It's nearly two o'clock in the morning when she taps softly at the door. He's not asleep. It's too quiet in there.
It's been an hour since they retired to bed, he to her guest room, she to her own. An exercise in futility.
"All right, Gill?" comes his voice. She pushes open the door - he'd left it ajar, she notes - and steps inside.
She thought he'd be a sprawler, but he's curled up tight as a walnut, in one corner of the bed, arms crossed up over his middle. Something twists almost painfully in her stomach at the sight. She eases herself up onto the bed, and fits herself around the curve of his back, her head on the pillow behind his.
"What you doing here?" he asks quietly. Not what the hell are you thinking, Foster?, but what brings you here, at this time of night?
"Thinking."
"That's dangerous."
He's one, to talk of danger tonight.
"I don't want to change you. I don't." She hesitates, and brings her hand up to rub her palm in slow circles at the top of his spine. It's one thing to share space together, and pretend that's all it is, but this touch is deliberate. Un-pass-offable as anything else but seeking intimacy. Especially murmuring all hushed into his neck like this. "I love you. You know that. But the you that I wish I could see more is the one I only get glimpses of. The one that isn't always sparring and circling and looking for a way in. Or taking risks that…but that's how you work. And I just…"
She's at a loss how to move on from this. Except that something has been shattered tonight, and they are both standing among the shards, frozen still.
"You know the worse I get, is when I want you too much and there's not a damn thing I can do about it."
"Oh, is that all?" she's amused at his candor, but touched by the truth of it. "Obsession with the truth and an overdeveloped sense of loyalty has nothing to do with it?"
If merely letting him snog her senseless behind her office door, and tumbling him into bed now and then would make for a more congenial work environment, she thinks they'd probably have figured it out long before now. It wouldn't have stopped him placing himself in front of an unstable, violent man simply to prove one particle of his innocence among a litany of his misdeeds. Wouldn't stop him tomcatting around town, if that's all it was.
No, the kind of all-encompassing relationship they would demand from each other would mean putting their entire friendship on the line, their work, and a total commitment to each other that seems impossibly far off. Though things on the horizon line often do, her mind supplies. They've been known to make wild leaps of faith together. They have a reputation for it.
She slides her arm around him, and pretends not to notice that he wraps his hand around her wrist like a lifebelt. He takes a slow breath and makes one of his lightning fast-forwards, as if he's had this conversation with himself so many times he knows the script.
"Look, we can try to compartmentalize, make a space for us , but there's no question of not bringing work home. We carry every case with us, wherever we go. We fight things out all the time at home. You deserve…"
Have they arrived here already? Or are they taking a glimpse into a possible future from a safe distance, like one of their late-night thought experiments, back and forth over scotch, on couches his, hers and theirs?
Isn't their entire relationship an exercise in crazy what-ifs?
He pauses so long she wonders if he's drifted off.
"What?" she murmurs, into the spiky soft hair at his nape. He smells good there. He'd cleaned up before running off to see the woman from the singles mixer. Like a young Zoe, he'd told her, as if realizing it out loud. Seeking distraction, before coming back. Coming to her. That's telling. "What do you think I deserve? What do you think I want?"
"Someone who doesn't cost everything you'll give. Someone you can care for without hurting yourself."
"What makes you think you're not worth everything I can give?"
"Textbook codependence, that's what. Wish you wouldn't let men take you for granted."
Ten years of watching her with Alec, she thinks. She hadn't thought much about what it had done to him to have to stand outside and observe, not be able to not-see. Likely about the same as she'd felt watching the little earthquakes and nuclear blowouts between him and Zoe.
"I wouldn't have to, if you'd watch out for yourself more."
He goes quiet again. Then he rolls onto his back, careful not to dislodge her. She lets him move around and then replaces her arm over his middle. She settles her head in the hollow of his warm bare shoulder, and his free hand comes up to stroke her arm. This is new. They've cuddled, but never in bed, or on a bed, and never with bare skin involved.
He smells even better here.
She wills herself not to touch.
"Could we do that?" he asks, musingly. Posing the question as part of the thought experiment they are. "We know what we're like. Could you honestly stand back and let me be a stupid shit and have to clean up my mess without you? Risk the firm for me being an arse? Could I keep bringing down violent arseholes and get up the noses of the powerful without knowing you will come find me?"
She rubs her cheek into his shoulder. It's soft and smooth. The fingers she can't see slide deliciously up her back, to play in her hair. He makes a compelling point. That and his hands are a hell of a combination. "Maybe not all the time. But maybe we can work on it some of the time. More than now, anyway."
Again, that quiet. His belly tenses with a ripple, like a snake's, and suddenly she's the one tipping over on her back, and he's leaning over her, tangled in her sheets, hands planted over her shoulders. His eyes glitter down at her in the half-light from the window, and she wonders what the hell just happened, and why did it take this long?
"Is that what you want, darling?" he demands, harshly. "Because that's too easy, that is. If finding a nice polite compromise was the trick, you don't think we'd have done it?"
He's not angry. He's at his wits' end trying to swallow the terror and the bitter adrenaline of the day and the too-comforting balm of the truths they've let fall. And what it all means for tomorrow.
That's three very large questions he's asked her, and she's not sure how much breath or brainpower she can give either one just now. His taut arms and chest are bare above her and she wonders briefly if he'd have the audacity to sleep naked in her guest bed. Probably.
"We never tried," she tells him. His face looking down at her is a study in complexity and arousal and love kept in a box too long. "We have to try something different. I can't do another day like today," she says, shaking her head on the pillow, barely above a whisper. "I can't. Cal, anything could have - what if - "
He kisses her. Hard.
Some what-ifs should never be spoken.
She opens her mouth to him and kisses back. Not desperately, not like she thought it would be. Because this was going to happen tonight, inevitably. It's greedy. Possessive. Death doesn't get to pull them away from each other. They won't allow it. But it only works if they're together,
Their world is what they make of it. The days will count themselves.
Her hands scramble for purchase down his back and he lets her feel his weight all down her body as his tongue takes her mouth again. It's - fuck, it's him, it's too good. Not dangerous and all-wrong but hot as hell and weirdly sweet. He really has been wanting her this badly, all this time.
It's mutual. She makes sure he knows it, and they're panting for each other in short minutes.
"What if," he mutters against her mouth, "what if it doesn't work, Gill? What if we can't?"
"Then we go down fighting," she says, and holds on with her fingernails.