Glancing away from Zoe, toward Mal, Wash ran through their three-way relationship in his head. It wasn’t like he didn’t know Zoe and Mal had a pre-established connection. Hell, Mal had pretty damned bluntly pointed out that they’d been together a long time before Wash came along, and that they had a history together. But what was that history? He’d believed--or had convinced himself to believe--that it wasn’t intimate. They certainly didn’t behave in front of Wash as if they had any sort of personal, man-woman type of closeness. Then the gorram Feds let him watch them alone together and Wash had the stunning revelation come to him that he didn’t know how Zoe and Mal acted when they were alone together precisely because he’d never seen them alone together. They were alone together when they were alone together. It was the precise, exact point of the matter.

-- Blue Sun Job, Part 21: PS1467 by Guildsister