A/N: Thanks for the warm welcome back, Mentalist friends. :) Your reviews and kind words are so appreciated. This story is ~100k and 36 chapters (assuming I don't break it up further in the course of editing). I've also got another story I'll start posting soon, that one's about 35k.

If it had ever occurred to her to consider the matter beforehand, she would have assumed that if she and Jane ever had a one night stand, she would wake up the next day in bed alone, with Jane long gone. In fact, she would have laid even money that if such an event came to pass, he would have done everything in his power to pretend it had never happened at all.

Instead, she woke up to find him lying next to her, still unclothed, and watching her intently.

"Hi," she said stupidly.

His expression was inscrutable. "Hi."

Then he surprised her by lowering his head and dropping a shy, sweet kiss to her bare shoulder.

A warm, unwelcome fluttering feeling threatened to blossom in her chest.

She quashed it down immediately.

Unable to think of a thing to say to handle the situation remotely gracefully, she finally landed on, "You okay?" Then immediately cursed herself for how awkward and inane she sounded to her own ears. What kind of question was that to ask someone you'd just slept with? But this was Jane. She hadn't been thinking of their bodies moving together when she'd asked, but of the dark, hollow look in his eyes when she'd found him last night.

He surprised her again by leaning over and pressing a long, lingering kiss to her mouth. "Never better." Then he got out of bed and started to dress. "There's a bagel shop around the corner. Want to stop there on the way to the morgue?"

She glanced at the clock and realized they had an appointment with the M.E. in less than an hour. "Sounds good," she said, and headed for the shower.

The rest of the day was taken up with the routine activities of an investigation. Reviewing the autopsy report, reviewing the forensic report, canvassing for witnesses, and coordinating tasks for the team. She'd instructed Van Pelt to try to trace the call Jane had answered when Red John had called Renfrew's burner, but predictably, it was a dead end.

She tried to keep an eye on Jane throughout the day, to see how he was doing.

He seemed calm, unaffected. Less manic and intense than he usually was during a Red John investigation.

This should have been reassuring. Instead, she found it distinctly alarming. Especially when she noticed a slight tremor in his hand when he made himself a cup of tea at a witness's home late in the afternoon. And again later in the evening. They'd grabbed a quick bite with the team and she heard him release a long, slow, shaking breath when he thought everyone else was distracted by an argument Rigsby and Cho were having over Rigsby's decision to order a burrito bigger than his head.

They didn't get back to Sacramento until late that night. Minelli had sent Ron to pick them up from the airport in a Suburban from the vanpool, and he took the team back to the CBI to pick up their personal vehicles.

There had been a moment in the parking lot when her eyes had met Jane's and she'd had a moment of panic-laced dread that he was going to ask her to talk about what had happened. But then Rigsby's cheerful, "Night, boss!" as he pulled out of his parking spot had thrown her out of the grip of Jane's gaze. In the end, she'd just gotten in her car and driven home.

She half-hoped, half-feared Jane might turn up on her doorstep. To talk, for another night of—her mind tripped over the word—'sex' seemed not quite adequate to describe the experience. 'Passion' was closer, but the term was so trite she cringed away from it in her own mind. She finally decided not to assign a term for it at all, and let it exist in her mind as a confused jumble of heat and uncertainty and not quite regret.

She used the time she spent dreading Jane turning up profitably. She examined her own mind and considered the situation from every angle.

It had been a mistake. She didn't regret it, but it couldn't happen again. Sleeping someone you worked with was never a good idea, and Jane technically reported to her, no matter how much he insisted he was cop-adjacent or whatever the hell term he came up with to avoid acknowledging he had any sort of responsibility to adhere to the principles of any organizational hierarchy. Sleeping with someone who worked for her violated every value of professional ethics she held dear. Of course, it was Jane, and he was the exception to every rule, so she wasn't going to beat herself up about it. He'd been having a hard time, and they were friends. Emotions had been heightened and they'd been in an anonymous hotel room. These things happened.

The main thing she worried about was whether things would be awkward between them going forward. She valued their friendship and the thought of losing it over something like this made her sick to her stomach. But today, in the immediate aftermath of their encounter, when things should have been at their most awkward, they'd gotten back to work and everything had been fine. She acknowledged to herself that she'd been more physically aware of him than usual, but under the circumstances, that was hardly unexpected. It was natural. No big deal.

At three am, she rolled over and closed her eyes, satisfied. She had a plan.

xxx

The next day, she rehearsed what she was going to say to Jane in her head as she drove to work. She would apologize—she'd started it. They would acknowledge that it was a mistake. They'd agree that it couldn't happen again. They could be professional about this. Stay focused on the job. They could still be friends.

She didn't have to wait long to give her speech. Though she'd gotten to work early, Jane appeared in her doorway not five minutes after she'd booted up her computer.

"So we should probably talk about what happened the other night," he said without preamble, shutting the door behind him with his foot as he brought in a steaming mug of tea for himself and a cup of coffee for her.

She nodded, relieved. "Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up."

She saw that betraying tremor in his hand as he set down the mugs on her desk.

She told herself she'd imagined it.

"Good." He blew out a breath. "Because it was—" here, he faltered. "It was—"

She interrupted him. "Jane, listen. This isn't a big deal. It was—" she hesitated over the words 'an emotional moment,' because Jane didn't like to admit he had feelings. "—A tense situation," she finished "We're both adults. Let's not make a huge thing of it." She took a sip of her coffee, pleased by how calmly she'd delivered this statement.

"Right," Jane said, almost absently. He stood, abandoning his tea, and started to pace. "The point is, it was a mistake."

Lisbon frowned. She agreed. She should have been relieved. They were on the same page. Still, it was kind of insulting the way he'd said it so baldly, without even bothering to dress it up in any comforting platitudes.

"It can never happen again," Jane said flatly.

A pit opened up in her stomach. What was wrong with her? This was exactly the outcome she'd wanted out of this conversation. But there was something about that word 'never' that made her feel like someone had hit her funny bone with a hammer.

His insistence that the whole thing had been a mistake made her feel suddenly contrary. Maybe it was just habit. She was hard-wired to argue with Jane, no matter what he had to say about a topic. Whatever the case, without quite deciding to do so, she reversed course and heard herself say, "Why not?"

He shot her an incredulous look. "Because of Red John. Obviously."

This hadn't been what she'd expected him to say. "What does he have to do with it?"

"He'll come after you," Jane said.

She rolled her eyes. "Not everything has to be about him, Jane. In fact, it would be good for you to have something to take your mind off your obsession once in a while, if you ask me."

He frowned at her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm not asking you to be my boyfriend, or anything. I'm just saying, your brain is going to explode eventually if you don't have some way to relieve the pressure now and again. And Lord knows I could benefit from having a way to relieve the tension from dealing with you all day."

He seemed to struggle with this. "Your idea of relieving the tension of dealing with me all day is to sleep with me?"

"Yes." She saw no contradiction between the two. Working off the tension Jane caused with Jane himself seemed like an eminently sensible idea to her. A neat solution to one of her most persistent problems. It would restore balance without any messy complications from involving some third party who might get their feelings hurt. A closed circle.

Jane stared at her. "What exactly are you proposing?"

She shrugged. "Look, neither one of us is interested in a relationship. You have your obsession to worry about, and I can't take the hassle. So what's the harm if we blow off some steam once in a while?"

"Friends with benefits?" Jane said, outraged. "That's what you're proposing?"

"Colleagues with benefits," Lisbon corrected him.

"That will never work," Jane said flatly. He started pacing again, getting more worked up with every turn in front of her desk. "It's out of the question. This can never happen again, and we probably shouldn't talk about it ever again, either. We can't risk him finding out. The best way to do that is to pretend it never happened. So that's what we're going to do." He nodded to himself, then swept from her office without waiting for a reply.

He left her gaping after him, his tea abandoned on her desk.

xxx

They went back to work. Lisbon tried to shrug it off and mostly succeeded. If his rejection stung a bit, that was human nature. Nothing to get worked up about. And she'd wanted them to forget all about it in the first place, so she'd gotten what she wanted, hadn't she? What had she been thinking, anyway? Colleagues with benefits. There was no way that wouldn't get messy.

She devoted some time considering Jane's fear that if they got involved, Red John would come after her. She had to acknowledge there was a possibility that what Jane said could happen, but she gave it ten percent odds of being a legitimate threat against a ninety percent conviction that Jane's paranoia was clouding his judgment and one hundred percent certainty that the real reason he didn't want to get involved with her or anyone else for that matter was because he didn't want to risk the kind of emotional intimacy that might ultimately force him to reprioritize his obsession. Lisbon didn't want anything to do with that kind of emotional intimacy, so she didn't see what the problem was, but Jane was Jane. There was no reasoning with him. That was one of the things that made him a strong prospect for the sort of messy complications she wanted nothing to do with, so she went back to working with him, convinced they were both better off.

It was surprisingly easy to pretend it had never happened. They slipped into their old routines easily enough, along with the familiar push and pull between them. After a few weeks, she found her memory of the whole thing felt like a dream. Like something that hadn't really happened after all. She had vivid flashes of memory of that night from time to time when she caught a scent of his shampoo or felt the warmth of his body pass over her like a wave when he brushed passed her, but they existed only in her mind and had no bearing on the waking world.

Only one thing seemed different. Jane flirted with her less.

She would have denied to her last breath that Jane flirted with her (or she with him) before all this happened. But perversely, the sudden lack made her more aware of what had been there before. She thought critically that this was a rather damning betrayal of Jane's consciousness. If it had really been nothing to him, he wouldn't have suddenly felt the need to alter his behavior.

Lisbon told herself she didn't miss it.

xxx

Six weeks later, Lisbon was well on her way to believing that it truly had never happened at all. She and Jane worked well together. They closed a particularly satisfying case and shared a grin over it.

She headed out to a little town called Smoke River tucked away in the northeastern corner of the state a few days later to pursue a lead on a new case, feeling positively cheerful. The rest of the team was back in Sacramento working leads from the office. Jane had gone to Fresno to talk to the victim's ex-wife. Lisbon wanted to talk to the sheriff and a few of the neighbors again, so she'd set off in the late afternoon, intending to get the drive behind her so she could start fresh in the morning. She checked into a rinky-dink hotel at the edge of town around 9 pm and got in the shower.

She was brushing her teeth in her pajamas, her wet hair leaving a damp trail down the back of her t-shirt, when she heard the sound of the key card reader disengaging the lock.

She started. Her brain instantly went into threat assessment mode. Where was her gun? In the nightstand, ten steps away. She swiftly crossed the room, but by then, the door had opened, and it was Jane.

She stopped dead. "Jane?"

He closed the door behind him.

She squared off and put her hands on her hips. "What are you doing here?"

He closed the distance between them and stopped her mouth with a searing kiss.

She shoved him away. "What the hell, Jane?"

"We can only do this when we're out of town," Jane said, reaching for her again.

She stepped back. "Changed your mind, have you?"

"No," he said. His hand tremored again. "I still think this is a colossally stupid idea."

"Then why did you come?" Lisbon demanded.

He shrugged helplessly. There seemed to be a lot buried beneath the surface of that non-answer.

Lisbon hesitated, reading some of what he hadn't said in the way his gaze was fixed on her with a sort of hungry desperation.

It would be better if they didn't put words to it, she reasoned. "Only when we're out of town?" she said slowly.

He nodded, his eyes still fixed on her.

She reminded herself that everything about this was a bad idea. Ethics. Messiness. Feelings. If she had an ounce of sense, she'd tell Jane he'd been right from the beginning and they should forget the whole thing.

Instead, she reached for the lapels of his jacket and kissed him back.