on the morning that her file was slapped onto his desk Robert Stahl allowed himself to speak her name out-loud into his empty office.

"Harlee"

the letters tasted like her mouth would months later. Sweet in a way that made his lips tremble. Vulnerable in a way that she'd never allowed herself to be.

"I need to be ok when this is over" it was a whisper over his lips, smeared with her lipstick and almost close enough to move with her words.

"I-I need you to tell me everything will be ok, I need to be able to live with myself when this is over" He couldn't promise but his tongue ached to say something that could give her the peace he'd taken away the day they met.

he kissed her again with her fingers tugging at the hairs on the base of his neck as if pulling him further into her gravity. Her scent consumed him and her lips haunted him, stitched him together and tore him to pieces.

A strand of her hair wrapped itself around his desperate fingers and she sighed into his mouth. you're so beautiful he meant to say, how are you doing this to me? he wanted to plead, but instead he just spoke her name again and again in between kisses and touches.

Soon enough her coat was on his floor, her scent clinging to the fibers of his unsuspecting carpet. His suit jacket followed and her hands touched him everywhere. Her slender fingers spread over his chest so to touch as much as she could manage. His skin tingled under the thin material of his button down almost anticipating the skin on skin contact. It was the last barrier between them, her eyes were warm in the aftermath of could-have-been tears and the depth of her dilated pupils were looking straight through any wall he had the pretense of building.

She was his, at least for the moment and he'd always been hers, save when he pretended to belong to no one.

He kissed down her neck, past where her wire would hang in attention, the tiny stones hiding a bug, the gentle necklace hanging him around her neck. She made sounds that he hoped he could live his life hearing and when he reached the junction between her neck and shoulder she seemed to explode into a fury of popping buttons and broken stitches on his shirt. His blood rushed and her clasp came undone, her body radiated need and his burned to quench it.

The ground disappeared from under her and his fingers splayed over the undersides of her thighs urging her to wrap them around his waist. They gasped in unison when she squeezed and he realized that he couldn't exist again until he made her his own. Something inside him wondered if he'd ever be able to revert back to the agent with the stoic eyes and the cold lips. In a brief second of air and Harlee taking his earlobe into her mouth, he supposed that maybe the answer was no, that maybe the gentile determination of her gaze would always be reflected in his own and that the warmth of her probing lips had been burned into him.

The thought terrified him but then they had made it to his bed and in an entrancing movement she landed on his bed. Their eyes met, sky and earth, and she was the period to end every sentence that could ever exist. She laughed suddenly,but only because he kissed his way down her stomach, but maybe also because finding someone to want was truly intoxicating, and Robert Stahl's eyes were the clear blue moonshine of a lifetime.

The sharp edges of his room beheld the curve of her ass and the slope of her lips as a believer would a deity. His lips worshiped her and she believed in a religion composed of the way their bodies moved as one.

He fell into her sunlight and into her darkness. He felt her becoming everything, his downfall and his completion. her eyes were melted pain and his were swirling with torment and each found their home in the broken cracks of what could have been. As the sun set and her dizzy head met with his beating chest, the pain faltered into a spark, a kiss, a murmur, and if only for one night they confused it for ardor.

She slept, and he followed her, the silence interrupted only by their breathing that sighed I need you.