Chapter Text
After they’re off the air and she’s sent everyone home for a few hours she goes to find him where she knows he’ll be: in his office watching whatever’s on ESPN. It’s quiet on the floor for the first time all day and she watches him for a minute, enjoying the silence, before she interrupts.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she says, leaning against the doorframe.
“And?”
“An orgy? With college football games on TV?”
“And shoes,” he repeats. “Hanging from the trees. I know what you like.”
“Why are there televisions and trees in the same –”
“Don’t overthink it.”
“I was thinking about that too.” She looks down at her hand, twists the ring around her finger. It’s too big and one day she’s going to have to tell him that but right now it feels like some kind of fucking metaphor and she can’t.
“I thought you might be.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No –”
She looks up at that, makes a face to say she doesn't believe him.
“– because I don’t know what’s meant to happen next. And I don’t know if you noticed, but I was sorta making it up as I went along.”
“Really? Your proposal was so seamless, I couldn’t tell.”
He ignores her sarcasm, is still glib, “I think that worked out pretty well as a strategy, I vote we stick with it.”
“For tonight?”
“Forever feels like it’d be a stretch.”
She nods. “There are some things to work out.”
“I know that. Mac.” He says her name and his tone shifts to sincere, “I don’t know what’s meant to happen next. I just know … I don’t want to waste anymore time.”
“But less broadly speaking?”
“You mean right now?”
Mac nods.
“Whatever you want to happen, we can do that.”
“Honestly?” She closes her eyes. “I want to sleep for at least a week.”
He checks his watch. “You might steal four hours.”
“Take me home?”
“You honestly think that after six years, I get you in my bed and we sleep?”
He meets her in the doorway and they smile at each other and she thinks on that, on being able to reach out and smooth the collar of his shirt, rest her hand at his neck, guide him to kiss her. (And then lean against the wall, pull him against her, his hands on her face, her back, her hips, her – they have to stop.)
She pushes him back with a palm to his shoulder. “Your bed?”
“I thought you’d say no to right here.”
“You told me earlier that I looked cultured. Not been to Europe cultured, by science cultured. I need to sleep and shower and wash my hair and … burn these clothes and these shoes are rubbing my heels.” She kicks up one foot and runs her finger around the back, wincing. “My bed. And more importantly, my bathroom, my closet.”
“I have no strong objections to where, it can be any or all three of those places.”
He kisses her again and she wraps her arms around his neck and hugs him, just rests against him and tries not to cry.
Outside the storm has stopped. It’s eerie and still, light snow falling, the streets white.
They stand in the street, waiting for a cab and she shivers so he pulls her against him. He feels her relax, a fist at his chest, nose nudging under his chin.
“I’ve missed you,” she says quietly. “And I’m in love with you.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” She hugs him tighter. “But I didn’t say it before. And I haven’t in a long time but. Will, I only ever stopped saying it because I thought you didn’t want to hear it. I never stopped meaning it.”
“I know that too.” He rests his cheek against the crown of her head. “I never stopped loving you either.”
“Then you know,” she says, “That it’s been hell.”
And then she cries. MacKenzie, who hardly ever cries (and never like this or only like this in front of him) sobs against his shoulder for every day they’ve been apart and this then, is his penance. He hates that it’s him who’s caused her so much pain and he knows she hates that it’s her who hurt him so badly in the first place. So maybe if they just spend the rest of their lives making it up to each other then …
That’s his plan.
Every single day, he’ll just be sorry that he ever hurt her, he’ll just love her more to make up for it and she’s already spent six years doing the same.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, voice still shaky with tears. She hides the words in his shoulder, embarrassed to be saying them at all. “Don’t leave me again. I couldn’t take it.”
“What makes you think I could?” he asks. Because there will never, ever be any danger of that.
He’s never been in her new apartment before. Everything looks different but it feels more or less the same, MacKenzie-esque, all ordered mess and a weird mix of modern and homey, hard and somehow soft. He’s distractedly taking stock of the pictures on her walls while she locks the door behind them, looking-but-not-really-looking as he replays the conversation they’ve just had in the elevator.
(She held out her hand to examine it, ring and all. “You didn’t return it.”
“No.”
“That was over a year ago.”
“You said you liked it.”
And she’d looked at him like she couldn’t quite decide how to best tell him he was a prize idiot. Her prize idiot. But still.
“Why now?” she’d asked.
He had kissed her, which wasn’t really an answer.)
And now the truth is bothering him. That maybe now is because she finally stopped pushing back when he was pushing her away. Still. He didn’t return it. Because as soon as she said that’s the ring that’ll do it it had felt like a good investment.
So now is really just long overdue and maybe he should take his own advice and not overthink it. For hours all he’s wanted is to get her alone, properly, in private, and now that they are neither of them seems to have any idea what to do about it.
They watch each other for a long moment in the hall, her leaning against the door. She still looks a little like she’s been crying. (And like he’s been kissing her – her shirt is half untucked.)
“Is it silly?” she asks, half-rhetorically. “That this is awkward?”
“This is awkward?”
“Well." She tilts her head to one side. "Just a little.”
“I would have said surreal.”
“That too.”
Mac extends her hand, pulls him closer, sighs into his mouth when he presses her up against the door. She’s smiling and they’re kissing so he can feel her smiling and –
Fuck, he should have made her this happy a long time ago. (To say nothing of the small miracle that he can make her this happy at all.)
She sheds her coat and kicks off her shoes and they make a bit of a mess of the floor between the door and her bedroom shedding their more superficial clothing until she’s shirtless against the wall and he’s kneeling to kiss her stomach (baseball injuries be damned), hands hiking up her skirt a little at a time.
She stills them with hers, tugs him back to standing.
“It’s been a long day,” she says, taking his hands and resting them on the naked curve of her back.
“Long couple of months,” he agrees.
“That too.” She looks down at their feet, rests her bowed forehead against his chest for a moment. “So.” She looks up. “Do you mind if I shower first?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to add ‘alone’ which makes me mind slightly more than not at all.”
“Not the first time. You can shower with me later, I promise.”
“Put that in your wedding vows.”
“For better or worse, in the shower and on the kitchen counter?”
“Works for me.”
(Her too, if he remembers rightly, and it’s one of the only ways she’s good in the kitchen, which is also fine by him.)
“Thank you.” She runs her hands from his shoulders to the back of his neck, holds his cheeks in her palms as she kisses him.
“Hang on,” he says, when she extricates herself to move toward the bathroom.
He pulls her back and starts with his hands in her hair, works down, touches everywhere, greedy for six years worth of this, her skin, how she feels and the way she moves under his hands.
(She’s going to shower and he’s going to have to think about the logical conclusion of all this touching for ten long minutes, so he wants to get as much in as possible before the drought.)
And the way she sounds. No one has ever sounded like MacKenzie; she’s loud but she tries not to be which makes every fucking whimper feel like a victory, and she tries to be polite but she takes the Lord’s name in vain a lot when she comes. (She says God Will and yes, he feels like one. Then again, he always feels like what she tells him he is. We can do better and Don Quixote and all that.)
He helps her out of the skirt, kisses and kisses and kisses her (mouth, neck, freckle on her shoulder that he’s always loved), reaches between her shoulders to unclasp her bra.
That’s where she stops him, takes his hands and holds them both. Aside from the obvious disappointed kid with hand removed from cookie jar feeling, there’s another kind of heaviness to the moment he wishes they could shake. And her reservations are probably good ones, but he wants to tell her to ignore them anyway.
(He wants her not to have them at all.)
“I’ll be quick,” she assures him.
“In the shower or –”
She narrows her eyes, but she smiles in spite of herself.
“Will?” She squeezes his hand. “I love you.”
“I know.” He reaches up to help her with the necklace she’s struggling to remove. “Here.”
It falls into her palm and she watches it.
“Thank you,” she says with double meaning. “It’s just … a lot, all at once.”
“I know.”
“Five minutes.”
She gave him six years, he can give her that.
He reaches for her and he has such grand plans when she crawls into bed beside him, is already hooked again on the way she gasps when he works his hand under her shirt, wants nothing more than to re-learn everything about her. And she kisses him like she has the same intentions, the full weight of shower-fresh MacKenzie pressed against him, warm and wet and hopefully in more places than one and –
She yawns, drops her mouth into the crook of his neck, lips warm against his skin.
Then he’s only half awake and she’s curling up beside him and they both fall asleep together, arms and legs and hopes and dreams entangled.