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

3. A perfect shot

That night, Yael had struggled to sleep. More than usual, more than her insomnia—a constant companion from years of night shifts—normally required.

She'd pondered at length why she'd accepted that coffee, why she'd opened that crack in a belief she'd always considered rock-solid. 

Could it have been his eyes, an incandescent blue, or that uniquely brazen way he wore his heart on his sleeve, that vulnerability he'd shown for her? 

She'd turned over and over in her mind the possibility that she'd been unfair, that she'd taken advantage of her own loneliness to justify her attraction. 

Perhaps she was leading him on, if there was anything to be led on to.

In the iron logic with which she disciplined her work, the inability to give herself an answer irritated her more than she cared to admit. 

There were no boundaries within which she could recognize herself in the instinctive leap she'd made in response to Sergeant MacTavish. 

She'd given in and would have to learn to live with the fact that the grip, over time, must have loosened. Or perhaps not? 

What the hell was she doing? 

After a sleepless night, facing the morning shift had been exhausting.

With her energy sapped by the last surgery, the smell of the OR still in her nostrils, she flopped heavily onto the couch in the on-call room. 

She pinned her trainers to the low lacquered wooden table, her colorful scrub cap still on her head, closed her eyes, and arched her back with a sigh that seemed to pass right through her. 

She knew her job, loved it with a wild and rebellious passion, the subtle adrenaline rush of the first contact with the scalpel, the need to make split-second decisions with brutal clarity. 

She wished she could reserve the same discipline for her private life. It was easy to hide in an operating room, to violently detach herself from everything outside, under the halogen spotlight of the surgical lamp and in the shadows at the same time. 

That was the world where she'd made her space, tooth and nail. Aseptic, orderly, manipulable. It was a shame she didn't feel the same certainty about what happened outside the OR doors.

To pursue that desire, to punish her father, she had gnawed so hard at her private life that she barely recognized it when she returned to the brick house on Jackson Cres. To be honest, it was a mess. 

She was self-sufficient, she'd always been certain of that. 

And yet, more often than she liked to admit, in the rejuvenating solitude of a quietly drunk coffee and a film on the sofa, the doubt crept in that she was wasting an opportunity.

With a disgruntled grunt, she ripped the surgical cap from her head, and her ponytail fell in disarray over the worn edge of the couch. 

She was about to get up, find Gary for a cigarette in one of their usual spots, eat something together before clocking off, when her phone vibrated insistently in her scrubs pocket. 

"Hiya, doc."

She read MacTavish's name on the screen, and her heart gave a slight jolt, almost a whisper under the starched collar of her blue scrub. 

It was enough to make her smile enough to want to reply immediately. 

"Hi, Sergeant."

Yael sank deeper into the old couch, curled up with that phone, with those three dots bouncing on the screen.