Disclaimer: See part 1

Note: Part 3/3

[3]

She'd been uncomfortable all day. Putting an end to things with Sully had been easier than it should have been. Even she knew this. (They'd never set a date, never booked a location, or chosen a color scheme. She told herself it was because those things didn't matter to her. She'd be just as happy getting married at a courthouse and telling everyone the next Monday. In the end, he watched her walk away from a fight he'd already lost. In the end, he said she'd never really said 'yes' to begin with.)

Still, nothing feels ended, complete. (People talk about break-ups like they are decisive moments. But she knows that life, more often than not, happens in cycles. The body, for instance, is governed almost entirely by negative feedback. The deficit of one chemical starts a chain reaction. When enough of the first chemical is made, the reaction stops. Until the body is lacking once more. Then it all begins again. For her, relationships are like that. She feels a void, of companionship, of sex, and when it is filled, she's finished until the ache begins again.)

Her unease, she knows, has nothing to do with the man she's refused to marry.

"It hurt me very much that you refused to be part of my wedding," she tells Booth while they're in the middle of talking about something else. (They never come at these things directly. The important things. They sidle up, circle around, skip over, and double-back. It's not until they've pretended at and then peeled back all the things they don't mean that they get to the heart of it.)

"I didn't refuse," he replies. They're on a park bench and it's windy. His collar rides high like blinders.

"You told me to ask Angela!" (It's cold but her arms are open, her hands turned up. She waits for him to explain it to her, to reorder the world so it makes sense and place it back into her palms.) "And then she told me to ask you again."

He shrugs and then tries on a smirk that doesn't quite fit. "You never asked," he says. "You said you'd been meaning to ask but you never actually asked."

"I know." (They've dropped, suddenly to the center of things. She feels like she's sitting on a fault line and the first warning tremors are shivering in her toes.) "I told Sully I wanted you to give me away …. Today, when I broke it off with him, he said he'd known then ... when I said that … that we wouldn't be getting married. He said I was the woman who could do anything, anything, except ask."

"Why?"

"Because I'd be afraid you would say yes." (She knows, hates knowing, that he would have broken himself for her. She hates knowing that he can be broken. It's the only thing that's kept her from this bench, from him, for so long. She hates knowing that she has that power.)

"Bones, I …."

She can see it in his eyes then. He would have done it. He understands her. He knows the limits she put on herself, the controls. (If giving her away to Sully had gotten her as close to the thresh hold she'd set on happiness, on love, as she could go, then he'd do it and never look back.)

She looks into his eyes, dark and warm. They are sitting on the fault line and the tremors are starting up her legs now. She leans her forehead against his but not even the heat of his skin or the strength of the bones beneath can still her.

She looks into his eyes and breathes him in.

He is a man who will do anything for her, anything, except put her heart at risk.

(There is another sort of force that governs the body. One that is rare. Because it is cataclysmic. The clotting of blood. The birth of a child. Positive feedback. Chemicals in the body build exponentially. The creation of one spurns the creation of another. The loop feeds itself, building, building, building. Until nothing can stop it but an event.)

She looks into his eyes and the tremors reach her knees. So she kisses him. She kisses him and takes the risk on herself. She kisses him and accepts that power, the power to destroy him by something as simple as walking away.

She kisses him and then she takes him by the hand. She doesn't ask him to come home with her. She doesn't ask him to stay. She doesn't have to ... because he'll do anything for her, anything. He'll say yes.