Dripping Honey
Title: Dripping Honey
Author: Stablergirl
Fandom: Bones
Characters: Booth, Brennan, Cam
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Genre: Romance
Rating: Teen (for language)
Prompt: 24. space @ story_lottery
Summary: Booth agonizes over his feelings for Bones, until he stops agonizing and does something about it.
Spoilers: Up to and including Season 5, I guess.
Warnings: Some language and romantic indulgence.
Word Count: 5,268
Disclaimer: Bones is not mine. This seems clear, but we fanfic writers like to say it anyway.
A/N: This is pretty standard Stablergirl fare. For those of you who are familiar with my stuff, sorry for any repeated themes and imagery, I'm not my most creative lately. Have fun!
I loved a woman once.
With everything I thought I had, at the time, and in the most honest way I could, at the time, I loved her.
Stayed up at night and watched her sleeping and I thought love had blonde hair and full lips, and I thought love made me somebody worth something.
Because, you know, love is a word that every arrogant guy in his twenties thinks he understands, thinks he masters and conquers and sweeps off its feet. Love seems obvious and easy when a guy is twenty seven and his girl is sweet and funny.
Love seems like cupid - young and fast and random with its heart shaped bow and arrow. Light-hearted. Exciting and unpredictable. Full of talk and full of friction and full of candlelit dinners and Hallmark cards.
Love seems…
But I’m older, and you’ve happened to me slowly, and now love seems like a glass full of straight up scotch.
Love, I’m realizing, is a heavy kind of thing.
Love doesn’t make you somebody worth something - it makes you nobody…or it makes you the only somebody worth anything.
And it drips down your throat and swims through your stomach and it pushes against your sides and it wraps around your head until everything is a heartbeat and everything has warm honey pressure…
Love makes you want more of something to fill up the empty space.
It’s thick relentless syrup.
It’s hard to swallow.
It’s impossible to shake off.
I promise you there is nothing easy about it.
Love stands across a crowded room, and you stare until there’s fog in your eyes that you maybe can’t see through, until you’re a blind man with no direction and no sense of logic - just this tightness, this sickly sweet maple flavor, this drip drip drip down your center, into your core and into the soul of you…
I have this constant drip drip dripping.
And you’d tell me I was overreacting…that I was falling victim to some hormone or pheromone, or that I was confusing proximity and camaraderie with a fairy tale. You’d feel sorry. You would, I’m sure, offer up some piece of thousand year old evidence for why this isn’t what I think…
But you would never be able to convince me.
Cause love is like a death sentence a man walks into deliberately, refusing to back down, and it’s hopeless and unfortunate and makes me wish I had a stronger will and colder intentions but I don’t and if I’m honest, like if I’m real and truthful, I know that I want more of you to fill up the empty space of me…
You’re always too far away and you’re always too much in my veins and nothing about it makes sense.
I will never succeed in explaining it to you.
So I just stand across a crowded room and I stare, and I let the fog roll in.
**
“Oh God,” Cam states loudly and I glare at her because I was right in the middle of explaining the reason I like prime rib better than beef tenderloin - which is a topic I take very seriously. “You know, some days I’m really uncomfortable being around you,” she says.
I search for the reasoning behind that and come up empty because I’m pretty sure Cam has not become a vegetarian...
“What? Why?” I ask and she presses her lips together and raises her eyebrows and shakes her head at her martini, silent, and I wrack my brain and come up with all I got in my arsenal for what she could be referring to. “Oh,” I sigh, “You mean because we used to, um…” and I tilt my head and lean toward her and conspiratorially mutter “you know,” in her ear.
She reels back and frowns at me, amusement hidden behind her facial expression and a laugh sort of half pushing its way out of her mouth.
“No!” she argues, “No, that is not…Jesus, Seeley, that is not what I was talking about.”
I reel back, too, because that’s what any guy does when a lady tries to get away from him after he vaguely references the horizontal tango, and I hold my hands up in surrender, letting my beer sit lonely on the bar.
“Ok, well what are you talking about then? Sorry,” I tell her, my tone high and tight and defensive but still laughing somewhere deep down, still content with the warmth of the atmosphere and the casual flow of conversation, still happy that most of the people I’ve learned to enjoy are somewhere in the room and the work day is over. I give the bar a haphazard scan and twice land on you without really realizing it - or without intending to, anyway.
“That!” she says, pointing at my nose and dragging my attention back to her, “That is exactly what I’m talking about.”
I blink.
You’re talking to Angela and a stranger, but I figure that’s ok. You’re a grown woman and you’re sensible, and I really don’t have any right to comment on who you decide to socialize with in bars…
“She’s fine over there,” Cam says. “Stop looking, it’s painful.”
“I wasn’t…” I start, but it’s half-hearted because I don’t like to lie, and it’s quiet because I’m shameful and caught red-handed and my beer seems like the only safe place to look now - if I lift my head a fraction of an inch, odds are I’ll glance at you.
Drip, drip, drip.
Cam sighs.
It’s dramatic sounding and so I peer up at her.
“I’ve been thinking about this.”
“About what?” I counter.
She levels her gaze and seems threateningly close to physical violence so I wave a hand through the air, striking the question from the record, and I take a sip of my beer.
“You shouldn’t think about it,” I tell her, and it partly sounds like a confession, or like honed and practiced advice, or like something I’ve told myself one too many times, so I quirk my eyebrows at her and lean down over the bar, raw, uncomfortable. “I mean I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s nothing,” which I admit was not the most convincing denial I could’ve mustered.
She smiles a sad kind of smile that seems to point out exactly how pathetic I really am. I don’t really mind, though. Truth is truth. A slow burn can give a man perspective, can drop a man to his knees, can make him insane or can make him surrender - neither of which have ever been in my repertoire before.
Cam inhales noisily and looks down at her fingers, holding the air in her lungs a while until she spits words out - a common habit when she’s delivering bad news: “You should tell her,” she states, straightening her spine and leveling her chin.
I blink again.
I hear you laugh from across the room and my jaw tenses.
Drip, drip, drip. Love is an angry dose of cough syrup that makes me wrinkle my nose.
“Forget it, there’s nothing to tell,” I mumble.
“Seriously, Seeley, it’s been keeping me up nights. You’re constantly watching her and standing too close and longingly…gazing…and I just…” she clears her throat at my angry, defiant stare, “I know that facial expression you get when you look at her - I used to see it a lot…except with me it wasn’t half as intense,” she argues. I open my mouth to deny that, to defend her to herself, but she shrugs it off and I let her. She’s right. Truth, after all, is truth.
You happened to me slowly.
“I’m, uh…” I start, and I glance at you again and you’re leaning closer to the stranger as Angela excuses herself, the blood in my veins freezing and picking up speed at the same time. “I already told her,” I say, my gaze still fixed to the way you flirt with other people.
“You did not,” Cam responds, annoyed, justifiably irritated. “You told her, uh, I think the direct quote was attagirl…which…” she chuckles and tries to hide it by leaning against her hand, her elbow on the wood of the bar and her legs crossed, ankles draped around the stool she’s sitting on. There was a time, I seem to recall, when I really enjoyed those legs. I try to conjure that again, but I just end up glancing at an anthropologist instead.
“Ok,” I scold, “I know what I ended up saying wasn’t exactly what I meant to…” I frown and a confession spills from my lips, “I chickened out.”
“Yeah you did,” Cam agrees heartily.
“Shut up,” I say, smiling, glaring at her half-heartedly. “It was just…”and then within milliseconds I’m reliving that certain single moment so close to rejection that it makes me need to run a few miles or box somebody who’s six ten and three hundred pounds of muscle. I grimace. “Seriously, Cam, you should’ve seen her face that second after I…”
Drip, drip, drip…
I go on and force myself to say it…to say something, because silence is a nuisance and she’s asking me to explain. I try: “After I told her? She just looked…” shaking my head I sip my beer and glance at you again, “she looked scared.”
Cam nods her head.
“I had to back off,” I explain.
“You know, I thought this was just coma-induced, initially,” Cam admits. Surprised, I stand up a little straighter. That wasn’t what she had told me. She told me otherwise, which was eighty percent of why I even opened my mouth to you in the first place and I’m about to yell at her when she continues and doesn’t give me the chance. “I mean, I believed you and I meant what I said that night, but I thought it was like when somebody has a near death experience and goes around hugging everybody and buying boats and quitting their jobs.”
If I look hard enough, I think there’s probably an insult in there, but at this point I’m not sure it matters so I just stare at her. Blank.
“But this has been…” she blows air out of her mouth. “I like to think I know you pretty well, like well enough to know that this has been going on relentlessly.”
I’d like to argue, but I feel the sickly sweet pressure against my sides and can’t say a word.
You touch a stranger’s arm on the other side of the bar.
“It isn’t like you to be idle,” Cam comments but I only half hear her because you adjust the strap of your shirt and the stranger glances down at the shadow in the vee of your neckline.
My stomach contracts a little and the fog in my vision gets thicker and I can’t tear my eyes from the way you seduce somebody else across the room.
You push your hair behind your ear.
He says something and leans toward your neck, and you laugh, and I’m crazy because this is none of my business but there’s the drip drip drip of my thoughts and the thump thump thump of my heartbeat and you’re too close and you’re too far and love is a terrible thing with no mercy, sometimes.
And I’ve been sort of successfully ignoring this when you’re within walking distance, but Cam is asking me and telling me and you’re blushing at some other guy and I’m teetering on some edge.
Cam is rambling and I half-hear her: “Maybe you can find a way to explain it to her cerebrally, you know? Or you can just explain that you had to get it out there and you can compartmentalize and it doesn’t mean you two have to stop working together because she’s extremely good at multi-tasking, and I already know, so, you know, I won’t tell…”
The stranger says something to you and you frown and I imagine - because envy is a very persuadable character - that you are insulted and it is a cue for me to intervene, so I stand up and toss back what’s left of my beer. Cam is tugging on my shirt sleeve but I don’t really care at this point because there comes a moment when the syrup gets to be too sweet and the hunger it causes gets to be too endless…
I head toward you.
Cam calls my name and says she didn’t mean for me to tell you this instant but it goes in one ear and out the other because I am focused and I am a warrior and I am about to jump from a cliff.
Love is a death sentence a man walks into deliberately, refusing to back down.
Drip, drip, drip.
Once I get close enough for you to feel me you look up at me, and you don’t look away, and there is a string of unrelenting steel tied up between us and I intend to cut it loose. The stranger is irritated at your diverted attention. I couldn’t be more satisfied.
More angry.
You happened to me way too slowly and Cam is right - I am not known for being idle and I am not known for self-pity and I am not known to back down when I am called into battle. You’ve brought me to my knees, maybe, but I am a warrior and a defender of honor and you’re important.
You’re much too important for me to sit across the room and watch you seduce somebody else.
Somebody else. This is the part you won’t understand.
You’ll feel sorry.
I grab you by the elbow and you look pissed but I don’t care.
“I need to talk to you,” I grumble low into your ear. “Sorry, guy,” I state, somehow belittling him through an apology, a skill I learned from crime fighting and bureau politics.
“Booth,” you’re saying as I pull you out the door and down the sidewalk, “Booth!” you call as I drag you around the side of a building and into an alley where there’s not enough space for you to put entire rooms between us. I let go of your elbow and that’s the moment when I realize I might be losing it and I drop my forehead into my hand and wipe my fingers across my face - visibly distressed.
You’re quiet and angry but you don’t turn back toward the bar, you don’t leave me behind. There is this steel between us - keeping us both apart and together - and I intend…
I intend.
There’s heavy weight in my stance and I look at you, deep and serious, and I watch that moment of fear happen all over again.
I watch it happen and linger and eclipse your anger and I wonder what you’re thinking I’ll do or say. I wonder if you’ll guess right because you’re intelligent or if you’ll guess wrong because you’re intelligent.
I swallow. “Cam already knows and she doesn’t care,” I spit the words at you awkwardly, and your face twists into confusion and away from fear which is some small victory. I am in love with you. I wonder how to say it.
This is something I would plan with most anybody else. But with you, planning is…
We’re in an alley and you’re angry with me and planning is…
Pointless.
“Cam knows what?” you ask me, crossing your arms in indignation. You’re beautiful, shadowed, too attractive, and I am embarrassed by my own longing and lust and can’t find a way to refuse to apologize for it - the way I’m sure you would.
“She knows,” I begin, “that you’re…” I sigh and shift on my feet, “Or I mean that I’m, um…” I shake my head and squint at nothing in particular, “She knows about my, uh,” and I gesture toward my mid-section like that will explain something to you.
You’re perplexed.
“I’m feeling very confused by this, Booth,” you inform me, “Are you ill with a stomach virus?”
“A stomach…? No!” Sort of, I think blandly to myself, “No, I don’t have a stomach virus, I’m…I did not like what was going on with you and that guy in there,” I blurt. Idiotic lead in, I admit, but I had to start with something other than a stomach flu.
You glance back in the direction of the bar, still confused, and you point toward it. “The guy in the bar? Is he a criminal?” you ask me, misunderstanding as usual.
I feel the melting burn of you dripping down into my shoes. I feel the melting burn that I’ve been trying however unsuccessfully to ignore and I hear the echo of Cam’s voice in my ear accusing me of idle infatuation and I take a step closer to you.
“I have no idea if he’s a criminal and I don’t care. I didn’t like it,” I repeat, trying to make you understand this and a million other things.
“Why?” you ask, “Are you feeling territorial?”
You state it so simply.
I glare at you, irritated.
“Yeah,” I respond. You nod like this is nothing and I can’t decide which is worse - that moment months ago of fear and near-rejection, or this moment now of your glaring lack of concern. “Don’t nod like that, this is important,” I accuse.
“It’s very common, Booth, and makes perfect sense that you would feel territorial toward me. The male hormones are designed to…”
“Stop it,” I plead and I close my eyes and clench my jaw and try to inhale deep amounts of air, I try to push down the pulsing of this, the vague need to cry to you, to fall into you in exhausted defeat. I resist the urge to give up and fall victim to the impossibility of you and me and how we are so very very different.
You’re silent for a long, long while.
I keep closed eyes because the fog of looking at you is overwhelming when you’re standing there and I’m so close to breaking.
I feel your fingers against my shoulder and I shrug you away.
“Don’t,” I request.
When my eyes finally open again you look hurt and I feel conflicted. Time makes some things fade, I want to explain to you, and it makes some things stronger - bolder - heavier and more worthy of stunned admiration. I am older than I ever was before and love is a word that you don’t believe in much…
Or you didn’t until recently.
And I don’t know how to tell you that you kill me.
I don’t know how to tell you in a way that you’ll understand.
I’ve been considering it for weeks, lying awake at night, staring at you during autopsies, sitting across from you in diners, and wondering how to explain because you are a scientist first and always and this is nothing involving Newton or Murphy or Einstein or Darwin…
This involves poets or artists or maybe psychologists…none of whom you have ever claimed to admire.
And so I’m at a loss.
I look down at the ground beneath my feet because I feel the fog in my eyes turning into water and I don’t want to bother with that, to waste time with it and make you feel you’ve done something wrong. I blink heavy and hard and push it down and away and I beg myself to think. To consider. To look up at you and realize how I can make you…
I look up at you and I take in the concern in your eyes and the lazy curl of your hair and the long sweep of your neck and I think…
“Booth,” you prod - sounding genuinely worried.
I shake my head.
“Bones, stop, ok? And just…” I half-request, and you complete my sentence in your head so that your lips fall silent and you wait. Eventually I’m tired of searching for the perfect words and I speak without them. “Listen,” I say, “I don’t know how to…I mean, I swear to god, Bones, this is so important that I would…” I exhale and I take another step toward you and I watch you resist the urge to back away. I go still and I look at you, hard. “I don’t like it when you flirt with other people,” I state plainly.
Your face is expressionless.
I take another step toward you and your back is against a wall.
“Yes, well, as I started to explain earlier, the male hormones…” you begin meekly. I shake my head and you fall silent yet again.
“I don’t like it when you flirt with other people,” I repeat, hitting the word 'other' hard and deliberate, and you frown.
“You mean people other than you?” you clarify.
“Right,” I say, inching closer and wanting desperately for that steel separation between us to crumble to the ground like the walls of Jericho.
I want you to fill up the empty space of my life.
“And I don’t like it when you go home at the end of the work day without eating dinner with me,” I add and I think I might start to see comprehension on your face, so hope opens up a little inside of me, like a bowl to catch the saccharine dripping of too-sweet honey in my stomach.
I feel like you’re listening.
Hearing me.
I go on, because I can’t help myself: “I don’t like it when you touch me and act like it doesn’t mean anything. Or when you make off the cuff remarks about my hormones like I’m an animal who doesn’t know exactly what the hell I’m doing,” I argue, inching closer still so that there is only a breath between your heat and mine, and so that your pupils start to dilate and your eyelids start to droop just a little bit lower. You seem to think about this situation I’ve put you in and you watch me, immobile and curious. I continue because I’m worried too much time for you to think is a bad idea: “I’m a man and you’re a woman,” I explain obviously, “so you can blame it on whatever scientific bullshit you want but it doesn’t change that I don’t like it when you flirt with other people.”
You scan my face with your eyes and you frown slightly, “Well then I won’t…flirt…with…” You stop yourself from saying it halfway through, and the expression on your face tells me you’ve realized the implications of it - the ownership it claims…and the fact that you got halfway through it speaks volumes, makes me forget how exactly to breathe.
I blink and I lose a little strength.
I lean closer to you.
I press my hands against the wall behind your head and I dip a little closer, still, breathing you in, playing with fire, and it’s too much and too good and too drip drip drip so that the confession doesn’t have a choice but to tumble out into your ears, so my inhale is deep and I murmur “I’m in love with you,” and the sound is rough and low and your mouth drops open in surprise.
And I am not an idle man.
And I do not enjoy a lack of action.
And you start to say my name but I’m too concerned about what rejection or condescension will follow, so I bend down fast and I kiss you.
Mouth against mouth.
Your crossed arms tense between us and my fingers are splayed out against cool, unfeeling brick, and I barely even notice that the scratch and the dirt of it are uncomfortable against my palms because your lips move - just a little - against mine and that fog rolls in like it had the first time we did this, accidentally under some foolish mistletoe. Your lips open up, just a little, so my tongue finds its way inside and I taste you and I can feel your arms relaxing between us…like I can feel you giving in…letting me…just letting this go, until finally your hand lands at the back of my head - encouragement - and it’s like that steel separation melts beneath your touch, oozes down to puddle beneath our feet and my dripping ache for you turns into a steady stream of something infinitely less bitter…
I step closer so that my body is against you and I think I hear you groan, girlish, into my mouth.
God, you are female, unquestionably, and I’m in love with you too much and one of my hands lets the brick wall off the hook so that it can hold you in place, gently demanding beneath your chin and against the pristine slope of your neck and I’ve had dreams like this and my head is swimming.
Your fingers shift and grab at the back of my shirt.
I push a little harder against your chin and you push back, fearless as usual, and I grin against your lips.
You’re much less afraid than I have ever been.
My teeth scrape against you.
You sigh out something without consonants and close your eyes, leaning back away from me and tipping your head to rest the crown against the building that I still have one hand braced against. You’re red-cheeked. You’re smiling and worried at the same time.
I’m breathing heavy and I let my head tip down to rest against your shoulder because love is a terrible thing, actually, and I can’t handle what it does to me.
You run fingers across my temple and then you wrap your long arms around me.
“I was always extremely jealous of Cam,” you confess in a whisper.
I feel myself start to laugh, relieved for some reason, knowing I have not been rejected exactly, even if that’s what’s approaching. There’s at least these few seconds of acceptance and shared commiseration.
“That’s understandable. Cam is an attractive woman, and female hormones create a…” I start to mock but you punch me in the shoulder, laughing.
“I mean I…”
“I know what you mean, Bones,” I confirm and you sigh, and I’m not sure I ever actually know what exactly you mean, what you’re thinking.
I wish you wouldn’t take me so often at my word.
I tilt my head a little so that my lips can graze your neck and you’re delicate and female while simultaneously unwaveringly strong and I end up wondering which of us has actually made this happen, tonight. I wonder what you’re thinking.
Although, not for long.
“Take me home with you,” you request and I stop breathing, picking my head up to look at you in serious concern.
“Bones…” I start, and your hands are distracting and restless against my back.
“Booth, I’d like to see what happens if you take me home with you.”
My head shakes practically all on its own with no instructions from me to do so. “I don’t think you realize how serious I am, here,” I comment.
But you pin me with a heavy, heated stare. Again, I am unable to breathe. I feel the pressure of my emotions push against my ribcage and you melt me. You kill me, over and over again.
“I realize,” you state.
It’s plain and simple.
It’s everything, and hard to swallow, and impossible to shake off, and there’s nothing easy about any of this. Your hand moves to my cheek and you feel the skin there and I feel the weight of this.
“I do, I realize,” you say again, as if to reassure me.
I nod at you and lean forward and I kiss you, but like slow melting wax, honest and relieved this time and there is a painful ache in it - relentless and intense. There’s a steady drip drip drip to this particular kiss and there’s honey sweetness and buried pressure and I can taste you…I can start to feel you in the empty spaces of my life…
After a moment you pull back, and you look concerned for the millionth time so I sense again a rejection in that, and I feel heart broken in just an instant and that is what is so dangerous about all of this…how easily you do that…how unintentional it is…
“We haven’t paid for our drinks,” you tell me, all earnest and worried and it pulls an easy smile to my lips and I chuckle quietly to myself, which makes you irritated immediately. “It isn’t right, Booth, we need to go back and pay. I enjoyed it that one time but we can’t make it a habit…”
I nod my head, “Ok ok,” I tell you, backing off and gesturing that you should precede me back to the bar, wondering if our friends will be able to tell once we get there that something has happened…that nothing and everything has happened.
That you have finally started to fill up the empty spaces and that I intend to take you home and let you finish…
You glance at me over your shoulder and we share some secret look.
I wink at you.
You blush.
I throw a twenty on the bar as you grab your coat and we both purposely ignore the sudden silence from a few stools away where the crowd of people I’ve learned to enjoy are watching us with rapt attention, huddled around Cam who is seeming extremely guilty and tight-lipped, making no attempt at subtlety whatsoever.
Hodgins tosses me my suit coat, which I catch easily in one hand while still refusing to make eye contact, and I turn and follow you back out the door into my SUV.
There is silence as I turn the ignition.
You look out the window at our friends, who are blatantly looking back at you, and then you turn away and stare out the windshield.
I start to feel nervous.
“I hope you aren’t one of those people who prays during sex,” you state.
My jaw drops open in shock and insult and I glare at you as I pull out onto the street.
“Excuse me?! Bones, that is not…you shouldn’t say things like that,” I argue.
“Why? According to your Bible, saying the Lord’s name aloud is considered prayer, and it is considered a sin when said in any context other than prayer,” you explain. “And, frankly, it makes me uncomfortable when it’s said aloud during intercourse.”
“Frankly, this conversation makes me uncomfortable,” I respond, hitting the blinker and turning left. You shrug.
“I felt it would be unfair to refrain from mentioning it since I know that you’re religious,” you defend and I feel my eyebrows tipping into a frown.
“Let’s just not mix religion and sex in one conversation, it’s not good foreplay, Bones, ok?” the request is made in earnest and I can see you considering it, accepting it in that indulgent way that you do, and I can also see you deciding whether or not to go into some anthropological rant about countries and cultures that see sex and religion as two things that work hand and hand. Before you get a chance to start, though, I counter-attack. “I hope you don’t make references to phalanges or any other crazy scientific names of body parts during sex.”
You gasp and your head whips in my direction.
I look over at you and grin, cocky and victorious, and your outrage turns to a wary smile as you glare at me, playful and adorable and all of the things I like best about you. You nod your head slowly in acceptance of the challenge.
“Ok,” you say.
“Ok,” I repeat.
And eventually we end up in my apartment, in my space, and there is room there set aside for you even though I didn't mean for it to happen. And love drips from the faucet, there, sometimes clean and cool and clear, and sometimes slow and relentless and heavy...and it's difficult to swallow...
But maybe, I think to myself as I purposely mumble the Our Father in your ear and as you purposely begin listing off scientific body parts, maybe the two of us are just different enough to be exactly the same - as cliche as it is, and maybe I'm older now than I ever was before and you've happened so slowly and really, I think, we have plenty of time.
Love is walking into a death sentence deliberately and coming out alive, and you've always had my back before so something tells me you and I will have to show each other how.
Author: Stablergirl
Fandom: Bones
Characters: Booth, Brennan, Cam
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Genre: Romance
Rating: Teen (for language)
Prompt: 24. space @ story_lottery
Summary: Booth agonizes over his feelings for Bones, until he stops agonizing and does something about it.
Spoilers: Up to and including Season 5, I guess.
Warnings: Some language and romantic indulgence.
Word Count: 5,268
Disclaimer: Bones is not mine. This seems clear, but we fanfic writers like to say it anyway.
A/N: This is pretty standard Stablergirl fare. For those of you who are familiar with my stuff, sorry for any repeated themes and imagery, I'm not my most creative lately. Have fun!
I loved a woman once.
With everything I thought I had, at the time, and in the most honest way I could, at the time, I loved her.
Stayed up at night and watched her sleeping and I thought love had blonde hair and full lips, and I thought love made me somebody worth something.
Because, you know, love is a word that every arrogant guy in his twenties thinks he understands, thinks he masters and conquers and sweeps off its feet. Love seems obvious and easy when a guy is twenty seven and his girl is sweet and funny.
Love seems like cupid - young and fast and random with its heart shaped bow and arrow. Light-hearted. Exciting and unpredictable. Full of talk and full of friction and full of candlelit dinners and Hallmark cards.
Love seems…
But I’m older, and you’ve happened to me slowly, and now love seems like a glass full of straight up scotch.
Love, I’m realizing, is a heavy kind of thing.
Love doesn’t make you somebody worth something - it makes you nobody…or it makes you the only somebody worth anything.
And it drips down your throat and swims through your stomach and it pushes against your sides and it wraps around your head until everything is a heartbeat and everything has warm honey pressure…
Love makes you want more of something to fill up the empty space.
It’s thick relentless syrup.
It’s hard to swallow.
It’s impossible to shake off.
I promise you there is nothing easy about it.
Love stands across a crowded room, and you stare until there’s fog in your eyes that you maybe can’t see through, until you’re a blind man with no direction and no sense of logic - just this tightness, this sickly sweet maple flavor, this drip drip drip down your center, into your core and into the soul of you…
I have this constant drip drip dripping.
And you’d tell me I was overreacting…that I was falling victim to some hormone or pheromone, or that I was confusing proximity and camaraderie with a fairy tale. You’d feel sorry. You would, I’m sure, offer up some piece of thousand year old evidence for why this isn’t what I think…
But you would never be able to convince me.
Cause love is like a death sentence a man walks into deliberately, refusing to back down, and it’s hopeless and unfortunate and makes me wish I had a stronger will and colder intentions but I don’t and if I’m honest, like if I’m real and truthful, I know that I want more of you to fill up the empty space of me…
You’re always too far away and you’re always too much in my veins and nothing about it makes sense.
I will never succeed in explaining it to you.
So I just stand across a crowded room and I stare, and I let the fog roll in.
**
“Oh God,” Cam states loudly and I glare at her because I was right in the middle of explaining the reason I like prime rib better than beef tenderloin - which is a topic I take very seriously. “You know, some days I’m really uncomfortable being around you,” she says.
I search for the reasoning behind that and come up empty because I’m pretty sure Cam has not become a vegetarian...
“What? Why?” I ask and she presses her lips together and raises her eyebrows and shakes her head at her martini, silent, and I wrack my brain and come up with all I got in my arsenal for what she could be referring to. “Oh,” I sigh, “You mean because we used to, um…” and I tilt my head and lean toward her and conspiratorially mutter “you know,” in her ear.
She reels back and frowns at me, amusement hidden behind her facial expression and a laugh sort of half pushing its way out of her mouth.
“No!” she argues, “No, that is not…Jesus, Seeley, that is not what I was talking about.”
I reel back, too, because that’s what any guy does when a lady tries to get away from him after he vaguely references the horizontal tango, and I hold my hands up in surrender, letting my beer sit lonely on the bar.
“Ok, well what are you talking about then? Sorry,” I tell her, my tone high and tight and defensive but still laughing somewhere deep down, still content with the warmth of the atmosphere and the casual flow of conversation, still happy that most of the people I’ve learned to enjoy are somewhere in the room and the work day is over. I give the bar a haphazard scan and twice land on you without really realizing it - or without intending to, anyway.
“That!” she says, pointing at my nose and dragging my attention back to her, “That is exactly what I’m talking about.”
I blink.
You’re talking to Angela and a stranger, but I figure that’s ok. You’re a grown woman and you’re sensible, and I really don’t have any right to comment on who you decide to socialize with in bars…
“She’s fine over there,” Cam says. “Stop looking, it’s painful.”
“I wasn’t…” I start, but it’s half-hearted because I don’t like to lie, and it’s quiet because I’m shameful and caught red-handed and my beer seems like the only safe place to look now - if I lift my head a fraction of an inch, odds are I’ll glance at you.
Drip, drip, drip.
Cam sighs.
It’s dramatic sounding and so I peer up at her.
“I’ve been thinking about this.”
“About what?” I counter.
She levels her gaze and seems threateningly close to physical violence so I wave a hand through the air, striking the question from the record, and I take a sip of my beer.
“You shouldn’t think about it,” I tell her, and it partly sounds like a confession, or like honed and practiced advice, or like something I’ve told myself one too many times, so I quirk my eyebrows at her and lean down over the bar, raw, uncomfortable. “I mean I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s nothing,” which I admit was not the most convincing denial I could’ve mustered.
She smiles a sad kind of smile that seems to point out exactly how pathetic I really am. I don’t really mind, though. Truth is truth. A slow burn can give a man perspective, can drop a man to his knees, can make him insane or can make him surrender - neither of which have ever been in my repertoire before.
Cam inhales noisily and looks down at her fingers, holding the air in her lungs a while until she spits words out - a common habit when she’s delivering bad news: “You should tell her,” she states, straightening her spine and leveling her chin.
I blink again.
I hear you laugh from across the room and my jaw tenses.
Drip, drip, drip. Love is an angry dose of cough syrup that makes me wrinkle my nose.
“Forget it, there’s nothing to tell,” I mumble.
“Seriously, Seeley, it’s been keeping me up nights. You’re constantly watching her and standing too close and longingly…gazing…and I just…” she clears her throat at my angry, defiant stare, “I know that facial expression you get when you look at her - I used to see it a lot…except with me it wasn’t half as intense,” she argues. I open my mouth to deny that, to defend her to herself, but she shrugs it off and I let her. She’s right. Truth, after all, is truth.
You happened to me slowly.
“I’m, uh…” I start, and I glance at you again and you’re leaning closer to the stranger as Angela excuses herself, the blood in my veins freezing and picking up speed at the same time. “I already told her,” I say, my gaze still fixed to the way you flirt with other people.
“You did not,” Cam responds, annoyed, justifiably irritated. “You told her, uh, I think the direct quote was attagirl…which…” she chuckles and tries to hide it by leaning against her hand, her elbow on the wood of the bar and her legs crossed, ankles draped around the stool she’s sitting on. There was a time, I seem to recall, when I really enjoyed those legs. I try to conjure that again, but I just end up glancing at an anthropologist instead.
“Ok,” I scold, “I know what I ended up saying wasn’t exactly what I meant to…” I frown and a confession spills from my lips, “I chickened out.”
“Yeah you did,” Cam agrees heartily.
“Shut up,” I say, smiling, glaring at her half-heartedly. “It was just…”and then within milliseconds I’m reliving that certain single moment so close to rejection that it makes me need to run a few miles or box somebody who’s six ten and three hundred pounds of muscle. I grimace. “Seriously, Cam, you should’ve seen her face that second after I…”
Drip, drip, drip…
I go on and force myself to say it…to say something, because silence is a nuisance and she’s asking me to explain. I try: “After I told her? She just looked…” shaking my head I sip my beer and glance at you again, “she looked scared.”
Cam nods her head.
“I had to back off,” I explain.
“You know, I thought this was just coma-induced, initially,” Cam admits. Surprised, I stand up a little straighter. That wasn’t what she had told me. She told me otherwise, which was eighty percent of why I even opened my mouth to you in the first place and I’m about to yell at her when she continues and doesn’t give me the chance. “I mean, I believed you and I meant what I said that night, but I thought it was like when somebody has a near death experience and goes around hugging everybody and buying boats and quitting their jobs.”
If I look hard enough, I think there’s probably an insult in there, but at this point I’m not sure it matters so I just stare at her. Blank.
“But this has been…” she blows air out of her mouth. “I like to think I know you pretty well, like well enough to know that this has been going on relentlessly.”
I’d like to argue, but I feel the sickly sweet pressure against my sides and can’t say a word.
You touch a stranger’s arm on the other side of the bar.
“It isn’t like you to be idle,” Cam comments but I only half hear her because you adjust the strap of your shirt and the stranger glances down at the shadow in the vee of your neckline.
My stomach contracts a little and the fog in my vision gets thicker and I can’t tear my eyes from the way you seduce somebody else across the room.
You push your hair behind your ear.
He says something and leans toward your neck, and you laugh, and I’m crazy because this is none of my business but there’s the drip drip drip of my thoughts and the thump thump thump of my heartbeat and you’re too close and you’re too far and love is a terrible thing with no mercy, sometimes.
And I’ve been sort of successfully ignoring this when you’re within walking distance, but Cam is asking me and telling me and you’re blushing at some other guy and I’m teetering on some edge.
Cam is rambling and I half-hear her: “Maybe you can find a way to explain it to her cerebrally, you know? Or you can just explain that you had to get it out there and you can compartmentalize and it doesn’t mean you two have to stop working together because she’s extremely good at multi-tasking, and I already know, so, you know, I won’t tell…”
The stranger says something to you and you frown and I imagine - because envy is a very persuadable character - that you are insulted and it is a cue for me to intervene, so I stand up and toss back what’s left of my beer. Cam is tugging on my shirt sleeve but I don’t really care at this point because there comes a moment when the syrup gets to be too sweet and the hunger it causes gets to be too endless…
I head toward you.
Cam calls my name and says she didn’t mean for me to tell you this instant but it goes in one ear and out the other because I am focused and I am a warrior and I am about to jump from a cliff.
Love is a death sentence a man walks into deliberately, refusing to back down.
Drip, drip, drip.
Once I get close enough for you to feel me you look up at me, and you don’t look away, and there is a string of unrelenting steel tied up between us and I intend to cut it loose. The stranger is irritated at your diverted attention. I couldn’t be more satisfied.
More angry.
You happened to me way too slowly and Cam is right - I am not known for being idle and I am not known for self-pity and I am not known to back down when I am called into battle. You’ve brought me to my knees, maybe, but I am a warrior and a defender of honor and you’re important.
You’re much too important for me to sit across the room and watch you seduce somebody else.
Somebody else. This is the part you won’t understand.
You’ll feel sorry.
I grab you by the elbow and you look pissed but I don’t care.
“I need to talk to you,” I grumble low into your ear. “Sorry, guy,” I state, somehow belittling him through an apology, a skill I learned from crime fighting and bureau politics.
“Booth,” you’re saying as I pull you out the door and down the sidewalk, “Booth!” you call as I drag you around the side of a building and into an alley where there’s not enough space for you to put entire rooms between us. I let go of your elbow and that’s the moment when I realize I might be losing it and I drop my forehead into my hand and wipe my fingers across my face - visibly distressed.
You’re quiet and angry but you don’t turn back toward the bar, you don’t leave me behind. There is this steel between us - keeping us both apart and together - and I intend…
I intend.
There’s heavy weight in my stance and I look at you, deep and serious, and I watch that moment of fear happen all over again.
I watch it happen and linger and eclipse your anger and I wonder what you’re thinking I’ll do or say. I wonder if you’ll guess right because you’re intelligent or if you’ll guess wrong because you’re intelligent.
I swallow. “Cam already knows and she doesn’t care,” I spit the words at you awkwardly, and your face twists into confusion and away from fear which is some small victory. I am in love with you. I wonder how to say it.
This is something I would plan with most anybody else. But with you, planning is…
We’re in an alley and you’re angry with me and planning is…
Pointless.
“Cam knows what?” you ask me, crossing your arms in indignation. You’re beautiful, shadowed, too attractive, and I am embarrassed by my own longing and lust and can’t find a way to refuse to apologize for it - the way I’m sure you would.
“She knows,” I begin, “that you’re…” I sigh and shift on my feet, “Or I mean that I’m, um…” I shake my head and squint at nothing in particular, “She knows about my, uh,” and I gesture toward my mid-section like that will explain something to you.
You’re perplexed.
“I’m feeling very confused by this, Booth,” you inform me, “Are you ill with a stomach virus?”
“A stomach…? No!” Sort of, I think blandly to myself, “No, I don’t have a stomach virus, I’m…I did not like what was going on with you and that guy in there,” I blurt. Idiotic lead in, I admit, but I had to start with something other than a stomach flu.
You glance back in the direction of the bar, still confused, and you point toward it. “The guy in the bar? Is he a criminal?” you ask me, misunderstanding as usual.
I feel the melting burn of you dripping down into my shoes. I feel the melting burn that I’ve been trying however unsuccessfully to ignore and I hear the echo of Cam’s voice in my ear accusing me of idle infatuation and I take a step closer to you.
“I have no idea if he’s a criminal and I don’t care. I didn’t like it,” I repeat, trying to make you understand this and a million other things.
“Why?” you ask, “Are you feeling territorial?”
You state it so simply.
I glare at you, irritated.
“Yeah,” I respond. You nod like this is nothing and I can’t decide which is worse - that moment months ago of fear and near-rejection, or this moment now of your glaring lack of concern. “Don’t nod like that, this is important,” I accuse.
“It’s very common, Booth, and makes perfect sense that you would feel territorial toward me. The male hormones are designed to…”
“Stop it,” I plead and I close my eyes and clench my jaw and try to inhale deep amounts of air, I try to push down the pulsing of this, the vague need to cry to you, to fall into you in exhausted defeat. I resist the urge to give up and fall victim to the impossibility of you and me and how we are so very very different.
You’re silent for a long, long while.
I keep closed eyes because the fog of looking at you is overwhelming when you’re standing there and I’m so close to breaking.
I feel your fingers against my shoulder and I shrug you away.
“Don’t,” I request.
When my eyes finally open again you look hurt and I feel conflicted. Time makes some things fade, I want to explain to you, and it makes some things stronger - bolder - heavier and more worthy of stunned admiration. I am older than I ever was before and love is a word that you don’t believe in much…
Or you didn’t until recently.
And I don’t know how to tell you that you kill me.
I don’t know how to tell you in a way that you’ll understand.
I’ve been considering it for weeks, lying awake at night, staring at you during autopsies, sitting across from you in diners, and wondering how to explain because you are a scientist first and always and this is nothing involving Newton or Murphy or Einstein or Darwin…
This involves poets or artists or maybe psychologists…none of whom you have ever claimed to admire.
And so I’m at a loss.
I look down at the ground beneath my feet because I feel the fog in my eyes turning into water and I don’t want to bother with that, to waste time with it and make you feel you’ve done something wrong. I blink heavy and hard and push it down and away and I beg myself to think. To consider. To look up at you and realize how I can make you…
I look up at you and I take in the concern in your eyes and the lazy curl of your hair and the long sweep of your neck and I think…
“Booth,” you prod - sounding genuinely worried.
I shake my head.
“Bones, stop, ok? And just…” I half-request, and you complete my sentence in your head so that your lips fall silent and you wait. Eventually I’m tired of searching for the perfect words and I speak without them. “Listen,” I say, “I don’t know how to…I mean, I swear to god, Bones, this is so important that I would…” I exhale and I take another step toward you and I watch you resist the urge to back away. I go still and I look at you, hard. “I don’t like it when you flirt with other people,” I state plainly.
Your face is expressionless.
I take another step toward you and your back is against a wall.
“Yes, well, as I started to explain earlier, the male hormones…” you begin meekly. I shake my head and you fall silent yet again.
“I don’t like it when you flirt with other people,” I repeat, hitting the word 'other' hard and deliberate, and you frown.
“You mean people other than you?” you clarify.
“Right,” I say, inching closer and wanting desperately for that steel separation between us to crumble to the ground like the walls of Jericho.
I want you to fill up the empty space of my life.
“And I don’t like it when you go home at the end of the work day without eating dinner with me,” I add and I think I might start to see comprehension on your face, so hope opens up a little inside of me, like a bowl to catch the saccharine dripping of too-sweet honey in my stomach.
I feel like you’re listening.
Hearing me.
I go on, because I can’t help myself: “I don’t like it when you touch me and act like it doesn’t mean anything. Or when you make off the cuff remarks about my hormones like I’m an animal who doesn’t know exactly what the hell I’m doing,” I argue, inching closer still so that there is only a breath between your heat and mine, and so that your pupils start to dilate and your eyelids start to droop just a little bit lower. You seem to think about this situation I’ve put you in and you watch me, immobile and curious. I continue because I’m worried too much time for you to think is a bad idea: “I’m a man and you’re a woman,” I explain obviously, “so you can blame it on whatever scientific bullshit you want but it doesn’t change that I don’t like it when you flirt with other people.”
You scan my face with your eyes and you frown slightly, “Well then I won’t…flirt…with…” You stop yourself from saying it halfway through, and the expression on your face tells me you’ve realized the implications of it - the ownership it claims…and the fact that you got halfway through it speaks volumes, makes me forget how exactly to breathe.
I blink and I lose a little strength.
I lean closer to you.
I press my hands against the wall behind your head and I dip a little closer, still, breathing you in, playing with fire, and it’s too much and too good and too drip drip drip so that the confession doesn’t have a choice but to tumble out into your ears, so my inhale is deep and I murmur “I’m in love with you,” and the sound is rough and low and your mouth drops open in surprise.
And I am not an idle man.
And I do not enjoy a lack of action.
And you start to say my name but I’m too concerned about what rejection or condescension will follow, so I bend down fast and I kiss you.
Mouth against mouth.
Your crossed arms tense between us and my fingers are splayed out against cool, unfeeling brick, and I barely even notice that the scratch and the dirt of it are uncomfortable against my palms because your lips move - just a little - against mine and that fog rolls in like it had the first time we did this, accidentally under some foolish mistletoe. Your lips open up, just a little, so my tongue finds its way inside and I taste you and I can feel your arms relaxing between us…like I can feel you giving in…letting me…just letting this go, until finally your hand lands at the back of my head - encouragement - and it’s like that steel separation melts beneath your touch, oozes down to puddle beneath our feet and my dripping ache for you turns into a steady stream of something infinitely less bitter…
I step closer so that my body is against you and I think I hear you groan, girlish, into my mouth.
God, you are female, unquestionably, and I’m in love with you too much and one of my hands lets the brick wall off the hook so that it can hold you in place, gently demanding beneath your chin and against the pristine slope of your neck and I’ve had dreams like this and my head is swimming.
Your fingers shift and grab at the back of my shirt.
I push a little harder against your chin and you push back, fearless as usual, and I grin against your lips.
You’re much less afraid than I have ever been.
My teeth scrape against you.
You sigh out something without consonants and close your eyes, leaning back away from me and tipping your head to rest the crown against the building that I still have one hand braced against. You’re red-cheeked. You’re smiling and worried at the same time.
I’m breathing heavy and I let my head tip down to rest against your shoulder because love is a terrible thing, actually, and I can’t handle what it does to me.
You run fingers across my temple and then you wrap your long arms around me.
“I was always extremely jealous of Cam,” you confess in a whisper.
I feel myself start to laugh, relieved for some reason, knowing I have not been rejected exactly, even if that’s what’s approaching. There’s at least these few seconds of acceptance and shared commiseration.
“That’s understandable. Cam is an attractive woman, and female hormones create a…” I start to mock but you punch me in the shoulder, laughing.
“I mean I…”
“I know what you mean, Bones,” I confirm and you sigh, and I’m not sure I ever actually know what exactly you mean, what you’re thinking.
I wish you wouldn’t take me so often at my word.
I tilt my head a little so that my lips can graze your neck and you’re delicate and female while simultaneously unwaveringly strong and I end up wondering which of us has actually made this happen, tonight. I wonder what you’re thinking.
Although, not for long.
“Take me home with you,” you request and I stop breathing, picking my head up to look at you in serious concern.
“Bones…” I start, and your hands are distracting and restless against my back.
“Booth, I’d like to see what happens if you take me home with you.”
My head shakes practically all on its own with no instructions from me to do so. “I don’t think you realize how serious I am, here,” I comment.
But you pin me with a heavy, heated stare. Again, I am unable to breathe. I feel the pressure of my emotions push against my ribcage and you melt me. You kill me, over and over again.
“I realize,” you state.
It’s plain and simple.
It’s everything, and hard to swallow, and impossible to shake off, and there’s nothing easy about any of this. Your hand moves to my cheek and you feel the skin there and I feel the weight of this.
“I do, I realize,” you say again, as if to reassure me.
I nod at you and lean forward and I kiss you, but like slow melting wax, honest and relieved this time and there is a painful ache in it - relentless and intense. There’s a steady drip drip drip to this particular kiss and there’s honey sweetness and buried pressure and I can taste you…I can start to feel you in the empty spaces of my life…
After a moment you pull back, and you look concerned for the millionth time so I sense again a rejection in that, and I feel heart broken in just an instant and that is what is so dangerous about all of this…how easily you do that…how unintentional it is…
“We haven’t paid for our drinks,” you tell me, all earnest and worried and it pulls an easy smile to my lips and I chuckle quietly to myself, which makes you irritated immediately. “It isn’t right, Booth, we need to go back and pay. I enjoyed it that one time but we can’t make it a habit…”
I nod my head, “Ok ok,” I tell you, backing off and gesturing that you should precede me back to the bar, wondering if our friends will be able to tell once we get there that something has happened…that nothing and everything has happened.
That you have finally started to fill up the empty spaces and that I intend to take you home and let you finish…
You glance at me over your shoulder and we share some secret look.
I wink at you.
You blush.
I throw a twenty on the bar as you grab your coat and we both purposely ignore the sudden silence from a few stools away where the crowd of people I’ve learned to enjoy are watching us with rapt attention, huddled around Cam who is seeming extremely guilty and tight-lipped, making no attempt at subtlety whatsoever.
Hodgins tosses me my suit coat, which I catch easily in one hand while still refusing to make eye contact, and I turn and follow you back out the door into my SUV.
There is silence as I turn the ignition.
You look out the window at our friends, who are blatantly looking back at you, and then you turn away and stare out the windshield.
I start to feel nervous.
“I hope you aren’t one of those people who prays during sex,” you state.
My jaw drops open in shock and insult and I glare at you as I pull out onto the street.
“Excuse me?! Bones, that is not…you shouldn’t say things like that,” I argue.
“Why? According to your Bible, saying the Lord’s name aloud is considered prayer, and it is considered a sin when said in any context other than prayer,” you explain. “And, frankly, it makes me uncomfortable when it’s said aloud during intercourse.”
“Frankly, this conversation makes me uncomfortable,” I respond, hitting the blinker and turning left. You shrug.
“I felt it would be unfair to refrain from mentioning it since I know that you’re religious,” you defend and I feel my eyebrows tipping into a frown.
“Let’s just not mix religion and sex in one conversation, it’s not good foreplay, Bones, ok?” the request is made in earnest and I can see you considering it, accepting it in that indulgent way that you do, and I can also see you deciding whether or not to go into some anthropological rant about countries and cultures that see sex and religion as two things that work hand and hand. Before you get a chance to start, though, I counter-attack. “I hope you don’t make references to phalanges or any other crazy scientific names of body parts during sex.”
You gasp and your head whips in my direction.
I look over at you and grin, cocky and victorious, and your outrage turns to a wary smile as you glare at me, playful and adorable and all of the things I like best about you. You nod your head slowly in acceptance of the challenge.
“Ok,” you say.
“Ok,” I repeat.
And eventually we end up in my apartment, in my space, and there is room there set aside for you even though I didn't mean for it to happen. And love drips from the faucet, there, sometimes clean and cool and clear, and sometimes slow and relentless and heavy...and it's difficult to swallow...
But maybe, I think to myself as I purposely mumble the Our Father in your ear and as you purposely begin listing off scientific body parts, maybe the two of us are just different enough to be exactly the same - as cliche as it is, and maybe I'm older now than I ever was before and you've happened so slowly and really, I think, we have plenty of time.
Love is walking into a death sentence deliberately and coming out alive, and you've always had my back before so something tells me you and I will have to show each other how.