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

19. You should stay

The tiny digital clock on her bedside table read five the last time Yael had rolled lightly between the disheveled sheets to check.

Outside the window, behind the light curtains, the soft light of dawn had not yet managed to pierce the dense shadows of the room. She took a breath and the familiar smell of the bed seemed animated by something new, indescribable.

A vague earthy, straightforward, almost harsh aroma, a pungent and metallic scent. It emanated lightly enveloped in an intense warmth, the quiet breath of a bellows staining the silence. She didn't need to see him to know he was there, wide as a closet, his muscles tense, his veins swollen just under his sun-kissed skin.

Yet, she turned on her side to look at him. The light irises, blinded by the half-light, narrowed stubbornly on the dark, heavy contours of the boy deeply asleep a few inches from her. They traced every scar, the straight line of the nose, the soft and messy mohawk crest on the pillow.

A few streaks of light timidly washed the dense and solid forms of the broad chest that rose rhythmically from under the sheets.

John MacTavish seemed to her, once again, ridiculously and scandalously attractive.

That thought had formed in her head suddenly, as if the pieces of something that already existed had come together perfectly only in that nocturnal stasis. While, sleepless, she had let herself be carried away by the movement of his breath and the heart that raced in her chest.

She had turned it over and over in her mind, examining it in every nook and cranny, but the knowledge had not sedated the torment.

The way the sergeant had returned to her had seemed so natural, how much he now belonged to those walls, to her heart that her breath suddenly caught in her throat. It was a nonsense, something unheard of, the thought alone scared her to death, but the alternative now hurt too much.

She wanted to touch him, to let that familiar warmth that invaded the bed sink into her body as well, deep into her bones.

Instead, she smiled at the soft crescent of light that caressed the tips of the now disheveled mohawk crest, traced a trail of light dust on the carefully shaved beard, accentuating its color with every movement in accord with the deep, constant breath, down to the old scar on the chin.

Yael was ashamed of that childish need that grew inside her to see his eyes, still hidden by the thick dark lashes, to be carried away by the density of that sea silk, its comforting and warm aura.

She approached him slowly, so as not to disturb at all that intense sleep that seemed to take hold of him every time he slept in her bed. Closer and closer. Her heart pounded under her sternum, pressed against his bicep in a rhythm that vibrated just up to his fingers in a slight spasm.

Without further ado, she buried her nose in his skin, slowly inhaling that metallic and earthy scent that was entirely her Johnny and her warm fingers reached the broad plane of his pectoral muscles, tracing the dense, familiar hair.

Under her fingertips, roughened by disinfectant soap, she clearly felt the slow, pounding beats of his heart and it seemed as if she couldn't fully register those feelings that tangled her brain to the rhythm of a crazy blender.

She loved him so much that it had become difficult to separate what she was from what she wanted to be with him.

A barely perceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth told her that her precautions had been useless. Or perhaps it was just the culmination of what the girl had desired.

Yael could feel the sergeant's muscles contracting, the thick tendons flexing beneath the taut skin as his limbs moved, his chest expanding like a bellows with a deep breath. He stretched in a crack of joints, freeing his massive body from the grip of sleep only to pull her closer to him.