She reached up behind the camera's viewbox and unplugged it. It wasn't the first time she'd done so, usually for the paranoid but non-violent types, and she always caught it from the guards and sometimes her superiors later. Patrick didn't seem to be paranoid, just protective. Of himself and of his family, and since his family had been murdered that meant protecting all that he had left of them. His memories, his ideas. She hadn't touched on his family more than to try to draw out happy memories of them, but he hadn't even seemed to want that. As though, like photographs, he was afraid to touch them too often for fear they would become faded and warped. So, eventually, even she had left that alone.

Sophie wasn't a woman to give up easily, though. Bit by bit, day by day she had drawn things out of him. A revelation here, a slip there, even getting him to talk had been an achievement. Getting him to do anything other than sit there and stare at the wall, the face on the wall. They had painted over it once and he'd gone right back and drawn it in again.

"There," she told him. "Now we're alone."

He looked at her.

Patrick Jane was a handsome man, honestly. He was handsome, and he was more than physically attractive, he had an attractive spirit. But when he looked at her like that all she could think of was how soft his lips looked, how much passion was coiled tight behind those faded blue eyes, how soft would his hair feel through her fingers, what would those slim and dexterous hands feel like over her body, how muscled was that lean chest, how were those broad shoulders, what sounds did he make and oh god why am I thinking like this?

He hadn't moved. He was just looking at her. Waiting for her to do something and that look had been enough to make her breath just a little bit harder. Also to remind her what a force of personality he could be.

She steadied herself, went over and sat next to him on the bed. "I know you're in there, Patrick," she told him quietly. Taking his hand, curling one finger around one side and resting the fingertips of the other hand in his palm. "I know you can come out if you want to. You were doing so well the other day..."

His eyes flickered over to her. He still didn't say anything.

"Patrick, please."

"What." His voice was flat, ugly, as much of a turn off as his look a second ago had been a turn on and for a second she was caught between wanting to run away and still wanting to pounce him. She didn't let a flicker of it show on her face. She was better than that.

"Talk to me? I know you can. You have before." And she didn't know what it was that had sent him back down again. Something one of the other doctors had said or done to him, perhaps. She hadn't been there, she couldn't know.

He smiled. Just a little, still so very sad, but it was a smile. For her. A smile just for her, and maybe the first anyone had coaxed out of him since he'd been in here. "You don't want me to do that?"

"Why?"

Not a flicker of change. "I'm a very dangerous man."

"I don't believe that."

He tilted his head at her as though intrigued by her answer. He'd told her that first, but he had been raving and about to hurt himself and she suspected he still blamed himself for his family's deaths (not suspected, knew, but this was different) and that that was the reason why he believed that. She'd seen the footage. It hadn't been a deliberate provocation.

So, no, she didn't believe that. And she let him see that in her body language, the way she leaned her shoulders towards him and stayed calm.

He reached out to her, and she didn't flinch. She was proud of that, but what he was doing was reaching, not grabbing. Not attacking, not the way patients sometimes did. If he wanted to touch her he was welcome to it. It would show him that not everyone was afraid, that he wasn't broken, not past repair. That he could be all right again.

"You're not afraid of me?"

She smiled at that. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Fascinating."

Her breath was coming quicker again. She'd have to watch that.

"Why is that fascinating?" She was curious. And she was a little amused that he thought she should be afraid of him. What was there to be afraid of? Except possibly temptation, because his fingers were touching her like a lover, trailing down the curve of her jaw and to her throat, where they fell away just before impropriety happened.

"It just is."

He knew. He had reasons, he just wasn't saying.

"Patrick..." the way he looked at her when she said his name made her wonder if maybe he wasn't used to being called in the familiar. "Look at me. Please?" Not past me, not through me, look at me.

He did. She endured it just enough to know that maybe taking the usual route with him and treating him as any of her other patients wasn't the best of ideas. Not all innocuous questions were safe ones. And now they were inches apart and her psychiatrist's mind was warring with her young woman's mind, the part of her that she hadn't seen since she was seventeen.

His lips brushed over hers and the first thing that ran through her mind was that they were as soft as she had imagined. The third or fourth thing that crossed through her mind was that she shouldn't be doing this, and yet it was so damned tempting. All the more so because of his hesitation and his shyness.

She shouldn't be doing this. It was an abuse of power, an abuse of the doctor patient relationship and then her hand slid into his hair and his hand brushed over the back of her neck, just enough to stimulate and not enough to feel the weight of his hand resting there. She wondered, entirely inappropriately, if he had made love to his wife this way. A whole lot of inappropriate thoughts were going through her mind right now, not the least of which was that she finally understood the meaning of so many of those novels saying that he made her burn with a secret fire because that was exactly how it felt when his lips moved down her neck, like fire, like her whole body was on fire and she was flushed from her roots down to where her bra curved over her breasts which was exactly where he was touching now.

It didn't once, by now, occur to her that this was harassment.

Even if it had occurred to her it wouldn't have done her much good. She was the doctor here. She was supposed to be in control. But she didn't push him away when he began to lift the edges of her shirt, and she didn't pull her lab coat tighter around her, and she was the one in control of the hands that slid up under the white cotton shirt that they'd given him, that pawed at the warm, smooth chest beneath. His fingers curled around hers (she didn't know when he'd gotten a hand free) and gently drew her hand out. Just as gently, he laid her back on the bed.

Somewhere in there, when her back was aching with the strain of muscles and her fingers were clutching at the pillow, somewhere in between when he brought her almost to screaming climax and when he didn't let her come back down before he started playing with her shivering skin again, she realized that she might have let him go too far. Not that she was sure where, but somewhere in here they had gotten out of hand. She had let it go too far. But too far was also too far to turn back now, and the worst thing that she could imagine right now was giving him a reason to stop. She didn't know what the consequences would be, if he would break, if he would break her. But if they stopped now, it would be ten times worse than what would happen if they kept going.

So she let him keep going. And he did; once she was too weak and shivering to do more than be stimulated by every new thing he gave her, he took her. And the air was hot and heavy with the moisture from their breath and sweat, and she would have sworn later that he growled but he didn't, and it didn't hurt although she felt the force and the pressure as he took her. Her mind shied away from the harder, Germanic word.

And after it was over he stretched over her, panting, supporting himself on his arms and she tried to look into his eyes but he wouldn't let her. Fifteen, twenty minutes had made everything between them so complicated.

"Patrick..." he was rolling off her when she rolled to her side and reached her hand to his cheek. "It's okay..."

The look he gave her sent her sliding off the narrow hospital bed, remembering in an instant (the same instant it had taken for her to go from zero to take me now) that they were sticky and cooling and he was her patient and she had done something she would have called unconscionable if anyone else had described it to her. Quickly, she got dressed.

"It's going to be okay, Patrick." One last attempt. Please let it work. "I promise. We'll help you."

He dropped his gaze. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

"You slept with one of your patients."

Sophie felt her mouth quirking up in a tiny, tired smile. It was a smile that had seen far too much of Patrick Jane, enough to be malleable, and enough to know that she was starting to become more than a little bit like him. "I know. It was ... wrong. Unconscionable, even." And the therapist couldn't do a damn thing about it, because now she was bound by the same damned client confidentiality agreement that Sophie herself was. "I shouldn't have let it get that far out of control... and I did. What can I say?"

That tiny, tired smile, and a shrug, and a spreading of hands. "Bless me, father, for I have sinned."

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