Takes place between 6x11 and 6x12. Title from e.e. cummings.

The ride back from Hilltop is drenched in silence, heavy with the weight of the promises they've made. Michonne leaves her perch at the front of the RV, away from Rick's sidelong glances and her own wandering gaze, shy in a way she'd thought she'd long since forgotten the taste of.

Alexandria opens for them, lets them in, and returns to its rest. Rick won't tell them what's been promised on their behalf until the next day. Instead, she and he go home, a bizarre luxury, but no less comforting for it.

It's late enough when they step past the threshold that the house is dark and quiet. Rick and Michonne don't talk as they pad on silent feet up the stairs and quickly, efficiently peer into the children's rooms.

Carl is a messy sprawl of gangly limbs and wild hair, tangled carelessly in his sheets and more deeply asleep than Michonne has ever seen him. It should be a sweet thing, and it is, but not only that. Before, outside, he slept like a cat, alert even at rest. He doesn't need to now, but Michonne is not yet able to believe that he never will again. Judith is curled into a ball, blanket kicked off and tiny back arched as she lies cheek to mattress. Rick fixes her bedding. Michonne carefully removes a finger from her mouth. They retreat.

Michonne pauses at the door of Rick's room before she follows him inside, nudges it shut behind her, and lets herself look at him again. It is like a deep breath held a long while, too long, until it burned in her lungs, and then came whistling out through her nostrils. The look he gives her in return, when his eyes meet hers, tells her she's not the only one who just relearned how to breathe.

Sex with Rick, having only at this point happened the once (thrice), is a deeply surreal experience. She has known him, trusted him, loved him, for several lifetimes in this world. This New World where time is counted in lives lost, lives taken, lives saved. Tragedies endured. But knowing him in this way, seeing him this way, letting herself see it, is a development she can still count in minutes and seconds and heat rising up her neck and breaths caught in her throat. In the faint lines in the corners of his smile as he looks at her for several moments too long- always too long and this at least is the same as it ever was. In the deliberate way he brushes against her now, touch so casual when she's known nothing but purpose since the world ended.

Rick checks the barrel of his Colt and sets it on the bedside table. Michonne leans her katana against the wall. He looks at her, chin down, as he unbuckles his gun belt and lays it aside. She remembers blood wreathing his neck and a stranger's hands at his throat. His eyes flutter closed as she brushes her fingertips along his jaw. There is a rumble, some low animal sound that raises and lowers his Adam's apple before he meets her mouth with his.

There is a softness to the way Rick kisses her that Michonne had not expected. Not that she often allowed herself even the remotest consideration of such a thing until the moment that she did, and he did, and they did, at long last. But those nebulous not-really-expectations involved the laser-honed intensity that he brings to bear in so many situations. And it is there, in part, no doubt about that, but the softness is, she finds, the greater part.

His mouth plies hers with a sweet, patient longing as he draws her upper lip between his own. The swipe of his tongue against hers sends a pleasant humming rippling across her skin. They pass breath back and forth. He greedily swallows her whimpering sighs; she feasts on his breathy moans. This tenderness a sustenance they've both gone for so long without.

Her fingers wind through his hair as their kisses deepen, intensify. Her hands always find their way to the soft curls, a magnetism, an addiction, that came on her all at once and she has no desire to ever kick. He'd been cautious about her hair the night before, an uncertainty borne of careful observation. Rick had witnessed her many a morning since they'd arrived in Alexandria, where runs could be concerned with frivolities like hair products, where the scent of coconut oil and shea butter on her hands wasn't only a distant memory.

"I've seen you fixing it," Rick had said, lips against her throat. "I don't wanna mess it up."

Michonne had giggled, another remnant of a world gone by. "You won't be able to do anything damn near two years without regular maintenance couldn't."

She can still see the way he bit his lip against his smile, feel the brush of his large hand against her head as he stroked a handful of her locks, the hot rush of new intimacy. Now he tugs her hair, lightly, guiding her chin up and her head back as his lips travel along her jaw, leaves a trail of electricity on her neck. Michonne slides her hands along his nape, across broad shoulders, down his back to his waist. She rakes her nails along his sides before she claws at his buckle. The belt thumps as it falls to the floor.

Rick pulls away from sucking a mark into the base of her neck before kissing her lips again and yanking her tank top over her head. She runs her hands up under his t-shirt, once white, now splotched with rust-colored stains about the collar, and his skin heats under her hands. He snatches his own shirt off then, balls it up and tosses it across the room like so much refuse, even though they both know that he'll clean it and wear it again, as if it never soaked up anyone's lifeblood.

"Wanted you all damn day," Rick grunts when Michonne's back is against the cool sheets of his-their-bed and they're working together to pull her pants down her legs.

"Never would've guessed," she says with a smile as he wrestles her pants off, underwear and all. All day, he'd reached for her at every opportunity, stared and smiled with impunity no matter who was watching. When they'd all been left to wait in that ridiculous house-while Maggie treated with Hilltop's equally ridiculous leader-Michonne had taken a seat across the room from Rick just so he'd be out of reach.

Rick's hands sliding up her bare thighs sends a fresh wave of heat rolling through her belly. "You tryna tell me I was alone in that?"

It's not a serious question. They both know that he's never alone, not while she's around. Michonne sits up to unhook her bra, slides it off, answers anyway.

"No," she breathes. Her thighs part.

Rick's beard trails along her inner thigh, further sensitizing already sensitive skin. Her belly flutters. He kisses her, a touch of his lips so featherlight it's almost ticklish, then presses the flat of his tongue along her slit.

"Rick," she gasps, and she can feel him smile against her.

He laps at her wetness, eyes fixed on hers as she gazes at him down the length of her body, and Michonne has to lie back, take three deep, unsteady breaths against the rising tide of her pleasure. The tip of his tongue flicks at her clit, setting her nerve endings off like a plucked string.

Rick is good at this. Very good. Good in a way particular to a man who loves his work. He moans as he eats her, vibrations against her clit that send her toes curling against the pale plain of his back, makes her wetter for him. He pets her knee then slides his hand up her body, palms a breast, tweaks a nipple. Michonne catches his hand in hers. She muffles a moan with a kiss to his palm before taking his index and middle finger into her mouth. The hand she hasn't claimed fists the sheets next to her hip as she mimics the rhythm of his tongue with her own.

He pulls back from her sex, mouth and chin shining in the scant light, and Michonne releases his hand. Rick wastes no time in pressing his two wetted fingers into her. Michonne's back arches as he lowers his mouth back to her clit, rolls his tongue, then suckles at her. Her first orgasm rushes over her in a wave, sudden enough that she cries out more loudly than she meant to. The second begins a steady build, climbing in time with the pump of Rick's fingers.

Michonne's hands find his hair again, her fingernails against his scalp. He's not looking up at her anymore, fully intent on what he's doing. Rick has learned in record time that she can come twice in very quick succession given a certain degree of stick-to-itiveness. Tenacity, Michonne knows well, is not something he's ever lacked.

She whimpers through this climax, "fuck" and "yes" and "Rick" garbled on her tongue. He doesn't relent until she's come all the way down, her muscles relaxed, her eyelids fluttering, her hand gently stroking his tortured scalp. There is a heartbreaking moment of loss when he withdraws. Michonne laughs at herself, that such a small thing could still feel so profound after the end of the world.

Rick rises from his kneel at the foot of the bed, shucks his jeans and boxers, then crawls forward as Michonne slides backwards. Cold loss is replaced by warmth as he covers her body with his. They kiss, deep and slow, the taste of her passed back and forth. His cock is thick and heavy between them, pressed against Michonne's thigh. She runs her hands over his skin, squeezes his ass as she deliberately rubs her thigh against his erection.

"What do you want?" Michonne asks, after their mouths part with a soft wet sound. His eyes are darkened by desire, the clear blue only a halo.

"You," he rasps like a man parched. "Just you." His voice is always something else, but here, like this, it's everything.

Michonne cradles his hips in the circle of her thighs, rests a heel against the small of his back. She feels his sigh through her entire body as he slides home. The slow rock of his hips into hers is a dance, a song, all the poetry he has to offer her. All that she needs. His lips find her cheek, her chin, her neck as his stroke lengthens, deepens. His heavy breaths are hot against her breast, his mouth wet against the tightened peak of her nipple. Her spine rolls as she meets his thrusts.

"Shit. Mich- Michonne." He gropes for her leg, catches her knee in the crook of his arm. The muscles in her leg stretch, right on the precipice of pain. His hips piston, unrelenting. Fire blooms in her belly. A moan escapes her like a gasp.

"So good. You're so good," Rick groans, followed by three strokes that make her eyes roll back.

"Yeah," Michonne manages, encouraging. Rick is vocal when he's close. She wouldn't have guessed it. He's never been a loquacious man, but now Michonne thinks he saves his words, hordes them so he can have them for this, for when it's important. All the better since she tends to be at a loss under these circumstances.

He drops her leg in favor of grabbing her ass, pulling her already working hips closer to him, pushing himself deeper. The bed creaks, complains, beneath them and Michonne knows she should care, but that caring, like everything else, has flown out of her head. Everything but the slickness of Rick's skin, his cock filling her, the pressure against her clit every time he rolls his hips just so.

He comes with a hand fisted in her locks, kissing her wetly, his rhythm stuttering. His lips trail from her mouth to her cheek as he releases inside her.

Love you is a whisper against her temple. A climax sweeps through her at that, necessary and natural as an exhalation.

She thinks of a time, a world, of men she would have questioned. But that is an ancient history now. Dust left in their wake as they walked the world together. They don't lie to each other, and this is a revelation already shared in the curves of their smiles, the lilt of their laughter, the night before. This is something known, bone-deep, beyond conscious thought, many, many nights before that.

Rick kisses her shoulder, playful, and nips at her collarbone. Michonne can muster only a wordless noise of satisfaction as she sweeps her fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck. His light chuckle is only the slightest bit smug as he withdraws. He doesn't go far. His arm is a comforting weight around her waist.

"Something funny?" she asks with a pinch to his side.

She can hear the shrug in his voice. "That you can go so long without something you stop missing it, stop even thinking about it at all." His teeth flash white against her shoulder, the tiniest pinch. "Then you get a taste, and suddenly you can't live without it."

Her cheeks crease with her joy, hurt with it. "You already got into my pants. You don't have to sweet talk me."

"It's not sweet. It's just true."

She kisses his brow; his thumb rubs a circle on her stomach. Another promise to end the day, less dire than the others they've made, but more important in its own way.

"Another long day tomorrow," Rick says.

"Then go to sleep." She kisses his brow again, closes her eyes with her cheek against his hair.

"Yeah," he agrees.

Still, for a while, they only lie together and breathe.