Disclaimer: Still someone else's sandbox. Other people have all the best toys

Author's Note: So in my endless quest not to leave unfinished stories, I decided it was high time to pick this up again. When I first started this story Dagmar left me a review that asked if Shawn got his favorite pairing, could she get hers . . .

Dagmar, because you're not only a wonderful writer but also just a damn cool person who's stuck with my stories for a long time, I say to you . . . Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy your present.

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Love is a funny thing. It makes people blind. It makes people crazy. It transforms people. I don't know why it did all three for me. Maybe it was just trying to get my attention.

Well it's got it, now.

Not that I didn't give it a hell of a fight. I fought. For two years, I fought falling in love with Kat. To be fair, I want it noted that she fought just as hard.

It wasn't that we thought of each other as off limits or anything. Yeah, sure, one of the basic guidelines for how not to plunge your well-ordered life into a complicated mess is don't date your best-friend's ex, and I'm definitely someone who likes his life ordered. But, let's be honest, by the time Kat returned from England, Tommy and Kim were already firmly headed to this wedding reception . . . where the DJ has actually just started playing Thriller and turned on a smoke machine . . .

Okay, it's official. He's the worst DJ, ever.

But Kim's just laughing and trying to teach the moves to her sixty year old aunt. I think that's a testament to just how much those two love each other. If you can just laugh when your DJ is this obnoxious, it's only because you're blissfully happy.

So, as I was saying, Tommy and Kim already blissfully happy by the time Kat comes back, not exactly the set up for a big explosive emotional fallout. If anything, I think they were probably anxious for their bliss to rub off on others. Maybe that's why I was blind to it at first, maybe the first few times I looked up and saw the glow that lit Kat's face, I thought I was just catching reflected bliss.

It could have been that. It could have been a hundred other little things that made me blind, blind to the fact that the morning meetings we had prior to opening the Athletic Center were the best part of my day, or that I was finding a thousand excuses to stick around and offer to drive her home after we closed up. I think more than anything though it was the knowledge that she wasn't looking for us to be anything more than friendship.

Sure, Tommy always says that love happens when you're not looking, but there's a difference. Tommy hadn't been looking, but he was still open to the possibility. Kat was going out of her way to avoid it.

She never said anything, but I could tell. I could tell because I was in the exact same place. It's a quiet place. You can stay there for years, going through life like everyone else, but there's always this part of you that's walled off, safe and completely alone. You join a kind of club, whose membership is comprised of those who stay on the sidelines, who encourage others to get in the game and convince themselves the bench is too comfortable to leave. There's no active meetings for this club, would be too much like involvement, but you can always recognize another member. Your eyes will meet across a room crowded with couples, and you'll smile and acknowledge that you're both alone, but neither of you makes a move to ask the other to dance.

So when I picked her up at the airport when she returned from England, when our eyes met across the roomful of reuniting families that seems to always characterize international flights, but neither of us rushed to make our way to each other, I knew I'd found a fellow member.

I don't know what caused Kat to sign up. Independence I think more than anything else. She'd gone through a lot of life attached, identified by another person, but over in London she was singular, individual, and she wasn't anxious to give that up. What caused me to pay my dues? Complacency, fear.

I didn't get as lucky as Tommy. My high school relationship didn't fizzle out post-graduation. Instead it intensified, burning hotter and hotter until finally it blew up.

After losing my powers I fell into Emily, lost myself in her willingness to be everything to me, because I felt as though I didn't have anything else left. Leaving the team changes things between you, especially when you're still hanging around. Billy or Rocky could tell you. No one ever means it to happen, but it does—conversations start taking place without you, there's shared experiences you didn't share, and slowly but surely you sitting on the outside of the circle.

So I let Emily become my circle. She had this crazy exuberance for everything, no matter how wild or how frowned upon. It wasn't like when she ran with the gang. She never hurt people, but she still didn't care much about the rules either. I had never lived that way, so far at the edge that you couldn't even see the Road-Closed barrier, and for awhile it was great, but then we needed each other more and more, too much. I couldn't be around others without her because I couldn't take their stares, their concern, but with her it didn't matter. Then one day I woke up to find myself making out with her in the back-alley behind the bar where she worked, and she's whispering that she's got to go to her grandmother's funeral tomorrow, and I realized I didn't even knowEmily had a grandmother, let alone that she had died.

Its sobering experience, finding out that what you thought was a relationship is really just a passionate affair. For awhile I tried to change it, tried to communicate, to get her to open up to me, but she wasn't interested, she wanted to deal with life the way she dealt with her grandmother's death, kiss me and pretend it didn't matter. But it did matter, it mattered to me, and soon I found myself wanting to be somewhere else. Still, you can't extricate yourself from a relationship like that cleanly. Everything about Emily and me was passionate, and in my effort to break free and her effort to hold on, we passionately destroyed each other.

I caused so much pain, felt so much pain, during that time, that when I had finally patched myself up, when I no longer thought of her every time a Harley drove by or had to physically stop myself from going into the bar where she worked, well . . . it was such a relief to stop hurting that I didn't care if I had to stop loving, too.

So when Kat came back, just as walled off as me, she didn't terrify me the way other women did. I didn't look at her and see the potential for gut-wrenching anguish because she'd never try to unlock that little corner of my heart. So it was safe to laugh with her, safe to offer her a partnership in the Athletic Center in return for her developing a dance studio under its label. And it didn't matter that she drove me insane with her insistence that I promote ballet in all my classes as a good way to gain flexibility and body control, or that we could fight about everything from the cost of the new floor she insisted her dancers needed, to my absolute refusal to set a good example by taking one of her ballroom dance classes. It didn't matter because we were just friends

We were friends and we were business partners, and we were each other's armor. We were each other's date to Adam and Tanya's wedding, to the annual Christmas party. We went with each other so neither one of us had to get someone's hopes up. We could just smile at each other, sit next to each other, and know we would never join the dance.

But eventually you realize the music's catchy, and the chair you've been sitting in is pretty hard, so you look over at the woman next to you and are just about to ask her whether maybe she'd like to dance after all, when she suddenly has to go get more punch.

It happened for me in the spring of our second year as partners. I'd been waiting around for her to finish up with a rehearsal for the dance recital. Having completely exhausted every possible chore, even to the point where I had balanced the accounts, I decided that if I was going to stay I might as well just watch.

She was just wrapping up teaching the eight-year olds, and when she has them cool down she likes to let them free dance, experience movement without worrying about perfection. So she had put on Orange Colored Sky and was spinning two of the little girls around, and there was this look on her face . . .

This amazing, open, undemanding joy just lit her from the inside, because she was completely at home in her own skin, doing what she loved. In that moment the door to that back room in my heart opened, and I was the one who had turned the key.

There was just one massive problem. She was still closed, still wary. In those few weeks after, Kat started shying away from me. She would rush in, too late to discuss business over a leisurely cup of coffee, and always have an appointment somewhere after closingthat she needed to get to. It was obvious what was happening . . . she knew. She could look at me and know I wasn't paying my dues anymore, I had turned in my membership and abandoned the secret handshake, and if she was ever sloppy enough to meet my eyes across a room of couples I'd probably walk over and ask her to dance.

For awhile I told myself that was okay, that she had every right to be pissed, and to avoid me because this hadn't been part of the bargain. But then I decided that it wasn't okay at all. I hadn't asked for this spot in my heart to be unlocked, but it had happened just the same, and if I waited for her to ask it would probably never happen. So I took her on in the one place she couldn't avoid me.

I signed up for her ballroom dance class.

I learned to waltz and forced her to meet my eyes. I learned to polka and got her to laugh again. I stayed late and practiced in front of her without a partner until she finally admitted it wasn't any fun alone.

I learned to swing dance and proved that I'd always catch her. I learned to tango and stole a kiss. I learned not to be scared when the music starts and to keep dancing once it's stopped because it will always start again.

I learned a lot of things when Kat taught me to dance and I taught her to love, but more than anything I learned that I'm only any good with one partner, there's only one Ginger to my Fred.

So when the first strains of Orange Colored Sky come over the speakers, and she meets my eyes from across the room, where's she's been dancing with Tanya and Adam's daughter, I don't hesitate.

"I fell in love with you to this song." I say, holding out my hand.

"I know."

And as she settles into my arms with sigh after I've spun her out and back in again, I whisper, "Dance with me."

"I am dancing with you, and you're pretty good."

"Forever. Dance with me . . . for the rest of our lives."

She pulls away, looking at me to make sure I know what I'm saying, and for a second I think she's going to put up walls again, but then that same open, undemanding joy lights her features, and after guiding me through a tricky turn, she grins, "You'd be rubbish with another partner anyway."

I was walking along
Minding my business
When love came
And hit me in the eye
Flash, bam, Ala Kazaam
Out of an orange colored sky.

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Comments and Criticisms appreciated as always.

Panache