This fic is brought to you by my off-the-charts impatience. It's a tag to 2x02 (if tags can be 6K words), because my need is strong and there's no way - NO WAY - they wouldn't have discussed SOMETHING after what happened in that trunk before moving onto the next mission. Gah. More bunker fic is the only answer.

Important note - this fic got away from me (obviously), and the end product became way darker than I originally intended it to be, so there are perhaps a few mental health triggers that some readers may want to be wary of...if you'd like more info before reading, please PM me and I'll provide details!

Lastly, a cool little milestone to share with you all : this is my 50th fanfic story! I think that means I'm over the hill now ;)

The luster of 1955 wears off bit by bit. Her lipstick disappears with a quick swipe in the mirror. The swishing circle skirt crumples against the rusted tiles beneath her feet, the ribbon slips from her hair, and then the dingy mirror finally reflects the exact same person she'd been before they left. She's exposed once more, the image before her revealing that she crumbles just as easily as the vile bathroom fixtures around her.

Playing pretend is where she excels most these days, and being here… Being herself - without the distraction or purpose that comes with a tangible mission - is what feels like a universe unknown.

The triumph of the day vanishes along with the fraudulence of this other person she's gotten to escape into over the last several hours, and with the squeak of the pipes and a thin spray of lukewarm water, the high of squashing Emma's plan rinses off of her for good.

Darkness crowds in. Her mind tunnels through hours of tedious concentration, mindless silence, the exhausting pressure of faking it day after day, week after week. She hears the same rote repetition of her mother's incessant preaching. Wyatt wants to know what happened to her? It's not half as interesting as he imagines it to be. Carol Preston's idea of torture was to imprison her daughter in what felt like one massively regressive time warp, thrusting Lucy back into the position of a dutiful - and often neglected - student who must sit back and watch the master at work. Flynn had no idea how close he'd come when he'd accused her of being her mother's lapdog. She could stand here for hours and watch as the dust of South Carolina washes away, but the piercing accuracy of his words stains far deeper.

Anger swells in her chest. She refuses to let this happen. Rittenhouse doesn't get to win, not today at the racetrack and not tonight in her head. She will not let their voices take up any sort of permanent residence in her mind.

Lucy reaches for the victories instead. They did more than thwart a Rittenhouse sleeper plot in Darlington; they also spared so many lives from what would have been a horrifically senseless tragedy. She remembers Wendell Scott's determination to set his own course in life even if it would come without recognition. She lets herself smile at the mental image of Rufus doing that little nod of acknowledgement and garnering nothing but confusion. Has he realized that he might just be the one who planted that gesture in history now? That's another potential ripple of consequence their team may have just added to the ever-shifting lines of time, but in Lucy's eyes, that may just be the best thing they've contributed so far.

The darkness is easing away from her, but it's not enough yet. She instinctively know what it will take to tip the scales toward the light before she's even giving it - giving him - any conscious thought.

Wyatt's little boy enthusiasm flashes behind her closed eyes. He'd confessed his love for the 1950s once before, even went as far as telling her that the cars were cool, but that conversation in Washington, D.C. had been nothing in comparison to what she'd witnessed today. Only now does she understand just how much he'd downplayed his enthusiasm back then. He really does love the 50s, or more specifically, oh God does he ever love the cars of the 50s…

Which reminds her that today isn't their first heart pounding car chase, either. Lucy recalls Vegas in the 60s, the remoteness of a desert night, the glamour of Judith Campbell, and a vague sense of floundering trust in Wyatt's abilities that is far, far shakier than anything she feels toward him now. There'd been a bomb involved that night too - an atomic bomb, no less - and he'd been just as sure then that he had the situation well in hand, that he could play chicken with all of their lives and win. He's always sure, or at least he seems to be...

But he's also so much different than the person she imagined him to be back then. The little gestures of support from early on - sticking up for her when she'd lost her sister, taking her hand in his as she cried over Lincoln's spilled blood, buckling her into the Lifeboat when he'd noticed her spiraling frustration - they've added up, multiplied even, reaching some kind of crazy exponential growth trajectory that she can't even begin to calculate since that sort of math is way out of scope for her, but the end product is easy to discern. Wyatt Logan is composed of so many beautifully complex parts, and when she tries to make logical sense of who he is in her brain, the only thing that's clear is that she has to be in love with him.

A few new layers were peeled back today, serving as poignant depth and shade to the overall picture. The fact that he could laugh so wildly as he tore through the streets of Darlington, hold her so securely when the walls had been closing in on her, wade so gently through the emotional wreckage of her life - wreckage that she'd much rather ignore despite his best efforts to ease her out of the debris...

Guilt wedges against her heart. He wants to help and she's far more comfortable with the idea of imploding on her own instead.

Lucy scrubs the standard-issue shampoo through her hair with unnecessary force. There's no reason to hide from him. He sees right through her no matter what she says, doesn't he? Even when he's too polite to call her on it, he knows a lie when he sees one. She's not okay. He knows it, she knows it, the whole damn Silo is apparently trading notes about it, so there had really been no point in telling him she was fine.

She hears the way he'd asked her about staring at the ceiling all night long, sees the unruffled twitch of a smile that shaped his mouth as he admitted to discussing her sleeplessness with Jiya. It's the same way he'd breezily recollected that she's wildly claustrophobic in the back of Wendell's car. It's too easy for him, like the idea of talking about her shortcomings brings some type of strange levity into his life, but she knows that's not the case. It's a well-honed maneuver. If he can smile as he addresses it, talk it down like it's no big deal, then she's supposed to match that tone and spill her guts in an equally offhand manner. He's succeeded with that tactic before; God knows she doesn't bring up her awful car accident story to just anyone without some pretty serious prompting. But with Wyatt? The experience of nearly drowning in that river had flowed right out of her as if she opened up about it every day.

As it turns out, she knows now that she's not the only one who's sunk a car into a significant body of water. He's done it too, but his was an act of defiance, something he can laugh off these days because it's been relegated to the rear view mirror. She longs to feel that same indifference toward her own spectacle of a family. She actually hopes it might be contagious, something she can catch off of him if she stays close enough...as in the cuddled up in the secret compartment of a trunk, his body resting halfway on top of hers, noses brushing together kind of close enough.

And now she's longing for something that bears no resemblance to indifference. She's longing for him.

She's just spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about Wyatt while standing beneath the spray of the showerhead. It's all been above board so far, but she can still imagine his shit-eating grin if he knew he'd been the center of so many of her shower thoughts tonight. Does she dare take it a step further and think about Wyatt in the shower...with her?

Lucy cuts off the water with a hasty, graceless movement. Too far. Too damn far. So damn far that now she can't stop picturing it.

Maybe she should have held onto that moonshine from '55. It sure wouldn't hurt to have something harder than tap water to throw back right about now, although the tap water in this bunker is actually pretty damn hard all on its own.

That helps to tame the flare of heat licking at her insides. She towels off quickly and shoves her limbs through a baggy set of sweats, replaying the bitter taste of the bunker's tap water on her tongue over and over again until she's cleared away all else.

The door rattles suddenly as if something bulky has slammed into the metal chair that she's been warned to use in lieu of a functioning lock. Lucy freezes at a second thudding echo, half afraid that Emma has been leading a full-fledged attack against them while she's been too busy daydreaming under the muffling sound of running water to take notice.

"Uh...sorry." It's Wyatt, and he's muttering another few syllables under his breath before he pipes up again from the hallway. "Wasn't paying attention. My bad."

He's so painstakingly hesitant even through the barrier of the door that she can't keep herself from going straight to him regardless of her mismatched clothing or the dripping mass of untamed hair that's tangled over her shoulder.

The chair is gone with a scrape as she cracks the door enough to catch a flash of guileless blue.

"It's okay," she squeaks out before he can apologize a second time. "I'm finished."

He nods wordlessly as his gaze flicks all around her, never once landing anywhere in particular.

She knows there's a million different things they need to discuss. She needs to address his concerns about what happened to her these last six weeks. They have to stop this almost kissing thing before it drives her off the deep end. She has dozens of burning questions about his past, most of which stem from the fact that his defense of you never asked isn't an option for her anymore. She needs to start asking. She needs to know everything there is to know about him.

Most pressingly, she needs to know why he isn't looking her in the damn eye.

"Wyatt…? You do realize I'm fully dressed, right?"

His lips curl to one side. "Yes, ma'am."

It's the first time he's called her that since she's been back. It astounds her to feel such affection at the sound of something that used to bring her nothing but irritation.

"So the reason you're talking to the space above my forehead is…?"

Lucy watches as his jaw tightens into an exquisitely sharp line. She's sure that he's weighing several different answers before he decides on one that leaves her spinning.

"To keep myself from shoving the chair back in front of the door and joining you in there."

Lightning dances over her skin and steals her voice. If she had been able to recover more quickly, she might have been bold enough to say that there's no reason to hold back on her account. She might have stepped back in invitation, might have dragged him through the doorway by the collar of his t-shirt, might have been the one to shove that chair into place all on her own.

But none of those things happen since she's still gaping up at him like a dumbstruck fish when he speaks again.

"I think we both know that's not a good idea, though."

"We - we do?"

His gaze meets hers at last as the exact shit-eating grin she'd been picturing earlier stretches across his handsome face. "Yes, we do. Chaos is sure to break out as soon as I take another step in your direction. An alert from the Mothership, a frickin' natural disaster, every goddamn person in this bunker needing the bathroom all at once - I don't know what it will be, but the moment I decide to kiss you, interruptions will be raining down from the sky. The laws of the universe seem to demand it."

She's laughing even though there's a part of her that's too annoyed to be amused at this point. "We have to catch a break eventually, right?"

"That's the thing," he says a little less lightheartedly, "I think it's a bit of a sign. Maybe there's a reason our timing is so off."

Her breath gets stuck somewhere between her mouth and her lungs. "A sign? I didn't think you believed in stuff like that."

There's a twinkle of humor in his expression, but he's still making no advances toward her as he answers very deliberately. "I didn't. You only have yourself to blame for that change."

They stand there motionless, facing off in the doorway of the bathroom, locked in a terrible stalemate that Lucy isn't fully comprehending. If he's serious - if he's really taking cues from the universe these days - then why is he still blocking the exit? And if he's not serious, shouldn't he be kissing her by now?

She spins around to toss everything in sight into her little plastic tote of bathroom supplies, throwing out random snippets of disjointed sentences over her shoulder as she goes - "Right. Okay, so - I'll be out of your way...just give me a - "

"Lucy..."

"There you go," she announces as her loofah lands in the shower kit with a wet thwack. "All yours."

Something unknowable streaks across his face with those final two words...something that makes her shiver all over.

She's not in the mood to test him now, though. Her face is probably burning with embarrassment and there's no need to prolong the awkwardness of this cryptic non-talking thing he's doing. She squares her shoulders and makes a move to duck past him into the hallway, not daring to say another word as she rushes out.

Wyatt intercepts her with one fluid sweep of his arm, turning her back flat against the bathroom wall while he firmly closes the door to the hallway with his other hand, and then he's on her with a kiss that borders on demanding. His mouth traps her just as fully as the hard planes of his body that press her to the wall. She drops the shower kit in a second, rising on her toes with her hands grasping at his face, giving everything she can, letting him take whatever it is he wants from her, whatever it is he's searching for with a desperation she readily matches. His hands slip soundly down around her waist, tormenting her with visions of what'll come next if he -

If he draws back and keeps her pinned to the wall with only those hands, no longer looking like a man who has any interest in kissing or touching or lifting her up to wrap her legs around him…

Okay, this is so not what she'd been banking on.

"What?" she puffs out, feeling her own face crinkling up as she examines his furrowing brow. "What's wrong?"

He takes his time in answering. There's a war waging in his clouded blue eyes, one that still seems to be unresolved even when he finally finds his voice again. "It scares the shit out of me to start this with you before I know you're really ready."

A broad stroke of sadness paints over his confusion as soon as the words leave his mouth. The pressure on her hips begins to ebb away, but Lucy's hands fly to his wrists before he can release her completely, frantic at the thought of losing this last thread of contact between them.

"If I'm ready? No offense, but I think I've been ready a whole lot longer than you have."

She immediately regrets saying it, because what kind of fool would not-so-subtly remind him of his wife when he's already harboring a different set of doubts? Why is she always in such a rush to hit the self-destruct button before someone else can do it for her?

A small, vulnerable smile flutters over his mouth before she can get too far on that tangent. His hands glide higher, rucking up her sweatshirt until she feels the warmth of his palms on her skin. "No offense taken. That's just not the kind of ready I'm talking about."

"What is it, then?" she asks softly, tipping her head back and reaching for his cheek, too fearful to pull him any closer but needing to touch him all the same.

His thumbs sweep back and forth over her waist in a gesture that's equal parts comforting and frustrating. "Lucy, I - I may not know exactly what you're going through, but I do know grief, okay? I know PTSD too, and I sure as hell know bad dreams and sleepless nights."

"Wyatt - "

"Please, you need to hear me out." His throat bobs, eyes glowing with determination. "I know what it's like to feel lost, and even worse, I know what it's like to override that feeling by diving headfirst into any distraction that can fill the void. I've thrown myself into piles of work, volunteered for every dangerous mission that came up just to try to absolve myself from one that went horribly wrong. I've also been known to use the people around me in various ways as an outlet for the pain I can't talk about."

He takes a meaningful pause there. Brittle tears build in Lucy's eyes as she catches the implication that's dividing its way between them.

"I wouldn't do that," she says in a tiny, rasping voice. "I could never use you like that."

"You wouldn't do it on purpose and you wouldn't do it to hurt me, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't do it at all."

He's cutting right through her with his steady eyes, his careful inflection, his persistent touch at her waist. He's slicing away at her heart and it's not fair. It's - she's…she's tired of being helpless. She wants to strike back verbally, but the words won't come, so she tries to push him away physically instead.

Tough shit. Her heart's not in it and he's not budging, so she lands right back where she's meant to be, surrounded by him and forced to face the music.

"I - I want this, Wyatt. Really, I'm ready, and not because of anything else that's going on. I - "

"You don't need to convince me, Lucy." He leans in and kisses her tenderly on the forehead. "It would just make me feel better if I knew what was going on in that head of yours, okay? Can you please try to talk about it...for me?"

So this is what she gets when she can't be swayed by casual, off-hand, smiling Wyatt. She has to resist the lure of affectionate, unguarded, sensitive Wyatt instead. Her whole body deflates when she considers those odds. She has no chance of holding out against that kind of firepower.

He nudges his nose against her temple, hands firming up as she falters. "Let's make a deal, okay? You talk a little, we kiss a little. We both get something we want."

It's an absolutely ridiculous proposition, but with just one glance upward at his imploring face, she's fizzling into submission. "Fine. What do you want to know?"

"Did they hurt you?" he asks without missing a beat, carving lines of distress forming around his mouth, "Physically, I mean, because obviously, um - you're - "

She stops him there with a hand to his cheek. "No. It wasn't like that."

"Not at all? You promise?"

"No, they - " she draws in a shuddering breath as a stray memory resurfaces out of nowhere.

"Lucy?" His concern seeps into his grip on her. He's holding on like she might start to dissolve into nothing if he doesn't keep her here of his own volition.

She can't look at him while she says it, so she lets her eyes fall shut and speaks quietly, wanting to soften the blow as best as she can. "Once, I guess. That first night when we were supposed to go back for Amy...that's when my mom told me who she really was, and I - I didn't take it well. I tried to run, even threw a few things on my way down, but...I don't know, I think someone came in from behind me and it all went dark after that. Woke up somewhere unfamiliar with a nasty headache and a big knot on the back of my head."

"And you didn't see who did it to you?"

She shakes her head with her eyes still closed, doing her best to withhold a wince at the audible strain in his voice. "It wasn't Emma...she was busy with her little Mothership operation that night, but that's all I know."

Wyatt's precarious exhale is her only warning before their mouths are meeting again. This kiss is softer than before, so achingly soft that it breaks her heart into fragments because she's tasting the agony on his lips. He's not handling this information well, which is just one more reason she hadn't wanted to go down this road with him. He's going to internalize every stupid thing that's happened to her and that's the last thing he needs - another set of burdens to start carrying around on his shoulders.

She coils her arms up around his neck and tempts him away from his misplaced remorse with a trace of her tongue along the crest of his lip. Lucy can sense the exact moment that his sadness gives way to instinct and she presses ahead, slides their tongues together, delighting in the way he sandwiches her further into the wall with a groan that's bound to be heard by someone other than her. She whines a little in return at the insufficient tease of friction she feels at her core.

"Okay…" he mumbles with his body still weighing heavily against hers, "you're really inviting the universe to screw with us now, Lucy."

"Anyone who caught those noises should be smart enough to steer clear at this point."

"I've been here a lot longer, so take my word for it when I say that you are grossly overestimating the tact of our bunkmates."

She kisses him again, but she's grinning as she does it, and that makes him grin into her mouth too.

All too soon, he's breaking away with a smoky look that turns his eyes to a torrid shade of navy. "That's it...my turn."

"These terms suck," she hisses with a frown. "My turn benefits both of us, but yours is only - "

"My turn also benefits both of us," Wyatt retorts between rallying breaths, "you're just refusing to acknowledge it. Doesn't make it any less true."

She shoots him a displeased look, but a deal is a deal and she's dead set on getting a second turn for herself. "Whatever. Ask away."

Once again, he's ready to go as soon as the opportunity presents itself, almost as if he's purposely armed himself with a full deck of questions. She doesn't want to think about how much time he'd devoted to debating these same questions before he had any hope of obtaining the answers from her.

"Where were they keeping you all this time?"

"I don't know exactly. It wasn't in San Francisco, but it was a place on the coast… somewhere." She shrugs, but no imitation of nonchalance can erase the confining gloom that comes with these memories. "The windows were boarded up but I could hear the ocean."

"And you were...what? Thrown into some kind of holding cell, or - "

"No, nothing as bad as that...it was a suite, I guess, sort of like interconnected hotel rooms with a kitchenette or maybe a small apartment..? Very impersonal, just the essentials, nothing that made it feel like someone's home. And of course no phone or TV or electronics. I was allowed to shuffle around all three rooms on my own if my mom was there to supervise."

His thumb is moving over her hip again, gently spurring her on. "But when she wasn't there..?"

"I got locked up in one of the bedrooms. Someone came and delivered my meals if she was gone for days at a time, but I never once saw anyone else...food would just show up while I was asleep, so obviously I was being watched."

Wyatt nods slowly, and she doesn't like the jerk of his jaw as he considers this information, so she braces herself with the premonition that his next question is going to hurt.

"All that time alone...was it better or worse than being there with her?"

"Worse," she replies without hesitation, glad to have been wrong about that foreboding feeling. "The first hour or so without her was always like a breath of fresh air, but…"

"But it's helpful to have something to fixate on, even if that something is as awful as Rittenhouse," he inserts with a small smile. "Too much anger is easier to manage than too much isolation."

Lucy skims her hands across his shoulders and expels a sigh of relief. He gets it. Of course he gets it. He's a high ranking officer with a Special Forces unit. Her experience over these last several weeks has probably been a cakewalk in comparison to the horrors he's seen, and even then, he'd never diminish what she's been through. He understands because that's just who he is.

She's sure that she's earned her next kiss by now, not that it's about the payoff of their bargain anymore. There's a familiar tug at her heart that never fails to spring up at a show of his unfailing compassion, so she arches closer and...and catches nothing but air as he leans away.

"One more," Wyatt murmurs halfheartedly. "What's the worst thing you did when that isolation became too much to handle?"

She recoils backward so sharply that her head would have struck concrete if not for his hand that races upward to cushion the impact.

So there it is - there's the pressure point he's been working up to, and it devastates her just as much as she'd anticipated. Her world tilts for a frightful stretch of silence as she tries to regain some form of composure, and Wyatt isn't looking at her when she finally refocuses her gaze. He's staring at the cement block just over her shoulder with a bruising grimace, and she worries that he's the one who's not really with her now, his mind retreating off into the maze of his own darkness.

"Hey," she says with a shadow of a caress along his jaw, "you're out of line, soldier. That question is definitely worth more than you've paid so far."

Awareness gradually passes over his face before he nods his approval. She closes the distance and seals them together once more, arms knitting tightly around him as she starts in with a shy nip at his mouth. He opens himself to her freely and his hands creep higher from beneath her shirt. Lucy tumbles against him as he becomes more daring, his touch roaming up her back, plundering along the outline of her spine, his thumbs vaulting forward for a quick graze over her breasts through the material of her bra.

And his tongue...his tongue is working through her mouth so deftly that she can't help but imagine the explosiveness of what he would do to her if he chose to use that tongue elsewhere.

"There," he grunts before she can even consider opening her eyes. "How's that?"

Her chest is heaving erratically. She can't catch her breath, can't respond at all.

Wyatt must figure that out for himself after a few more seconds pass. He slants back in to drop a chaste kiss to the space between her eyebrows as he offers his drawling reassurance. "Whenever you're ready, sweetheart."

There's a teasing note playing along the rhythm of that last word, but he's clearly compensating for a shitload of other emotions, his expression not concealing an ounce of what's at stake.

Lucy gets herself under control eventually, grateful to realize that the anxiety she'd initially felt over this moment has dwindled down to nothing but a hum of adrenaline. "It..it had been so long that I'd lost track of the last time I'd spoken out loud. I was so bored that I actually started reading the pamphlets she'd left behind...told myself it was nothing but research, but that...that lie was hard to swallow at that point. I'd known about the explosion at Mason for a few weeks then and - and I didn't believe any amount of research would be helping anyone, not anymore."

"So what happened next?" he asks quietly.

"I woke up with a start and I...I'd been reciting that damn propaganda in my sleep, not even knowing that I'd started to memorize it. That's just how my brain works. I memorize facts, dates, details...give me a book on any subject, I'll learn it. That's my life."

"And you're good at it, Lucy. Your brain has saved my ass more times than I can count."

She shakes her head, rejecting that attempt at a compliment entirely. He knows where this is going and he's trying to remain positive, but they're too far beyond that particular brand of bullshit. She doesn't want to hear it. "I blew a fuse as soon as I realized what I'd been doing. It was...well, yeah. Not pretty. I tried to rip through the boards on the nearest window. I didn't care how high up I was, I wanted out. Nothing else mattered."

His hand runs across her shoulder but he remains silent, waiting her out with unnerving calm.

"It won't surprise you to hear that brute strength isn't my specialty. All I succeeded in doing was tearing up my hands and making myself that much more hysterical, so I threw a lamp at the wall instead, and then I had my answer...shards of glass were everywhere, and there was no you, no Rufus, no family left to speak of...so why even bother, right? I had nothing left to fight for, and suddenly I was alone with the first sharp object I'd seen in weeks."

Wyatt's unnerving calm is now as dashed up as that stupid lamp she'd destroyed. A tear rolls over his cheek, quivering along the ridge of his stubble, then another one comes streaming down the other side to match. His hand goes static on her shoulder, thumb pressing into the hollow of her clavicle, but he still doesn't speak a word.

She continues with a sigh, the air around them going stale as she closes out this ugly chapter for what she hopes will be the first and last time. "Like I said, I'd be alone for awhile, hadn't heard a peep from my mom since God knows when, but of course the second I'm staring down at a piece of broken glass in my hand, she's breezing into the room like she'd just been out for a minute to run errands and - surprise, surprise - her daughter's had an unfortunate little meltdown while she's been away. Convenient, right? Just a silly mess, nothing she couldn't fix."

Tears are trickling down Lucy's face too, tears she hadn't even felt until they're already sullying her skin and dripping onto her sweatshirt below. "That's when I made a decision. I told myself that it was long past time to get it together, to stop dwelling on what I'd lost. My life may not have mattered to me, but I remembered - I remembered you. You're the one who said we had to stop Flynn because there was no one else who could do it - that it had to be us - and I held onto that. If I was the only one left who had a shot of taking down Rittenhouse, then I was going to make my death count for something more. I wasn't going to waste it on a pointless act of rebellion in that damn dungeon of a room."

She closes her eyes and sniffles once, hard and final. "That's it. That's the worst."

When Wyatt kisses her this time, she's not so sure that he even remembers the deal. His lips collide with hers in a raucous motion that's hectic and out of focus. He keeps stopping mid-kiss to press his cheek flat against hers, their tears mingling together as they breathe in unison. His hands prowl up and down her arms, hook behind her neck, smooth over her damp hair. She hears herself whispering his name but it doesn't seem to reach his ears. It isn't until she captures his hands in hers and tugs him into an uncompromising hug that he finally seems to come back to reality.

"I'm here," she reminds him with her mouth on his neck. "So are you."

He squeezes her even closer. "I know. I'm not taking that for granted, not for another second."

Something is unwinding inside of her, and she's fairly certain that it's a good something...a healthy something. But she's exhausted, bones drained away to nothingness, mind going blank as she absorbs the heat that radiates off of him. "I have a feeling that I'm going to sleep really well tonight."

His face is contorting against her skin in what she presumes to be a satisfied smile. "Glad to hear it. I wasn't quitting until you were unconscious, even if that meant I had to wear you down in...other ways."

She's lucky to already be hiding the flush that's starting to unfurl over her cheeks. "Let the record show that I wouldn't have objected to other ways."

"I'm aware," he says with a smirk she can hear. "But look around, Lucy. You deserve better than this. Way better."

"We might not be seeing way better for a very long time."

"The hell we're not," he grumbles, following up with a kiss that gets lost in her hair. "I'll get us better even if it means locking horns with the boss lady."

She tips her head back to regard him with a weary half-grin. "Hey, I thought I was the boss lady."

"You're the only boss who matters," he chuckles in return. He's still laughing a little as he reels her in for another kiss, one that's stamped with nothing but pure affection. "Now as a show of good faith to help prove myself in the meantime, I've arranged a little switch-up in the rooming assignments for tonight. Jiya's bunking with Rufus, so I can meet you in your room as soon as I'm done in here...if that's okay with - "

"Yes," she answers automatically. "Definitely yes."

"Good, so - "

"Wait, you really did that..?" she interrupts with delayed recognition. "You talked to Rufus and Jiya about switching before we even - before any of this?"

Wyatt smirks back at her, but the hand he runs through his hair is far from poised. "I was feeling pretty confident about how this conversation would turn out until I found myself pacing in front of the bathroom door like a raving lunatic. I couldn't deal with another night of not addressing what's going on between us, not after coming so close to kissing you in that trunk today… but the longer I waited out there, the less convinced I became."

"You paced right into that chair, didn't you."

His grin gives him away, but that's all the more answer she gets. "See you in five, okay? Feel free to doze off without me."

She guides him down for a hint of a kiss, just enough to hold her over until he returns to her again. "Okay."

Lucy saunters back to her room in a depleted haze. She's tired. Zapped. Maybe a little happier than she has any right to be. That conversation had been one hell of a punishing hurdle, but she supposes that someday this will amount to nothing more than a speed bump along the way to that wide open road that's unfolding ahead of her.

She crashes immediately onto her bed, and her eyes are too heavy to fight it off, so she's halfway to dreamland by the time Wyatt is crawling in behind her. He smells so irresistibly fresh and clean with his tousled wet hair coming to rest against her head. Yeah, she admits to herself as he slings an arm over her...this is absolutely more happiness that she can even begin to justify.

"That was longer than five minutes," she whispers groggily.

"I maybe got a little distracted thinking about you and had to, uh, take care of that issue…"

Lucy smiles into her pillow and threads her fingers through his. "Next one's mine. Here or elsewhere, improved surroundings or not - no excuses. Got it?"

Wyatt kisses the back of her neck, hums something that sounds an awful lot like "boss lady" into her skin, then nods against her. "Got it, ma'am."

She falls asleep with that same blissful smile still stretching across her face.

that's all :) Thanks for reading! Reviews are life-giving, friends.

ONLY 3 DAYS TILL SUNDAY