Until She Catches Him

As I write this letter Send my love to you Remember that I'll always Be in love with you

Treasure these few words till we're together Keep all my love forever P.S. I love you You, you, you -- John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Wash smiled when he heard the click-click-click of boot heels in the corridor behind him – Zoe, striding purposefully. Coming to berate him, no doubt. He didn’t mind. He’d rather be taken down four or five notches by Zoe on a bad day than have any other woman fawn on him, pretty much. So when she came click-click-click up the steps to the bridge, he felt the shudder of the flooring right at the base of his spine.

She stopped right next to his console, looking balefully down at him with those dark, delicious eyes and he stared up at her, still smiling – his best ‘innocent’ look. “Well,” he drawled, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

She held out a sheet of scrap paper – the note he’d left in her quarters while she was off-ship, for her to find when she got back. “You wrote this,” she said. It sounded like a threat.

“Well . . . no . . .” he admitted, watching her jaw tighten in disapproval. “I mean, yeah, I wrote it on that paper, but the words aren’t mine. I swiped ‘em. Couple of dead poets from earth-that-was.”

Something in her face changed, then, but she was so hard to read that he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. When she didn’t say anything, Wash said hopefully, “Did you like it?”

She replied coldly, “Did you mean it?”

Wash slid down in his chair, frowning. Did he mean it? What kind of a question was that? It was a love poem! Did men slip love poems to women without they meant . . . well, having thought about it, he decided maybe the question made sense after all. So he said, softly, “Every word.”

Zoe stepped smoothly around the console and grasped him by the front of his shirt, pulling him to his feet. Wash gulped. Was she going to kill him now? For what? For loving her? For telling her so? For meaning it? If she was, he was a goner. He wasn’t at all sure he could raise even a finger in his own defense, against Zoe; wasn’t sure it would do him any good if he could. Her fist was pressed against his breastbone; her face only a handsbreadth from his. The scent of her hair was intoxicating; the thought flitted through his mind, if this is what writing love poems on scrap paper gets me, I’ll do it daily.

“Every word?” she asked. She still sounded like she was about to murder him, right here on the bridge of Serenity.

His mouth had gone completely dry. “Yeah,” he choked.

“You know,” she said, “The word forever is in there.”

He blinked. Tried to smile. “It is?”

“It is.”

Wash tried to focus, tried to figure exactly what she was getting at, what was going on, but she was so close, and she was touching him, and it was all he could do to breathe. It was all he could do to not lean into the short distance between his face and hers, and kiss her. Then again, he might never get another chance like this one.

He leaned forward, and touched her lips with his. He expected her to draw away; expected that the next thing he’d feel would be her fist connecting with his jaw.

So he was surprised to feel her lean into him, and return the kiss. She released his shirt and slid her hand up his shoulder and around his neck, and he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her against him. Forever, he thought, his hands pressed against her back, the pistol she carried in a shoulder holster pressing against his forearm. He kissed her cheek, her earlobe, her neck; she ruffled his hair. “I meant that too,” he breathed into her collar.

She wrapped her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. “Well, then,” she said, her voice softer than he’d ever heard it. She sounded pleased. “Maybe we have something here.”

Mal’s voice came over the comm, and they both startled. “Zoe, can you come down here?”

She reached up behind Wash to punch the button on the bridge’s comm unit, pressing against him as she did. “Coming,” she said, and punched the unit off again. She pulled away from Wash, but fixed him with her gaze. “I don’t do one-night stands,” she said. “I don’t do flings. And you better never say anything to me, your words or anybody else’s, that you don’t mean.”

“Never,” he said, one hand still resting against her waist. He grinned. “I mean it.”

She smiled.

I could die happy now, Wash thought.

Zoe turned to go, click-click-clicking back down the steps toward the hold. Wash sank into his chair, sweating, and closed his eyes. Forever, he thought, and frowned. I mean that. I do?

What the hell did I just do?