"Stay the night. Please," he'd said.
But she hadn't. She had finals and she had the side job at the library and somehow that seemed more important than breakfast in bed or whatever silly promise he'd whispered in the dead of night, in that tiny single room, in that student's flat he shared with two other cadets.
And what did it matter anyway, when he'd be off oversea in three weeks and she'd only met him the very same night at a graduation party.
She hadn't.
Flash forward twenty-five years and she has a daughter with a dead man and he has a son and an inherited stepdaughter when they meet again at their children's wedding.
And he's asking again, later, because she married a blond, blue eyed engineer, but she's always had a thing for deep, mysterious eyes and uniforms and his scottish lilt. Stay the night. Please.
But what excuse does she have? How to explain to Clarke that she fell into bed with her new husband's father (again)? How to tell Bellamy that the person he reminded her of the first time her daughter brought him home was a vague memory of hot skin and darker eyes of a wild one-night-stand sex in her college years? How to avoid being the talk of the week (month?) with this soap opera-ish preamble?
Stay the night. Please.
Her skin is tingling with the buzz of pleasant tiredness and she would want nothing more than just fall asleep then and there, in a hotel room five floors above the ballroom where her daughter married his son mere hours ago, in a city neither of them ever lived in but that their children call home.
Specially now that he's lazily kissing her shoulder and mumbling something about time - gone, present, yet to come, what does it matter anyway when it can finally be theirs.
"Do I still get breakfast in bed?" she asks.
His lips stretch into a grin, hot against her bare back. "Gotta find out."