"Sue? Sweetheart, are you awake?"
"Mmmmmnnn."
"Sue, honey. I'm sorry, it's late and you said you didn't want the kids to know just yet. I'll drive you home, if you haven't changed your mind?"
Sue gave Charlie one of her rare smiles and the lines at the corners of her eyes changed from the drooping signs of sorrow and suffering on a woman who aged before her time, to crinkling laugh lines that gave her an aura of lingering youthful beauty.
"I think the kids were staying the night at the Cullen's—," she wrinkled her nose, "house tonight anyway. There really isn't any need for me to go rushing back to an empty house."
"No, I don't suppose there's much logic in that." Charlie had spent years as a gruff Police chief, mourning the end of his relationship with Renee. He was not smooth or practised in dating. Sue was still very much the grieving widow, she had devoted herself completely to her children after Harry's sudden death and her sudden attraction to his friend was something that she treated with caution.
They had fallen asleep on Charlie's old couch. A smoother man would have suggested moving to a more comfortable place, such as a bedroom. A more forward woman would have made a move or wandered upstairs in an act of innocence. But they were not these things and in an act of unfamiliar awkwardness, Charlie pulled a blanket from the chest next to the couch and draped it over them. Sue moved painfully slowly to move closer to him and rest her head on his chest, he placed a hand on her back. The TV had been turned off and the room was dark and quiet.
They stayed that way all night. Too nervous in their new roles to sleep until exhaustion overtook the in the early hours and too content in each other's company to want to move at all. And so Sue Clearwater spent her first night close a man who was not her husband.