I know. I've been absent. I'm a horrible, horrible person. Yada yada.

Enjoy the chapter, hope you like it.

CHAPTER 6: STAY THE NIGHT

But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple

things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.

Daphne Du Mourier – The Lover

April, 3rd

They decide to spend the night in Brussels and take a train in the morning to somewhere new. They haven't decided where yet, just exchanged opinions and thoughts. Kate suggested Latvia and Rick suggested The Netherlands. Since they almost got into a fight because of that, they both thought it's best they decide in the morning.

At 7 PM, when they can't find any suitable hostels, Rick just stops a random passerby on the street. It's an old woman that smiles at them when Rick asks her if she knows about any cheap places where they could stay for the night.

"There is a new hotel in town, Albert Hotel. It's on Rue Royale Ste-Marie 27-29. It's quite cheap," she tells them in broken English, but it's understandable enough that they thank her after asking her for directions and slowly walk towards their destination.

Albert Hotel looks average from the outside, beige bricks and dark blue window frames making up the façade. Kate and Rick decide to at least try the hotel and see how the prices are, seeing as they don't have much money anyway.

Kate glares at her co-traveler at the front desk, when he suggests they take a single room with two beds, so they don't have to pay so much. "Sooner or later, we'll run out of money, and it's cheaper and I swear I'll be a perfect gentleman," he tells her.

After a short inside talk with herself, Kate reluctantly agrees (it's not like she'll be tempted to jump him or anything).

The room isn't quite as small as Rick and Kate have expected. The front door leads into a short hallway filled with paintings; one of them is a fake of The Birth of Aphrodite, which Kate absolutely adores. Rick just smiles and nods as Kate gushes to him about the beauty of the painting and starts telling him about the goddess of love and beauty (Rick actually already knows all about it, but he lets her talk, because he doesn't want to wipe the awed look off her face).

When Kate finishes with her short history lesson and looks at him with a sheepish smile – she doesn't realize how adorable she looks – they continue with the room research.

There's a small bathroom on their left, and then, at the end of the hallway is the bedroom. It's not small, but it's not the President suite either. There are two beds, situated next to each other, the bedding navy blue, contrasting with the beige colors of the hotel room.

Kate exhales slowly and smacks her lips together, then puts her backpack next to the bed that isn't by the window.

Rick asks her why not the window-side bed, but Kate just shrugs and tells him, "I don't like the sun waking me up," which seems illogical, because they would have woken her anyway in the other bed. It's not like Rick is five feet wide to be able to block out the sunrays. He likes the fact that his built is large, mostly his torso and shoulders, but he's not overweigh and he knows Kate knows this. He's caught her staring at his chest and abdominal planes enough times to know she likes his figure.

"So… what now?" Kate asks, and Rick averts his eyes from his bed to stare at her. The late spring sunbeams catch her hair and color it in a whole spectrum of brown and red and orange. She looks almost like a vision from his dreams, that have been haunting him the last few months. "Rick?" she calls out, and he clears his throat, then scratches at the nape of his neck.

"Yeah, um… I don't know. We could, ah, maybe we could watch TV or… or something?" Kate smirks and crosses her arms on her chest.

"Are you okay?" she asks Rick, and although he wants to tell her how beautiful she looks, he refrains and instead just nods.

It's a little awkward after that. They sit on their own respectful beds and do their own stuff, completely disregarding Rick's opinion to watch tv: Kate reads a book Rick has never heard of before, and he writes about senseless things, doesn't really know what it is about. It's kind of like the stream of consciousness – the winter has no meaning, what is here is not, I miss her, but she's here, where do I go next; I need to figure out, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME, my bed feels lonely, my ears are deaf, I hear the sounds of something and it seems wonderful to be able to lie dead – he stops then.

He hasn't had any suicidal thoughts for a long time, but now it feels like it has been building and in the silence of the hotel room, with a beautiful, but unreachable, young woman close to him, he feels unexplainably aware of the voices in his head that keep chanting to him, and he just wants to go home; back to his little baby.

Without realizing, he sniffs and feels liquid warmth ghosting slowly over the angle of his cheekbone.

Then a hand touches his shoulder and he's staring in the concerned face of Kate, her mouth opened in shock and her eyes stretched wide.

"Hey. Don't cry," she whispers, and he feels hollow enough to let his head tumble forward into Kate's neck and allows his tears to penetrate the walls he's been keeping up for too long.

Kate sits there for what feels like hours, with her fingers running repeatedly through Rick's hair and his face nestled into the crook between her jaw and her shoulder.

She was stunned for a few moments at first, but then she held him as tightly as she could, sensing his need to be comforted. She thinks he hasn't been comforted enough, and this thing that's breaking him, is now breaking him open, but Kate is acutely aware that she's probably not the right person to whisper you'll be okay and shhh, it's alright into his ear. She's probably more fucked up than he is.

Also, she doesn't even have a clue why he's crying and how it has even come to this; all they were doing was minding their own business and he had been okay right until she heard him sniff and saw that he was crying.

So of course, she has a soul, and she felt bad for him, especially because in the one day she's known him, he seemed impenetrable to the bad things, and he always looked giddy and he was childish.

She didn't want him to cry, so she went to at least talk to him. But instead, he used her for a pillar, and well, she isn't completely opposed to it, not with his hot breath against the skin of her neck and his fingers coiled tightly into her t-shirt, his hair between Kate's fingers, all silky and soft, and her other hand strumming against his back, the play of muscles strong and unyielding, but at the same time so soft and sweet. The only thing really wrong about all this is that he's crying and she doesn't know if she even deserves to comfort him this way; she should have just left him to heal on his own.

With this in mind, she slowly brings both hands up to his cheeks and lifts his head so she can look at him. He's stopped crying, she notices.

He's looking at her like he's ashamed, and he opens his mouth, probably to say he's sorry, but then Kate is shushing him with her thumb. His lips feel wonderful under the pad of her finger and she has to physically stop herself from replacing it with her mouth.

"Rick, it's okay," she tells him, but he hangs his head in embarrassment. "You don't have to tell me what's wrong, but… When – if you ever feel like crying your heart out, I'm here, okay? Don't feel bad about it."

Rick's head lifts again, and suddenly Kate's aware of his body thrumming against hers, his torso touching her chest and his hands on her hips, his face too close to still be deemed appropriate. She stutters out a breath and her eyes fall to his mouth without Kate's permission.

Rick's fingers drag upwards to caress her ribs, and Kate stops breathing at once.

Rick moves closer, his leg wedging between hers, his knee almost hitting her right there, but then the only thing still moving closer is his face, his nose bumping hers, hot air curling between their mouths. They are still like that for a moment, and Kate can almost feel his lips brush hers, before she realizes what she's doing, what they are doing and she moves away from him like she's been burned.

He doesn't know why he even let himself break down in front of her. He doesn't know why it felt so good to have someone, to have Kate be there for him, her hands gentle and her mouth tender with whispered promises that he'll be alright. He doesn't know why it even clamped around his heart right now, because he hasn't cried in weeks, and having someone with him, being as reckless and careless and free as he could be should help, not make him want to claw his insides out and vomit with the force of his loss and Kate, beautiful, beautiful Kate cradling him shouldn't feel good, but it did, it does, and he has never wanted to stay in another woman's arms forever, but with Kate… With her, he could stay suspended in one moment, their bodies drawn together with compassion and care, until he dies.

Nothing has ever felt so good.

And when his tears stopped falling and she told him that she's there for him, that he can cry all he wants, his heart just broke open and he couldn't stop himself. He had to paint her body with his fingers, had to taste her lips; but she pulled away before he could and he could feel the tension rush out of him in an instant.

"I'm – I'm sorry, I… I can't," she mumbles, with her fingers pressed against her lips and her eyes wide, almost black, a complete opposite to the sun still shining through the windows.

"What?" Rick chokes out, because he can't think of anything else, not when they almost kissed, not with the phantom of her body against him still settled deep into his bones, hard with grief, but melting slowly with the warmth of Kate's whole being.

"I need to take a walk."

"Kate, wait –"

"I'll be back soon," she promises, then almost runs to the door and shuts it loudly behind her.

He lies on his bed for a long time after that, staring up at the ceiling and growling at his stupid, stupid head, and he'll die if Kate doesn't come back, come back to him, because deep inside, he knows it wasn't just all his doing. He could see it in her eyes, feel it in the hitch of her breath, how she wanted the kiss, how she wanted him to kiss her. But with how she moved back and how she ran away, he doesn't know if it would even mean anything to her, and he's pretty sure that she would have blown him off and really ran and then he would never see her again. He couldn't allow himself to fuck this up, because it felt like Kate was really his friend, and he was so glad for it – he hasn't had any real friends in forever. Everyone eventually leaves but he can't let Kate leave him. She is good for him: makes him happy and independent and she frees his soul of everything, and there is just her.

He wants her, yes. He wants her carnally, his body thrumming with his need for her, but although there's some deep-seated care for her, he doesn't love her… yet. He thinks he might start to love her if she continues to be this amazing and wonderful and pretty.

So yes, being with her in that way would mean just one night with her, and something in him wants more than just that, even though he has his doubts.

She enters the hotel room at 11 PM. It's dark; none of the lights are turned on, so she doesn't know where Rick is. That is, until her eyes adjust to the darkness and she sees a silhouette of a man's body lying on the top of the comforter in his bed.

It looks like he's sleeping and for a moment Kate just stands there, observing the inhales and exhales of the man who, just two hours before, used her body to cry himself out.

When she ran from him and out to the street, she could feel the damp fabric sticking to her skin at her shoulder and her neck, still warm. She wiped it with the sleeve of her cardigan and strolled relentlessly, over and over crossing the same streets, until she realized she was walking in circles, and it always brought her back to the hotel; back to him.

All her life, Kate has had problems with continuously attaching herself to people too fast, relying on them and in the end, everyone has always let her down and made her hurt. Her mother was the only one who could make her feel okay again, but now even she was gone, and she left her only daughter to find the reason for her existence in this crazy world.

Kate hated her mother for leaving her for a long time since she passed away. But then, sometime in the year 2000, after she spent the night dreaming about her mother giving her lectures about life again, she felt that anger disappear, burn to ashes. All that was left was the grief and the sadness that Kate doesn't think she'll ever get rid of.

So being in Europe, with Rick, she has almost forgotten about her sorry excuse of a life and finally found hope that she could become something more, that she could be better, if not for someone else, then at least for herself and what she is worth of.

She stares at the long line of Rick's body; Kate's muscles clamp tight with the sudden urge to hug him and maybe use him to cry herself out. There's a sharp inhale echoing into the room all of a sudden, and then a light comes on at the side of Rick's bed.

His eyes stare at her as he says, "I'm so glad you came back."

"Where else would I go?" Kate asks him. He feels relieved with the knowledge that she's back in the hotel room, safe and okay.

"I don't know. I was afraid something had happened to you, or that you won't come back."

"I didn't even take my backpack, Rick. I had to come back at some point," she points out and looks at him as though he's crazy.

"So you're leaving again? For good?"

Kate closes her eyes and bites her lip. She carefully sits onto the edge of her bed and fiddles with her fingers for a moment. "Look… After what happened, that – you crying and then…" she looks pointedly at him, and he can swear there's a blush on her cheeks. "And then that… I think we know we both have been hurt before and that we're both still hurting from some things and maybe it would be a good idea not to –"

"I know what you mean," he interrupts, because somehow he can't stand to hear her say she doesn't want it. "But, Kate. If you ever need someone who'll just be there for you, who'll happily listen to you gushing about your favorite painting or comforting you when you cry, I'm – I can be that. I can be that for you," he tells her, his voice serious and honest.

"Thank you," she says, and her face lights up with a smile when she offers a hand for him to shake.

"Is this like a peace offering?" he asks her, and she answers with a shrug. "You should have brought cookies along and I'd even be prepared to braid your hair and listen to you complaining about boys and their cooties."

This time, her laughter is the thing that eases his chest and makes his heart flutter against his sternum.

Please review so I'll write faster and won't feel so bad about not writing anything and posting it. This is for everyone's good. (:

Ariela