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“What is it that you want, love?”
His voice is warm and soft and fond and she doesn’t know how she lived her entire first three decades without it. His fingertips whisper across her naked skin, run up her arm and dance patterns on her shoulder. She is lying with her head on his chest and her arm wrapped around his middle, and all of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, she starts to cry.
“Emma?”
He sits up and pulls her with him, holds her by the shoulders so he can look at her.
“Emma, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers - and it is the truth. There is nothing wrong. There is everything right about lying in bed with your husband on a Sunday morning, when your son is at a friend’s house for a sleepover and neither one of you have anywhere to be.
And after you have made very good use of this very free time. Twice.
“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head and reaches for a tissue. “I don’t know---”
He cuts her off with a kiss, one of those incredibly soft and warm kisses he gives her whenever she is in distress.
“Please don’t apologize.” His voice is a whisper and he kisses her again. “Just talk to me.”
She nods, but those tears she can’t stop because she has no idea how they started just keep coming, and he pulls up the blanket, settles her against him. It feels so fucking right that the tears start to spill in earnest, and he just lets her sob.
For a long time.
When she finally pulls back, she doesn’t care how red her face or how swollen her eyes may be, because he’s looking at her with his scruff that’s too long, and his messy hair that’s way too long, and the laugh lines around his eyes that no longer disappear, and she has never loved him more.
He wipes her cheeks with his knuckles and smiles at her.
“You don’t have to answer, love. It’s perfectly fine if you’re content as things are.”
He kisses her again, and she sighs.
It’s a conversation they have on occasion, mostly when she goes after perps which tip what she calls the Killian-scale. Because he is perfectly fine with her job and everything she does, proud, even, of the way she can handle herself, right up to a certain point. After which his worry tips that scale and he becomes much, much more concerned than anything else.
Exactly what makes up the criteria for hitting this point she doesn’t quite know. She’s not sure he does. It’s probably gut feeling.
The problem is, of course, that his gut has a tendency to be right.
The last perp she went after slammed her into a concrete wall so hard that her old injury came back with a vengeance. She did manage to bring in the perp in question, but she also spent almost a month afterwards doing nothing but lying on the couch with meticulously medically arranged pillows. And going to physical therapy.
He never said a derogatory word about her job, not one. Not when he had to help her get dressed, or carry her to the bathroom, or take two weeks off from work, because she couldn’t move.
He kissed her a lot and cooked her fabulous meals and picked up Henry from school; he joked about how it’s every man’s dream to have an iron-clad reason to take every shower with his wife; and at night he whispered his fingertips across her skin and told her in a low, absolutely indecent voice, what he was going to do to her as soon as she was better.
She is better.
They put the all-clear to the test several times last night.
And twice this morning.
And then he asked her what she wanted.
She knows what he means.
She has seen it in his eyes this whole past month, every time he didn’t know she was looking. He is afraid. And she reminds herself that it’s not just that he is afraid for her.
He is from an entirely different background. Physical violence is just as alien to him as dissecting complicated literature into linguistic components is to her.
He is so, so scared, but still he won’t force her to give up any part of her life, even this one, not even for him.
She nearly starts to cry again.
She smiles instead. “In a perfect world?”
He nods.
“In a perfect world I would not chase perps,” she starts, and she can feel his exhale. Feel tension she had not noticed bleed from his shoulders. “In a perfect world I would volunteer at the homeless shelter downtown where I ended up when I first got out of jail.” She sits up all the way, faces him. “I would drag people into your library by the bus load. Show them all the tools at their disposal. Show them all the opportunities out there. Show them their lives are not ending just because they have fallen on hard times. Show them there is no shame in falling on hard times.” Tears spring to her eyes again, and she wipes at them, angrily. “Show them hope."
“God I love you.” He leans forward and this time his kiss is deep and possessive. His hand winds into her hair and pulls her close and their conversation very nearly veers off the tracks. But then he leans back, wills his breathing to calm, and looks up at her. “So why don’t you?”
She shakes her head. “We need my income, don’t we?”
His brow furrows. “No we don’t. We’ve been fine with----” He cuts himself off and his eyes grow wide. “Is that what this is about? Us talking about maybe buying a house?”
He sits bolt upright. She can see his hands start to tremble. “Emma.” His voice is a whisper. “Emma, love, have you been going after more dangerous people because they bring in more money? ”
Well, when he puts it that way, it does sound ridiculous.
But they were talking about buying a house, because his apartment -- their apartment -- is getting a little small now that Henry is a teenager. A teenager who will not stop asking for a dog.
All of this is expensive, and even though the books (three of them now) sell, it’s not like they’re pulling in JK Rowling money. She wants to contribute.
Emma shrugs, and Killian looks--- devastated. He opens his mouth but no sound comes out, and then he launches forward, pulls her in, wraps her into a hug so hard that she has trouble breathing.
“Emma, please.” His arms tighten even more. “Please love, lets----”
He pulls back suddenly, grips her shoulders, hard. His eyes burn into hers. “I don’t need a house. It’s an incredibly idiotic thing anyway, having to own a domicile as part of fulfilling the dream of a good life. You Americans should never have adopted this particular adage.”
She sputters a laugh. She can’t help it. He’s so earnest.
“Let’s not get a house,” he goes on. “We really don’t need one. What we need, what I need---” he swallows hard, “is you in one piece.” His voice drops to a whisper while his grip on her shoulders tightens. “You and Henry happy. That is what I need. And that is all.”
There is absolutely no way she can’t not cry at that.
It’s the same voice he used when she freaked out about not wanting a wedding, because she had no people to invite other than David and Mary Margaret, and because she didn’t want A Ceremony, she just wanted to Be Married. After which he told her that that was all he wanted, too, and then proceeded to make an appointment at the courthouse, marry her in front of Henry and David and Mary Margaret, and then take them all to their Azerbaijani restaurant, which had turned into an open house for celebration: There was one huge table in the middle and every patron who walked into the place was simply asked to join the festivities.
Emma cried a lot that day.
Especially when she saw David give Killian a hug, one of his patented David Nolan Bear Hugs which was the ultimate David Nolan Seal Of Approval.
She’s still wiping her eyes when he takes her hand. “Emma?” And then wraps both of his hands around hers and holds them against his heart. “Love?”
She coughs a watery laugh and shakes her head. “What if we need more room?”
His brow furrows.
Emma squeezes his hand. “What, uhm, if we---” Her voice cuts out. This is not how she wanted to do this. “We might need more room. Soon.”
She bites her lip.
Waits for him to catch on.
When he does his eyebrows snap to his hairline and his jaw drops.
“Love?”
She nods.
He surges forward and hugs her again. So tightly, she can feel tremors running through his body. He doesn’t let go for many, many long minutes and when he does pull back, his eyes are wet.
“You are not going to get yourself thrown into any more walls. Is that clear?”
Oh, she loves it when he becomes protective. She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. She should be strong and fierce on her own, and she is, but even though she wouldn’t admit it under pain of death, oh, she loves this.
“OK.” There are more words at the back of her throat, but they can’t fit past the lump, and besides, she is now crying again.
Dammit.
“OK?” His eyes are large, and slightly doubtful of her easy acquiesence, and shiny.
“Yeah,” she whispers. “OK. I’d much rather volunteer at the shelter, anyway.”
“Thank you, love.” He exhales a long breath. “You know I never want to tell you what to d---”
She cuts him off with a kiss, and then pulls back and swats him.
“Killian.” She looks at him sternly. “Process.”
He does get so caught up in his head sometimes. There is an absolute fuddy duddy of a professor inside this man.
She holds his head in both hands as he focuses his eyes on hers and breathes and then whispers, “How long?”
“A little over two months.” She grins. “I was a bit distracted and didn’t notice sooner.”
He starts to tremble again, and she moves her hands down to his shoulders. “Killian?” He doesn’t look like he’s breathing. “Are you all right?”
With a growl he suddenly surges up and flips them around, blankets her body with his and gives her the deepest, most possessive kiss he ever has.
When he pulls back he is breathing hard, and his eyes are black.
“Oh love. I am so much more than all right.” He grinds his pelvis into hers and god - he is hard. He bites her earlobe and whispers, “Let me show you.”
She groans as he runs his mouth down her neck and bites her pulse point. Then he lets his hand slide down to cup her breast and she whimpers.
He looks up in surprise.
“They’re getting a little sensitive.”
The grin he gives her at that is both wicked and tender.
She looks up at him and says, “I love you.” His smile turns blinding. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.” His voice is a whisper. The look in his eyes nearly breaks her. “And Emma?”
She nods.
“I don’t want you to worry. We’ll figure things out. We always do.” His hand moves down, splays across her belly. His eyes turn gentle for a moment. “This is amazing, and I love you.”
And then the look turns hungry, and god - that’s her favorite look of his. She lifts her hips and grinds them against him while his hand wanders between her legs and makes her gasp for real.
“Now come here, Mrs Jones.” His voice is wrecked, right next to her ear, as he kisses his way up her jawline and gets himself into position and she groans in anticipation.
“It is high time I show you how much.”