A/N: Well, This Was Longer Than Intended: A Memoir. Or, alternatively, this is what happens when I write pages of dialogue to narrate later, I always wind up underestimating how much narration I'm going to need. Either way... it got long, story of my life.

This is the last update I'll be able to do until finals are over. My last term paper is due May 2nd, although I do plan (ha) on finishing it before then, if all goes according to schedule and my motivation doesn't fall out from under me entirely. If all idoes/i go well, Chapter Four should be up May 3rd or 4th, depending on how tired I am and how long it takes me to move home. (Virginia to New Jersey is a lovely eight hour backcountry drive.) So I've tried to not leave you on a cliffhanger.

Thanks to miss ellinor, seareader, rachellehr16, guest, Sleepisfortheweak16, and Sueg5123 for reviewing the last chapter!

CHAPTER THREE: CENTER FACE

"Why do you think she went, then?" Habib asks, leaning forward in his chair, lacing his fingers together.

Will snorts, crossing his arms. "I don't know, I thought it was to make herself the victim." Habib scowls, leaning back again. Will scoffs, and then shrugs. "Make herself sympathetic, so she could come back to New York, and shove it in my face that I was the bad guy, I was the one who made her go into a warzone, that she was the poor traumatized one."

Habib nods. "Has she?"

"Has she what?"

He sighs. "Shoved it in your face?" Reaching for his notes, he flips through them until finding the detail that he wants. "She did spend twenty-six months there. Something must have happened."

Will falters. "No she—she hasn't."

"How often does MacKenzie talk about her time overseas?" Habib asks.

Quickly, his mind runs through a year of stories on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military presence in Pakistan, of Mac folding her arms and concaving her body, providing factuals and counterfactuals, but nothing of her own experiences beyond general knowledge, her eyes flickering to the clock labeled "Islamabad" in the bullpen. "She doesn't."

Habib lifts his eyebrows, seemingly curious. "Not at all?"

Will opens and closes his mouth around a few potential answers, half of them flippant or irreverent. Why should I care?

"Jim does. Sometimes." Jim definitely does talk about it, offering quips about standing by and sleeping in ditches and palling around with marines. Occasionally the quips even make Mac smile. Archly, of course, aloof. Offering nothing in return but her amusement at the shared memory. "I mean—maybe that's why she went over there. And then decided against using it against me. Because she…"

"Because MacKenzie has never stopped loving you," Habib finishes when Will stalls out.

Scowling, Will brushes off the notion with a vaguely hostile hand gesture. "I don't know if she never stopped."

"But that's what she said," Habib reiterates, referring to the half-asleep, rambling message that still sits on Will's voicemail.

"Yeah."

So? MacKenzie has said a lot of things without meaning them, trying to cover up for her own recklessness.

"You don't trust her?" The therapist's face crinkles in consternation, but his voice remains even.

He hesitates, biting down on his words, on the inclination to say yes. Because he knows that he shouldn't trust Mac as much as he does, that he's just asking for more pain if he forgives her, moves on with her. "I… trust her with the show."

Habib nods, and Will rolls his eyes in anticipation of some sort of wise remark about what Mac does or doesn't deserve. "But you don't trust her when she says that she didn't tell you about Brian to break up with you?"

(There it is.)

"I trust that I backed her into a corner by calling her while I was high and telling her to respond or I'd assume she feels nothing, and so she had to come up with something," Will answers, plotting his points with flips and waves of straightened fingers.

Like he hasn't already worked this through? He wishes desperately that he could trust Mac, forgive her. It'd be easier than living like this, completely in love with her and completely unable to move on from her and completely consumed by the image of her and Brian.

Although now he can't tell if he's so pissed because she was able to call it before it happened—you're going to wake up and you're going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me, but I can wait.

MacKenzie is waiting, and he's idiot for the ring.

Habib steeples his fingers under his chin. "Okay, let's just take for granted, for a moment, that MacKenzie is telling the truth."

"Why?"

"You're a pain," the therapist grouses. "Just do it."

"That's not a very smart thing for a psychiatrist to say," he snarks.

"You're a special case," Habib replies, mostly irreverent, before his face clouds with an expression much more serious. "If she told you, like she said, because she thought that's what she should do now that the two of you were in a very serious, very committed relationship, then why do you think she decided to embed?"

"To run away from what she did," Will answers automatically.

Habib purses his lips. "My notes say you told her to get out of New York."

"I… yes." He did say that to her. Out of anger, when she kept insisting that Brian meant nothing to her anymore, when she asked why he wouldn't talk to her. And the next day he'd heard that she'd tendered her resignation and was meeting with headhunters from CNN Atlanta who were interested in her previous embed experience, her contacts in the international sphere.

Get the fuck out of New York, is what he said, specifically, looking at the cigarette in his hand instead of her face, as carelessly as he could muster. If he didn't care about MacKenzie, then it wouldn't hurt.

But he cares about MacKenzie.

Otherwise he wouldn't be seeing the look on her face when he told her that the ring was a practical joke—no, a rejoinder—again and again during the quiet moments of the day.

"So I'm going to guess that it was more than running away, although it's very possible that running away was one of her motives," Habib hazards, before pausing thoughtfully. "During the fight in her office, you said she rattled off a list of punishments she's taken—her contract, the dates coming by the newsroom, et cetera, and on that list she put 'twenty-six months in a warzone.'"

"So?"

Habib scoffs. "Will, you're not this unfathomably stupid."

"I didn't send her to a warzone as punishment," Will balks.

"Honestly?" Habib says, cocking his head.

"I didn't," Will protests. Habib physically restrains himself from rolling his eyes, and he flinches towards him.

The therapist inhales and exhales slowly, sifting through his notes. "Yeah, that's not what I was—have you considered the possibility that MacKenzie sent herself to a warzone to punish herself?"

"I… why?" Irreverent to consequences is one of Mac's biggest character traits. Even if he accepts that Mac left New York because he asked her to, it doesn't make sense that she'd embed just to punish herself. Before coming back to New York, she'd never signed a contract for longer than twenty-four months, preferring to be mobile, fluttering between New York and DC and Atlanta and abroad.

Will has no doubts that she'd sign on for three years at CNN without casting second thought at what could happen to her in the Green Zone, or Peshawar, or wherever.

Habib leans forward, clasping his hands together. "Because, again, if we trust her—because she never stopped loving you."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Why not?"

Will flounders.

"Because it doesn't." Scrubbing his hands over his face, he gives up on appearing nonchalant and disaffected, leaning forward so he can rest his elbows on his knees, remembering his conversation with MacKenzie Monday night, after the show. It had been, like the life of man, nasty, brutish, and short. But for what the conversation wasn't, compounded with his… non-talk with Jim, reminded him of what Charlie told him when trying to get Mac to stay on a year ago. "When she first came back, Charlie said she was 'physically and mentally exhausted.' Been to too many funerals, hadn't sleep for more than four hours at a time in three years. I asked her about it, and she said she's been exhausted since she was thirty."

Habib gives a short little laugh. "You know, considering you don't trust a word that comes out of her mouth—"

"That's not what I said," Will protests, looking up.

"It's pretty much what you said," he says, inclining his head towards Will. "Do you think Charlie was lying? And what about the other one, the kid—"

"Jim. He's not—he's not a kid." The words are out of his mouth before he realizes it.

Habib's face softens. "What?"

"What?"

He shrugs. "You look… overwhelmed."

Will scoffs, hardening his features. "I'm not—after the fight, Jim must have found her. I didn't know he could get that… angry. But he said—he said I was there for her when you weren't. And something about how it was going to be a rough day for her, because of what it was going to bring up. Bin Laden's death, I mean."

"So?"

"I don't know what that means," he grumbles.

"I think you do." When Will says nothing, Habib sighs. "It means that she's lying to you. Because—"

"You really think she's punishing herself?" It still doesn't make sense to him. "But she wants—she wants my sympathy."

Pursing his lips, Will can tell that Habib is choosing his next words carefully, forces himself to stay quiet.

"I think, and again, I've never met her, but considering the filing cabinet taking up space in my office, I think that MacKenzie believed, up until you told her about the ring being a joke—which, by the way, I told you so—that she deserved absolutely nothing from you but punishment," he says, voice measured and clinical. "I think that she came back from being embedded with some sort of post-traumatic stress, and she lied to you about it, and that she did this on the same day she signed her contract."

"So?"

He's not making the connection, deliberately trying to avoid finding the depth of what post-traumatic stress means, and deserved absolutely nothing from you but punishment, because Will's slowly realizing exactly how much he agreed with that statement until he actually said the words the ring was a practical joke out loud. He's spent the past two days terrified, and holding it in.

Because what if he's missed Mac struggling? What if he's resented her so much he's willfully overlooked something? Hell, he's let she's mentally and physically exhausted slip from his mind for over a year.

No, that's not his fault. Mac said she was fine, and he asked her directly.

But what if…

"She was denied employment from every major news station except yours. Charlie knew what happened to her. Why wouldn't other news division presidents?" Habib asks, laying out his points in a way that hints that he reached this conclusion long ago. "Will, one of the hallmarks of PTSD is feeling a pervading sense of guilt, and shame."

Terror rises up again. If nothing else (and there is a lot else, he concedes dimly) he prides himself on knowing Mac better than anyone else. "Are you saying she thought I would fire her if I knew she was—she knows I would never—"

"Does she?" he asks quietly, calmly, and in a way that thoroughly pisses Will off.

"I love her."

"Up until three days ago she didn't know that," Habib continues.

Will recoils. "Even if I didn't—"

Habib doesn't let Will bowl him over. "You made her sign the most humiliating contract since, and I quote, 'Antonio made a deal with Shylock.' You put her in her place, Will. She went willingly, but you were the one who told her she'd have to pay her pound of flesh." Not finished, he makes sure what he just said sinks in before adding on one last thing. "And I suspect that Charlie told you because he knew it would curry sympathy with you, considering your past."

Oh.

"Mac acts like she's fine," he protests. But he doesn't even believe it himself, feels that assertion crumbling out from under him before he even finishes saying it.

Habib gives him a small smile. "So do you."

Which is how Will finds himself with his finger hesitating over the doorbell next to MacKenzie's front door that Saturday at eleven in the morning, flowers in hand. (She hasn't moved, just rented her apartment while she was away. Probably because it was easier, quicker to do that than try to list it. Will's wondered if that means that she's always intended to come back.

Still, it's uneasy, in a way. He hasn't been here in years. Remembers where it is, of course, on the twelfth floor of a midtown high-rise with a solid view of Times Square. Mac's never liked the quiet or the dark, but then again, neither has he.)

12E. He'd double-checked on the ground floor, at the mailboxes (Mac's never liked living in buildings with doormen), to make sure. His finger rests on the doorbell, and sighing, he forces himself to press it.

"I woke you up," he comments when MacKenzie opens the door looking bedraggled, hair piled on top of her head, clothes askew.

(Beautiful.)

She shrugs, opening her door further to let him in. "I didn't fall asleep until late."

"How late is late?" he asks, handing her the bouquet of lilies, roses, and gerbera daisies.

Smiling in a vaguely sleepy fashion, she turns away from him to walk to her kitchen (she hasn't moved where she keeps her small collection of vases), leaving him to shut the door behind him.

"I've missed how your apologies always seem to come with some overpriced token of affection," she teases, and he immediately feels relieved. She's been coldly tense towards him all week, deservedly so, but Will hasn't wanted to drag out their personal issues at work again so he's let it go.

Although yesterday they had seemed to be settling into something like normal, even if his brain has been running on loop about Mac embedding to punish herself since Wednesday morning, and then kicking back don't ask her here, you idiot in response.

He doesn't want to hurt her more.

And he'd tell her she's wrong about the flowers being overpriced, but the roses are out of season. So instead he lets his eyes linger on the backs of her legs, and how good they look in her incredibly short, incredibly tight shorts.

After pausing thoughtfully, Mac continues. "Seven? I was stuck on something one of our military sources gave us."

"Stuck on what?" Will asks, shoving his hands in his pockets and following her out of the entryway and into her living room, stopping in the alcove that holds a server and a small dining room table. "And that's not late, that's early."

"Do you want coffee?" she asks, yanking the pot from the machine and filling it at the sink after depositing the flowers into a fluted vase.

"Sure."

"You can sit, you know," she says, looking back over her shoulder, over the half wall that meets her kitchen and the dining area. "I'm not tossing you out, if you couldn't tell from the fact that I offered you coffee."

"Coffee takes ten minutes, it's not much of a commitment," he muses, looking around her apartment. Not much has changed, he thinks, trying to not dredge of the memory of the last time he was here, carrying Mac with her legs wrapped around his waist to her bedroom.

Same earthy, muted tones and dark woods, leather (one of the few things they've ever been able to unilaterally agree on is preferences in home decor, although her place has softer edges, personable clutter, framed pictures), plush rugs over hardwood floors, bookshelves filled to the brim. Throws on the couch, because she gets cold too easily, one TV in the living room but he knows there are probably two or three in her bedroom. An office she will typically forsake for her bed, which will end up half covered in legal pads and production notes before she finally falls asleep.

MacKenzie laughs. "Well, you bought my good will with the flowers."

"Exactly what they were supposed to do," he replies, somehow finding himself smiling, albeit at the floor. He can hear the clink of mugs being lifted down from the shelf and onto the counter, the fridge opening and closing.

"That, and the purely pathetic look in your eyes," she continues on, as if he hasn't said anything.

"Hey!"

"And my own sleep-deprivation," she rambles, mostly to herself at this point. Rolling his eyes, Will shrugs off his jacket and tosses it on top of the table, rounding the back to her couch.

"You and sleep-deprived have never equated to good will towards anyone." He startles when she walks out from the kitchen, revealing her thighs which are now directly in his eye line. "I—what's that?"

Barely missing a step, Mac looks down between the mugs in her hands, biting her lip. "Um… just outside Baghdad. 2008. Shrapnel."

"How did I not know about that?" he asks softly, eyes focused squarely on the long red line puckering the middle of her left thigh, the dotted dime-sized scars speckling the flesh around it.

"Well, I don't exactly walk around the office in spandex," Mac explains tamely. "There wasn't a wire report." Biting her lip, she looks down again, shaking her head as if to clear it. "I mean, not that you…"

"I would have noticed if a report came down the wire that said that you were injured," he tells her lowly.

"Oh."

Will can tell that's not what she expected him to say, stiffly holding out his coffee for him to take. He does, and immediately places it on the low table in front of her couch, before reaching in front of him to lightly grasp her hips, guiding her to stand in front of him.

I think that she came back from being embedded with some sort of post-traumatic stress, and she lied to you about it, Habib had told him.

I love you, Will almost says. Certainly thinks it, without nearly as much pain as he's felt in years. Almost runs his index finger down the length of the scar, the indentation of it in her leg, the bump where he can see the skin healed over itself. Almost, and doesn't, because he doesn't know if she wants him to touch her.

But she hands him her cup of coffee to place on the table, so he thinks that she might.

"What happened?" he asks, after clearing his throat. She shifts within his grasp, but makes no move to escape it, instead dropping a hand to rest over his, swallowing hard.

"Routine patrol, IED," she starts, softly. Her fingers squeeze around his. "Didn't get cover quickly enough. Got under some cover, otherwise my calf would be—I'd probably be missing from my knee down. Jim got nicked in his lower back, couldn't walk for a few days after. I mean… neither could I."

She looks down at him, and he can tell her smile is somewhat forced. It hits him, nothing like a physical blow, but with the creeping tendrils of fear snaking into his muscles, hooking in a pulling—MacKenzie almost lost a leg. MacKenzie almost lost a lot more than that.

Facing the Taliban was easier.

When he slides the hand not covered by hers down to trace the contours of scar with his thumb, hard, recessed flesh under the pad of his finger, she continues.

"The medic only had time to get the shrapnel out and staple my thigh back together and then when we got back to base obviously had… bigger things to handle."

I was there for her when you weren't. Remember that.

She shivers, he thinks, or it's just his imagination. When he looks up at her to gauge how she's doing, she splits her face into another pasted-on grin, before using the excuse of tugging her hair out its bun to look away.

"What else… was there anything else that didn't make it into a wire report?"

Mac considers not showing him, but if they're going to fix this-and Will showing up at her apartment on a Saturday morning with flowers days after starting to apologize definitely seems like they're fixing it—she has to. Because he's going to see it eventually.

Hopefully.

And even if not, she should put herself out there to Will.

"Um…"

Hesitating slightly, she curls her fingers into the hem of her tee shirt before lifting it six or so inches, revealing the jagged eight-inch scar that she knows curves up and across the right side of her abdomen.

Will makes a distressed little noise, something low and breathy; when his fingers lock up around her hips she bites down on her bottom lip, takes one of his hands and places it on top of the scar.

"It almost got me airlifted to Landstuhl, but I managed to convince my dad to call off the helos. I'm not quite sure how we managed to keep it quiet… my dad, probably," she explains quietly, smiling nervously, trying to keep her voice unemotional for his sake. He doesn't quite know how to touch her—she almost regrets telling him that she could have lost part of her leg. "And Jim was pretty forceful. I was laid up in our hotel room in the Islamabad capital district for weeks, going out of my mind with boredom. I'd never filed so many stories. Although I think Jim kept a lot of them from going down the wire, because I was so stoned…"

She's never done well on Vicodin.

And she should want to hurt him, she knows. For the ring, that is, but she's never been particularly good at holding a grudge. Especially against Will. She knows why she can forgive him so easily, when he can't forgive her. And it's okay. He has baggage that she'll never come close to understanding. She can wait.

Because now she knows what it's like to carry around baggage herself. She wants to tell him. I came home with PTSD. No one would hire me, except Charlie. Because he was an embed once, and a marine, and he trusted that you would take me. Because we both needed each other.

"What happened?" Will asks, voice rough, eyes concentrated on the scar.

"Religious protest in one of the Shiite neighborhoods. US military contractors, armed guards, got involved, and it turned into a riot. I don't really—I don't really remember what happened." She… does. Some. But it's garbled and distorted, and Mac can never tell if it's real or something her mind has come up with to fill in the blanks and her nightmares. "You'd have to ask Jim. One minute we were trying to get out of it, the next I was on the ground looking up at Jim. It was deeper than we thought, since it's… since it's so long. Jim got me back to the military complex and they sent us to one of the private hospitals and by then I was…"

Her voice drifts off. She remembers hearing about Jim and a couple other of guys having to donate blood to keep up with her.

"Was what?" Subconsciously, she thinks, he pulls her closer, until her toes are pressed against the base of the couch.

"I wound up losing a couple of feet of small intestine," she explains, as lightly as she can.

The look on his face is distinctly alarmed. "Mac?"

She tries to brush it off. "They stabilized me pretty quickly. I wasn't even under all that long."

"Mac," he protests, looking up at her. And then must realize how hard his fingers are digging into her hip, because suddenly his grip on her loosens, and something like shame flashes across his features.

"I almost died. A little. It wasn't that close," she assures him, laughing a bit even if she doesn't quite feel it. "By the time a CNN internal affairs person came around I was mostly fine."

When she realizes Will doesn't quite know how to touch her, or if he should, she sighs and carefully sinks into his lap. Curling against him, she wraps her arms around his neck, tucking her head under his chin. Tentatively, and then all at once, his arms come around her. MacKenzie turns in more against him, bringing her knees up from where they're strewn across his legs, worming her way into his side until her lips rest against the collar of his tee shirt.

"How in the hell did you keep it off the wire?" he asks quietly, bringing up a hand to gently comb his fingers through his hair.

"Lucky, I guess," she says with a shrug. "Had a good team."

"Does it hurt?" His other hand trails from her waist to her knee and back, like he can't get enough of her skin under his own.

Curling her fingers around his, she slides his hand back down to the shrapnel wound on her thigh. "Sometimes the adhesions pull. But that's more uncomfortable than anything else, anymore. But yes, sometimes. I mean, my thigh hurts before the adhesions do." For one, she rested after the stabbing like she was supposed to, if only because Jim would not let her get out of bed.

"Why haven't I noticed?" he asks, fingers connecting the dots between the smaller scars on her leg, almost like he's learning them, shaping them into constellations to remember.

"To be fair, I didn't exactly want you to." Because she just figured that he'd tell her she deserved it, which she already knew, already believed. And on the off-chance that he didn't it might have been too much for her to handle, at the time. So much of the way she's defined herself these past few years has been on her own guilt.

His hand slides up under her shirt, not seeking out the stab wound; Mac thinks he might just want to touch more of her, a sentiment she understands. Her own are wound around his neck, but her face is almost pressed into his shirt—he smells like soap, and aftershave, and laundry detergent, feels warm and solid under her, shirt soft and overwashed.

He turns his head slightly, winds up pressing his jaw into her forehead. "When you first came back… Charlie told me you were mentally and physically exhausted—"

Mac sighs, closing her eyes.

She remembers. How couldn't she? He'd been so sweet, let them slip back into old roles for a moment, inhabit spaces she'd missed so desperately for years, trying to claw her way back into feeling normal, feeling real.

"And you asked me about it," she finishes.

"Did you—were you telling me the truth or were you deflecting?"

"I was deflecting." Will tenses under her. "I mean, and it wasn't that—I mean I could barely talk about it to anyone but my psychiatrist and Jim and Charlie for a long, long time."

"I'm sorry," he says, lifting his hand off her waist to rub his forehead.

Mac knits her eyebrows together. "Why?"

The hand flings out from his forehead to the air in front of them in a gesture of pure frustration. "Because I put you in a position where you felt like you had to lie to me. Charlie told me—"

"Will, I—"

He won't let her interrupt him. "MacKenzie, he told me you were struggling. It's not okay that I—"

"And I could have not lied to you about it," she says, pushing back to look him in the face, voice rising, more certain.

"So we're both at fault?"

"Yes," she assures him, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. And then, eyes fixated on his collar, "Regardless, I forgive you. I was the one who sent myself over there, because I—"

"You didn't have to punish yourself, after," he tells her, voice nearing gentle, but still deliberate, unyielding in a way, and she wonders when he came to this conclusion. Probably when she was trying to not yell at him this week, she figures. She'd forgiven him by Thursday, but still. "After you told me about Brian. What you did, and I know I'm assuming a lot here, but what you did didn't merit sending yourself into a warzone. Unless, I don't know—"

She shakes her head, fanning her hands on over his chest. "My head was a mess. I would have wound up finding some way to punish myself."

That much is true. And she's been trying to work on her tendencies to self-punish, to use her guilt as a crutch, but it's true. Four years ago, she would have found a way, even if the opportunity to embed hadn't presented herself. And maybe her guilt was selfish, and shows how stupidly self-absorbed she used to be, but it's what she felt and it's what she did.

"I don't want you to punish yourself." Eyes widening, she looks up at him, biting her lip when he begins to stammer. "I know I can't—I can't forgive you yet, and I'm sorry, I'm just—"

"It's okay, Will."

"What?" He seems genuinely surprised.

Mac shrugs, looking at her hands. She's already been over this several times in her head since he told her the ring was a joke, rejoinder, whatever. "I mean, I know why you can't. I love you. And like I said, in the voicemail… I can wait."

"Really?"

She laughs, realizing its rung through with a bit of self-deprecation. But it's honest. "I mean, I'm assuming somewhere around year six or seven I'll probably start to get a little impatient, but I'm not leaving again. I mean, I can't, anyway. I signed a three-year contract."

And then she remembers the other thing, working her jaw when she remembers the non-compete clause, the three million dollars, the very tangible reminder of how angry Will can be at her. The hand in her hair slides down to the nape of her neck, and then comes around to cup her jaw. Reminding herself not to flinch (this is good, it's overwhelming, but it's good) she plows forward.

"Unless—I mean, if you fire me, and if you want me to go I will—"

And then she stops talking, because Will's mouth is covering hers, his thumb stroking the line of her jaw. It's quick and it's soft, chaste almost, lasting only a few seconds. He lingers for a moment though, after pulling back, keeping only inches between their lips. And then sighs in a way that sounds both satisfied and frustrated, sitting back.

Surprised and mildly overwhelmed, all MacKenzie can do is blink at him, lips parted.

"I'm not going to fire you," he tells her intently, both hands framing her face for a few seconds before drifting down to her shoulders, and then more hesitantly, her waist. "And I'm, you know, sorry about that, too." He deliberates on something for a moment, before leaning in again, kissing her gently on the cheek. "I love you."

She laughs, a breathy little sound that she almost doesn't believe. "I know, I have proof."

"Shut up," he grouses, but almost seems relieved to fall out of the moment with her.

MacKenzie snorts. "Are you hungry?"

They wind up ordering in, squabbling over who pays—Mac insisting it's her apartment, Will countering that he's the one who showed up uninvited, Mac saying she doesn't care, Will winning because he carries the Bank of Vienna around in his wallet—before settling onto the couch to eat Chinese out of takeout boxes while watching the weekend shows.

At some point Mac goes back to her bedroom and hauls out her notes (including a list that at 4 AM she apparently titled Will Looks Good With His Hair Pushed Back and Other Things to Make Him Keep Doing On Air that hastily gets folded and shoved into the back of a notebook) to berate him with, and they wind up plotting out half of Monday's show without realizing it.

And then it starts to pour, so when the news shows change to cheesy cult movies that they both not-so-secretly like, Mac winds up pushing Will down onto the cushions so she can use him as a pillow. He protests in a token way, letting her stretch out on top of him before reaching up and grabbing one of her throws off the back of the couch, tossing it to cover her.

When she realizes that she's falling asleep sometime around three, she tries to sit up—

"I don't want to trap you," she murmurs sleepily.

Will rolls his eyes. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Oh."

—but winds up drifting off to sleep with her ear resting over his heart, with his fingers carding through her hair.

Thanks for reading!