Title: Of Hammocks, Car Accidents and Lazy Afternoons

Author: Isabelle

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimers: I do not own anything.

Summary: She doesn't show her feelings often, not as often as he does, but when he sleeps and she watches, she admits to herself that their children will be beautiful.

Spoilers: Any aired episode is game.

A/N: The best BETA in the whole world is Tati who corrects faster than I write. She rocks.

--

"You know you love someone when you can spend the entire night just sitting by the fire watching them sleep." – Gram (Dawson's Creek)

She doesn't show her feelings often, not as often as he does, but when he sleeps and she watches, she admits to herself that their children will be beautiful.

It started on a December night, the first night they spent together after months of being apart. She lay with her eyes closed as he stared at her, and once she felt him slip into slumber, she dared open her eyes. His face was so close that his breath became her breath, and she was taken aback by the intimacy of the moment.

She was in love with Chuck Bass. This tugged a smile at her lips because if you would've asked her a year ago… well, maybe longer than a year, she would've laughed it off.

Yet here she was, his face inches from hers, and she was in love with him.

She raised her hand ever so slightly and touched the soft hairs on his hairline. They were soft and smooth, like a baby's. Not that she knew what a baby felt like, but they were definitely soft. And they were blondish. Slightly blondish.

She leaned in and placed a butterfly kiss on them because she loved those little hairs. He stirred, and she was still. She didn't want to break the December night magic of their union.

She thought about how he could break her if he really wanted to, because she's so very attached to him that all he does hurts her more deeply than anything Nate ever attempted.

His hand slid up between them, sleepily touching her face. He started snoring, and she held in a giggle.

She kissed his fingers and pulled his hand down to inspect it. He had smooth, manly hands. The only callus was on his thumb from all the text messaging he engaged in. There was also a dent on his index finger from where he wrote. She ran the pad of her index finger over the dent. She loved that little dent and wished she could tell him.

He kept his nails short and the cuticles pushed back, and she envisioned a time when they could get matching manicures. Chuck was the type of guy that didn't mind them and even made them seem the most natural thing for a man to do.

His hand fidgeted, and she dropped it. She'd stare at him another night – perhaps when it wasn't so cold.

It was an afternoon that they fall asleep together. The flowers were in bloom because Spring was clearly here. The wind was just perfect, so she decided to open her window and let the breeze in. They lay on her bed, attempting to study, when he began nodding off, phone in his hand and shoes off his feet. So she crawled to him, he enveloped her in his arms, and they fell asleep together.

She woke before him, facing the purple of his shirt. She studied the button there and decided to touch it. This made him roll over and begin the snoring she was now used to. She crawled a bit to look at him more carefully and studied the way his jaw connected to his ear.

He was etched in perfect stone, and she reached out to touch it because it was calling to her.

The skin of his face was smooth and freshly shaved. She liked when he was like this, smooth and smelling of his Dior aftershave. She leaned her nose in and smelled the skin where his jaw and his ear connected and sighed contently.

She didn't think she had ever loved a smell more. He mumbled, and she pulled back, fully prepared to close her eyes and pretend to be asleep, because she would die of embarrassment if he ever caught her. Because that damn smirk (that she loved so very much) would take over his now-peaceful features, and she would be ashamed.

This time, Summer went the way it should've gone. He joined her in Paris, and they visited her father in his vineyard.

It was another lazy afternoon on a warm June day when, as they lay snuggled on her father's hammock, he fell asleep before her. His hair was longer than she would have liked it to be, but she believed he refuses to cut it just to annoy her. So this was the perfect moment she had been waiting for. She pulled the small sheers from her pocket and leaned up to begin snipping away at his hair.

He was going to hate her when he woke. He was going to absolutely hate her, but desperate times called for desperate measures. They couldn't possibly show up at Yale with him looking like some wild man.

He stirred a few times, but the soft sway of the swing, the warmth of her body, and the breeze kept him asleep.

He murmured often in his sleep, she noticed. She wondered if years from now, when parts of her had been Botoxed, would they lay on swings and nap the afternoon away?

His hair now looked like he should run to the salon – which she knew he would do the moment he saw all the fallen brown hair on the lawn. She smiled and buried her nose in his hair and fell asleep right there. This was the perfect place to do so.

They were in college and had been broken up for a few weeks. After a week of dancing around each other, they apologized and decided to be friends. Their new friend status led them to fall asleep together. Now it was early in the morning, and he was in her arms, his head resting on her chest, his face turned towards her. She curled her arm around his head and gently held him, because she knew now that this was the most precious man in her life.

He loved her with such passion that he often messed up and upset her, and so they would break up. Their love was a fiery, passionate love that consumed itself and was often left in ashes. But in moments like this, when they would fall asleep together and she got to watch him, she realized this was the man for her.

When they woke, they pretended it was normal and went back to being 'friends'. They saw other people, but his eyes still burned into her as he watched her with her boyfriend, and she couldn't remember a moment she had watched her new boyfriend sleep.

She smelled his cologne one morning and instantly knew it was him.

He was close by, and the butterflies that are twin souls of his fluttered in happiness.

She realized at that moment that she didn't care how mad he made her, she wanted him back in her life. She went to tell him, but found him making out with a blonde by his limo.

There were tears in her eyes when she crashed her new car that afternoon, and she couldn't remember anything but the flashing lights of the ambulance.

When she woke in the hospital bed, he was asleep next to her bed, her limp hand in his and his head on her lap.

There were dark circles under his eyes and his hair (which needed a cut once more) was mussed and disorderly. His tie was gone and his sleeves were rolled up. He looked like he had been sitting by her bed for hours.

She almost died, she told herself. She almost died.

If she had died, she would never have been able to watch him sleep again. All of the nights, for the rest of his life, he would be watched by someone else, and she hated that thought. Because he belonged to her as much as she belonged to him.

His sleep was hers and only hers to watch.

When he woke, he held her without saying a word, and she could see the fear in his eyes.

He told her he was afraid that he had lost her, and she told him then that he had always had her. She had always been his, since the moment they were first together all those nights ago in his limo.

She didn't need to look at him this time as his arms surrounded her, and she didn't ever want to leave his embrace. She loved him more than her Chanel bag collection, and that was saying a lot.

It wasn't long after that he asked her to marry him, and she only had one answer to that question.

So, a few weeks later, today, he is once more asleep as she studies him.

She doesn't show her feelings often, not as often as he does, but when he sleeps and she watches, she admits to herself that their children will be beautiful.

--

The End