This is a short piece I wrote in response to a request on LJ. I don't usually write this pairing, but I gave it a chance.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

That I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

- Pablo Neruda

Since then she has saved her best bottle for these nights; the ones she spends alone in a room with a cup and a fading memory that must burn like the liquor poured down her throat.

She used to visit the memorial stone. She used to let him stand beside her as she traced the words with her fingertips and emptied the bottle over the parched earth. He wondered when she stopped and why he wasn't there when she began to raise the lip of the glass to touch her own.

She is so far into her cups she hardly notices him enter; and when his hand reaches out, the back of his knuckle brushing her shoulder, she looks up at him with alarm. Her honey colored eyes are wide with fright before relaxing with recognition. There is a slight streak of moisture on her cheek, and his fingers shift, cupping her cheek while his thumb rubs it away.

He hopes these small gestures will remind her that she's not alone; that she will allow him his place beside her once more.

He watches the terror slowly seep into her expression. Her body freezes with understanding and he uses this pause to allow his hand to linger against her cheek.

He expects her to lash out with a fist or the back of her hand. Instead she lowers her eyes and there is a resignation in it, as if she has given up on fighting, on life, on love. It is his opening, his one chance to win her back and for all his experience, he can feel a tremor in his limbs as his thumb lowers to press against her bottom lip.

She raises her eyes again and he can see himself in their reflection. His own expression scares him and so he concentrates on her lips, forcing himself to breathe, to not burst from the years of carefully contained emotions.

His lips hardly brush hers and it is enough to make him shudder. He takes her face into his hands and kisses her hungrily; like a man who has not eaten and found honey on her lips.

The sake cup clatters against the floor and her lips are moving against his. Her fingers dig into the fabric at his chest, nails raking through the thin material.

She kisses him like someone desperate, like someone fighting to stay alive. Her hands are peeling off his clothes before he can even move from her lips. Her nail catches the edge of a shoulder, tears away sleeves and skin. She is moving toward the floor and he is following her, knees edging along her thighs.

He kisses her again before pausing to look at her, to give her time to change her mind. He looks down at her, itching to touch her soft curves, or taste the salt of her skin.

He meets her eyes and silently asks if this is okay. And when her hands move to the waist of his pants, her gaze distant he feels something between them come undone.

In the morning she rolls away from his arm draped around her. She gathers her clothes, and pulls herself together with a familiar cold, calm, efficiency. She says nothing as she pauses at the doorway, his only message in the bow of her head and the curling of her fingers against the frame.

Years later he will relive this scene through the telling of a story that is meant to be funny. He will cross it out with thick black lines and the white pages will crumple beneath his ink-stained fingers again and again. He will remind himself that this isn't a tragedy.

And when it is finally right, there will be no silences in the morning. The fragment will end with him poised above her and the silence will be interrupted by the comedic blurting of another man's name.

It will be his favorite scene- the one he laughs at harder than the rest- so that no one will question why the laughing will make his chest hurt or make tears spring instantly to his eyes.