A/N: School's out and I'm beginning to pick myself up off the floor, albeit slowly. Thanks so much to Eternal Destiny 304 for her brilliant betas, as well as to those who reviewed Ch. 10 of this story and the first installment of Collide. Ch. 12 will be posted June 16th, as I promised I'd post the last part of Collide by the 9th.

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Booth was never particularly comfortable with silence. While Brennan enjoyed times of quiet, he was prone to filling every moment with some kind of noise, such as the music he had blared all the way to the beach. Sweets had once commented about the FBI agent's inability to 'be alone with his thoughts,' and Brennan couldn't entirely dismiss the psychiatrist on that point. On stake outs, Booth would invariably chastise Brennan for making small talk, then turn around and demand that she make conversation while they waited for their suspect to appear. It was an interesting dichotomy, one which led to Brennan feeling definitively smug as her partner lay behind her breathing heavily, his lack of small talk an indication of how thoroughly she'd worn him out.

She scooted back further into his chest, deliberately wriggling her hips to draw a groan out of him. He dropped an arm across her hips, pressing her firmly into the mattress in a bid to halt her mischief. She snickered and subsided. His breath whispered across her ear as he finally spoke.

"How can you even move?"

"I'm apparently in better physical shape than you are," she taunted, reaching behind her to playfully pinch an inch on his firm, naked thighs.

"Hey!" Booth yelped and moved with surprising speed, sliding out from beneath her so that Brennan was now flat on her back staring up at him. Imposing physical figure that he was, Brennan fully enjoyed the dangerous glitter of her partner's eyes and the tensed muscles in his upper body as he loomed over her, attempting to appear menacing. "If a guy did that to you, you'd knock him on his ass, before breaking every bone in his body."

"You did do that to me. And I did knock you—" Brennan's retort ended as he brought his mouth down over hers.

In spite of her bluster, she didn't have enough energy left in her to do much more than just lie back and enjoy as her partner did all the work. He was as meticulous in his kiss as he was on the job, and being on the receiving end of that thoroughness made Brennan grateful all over again for how good he was at his work.

Adding to the pleasure was the small part of her shirt that had hiked up, pressing her bare abdomen into his. Once again, she thought of what his bare chest against hers would feel like, and that killed the moment completely. She pushed Booth away and got up, angry at herself for allowing her emotions to override her reason. As she stalked towards to the bathroom, merely as an excuse to do something other than lie beside him feeling sorry, Booth's quiet words arrested her flight.

"I don't mind."

Brennan stopped just before reaching the door, her anger uncoiling itself like a disturbed rattlesnake. She turned on her partner, angry at his endless patience and unfair emotional advantage. He understood more about what was going on in her head than she did, and that was not only impossible, it was unacceptable.

"You should," she snapped, wishing he would get off the bed where he was now sitting up patiently, and come at her. She knew how to handle physical aggression. "I am very beautiful, Booth. Having sex with me while I am partially clothed is—"

"Better than not having sex with you at all," he interrupted. "Look, Bones. It's not how I fantasized about things, but I'm okay with it. Are you hungry?"

His random question derailed her anger effectively. "What?"

"We haven't really eaten since dinner yesterday." He got up and reached for his clothing.

Accustomed as she was to his usual shyness, Brennan found it strongly arousing to see him casually pull on his jeans commando, not seeming to be disturbed by her gaze on him.

Booth zipped the jeans up and looked around the room for his shirt. "It's gotta be, what, around noon?"

She knew, intellectually, that he was refusing to engage her in an argument. While the awareness was irritating—she was in the mood for a fight—she couldn't fault him.

He located the shirt and dragged it over his head, further disheveling his hair. "There's a Waffle House a couple blocks away. I bet you've never been to one."

She walked across the room until she stopped in front of him. "I haven't." Brennan reached up and dragged his head down to hers, none-too-gently. To her surprise, he didn't let her lead the kiss. She'd expected more patience. Instead, his arms locked around her waist and he bent her backwards, his mouth hard and demanding. She clamped a hand behind his head and fought back assiduously. They dueled with their lips, engaging each other in battle physically when neither had the energy left to do so emotionally. In the back of Brennan's mind, she hoped her kiss made a clear point that she couldn't otherwise express. Thank you.

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He'd always been a little obsessed with Brennan physically, but now that he could actually do some of the things he'd been dreaming about, Booth didn't fight it. Sure, getting into the car and to the actual Waffle House took longer than it should have, but that was because he stopped and kissed her against the bungalow's wall. Against the car door. At every red light. In the parking lot, before they walked inside. What made it better—or worse?—was that Brennan was completely willing. She would probably have kissed him all the way to the cash register and throughout breakfast, if Booth's sense of public propriety hadn't taken over finally. As it was, he didn't wait longer than 30 seconds after exiting the restaurant before dragging her to him again.

"The food was terrible," she informed him, mid-kiss.

"That's why people eat there, Bones." He concentrated on the strawberry syrup glazing his partner's full lips. "It's so bad, it's good. You know?"

Clearly enjoying the maple syrup left over from his waffles, Brennan replied, "No."

A nearby car honked as it pulled out of the parking lot, its owner leaning out the window to yell, "Get a room!"

"We have one," Brennan yelled back, grinning widely as Booth flushed.

His partner had exhibitionist tendencies; the Wonder Woman costume was exhibit A on that end. Booth found it a little disconcerting that they were rubbing off on him. Nevertheless, he couldn't find it in himself to mind as she slid her hand into his back pocket and smirked up at him while they made their way to the SUV.

Trying to find something to turn down the heat at least long enough for them to get into the backseat of the car—he strongly doubted they were going anywhere else for at least 30 minutes—Booth blurted the first thing that came into his mind.

"Hey, Bones. What was the deal with the mug?"

"Mug?" she repeated, squinting in confusion.

"The one Parker smashed. You got this really weird look on your face when you were picking up the pieces."

Brennan stopped and pulled away, creating a deliberate gap of space between them. Her face, previously open and relaxed, got that familiar guarded look and Booth realized he'd done more than turn down the heat. He'd somehow inadvertently thrown cold water on the furnace.

They finished their walk to the car in silence, with Booth scrambling to find a way to fix things and coming up empty on every count. He knew how private she was, and obviously he'd gotten too close to something she wasn't ready to share. As she stood waiting for him to unlock the door, he cursed himself up and down and searched for the right thing to say. Eventually, when they climbed inside and sat beside each other uncomfortably, he said the only thing he could think of.

"Forget it, Bones. It was a stupid thing to—"

"Angela made the mug for me." Brennan looked out the window as she spoke. "It was shortly after I told her about the foster family that locked me in the car trunk. We had an argument about experiences."

She was quiet for so long that Booth finally felt he was supposed to say something.

"Experiences?" he prompted carefully.

"At the time, Angela was studying Buddhism as part of a course in religious art history. She expressed her belief that all experiences in life have some sort of ulterior purpose or meaning. I disagreed."

"They do," Booth interjected. "Bones, we go through stuff for a reason. Everything's connected, kind of like in the human body. You hit one organ and it affects the entire system. You're a scientist; you oughta know that."

"To compare the chaos of life to the human body's inherent organization is absurd! The body is a closed system, therefore, each cellular unit has an impact on the next. Though there are certain environments within the world that are interconnected, human beings are not intrinsically interrelated, nor are their experiences." Brennan scowled. "I don't subscribe to the 'butterfly effect.' You could say that being abused has helped me better relate to a specific type of person who has also shared elements of my history. This in turn has occasionally assisted us during murder investigations. Does that mean that my experiences were inherently positive?"

"No!" Booth shook his head. "Bones, you're twisting things all out of shape. There was nothing good about your childhood abuse. The point is, you took the negative and turned it into a positive. We assign reasons to our experiences in order to give our lives meaning. Maybe the actual event doesn't start out with a purpose, but by eventually looking back and realizing where it fits into the scheme of things, we have a better understanding of why we had to go through it in the first place. It's like … every experience is an opportunity."

Brennan looked completely unconvinced. They'd had this argument in any number of variations over the years, and Booth's jaw tightened as he tried to find a way to get her to see reason, even when 7 years was ample proof that she wasn't going to change her mind on this one.

"What does the mug have to do with the fight?" he finally asked, giving up. Some things were just easier not to argue with her about.

"Angela told me that the hibiscuses and sunflowers on the mug were symbolic of my experience, but that I should not research their connotations. According to her, the meaning would someday be revealed fortuitously." The irate look on her face faded away and was replaced by something softer. Sad. "I am accustomed to finding answers, yet the mug was a mystery to me. I … enjoyed the novelty, even after I'd had it for many years. When it shattered, I was sorry to no longer have that daily reminder of what Angela called 'possibility.'

Booth frowned. "You mean you seriously never looked up the meaning?" Brennan ignoring a mystery was akin to him not chasing down a bad guy.

"She told me not to." Brennan looked at him reproachfully. "I promised."

He started the engine and guided the car onto the road, his mind several steps ahead of the wheels on the SUV. He knew the area well, and if memory served him …

"Where are we going?" Brennan asked as they passed their motel and he didn't turn in.

He pointed at a corner of a strip mall where he and Parker used to stop at the surprisingly well-stocked food court. The little store with its walls decorated in all manner of exotic blooms and its cheerful purple and white sign, Violet's Vincas, was at odds with the graying buildings all around it.

"It's way past time you figured out what those flowers mean."

"But, Angela said—"

"She said you couldn't research it. Not me." Booth slid his car into a parking space. Seeing the stubborn look on Brennan's face, he opened his door and decided this argument, at least, he was going to win. "Look. Angela said the flowers' meanings would be fortuitously revealed, right? That mug smashing was fortuitous. If Parker hadn't broken it, I wouldn't have come over and you might never have told me about possibly being sick."

They stood on the pavement, glaring at each other.

"I might have told you," Brennan objected. "You can't say for certain that I wouldn't have."

"Maybe if the diagnosis came back positive I might have heard something. If not …" Booth shook his head. "Nothin'. You never would have said anything."

"If the diagnosis was negative, there would have been no need for me to tell you," she retorted.

"Yeah?" Booth went for the jugular. "What if I told you that a few months back I had a cancer scare of my own and didn't say anything?"

The expression on her face, like she'd been slapped, told him he'd taken things a step too far.

"You suspected a recurrence of your brain tumor?"

"No, Bones." He sighed, feeling as guilty as he was frustrated. "I'm fine. The last check-up, everything was fine. Just—how would you have felt if I didn't say something to you, even if it turned out to be nothing?"

She was quiet for a moment, the emotional gears in her mind turning slower than the rest as they struggled to catch up.

"I see your point," she finally replied.

That was concession enough for him. Booth nodded and started toward the shop. "C'mon."

Brennan stepped in front, blocking his progress. She reached up and kissed his cheek lightly, like she did every now and then when her vocabulary wasn't enough to match her feelings. She slid her arm through his and looked up at him with a shy smile.

"Opportunity is ringing."

"Huh?"

"Our conversation earlier. You stated your belief that every experience is an opportunity."

Only Brennan could stir him up this badly, leaving him strung out somewhere between confused and elated in the space of a few sentences.

He started them walking in the direction of the store again, chuckling. "Knocking, Bones. Opportunity is knocking."

She butted her head into his shoulder. "Why not ringing?"

"Because there's no doorbell on opportunity, Bones."

"There could be."

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"It's just a door, Bones. Opportunity's old-fashioned. No bells."

"Then somebody should metaphorically install one. It's easy not to hear someone knocking."

"That's the point. Opportunity isn't always obvious."

"I still prefer my idiom."

"Bones, you can't just co-opt an age-old saying just because you disagree with it."

"My idiom is more suited to the 21st century."

"There's no expiration date on idioms. When you hear opportunity, you hear knocking. Not ringing."

"What about texting?"

"Nope. Knocking. It's always gonna be knocking."

"An opportunity could arrive by text. Or email."

"It's knocking. Not buzzing or ringing or vibrating. Good old-fashioned knocking."

"What if there's no door?"

"There's always a door."

"What if there isn't?"

"There will be."

"There might not. A doorbell would be a good precautionary measure. Opportunity both knocking and ringing would be more efficient than mere knocking."

"Ha! Nice try, Bones, but it's not happening …"

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A/N: Next chapter—floral connotations. Plus, Brennan encounters the clawwwwwww, and schools a surprised Booth on the wiles of Oikake, Machibuse, Kimagure and Otoboke. (I'm gonna go all Angela here and recommend you not research the names. Allow their meanings to be revealed to you … fortuitously. ;) )