Author's Note: Warm Bodies is going straight on my favorite films list. Such a great movie: awesome cast, awesome story, and I absolutely loved the book. Anyway, please let me know what you think!

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Interlude

By: Lady NeverAfterNon

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Julie sits on the floor of her bedroom, tucked into the corner between a wall and one of her little bookcases. R is flush up next to her, his elbow rests on her knees and her cold bare toes are jammed up under his jean clad butt. Nora is passed out on Julie's bed, snoring softly. The remains of several ratty card games, Slap Jack and Uno (R is decidedly better at Uno), litter the ground around them. The only light in the room is a camping lantern covered with a paper shade that Julie punched star shapes out of. As a result it throws clumsy constellations of blue light around the room.

The Big Dipper is lopsided and Orion's belt is sagging and if he had pants they'd be down around his starry knees; Julie doesn't care and R doesn't mention it.

She is so, so very tired.

It's almost deathly silent, except for the occasional barking dog and Nora's snoring, and the quiet holds them like a blanket. Julie is exhausted: too many long days filled with zombie-to-human orientation for R's massive 'family' on top with her other duties. She doesn't want to sleep, though. She and R don't get much time to themselves now that the fun part of the adventure is over, it's all she can do to have dinner with him once and a while. They started a race, but now they've slowed and the rest of the zombies and humans are leaping and bounding past them towards an unforeseeable finish line.

Julie wonders if she and R have found their own finish line, because while he isn't a corpse he isn't exactly fully human, and she certainly doesn't feel completely human anymore either. She knows he doesn't need to eat yet, and his sleeping is erratic. Julie still loves Pad Thai but she doesn't seem to need to eat as much or as often anymore, though she still sleeps when she can.

She thinks that maybe when the Beast kissed Beauty and broke the spell, that maybe Beauty got a bit of the Beast when the Beast got his Beauty. Ugh, just thinking about the new horizons they were charting made her head hurt.

His eyes, that brilliant shade of gold like a pirate coin in a tropic sun, meet hers and she suspect that his thoughts might perhaps mirror her own. She raises an eyebrow and cocks her head.

He quirks a smile at her in answer and shrugs his shoulder, because he knows it will get a rise out of her.

"Shrugger," she says affectionately. She's quiet, because Nora is unconscious five feet away, and her walls are horribly thin.

That doesn't stop her from climbing into his lap though. Julie straddles his slim hips and slides her hands into his shaggy black hair. R's arms fold around her, and while sometimes she forgets just how much bigger he is than her, its times that these that remind her.

She kisses him this time. Though it's hard to tell just who lunged for whom first in that dirty cistern a few weeks ago.

It's slow and not rushed, she's too tired for serious hanky panky, though she wishes to hell that she wasn't. R is getting better at this kissing business and Julie is happy to simultaneously be his teacher and reap the fruits of his learning. She's so tired, but this moment with R is a coveted thing and Julie is very, very greedy.

She tells her exhaustion to bugger off, and her drooping eyelids to shape up and look alive.

Julie murmurs the words to 'Rock You Like A Hurricane' as she moves from his mouth, down the line of his jaw and down his neck, punctuating each word with a tiny nibble or wet kiss. She always likes the way the thin skin of his throat moves under her lips when she's kissing him and he swallows. She can hear every small gasp or breathless whimper. God she loves those sounds.

R shakes with laughter when she rests her forehead in the crook of his neck. The noise is like muffled rocks in a coffee grinder, and it makes Nora shift and mutter something about zombie nurses. It is freaking adorable. It also makes Julie wish she wasn't so damn tired, or else she'd jump his bones and make his poor brain explode with more fireworks than the Fourth of July, but there's nothing she can do about it. It's her own fault she's so busy.

That doesn't mean he gets to make fun of her though.

Julie pulls back and puts her hands on her hips. "It's generally considered bad form to laugh at a girl when she's trying to be sexy," she whispers, grinning, and poking him in the chest.

R grins back at her and holds up two fingers, and Julie squints at them.

"If you can tell me how many fingers I'm holding up, sweetheart, then we'll go downstairs where Nora can't hear us and give your neighbors something to bang on the walls about," R tells her, waggling his fingers like a challenge.

Julie loves challenges. It's part of the reason she didn't lose her shit on the four hour zombie march after her first meeting with R. It's also why she couldn't let her father shoot him in the head, and why she stubbornly refused to let him go when he was bleeding out on the floor of the infirmary. She will haul R kicking and screaming back to life, whatever it takes. She hasn't had to do it yet though, so far he's followed her willingly.

She loves R for it, from his klepto loot hoarding (he still brings back things that catch his eye to her room; yesterday he left a metal bookend in the shape of a turtle on her dresser), to his expressive shrugs, his crazy eclectic music taste, and his gentle love for her and the way he sticks by her.

She still can't believe sometimes that R loves her. Her, crazy Julie Cabernet, with her head in the clouds and her always asking questions: why this-, what would you do if-?

So that's why she squints at his fingers and tries to give him an honest answer, even though they're fuzzy and waving back and forth like drunk white butterflies.

"Um, three?"

"Nope. Two." He plants a wet affectionate kiss on her forehead and Julie pouts.

"Fooey," she muttered. "I thought for sure it was three."

R unfolds his long gangly limbs long enough to snag a free blanket, which is no easy task because Nora has rolled herself into most of Julie's quilts like an alligator. Then he's sitting back against the wall, enshrining them both into the quilt. She wonders whether his butt is going to fall asleep from sitting on the floor too long, but R doesn't seem to care.

It's nice and warm in their little cocoon. Julie has her head tucked up under his chin, her ear is up against the hard wall of his chest, but that skin and bone cage is still thin enough that she can hear his heart thumping strong within it.

Julie counts it as one of the most beautiful sounds she's ever heard.

She's happy. Exhausted as hell, but so happy she wants to explode at the same time. It's a weird feeling, one that she can't quite catalogue but one she wouldn't trade for anything either.

R rests his cheek on the top of her head. His breathing is slow and deep, and for a moment she thinks that maybe he is asleep. So Julie looks up at John Lennon floating above her head like a ghost or a memory, then closes her eyes and murmurs against his skin, "I love you, R."

He hears her.

She knows this because those long arms of his fold her closer to him, inviting her to tuck her nose into the gap between his hoodie and his skin, which she does because god he smells good, and because after a pause of basking in the wake of her soft whisper, he says it back.

"I love you too."

Fin