From somewhere deep within me, I feel the burst of her delight, so powerful that it seems to suck some of the caution out of me. I watch her watching me with an expression on her face that looks like admiration and before I can stop myself, I smile. Her hair is a halo of frizz, and red sheets are pooled around her lap. Sitting up just to my right, completely awake.

I feel that I should be concerned waking up so late that light is streaming through the window, but then I see her. I bring my hand to my face in order to clear my eyes and shield them from the daylight. I try to open my eyes, but I’m blinded by sun. I release the pillow that’s underneath me and turn to my side where the warmth has disappeared. Still mostly asleep, I tighten my arms around the pillow underneath me, groggily soaking in the pleasing sensation of fingertips against my skin, breath against my spine.

I wake to the sensation of lips pressed against my back. I’ll stop talking and just let you read chapter 56, the bathtub scene, as told from the beloved perspective of aaron warner. it’s why i haven’t written a chapter 55 fanfiction: i just can’t decide how exactly things would go down. I’m publishing this now, but I feel as if I could rewrite this fic 30 different ways and post them all. Obviously I followed the dialogue in the book for as long as I could, but after that, I went wild. But this is, in general, a really hard fanfiction to write because there’s so many directions it could go. I’m personally a big believer of the “they don’t have sex in chapter 56″ argument, so this is where this fanfiction goes. So this is either gonna be really good or really bad to you, depending on a lot of factors.

Aaron warner and juliette ferrars