Author's Note: So, this one follows them both. First Bobby then back to Lucy's POV. Sometimes I just have to go with the voice bouncing around in my brain.

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And every time I've held a rose… It seems I only felt the thorns… And so it goes, and so it goes… And so will you soon I suppose

She had stayed the night, just as she said she would, and when Bobby opened his eyes in the morning, she was sound asleep beside him. He had wanted to roll over and pull her into his arms, feel her against him. But, something stopped him, and it wasn't just the physical pain of his cracked ribs.

So he lay there on his back, the wild curls of her molasses colored hair softly tickling his arm, contemplating the curve of her. She was on her side, facing him, on top of the blankets, still wearing the dark jersey dress she had on from yesterday. His eyes traced the full swell of her breasts, the narrow turn of her waist, the outward curve of her hips. He mentally smiled as he looked down and noticed she was wearing a pair of his bright white tube socks on her feet. She smelled like mint, something about her hair, her skin. When she opened her eyes to look at him, she was almost immediately alert. She was the consummate morning person. "My feet were cold" she said, as if even asleep she could read his mind.

He couldn't help but wince when as she moved to sitting, she moved the bed. He stayed still for a moment, thinking that sitting up was not going to be nearly as easy for him. "You should probably try to move to your side first, then maybe swing your legs down," she had suggested, again, perceiving what he was thinking. She moved around to stand in front of him while he sat on the edge of the bed adjusting to the pain seeing if it would subside trying to think about breathing. She gently took his hand and placed it on her sternum. He could feel her breathing, in and out, and just the tactile sense of her, even and deep, air in and out, helped him regulate his own breaths.

He had this physiological need for her. His body, his senses were much better off when he was around her. She brought him to center, she always had, which was why he always homed to her. Short day, long day, bad day, drunk day, he found himself at her doorway.

"I'm going to rearrange my day." Lucy had said, as his breathing steadied.

"Don't." He managed to say. He didn't want her to rearrange her day. He wanted her to have a normal day, whatever that was.

"Don't what?" She asked, watching him stand, but she didn't step away, so he found himself standing very close to her.

"Rearrange your day." He said, wanting to touch her, to run his hands over her hair, to gently tilt her chin up and kiss her. She looked at him puzzled. "You should probably keep to your day. I'm not the only one in the world that needs you." He tried to muster a bit of sarcasm, but it fell a little flat.

"Ok." She said, looking at him, he kind of wavered on his feet, forcing her to take a step backward so he could adjust his own balance to keep himself from falling forward. "You have a doctor's appointment this afternoon." She offered. "I would like to go to that, with you." She continued, watching him shuffle across the bedroom.

"3:30." He said, nodding.

"Bobby…" She said his name and followed him, so she was standing close to him again. He could practically feel the current in the air, the physical pull of his desire to touch her.

"A normal day, right?" He expressed kind of half of his thought.

"I don't feel very normal." Lucy allowed, looking away for a moment, he could almost see her brain switching gears, trying to understand what he was saying. He was trying to afford her a little space, afford her a little time, to find center.

"You should probably find that." He said, and then looked at her for a long moment. "And, then come back by at 3:00 to take me to my doctor's appointment." He changed the tone of their conversation to slightly humorous. As if Lucy could find her way back to normal in the next few hours.

"Ok." She said, and she was smiling.

"I'm just going to." He pointed to the bathroom. She was gone we came out of the shower. She had scribbled a note that she had a few morning appointments and she would see him at 3:00.

As he headed toward the kitchen, he actually took two steps forward and one step back. Or, maybe it was one step sideways, as he kind of crashed his shoulder into the wall from the pain in his ribs. He was thinking that he wasn't exactly the best at love. He did not have a lot of experience with it. In truth, lately he wasn't exactly the best at life. His existence had been skittering sideways for quite some time, and he hadn't really done much to stop it. Bobby needed Lucy, and he had her friendship. He was a bit paralyzed over the thought of risking their friendship because he needed her love. There would be no going back, and if he screwed this up, he thought that maybe he would push on her so hard that eventually she would leave.

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At first I didn't know what Bobby meant when he had told me to have a normal day, but then I realized that he was probably asking for a little space. Things were turning quickly in my life; I had gone from being a friend to wanting the possibility of more without really giving him a clear headed opportunity to catch up. I was back to finding myself standing within his personal space, waiting to see what he would do. But, this time, it felt different. I could feel something from him that I had never felt before, a need, a desire, a wanting.

So I had stood in his bedroom, intentionally not budging from being just a breath away from him, trying to gauge his feelings. I realized he wasn't pushing me away, at least not entirely. He was just pushing on me so he could get some bearings. I resisted him at first, and followed him across his room. The only reason I acquiesced about not rearranging my day was that he asked me to come back that afternoon to go with him to the doctor.

I went home to shower and change, I needed to get to the office to take care of a few things. I had two appointments today that I was going to keep, the other two I needed to reschedule. While I was home, I cleaned up a bit. There was something about making the bed that helped me think. I decided to completely change my bedding. My mom had this thing about bedding. She thought it always seemed ridiculous to have bedding that you didn't sleep under. I remember I used to help her make the beds, and she would laugh and smile and say we just weren't the type of people that had hotel bed spreads, that were just for the looks and not really for a purpose. That if it was on the bed, it should be comfortable enough to sleep under. And if you slept under it, you needed to be able to wash and dry it.

So, I stripped off my bedding, placing most of it in the wash, and remade the bed with soft white sheets, a fresh feather quilt, and a deep moss green blanket on top. My bedroom walls were a khaki color, with white wood trim. So for my bed, depending on my mood, I alternated between the moss green blanket, a deep red blanket, and a navy blanket. All of my sheets were white. I loved the feel and the smell of lightly chloroxed sheets, another hold over from my mom.

My sister Laura had gone the opposite way. All of those years of plain white sheets and serviceable fleece blankets left her craving for patterned sheets and hotel bedspreads. Whenever I stayed at Laura's house, when I folded down the bedspread in the guest room, because in Laura's house you don't actually sleep under the bedspread, I thought about how the patterns of our childhood affect us as adults. In some ways, Laura was like our mother, in others she was opposite. And, in some ways I was like our mother, and in other ways the opposite. This often left Laura and I opposite from each other. But even so, we were raised with knowing the kind of love where you would set aside your life to put the other person first. Our mom had loved us like that, our dad had loved us like that, I thought Laura shared a love like that with her husband Bruce, and I know that I had that with my friend Annie. I wondered if Bobby had ever experienced that.

Bobby had a connection with his mother. But it was upside down. When the child becomes the parent, so much becomes upside down. Bobby was independent and self reliant, often to his own detriment. So for him to open up to anyone, and actively rely on anyone was an enormous stretch of muscles he never used. By default, he depended on his partner Eames. Or, maybe it was out of years of co-existence. And to some extent, by default, I believe he depended on me to be his friend. I made sure my door was always open, no matter the time, no matter the circumstance.

I smoothed the blanket on the bed and tossed the bed pillows into place, a small feeling of accomplishment inside of me. I breathed deeply, feeling strangely at ease about my ending things with Emil. I had never really completely opened myself up to him. I wanted to, I had tried to, but he always had me a little bit on my guard. At times, his distance from me made me self reliant. When we first starting seeing one another, I rationalized that maybe it made me stronger. I realized that it was this distance that probably made my heart flutter. It kept things on new ground, uncertain. Emil had thought that I was the one introducting the distance. That since my parents passed away, I had a difficult time letting people in. He was partially right, but Bobby had managed to get into my life. And, I realized that maybe I couldn't fundamentally change what I needed. For me to completely give myself to someone, I needed to sense that they had the potential to have the kind of love for me that they would be able to put their life aside to put me first. And no matter how hard I tried, and I knew I really had tried, Emil was not that man.

More than before, I was opening my heart to Bobby. I wondered if he could open his heart to me. In the end, love comes down to a leap of faith, and people without faith, never seem able to fully make the leap.

I could feel Bobby kind of checking me to see if I was sturdy. Kind of like you kick a tire to see if it is safe, or push on a mattress to see how well it will hold you. In our friendship, Bobby would test me like that in a variety of ways, but they were always kind of gentle kicks. I thought that in a romantic relationship, he would probably kick harder. Kind of like he did the other night, when he told me he didn't need me, when he acted in such a way, at such a time, that he knocked the breath out of me and I had to find a place to get some air back into me. I also could tell that he hadn't expected me to walk back in. I knew that ultimately, when he really did love someone, that would be the person he would kick the hardest, just to see if she would stick around.

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A/N: Deliriousdancer put this into my head, when Bobby told Lucy he didn't need her, it was like a child saying "I hate you." When kids do this, they're kind of shoving at you, maybe kind of pushing the margins to see where things get stabile. That is exactly how I think of Bobby, he is always pushing the margins of people…