LOVE
SEVEN
Her eyes sparkled, "I had no idea you liked it that much."
John couldn't help but grimace, "Well, it's not the kind of thing one necessarily asks for…"
She grinned mischievously. "Are you telling me you're uncomfortable about something – anything – to do with sex? That you're, um, repressed?"
He returned the smile but then his face turned serious as he searched her eyes, "Wil, this ability of yours to hear what I'm thinking, can you turn it off?"
"I'm sorry, John. I don't know how. I don't know what turned it on in the first place."
"Could you maybe at least try to pretend it isn't happening?"
All things considered, and despite his nagging discomfort with the recent and indubitably disturbing revelation, John Hart was forced to admit that they'd just had the most amazing sex. It was like she was inside his head, anticipating his every wish, his every need, his every desire, his every fantasy. What's more… and maybe this was the downside, it appeared she actually was inside his head. The love-making had gone on for hours and although in his experience makeup sex was almost always astonishingly good (hell… that was in large part why he and Jack fought so much), this… THIS had been way beyond good. She'd played his body like some sort of musical instrument. It had left him a quivering pool of pure pleasure… repeatedly.
She tenderly took his hand, kissed its palm and then placed it above her left breast. "For you, Captain John Hart, oh heart of mine, I would pretend anything, but I'm afraid it isn't going to make what has happened to me go away. It's like I can perfectly hear your voice, and it sounds just like you, but you're not really, literally speaking."
"Speculate," he said, suppressing an involuntary shiver.
"Um… I don't know that such speculation is productive but I'll give it a shot if you want. Maybe it has something to do with having been pregnant. Maybe it's related to how upset I've been. Maybe it has something to do with how much I love you. How much I don't want to lose you. Or…" she paused, reflecting.
"Yes?"
"Maybe I'm becoming less human, more… something else."
This time he actually did shiver. "Gods, what do you mean by that?"
She shrugged, a tone of exasperation entering her voice, "I don't know. You asked me to speculate, so that's what I'm doing. Strange things, weird things, have happened to me since, well, ever since I met Jack…"
"Tell me about it," he snickered but lost in her own thoughts she totally missed the sarcasm.
"There seems to be a statistical correlation between Jack appearing in my life and really freaky shit happening to me, John.
"Things have happened…" she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Strange things happened to me, were taken away, but then happened to me again. Sometimes I feel like a bloody yo-yo. Or someone's idea of a really bad joke. Time Lords and TARDISes and Terraformers…" She giggled almost manically, her words spilling out faster and faster. "Lions and tigers and bears… oh my! But, John, my psyche feels totally integrated. Centered even. I mean I know I have all these different, for lack of a better word, intelligences inside of me but they don't seem wrong, you know? I don't know how to describe it. I still feel like me. Only there's more than just me inside my head!"
He moved his hand to her face and pushed back a few stray strands of hair, "Hush… it's all right, M'Lady. I have no doubt you are you."
"John…" she cautioned, peering at him intently.
He breathed in loudly through his nose, "Right, you can hear my thoughts. Heaven protect me from lovers with superpowers. First Jack and now you! And I am sorry – Gods, I have a feeling I'm going to be spending a lot of time apologizing to you from now on. So let me apologize ahead of time for all my future apologies!" He laughed but again his expression became somber. "Well, to be totally honest, maybe I am a little freaked out by what's happening. But then who wouldn't be? Damn it Wil, how in the hell are we going to deal with this?"
She looked like she was about to say something, but then she pursed her lips and shook her head.
"Okay, okay… then let me ask you something else. Something maybe you can answer. So… was that it? The guilt trip? Did we cover what's been bothering you? Upsetting you? Or is there other stuff? I mean, you've been through the proverbial wringer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying losing a baby isn't difficult enough on its own, but I want to make sure, you know? Is there more?"
Wil kissed him and then gently pushed him down on the bed and nuzzled her face into his shoulder. They lay like that for a long while, she thinking, he doing his best not to. "Can we talk about the baby?" she said at length as she closed her eyes, the pain and sadness washing over her.
He pressed his lips to the top of her head, "Yes, of course."
She sighed, "I've always wanted, or at least thought I wanted someday to have children – but I had no intention, John… the pregnancy wasn't deliberate. I take my pills religiously. I know we've never explicitly discussed it, but I would never purposefully make a decision like that without talking to you about it first."
"Accidents happen," he murmured into her hair. "The pills don't have a perfect success rate, we both know that. If you figure the failure rate is five percent, and then think about all the times we've made love… Perhaps the odds were against us. Maybe we just got unlucky."
"Were we?"
"Were we what?"
"Unlucky?
"Well, yeah, I suppose so."
"John what if… what if I told you that I wanted to try again?"
"You… what?"
"What if I told you that I want to have your baby? That I want to talk about us having a child? The two of us? Together?"
There was a long silence. "Oh God," she said finally, when she could bear it no further. "I'm sorry; I should've never asked that. I wish I hadn't. I had no idea… None whatsoever! I don't know what the hell is wrong with me – I keep forgetting it's a platonic universe and all we can see are the shadows on the wall of the cave. I'm so sorry." She rolled away and buried her face into the pillow. Fleetingly, the specter of Jack Harkness strafed her consciousness, recalling whispered, late night conversations of love and family and babies. She banished it.
I'm going to have to get much better at not thinking, John resolved as he moved to her, spooning his chest comfortingly against her back and doing his best to wrap his arms around her.
"No," he whispered, "I'm sorry. I've never imagined myself as a father or a husband or even a long-term lover. Other than Jack, I've never been in an enduring relationship with anyone, and let's be honest here – I don't think what I have with the Captain can be regarded as a normal relationship by any stretch of the imagination. Wil – I've never thought about it, I've never even considered having a child. It's never seemed like even the remotest possibility. Besides, I'd really suck as a father."
Wil lifted her head and glared at him, her eyes an intense jade interspersed with slivers of blazing gold, "Don't depreciate yourself, it doesn't suit you. You'd be a fantastic father."
"Come on!" he laughed. "Who's lying now? Ask Jack, I'm a nasty son-of-a-bitch who'd just as soon stab you in the back as turn and walk away from you. I travel around the universe, the universes now that I'm trekking with you, never staying in one place for more than a few days at a time. I am constantly getting myself into trouble. Big trouble. Someone is almost always trying to kill me. I am always running away from something – usually multiple somethings. What kind of life is that?"
She grinned, "It sounds like a pretty fun life to me."
He rolled over on his back, pulled her down onto him and kissed her passionately. "You know," he said, "I never responded to that observation of yours."
"What observation?"
John's eyes flashed. "Yes, I do indeed like it that much. At least I think I do. Shall we try it again to be sure?"
-00-
Do you love me because I'm beautiful,
or am I am beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein, II