A/N: So by "a short epilogue" I clearly meant "I cannot be concise to save my life, so here have a third part." So, um, here, have a third part. In celebration of the new footage. Thanks to everyone who commented on the last part!

PART III: YOU'RE COMING BACK FOR ME

First on the agenda is room service. MacKenzie is far too thin, and among the many problems between the two of them, feeding her is the easiest and simplest to solve. She protests, but he still picks up the phone on the end table next to the couch and orders half the menu, picking and choosing appetizers and entrees and desserts that he remembers she likes.

Regardless, he tells himself, he didn't eat dinner before the eight o'clock panel and now there is no way in hell he is showing his face in the general vicinity of a camera until checkout tomorrow morning, and from what Mac's told him she went straight from the airport to Northwestern so she needs to eat too, no matter if she's hungry or not.

"You need to call Charlie," she tells him when he hangs up, eyes on the screen of her Blackberry. "You're trending on Twitter, and Don just quit."

Will would rather not. And besides, he's already found a replacement EP.

"He won't be mad," Mac says softly. "He'll like what you said. But you need to call him, and probably your agent. I'll wait."

Frowning, he looks at her, scrutinizes her. "I'm not worried he'll be mad."

Then the softness is gone, replaced by a sarcastically arched brow. "You need to call Charlie," she orders.

Rationally, he recognizes that, sighing at his BlackBerry. On the other hand, he doesn't look forward to Charlie's smugness, or having to share a MacKenzie who very much looks like she's ready to collapse into bed and stay there for a very long time.

But then again, he doubts that she'll relax until he makes the phone calls.

"Fine."

His acquiescence comes with sinking down into the couch cushions, hoping that she'll follow. Watching him carefully, she edges closer before finally unlacing her fingers and shrugging out of her camel-colored blazer, throwing it over the back of the couch, and settling down next to him. When he makes a show of dialing Charlie's number, she smiles.

It's almost enough to wipe the dread of facing Charlie away.

Almost.

Charlie picks up before the second ring gets a chance to sound. "William Duncan McAvoy. What in the hell have you gone and done now?"

"Yeah, about that—"

What the fuck does he even say? By the way, I'm still in love with MacKenzie and I've been trying to sort my head out since she almost died last fall, and we've been talking and crossing weird lines and she kind of produced my little outburst. Sorry for the headache? Not that he needs to protect Mac from Charlie of all people, but this is happening all so fast, and he hasn't spoken to Mac in a month, and he has no idea how she is outside of a CNN IA report. But she's here, within arm's reach. Not fragile, no. Never fragile, but he still wants to spare her any pain that he can.

"Don's gone and quit, I've heard. Not that I'm entirely unused to you driving away your EPs, but this one was done pretty spectacularly—"

Mac presses her fingertips to her lips, quieting a laugh.

Will cringes. "About that—"

"No, it's probably time he found a better fit," Charlie rambles genially, cutting him off. "I'm meeting with him and Elliot tomorrow for lunch, I think it's quite possible that it's time that you have eight o'clock to yourself again. We'll need to start putting out feelers for a new EP for you. I don't think we want someone in-house this time."

"I agree." Now or never, he figures. "Mac is here."

Charlie takes that as encouragement. "Yes, I heard she was back in the country—"

"He's called me seven times since I got back," Mac explains lowly, looking down at her hands in her lap.

He cuts Charlie off there. "No, I mean Mac is in my hotel room, sitting a foot away from me."

"That… changes my game a little bit," he replies after moment. Gritting his teeth, Will waits for the inquisition to begin. "How is she?"

With a nervous expression, Mac reaches for the phone, but he moves it out of her reach.

"I'll put her on speaker," he says, ignoring how Mac rolls her eyes.

"Hi, Charlie," she says sheepishly once he sets the phone down on his thigh.

"I'm confused," Charlie says, forthright in his backhanded demand for an explanation. Not that Will expected any less.

"You haven't—Will," she chastises him, voice turning shrill with alarm when she pieces together that Charlie hasn't the faintest idea that they've been speaking. Shoving his shoulder, she looks down at his phone."Will and I have been back in touch since I got hurt back in September. Just emails, and the like. I was—it's a complicated story, but I was in the audience today and there were signs held up and really, I am only accountable for the words 'it's not, but it can be' and then he had to go and—"

Nervous, she rambles, hands flinging out in front of her.

"Got it," Charlie says genially. And then, abruptly, "MacKenzie, you looking for a job?"

Mouth hanging open, she looks from the phone to him and back. "No," she denies almost immediately, but then squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, reconsidering. "I mean, well, yes, but—"

Her hands fly up to her face, nearly hitting him in the process. Startled, he grabs the hand that almost struck his nose and wraps his fingers around it, gently forcing it back down into her lap.

"Do you wanna be Will's new EP?"

Will arches a brow at that.

"I'm right here, you know," he reminds him.

Charlie snorts. "William, you don't have contractual approval of your EP, I can hire whomever I find to be the most apt at handling you like a man. Which is, and always will be, MacKenzie McHale. What do you say, dear?"

Wait.

"I don't have contractual—"

"Stop ruining the moment," Charlie rebuts sharply.

Mac emits a watery laugh, looking at him with a manic expression of disbelief. "Will, you offered me the job forty minutes ago."

"It's the principle—" He scrambles, before shutting himself down. "Okay, okay. Mac, please say yes so this can be settled before dinner?"

He gives her a smile that he hopes is encouraging. Or at the least, not off-putting.

She stares at him for a moment with an almost inscrutable expression, before smiling in a way that crinkles the corners of her eyes. "Charlie, have your people call my agent and we'll have ourselves a deal. I'm also going to have to bring some of my own people with me. A senior producer, a few desk producers, an H&A producer… and a woman who could be on-air talent."

"Yes. Good," Charlie says in a way that connotes finality. And then, with a tone of barely-masked mischievousness, "I'll leave you two kids alone."

And with that, he hangs up with an audible click that resounds loudly between the two of them. Will's BlackBerry lights up, showing Charlie's contact info one last brief time, before flickering to the lock screen.

"Oh god," he says, tossing his phone onto the coffee table before sitting back fully into the over-stuffed couch, scrubbing his hands over his face.

No pressure on the traumatized woman, or anything.

"I'm sure he didn't mean it like that," Mac hedges, giggling nervously.

He did. The past three years haven't been an exercise in subtlety for Charlie, especially once he starts into the decanter of bourbon that sits ubiquitously at attention on top of his in-office liquor cabinet. Will's just happy that he stopped short at asking about grandchildren, or something equally ridiculous.

After all, if he was able to easily access Mac's PTSD diagnosis, there is no way that Charlie doesn't know about it. There's something there, but Will is too distracted by MacKenzie being right here, in front of him, to interrogate that line of questioning any further.

"No, he definitely meant it like that," he says, because there's no way to make this any less awkward. "There's a reason I didn't tell him that we've been emailing."

"Well… alright then," she replies softly, voice trailing off, eyes scanning the pristinely decorated hotel suite. Something flickers in her eyes—a decision, probably, setting a new course—and she pastes on a smile. "Now that that's settled, when would you like me to start?"

She can't possibly…

"Oh, we don't… have to do that now." Anxiously, he rubs his palms over the thighs of his pants, looking her over from the black blouse to the charcoal skirt and the warmly familiar sky-high shoes. MacKenzie is dressed the part, but he can't get the image of her in his tattered flannel shirt, her hair piled on top of her head, the skin under her eyes stamped with exhaustion, out of his head. "The food should be here soon—you're exhausted."

"Everyone's exhausted," she says, gingerly straightening her spine. Her cheeks flush, eyes watering.

"Not everyone has PTSD," he replies as matter-of-factly as possible.

"I don't need to be coddled," she snaps, although the harshness of her tone is tempered by the tears spilling down her cheeks.

Wordlessly, he reaches for the box of tissues on the end table next to him, and passes one to her.

"I'm not coddling you. You are exhausted, and I know that no one on your team can do a damn thing to make you rest and you'll just keep pushing yourself out of some—" He sighs, briefly looking at the ceiling before turning back to her. "That part's not important. If I know Charlie, he's already booked an extra night on the ACN account. You're going to eat, and then do whatever the fuck you want that doesn't involve moving and sleep in late tomorrow."

"I appear to have lost the ability to sleep for more than a few hours at a time," she says quietly, folding a tissue in half, and then half again, before blotting at the mascara smudged around her eyes.

"Breakfast in bed, then," he answers, trying to be gentle without making her think that he sees her as weak, or worse yet, incapable. "Unless you've lost the ability to lay in bed and eat French toast, too."

MacKenzie laughs, her hands falling to rest in her lap. She looks at them for a long moment, collecting herself, before looking back at him. "No, I think that I can still do."

The food arrives shortly after that. It's chicken something and beef something and two kinds of pasta dishes and parmesan fries with garlic aioli and a dainty margherita pizza that she winds up eating in its entirety, before convincing herself that her stomach can handle cream sauce and whatever the Waldorf kitchen has drenched the asparagus in.

It's nice. A little surreal, but nice, and she eats more than she has in half a year around easy conversation. At some point, her mind stops telling her that it shouldn't be easy to be like this with Will, and she relaxes.

"I've had a problem with forgetting to eat," she says while examining a French fry, five or so minutes after Will has pulled her knees to rest over his lap.

"You've always done that, though. When you've been off on something."

Mac snorts, eating the fry and collapsing down onto the couch cushions, pillowing her head on a monstrous velveteen pillow.

"Not for days at a time," she muses dryly, and sighs, forcing her tone to be light. "I kind of just… stop trying to take care of myself. Sleep. Shower. Eat. And now, being back over here is… I don't know how to process it. The beds are too soft. The lights are too bright. The showers have water pressure. No one uses military time."

The last part she intends as a joke, but neither of them laugh.

Will looks at her, his expression entirely too soft. She's having a hard time when she doesn't have to something to fight against. But she doesn't want to fight Will.

"I'm sorry I didn't reply to your emails," she says, when it becomes apparent that they won't recover the light-heartedness of their earlier dinner conversation. Having no idea where they stand, she plunges forward. If Will kicks her out (although she supposes that he won't) it's not like she has much left to lose. "I read them, I was just… really fucking angry. And a whole lot of other things, not necessarily at you."

She settles another one of the decorative pillows over her middle, fingers tracing and playing with the little braided tassels at the corners. One of Will's hands cups her knee, his thumb tracing circles into her skin, fingers absently inching to where her skirt has crept up. She wonders if he can notice how every hair on her body is standing up, if he cares that she hasn't shaved in days.

"I kind of have to forgive you," he says, staring down at her legs in her lap, tripping the fingers on his other hand up and down her shins.

"Why?" she whispers.

Everything—from the moment she stepped off the plane and into O'Hare International—feels too good to be true, like she's going to wake up any moment, back in the hot morphine haze she was in in Landstuhl. That this is some drugged farce her mind has constructed to numb the pain as everything she has left in her life goes up in flames.

But no, she thinks. The burning she felt from the morphine didn't feel like this. She doesn't feel like her nerves are kindling for the conflagration. She's warm, pleasantly so.

Will's hands encircle her ankles, fingers brushing over fine bones before he pauses, massaging her calves. "I didn't read your emails until I'd heard that you were in critical condition in Islamabad," he explains with a tone of voice that she knows is only the act of irreverence.

Slowly, she pushes herself up to brace her weight back on the heels of her hands. "I—you read—why didn't you say anything?"

"I don't know." He shrugs, before laughing at himself with an air of self-deprecation. "I mean, I do know. But you were saying that you loved me and were begging for forgiveness and I didn't know what I—"

"Not loved. I do love you," she corrects, trying to chase any trace of desperation from her voice. But Will wasn't wrong—she's exhausted, mentally and physically, and most of all emotionally. "And I'm sorry, I'll be sorry for how stupid I was for the rest of my life, if only because now I have an unstable abdomen and a head full of crazy, but not if only, because—"

His head snaps up.

"What I mean is I didn't know how to reply to you, then," he says, cutting her off. Gently, but firmly. "I do now."

The pillow falls from her lap to the floor.

"Oh."

She still has little to no idea how to comprehend that Will has read all of her emails.

"I need you, remember?" he says, reminding her of their exchange in the lobby of the Marriot, before he swept her into a taxi and dropped his arm over her shoulder. It's hard to look past the impulse to read more into what he's saying, and Mac tries to break the habit she's begun during their months of correspondence. The expression on Will's face is painfully earnest, open and persuasive.

—He wants her to believe him because he's telling the truth.

Because he doesn't want her to suffer.

"Oh." She sits up fully. And then, scowling at him, "Why didn't you tell me, I would have come home months ago—"

"How was I supposed to know you wanted to come home?" he asks, leaning closer to her. Somehow her hands find placement on his chest, and they slide into old choreography without thinking, his hands moving from her calves, over her knees and up her thighs to grasp her waist.

"You're an idiot," she chokes out, desperately ignoring the tears welling in her eyes, not wanting to cry again today.

Is Will really this insecure? Then again, does she really have PTSD? This crying thing, it has to stop at some point, right? The therapist at Bethesda said it will, once she starts responding to the medication and her body no longer thinks that it's under attack and every stimuli will, somehow, cease to be entirely overwhelming.

"Yeah, well, you're the one in love with an idiot," he murmurs.

Snorting, she rolls her eyes and opens her mouth to stammer a retort, but her words—Thank you, that is entirely reassuring, you were saying?—are halted by Will slanting his mouth onto hers. Exhaling unevenly through her nose, she climbs even further into his lap; his hands at her waist roaming up and down her back before one settles at the nape of her neck and the other on her hip. He kisses her softly, easily, pulling back before it has the chance to escalate into anything else at all.

He just looks at her for a long moment, the hand cupping the base of her skull moving to frame her cheek, his thumb stroking her cheekbone.

"I love you. I think we should try this again—"

"Do you mean kissing, or—"

"MacKenzie," he sighs.

Biting her lip, she smooths her palms up and down the slope of his shoulders. "We were a show that flopped."

His smile becomes one of decided exasperation.

"Sometimes revivals turn out better than the first production," he counters forcefully. "Didn't you hear—I love you. I never stopped loving you. I think we're better off together than apart. I want you to come back to New York with me and stay in my place or something until your apartment is sorted out, and this all probably sounds overly-rational and very sudden, but—"

"Yes."

Rational is good, she wants to say. Rational is appreciated, when everything feels like it's out of my control. I like rational. Will keeps rambling on, though, finding new and interesting places to move his hands, like over the back of her thighs where her pencil skirt has ridden up indecently high.

"—I've been freaking out since we had the fight a month ago and I've been freaking out since you got hurt and I read all of your emails in a wild blur of coffee and cigarettes and I've come to the conclusion that recently I've been freaking out about that more than you with Brian and I kind of haven't been to see Abe in a… long time, but I think that's significant."

Leaning up onto a knee, she tries to get him to catch her eyes again, but he's not interested in contact, focusing solely on getting all of the words out before he loses his nerve. "Will, honey—"

"I'm trying to say that I forgive you. Not that you… explicitly need my forgiveness. I've done some things in the interim to make things worse and I—"

Breathing raggedly, MacKenzie turns her nails into the fabric at his shoulders and, angling her head, brings their mouths back together.

She doesn't quite know what to think. She knows how she feels, though, shivering when Will untucks her shirt from her skirt and slides his hands over her lower back, not daring to move them any lower. Faintly, she remembers Charlie's insinuations about what activities they would be doing tonight, and almost laughs. But then his tongue traces her lower lip and, moaning, opens her mouth to him.

Mindlessly, he complies when Mac pushes him back onto the couch cushions and moves to lie on top of him, her forearms bracketing his head and her knees pressing into his hips. It's easy to lose track of what he's doing with her breasts pushed against his chest, her hips moving against his, her hair falling in curtains around their faces. Without thinking about it, his fingers unclasp her bra, hands skirting around to her sides to slide under the loosened garment, his thumbs getting between them to circle her nipples. Her fingers clench into his hair, and he decides that he'll worry about what she's doing to his cowlick later.

He should be doing something else. Issuing a statement, or apologizing to Don and Elliot, or anything, really. But god, this seems so much more important—the little noises the Mac is making, the way the muscles in her thighs tighten almost imperceptibly against his hips, the slide of her tongue against his. Far more important.

Will thinks he'd be perfectly content to stay like this forever, necking with MacKenzie on the couch in a Waldorf Suite.

So when Mac pushes herself off him and stands, absently re-arranging her skirt, he stares up at her in confusion. Until she bites her lip over a smile, holding her hand out to him.

"Come here," she says, angling her body towards the bedroom.

"Um…"

A nervous expression takes hold of her features; her fingers twitch, and she retracts her hand to pull her skirt down. "Unless you don't want to—"

"Definitely not complaining," he quickly recovers, sitting up. And then remembers something crucial. "Wait, what about—are you on something? Or do we need—?"

"Fuck," she mutters, eyes going wide. And then, with a wry twist to the corners of her (swollen, he notes) lips, "Don't you have a condom in your wallet, or whatever it is that men do to be prepared in the event of even the slightest chance of sex?"

Snorting, he pushes himself up off the couch, reaching to wrap his arms around her waist and pull her back against him. "Okay, first of all, the friction from being stored in a wallet causes small tears in the latex, and second of all, we can work around this."

"With what, plastic wrap?" she quips, tilting her head up to nip at his mouth.

"You're—no. I mean, we can do… other things," he manages to get out, moving his hands to her ass. Other things, he thinks, remembering what it was like to have Mac's thighs wrapped around his head. Other things are good too. Then he frowns. "You went off the pill? The last time you did that you were spending two days a month curled up in a ball in bed."

(He'd never been so keenly appreciative of ladies until the moment he realized that period cramps can make a woman throw up, but whichever pill Mac was on had been in her system for so long that it was making her dizzy and fucking with her emotions and giving her daily headaches and just generally making her miserable.)

"You can't really stay on the pill when you're traipsing through the desert… although all things considered some women thought of it as contents insurance. And I got used to it." Scrunching her nose up a bit, she laughs, but diverts her eyes to somewhere around the first button on his shirt before centering herself again—he regrets bringing it up. "And no, we're calling the concierge desk."

Oh Jesus, he can already see the In Touch cover. His prudish Republican image is all he has left going for him.

"I'm already a PR disaster today, we really don't need to tack on a story about—"

"Yeah, over a million views on YouTube at last count. I'll call the concierge desk," Mac replies, already slipping out of his grasp in hunt for the room's phone.

His mind disengages for a moment. "Or we could take the risk. I mean, would it really be so bad if we had a baby—oh my god. What just came out of my mouth? Words. Just words. I didn't say that."

The look on Mac's face is a stunned cross of panic and amusement, before she makes a display of picking the phone up out of the cradle, dialing, and putting it to her ear.

Twenty minutes later a discreet bellhop is at the door with a twelve-count box of lubricated Magnums, and Mac hands him a stack of hundred dollar bills that he had fished out of his wallet the moment the concierge asked her for the name of the person to whom the suite belonged and what brand she wanted. He really, really hopes that five hundred dollars is enough to buy the twentysomething's silence.

It hits him, then.

MacKenzie is right here, in front of him, after a month of uncertainty and anxiety and at many points outright panic. MacKenzie is here, and they're on their way to bed, picking up where they left off, except not at all because three years has passed and she's been stabbed and gassed and shot at and two hours ago he completely upended his life on a stage at Northwestern.

"Well?" she asks, holding out her hand again, looking just as nervous as he feels.

For such a small amount of floor space to cover, their trek to the bedroom is a long one. Her skirt is discarded, and then his shirt. His belt clatters to the floor shortly thereafter, while he's busy trying not to trip getting out of his shoes and socks. Next is her blouse and her already-unhooked bra, and she's left standing in a lace-trimmed black camisole that he's loathe to deprive her of until she's ready, instead letting her pull his tee shirt up over his head. They get onto the bed next—the proper order of things, Will thinks, pulling her lace briefs down her thighs as she unbuttons the fly of his trousers. When he rolls onto his side to push them off, Mac sits up and strips off camisole, throwing it to the floor and falling back to lay against the great wall of pillows propped up against the headboard.

"It's not pretty," she says quietly a moment later, catching him staring at the six-inch scar curving up the left side of her abdomen.

"At least you have a better story than falling off a tractor," he quips as lightly as possible, referencing a patch of pearly scar tissue the size of softball on his right thigh.

Her response is an anxious giggle.

Rolling back onto his stomach, he lies between her legs, moving down until the stab wound scar is at eye level. Five feet of small intestine, he remembers from her early emails after it happened. But no threat of Short Bowel Syndrome.

The scar tissue is still very red, and raised under his fingers as he traces it after looking up at her face, asking tacitly for permission. Mac shivers, but her shivers turn to trembles which quickly escalate to her shaking herself out of her skin. He moves his hands to cup her hips and bends down to press a soft kiss to the scar.

"No one ever has to see it," he says lowly, resting his chin on top of her thigh. "Or you could use it to intimidate the staff, become the stuff of legend."

"If it had been a bullet I could have gotten it bronzed," she retorts unsteadily. "I threatened to get Jim's bullet bronzed."

Will frowns.

"You know, we don't have to—"

"I want to," she says assertively, lifting her head up off the pillow to glare down at him. "I'm sorry, I'm just a little… off-balance. I didn't even mean for you to see me today."

"Were you just going to leave?"

"I didn't really have a plan," she sighs, combing her fingers through his hair. "For anything, really, until we made eye contact. Then I kind of just figured what the hell and here we are. And I have a job. And you. When I landed here a few hours ago I thought I'd be heading back to DC tomorrow morning with no job prospects and no one from my team left."

Slowly, he starts to trace circles into the inside of the thigh his head isn't resting on. "How in the hell did you think I wouldn't see you?"

"Will, there were two thousand people in the audience today," she explains with a hint of a smile, the tremors beginning to ease.

"Yeah, but none of them were as important as you," he answers, moving lower and lifting a leg to rest over his shoulder.

"You—"

He cuts off her reply by licking a stripe up the inside of her thigh.

"Will," she gasps.

Inhaling deeply through his nose, he fits his mouth against her folds. Her hips lurch forward, and she moans, sliding a second hand into his hair. He's missed this—all the little twitches and breathy noises, the subtle contract and release of the muscles in her legs and abdomen, the rush of wetness against his mouth, the feeling of her skin heating up under his hands.

MacKenzie's never been particularly shy about expressing what she wants, and in what seems like no time she goes from moaning loudly, grabbing his hair to direct him to moaning loudly and pushing him back from her, panting through an orgasm.

Smiling, she hauls him up her body and plants her mouth onto his.

Somehow in the mix of lips and teeth and tongues, roaming hands and tangling legs, he ends up leaning back against an overstuffed headboard with Mac straddling him, grinding their hips together.

Smirking, she offers to put the condom on with her mouth, which Will promptly declines. With aftershocks still rippling in her thighs, she lowers herself onto him. Tossing her hair back over her shoulders she sighs, rotating her hips to find an angle that feels good. When she notices how intently Will is watching her, she laughs, leans forward, and kisses him.

"Sorry, I'm a little rusty. I'm not entirely sure this is going to be like riding a bike," she jokes breathlessly, testing out knee placement.

"I'm not exactly on top of my game either," he says, kissing along her jaw from her chin to her ear. "We'll figure it out. I remember us being pretty good at this."

"Yeah," she sighs in agreement, rolling her hips up and then back down. "We were."

She doesn't want to interrogate Will's statement. It's a matter of fact that she hasn't been with anyone in years, but she knows Will has dated (for publicity or other reasons, she's not wholly certain) and now is not the moment to be dragging their sexual histories out. But still, his statement drags her thoughts back to earlier—

I never stopped loving you.

As she finds a rhythm her head falls back. It's slow, and the smooth stretch and burn between her thighs heightens every time she descends, surging when her hips quirk forward, pressing the bundle of nerves into the ridge of his pelvis. The only sounds coming from Will are those of constrained breathing, until, tightening his hold of her waist, he groans and buries his face in her breasts. His legs jerk under her, bending at the knees so he can plant his feet on the mattress.

"You haven't forgotten a goddamn thing," he moans, almost accusatorily, sending a hand down to the apex of her thighs to rub tight circles over her clit.

A jolt of pleasure ripples through her legs before pooling between them. "Maybe we're just naturals," she counters.

"Fuck, yeah, we're definitely—" she chokes out, before her brain refuses to find an ending for that train of thought. The hand still at her waist slides up to wrap around under her shoulders, keeping her upright, or at least at the angle that's currently lighting up fireworks behind her eyelids.

"You close?" Will asks, and MacKenzie can feel the muscles in his arm tightening, and realizes faintly that he's mostly responsible for making sure that she doesn't lay herself out back against his legs. "Hon?"

"I'm—yeah," she finally answers, blinking open her eyes.

Will wastes no time getting her there.

He presses down harder, and then pauses, his fingers lingering when she throws herself back, digging her fingernails into his shoulders to keep herself from falling backwards. "I love you," she gasps out, feeling her own body stutter and then tighten almost painfully before release washes over her in waves.

And then she says it again, and again, draping herself over him, waiting for the blood to stop pounding in her ears and fingers and toes.

"I love you too," he murmurs, tracing his hands up and down the sides of her spine before lifting her hair from where it's lacquered to her sweat-slick skin, turning his head to kiss her ear, her cheek. She shivers; it's beginning to feel real. Finally, everything that's happened since September is beginning to feel real, and not like it's going to kill her.

Her pulse still faintly throbbing through her limbs, she tightens herself around him, feels his erection flex within her.

"Are you—?"

"I'm good," she assures him, and then squeals with shocked laughter when he tucks her legs over his hips and pushes her onto her back, her head landing somewhere near the end of the bed. "I could have—"

"You've already done enough," he teases, taking a few testing strokes before his face slackens with pleasure.

God, she loves him.

Feeling herself smile, Mac wraps her arms around his neck and pulls his face down to hers. Moving faster, Will seems beyond anything but the wet slap of their hips meeting, but she traces his bottom lip with her tongue before sucking his into her mouth. It's another minute before his back locks up entirely.

Kissing the corner of her mouth, his muscles slowly loosen until he collapses on top of her, rambling into her neck how much he loves her, what a spectacular woman she is, how much he missed her, how she's never leaving his sight ever again, goddammit.

—She giggles at the last one, and reminds him that the logistics of doing a news broadcast mean that she can see him but he can't see her.

Groaning, he rolls off of her and onto his back.

"Unfair."

"And I'm not certain I can just show up to the newsroom on Monday," she points out, nudging him to get up and deal with the condom before he passes out. Will does, and returns from the en suite bathroom with a brandless pack of baby wipes, handing them to her.

"All things considered, I'm not sure I can just show up to the newsroom on Monday," he mutters, climbing back onto the bed, laying across her legs once she finishes cleaning herself. Absently, he starts to massage her thighs and calves.

Somehow they both wind up under the covers and with an appropriate amount of pillows, curled up together looking at the explosion in his inbox, when a new email from Charlie appears.

To: mmchale , wdmcavoy
From: coskinner
10:28 PM on March 26 2010

As promised, MacKenzie, my people have been in contact with your people and I've gotten some browbeaten IT intern to re-instate your old ACN email account. If all goes well, you should be able to start here in three weeks. As for you, William, the 44th floor is ordering a vacation. I fought the good fight, and upon defeat, remembered that you have a lovely lady in your company who is actually in dire need of a vacation. You're both going to St. Lucia, compliments of the Lansings.

Upon your returns, you may find that things may be shaken up a bit at ACN…

Thanks for reading!