For as long as she could remember, Amy had always been a light sleeper.

Living in the enlisted barracks, with people constantly coming and going at all hours of the day and night, it was a serious liability. Now that she had her own place, though, she considered it a non-issue.

Mostly.

Every now and then, she'd find herself wide awake because Syd had decided to go rummaging around in the fridge for a midnight snack, but those occasions were rare enough, and minor enough, that she would have felt silly complaining about it.

She glanced at the alarm clock beside her bed, and scowled at the time it told her. She'd only been asleep for a few hours. Why in the world was she up now?

Her apartment was located in a quiet, low-crime neighborhood. The building had excellent security, and she lived all the way up on the seventh floor. A break-in seemed incredibly unlikely. Still, with all of the crazy things she'd seen yesterday...

Working from memory, she felt around the nightstand top until her hand closed on the grips of her backup gun. In a single practiced movement, she brought it up to a low ready and flicked off the safety. The hammer was already cocked, of course and it had a round in the chamber. Condition Zero, the range safety officer would call it. Ready to fire. Feeling a little better now that she was armed, she slid off the bed and looked around the room.

A loud thunderclap nearly made her jump out of her skin.

It was probably the storm that woke me up, she told herself.

Her instincts insisted otherwise, though. Hard experience had taught her to trust them.

The echoes faded, giving way to softer sounds produced by the downpour tapping against the windows.

...and another noise, an unfamiliar one that couldn't be explained by the foul weather outside. It had come from the living room, she thought. Moving as quietly as possible, Amy padded naked over to the bedroom door and waited, listening intently.

A moment later, she heard it again. First, the faint creaking of floorboards, followed by... muffled voices?

Familiar voices. Letting out the breath that she hadn't noticed she'd been holding, Amy lowered the pistol, putting it back on safe.

Just Syd and Ryan talking, she realized. Relax. You're not nearly old enough to be getting jumpy like this.

After returning the little handgun to its place on the nightstand, she ruefully fluffed her pillow, then arranged the sheets the way she liked them. Just Syd and Ryan talking. As she was climbing back into the bed, the words kept turning over in her mind, bringing a frown to her face.

Just Syd and Ryan talking... at five o'clock in the morning... with the lights turned off...

It really was none of her business.

Feeling a bit guilty, Amy crept over to the door again, and pressed her ear against it.

"I'm... not very good at talking about stuff," she heard Syd's voice whisper.

Don't I know it, she agreed vehemently. The understatement brought a wry grin to Amy's face.

"Amy tells me all the time that it's something I need to work on. She says that I should just tell people how I feel."

That's right...

A long pause followed, then her roommate softly continued, "That's pretty fucking rich coming from her, right?"

...wait, what? What was THAT supposed to mean?

SYD, of all people, wanted to criticize HER for not being honest?

Unbelievable!

She felt herself gripped by a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to fling the door open, to storm out there and set the record straight. Before she could act on the impulse, though, she heard Ryan reply.

"It's okay, Syd," he murmured back to her. "You don't have to –"

She winced when Syd swore in reply.

"Why am I so bad at this?" the girl – no, the young woman – who she thought of as a little sister asked herself quietly. "Listen, Ryan, I like you. Okay?"

Amy froze, wide-eyed. Her thoughts came crashing to a halt, but Syd's words didn't stop there.

I told him no, a voice in her head reminded her. Just a few hours ago, I said that I wasn't interested. Why did I do that?

Syd was right about me, Amy realized, as the awkward but heartfelt confession continued to spill out, gaining momentum as it went. How can she be so honest?

And why can't I?

The whole thing had probably started while she was in the Marines. No, it definitely had. That was when she'd first set the rule for herself: no work relationships. Period.

She absolutely refused to be one of those enlisted females. Everyone was familiar with the type. The barracks bunny. The deployment sidepiece. The boat boo. More than anything else, Private Reid had wanted to earn the respect of the men and women she was serving alongside. A rule against dating her fellow devil dogs seemed like a small price for her to pay, in order to achieve that goal.

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Before long, it had gone from a rule to a habit, and then from a habit to a routine. She started refusing advances by reflex, without the need to even think about what she was doing. Eventually, word got around that there was no point in trying. Corporal Reid just isn't interested.

There was only one problem: work was, pretty much, Amy's whole life. In practice, no work relationships meant no relationships for her, period.

It didn't bother her too much at the time. She was still young, and after her enlistment she would have the rest of her life waiting for her. Until then, she had plenty of responsibilities to keep her busy. Again and again, she told herself that everything was going to change once she got her discharge papers and returned to the civilian world.

That didn't happen, of course. The police academy was demanding in different ways than her time in the Corps had been, but the regulations forbidding relationships in the workplace were nearly identical. It wasn't that she slipped right back into the old, familiar routine; really, it had never been given a chance to lapse.

Before she knew it, the word had gone around again. Sergeant Reid just isn't interested.

Fast-forward a bit, and now, here she was.

Alone.

Amy was interested in Ryan.

No, she thought, that's way too clinical, too... fake. I can be honest about this, at least in the privacy of my own thoughts... can't I?

Amy wanted Ryan.

There, she'd admitted it.

Her stomach fluttered every time he looked at her. It made her feel like she'd been miscast as the lead in one of those awful tween dramedy movies that she secretly loved to watch. Honestly, she asked herself, what kind of person doesn't get their embarrassing high school first crush until they've already turned twenty-four?

If it had to happen to her, though, she supposed that she could have done a lot worse than Ryan. Yes, he had a certain boyish charm that she found attractive, but that wasn't all there was to him. The man understood when he could joke around, and when it was time to get serious. Mostly. Syd was a bad influence on him, but that couldn't be helped.

At first, she'd been drawn to Ryan's nobility, his heroism, his instant willingness to put his life on the line for people he'd only just met. The appeal of those qualities was easy enough for her to explain. But she'd seen that there was a dark side to him, too, something deep down inside him, lurking beneath the confident grin he so often wore. Something that had been broken by his captivity. Something that she was sure she could heal.

And those abs! Amy wondered how it would feel to run her fingers over them...

...yes, it was obvious that she wanted him.

Not only that, she knew that Ryan wanted her, too. Although the man had a surprising number of talents, a poker face was not among them. He wore his feelings on his sleeve, as the old saying went. They hadn't known each other for long, but it was painfully obvious that he wasn't just looking at her as a teammate. He was willing to try, if only she would let him.

Yet she'd automatically shot him down with the same casual indifference that she'd rejected dozens of other men over the years.

Why?

That wasn't all. If she was trying to be totally honest with herself, she had one last admission to make. Yes, her pulse raced when Ryan stared at her... but it pounded just as hard when she was watching Cat shamelessly flirting with him, or when she caught Syd ogling his naked body. Harder, even. That was the moment of self-discovery that had rattled her more than any of the others. She was getting excited, she'd realized, from watching another woman put the moves on a man that she undeniably had feelings for.

Reaching down, she ran her fingers below the thatch of her neatly-trimmed pubic hair. She wasn't just damp, she was soaking wet... from listening to Ryan and Syd have an honest heart-to-heart talk about their feelings for one another.

Seemingly of its own accord, one of her fingers began to move in tentative circles around the tiny bud at the juncture of her thighs.

What in the world was wrong with her?

Thunder crashed, and in its wake, the voices faded. Straining her ears, she waited for them to begin speaking again. Finally, with a slightly-shaking hand, she pulled the door open a crack and peeked out into the room beyond.

As her vision adjusted, the indistinct shapes of two bodies slowly emerged from the surrounding darkness.

The smaller one was Syd, obviously. She was on her knees in front of the sofa, leaning forward with her arms extended. From Amy's angle, it certainly didn't look like a very comfortable position. Maybe that's why she's shifting around so much.

Which meant it was Ryan laying on the couch, face obscured by the low seat back. That made sense. The man was supposed to be recovering, and Cat had strictly warned him not to exert himself any more than necessary. She was glad to see that he wasn't up and walking around.

At the very edge of her hearing, Ryan let out a low groan.

Syd's head dipped, rose, then dipped again.

For an instant, she worried that his injury was bothering him. Then, all at once, Amy realized what she was seeing.

Syd was... they were... in her living room!

Syd made a wet gagging sound.

Could something like that even fit into...?

This is wrong! she thought. I need to stop this! It's not too late...

Her hand drifted back down.

Before they go any further, I can go in there, and tell him that I changed my mind. That we don't have to wait. That I can make him happier than she will.

That I love him.

But Amy didn't move. It felt like her feet had been nailed to the carpet.

Suddenly, there was nothing she needed more than to watch Syd messily struggling to take Ryan into her throat.

No, an awful, wicked voice whispered, she didn't just want to watch. What she really wanted was for them to realize she was there.

More than anything, she wanted to let them know that she was watching them.

She bit back a moan, barely.

Her palm pressed down on her mound, fingers plunging desperately between her inner lips. When Syd pulled away, gasping for air, ruined makeup running down her face, it was too much.

Amy came.

As Ryan shuddered and finished in Syd's mouth, she came again.

In the hazy fog of pleasure, Syd's eyes met hers. Ducking back into her room, she pushed the door closed, then leaned against it, trembling.

It's so dark, Amy reassured herself a moment later, once her heart had stopped racing, and Syd was... otherwise occupied at the time. There's no way she could have seen me.

Left alone with her thoughts, the guilt came roaring back.

What am I doing? Why am I like this?

She sighed.

Despite all of her regrets, she'd needed to bring herself to a third climax before she could eventually get back to sleep.