title: A Simple Touch
fandom: Bones
pairing: Booth/Brennan
word count: 504
rating: r
for:
The Porn Battle IX; prompt: touching
spoilers: Dentist in the Ditch
When she finishes her toast he leans in, hand on her waist, and says softly,
"Good toast, Bones. You're really getting good with the toasts."
She smiles at him, hazy and radiant all at once.
She settles back into her seat and they settle into a conversation. She shares different cultures' marriage rituals as they sip their drinks and Padme smiles politely. It's a genuine polite, though, not the irritated-yet-longsuffering kind. It's nice, Booth thinks.
He also thinks that this night is nice for Jared and good for the two of them as brothers but it pales in comparison to that toast. To her.
It just . . . happened, this sudden and complete shift. It feels like a natural and expected step, and yet so surprising, so huge. She's come so close, and she's so warm he can feel her, and she's only inched closer as the months shift past around them.
Whether she was somehow picking up on his own realization that he really was in love with her or whether this (the years. The bullets and fighting and fear and dancing and drinks and touches lasting longer and feeling too short.) was simply what it had taken for her to start to see him . . . it doesn't matter, either way. She's seeing him as he sees her now.
Seeing her look at him, smile at him, say those words (to him); it's like she's laid herself out for him. Bare and complete.
Her arm touches his on the table. He feels her wrapped up in him, wrapped around him, feels the muscles that would flex when he braces an arm around her waist and flips them over.
She laughs, and he hears it in the dark. Laying on their sides, foreheads together, hands slipping everywhere.
She crosses her legs and her foot grazes his shin. He feels her calves sliding up around the backs of his knees, the silk and heat of her thighs around his hips.
She laughs again. He smiles at her, and she catches him from the corner of her eye. She turns and looks fully into his eyes and she just glows, glass at her parting lips, touching him in a thousand different ways, places. His hand closes gently around her knee and he leans in and kisses her cheek softly, once.
Her eyes go hooded, just a tiny bit, and she smiles bigger and brighter. "What was that for?"
He shakes his head slightly, just grins at her. Her fingers ghost over his on her knee and then they slide between his easily. His hand turns over under hers and for a second they match up palm to palm, her slender fingers stretching out flush beneath his longer ones. The tips of her nails scrape over the pads of his fingers lightly, and maybe his fingerprints are rearranged in that instant.
Something turns over and settles back into a new place between them, between their palms held together over her knee.
"Everything," he murmurs.