Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

10. Say it again

Johnny appeared visibly more relaxed as he casually drove the huge military jeep towards Yael's apartment. And yet, something was bothering him.

In the glances the girl stole at him from the passenger seat, it was clear that the stiffness in his body had not yet dissipated. 

She had noticed it in the fingers that gripped the steering wheel as if they were about to break it, in the muscle contracted in his jaw, and in the way his dark eyebrows remained furrowed, despite the familiar grin with which he spoke to her.

He had asked her about her work, what operations she had taken part in during the weeks he had been away, if she had remembered to eat and rest enough, but, as usual, the missions Johnny had taken part in were an absolute taboo.

Yael had learned from a young age to meticulously avoid the subject, and she didn't ask the sergeant anything, just as she had never asked her father anything. Sometimes, though, looking at him, she still had the impression that she had welcomed a stranger so deeply into herself.

John MacTavish, as Colonel Henry Williams had been before him, was a man loyal to death.

And in that devotion, the girl knew that she could never reach him, could never understand.

She watched him drive that car, almost as if they were a normal couple returning from an errand; instead, that scene was full of discordant notes.

His tactical uniform, the SAS badge on his rolled-up sleeves, the holsters on his thighs, the reinforced gloves and stiff knee pads, the knife gleaming from the glove box next to the gearshift, and that deadly smell of gunpowder in the cockpit.

She looked at him, so painfully attractive, and for a crazy moment she had the sad feeling that he would never be hers.

"Go upstairs and take a shower. I'll make some tea." Yael said with a provocative smile, as she led the way into the small brick house to that curious part of her life, solid, cumbersome in its load of loneliness and boldness.

She could feel his enormous presence behind her, boiling, that unique and unmistakable scent of musk, tobacco and fuel. 

His husky laugh tickled the back of her neck with a deep, almost guttural vibration.

"Fuckin' Brits..." he grunted in amusement in the familiar Scottish brogue, so thick it made her head spin. And yet, she didn't protest.

She watched MacTavish climb the stairs, too narrow for his broad shoulders, his steps slow and heavy, as if he were carrying the weight of the world. A sudden emptiness treacherously gripped her stomach.

Yael forced herself to look away, not to dwell on that familiar sense of helplessness that had alienated her from her father. She wanted to ask more, but she was afraid. Not afraid of rejection, but afraid of feeling loved by someone so dangerously close to death.

She deliberately took longer than necessary to fill and light the kettle in the kitchen. The reason wasn't entirely clear to her, but deep down she knew that until then they had only danced around feelings too cumbersome for the stolen fucks between each other's work.

As much as it pained her to admit it, the image of John MacTavish that had been etched into her heart in complex swirls was different from that of any other man who had ever left a mark on her.

To admit it would mean crossing a boundary, a line from which there was no return. To let him in, to peer into the chaos she carried within, to answer questions that required a courage she did not have.

She climbed the stairs with a vague sense of numbness dulling her brain. The soft rustle in her bedroom indicating that the sergeant was really there confused her.