't avoid it this time.
But under there, somewhere, was still the lost child that had craved her touch.
She inhaled shakily, forced her hand away from the one slowly cutting off her air supply and out towards him. "No I won't."
The thumb digging into her windpipe pulled away some. She continued, fatalism steadying her voice, her fingers brushing the side of his neck. If he actually meant to kill her, it would be quick. He'd do that much for her, no matter what. "I won't go anywhere if you don't want me to."
His mask cracked. "I can't believe you!"
"Then don't. Then kill me, and understand that I'd leave only because you want me to."
The set of his mouth softened, his expression shifting from bloodlust to confusion to horror. "No!"
Gaara jerked, tried to scramble away from her, but she caught him by his shirt. Hell with what he does to me, there's no way I'm setting him loose on the streets in this condition! He shoved at her hopelessly for a few short seconds, trying to untangle himself without hurting her. The sand spiraling up her wrists had her sure for a heartbeat that he meant to start breaking bones in order to get free; then, just as quickly as he'd tried to retreat, he lunged into her arms, wrapping around her so tightly she was sure he'd crack some of her ribs.
She tucked her chin against his forehead, pushed her nose into his hair. His breath dampened the hollow at the base of her throat. Something still doesn't seem right . . . Then her brain finally processed what her nose was telling her.
He smells like blood. Lots of blood. Oh no.
Can you smell the blood on his hands, Sakura?
His hands? Try his entire body!
She shuddered. What happened?
The arms around her tightened, then loosened, as well as the leg wrapped around hers. His answer made her aware that she had spoken out loud. "I don't know." Fingertips dug into her side, ribs. His hair tickled her face as he shook his head. "I don't know. I. Don't. Know."
Sometime between then and later, between the point that his grip bruised her skin and the point that his fingertips started their usual, gentle, back-and-forth motion against her shoulder, she learned about something bigger than a walking pillow, bigger than comfort. Absolution.
It would be a long night.
The insistent pounding on her front door came with the half-light just before dawn. She untangled herself from Gaara's grasp, meeting his lucid, haunted gaze for just a second. He looked like he'd been beaten, like he'd been hollowed out and left to dry. Before either of their emotions could overcome her, she left her bed to find out who was waiting outside.
Approaching the door, she heard, faintly, a male voice. "But why are you looking for him? And why would he be here?"
Sakura opened the door to Tsunade herself, flanked by Lee and Temari. "Sakura, have you seen Gaara?"
Said Sand ninja appeared behind her, looking more grumpily rumpled than emotionally battered. Lee took in the two of them and his face crumpled as he came to all the wrong conclusions.
Temari stepped forward. "You're okay! Both of you!"
"Yeah," Sakura said. "But do you mind—" Telling me what the fuck just happened last night? Inner Sakura yelled. "—explaining to, well, both of us, what went wrong where, and when?"
"We think it was an assassination attempt." Temari dug in a pocket, produced a vial. "I found this. It's a sedative."
Gaara snarled, his arms folding. "No wonder things went . . . They thought drugging me would be a good idea?"
Temari continued, directing her statements to Sakura. "We found what was left of the bodies, but couldn't find him. And from the patches of forest that got wiped out in the distance between Sand and here, we figured he was out of control."
So, fighting a drug, fighting for his self control, and after fighting a set of nameless someones for his life, he came . . . to me. "We're okay now, though," she said, but didn't quite believe it.
Tsunade spoke up. "Gaara, do you remember anything about the people that attacked you?"
His hand went to his head in a gesture she hadn't seen in more than a year and a half, eyes squeezing shut, lips peeling back from teeth. "No."
"You, and Sand, have to find out who and why. This could be anything, from a personal grudge to the start of a war."
He nodded and stepped around Sakura; then stopped just outside of the door and turned back. Fingers caught hers, raised her knuckles to his lips as the look in his eyes told her everything and nothing, too much and not nearly enough. "Thank you," he murmured.
Worry. Pain. Gratitude. She couldn't identify anything else.
"Set things right," she whispered in return.
He nodded once, tersely, and released her hand. Temari fell in step beside him as they departed. On some level, Sakura noticed that he'd matched the height of his sister.
In case you also didn't notice, that wasn't a kid's body you got to wrestle with last night, either, Inner Sakura offered. A little too padded, not as bony.
I don't need your help, Sakura grated back.
Tsunade glanced between her and Lee. "Once you're done, come see me, Sakura."
It seemed that when she wasn't reporting on Sasuke, she was reporting on Gaara. "Yes, Hokage."
The older woman departed silently. Lee bit his lip and finally met Sakura's eyes.
"It's not what you think," she said, lamely.
"What is it, then?" His voice shook a little bit, and she suddenly felt like the most awful person in the village. No, the country.
Looks like I have to tell him about the lap thing to him after all.
He kept talking. "I mean . . . You don't look at me like that."
And she knew he was right. But there was a way around that. "You didn't wake me up and try to strangle me in the middle of the night, either."
He looked up, back straightening, eyebrows twitching, anger at someone trying to hurt his Sakura mingling with good humor and a possible form of understanding. "Should I?"
Against her will, she smiled. "Please don't. I've had enough excitement for the rest of the month."
Lee sighed, looked away, then looked back. "But why would he come here instead of to me, or even to Naruto? Naruto could control him if he had to, you know?"
Sakura mentally ran over a half dozen gentle, clean ways to explain things to Lee. She'd been working on all of them for months. None of them would not upset him, and none of them could explain why she had kept things a secret from everyone but Ino, but she hoped they would do.
"Come on in, Lee. I've got something to talk to you about."
It was awkward, of course, but not as painful as she thought it would be. Lee sat with his elbows on his knees and listened quietly as she stammered out her actions and reasons. Once she was done he looked up and, surprisingly, smiled.
She still asked. "You're . . . okay with it, then?"
"Well, yeah." He shrugged. "It's innocent. And if you hadn't, and if he hadn't known he could come to you, then right now either us or Sand would be digging the dead and wounded out of the rubble of the village."
Lee stood, approached her. She took his proffered hands and rose to her feet as well, looking away from him.
"Sakura, I want you to be happy. I . . . I want you to want me, you know? But above that, I want you to be happy. And if I can be that person that makes you happy, then that's what I want to be."
Her arms encircled him and she was encircled in turn, cheek against his chest, suddenly understanding that he was talking about a lot more than Gaara's unofficial therapy. "Thank you, Lee."
"When it comes down to it, what you do is up to you. Not me." His lips pressed against her forehead. "It's your choice."
She clenched her fists behind his back and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping with all her heart that she could be good enough to match him, could be a good enough person to deserve someone as good as he was.
ooo
The disturbance in Sand had proven to be an attempted uprising, aiming first at taking out Sand's best fighters—ones who'd proven loyal to the new Kazekage. The two factions played least-in-sight throughout the summer, with pockets of rebels being destroyed as soon as the intelligence on them was verified. Things might not have lasted too long, might have been quelled quickly, until Sound got involved. In the thick of both information gathering and eradication of all opposition, Gaara was kept away from Konoha for five months straight.
Sometimes Sakura worried—not for his safety in battle, but for his grip on his sanity. In as few as three weeks away, his desperation for the comfort she could offer could be felt, could be tasted and smelled, like the change of seasons.
Would he keep a hold of himself, she wondered, or would he find someone else willing to sit with him, listen to his stories, play with his hair? Or would he revert to the soulless creature, the half-human he was before he truly knew us?
She was sent on a bodyguard mission with a team of genin, and so was away from the village when her mother died. The nagging winter cough that had just never gone away had been the symptom of something much more serious, something that overran her organs and made her collapse in the marketplace. By the time Tsunade had reached her there was nothing that could be done. Sakura had only arrived back just in time for the funeral. Lee and Naruto pressed close to either side for the duration, arms around her, as she stood dry-eyed in her misery, noting how only a handful of people had turned up to pay their respects.
Afterwards her teammates hugged her, promising to be there if she needed anything but respecting her request to be alone. As if in sympathy, the darkened sky opened up on her. She stood, accepting, as the rain washed over and soaked her, finally giving in to the understanding that there was one more person that she would never see, never be able to talk to again. Knowledge of her own mortality, sureness of how poor the attendance at her own funeral would be, and frustration with her own morbidity finally brought tears that she turned up to the frigid precipitation.
When she opened her mouth to catch the droplets, acting out the childish whimsy in defiance of death, in declaration of her own life, she clearly tasted the promise of winter.
Body racked by shivers, she finally began walking to her darkened home. By the time she got there, her hands were numb and shaking so badly she could barely grip the doorknob.
"You're soaked."
Eyeshine gleamed momentarily from a shadowed spot under an overhang before Gaara stepped forward to meet her. His features had been sharpened by war in the same way Sasuke's had been sharpened by captivity. Childish roundness had melted away, replaced with high cheekbones and a strong jaw, black-ringed eyes so intense she could barely meet them. There was a hardness to him, a coldness that hadn't been there the last time she'd seen him, but the fingers that touched her throat were still gentle. "And you're freezing."
She tried to stammer out a reply as he opened the door for her, half-dragging her down the hall by her wrist. Uncomprehending, she watched as he turned the hot water in the shower on full blast, but she figured out what was going on quickly enough when he deposited her, fully clothed, directly under the scalding spray.
She screamed and grabbed for the cold water knob, but he slapped her hands away.
"It's too hot!"
"I don't care!" he snapped.
"But I can't—"
"It only feels that hot because your skin is freezing cold. Stay under it so you warm up. I am not having you get sick."
"I can't. It's too hot. I'll pass out."
He snarled at her but turned the cold water on and up a bit, then snapped the curtain shut. She heard a thunk as the gourd from his back hit the floor.
Though the temperature was still barely bearable, her shuddering eventually began to subside.
"I got here as soon as I could, after I heard. I'm sorry." While still rough, his voice carried a hint of regret.
"Thank you," she said. It was enough that he had apparently put effort into keeping track of her. Sakura's extremities were starting to regain feeling, painfully, and the heat and steam from the water was making her dizzy. She leaned against the shower wall, away from the spray. "I just got here a few hours ago myself."
"And gave yourself just enough time to get into trouble, I see. Get back under the water."
"How did you—"
"It sounds different."
"I told you, it's too hot and—"
The snap, the edge to his voice, was new and unwelcome. "I told you, I am not having you get sick because you're too damn stubborn to listen to me! Now get back under there, before I make you."
Arms folded around herself, still shivering from a deep muscle chill not quite reached yet, she glared at him through the gap in the curtain. He glared back and deliberately reached for the buttons of his high-collared shirt.
By the time half of the buttons were unbuttoned, she realized that something was very not right. "W-what are you doing?"
"If I have to get in there to put you back under the water, then I'll be damned if I get my clothes soaked too." He turned to shrug the shirt off, folding it neatly and putting it on the edge of the sink.
Ohmy—
The quiet, rational part of her mind said that it was understandable that he was built like that, carrying around all that weight in sand all the time. The rest of her stumbled over her vocabulary, trying to find words for the musculature that rippled across his shoulders, cut almost vertical lines near the small of his back.
Beautiful.
The glance he threw her over his shoulder was pure challenge.
He doesn't intend to . . . He doesn't mean . . .
Gaara turned around, leaned against the wall, and started to unwrap the lacings and bandages at his ankles.
Oh no I think he really does mean—
Tummy! Inner Sakura shrieked gleefully.
Barefoot, he crossed the floor to stand directly in front of her, expression darkly, wonderfully malevolent. "You have three seconds," he said.
She blinked, mouth gaping.
Not breaking eye contact, he unfastened his pants.
"Two."
Ohshithemeansit!
Muscles stiff with cold and locked up from shivers protested her sudden, violent movement back into the water. A soft snort came from the other side of the shower curtain.
I can't. I can't. I'm not . . . I'm scared.
She peeked around the edge of the curtain. Arms folded, Sand's best weapon stared coolly back from the middle of the room.
But . . . That look. There's nothing to be scared of, because . . .
Nothing.
Asexual. Completely uncaring.
Friends don't do that, he said. So if he did strip and get in here with me, it would just be two people in the shower, nothing else. Nothing else.
Even though his proximity would drive you out of your own skin, Inner Sakura stated.
Even though. Because he isn't looking at me like I'm a girl, he's looking at me like I'm . . .
Sasuke's words, his favorite accusation. "You're annoying."
Oh.
Oh no. A pillow, and that's it. Nothing more. Not good enough for anything more. Never good enough for . . .
Her breath left her in a rush and she collapsed against the wall of the shower, eyes sliding shut. She almost welcomed the connection of the back of her skull with the hard tile. Physical pain was real, better than—
The curtain was ripped back and hands grabbed her arms, shaking her roughly. Her eyes snapped open and she gasped her protest, clutching at the first stable thing to meet her hands.
Which just happened to be smooth skin, cool to her water-reddened fingers. Looking up, she met Gaara's amused expression.
Unfortunately, the shaking and dramatic temperature changes had taken their toll on her. Sakura gave an undignified whimper, and her knees gave out. He absorbed her weight with a small chuckle and tugged her out of the shower, an arm around her waist supporting her. The water continued to run. "You okay?"
"I don't know." I won't cry. I won't. "I'm dizzy." Her voice betrayed her by cracking on the last statement.
He made an apologetic sound in her ear, ran a hand over the back of her dripping head. "Just tell me if you're going to get sick, all right?"
"You didn't want to get wet, and I'm wet, and now you're gonna be wet, and then you'll be mad at me and—"
"Hush."
Deep, sometimes shuddering breaths stabilized her stomach and her equilibrium. He held her until she felt sure enough of herself to pull her head away from his shoulder, then released his grip on her waist a little. But only a little.
Mischief colored his arrogant smirk. "That wasn't so bad, now, was it?"
She stared at him, trying desperately to come up with something insulting to say back. But the words disappeared as his fingertips began to delicately trace her cheek.
"You're warm now."
Yes, I am. I bet my face is as red as—
Eyes wide, keeping her gaze the entire time, he leaned forward. The first brush of his lips against hers was whisper-soft, the next a nuzzle. Barely daring to breathe, her eyes flickered shut and she leaned forward, rewarded when he drew her lower lip between his, tasting it carefully before releasing her.
Amusedly arrogant. Amusedly, curiously, tenderly arrogant. She might have hated him then, but she couldn't tell.
He pressed a towel into her hand, smiled at her. "I'll go get you some dry clothes."
She gaped at his back as he walked away. He was insane. That was the only explanation. Completely out of his mind. Beyond redemption, beyond anything any of them could ever do for him.
And he was contagious.
He has to be, she thought, as she changed into the pajamas he'd brought her behind the shower curtain, as he waited patiently for her in the middle of the bathroom, not bothering to put any of his clothing back on, only re-fastening his pants.
Because she would never rationally agree to sitting quietly with his head in her lap, fingers lightly intertwined with his, after what he'd done. Especially with him half-naked like that.
Because feeling needed shouldn't, couldn't feel this good. So to feel that way meant that she was definitely not in her right mind.
Because no sane person would ever dare to call Sand's best, cruelest, most efficient and most unstable weapon beautiful.
But even if she was insane, she would never go to sleep in his presence again. Even a crazy person couldn't trust him, after all.
And she would definitely never wake to him carrying her to her room, would never forget to protest when he crawled into the bed with her. And because she would never do any of those things, it was obvious that she didn't curl against him, that she didn't enjoy the warmth of his skin against hers. That she didn't close her eyes with pleasure so acute it was almost painful as his fingers explored her face, and that she didn't, on some level, recognize the intensity of the emotion in his expression. And she definitely didn't finally doze off pressed against his body, ear against his chest, as the beating of his heart did absolutely nothing to soothe her to sleep.