What He Offered

Chapter 31: Consummation

Bones took a moment to wave a cooling hand before her heated face. Goodness, what purple prose! And, talk about euphemism! Would Tim and Jay have a similarly torrid scene? She read on.

A Tale of Twin Booths, cont'd

Jay sat on the couch, hugging a throw pillow in a brightly-colored tribal print to her mid-section. Before her on the glass-topped coffee table, an open bottle of beer sweated, practically untouched. "I still can't believe it," she said. "How can such a thing happen so fast? One minute, Mr. Nigel-Murray was standing, holding the phone, and the next…" She shuddered.

Seated across from her in an armchair, Tim studied the label of his own bottle without making any sense of it. "I didn't know him very well, but what I knew of him, I liked."

"He was an overgrown kid, really. Just recently, he made the rounds apologizing to everyone he'd wronged. Some of his peccadillos were really quite funny. He asked Tempe, for example, to forgive him for borrowing our iguana one evening when we were out of town, and wearing the poor beast as a hat!" She smiled sadly at the memory. "And, he apologized to Cam, Angela and most every other woman at the lab for having claimed, at one time or another, to be her lover."

"But, not to you?"

"Oh, yes! I came in for my share. Apparently, he spread the rumor that he and I were each other's 'sexual playthings'."

Tim scowled, outraged. "Of all the nerve! I'm liking him less by the minute."

"I'm afraid I laughed in his face when he told me, poor guy. It's so absurd, I'm sure no one believed it."

"Sorry, I don't follow. What was so incredible about it?"

"Well, I have a reputation for being…" A flush began to stain her cheeks, and she looked away, unable or unwilling to finish.

Out of Nigel-Murray's league was Tim's first thought, but he suggested, "Discriminating in your choice of men?"

"That's nicer than 'something of a nun,' so, I'll take it," she answered, shyly. She put the pillow aside, and stood up. "It's late. You'll want to get some sleep. There're clean sheets on Tempe's bed, and fresh towels and a new toothbrush in the bathroom. If you need anything else…?"

He got to his feet, and passed her his half-full bottle. "Directions would be good. I've never seen the sleeping quarters here."

Jay's bedroom was the nearer of the two along the hall off the kitchen, with her sister's at the far end, and a bathroom that could be accessed from either side in between. Brennan's room was decorated similarly to the public rooms of the condo, with sleek, modern-style furniture, hand-loomed rugs, woven hangings and hardwood carvings collected in Africa and South America on the walls, and shelves displaying a motley of figurines, baskets and pottery vessels from the world over. Tim was pleased to see the replica grecian urn he'd given Brennan one Christmas in pride of place. "It's a portrait of you and Vic," he'd told her, pointing to the decorative detail of Zeus in his eternal chase of Aegina. He wondered if the slip of paper onto which he'd copied John Keats' famous ode was still inside, and if Brennan had ever found it. He suspected not.

Tim washed up quickly, turned back the covers, and, wearing nothing more than his boxers, slipped between the sheets. He fully expected to spend a sleepless night reliving the day's events, trying to come to terms with the insanity of it all. He didn't need his twin "spidey" sense to know that Vic was also lying wakeful in his bed wrestling with guilt, rage, and sorrow. His brother was a good man, whose primary purpose in life was to protect and serve, to take on other people's problems and to solve them; he would be excoriating himself mercilessly for Nigel-Murray's demise. Brennan, too, was reeling from the shock and grief of losing her favorite intern, as was the rest of the Jeffersonian team. And, what of Mrs. Nigel-Murray, an ocean away, whose placid life would soon be shattered by the news of her only son's murder? What of Nigel-Murray himself, who had so wanted to be saved from the maw of death? Tim thought of all these sufferers, and his eyes, tearless since well before Afghanistan, began to fill.

Once the weeping started, he could not make it stop. His memory disgorged the many faces of human misery he had met with as a profiler: the deaf girl stolen from her loving parents, and forced by circumstances to kill in self-defense, the woman who had unintentionally caused her agoraphobic former lover a lingering death from starvation, the teenage boy who had stood up to blackmailers and been left hanging from a tree branch, his friend Tanaka's sister who had not only been murdered, but beheaded as well. For these, and for so many other victims of violence, Tim wept.

He cried, too, for all the soldiers who had come to him for solace during Desert Storm and more recently in Afghanistan: those who had lost comrades to IEDs, those who had failed to staunch a critical wound, or intercept a fatal bullet, radio operators who had had to turn a deaf ear to men in urgent need of air support, helicopter pilots who could find no safe place to land to effect a rescue, men and women who had panicked while on patrol and killed or maimed innocent civilians. For all of these, as well as for the homesick, the dispirited, and the simply wretched, Tim wept.

He lay on his side with his back to the door, and so did not see it swing inward. The first he knew of Jay's presence was the mattress sagging beneath her weight on the far side of the bed. Conscious of his tear-ravaged face, he tried to feign deep, even breathing, so she would think him asleep, and leave, but she was not fooled. "Tim," she said, quietly, "you don't have to pretend with me. How can I help?"

"I'm fine." He hoped his thick voice didn't betray him too badly. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you."

"Whatever it is, you don't have to be alone with it. I'm here for you."

"No, really. It's… it's nothing. I'm over it. Go back to bed."

She was stock still a long moment, and he waited, not knowing quite what he wished would happen. And then, the mattress sagged again, and all he heard was the padding of her bare feet as she left the room.

He'd just decided that he was, after all, more disappointed than relieved at her departure, when she returned, and climbed back onto the bed. She reached her forearm over his shoulder, a thick square of white fabric dangling from her hand. Even in the low light of the one night table lamp, he could make out the raised letter B in the corner. He accepted the crisp linen handkerchief, and began to repair the worst of the damage. "You kept it all this time."

"I've been waiting for the right moment to give it back to you. I guess this is it." She said no more while he finished mopping up, and then, continued, "Tim, please don't send me away. They have a proverb in Honduras: 'Grief shared is half grief.' Let me lighten your burden, if only a little."

All his life, Tim had been waiting for this very offer, and yet, now that Jay had made it, he was hesitant to accept. What if he repelled her? "You don't know what you're asking."

"Do you think if I see you vulnerable, needing me, I'll run, Tim? I won't. I've improved. You'll see. You can trust me."

He couldn't deny her after that. He turned onto his back, and laid his head on the pillow, open to her inspection.

Her face clouded with sadness and concern at the sight of him, but she did not recoil. "Those bloodshot eyes and red-tipped nose don't do a thing for you, Tim, but you're still handsome enough for government work. Do you think I could lie down with you? I won't if you'd rather not."

In answer, he moved to make room for her, and, when she'd stretched out next to him on her side, he rolled to face her. She took the handkerchief he still held crumpled in his hand, and blotted away the remaining dampness on his cheeks. "There," she said. "Now, tell me."

He obeyed. In fits and starts at first, and then, more easily, he unwound the bandages around his bleeding heart, and allowed her an unobstructed view of that scarred and battered organ. It could not have been a pretty sight, but she did not shy away, not even when he revealed the two deepest, rawest cuts, the newer of which he had inflicted upon himself in a moment of stupidity and impatience, and the other, the oldest one of all, the jagged hole his mother had torn in him when she left.

Jay had never heard of his abandonment, and as she listened to the tale, tears streamed freely down her face. "No," she said, when, in his dismay at making her cry, he would have dropped the subject. "I may not be impervious anymore, but I am impermeable. Don't worry about me."

He spoke until he ran dry of both words and tears. Somewhere along the way, in an expression of compassion and fellow feeling, she had worked her shoulder under his, and laid her head in the crook of his neck, and he had wrapped his arms loosely around her, and rested his cheek on the pillow of her hair. It was in this position that sleep found them at last.

Tim awoke minutes or hours later to find himself alone. If not for the lingering trace of warmth on the sheets, he might have thought it had all been a dream. Had Jay returned to her own bed, he wondered, and why? He rolled onto his side to check the time on the bedside clock: thirteen minutes to five. Too early, surely, to start the day, especially given the little sleep they'd had. He turned onto his back, and there she was, stepping out of the bathroom and climbing back into bed. She slid between his side and outstretched arm, and, supporting herself on one elbow, skimmed her other arm over his torso until she was half-leaning on his chest. She looked down at him, and smiled gamely, her expression sweet and uncertain.

He knew what she would say before she said it. He had lived this scene before, had relived it so many times in memory, had been homesick for it. Then, as now, her hair fell forward, obscuring her beautiful face. Yes, there was the urge to reach up and smooth it back over her ear. Dear Lord, please let him not be dreaming again.

"Do you love me?" Jay asked. His dream-Jay had been confident, almost cocky, but this woman, this morning, was tentative, shy.

He knew his lines, and even though they might not precisely fit real-life, he couldn't resist saying them. "Yes. Do you want me to prove it?"

Right on cue, she gave her answer: "If you're not too sleepy."

And, here, he thought, his spirits sinking, was where the two scenes had to diverge. "Jay… no," he told her, regretfully.

"You don't want me?"

"I want you very much." There was no lack of physical evidence of that.

"Is it because of Mr. Nigel-Murray?"

"No. Or, at least, yes, in small part."

"I don't think he would begrudge us some happiness, Tim. He wasn't like that."

"It's not that so much as… well, to be blunt about it, I don't want to have comfort sex with you, Jay."

"That's what you think I'm offering? Comfort sex? You couldn't be more wrong, Tim. I liked Vincent, and I mourn his passing, but what I want, right now, is to celebrate life, life and the love I feel for you. I asked if you loved me, and you said, 'yes.' Well, actions speak louder than words, Tim: prove it to me."

It had been more than two years since Tim had held a woman in his arms for any purpose other than consolation, and he sped a quick prayer heavenward that his rustiness wouldn't matter. He rolled her over onto her back, and, with trembling hands, helped her shimmy out of her nightdress. All coherent thought vanished at the wondrous sight of her perfect nakedness, and he might have remained transfixed forever by her beauty, except for Jay's busy hands at the waistband of his boxers. When, at last, their clothes shed, they came together skin to skin, the shock of pleasure was so great, Tim wondered how he could have lived so long without it. They were tender with each other, hands gently stroking, fingers caressing, legs loosely tangled together. They kissed long and deeply, drowning in each other, only coming up briefly for air. The sheets twisted and bunched beneath them, white whorls like eddying water, and then, they two were as if on water, borne up, afloat, sucked out to sea, one fragile boat, on a boundless ocean that welled from deep below, a mighty swell lifting them up, carrying them on its surge, racing toward who knew what shore, rollers building ever higher, higher, until they rode a towering wall of water, scaling unimagined heights, and then, cresting, and at long last, a blessed breaking, and a crashing back down, and a flooding, sweeping all before it, even consciousness.

When he once again knew who and where he was, Tim was distressed to find himself sprawled bonelessly over Jay, like so much storm wreckage washed ashore. He moved to lift his weight off, but she locked her arms around his lower back, refusing to relinquish him, so he enfolded her in his arms, and rolled them onto their sides. She tucked her head under his chin, and snuggled closer, her hands flat against his upper chest. He dropped a kiss on her tussled hair, and, with a quick glance to ascertain the time — nearly quarter to six — closed his eyes.

In the moment before sleep overtook him again, he heard Jay say, "I think we did it, Tim: we came very close to breaking the laws of physics."

"We did what?" In his fuzzy state, he wasn't in any shape to discuss scientific principles.

"Came close to breaking the laws of physics. You remember: two physical objects can't occupy the same space. But, you said, when two people make love, they can come close. I… I thought we did, but it was my first time making love, so…"

He squeezed her more tightly to him. "It was my first time, too. And, yes, you and me, just now, together: that was a miracle. I've never felt so much joy in my life."

To his consternation, Jay's shoulders started shaking. "Oh, Tim, sweetie, that was funny. It's a pun, because you felt 'joy' as an emotion, and you felt me, Joy, in the flesh. Double joy!" She chuckled happily.

Tim decided not to disabuse her as to his cleverness. "It's true: you are my one, true Joy, the greatest of my life."

She pushed back against his arms, and he loosened his hold so she could draw back sufficiently to look up into his face. There was no laughter in her eyes, now, only pure sincerity. "I want to be your Ruth, too, Tim. I've been afraid — afraid I wouldn't be enough for you, afraid to fail you — but I don't want to let fear govern me any longer. I love you, Tim, and I want to be your loyal friend, your faithful companion, your one and only for the next thirty, forty, fifty years. That is, if you'll have me. Will you, Tim?"

Then, for the first time in his life, Tim's heart overflowed, not with sorrow, but with the healing balm of happiness. "Yes." He knew he must be grinning like a fool, but he couldn't help himself. "Of course. Yes." He sealed the deal with a kiss.