An Arrangement of Sorts Ch. 02

She looked so small to him then as she began to crumble and he got a glimpse of the pure weight of what was behind that dam as it began to crack. As the last of her control fell away and she started to cry, he pulled her to him gently and held her as it began.

Her shoulder blades heaved from her sobs and she held her face against his neck as it came out. She barely knew a thing about him, but it felt good to hold herself to him. Joss Whitfield felt like a small leaf floating lost on a river, and until now, it was only a foregone conclusion. She just didn't quite know the moment when she would slip under. But somehow, she'd found herself washed up against another leaf.

Moreth had cracks in his own dam as he held her and she felt his hand caress her head. He looked off into his million mile horizon for a few moments. But then he blinked and a pair of his tears slid down his cheeks.

They might have looked a little funny, the two people holding onto each other in the McDonalds lot at midnight with the large and very confused dog who stood by them, but it didn't matter.

He felt her tears as they began to soak his shirt, and he didn't care at all. He needed more to feel the way that her shoulders shook and he needed to hope that he was doing somebody a little good for once in his life. It was awful for the emotion of it, but he felt the swell of her breasts against him and he realized that it had never felt so good to hold someone as it did now.

He was doing ok, he thought with a quiet sniffle. The scent of her hair came to him and he had a thought that he now knew what slightly short blonde hair smelled like. He'd smelled a woman's hair before, it had just never seemed this important to him before in his life. He was doing alright, though. It wasn't killing him the way that he thought that it would to hold her as her pain came out, but she finished it for him in her own way when she asked him.

"How did you know?" she asked in her soft and now-breaking little Georgia voice from under his cheek, "You said that you saw it before," she sniffled, "When?"

She felt his own need to be held tightly then. It took him a minute, but he got it out and then wept as well, nothing as hard as she was weeping and very quietly, but he lowered his head and wept all the same.

"I see it sometimes, once in a while," he said very softly as he inhaled her gentle scent the way it came to him from her neck.

The smell of Joss and a little soap.

He was losing his ability to smell it with his nose running a little from his tears and he hated that. He sniffed once to try to memorize her scent and then it was gone and he couldn't smell anything. But the imprint was enough and he knew that he'd remember. Such a friendly smell. He wondered how anyone could want to never smell something so wonderful again.

Then he squeezed his eyes shut tightly as he felt his breath shudder out of him.

"Sometimes."

She was still weeping, but she had to know now. Her voice carried the tortured sound that people's voices often do when they're crying as she asked the side of his throat when he'd seen that. She wanted to know if he'd helped someone like her before, but knew everything herself with his quiet reply.

"When I shave sometimes."

Joss Whitfield froze for a moment and then she hung on to Moreth as tightly as she could while he wept.