"I'm sorry..." it felt very strange...to be dismissing the idea of just kissing him. She had wanted to for so long; and then there had been Fauna, and Chance, and Figaro... and it was all just so messy. It would have been easy to close her eyes and pretend that she was the person he loved; but she never would have believed it, not deep down where it mattered. Hurting him, the look of pitiful rejection and the slump of his shoulders made her feel sad rather than vindicated. She had thought, somewhere in the dark reaches of her not-always-nice mind, that she would at least feel like she got a bit of her own back. The problem was, spiteful as she could be...in the long term watching people she loved suffer made her suffer too. And she did love Devlin just not...in that way anymore. She valued herself too much now to play second to a memory of someone else.

She made a soft hum of sympathy as he laid back. She wanted to make him feel better but wasn't totally sure how. Physical comfort had always been something she needed, being close to someone and feeling how solid and real they were beneath her fingertips mad her feel less alone. She could give him that, at least for a little while. Leaning down she brushed the hair from his forehead and placed a small kiss there before curling up next to him with her head on his chest, slender arm draped over his stomach as her bare knee brushed his outer thigh. Sophie was not aware that in the grown up world this was called sending mixed signals; she just didn't know another way to show him that she was there and it was real and she wasn't giving up on him.

"I think..." she paused, picking at a piece of invisible lint on his shirt before craning her neck to look at him, "you, we both, really have to stop looking at what's gone," her expression was thoughtful as she reached up to touch his hair again, "A person can get so busy looking at what's gone they miss out on what's right in front of them. Lost people aren't like lost door keys; even when we find them again they're inevitably different than when we lost them, so we have to learn to care for them differently," she wondered if she was making any  sense at all; it made sense in the context of One Art, but Sophie was no Elizabeth Bishop. She thought vaguely of reading the poem to him; but it was on her bookshelf across the room...and Devlin never had seemed like the poetry type. Her voice was soft as she gave him a small squeeze, "Everything, except the very very last thing is survivable; and this is not the last thing yet Dev, not even close".

"Everything, except the very very last thing is survivable; and this is not the last thing yet Dev, not even close".

"Yeah..." He said softly, his hand toying with a strand of her hair absentmindedly. Unfortunately... he added in the back of his mind. There was much more to come and he didn't know how much more of it he could deal with. But her surprisingly mature words were meant well and he did appreciate them. Uncertain how to voice it properly, he simply pulled her closer and pressed a light kiss to the top of her head before resting his chin on her soft and fragrant hair. Staring at the ceiling, Dev let his breathing line up with hers until he felt her relax. His own eyes begin to droop and he considered just staying there for the night, warm and comfortable, but he knew that it couldn't be that way.

When he heard her start snoring softly, Devlin slowly begin the difficult task of detaching her. It was quickly apparent why she was so fond of monkeys, since Dev had a helluva time getting her unglued. Get one arm off, the other would slip back around. It took several minutes, but he managed to finally drag her off without waking her up. Tucking her in, he pushed away any dirty thoughts that might have rose staring down at her unconscious frame, and pressed an innocent kiss to her forehead. With a sigh, he opened the window and begin to crawl through, looking back at her only briefly before disappearing into the night. It was for the best, he told himself, that nothing had happened. He couldn't see her again, not for a while, and he realized how much it would have harmed both of them if something had sparked between them that night. It just hurt to admit.

(Fin)