A/N: I was prompted to write a oneshot based around one of the new teaser quotes for The Fiery Heart. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, the quote is bolded!

Morning After

I woke to sunlight trickling in through the broken blinds, casting visible rays of sunshine across the small, messy room. I'd been meaning to get those fixed (waking up to sunlight on my skin always made me feel sick and drowsy for the rest of the day). Today, though, the sun hadn't reached me yet. Someone else was sleeping on my usual side of the bed. Sydney.

Moroi shied from sunlight, but as I watched the way it illuminated Sydney, I knew without a doubt that humans had been made for the sun. She looked like a painting; she was too beautiful to be real. Endless miles of sun-kissed skin wrapped invitingly in thrift store cotton sheets. Choppy blonde hair tangled on my pillows. I vividly remembered running my hands through that hair. And over that skin. All of her skin.

God, had last night actually happened? It seemed like a dream. Like one of the many dreams I'd had about Sydney since coming to Palm Springs. Only, in my dreams we made love on satin sheets or secluded beaches or (in one particularly memorable dream) on the hood of the Ivashkinator. Last night, Sydney had come bursting through the door and practically dragged me to the bedroom, and my unmade bed. The setting hadn't exactly been romantic, but she hadn't cared. She'd been passionate and clumsy and starkly, vividly real.

And it was so much better than anything I'd ever felt or imagined before.

I brushed a lock of hair from her cheek, remembering the fire in her eyes. The nervous determination I'd seen there. The things she'd whispered as I kissed her neck. The sounds she'd made when I'd kissed her elsewhere. God, those sounds. I'd known that she'd be a firecracker in bed – my Sage was good at everything after all – but I'd underestimated just how amazing it would be. Sage somehow both haunted my dreams and kept me rooted in reality; last night had been both too good to be real and too real to be a dream.

I couldn't remember what time we'd finally gone to sleep. Three? Four? Five? Even after we'd settled down, we'd stayed awake. I'd found it hard to stop touching her. And whispering to her; pouring my heart out, telling her everything I hadn't had the chance to say to her in the last few weeks. And she'd done the same until her eyelids drooped closed and she fell asleep mid-sentence.

I could have spent all morning gazing at her while she slept, but I wasn't in the most comfortable position. My left arm was trapped underneath her head and she'd wrapped one of her long, pale legs around mine during the night. Which made me uncomfortable for entirely different and not altogether unpleasant reasons.

I tried shifting a little further away, but the bed was small and she clung to me stubbornly. That was my Sage: stubborn. I smirked and leaned in to kiss her forehead and her nose and her chin, breathing her in. She smelled of sweat and sleep and summer dust, like the Palm Springs sunshine was actually trapped beneath her skin. I buried my nose deeper into her neck and she let out a sleepy noise halfway between a snore and a coo. Her sandy brown eyelashes fluttered and her nose twitched. God, she was adorable like this. I ran my nose along her collarbone and nipped lightly at her shoulder, careful not to use my fangs.

"Mmphh," she groaned sleepily, peeling her eyes open and stretching like a cat. I watched greedily.

"Hi," she said softly when my eyes finally flickered back up to hers.

"Morning, sunshine," I said. She squirmed away as my breath tickled her bare skin, but her mouth stretched into a huge smile.

"Sunshine?" she asked. Her hand slid up my stomach and along my chest, lighting fires. "What happened to the food nicknames?"

I stilled her hand when she reached my heart and held it there, as if hoping she would reach right through my ribcage and claim what was already hers. "You don't like sunshine? It suits you."

"I like it when you call me Sage." She looked down at our hands, as if admitting to something embarrassing, and I remembered how she'd practically keened with pleasure every time Sage had slipped from my lips as we'd moved together last night.

Fuck. I wanted her again. Now.

I rolled her onto her back, planting lazy, sloppy kisses across her collarbones as my hands found her thighs. Sydney still seemed sleepy, but she relaxed beneath me, pulling on my hair with one hand and trailing another down my side.

Her lips had just grazed my ear when a loud scraping noise made us both jump apart. When I realised it had come from the door, I groaned and flopped back onto the bed.

"What was that?" Sydney asked, wide-eyed. She looked fully awake now.

"Our darling love child." I wished I'd remembered to leave food out last night for the little monster, but to be fair my mind had been a bit preoccupied by the gorgeous blonde dragging me to bed.

"Hopper?" She climbed out of bed without another word and I rolled over so that I could watch her. All of her. She'd been self-conscious at first last night, but that had faded fast. Now, as she shrugged into my shirt and opened the door to scoop up Hopper, it was as if all of Sydney's insecurities about her body had vanished overnight. She was practically glowing with confidence. Or maybe that was her aura. I leaned back on the bed and let my mind relax, taking in the healthy yellow-and-purple glow that surrounded her. God, she was so beautiful.

She crawled back onto the bed with the callistana perched on her shoulder and I couldn't help but tug her closer, needing to feel her lips on mine. We kissed for a few seconds and then Sydney leaned back.

"We both have morning breath," she said, and made a face.

"I don't care." I leaned in again and she pushed me back, giggling. I'd never heard Sage giggle before. It was beyond cute. It made me want to kiss her some more.

"I need to freshen up," she said. Her grin faded. "What's the time?"

Our eyes both turned to the bedside clock I'd brought when I'd enrolled in art classes. It was half past ten. Not much of a lie-in by my standards, but Sydney's eyes widened and she let out a yelp of alarm as she scrambled off my lap.

"I have to get back to Amberwood," she said breathlessly, wringing her hands. "Zoe thinks I've gone to an academic conference out of town; she was expecting me back early this morning. Oh, god, I know she'll ask about it and haven't even considered what to tell her. What if she wants details? What if she expected me to take notes?"

I leaned forward and took her hands in mine. "Hey," I said gently. "It's okay. I'm sure Jailbait would've called us if your sister was getting suspicious. And you know all there is to know about all kinds of things." An idea came to me and I smirked, trailing my fingers along her arms, then down her waist to her bare thighs. "Tell her it was about those sexy Greek women. The hetaerae."

Sydney smacked my hands and moved away, but her smile was back and she seemed a little calmer. I sighed and leaned back against the headboard, wishing she'd told her sister she'd be gone all weekend.

"Do you have a spare toothbrush?" she asked as she rummaged through her overnight bag.

"Check the bathroom cabinet."

She nodded and then smiled at me as I eyed her long, lithe form in the doorway. "I won't be long. Feed Hopper," she ordered.

"You're bossy in bed," I observed.

"You're the one still in bed," she pointed out.

I flashed her another grin. "Only because that's where you want me to be."

She threw a shirt in my direction and then slipped through the door.

Hopper chose that moment to crawl onto my chest and gurgle plaintively at me, so I took the hint and dressed quickly. I fished out a couple of strawberries and a chocolate cookie for Hopper as I waited for Sydney, feeling increasingly nervous. This wasn't how I'd hoped our first morning together would go. I'd never bothered to hang around after sleeping with a girl in the past, but Sydney deserved morning sex, breakfast in bed, and a day of lazing around watching bad TV and discussing our future together.

When she entered the kitchen a few minutes later wearing a sensible pair of beige slacks and a blue dress shirt that I guess she'd packed for her fake conference, I wrapped my arms around her immediately and breathed her in.

"Stay a while," I tried, knowing that I sounded needy and not caring. "You can tell Zoe that the traffic was bad. Jill will cover for us."

Sydney smiled but shook her head. "If we're going to keep this up, I can't give her any reason to be suspicious of me."

My hands tightened around her waist. "Does that mean that you might have another conference coming up soon?" I asked hopefully.

"Maybe." She grinned teasingly, and then looked down. She fiddled nervously with the buttons on my shirt. "I mean, if you want me to."

I reached down to pull her chin up and press my lips to hers. We were both breathing heavily when I pulled away. "What do you think?" I murmured.

Sydney gave me a shy smile; it surprised me after everything we'd done and been through together. She certainly hadn't been very shy last night. "I just wasn't sure if… I mean… last night was good, wasn't it?" She looked down again, and a blush rose in her cheeks. "Forget it," she mumbled.

"Are you kidding me, Sage? How can you even ask that?" Just remembering last night made me want to drag her back to the bedroom.

She shrugged against my arms. "Well, I thought it was good, but I don't have anything to compare it to."

My right hand snaked around her back and dipped under her shirt. "If you thought last night was just good then I obviously did something wrong."

Sage's eyelids fluttered, then drooped lazily shut as I traced my fingers slowly down her spine. "It wasn't just good," she protested weakly as her hands wrapped around my neck. I bent down to press my lips to her jaw. She still tasted like summer.

"Last night was the best night of my life," I whispered against her skin. "And this morning is probably the best morning of my life. It's killing me to let you walk out that door."

"You've only been conscious for half an hour," she reminded me in a shaky voice.

"Still one of the best half-hours of my life," I countered. "Someday I'll give you a proper morning after. Complete with bad hair and morning breath and awkward shower sex and burnt waffles. I promise." Sage snorted and reached up to tug me into another kiss. I let my hand drift down to her lower back, memorising the warmth and softness of her curves as she opened her mouth against mine, morning breath be damned. I happily let her take the lead, knowing that this was one of the last chances I'd get to kiss her for a while.

"Text me when you get back to Amberwood?" I asked when she drew back and made her way towards the door.

"Of course." She paused, one hand on the doorframe. "Last night was the best night of my life, too, you know," she said matter-of-factly, as if we were discussing the weather.

"And this morning?" I asked, wondering whether she knew how much my sanity had depended on those words.

She smiled sweetly, one foot already out the door. "This morning wasn't so bad, either."

And then she was gone, taking the mid-morning sunshine with her.