A/N: How great was episode 20 though? I'm still having emotions about it, my goodness. The writing just flowed this week, and I am so proud of it!

Back to the fic, so the reviews so far have been amazing, thank you again! To f. wentworth, I have no idea if HAAEKY has found this fic but that'd be awesome if they did; I'm a big fan of their blog. To JRB, I literally had to cover my heart at your comment - thank you! I'm glad you can see the fics playing out in canon, that's the ultimate compliment. And for all of you hoping for some Emma POV, look no further!

Okay, so I apparently don't know how to write Emma's POV without angst ensuing so that's exactly what this is, thankfully with some pure fluff near the end. To be honest, I'm not entirely happy with this chapter but, at the same time, I am very happy with it and I can't bring myself to not post it. So I'm going with my gut and I hope you can give it a chance too.

Still don't own a thing, especially those pesky spelling mistakes.

It's not weakness, it's strength.

She opens the door to find Alex standing there, looking back at his car as though admiring it, before turning to face her. His eyes flash with concern as he demands, "What happened?"

Emma feels so nauseous and confused that rather than responding, she tugs at his hand and pulls him into her condo. Even though she's glad he's there, surprised as she was that he answered a vague text so promptly, she can't stop herself for going over and over what she's about to ask him.

"You're really starting to worry me, Emma. And not in your usual Alex, I spent the company's budget on a really nice new pair of shoes kind of way," he tries for a smile at this to show that he's teasing, but Emma knows he feels the tension in the air too.

It doesn't help the tension much that Emma stays quiet after this.

And, for probably one of the only times in their entire relationship, Alex breaks the silence first.

"Okay, seriously. Am I going to have to call Annie to explain your current state or will you just let me in on whatever's bothering you?"

Emma stills herself with a deep breath, she hadn't realize she was shaking, before stating, with as much confidence as she can muster, "I want you to sleep with me."

Alex blinks. He looks like his brain has fully registered her words and then rejected them in the same nanosecond. The silence is deafening.

"Yup, I'm calling Annie," he says, turning away from her and walking towards the kitchen. She grabs his arm as he frantically searches for Annie's number in his phone.

"Why are you being so weird about this? It's not like I haven't asked you for a favour before…"

He narrows his eyes at her while letting his jaw fall limp and his head cock to the side to give her his patented What the hell is wrong with you Emma Woodhouse face. "Are you hearing yourself?"

"Perfectly well, thank you," Emma doesn't know when her confidence came back but she's enjoying exerting it again.

"Emma, you're…I'm…we're…this is weird, this is so god awfully weird!"

She rolls her eyes and uses the hand already on his arm to pull him into her kitchen, plopping him down on one of her bar stools. Standing directly in front of him she realizes that she's taller than him right now, if only by a small amount. Alex is staring down at his shoes and mumbling more incoherent things about this being weird.

"Alex!" the shout she wishes she could muster turns into a groan of annoyance. He doesn't look up at her to answer, his voice just above a whisper, "I'm not doing it, Emma."

"Why? No feelings involved, pretend it never happened, move forward with your life with a little spring in your step, everybody wins."

Alex turns his head up to look at her and she realizes she has no desire to meet his eyes just then. In fact, she could really use a glass of water. Or, comparatively, something stronger. Before she can even turn to examine her collection of beverages, she feels Alex's hands on her waist.

"No feelings involved? You really expect me to believe the great Emma Woodhouse, matchmaker extraordinaire, doesn't see what's going on here?" He doesn't sound smug, or even his usual snarky self. He just seems…sad?

Emma ignores this, and the feeling of his hands still holding her place, when she says, "Purely physical, that's the beauty of it, Mr. Knightley!" but she still can't meet his eyes.

"Why…why are you doing this to me?" he asked, sounding as exasperated as she felt a few hours ago. As she's been feeling for too long.

"I'm doing this for me, Alex, you're just reaping the rewards," she says, with a forced laugh and a painful wink to boot. Why does he have to look so upset about this? Is the prospect of sleeping with her that bad?

"I don't…I don't want to…to sleep with you, Emma," he says, talking to his arms rather than her face. "Not like this."

Her confusion only gets worse. Why is he making this about him when she is the one falling apart?

"I wasn't suggesting we 'get busy' in my kitchen, Alex. You can choose the location if it makes you feel better."

He laughs at that. And, for a brief, idiotic moment, Emma thinks they can actually go through with this. Then he says something she doesn't quite make out.

"What?" she asks.

"I said, I don't know if this is a joke and I don't know if I want it to be," he sighs, "well, I mean, I embellished that version a bit but that's pretty much what I meant."

"It's not a joke, why would you want it to be a joke?"

He's still staring down at his arms intently with an expression that can best be described as painful concentration. Then, he removes his hands from around her waist and she thinks he's just going to leave her like this, when out of nowhere, he kisses her.

Thinking of this as her out, Emma smiles triumphantly, though she doesn't feel as great about this as she thought she could convince herself to be. And it mostly has to do with the fact that Alex isn't kissing her like he plans to take her to bed, but like he wants to never stop kissing her. Upon that realization, Emma finds it hard to breathe and pushes him off.

"What the hell?"

Alex is standing now, his jacket half on half off from where she tried to pull it off him. He looks so broken and Emma wants to hit him because she remembers that expression from looking in the mirror a few hours ago. So she hits him, hard in the shoulder.

He doesn't react.

"What the hell?" She repeats, this time quieter, as if to herself.

"Why do you want to sleep with me?" he asks, no longer afraid to meet her eyes, preferring to stare profoundly into them. She takes this as her own cue to become interested in anything else other than him.

"I told you, it's all phys-"

"Just tell me the truth, Emma," his voice isn't harsh. It just sounds kind of hollow. That isn't Alex, she thinks, Alex doesn't sound like that.

Turning on her heel, Emma leaves the kitchen slowly, before turning a corner and sitting on the stairs going up to the second level. Alex joins her shortly after, looking very much like the big brother she had once thought of him as. Had she really thought sleeping with him would be easy?

When he first finds her on the staircase, he looks like he's considering staying where he is, in the kitchen's doorframe, a few steps away from her. But shortly after, he seems to dismiss this and takes a seat on the stair next to her.

They sit in silence for a minute before he rocks to the left and hits her shoulder with his own.

"He said I didn't get it." Alex turns to look at her, waiting for her to continue. When she doesn't, his face turns quizzical and he prompts, "Who said you didn't get what?"

She sighs, like this was exactly what she wanted to avoid, which it was. But she responds honestly, nonetheless, "Evan, Evan James. He says I don't get any of this relationship stuff."

Alex looks like he wants to laugh when their eyes meet. He thinks she's kidding, she realizes. Or, alternatively, over-reacting. She moves to get up off the stair but his hand lies on top of hers and his eyes are telling her to continue.

"He says I've never been a serious relationship so how would I know the complexities of one. How could I know how it feels to experience that pain, that longing? How could I pretend for a second to understand him?"

She sounds like she wants to cry. That's not me, she thinks, that's not what I sound like.

"And he's right! I give everything that I have to the people I care about and I've never woken up and realized that I don't have the very thing I want so desperately for everyone else. I thought I was so above that; like it would happen when the circumstances were right. But what if I just go through life and end up without it? I'll be alone."

She's not crying, not really. She can feel her pulse in her head and the pressure behind her eyes, but her cheeks are dry. It makes her feel even more detached.

"You won't," Alex says, and then he cuts off her bitter laugh by pressing his lips to hers again. And even though it's the exact opposite of it, she feels like she's breathing for the first time in a while. He's kissing her slowly, like every millisecond is relevant to the overall kiss, and his hand moves to the side of her face and she feels like crying for a whole different reason.

When he pulls back, he's smiling. She feels herself smiling too. But the words creep back into her head.

"Are you taking pity on me, Mr. Knightley?" she asks, trying to sound teasing, but sounding more sad than anything else.

Alex is looking into her eyes, and his mouth falls into a half-smirk when he responds with his own question, "You really don't know?"

She sniffles, even though she still hasn't managed to cry, and shakes her head stating "Know what?"

His half-smirk turns into a full one, "So the great Emma Woodhouse doesn't know that boring Mr. Knightley has a crush on her, eh? Aren't you, like, the love expert?"

She closes her eyes because she wants him to take the words back. Not the teasing insult, but…the other words. The words that mean her asking him what she did was completely callous and wrong. The words that mean she's been neglecting her best friend for the past…however long it's been. She wants him to take it all back but all she manages to get out is "I'm so sorry."

He laughs, a full laugh that makes his eyes get bright, before turning back to her "It is pretty terrible sometimes. See, she doesn't know and he's been trying terribly hard to hide it. Which means he doesn't get to tell her as often as he'd like how beautiful she is," her eyes raise to meet his and she honestly thinks she is crying now. "Or how smart and ambitious she is, how amazing it is to see her never give up, how great it is that she wants to make the world a better place. And even now, when she knows all this and he's pouring his heart out to her like a bad romantic comedy, she still looks at him like she doesn't understand it. Like she doesn't see what he sees."

Now, Emma Woodhouse is not, by any stretch of the imagination, insecure. She thinks insecurity is a road block to success and has therefore never had time for it. But she knows Alex is telling the truth about the way she looks at him. But it's not that they don't see the same qualities in her, it's more that she doesn't understand how he sees her that way. She knows she's always tried to be smart, ambitious, stubborn, giving, and whatever else, but he never seemed to care much about that before. Her head starts hurting from all the confusion and she only manages, "I'm really sorry, Alex."

There's a silence in which the laughter drains from Alex's eyes and he just looks at her, like he's seeing her for the first time. "Why did what that guy say bother you so much? How do you even know him?"

Emma wished he would just kiss her again, and make her forget about this topic. But, he'd bared everything out in the open; she owed him something.

"One of those phone consultations you set up for me. Evan James, 34, single father, didn't know how to get back in the dating game," she drones out the facts she knows he doesn't remember. For Knightley, there were always too many names, too many stories. He likes his world in number order, he lets the minor details stray by the wayside. Except for, apparently, when it came to her.

"We talked and I thought, I don't know, it's been 8 years since his wife died and he was calling me after all and his profile said that he was very open and was looking for a new commitment but apparently I read the situation wrong and I don't do that Alex! I just don't do that!" She's no longer certain of her tone of voice, of the volume of it. She only knows that she's crying harder.

Alex moves his hand to wipe the tears off of her face. Emma wonders when she started being so hard on herself. And when she started being oblivious to Alex's total look of concentration when he looks at her; like she's the only thing in the world.

She kisses him again because she needs to catch her breath. His hand is still on her face and she finishes the kiss feeling worse than before.

"You were never meant to be perfect, Emma," he says it like he means it and the pain in her gut gets worse.

"But I wanted to be perfect at this," was all she could offer in response.

More silence, punctuated by the sound of Knightley breathing beside her. The feeling of his fingertips on her arm whenever he hears her sniffle.

"Why did you want to sleep with me?" he breaks the silence without turning to face her. If she were herself, Emma would joke about him sounding eager. But the tears on her face remind her that she's not herself right now.

"I thought…I thought it would make me feel less empty. I thought that maybe I could get out of my head for an hour and stop thinking about how much those words…weigh on me."

His fingers are moving up and down her arm again when he says, "You could always try yoga next time, though I suppose that is more costly."

And she's laughing. Laughing like she wasn't crying a few seconds ago. Laughing like Emma, normal Emma. Emma approved Emma.

"I hardly think I'm flexible enough for yoga, sadly," she's leaning her head on Knightley's shoulder and she feels herself shaking but knows it's from laughter, not tears.

"Well, by all accounts, you'd hardly be prepared to sleep with me then," and she's laughing harder; she worries she might fall off the stairs.

"Hey, I'm only suggest-" but his next joke is cut off by her kissing him, her smile pressed against his.

It's over too soon for either of their liking, but Emma feels inclined to say, "If you make me laugh one more time Alexander Knightley, I will do worse to you than that."

He raises both eyebrows, "There's such a thing worse than kissing you?"

She pokes him in the ribcage. He retaliates by tickling her. She's laughing more and he's kissing her from her collarbone to her lips. When he reaches them, Emma moves her now free arms to wrap around his neck and pull him closer to her. He's deepening the kiss and lifting her off the stairs and she's smiling to let him know she's still laughing internally.

When they break apart, she's winded but he somehow manages a, "Yes, that was infinitely worse than simply kissing you, Miss Woodhouse," and she doesn't think it's possible to smile brighter than she is right now. How'd did this happen? How could she go from where she was to here, just because Knightley knows how to make her laugh? Knows the exact right moments to let her talk and when to help her breathe?

She realizes that she's still upset at herself for texting him for such a ridiculous plan of hers. But she's also never been happier that he texted her back. And showed up at her door. And kissed her to remind her she isn't alone.

Mind returning to normal after the realizations and the kissing, she sees him straighten his jacket and then notices that he had lifted her back over to the front door.

"You're leaving?"

He looks up and smiles when he sees her longing expression, "Yeah. I don't want to," he adds, as he moves over to interlock their hands, "but, you need to figure some things out. About you. About us. And I can't be objective about those things, plus I've proven myself to be a world-class distraction," he winks at her. Emma swears that's the first time she's seen him do that without sarcasm. When did their roles become so awkwardly reversed?

"And Monday?" she asks, because she knows if he's saying this now, she probably won't see him all weekend.

He takes the extra step to press a kiss to her forehead, "I'm not going anywhere, either way."

And when he lets go of her hands and walks out her front door, she realizes how much she wants him to come back and spend the night talking to her. Kissing her. Holding her.

But she knows, as she'd always known since she sent him that text, that asking him to save her wasn't fair. Knowing he'd be around when she got back on her feet, however, made the challenge ahead a lot less difficult to deal with.

Will I ever be able to write Knightley not being in love with Emma first? The answer: probably not. But, especially since you guys have been asking for it, I am working on some Emma-centric fics (that are a lot better and hopefully less OOC than this one). Reviews are my oxygen, I need them to live and to keep writing!