Author's warning: as the title would suggest,
this chapter comes with some darker themes.

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How it All Fell Apart

His breath was heavy, his warm skin sticky and salty under a thin drying layer of sweat. Jamie smiled as she tried to catch her breath and couldn't help but let out a tired laugh as she rested her head against his chest. There was a bubbling in her stomach that despite being slightly nauseating left her feeling completely and blissfully sated.

"I want to change what I said earlier," Ben's raspy voice spoke between breaths. His heart was racing, pounding a heavy rhythm in his chest like some harsh song she loved the beat of. "I missed the sex too."

The laugh that came out of Jamie's mouth was loud and obvious of her amusement. "Well maybe I can miss my flight and just stay here till someone comes to get me. Give me some food and sleep in between and I have no objections to staying in bed with you until that happens."

"Oh, don't tease me," he groaned playfully. With that he groaned loudly and took the opportunity to roll the pair over with a laugh erupting from the beautiful girl now under him. Ben held his weight up by his arms on either side of her small shoulders and smiled at her. There was a moment of quiet then. Jamie's eyes searched his warm brown ones for the thoughts swirling in his mind, but what she saw in them made her lungs heavy in his chest and air catch in her throat.

"Don't leave me." His voice was much softer than he had anticipated.

His eyes were steady on hers, a warmth and strength radiating from them in a way that made her skin swarm with goosebumps. She knew there were words hiding behind them, waiting to come out, telling his brain to speak up and unleash them but he didn't. His eyes darted down to her lips for a second and she swallowed as her eyes started to flutter close before his warm sweet lips met hers again in a way so full of warmth and promise and hope and oh so different than the hot and sexually driven hungry kisses from before.

The kiss was soft, his lips just the right pressure against hers, the taste of his breath swimming in her mouth as she tasted him, and when they finally parted, there was so much sweetness and emotion in the kiss, she felt like was she was weightless in his arms. They hovered, lips just barely grazing each others as they breathed, eyes never opening for fear of ending the moment.

"I love you," the worlds finally slipped off his tongue in a whisper after begging to be released for so long.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, Jamie trusted herself to open her eyes and what she found in Ben's warmer browns made it hard for her to breathe. His eyes were searching heres, watching her for any form of reply. A shiver ran over the smaller woman's body, the sensation foreign and unnerving and completely unwelcome.

She swallowed again, feeling her throat sudden sticky and dry. She opened her mouth to say something, anything against such a bombshell the handsome man on top of her had just dropped, but no words or sounds came out of her mouth.

"You don't have to say it back." His eyes were soft and sincere, and it made a violent twist in her stomach she hadn't been expecting. "I just wanted to tell you." He watched her for only a second more, and when the apparent fear in her eyes stayed strong he let himself roll back over to the other side of the bed.

His eyes watched the ceiling silently. Half of him expected the woman beside him to run away like she often felt the impulse to do so when any serious conversation arose, and the other half wished she'd something reassuring back. Neither happened.

Stunned and feeling suddenly swarmed with thoughts, Jamie lay still in her same position, processing.

You don't believe in love? He had asked her that very question the first night they met. She thought they had made an agreement. She knew he wasn't the kind of man who wanted a string of booty calls with her. She knew he wanted more, but she figured a whirlwind romance would give him a little bit of attachment and her the fun and adventure she craved. She never wanted a relationship. Relationships and the CIA didn't mix. Foreign relationships and the CIA especially didn't mix.

Was she in a relationship? The information plummeted into her gut like a ton of bricks. They were a 22-hour-flight apart and when they called each other, they weren't just in different time zones, they were in different days of the week. She couldn't be getting into this now.

Beside the young woman, Ben was silent and still. No matter the length of time he starred at the popcorn above him, it didn't help the muddling thoughts in his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling like the entire world had stuffed itself into a lump in his throat he couldn't swallow.

She felt acid bubbling in her stomach, a wave of intense nausea swelling in her gut, but she swallowed it back, almost tasting the rancid taste of vomit in her mouth. Relationships just make things complicated. She didn't want a relationship. She wasn't Alex with the suburban house, the wife, the dog, and the 2.5 kids in the making. She was Jamie Anderson, a covert operative for the CIA. The thoughts held a war in her head between what she had always assumed was her better judgement and what she was feeling now.

I don't want love, she told herself as she finally tried to turn to her side to face him. When her eyes caught him staring at the ceiling, so many obvious emotions filtering through his expression, she felt something change. She traced his profile with her eyes, the edges of that unruly head twisting and partially curling in every direction, illuminated by the light of the windows behind her. His forehead, with eyebrows brought in slightly, indicative of his inner thoughts. The dip of the bridge of his nose, soft eyelashes bordering it and blinking every few moments. She knew he was waiting for her; knew she was watching him in an attempt to distract herself. Her eyes made it over the curve of his nose and onto the first swell of his warm and sweet lips and she felt another shiver race down and across her skin.

2 weeks…

There was a dark grey cloud looming in the distance, the boom of thunder shaking the earth gently at first and more violently as the storm neared. It did not matter much, however. The sun could have been shining, the flowers blooming, the birds singing and the clouds white and fluffy like creamy wisps in the pale, blue, sky. None of it would have mattered; she wouldn't have noticed it.

Dark greying eyes stood still and vacant. Her skin was cold but she didn't move to cover herself. Her throat was dry, but she made no attempt to get something to sooth it. Her eyes felt itchy, watery, sticky and dry all at the same time, but she blinked as if she was numb to it all because she was.

You don't believe in love?

The words echoed in her head like the thunder outside her D.C. apartment. There was a physical, painful, unbearable ache in her chest that grew and spread and made everything else seem so miniscule in comparison, she was numb to it all.

You don't believe in love?

She didn't. She never really felt like she had. Who was she to try and believe in something so frivolous? Were little girls supposed to learn about love through their fairy tales of princesses falling in love with princes? Maybe that was the problem - she never was much into those. She was a covert operative now. She had always been set on becoming everything she was today and getting there as fast as humanly possible. Relationships were dangerous. She had stories and physical proof to show as much.

You don't believe in love?

Except then she did.

There was a slip of something warm down her face but she didn't register the foreign sensation.

Everything had seemed so blissful for some time. She spent three steamy days in and out and around a bed with him. She had spent the next five weeks counting down every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every single day that passed until she could see him again. She dreamt of those warm eyes. She fantasized of those lips of his and the taste of them. She could almost feel the warmth of his skin as he touched her and held her. She remembered the sound of his heart beat when she would lay against his chest, sweaty and sticky waiting for sleep to overcome them. Then he had told her he loved her.

She felt a strangled gasp escaping her throat, choking the air escaping her lungs and making her eyes burn harshly. She finally moved, slowly standing from her reclined position, the achy, sore muscles protesting after being forced in the same position. Her feet were near silent as she slowly stepped away from the only window in the room and towards her small kitchen area.

A thin sheet of dust coated the tiny apartment and swirled in the air but she made no note of it. She felt a sudden ache deep in her gut and paused for a moment clinging at the phantomous pain. Why had this all happened? Why did she have to ruin it?

With a heavy sob that was finally freed from behind the deep barrier she had built up, she crumbled. Her shaky legs carried her towards the cabinets that rested half empty, her eyes now running like the raindrops against her window.

She had him. It would have been so easy to keep him there, to tell him everything early on and let him in to stay. Her shaky hands found the tall glass bottle and pulled it carefully out of its hiding space.

He had told her he loved her and even if it took a while to register the full weight of such a statement, she had. She had accepted it and for the first and only time in her life could have easily said it back.

But then it all crumbled.

She felt a brief splash as the liquor ran over the rim of the small glass. She barely even remembered it; it was all such a blur.

The car and the look in his eyes just before it all went black.

The voices and sounds of a hospital in and out of focus.

All the blood where it shouldn't have been.

She tried to steady her hand, her eyes badly focused on the small glass in her fingers as the tears fell freely now, numb like most of the rest of her small body.

One minute she was happy and with Ben, daydreaming in bed, kissing him, making love to him, listening to him speak. The next she was in the hospital, telling him everything, waiting for him to walk away and leave her.

With that thought, she swiftly pulled her arm back and in one swift movement swallowed down the first shot as it burned down her throat.

She had not even known she was pregnant until she wasn't any longer. She then told him everything she was and waited for him to walk away, and when he stayed she left him. The worst part of all wasn't losing the pregnancy she didn't know she had in the first place, but losing the only man she wanted because she purposely pushed him away in fear.

With a much steadier hand, she poured herself another, and waited for it all to be numbed away again.

Author's Note:

I am so sorry. For both taking so long to post this, and for this being so absolutely torturous. If you read the "Jamie's Rules" one-shot from "Time Frame," then you probably knew this was going to happen sooner or later. Either way, this was rough and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to go about breaking up such a beautiful pair as Jamie and Ben. I wrote about 8,000 words total in all my different variations of endings to this chapter before I finally settled on something semi decent. (And I was going to cut out the beginning of this chapter but it was just so cute to me it killed me not to post it.)

Even though I tortured you all now, I hope you still love me enough to leave some love.

- Liz

Clearing up a few things, I need to make a note on the timeline of this whole fic:

Chapter 1 is the present time. Everything after chapter 1 is in the past. That means if you don't see a "2 weeks later" or any other marker of time, consider it as it being a scene immediately occurring after whatever the previous chapter just left off on. In other words, ch 4 started off as probably being that same day Ben picked Jamie up at the airport at the end of ch 3 (which is 5 weeks after she met Ben initially.) The end of ch 4 would be two weeks later. Everything she's remembering in the end of chapter 4 happened within those two weeks. As you are probably wondering, I kind of glazed over it because 1.) I couldn't get it written out to save my life, and 2.) since this is all basically Jamie retelling how she ended up at the point where chapter 1 started, I figured she wouldn't want to dwell on the details much.

If you have any questions, please don't ever hesitate to ask! =) I don't bite, I promise! (unless you're into that sort of thing in which case I should lead you towards my really old and eternally unfinished vampire diaries fanfiction. ;)