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The thought had been rolling around since they'd come back from the abandoned house--before they'd left it--and it showed up now, loud and insistent.

Just get it over with. Just end it.

Maybe she'd noticed, or maybe she'd have reacted to that other life with clinginess and affection anyway, crawling under his arm while he was trying to read, chasing his hands while he was trying to type, tugging at his sleeves and his belt loops and his ears. He felt strangely separate from himself and from her, capable of dispassionately turning over his own ferocious love and fear, examining them, assessing all their many weaknesses.

Just tell her you don't want to any more.

He reached tentatively for Fiona, and he got nothing. This was his problem, and there was no optimum solution. The further they sank into one another the more traumatic the tearing away would be. It was already too late.

He'd gone in believing that the thing that eventually separated them would be the inevitable day that his need for normalcy, for a life and a home with her, would outweigh the million small and large benefits he got from being close to her as he could manage. It was different, heart-rendingly different, but it was still the need for normalcy, he thought, that would be the end of things if he did what he felt so much like he ought to do and said to her now: we need to talk.

"Do you remember when I told you about my kitten? Aravis. And how--how you can't--"

He stopped. Just say it. Just make it stop.

His face crumpled and he scrubbed exhaustedly at his eyes to hide it and the tension rose in his throat but he didn't cry. He felt incapable of it. He opened his mouth to say we need to talk and what he said instead was: "I'm so ******** tired. Please don't leave me."

When she surfaced again he was only watching her, his face still set into grim and serious lines.

The conversation wouldn't happen today. He'd told himself save it til after Christmas. And then there'd be New Year's. And Valentine's Day. The goalposts shifted constantly, and he watched her, tired and drained.

"Does the fact that it didn't help mean you won't let him drag you down into his bullshit again?"

"I'm not sorry you did either," he said finally, but it wasn't exactly indulgent or affectionate, just painfully honest. "I'm also not sorry I got pissed. I'm sorry I make things--complicated, or whatever, though."

He paused, and it was obvious that he was feeling his way towards something else.

"I wish you wouldn't get so stuck on--on what might happen later. I wish I wouldn't. I know you can't help it but I want this, you know? Right now. And it feels like one or the other of us is always too busy looking for fire when there's not even smoke yet, to--to just... be here. Right now." The horrible future that was inevitable; the beautiful one that was impossible. Both of them wrapped up in every moment, suffocating the present out of them. "I love you so much it's ********' terrifying but I don't want us to be scared all the time. I'm so ********' tired of being scared. I'll try if you try."

He paused, watching the shape of the water around her knees, and there was no answering smile when he reached up and hooked his pinky around hers.

"You know," he said quietly, "that I never loved you any less when you told me you wanted to break s**t. Because you don't, anyway, not always. Even your ******** in people's business, all the time. Trying to fix their relationships or their motivation or their lives or whatever. Loved you more, because you fix things anyway. And you're good at it--fixing things, holding broken things together. But I don't think you need to--to segregate it, this part of me is good, this part of me is ugly. Or pit them against each other, or whatever. Everyone goes around hating someone or something."

He hesitated, giving himself a little shake and rolling up his sleeves, an abrupt shift in tone indicating that he was willfully removing himself from his pensive reverie for the here and the now, just as he'd just promised. "Your hair's a mess," he informed her, already gently combing his fingers through. "Let me take care of it."

They should have taken a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. He gently teased a tangle loose and ran his hands through her hair, absently kissed her shoulder.

"We should," he said. It was a terrible idea and so, of course, he longed for it. A little slice of faux normalcy. "Just you and me. No work."

He'd just told her to stop trying to think about the future and so the words felt stupid and hypocritical even though the meaning was so drastically different, but he said them anyway: "Let's make plans." A pause. "Or let's just do it. Either way."

Anywhere with you would have been true and it's what sat on the edge of his teeth, but the past several weeks had been too much raw vulnerability and emotion. He'd tried to withdraw from her but she'd thwarted it and so he took refuge, however briefly, in practicality.

Normally he would have had her give him those dozen ideas. He'd told her he wanted to go ice skating because he'd wanted to see her face light up. Letting her make the decisions about things like leave days was never a sacrifice, or if it was it was outweighed by the pleasure he derived from hers. He thought about it, shifting away from detangling her hair to combing his trembling fingers against her scalp, the pretense of cleaning her up abandoned for the true motive of touching her in a way that pleased her, made her lean into his hands.

He yearned to share something familiar with her, the way they had at the lake, in the car. He longed for old comforts, for remembered boyhood outdoors smells mingling with the newer ones of her arms and her hair, and for a house they could pretend for a weekend was theirs, for the amplifying of old fond memories with fresh ones. He didn't want to go somewhere new and strange, always, always accompanied by his irrational fear. He wanted winter rain pinning them up inside and the break in the clouds pushing them down old trails together.

"My parents," he said finally, "used to rent a cabin in the Smokies every year. Not ********... Dollywood, Rock City tourist trap bullshit. Out in the park." He paused, tipping her head towards him so that he could distractedly kiss her forehead. "Every year I wanted to see a bear and I never did."