Daniel's spent much of his life priding himself on a reasonable and healthy approach to sexuality: moderation, but not asceticism. Despite scuttlebutt at the SGC, he is neither monk nor prude; he'll freely admit (to himself, at least) that his body has needs, and even if it's simply more efficient to take care of them himself, it's never as clinical as it might sound if explained to someone else. He's never been singleminded in the pursuit of pleasure, but he's always thought he had a healthy and adult appreciation of his body's desires.

Right now, and for the first time in his life, he is so hard that his hair hurts.

He's grateful for the fact that it's late enough to be dark outside, because just catching glimpses of Cammie's thighs out of the corners of his eyes while he drives, in the puddles of light from the street-lamps, is nearly enough to make him throw caution and reason to the winds, pull the Jeep over to the side of the road, and slake his thirst against every single inch of the skin she's got on display. Oh, God, he can smell her, rich and mysterious like sandalwood, and the thought that he will be permitted to touch -- that she wants him to touch -- is new and strange and wonderful.

And terrifying. There's a layer of his thoughts occupied in turning over the most banal of worries (when was the last time I changed the sheets? Do I have any idea where I put the damn condoms? Do I even have any condoms?) and a layer that's stuck on the big ones (his rational mind knows that correlation is not causation, but his lizard hindbrain persists in throwing out the fact that the only two women he's ever loved -- the only other two women he's ever loved -- have both wound up as Goa'uld hosts). But every time he slips sideways into starting to fret at himself (as Cammie would say), she shifts her weight on the passenger's seat and makes some small abortive move, like she's stopping herself from reaching for him, and he gets distracted once again by the far-more-elemental equation:

Cammie wants him. Cammie wants him.

He's as far above the speed limit as he thinks his reflexes can safely handle, and the drive to downtown and his building's parking lot still takes approximately fifteen thousand years, and he will never again, never again, mock Sam when she starts going on about relativity. There's no sound in the Jeep but the sound of breathing: his breathing, her breathing, both a little ragged. He knows why he's not saying anything (he can't think of anything that won't sound idiotic, and they've said enough hurtful things to each other in the past two weeks that he's not willing to risk saying the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time again, particularly since his understanding of precisely why what he said was so heinous is still a little bit fuzzy -- time enough to get that cleared up later, really) but he's going through a thousand worst-case scenarios about why she isn't.

He's known for a while that Cammie talks to herself -- only a Deaf person could stand a chance of missing it, and even then, the lips moving would be a dead giveaway -- near-constantly when she's happy and content and occupied, and he's also fully aware that she has no clue she's doing it. He's spent a hundred pleasant afternoons with the sound of her internal monologue drifting in from the kitchen. She talks, she whistles, she hums; Cammie drifts through life on a cloud of sound. It functions as a useful diagnostic. If Cammie is making noise, Cammie is happy.

Cammie's silent now, though, save for the sound of her breathing. If she's changed her mind, he might just let her shoot him like she threatened to.

But when he finally pulls into his parking space, the sound she makes as he snaps off the ignition is a sharp exhale. He's about to turn to her, suggest that they can get the bins of her things (flush of shame there, but what had he been supposed to think?) up in one trip if they just cooperate a bit, when she speaks into the sudden silence brought about by the lack of engine noise. He barely recognizes her voice; it's dark and it sends shivers up his spine. "Baby mine?"

He's been 'baby' to Cammie for as long as he can remember -- and he had noticed that he was the only one who got it consistently (Sam rarely, Teal'c never, and everyone else gets 'honey' or 'sugar'), but he'd never wondered why -- but the possessive is new and thrilling. He curls his fingers around the steering wheel, because if he doesn't, he'll maul her right here. His own voice is unsteady. "Yeah?"

"You think maybe we can skip haulin' the bins up so's I can get my hands on you 'fore I explode?"

And she still isn't looking at him, still hasn't moved, but now it's all right, because now he knows why. He breathes out on shuddering laughter. "Ah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we can do that."

"Okay," she says, in the same tones she uses right before they're about to embark on yet another jailbreak: brisk and bracing. (He once heard her call it her 'pep talk voice', and he wonders which of them needs the pep talk right now.) She doesn't move, until she breathes in, and her shoulders come up, and she shudders, once, straight through. Then she reaches down to her feet, grabs her go-bag in one swift motion, and is out the door with it slammed behind her before he can do so much as blink.

She'd put those impossible shoes back on for the drive over, instead of putting on something more sensible, and now he can see why. Watching her eat up a parking lot with that ground-devouring stride, everything from her ankles up to her hips leaving absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that Cammie's body is a finely-honed, fine-tuned example of physical perfection, is always a delight. Watching her do it in three-inch spike-heeled sandals, all the while wearing a dress that likely violates public indecency laws, is a religious experience. He's caught staring after her, probably gaping like a stunned fish, for long enough to make him feel like an idiot before he realizes that she's halfway to the lobby and he's still sitting in the damn Jeep.

Shaking it off and getting himself moving is torture, but thankfully, objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and he catches up with her while she's waiting for the elevator (usually they both take the stairs, but he's not sure how the hell she'd manage stairs in those shoes to say nothing of the dress and the fact that there is half a centimeter between the top of her thigh and the bottom of it and that's when she's not moving and he is mortally certain that there is nothing underneath Cammie's dress but Cammie herself and a hell of a lot of divine grace). They keep to opposite sides of the elevator by mutual unspoken consent, even though his hands itch to reach for her, to pull her up against him, to let her push him back against the wall --

Ding. The doors open on his floor; he gets himself out of the way of temptation as quickly as possible and into the hallway. He strides right past his next-door neighbor in the hallway (Eric, who calls himself the big gay defense lawyer, and Daniel had lived next to him for two years and hadn't even known his name until Cammie had moved in with him and made friends with the entire building in less time than it took her to finish unpacking her kitchen tools). He barely hears Eric whistling at Cammie behind him, barely registers the call of "hot date, girlfriend?" He's too busy trying to remember how to work the key in the lock.

His blood's rushing in his ears -- the part of it that hasn't been diverted elsewhere -- and the whole world feels bright and overexposed. He gets the door open, and Cammie's right behind him as he gets through. He's just flipped on the light switch to brighten the entry hall when Cammie kicks the door shut with one heel, slings her bag down the hallway without seeming to care where it lands, and shoves him back up against the wall with the flat of her hand in the hollow of his shoulder.

She's down on her knees in front of him before he can so much as blink, her thumbs pressing into the lines of his hips where her hands are holding him, and he can feel the heat of her breath as she mouths the line of his jeans' zipper, mouths the spot of damp he's been able to feel growing there for the past twenty minutes. Then she turns her head and rubs her cheek along where her mouth just was, and his knees threaten to give out on him and make him slide to the floor with her. "Wait," he manages. He has no idea where to put his hands, but God does he want to touch her. At this rate he'll embarrass himself like a teenager before he even gets the chance to. "Cammie -- wait, slow down, wait, give me a minute to --"

She looks up at him, and he can see that despite the light from the hall lamp, her pupils are nearly swallowing her whole eye. "No," she says, simply, plainly. "Baby mine, I am done with bein' a grownup, and we might got all night but if you don't let me get my mouth on you right this fucking second I am gonna scream this building down like a banshee."

He can't figure out why she'd want to -- blowjobs, in his experience of women, have been something doled out reluctantly and with an air of great forbearance (before Sha're, but Sha're had been innocent, and the two of them had learned each others' bodies so thoroughly and lovingly, and for the first time, the thought of those sweet and happy times doesn't hurt in the least). But apparently he's not going to be given a chance to register another protest, because he can feel her mouth closing over the button of his jeans, sucking damply on denim and working her teeth until the button pops open, drawing down the zipper with teeth and tongue, and then she's got his dick in her hand and into her mouth and Daniel's vision goes grey.

He's got just enough self-control left to remember not to bang the palm of his hand against the wall, because he doesn't know if Eric was coming in or going out and he doesn't want Eric to call 911, and there's something in the back of his brain trying to remind him to keep control, because this should be about her pleasure, dammit. But apparently it is. She's got her other hand snaked around the small of his back, pressed flat against the top of his ass, and she's using it to urge his hips forward like she wants him to bury himself in her mouth.

He scrabbles at her shoulder with his hand, trying to warn her to leave him one remaining functioning braincell, enough to remember that he shouldn't accidently choke her. She pulls her hand away from the base of his dick, circles his wrist, and pins and holds it against the wall, long enough for him to get the message. Then she moves it so his palm is cradling the back of her head, puts her hand over it, and slides her lips so far down his dick that he can feel her nose brushing against his pubic bone.

God. God. She's making breathy little moaning noises in the back of her throat like she's just as turned-on by this as he is. He can feel them vibrating through her mouth and straight through him as she hollows out her cheeks and swallows hard, as her tongue slides along him, as she spreads her knees wide to capture his ankles between them and rocks back so she's sitting on her heels. She takes her hand away from his, and urges his hips forward again, and the noise she makes is like he's just given her something she's been wanting for a long time, and he's just trying not to break things. Like his lease. Or her neck. Because he's sure he's not supposed to be this rough with her. But she's not showing any sign of easing up.

His fingers curl around the hinge of her jaw; he can feel his heart hammering in his chest. He hears his own voice, sounding faraway and distant, and he has no idea what he's saying. Or what language it's in. But it doesn't seem to matter; she laughs, deep in her throat, and the sound of it would undo him even if the vibrations didn't.

Before he can warn her, before he can say anything, he's coming against her tongue, like a shot to the chest, like everything inside him has been tense for forever and is exploding all at once now. He always forgets how it feels when it's someone else, not his own right hand, not just 'taking care of needs' but something that springs from mutual desire and affection and love. And just as he's starting to center back in on the way his pulse is leaping and his knees feel weak, just as he's starting to think he should do something or say something or -- something -- she slides her mouth off oversensitized skin with slow and torturous ease. She tucks him back into his underwear with the gentlest of touches, not bothering to zip his jeans back up, and he can feel the little electric shivers running through her skin as she licks her lips.

Then she's rocking back on her heels, standing, pressing herself up against him, warm and solid and secure and strong, and she's licking at his lips too, until he opens them and yields to her. She kisses him like they've got seven seconds left to pack a lifetime's kissing into, and her mouth tastes of chocolate and mint and the taste of him, and he'd thought the kiss back in her apartment had been perfection. Now he knows it was only a beginning.

He slides his arms around her waist just as she breaks off the kiss. "Babydoll," she says, "you ain't got no idea how long I been needing to touch you like that."

There's honey and lazy sunshine in her voice, and it's lower and throatier than he ever remembers hearing it before. He groans, because no matter how long she's been needing to touch him -- and sometime soon they're going to have to have a conversation about just how long she's had the idea, because he has a sneaking suspicion it's going to make a lot of things suddenly start to make sense in hindsight -- he's starting to realize that he's been needing to touch her just as long. She's solid and tangible and touchable and real beneath his hands. It takes him a minute to realize what's wrong with this equation -- she's still in the heels, which makes her taller than he is, and the sudden realization that she hadn't even stopped to take off her shoes before sliding down to her knees shouldn't be as erotic as it strikes him.

But she's winding her arms around his neck, and as he slides his hands down her hips to let his fingers quest beneath the edge of her dress, she steps out of one shoe at a time to kick them aside. Barefoot and against him, she is at just the right height for him to nuzzle the side of her neck. She smells like real vanilla and fresh-baked bread, two scents he'd been familiar with only in the abstract until her introduction into his life, and he wonders if every part of Cammie Mitchell smells new and different and wonderful, and he resolves that he's going to find out. He kisses her, in the hollow that lives right behind her ear, and she shivers. "Cammie --" he says.

"Take me into the bedroom, Daniel," she says, and it's direction and request and order and promise all wrapped up into one, and he puts his hand into hers and does.

He stops them just next to the bed, suddenly uncertain about what comes next. But Cammie turns so the backs of her knees hit the side of the bed, and falls over backwards, and props herself up on her elbows and looks up at him, dark-eyed and full of promise. She's laughing -- not at him, but out of sheer joy, and he remembers, right then and there, that he's always thought all sex should be full of laughter, and he thinks that with Cammie, it probably is. Her knees fall apart, and her dress is riding up to her hips, and he had been right: she isn't wearing anything underneath it. Her thighs are glistening wet and sticky, just from wanting. From wanting him.

He pulls off his shirt, kicks off his shoes, almost like an afterthought, because his eyes are on her. He's pushing down his pants when she wiggles backwards on the bed and reaches down to gather up the material of her dress in both hands, brisk and practical and somehow even more alluring for the fact that she doesn't linger seductively at the task; her dress joins his clothes on the floor, and he suddenly knows that she was right to ambush him in the hallway, because if he'd still had that need clawing him up from the inside, he wouldn't have been able to indulge this need. When he kneels on the bed between her thighs she sighs, and her eyes close, and her head falls back, and she puts one foot on the arch of his thigh and kneads it with her toes like she has to have some part of her touching some part of him even while she's waiting for him to make up his mind about how he's going to touch her.

"Come love me, Daniel," she invites, laughter in her eyes, and his heart feels like it's fluttering in his chest like a bird as he bends over her and presses kisses against the magnificent curve of her belly.

I do. I will. The words rise to his lips, but he swallows them back -- words have the power to summon the fates, and Cammie should know that she is loved, but he can't yet bring himself to risk all the tragedies he couldn't bear again. He tells her with his body instead -- hands, lips, tongue, kissing his way down her belly, feeling the shift and leap of muscle beneath the silken perfection. The smell of her, heady and inviting, makes his skin tingle, even though he's utterly spent. He settles his weight between her thighs, and she lifts one leg, hooking her calf over his shoulder, resting her heel lightly against his back. The curve of her hip, the swell of her thigh, all lead him downward, and he shifts so he can slide two fingers inside of her even as he presses his tongue against her sex.

The sound she makes is half sigh, half moan, and it makes him want to give her -- everything. Everything she's given him, and more. Peace and joy and happiness and contentment and all the things he doesn't have any words for.

"God," she says, awe and joy, "yeah, yeah," and her hips hitch up against his fingers. Her head falls back, her fists twining in the rumpled sheets of the bed he never bothers to make when he gets out of it in the mornings. The sound she follows it up with as he twists his fingers inside of her isn't precisely a moan, or a whimper; it's just need, relief and hope and wonder all at once. "Like that," she says, breathless already. "Like that, yeah, God, Daniel --"

The string of words pulls at him, none of them quite real, direction and encoragement and -- because it's Cammie -- a hint of a dare. "Fuck," she says, when he brushes the tip of his tongue over her clitoris. Her thighs tense around him, and she bangs her heel against his back. "Fuck, yeah, there, harder -- God, Daniel, your hands, I want you in me --"

It should be crude, he thinks, with the one corner of his mind that never stops analyzing, and yet -- it isn't. He rather should have realized she'd be bossy in bed. Or -- not bossy, but precise and clear, offering a roadmap on how to please her. And he wants (so badly, so much) to please her. Three fingers, twisting in and out of her. Lips and tongue and, at her command, teeth applied just so, and when she comes the first time, he doesn't stop. He has one arm twined around her, his fingers inside of her; her legs are wrapped around him, her fingers tangled in his hair, and that's enough touch for him to know what she wants. What she needs. He might not have her experience, but he's no innocent, and he can read the flow of information from her body as easily as (easier than) he can read a page of text as she gasps and writhes and swears under his ministrations.

Body and voice and the tension in her muscles all tell him when it's finally time to stop, to let her slide down (drowsy and sated) into the last tiny aftershocks of pleasure. Her skin is damp; he kisses the inside of her thigh as she lets her leg slide down from his shoulder. He slips his arm out from under it as it falls and strokes his hand down, hip to knee, rising up, kissing her belly (rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away with me). He kneels back, rolling his neck to work out some of the kinks. His spine cracks. She's watching him through drowsy eyes; she lifts a hand, slowly, as though her muscles have turned to lead.

He moves up the bed, fitting his body against hers, feeling the stirrings of renewed desire as he presses himself against her side. She tips her head to face him, her eyes still languid, her body warm and loose and limber. "Yeah," she says -- not an answer to any question he'd asked, but as punctuation to the pleasure she's just received. Her arm curls around him, her fingers tracing lines and curves in the small of his back. "Gimm' minute to catch m'breath," she says, imprecise and blurry. "I wanna touch you. Oh, God, Daniel, I wanna touch you."

She is touching him, her hands restless and hot against his skin, like she's still burning with fever and need even though that initial fire has burned out in them both. It's enough to kindle awakened fervor in his own body. She tips up her face, begging without words for his mouth, his kiss. He can't hold himself back any longer, and he thinks Cammie wouldn't want him to. He rolls over so he's stretched out on top of her, drawing his hands up her sides, until her arms rise over her head with his. "No," he says, against her ear, tangling his hands in hers and pressing their joined hands down into the pillow. "I'm going to touch you first."

She could dislodge him so easily. Knock him free, probably have him face-down on the bed and an inch from begging for his life in half a minute if she didn't want him there, and knowing that makes it all the more sweet when she sighs out and spreads her legs beneath him.

The words tangle in his head -- with my body I thee worship and from this day forward, of life and limb and earthly worship, and faith and truth I will bear to you, to live and die with you and yours against all people and the marriage-songs of Abydos -- but he dares not give them voice. "Stay right there for a minute," he says, holding on to just enough of what he should and ought to remember about the practicalities. He's just starting to shift his weight enough to leave her for a minute (only a minute, but a minute will be too long) when she hooks an ankle around the back of his knee.

"We don't need --" she says. "Let me feel you." She wraps her thighs up around his hips, and oh, he'd known she was flexible, but not like this: he has her arms pinned down to the bed above her head, and she can still shift enough to trap him against her body, twining her legs over his and rocking her hips up so he can feel his dick sliding up against her damp curls.

And maybe this is the slow and gentle he'd been thinking of, because he doesn't even let himself think, doesn't let the part of him that protests and calculates and arrange things take hold. She's whispering his name against his lips, and their bodies fit together as though they were designed that way, and he slides into her and it's everything he didn't know he was missing.

Then it's nothing but tight liquid warmth all around his dick, and the heat of her body radiating into him. Daniel lowers his head to kiss her. For a long sweet eternity, he luxuriates like that -- kissing her, holding her, her holding him against her with her thighs and her ankles and her kiss. Then he realizes that his hips are rocking into hers just a little, not even thrusting, just a slow rhythmic push like a steady pulse beating. The moment he becomes aware of it, he wants more. He untangles her hands from hers and settles his elbows against the mattress, and she wraps her arms around his neck, and he pulls back and thrusts.

It's slickness and tightness and being able to watch her face. Closeness, and being close to her, and listening to the sounds she makes, an entire language of huffs and growls and tiny throat-noises. Softness and strength and serenity. And he wants it to be good for her, wants it to last, but it isn't long before he realizes Cammie has other ideas entirely. She rocks up against him, pushing, challenging, demanding his strength in return. He can feel the flex and play of muscles -- in her arms, in her thighs -- and a part of him (below speech, beneath conscious thought) realizes that there's no need to hold back. She isn't fragile. She won't break.

He couldn't hold back if he wanted to, anyway; it's match her or be flung off the damned bed, and Daniel has no intention of going anywhere. He's straight-armed against the mattress and she's curled up around him, clawing at his back, hissing curses at him in languages he hadn't known she knew. It only makes him want to drive her further -- how many languages do you know, Cammie? Let's find out -- and he chases his own pleasure as ruthlessly as he serves hers, both of them driving toward the ultimate goal, this time together.

When she comes, she arches backward strongly enough to lift him clear off the bed. He barely notices. He's almost there, and she's managed to drive him out of the part of his head that endlessly analyzes, because he wants, he wants --

"Yes," she hisses, and "do it, come on, come on, baby, come for me --"

He feels it in his thighs, his back, his balls, his dick; pushing and thrusting and grinding into her with a mindless need to have. To hold. Spent, he collapses against her neck, sweat-drenched and gasping, and she combs her fingers through his sodden hair. He couldn't move if he tried. After a minute, she digs a heel into the mattress and heaves, her arms still wrapped around him, and settles herself onto one hip, cradling him against her chest.

Daniel wants to say something profound, something loving, something that will encode all of this into words, but all he can think of is that she smells like flowers and ocean, and that sometimes the desert smells that way, too.

And then he's asleep.

When he surfaces again, the room has the soft grey light of early dawn, hazy and misty like time out of time. Cammie has rolled over in her sleep, sprawled out on her back and taking up far more of the space, even in his oversized bed, than any one person has a right to. He's curled up into a tiny sliver of the edge, one of his hands resting on her belly, their legs tangled together. His arm's asleep, and his back is cramped from the way he's been lying, and everything below his waist feels unpleasantly sticky, and he has to pee so fiercely he thinks he might explode from it.

He can't remember being so happy for ... a really long time. Since waking each morning to Sha're's smile, and it's the second time he's thought of Sha're while next to Cammie, and the second time the thought hasn't hurt at all. Not a goodbye, not a forgetting, but a healing, and he hopes that somewhere, in the houses of the dead, Sha're's ka looks upon him and his choice with blessing.

It isn't often that he wakes before Cammie does. He's careful in the process of detaching himself from her, but she stirs anyway the minute she moves, her subconscious sentries rousing her just long enough for him to stroke her cheek and say "just me" in a low voice. She mutters hazy agreement and pitches back down into the depths of unconsciousness. He stays there for a minute, watching her chest rise and fall, conscious of the stupid smile spreading across his face, and then gets up and heads to the bathroom.

Flush the toilet, brush his teeth -- her toothbrush is in the carry-case of her cosmetics that's been taking up space in his bathroom for so long that the back of the toilet tank looks empty without it, because it's with the rest of her stuff in a bin in the back of his Jeep, and he doesn't want to go out and get it. He reaches beneath the sink to dig out a fresh one from his guest-supplies instead, and catches himself hoping that this is the last time the words 'guest' and 'Cammie' ever appear in the same mental sentence. He tries to figure out if he's awake enough that he's up, whether a wet washcloth or a hot shower is more appropriate. The shower wins.

He's somehow not surprised when he hears the toilet flushing from past the shower curtain, the water running in the sink, and a minute later the shower curtain parts and he's joined by a sleepy-eyed, yawning, snuggly woman pressing him up against the cold tile and nuzzling his throat. "Mornin', babydoll," she says, against his skin.

He's always heard that morning-afters are supposed to be awkward. He hasn't actually had that many. It's hard to have a properly-awkward morning-after when you're both running off to class (to attend or to teach), and he hasn't exactly had a social life since SG-1. But if he were collecting awkward morning-afters, this one wouldn't qualify. He's not quite awake yet, but Cammie is incapable of being anything other than Cammie, and right now she seems to be interested in nothing more than him. When he says, eventually, "Cold" -- because the tile is, dammit, and it doesn't matter how hot or how long the water runs, you'd think there were refrigeration coils right behind the wall -- she chuckles, and kisses him, and slides her hands between his shoulders and the wall. He tastes toothpaste, and runs his hands over shower-warmed skin, and the memory of last night makes him want all of it again. Right now.

"Let you wash my back," she offers, drowsy laughter in her voice. He laughs back, and flails out a hand for the soap, sliding it down her spine. She shivers, her shoulders rolling magnificently, her breasts sliding against his chest. They both get clean by the elegant expedient of lathering Cammie up, and then transferring the soap to Daniel as she slithers her body over his. Possibly not the quickest shower in the world, but he can't remember one he's enjoyed more.

And oh, God. He can't decide which he wants more: coffee, or to take Cammie back to bed. Which is how they end up naked in the kitchen. The coffee's brewing, Cammie's balanced on the edge of the kitchen counter with her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck, and he's faintly indignant: the kitchen table is too low, and the counter is -- just ever so slightly -- too high. Modern architects have no sense at all.

But the counter's taking enough of her weight so he'll be able to walk tomorrow, and Daniel is thinking -- as much as he's thinking at all -- that she's beautiful in the morning light.

Afterwards, she slides down off the counter, matter-of-factly grabs a handful of paper towels to tuck between her legs, and nestles into his arms. "Hope to God there's something in your refrigerator to make into breakfast," she says, nuzzling his neck, "because we're both gonna need all our strength."

"If there is," he says, absently -- he's far more interested in trying to piece through the puzzle of how she smells like sun warming the desert and a little bit like flowers, when he knows full well she should smell like the soap they both just used and a little bit like his skin -- "you'd know better than I would. I don't think I've opened my own refrigerator in weeks."

She laughs again, and kisses him. "I think I can find something," she says.

The 'something' turns out to be a carton of eggs -- which Daniel knows full well he did not put there; he doesn't buy eggs, not since he got tired of throwing them out, but Cammie uses them without even checking the date, which means she must have snuck them in on one of her grocery runs -- and a loaf of bread, ditto. He leans a hip against the counter and can't stop himself from running a hand down her naked back as she busies herself with bowl, frying pan, stove. When she opens up the liquor cabinet he raises an eyebrow -- he's never seen her drink before dinner, unless their sleep schedules are all turned around again -- but all she does is reach for a dusty bottle of amaretto in the back.

"This needs fresh-baked bread," she says, mournfully -- the way she always does when she's forced to make french toast with store-bought -- as she's busy battering up slices for french toast. "Challah, ideally. But it'll do."

Warm kitchen, naked woman, the early-morning sunlight creeping in through the window and the slow, languid sensation of peace suffusing his bones: Daniel thinks this might be heaven. "Come here," he says, struck by the way the light glints against her skin, and catches her hand.

She cocks her head, puzzled, but when he draws her close and kisses her, she makes soft and happy noises up against his lips. Until she breaks away, sliding free with a tiny click of regret. "Food before love," she says. "I'm starving."

She's disgustingly awake and perky now, even though he knows she's only had half a cup of coffee. But he's known for a while that Cammie, among her many vices, includes an affinity for early mornings that leaves him, quite frankly, shuddering. She whistles as she moves through the kitchen, bright and free, and he leans against the counter, drinks his coffee, and thinks that he's not entirely sure what comes next.

What comes next, apparently, is breakfast (extraordinary; Cammie's french toast is a miracle and a blessing), pushed-aside dishes, and a lap full of Cammie, her lips tasting of maple syrup. His body's not quite up to rising to the gallant reflex again, but she catches his hand when he tries to slide it between her legs to tend to her: not knocking him away, just holding on, but he takes her meaning. Necking at the kitchen table has never exactly been on his list of things he's always wanted to do -- never would have occurred to him, in fact -- but it's Cammie; he thinks, delirious with the soft pleasure of her mouth, completely free of urgency, that anything allowing him to touch her would be enough right now.

Eventually, she slides off his lap to stand, holding a hand down to him, and gives him a smile that makes his toes curl. "I'm too old to be canoodling in the kitchen," she says; "back to bed with you, mister," and he laughs and lets her draw him back down the hallway.

The sheets are crumpled and thoroughly-used. "We'll change them later," Cammie says, noticing him frowning at them, and bounces back into the center of the bed and looks expectant. Daniel's more than willing to follow. There are entire regions of her he hasn't had a chance to get his mouth on yet, and he really, really, really wants to. He stretches out next to her, kisses her mouth until he can no longer even imagine he tastes syrup -- though there's a sweetness there still, and he makes plans to analyze and experiment and catalog all its variants -- and then moves down along her throat.

She makes a liquid, purring trill and softens beneath him, spreading herself out for him to touch. And touch he does, slow and lazy exploration. He spends a long time amazed at the sensation of her pulse beating against his tongue -- so vibrant, so fragile -- as his hands stroke over her skin. Muscle over bone. The irregularity of scars he's seen before, but never touched: slick, raised, hard knots beneath the skin, honorable badges of service rendered and battles survived. He's not in any hurry to get anywhere, because being able to touch any part of her at all is equally miraculous. But the sound she makes when he cups the swell of her breast in his hand and sucks the nipple into his mouth makes him think the journey has a destination, and the beginning of the road is starting to come into sight.

This time, when he slides his hand down her belly and between her legs, she doesn't stop him. She's slick and hot beneath his fingers, and he traces circles along every millimeter. She squirms under him -- lips and tongue and fingers, hips and breasts and thighs -- until suddenly, decisively, she grabs his wrist, pulling his hand away. He's about to protest when she rolls them both over, straddles his thighs, pressing the erection he'd been only vaguely aware of against his belly. She licks her lips; they're swollen with kissing, and her cheeks are flushed. "A'ight, baby, fun's fun," she says, rocking her hips at him.

"But?" he says, recognizing the cue, resisting the temptation to close his eyes (weight, pressure, desire).

She grins at him. "But there's more'n one way to have fun," she says, and kneels up just long enough to clasp his dick, angle it up, and sink down onto it slowly.

For a minute, she's poised over him: naked, flushed, motionless and waiting. Then she breathes out, a sharp sound of relief and rightness, and rolls her hips with one liquid motion until she's right where she wants to be. "Damn, baby," she breathes, bending her head to kiss his lips, "but you feel good," and that's something he can agree with wholeheartedly. The feeling of her enveloping him, bearing down against him, is better than anything he's felt in years without drugs or their equivalent.

He brings his hands up, cups her breasts and thumbs her nipples, and the look she gives him takes his breath away: heavy-lidded, languorous, so full of love and care he thinks he can almost hear her thinking it.

It's more than just the physical. He thinks, suddenly, that it's important for her to know that. She confessed her love for him -- a concept that still leaves him reeling -- last night at a decibel level that means her neighbors are now intimately familiar with the finer points of her personal life, but he never said the same, and he'd rather like to be able to say it in the light of day, while they're entwined like this, her muscles fluttering around him and her knees holding him tight. The words stick on his lips, though. It's been so long, and there's a part of him still convinced his love is a death sentence.

She's been saying it for months, though. Daniel can see it now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight. He lifts his fingers to where she's chewing on her bottom lip; she nips at them instead, drawing them into her mouth, warm and wet. "Cammie," he says, helplessly, and this time she doesn't smile at him. Her tongue rounds the pads of his fingers as she lets them slide from between her lips, and she kneels up and sits back hard and heavy.

"Feel that?" she rasps, and oh, he can't feel anything else: the way her thighs are gripping his flanks, the way she's hooked her feet up over his thighs behind her, the way she's rocking up and down along the length of him (buried so deep). "I ain't lettin' you get away from me. Not now, not ever. I ain't goin' nowhere. An' neither are you."

"Cammie," he says again, more urgent this time. He brings his hand up, spreads his fingers over her belly, dips his thumb down lower to nudge her clitoris. And she moans and arches her back, reaching behind her to plant a hand on his thigh and squeeze, and then he's got his heels braced against the bed and is arching up against each and every one of her strokes.

He's barely able to concentrate enough to keep a hand on her. What he wants, he wants so intensely it almost frightens him, and it's more than sex, more than just physical pleasure. He wants her, whole and entire. Her body, her mind, her intellect and her skill and her bravery and her heart, and it's a need he isn't even sure how he could possibly ever satisfy fully. He's touching her, stroking her, hearing her hitching, rasping breaths. She grabs his hand, pushing it against her, where they're joined. He curls the hand into a fist and rubs his knuckles against her, and she drops all her weight onto his hips, freezes, and snarls her pleasure, and he gasps at the clutch and pressure of the muscles gripping him, hot and slick.

Daniel drags in a ragged breath, finding his words at last, telling her that she is beautiful, she is valiant, that she is his beloved and all the world. But the words he speaks are in a language that he knows she does not know, because all its speakers are dead. He is the last.

When she releases his hand, he grips her thighs. After all the intensity, his own climax is very nearly gentle: a deep soft surge, rather than a detonation. She bears down against him, rising and falling, giving him what he needs. It's strange, perhaps, that in this moment he should feel protected and cherished and safe, but he does.

After, she rolls her spine, sinuous and graceful, and stretches out on top of him. "Good enough for a start," she says, her breath huffing against his ear.

"We should practice," he says, when he's finally sure his voice is steady. He spreads a hand out on her back, fingertips caressing the bumps of her spine. He already wants her again, physical impossibility aside (right now his body's incapable of even thinking about sex; he's a little astonished at the responses she's been able to coax from him). Or -- no. Not quite right. He just wants her. And whether they're about to make love, or are making love, or have just made love -- well, he doesn't think that will affect this fact, or change it, or make it more or less. He wants her.

"Oh, we will," she says, and the laughter's back in her voice. "Told you. Ain't lettin' you go."

There's something, in her voice or in her eyes or just in the sweet press of her skin against his, that makes him believe she means it. That she's thinking the same thing as he is, that this isn't casual for her, that it isn't just a game she's decided to play at. Something eases in the depths of his chest at the way she's smiling at him, and he strokes patterns along her back, feeling her shift and twist with pleasure beneath his hands like a cat being petted -- a comparison he knows better than to ever say out loud, especially when she's close enough to reach his tender bits.

"I -- guess we should talk about this," he says. It isn't that he doesn't trust her, or thinks she's toying with him, or thinks she would treat his heart lightly. But he's thinking words like want and love and forever, and he wants to see if she is, too.

Cammie picks up her head and blinks down at him, sleepy-eyed. "What part of 'this' you talkin' about, honeybaby? Seems to me we got the basics of 'this' down already."

She's got a starburst of moles along the backs of her shoulders; Daniel's never noticed them before, never let himself look, the various times he's seen her unclothed, but now he's seeing her naked and there's a difference. He traces them with his fingertips. "There's -- rules about this kind of thing, aren't there? Relationships, I mean." He's never been very good at them. But he knows that much.

She turns her head away from him, but it isn't annoyance or irritation; it's just manners, to stifle a yawn against his shoulder so she doesn't yawn in his face. "Figure we just keep on doin' what we been doin'," she says. "Only more of it."

He's pretty sure that sentence made sense to her, at least. "If we do much more of 'this' I won't be able to walk," he says, without thinking, and she laughs -- full-throated, joyous, pressing her cheek against his shoulder again, this time so she won't laugh in his ear.

"Oh, baby darling," she says, once she can. "That too. But everything we been doin'. I figure we got it down pretty good by now, right?" She shifts herself a little, rolls to the side, settles herself up on her elbow with her head propped up on her hand and spreads her hand over his chest. "All's gonna change, seems to me, is I'm not sleepin' on your couch now. Am I?"

"Oh, God, no," Daniel blurts. "But I -- you --"

He gets tangled in the words, in the need for words, in the difficulty of constraining the surge of emotion down into syntax and pragmatics and vocabulary. Cammie hooks her leg over his knees and kisses him again, deep and thorough. When she stops, looking down at him, her face is serious. "We do need to talk about the details," she says. "Figure out what'll work for us and what won't. But we don't need to talk about it just now. Daniel -- we don't need to talk about our relationship. We been in a relationship for a long damn time. You just never noticed. And all of the details worked themselves out just fine." She makes a face. "A'ight, most of the details. But the rest of it's just taking care. And we've been doing that just fine."

"...Oh," Daniel says, after a few minutes of considering this, casting his mind back over everything: the bickering, the long talks, the post-injury rehabilitations, the things they've been and done and given to each other. They're all taking on new light now. And he thinks -- this might have been her goal for a long time, maybe even as far back as he can see, because Cammie gives care to and takes care of everyone around her, but so much of what she gives him is unique. "We kind of really have been, haven't we?"

His words are banal, and a little bit embarrassed -- he really has been oblivious, and he wonders how many times she's nearly thrown up her hands and despaired of him, more than the times she did so vocally at least -- but Cammie only kisses his nose. "I love you," she says, simply, and his hand tightens on her hip, out of reflex, his worst-case-scenarios flashing before his eyes. "Have for a while. Will for a long damn time. Can't see it ever changing. An' I'll take what you can give me, an' be what I can for you, an' we'll figure out the rest of it as we go along. An' we're gonna be lucky. Everyone either already thinks we been together forever, or thinks we're just the weirdest best friends they ever seen."

The thought strikes him like a knife. "That -- this -- isn't going to be a problem for you, is it?" he asks. He doesn't know what women go through from direct experience, but he'd be stupid if he hadn't learned something from Sam's rants over the years, from listening to her and Cammie bicker back and forth, and he's heard (and despaired of) all the gossip, no matter how friendly it is. "I could --" He isn't sure what he could offer to do, but he offers it anyway. There isn't much he wouldn't offer her. He'd have been willing to give her a kidney already, and he'd been telling her the truth last night about what losing her would do to him. He'd just thought the impulses came from friendship.

"Daniel," Cammie says, fond and exasperated. Loving. She puts her hand over his mouth. He resists the temptation to lick her palm, and wonders where the hell it came from. She's a bad influence. Or a good one. "Hush. Shut that mind'a yours off for the afternoon and just enjoy today, all right, honeybaby? No use borrowing trouble when you could be doing other things."

Put that way, it does sound appealing. He squeezes her thigh again. "And besides," she adds, somewhat gleefully, "by now I've got a whole mountain full of boys who'll yell 'honi soit qui mal y pense' at the slightest mention."

Her accent is horrible, but Daniel laughs anyway. "Whether they speak French or not," he says.

"I'm translating," she assures him. Then rolls off him and stretches. When Cammie stretches, it is thorough, dedicated, athletic, and a marvel to watch. And now Daniel can, to his heart's content, and he can't imagine it ever growing commonplace and unremarkable. "Now," she says, briskly, "you are going to stay put, and I am going to get the Gatorade, because damned if we're both gonna end up dehydrated."

Daniel laughs again. "I don't have any Gatorade," he feels obligated to point out.

She pauses in the process of getting out of the bed and grins back at him. "Whose kitchen is it?" she informs him. And sure enough, she comes back with one of the industrial-sized bottles.

And Daniel hates Gatorade with a passion he reserves for very few things -- it's on the short-list with Budge, bureaucrats, and budget meetings -- but to his surprise, right now it tastes fabulous. She sits down cross-legged next to him, and they pass the bottle back and forth, and between them, they finish most of it. It's cold (which helps), and that means he not only had Gatorade, he had Gatorade in his refrigerator.

He supposes it's time to give up and admit that it's Cammie's refrigerator. Just as it's Cammie's kitchen, even though both of them happen to be in his apartment. Which means, really, that it's their apartment, and the thought suffuses him with a warm glow. "We could move," he says, and he knows it's out of nowhere, but she doesn't look at him like he's grown an extra head, which means she's been able to follow at least some of his thought process, and he realizes just how often that happens. He'd never consciously noticed the lack of what-the-hell and you-freak looks, or the way he almost never has to stop and explain to her, or the way she'll let him seize the conversational reins and catch up later. But she does, and she can, and the realization is enough to derail him.

"Move?" she prompts, when he (distracted by this insight) fails to continue.

He shakes himself. "A bigger place, I mean," he says. "Space. For -- us."

Cammie melts. He can see it: her shoulders curve, and her eyes go soft, and she gives him a smile he's never seen before, sun rising over the mountains. "I got plenty of room here," she says, twining her fingers with his. "And I know you love this place. An' I love the kitchen. Although I wouldn't say no to a bookshelf I can shelve with impunity, though."

They will never, ever, ever stop having the bookshelf war, because her filing system is completely and utterly wrong. And the fact that Daniel's been willing to put up with it so far should have been a sign to him, now shouldn't it have been? "Absolutely," he says. "And you can -- bring things over, if you want. I mean, not that you haven't. But -- your own furniture?"

He wants her to feel welcome here. To feel safe, and secure, and cherished. Because she is. And he knows how important home is to her, how important she considers family. He's seen it in her for so long.

But she's smiling at him, and shaking her head. "Furniture don't make a home, baby mine," she says, and he will never get tired of hearing her call him that with so much obvious love in her voice. "People make a home. And laughter. And love. An' the smell of bread baking in the kitchen, and having someone to put your cold toes on to warm 'em up, an' snuggling up on the couch to listen to the rain outside. An' we've had that for a damn-hell long time, you know, an' now you know why I been so stubborn about needing to tend it."

It's like a revelation. Like a brick to the head, fast and painless, the rush of realization. Watching her dust and scrub and tidy has always bothered him before -- because he's thought it was demeaning for her to have to, because he never wanted her to feel like she was obliged -- but all of a sudden he understands, and in that instant he'd allow her to arrange every book he owns by size and color if she wanted to. "Our home," Daniel says, and the plural possessive is terrifying and liberating all at once. This had only ever been an apartment to him, a place he keeps his things. Until Cammie. Not through anything he's done -- he's never known how to make or keep a home; his life has always been transient, transitory. But step by step, slow stage after slow stage, this apartment has changed from the place he lives to his home. Their home. Cammie has done this. For him. For them.

It's the greatest gift anyone has ever given him.

"Has been for a while," Cammie assures him, and picks up their linked hands so she can kiss his knuckles. "Just had to keep you from noticing. Didn't want to scare you off before I had my hooks in you."

A part of him notices it's an answer to a question -- just how long she's been planning this -- but the rest of it is drowned in the rush of love, whole and entire. Daniel takes her hand in both of his, turns it over, presses a kiss into her palm. They've made love so many times already, between last night and tonight, that everything aches by now, well-used and well-spent, and he still can't get enough of touching her. He wonders if he ever will.

"Now, c'mon," Cammie says, pulling her hand free, re-capping the empty Gatorade bottle, and chucking it half-heartedly at the wastebasket without even looking; a perfect shot, and he marvels at her aim. "I'm stealin' your yukata --"

Which is nothing new; she even knows how to tie one properly, and he wonders where she learned it, and he's struck once more by the realization that he's allowed to ask now, where before he'd always tried to be polite about not interrogating her about her past and her history. He's always figured she'd tell him what she wanted to tell him, and she's never been shy about talking about some parts and there are other parts she won't go near with a ten-foot pole, but -- lovers; a lover can ask what a friend can't be sure of. And it goes both ways, and the thought of talking, of telling her the things that he's kept penned up for years, terrifies him. But only a little.

Cammie doesn't seem to notice his mind working, though, or she's tactfully ignoring it. He suspects the latter. "--and we, baby mine, are curling up on the couch an' watching bad movies an' making out all afternoon, an' we ain't doin' a lick of work, an' -- brace yourself, 'cause this might be the only time you ever hear me say these words: tonight, we are calling for delivery." His face must show his shock, because she laughs at it. "Because I don't think I wanna take my hands off you long enough to cook."

The laughter bubbles up from the depths of Daniel's chest. "Shocking," he says, and kisses her. "I'll alert the media."

Cammie slides from the bed, lithe and limber, and he watches the play of the sunlight on her skin as she pads unerringly over to his closet and reaches for the yukata and wraps it around her. He looks up at her, and the thoughts hit him, in rapid succession: God, I love her. Oh my God, I'm going to be spending the rest of my life with her. Oh, God, that idea doesn't scare me at all, and it doesn't even hurt.

Because she's Cammie. Utterly impossible and completely implausible and not at all what he ever imagined wanting. The woman who throws popcorn at him, and hogs the remote, and has installed a monster sports package on the TV she made him buy, and wanders around his apartment half-naked, and licks the spoon when she's making cake batter. The woman who won't put up with anyone putting anyone down around her. The woman who won't ever make the easy decision instead of the right decision. The woman who won't let anyone hurt if she can help it, and even if she can't help it, won't let anyone hurt alone. And it's a good thing that she's also stubborn, hardheaded, impossible to convince of anything once she's made up her mind, manipulative, prone to random bouts of temper fits, and utterly incapable of returning the books she reads to the proper shelf of his library, or else she'd be pretty much insufferably perfect.

"Come here," Daniel says, and sits up so he's sitting at the edge of the bed. She cocks her head, puzzled, but comes willingly. He wraps his arms around her waist, and rests his face against the thin cotton of the house-robe, and her hands come up to tangle in his hair.

"I love you," he says. Before he can stop himself.

The sky doesn't fall.

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