A/N: Part 2 of 3

Thanks so much to all the people who reviewed Ch. 2.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Brennan muttered a curse as her phone rang, followed by a sharp knock at her door. She cast a wary eye at the puzzle she'd spent the past two days rebuilding. For a long moment she was tempted to ignore both interruptions, but the insistent knocking won out. She ignored the phone—it was far too soon for the call she was expecting.

"Just a minute!" She did nothing to conceal the irritation in her voice as she grabbed a sweater to throw over her skimpy tank top.

Across the room, the phone finally stopped ringing as Brennan unbolted the door and opened it.

Phillip Sinclair grinned hopefully and held out an armful of roses. "Happy anniversary."

She stared at him, bewildered. "What anniversary are you celebrating?"

"C'mon, Tempe." He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek that she did nothing to reciprocate. "Six months ago we met on this day. You don't remember?"

"No," she said flatly. "Why would I recall the exact date you spilled coffee on me in a misguided attempt to garner my attention?"

He flashed another smile, his white teeth contrasting appealingly against his dark biker's tan. "It worked, didn't it?"

It had, Brennan had to admit. Even before he'd dumped a lukewarm espresso con panna down the front of her shirt, she'd noticed him at a nearby table. He wasn't particularly tall and his facial features lacked symmetry, but the red and white cycling apparel he was wearing made his strong physique immediately visible.

She leaned against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. "You were wearing sunglasses. Inside." This had particularly annoyed her.

"Black eye," he reminded her, pointing at the small white scar that remained from his head-on encounter with a sycamore. "That tree wasn't very forgiving."

She couldn't help smiling a little remembering his hyperbolic description of the accident. Phillip immediately pressed his advantage.

"How 'bout a coffee? For old times' sake?"

"There are no old times," she pointed out unnecessarily. "We only saw each other on a handful of occasions."

He scowled, scrunching his bushy, white-blond eyebrows together. "That's because you had your head full of Boots."

"Booth," she corrected. "And he is not the reason I stopped returning your calls. You repeatedly expressed your desire for a romantic relationship, even though I was very clear from the start that I was uninterested in dating." She indicated the bouquet in his arms. "It would seem that things haven't changed."

Phillip glanced at the flowers as though he'd never seen them before. "What? These? You thought these were for you?" He lobbed them down the hallway, causing Brennan to crane her neck to see where they had landed. "I just like carrying roses around. It's a biker thing. Don't read anything into it."

Brennan sighed, reluctantly amused by his antics. "Phillip, our relationship, if you could call it that, was physically unsatisfying. You proved as unoriginal in bed as the clichéd ploy you used to get me to notice you."

"Ouch." He winced. "Wow. Anybody ever told you you're hard on a man's ego?"

"Yes."

"What if I told you that had changed?" he asked. "We could spend the evening gathering empirical evidence to prove my point."

She laughed. Being pursued by a self-confident, attractive male was flattering, whether or not she was interested. "I would enjoy being your friend, Phillip. However, you previously stated that you are unwilling to maintain a completely platonic relationship with me."

"Not unwilling. Unable." His tone turned wheedling. "Temperance, you're not someone a guy can just hang out with. That would be … impossible."

Brennan said nothing as the door to the stairwell opened and Booth emerged carrying several large boxes. Spotting her standing in the hallway, he waved, took several step forwards and inadvertently trampled the roses. Surprised, he looked down at the increasingly battered bunch.

"Usually, tossing the bouquet happens in a church, Bones," he called. "I know you're kind of out of practice with these things but, trust me, it typically involves bridesmaids."

Phillip turned in surprise, his lips thinning as he spotted his rival. "So Boots is still in the picture."

"Booth," she corrected again, smiling as her partner made an exaggerated pantomime of throwing the bouquet, then ran after it like a football player. The boxes in his arms wobbled dangerously as he dove forward and caught the flowers just before they hit the floor again. "He was never out of the picture."

"You think he's funny." Phillip's comment was more offended than dejected.

"I'm a funny guy." Booth arrived at her doorstep and inserted himself seamlessly into the conversation. "Hiya, Bones." He brandished a stack of pizza boxes with an envelope taped to the top and lifted a plastic bag which held a six-pack of her favorite beer and several other items she couldn't identify. "Emergency rations."

"What's the emergency?" Brennan inquired.

Booth shrugged, completely ignoring Phillip. "Last time you took a personal day was during the first Ice Age. There had to be some disaster that stopped you from coming in without at least letting me know."

"Is your relationship with him satisfying?" Phillip demanded, before Brennan could contest Booth's ludicrous hypothesis.

"Satisfaction guaranteed," Booth answered for her, muscling by Brennan into the apartment. He started towards her kitchen. "Paper plates are still in the cupboard on the left, right?"

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Brennan finally showed up in the kitchen when Booth was halfway through his second slice. He nudged the box across the counter in her direction. "That guy was an asshole."

"That is an assumption based on testosterone and your alpha male tendencies," Brennan retorted, grabbing a slice of her own and digging in.

"Nope." He didn't feel the slightest guilt at having sent her first visitor packing. "Gut feeling, Bones. That guy wanted in your pants."

"Many men want sexual intercourse with me." She opened a beer and took a long swallow. "While Phillip succeeded, I will admit it was a mistake."

His pizza tasted way better suddenly. Booth pointed at the plastic bag. "Parker sends his apologies."

He watched Brennan extract the brand new coffee mug, decorated with the image of a roaring lion and various scientific facts about the animal.

"He made me chase all over the city till I found that," Booth informed her.

"I don't understand." Brennan looked at the mug in confusion. "The gesture is nice, but—why a lion?"

Booth grabbed a bottle of his own beer—Chinese labels just didn't do it for him—and pointed at the envelope decorating the pizza box. Parker had made him check the missive so many times for spelling errors that Booth had it memorized. He recited it to himself as Brennan read.

Dear Bones,

I'm really, really, really sorry for breaking your puzzle and your coffee cup on Friday.

I shouldn't have touched anything without your permission.

I'm sending you this coffee mug because you did not know what beast meant when I said it. The lion is like a beast, like you thought I meant with your apartment. Get it?

I'm really sorry.

Love,

~Parker Booth

Brennan looked from the mug to the letter and grinned. God, he loved her smile any day, but especially when it had that triumphant little gleam just before she announced—

"Oh, I get it. I was not familiar with the teenage terminology that Parker used to describe my apartment. He recollected my misunderstanding and is using the mug as a play on words. I thought he meant my apartment was beastly, and he's given me a mug of a beast." Her eyes lit up. "That's very funny!"

Booth smiled into his beer and pointed at the bag again. "There's a present in there from me too, since I'm partially to blame for Friday's accident."

"This is unnecessary, Booth." Brennan peered inside the recycled Walgreen's bag again. She pulled out the puzzle and stared at it with similar confusion. "I already have a puzzle."

"Bones, your puzzle was of a skeleton. I saw the box when we were cleaning up."

"That is correct. Russ gave it to me as a birthday present. He had a puzzle made from a photograph of an anatomically correct skeleton. Why do I need another puzzle?"

He rapped his knuckles on the kitchen counter he was leaning against. "You told me you weren't working over the weekend, remember?"

"I didn't work," she said in surprise.

Booth shook his head. "Don't get me wrong—Russ's puzzle was a great idea, but it's like work."

"Why?" she asked, reaching for another slice of pizza.

"You were doing the puzzle standing up."

"I find it more comfortable than being on the floor."

"You had your iPod playing."

"I don't listen to music exclusively at work."

He counted off the similarities on his fingers. "Working on a skeleton, standing up, listening to music. Sound familiar?"

Brennan paused in mid-bite, considering. "Although it is a stretch, I can see where you would draw your conclusion from," she conceded. "Perhaps I found working on the puzzle relaxing because it reminded me of reassembling skeletons, which is another activity I draw pleasure from."

Booth snorted. "Yeah. Total stretch."

She looked at his gift again. "So you brought me a lighthouse to work on instead?"

"The beach, the sand …" He waved his beer for emphasis. "It's about as far as you can get from the Jeffersonian. That's what a weekend off is supposed to be."

"I appreciate the gesture, Booth." Brennan slid the box back into the bag. "Once I finish the skeleton, I can start on this."

He shook his head. "Nope." Grabbing her by the elbow with one hand, and hefting both the bag, pizza box and beer in the other, he steered her out of the kitchen. "Today."

She resisted slightly. "I don't want to start another puzzle when I haven't finished the first one."

"You work on more than one skeleton at a time at the lab." Booth gave her another nudge in the direction of the dining room table and smiled charmingly. "C'mon, Bones. Start this one with me. It'll be fun."

Brennan frowned at him, clearly weighing the pros and cons of arguing versus giving in and possibly chasing him away more quickly. Booth hid his own frown as his gut sent him urgent messages similar to those on Friday. His partner missed work for personal reasons, oh, about every thousand years, and he had every intention of figuring out what she was hiding, even if it involved being somewhat boorish.

As she mulled over her options, Booth began setting up. He set a box of pizza on either side of the table, got them both fresh beers and opened the puzzle box. He tore open the plastic bag that contained the pieces and was just about to pour them onto the table when Brennan intervened.

"What are you doing?"

"Uh … starting the puzzle?"

Brennan waved his hands away. "You should never just invert the pieces onto the surface you plan to be working upon. Brand new puzzles have cardboard particles from the manufacturing process." She grabbed a nearby napkin and shook a few pieces out, then pointed at the fine brown dust that accompanied them. "They make the work surface unsanitary."

He grabbed the box back from her and dumped the puzzle over. "This isn't a lab, Bones." Booth settled into a chair. "Puzzle dust isn't going to cause a biohazard alert."

Brennan looked decidedly annoyed, but she took a seat in front of him anyway and dragged an armful of pieces over to her side, pointedly shaking off the dust and glaring at Booth as she did so. He ignored her and grabbed his own handful, beginning to sort the pieces. As he did so, he could feel her watching him intensely.

"What?" he finally asked.

"You're not sorting the pieces."

"Sure I am. I'm picking out the edges." He held up a piece of the upper border as proof. "See? C'mon, Bones. Everybody starts with the edges."

"A more efficient process would be to categorize the rest of the pieces as you go, so you don't have to repeat the process twice." Brennan sifted through several of her own pieces, neatly moving them into several distinct piles.

"Puzzles aren't about being efficient, Bones." He went back to his own sorting. "They're about having fun."

"Your method—or lack thereof—will require considerably more time."

"What's the rush?" Booth shrugged.

"My system allows me to proceed at a much faster pace, so I can complete more puzzles, thus increasing my fun."

"Okay, Bobby Fischer." He rolled his eyes. "How about you just do your thing and I do mine, huh?"

Atypically, they managed to work without bickering for a few minutes before Booth looked up to check on her progress and noticed the bizarre assortment of piles she was systematically creating.

"Bones, your piles are messed up. You've got blue in with the orange and red."

"I'm not sorting by color," she replied. "It's inefficient, given the great variety of shades in any given puzzle."

"What else is there to sort by?" Booth watched as she added multiple white pieces to a mound of green and tan. "Hey!" he exclaimed, noticing several of his edge pieces hiding in her piles. "Those are mine!" He reached out to steal them back, when Brennan's hand clamped down over top of his.

"They have rounded tabs and two blanks," she insisted. "They belong in the appropriate geometric category."

"They have an edge," Booth shot back. "They belong in the appropriate edge category."

They vied for control of the pieces, neither willing to give an inch, until Brennan's elbow slipped on the table and sent several of her piles skidding into each other.

"Now see what you did?" she complained, letting go as she attended to the disarray.

Booth grabbed his pieces and pulled them over to his side. He wrapped a protective arm around the border he was building . Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Brennan reach for her cellphone. She fiddled with the buttons on it, making it beep repeatedly.

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Setting a timer to see whose method works best—yours or mine. Generally, I can complete a 1000 piece puzzle in 48 hours or less if I have unlimited time at my disposal."

"You really need to look up the definition for fun again," Booth muttered. "Who works on a puzzle for 48 hours straight?"

She placed the phone between them. "It will be interesting to see how long it takes the two of us working together. Logically, the time should be halved, but I would hypothesize that, due to your lack of an orderly method, we will take considerably longer than the norm."

"There is no 'norm'! Puzzle solving isn't a scientific experiment, Bones. There aren't specific procedures and timeframes you have to follow."

"You said 'everybody starts with the edges.'That would imply that there is a distinct method that specific groups adhere to."

"But … Bones, those are edges. How can you make a puzzle without a clear edge?"

"A clear frame for a picture means nothing if the picture itself can't be reconstructed."

"Listen," Booth fumed. "I've solved plenty of puzzles in my time. My way works just fine, okay?"

"So does mine."

"We'll see about that." He bent over his pieces. "If my way turns out to be faster, you owe me dinner."

"And if I win, as I undoubtedly will, you can accompany me to the next scientific lecture I attend."

"Deal!" He extended his hand.

She shook it firmly, eyes gleaming with the thrill of a challenge. "Deal."

"Just—we don't have 48 hours to work on this," he pointed out in hindsight. "We've got work tomorrow. Do you just want to add up the time it takes us over the course of several evenings?"

"That is acceptable." Brennan nodded.

Booth reached for a cold slice of pizza with one hand, while he continued to sort pieces with the other. "Told you this would be fun."

She smiled. "These last months … it's been fun becoming us again, Booth."

He raised his beer in agreement and grinned. Slowly but surely, they were rebuilding the relationship they'd both taken a sledgehammer to. "To us."

Brennan leaned over and clinked her bottle with his. "To us."

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

"Would you mind if I put on some music?" Brennan asked.

Booth leaned forward and tapped a piece of the lighthouse into place. In spite of his inefficient methodology, he'd completed a large section on his side. "Go for it."

She retrieved her iPod from the living room and set up the docking station on the table. "Angela prepared a song mix for me that she explained was ideal for a girl's night in."

Booth grimaced. "I'm not a girl, so that doesn't apply to me. How about something else?"

"Some of the songs are quite catchy." Brennan selected Angela's playlist in spite of his objections. "I've been looking forward to hearing one in particular whose title I recognize from the radio."

"What's that?" He snuck a piece from one of her piles and earned a slap on the hand in return. "I need that piece of the tower," he complained.

"It won't fit. The size of the blanks is wrong."

He tried the piece anyway and reluctantly nudged it back in her direction when her assessment proved correct.

Brennan located the song and pressed play. "It's by the artist Sheryl Crow, I believe. All I Wanna Do."

She settled back into her chair and began rotating a piece of improbably aquamarine ocean when the song began. The instrumental beginning didn't match her memory of what the song sounded like.

Booth looked over from his lighthouse, a look of alarm spreading across his face. "That isn't Sheryl Crow." He grabbed for the iPod. "No way are we listening to this."

Brennan batted him away. "My apartment, my music selection."

"Bones," Booth groaned, "This is Heart."

She scooted the iPod out of his reach. "I don't know what that means."

"1970s girl band … power ballad queens?"

She shrugged. "I don't know them. The lyrics seem promising."

"Random girl picks up random guy off the side of a rainy street corner." Booth scowled. "How is that anything but stupidly unsafe?"

"Popular culture enshrines men who make multiple conquests of complete stranger. A song where a woman is the one who makes the selection is intriguing to me in its reversal of gender stereotypes."

"It's not about reversing gender stereotypes." Booth took an unnecessarily vicious bite of the Thai they'd ordered in after five hours of puzzling had made them both hungry again. "It's about deceit. Okay, Bones? Deceit. This girl sleeps with this guy just to get pregnant, because her otherwise perfect husband is firing blanks. Then she pulls a vanishing act and passes his kid off as another man's."

She pushed rewind. "Now I have to listen to the song again, in order to verify the accuracy of your comments."

He jumped up and reached for the docking station again, sending several pieces flying to the floor. Brennan grabbed the iPod and jumped up. Booth followed her menacingly, making various swipes towards the music device that Brennan avoided with nimble footwork.

"It's only a song," she teased.

"C'mon, Bones. Give it up," he ordered, lunging toward her again.

"No," she retorted, feinting left, then diving right.

Booth's eyes began to twinkle. "You're dead, squint."

Feeling more alive than she had in a long time, Brennan ducked again. "Are you threatening me?"

"Oh, yeah," he growled, making an unexpected dive at her midsection.

She fended him off with one hand, while trying to keep the iPod away with the other.

"Give it to me."

"No."

"I'm gonna take it anyway, Bones." He grinned dangerously. "Just give up already and maybe I won't be too hard on you when I win."

Brennan laughed and waved the iPod mockingly as she pushed rewind again. "Come and get it."

She fought only as hard as necessary to keep their game going, and wasn't disappointed when he finally snagged her arm. She dug her heels into the carpet as he began to pull her towards him, chuckling victoriously.

"Now you're in trouble, lady."

Brennan snickered, still managing to keep the iPod away even as he dragged her nearer. "Are you going to read me my Miranda Rights?"

The expression on Booth's face changed abruptly. "Whoa. Bones."

Suspecting some kind of ploy, she rewound the tune yet again. "Nice try."

"No." He released her arm and stepped back, eyes wide. "Bones—you're bleeding."

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Sorry for the cliffhanger. School is keeping me busy and I haven't quite finished the piece yet. All questions will be answered in the last section, to be posted next Thursday.