Work Text:
Early July, 2021
Chris curses to himself when he turns his phone off airplane mode and the first thing he sees is Her text message.
“What?” Scott asks, trying to lean over the armrest between them to look at the small screen. Chris just reaches for the plastic barrier between their seats and pulls it up, effectively shutting out his little brother. Gotta love first class. “Hey!” Scott whines, so Chris rolls his eyes and puts the barrier back down. He turns the phone so that Scott can read it.
Fiance: Can’t wait to see you. I’m at Carly’s with the family, so just come straight here. Love you.
“What’s wrong with that?” Scott asks, looking up once he’s finished the message.
“I mean, nothing, I guess.” Chris leans away from Scott and works his phone back into his hip pocket. “I was just kind of looking forward to going home and seeing her. Like … just her.”
“Ohhhhhh,” Scott drawls. “You mean, when she says, Can’t wait to see you, you were hoping she was planning on seeing a lot more of you.”
Chris looks over at his brother, lips pursed and eyebrows raised as if to say Duh. “It’s been like …” he trails off and makes his eyes wide, tilting his head a little side-to-side, “a long time,” he finally says.
Scott scoffs. “Don’t act like you didn’t get reacquainted with your right hand these past few months. We shared a wall in France, I heard you two on the phone.”
“Dude!” Chris smacks the center of Scott’s chest with the back of his hand. “Not cool.”
“No,” the younger Evans rolls his eyes, “not like that. If I’da heard that I woulda taken a walk or something. Maybe jumped out the window, whatever it took. I just mean I’d hear you guys start talking, then I’d hear your voice do that thing you think is sexy, and then you’d close the door. We shared a bathroom for a lotta years, I know what happened when you closed that door.”
For a second Chris just stares at him, levelling him with a glare. Finally he says, “From now on, any time you stay with us, you’re sleeping in the basement.”
“You act like it’s something I want to hear. I don’t need that much information about either of you.” Chris rolls his eyes and Scott makes note of the people around them starting to stand, restlessly reaching for carry-ons and shuffling into the aisle. It would be easy for them, in first class, to be the first people off the plane, but it’s kind of an unspoken agreement between them that they just wait until everyone else has deboarded, that they’ll draw less attention if they stay in their seats, heads down scrolling through their phones or reading books. “Anyway,” Scott goes on, lowering both his head and his voice and leaning a little closer to Chris, turning so that his back is mostly to the aisle, “my point is that you haven’t exactly been celibate all this time. You can spare a couple minutes for our mother and sisters. And be grateful that you’re marrying a girl who puts your family before sex, unlike you, apparently.”
Chris’s jaw drops. Seriously? “Okay, don’t act like you’d even be on this side of the country right now if Ma hadn’t laid on the guilt trip from hell. We both know that if you had it your way you’d be somewhere over the middle of the country already, probably paying for airplane wi-fi so that you and Steve could be messaging right up until the second you land.”
Scott tucks his chin toward his chest and turns away from Chris, refusing to make eye contact as he says, “I can neither confirm nor deny those accusations.”
“That’s what I thought, ass. Now sit there and be quiet before we draw all the wrong kinds of attention. We’ve already established that I’m frustrated, don’t make me drag you off this plane in a headlock.”
Scott looks like he wants to say something to that - looks like he’s aching to do it, really - but Chris only deepens his glare and Scott snaps his mouth closed again with a melodramatic roll of his eyes. Chris loves his little brother, truly. The idiot to his right is his best friend and has been since the day he was born. But the other thing that’s been true nearly as long is that the two really know how to push each other’s buttons. The last time they spent as much time together as they have over the last several weeks was last spring and summer, when Scott was quarantining with Chris at his house. But that was at his home, with his dog, and all his creature comforts and all the space his big, rambling farmhouse provides. It was also just a short drive from Shanna’s place and from Carly and their mom’s, meaning that any time they started feeling like they’d had more than enough of each other, Scott could disappear to one of those places for a while. In France they were sharing a hotel suite - a very nice hotel suite, but still, it was four rooms total, including the bathroom. And Scott was always just there, unless Chris was actively filming. They ate together, slept, as Scott just pointed out, just one wall away from one another, and Scott was even right there on the sidelines every time they wrapped a take. There was no getting away from each other.
And none of that even accounts for the biggest difference between the two of them living together in Chris’s house last summer and basically living together in a hotel room this summer - Her. She was there, too, in his house. And yes, that means he was having regular sex, which is an obvious plus (and the lack of that is definitely contributing to his mood right now), but it also just means he had regular access to her. And he misses that. A lot. He misses holding her while they sleep, the smell of her shampoo as they buzz around each other in the kitchen or when she curls into him on the couch (and he bought a bottle for himself to bring with him on this trip, but it’s not the same), the way her whole face scrunches when she laughs at something stupid he’s done. Hell, he even misses her cold toes pressed to the backs of his legs and the errant bobby pins that seem to just appear on every surface in the house. He misses all of it, all of her, and all this time away from her (the most time they’ve spent apart consecutively, without at least a weekend visit or something, since they met), while also being cooped up with his little brother, has definitely started to wear on him.
Still, they manage to make it to their mom and older sister’s house without killing each other. The fact that they walked through the airport itself in near complete silence and with their heads down probably didn’t hurt, and once they got into Chris’s car in the long-term parking lot, Scott buried himself in his own phone (and Chris managed to swallow down the urge to ask if he was talking to Steve) and Chris turned up the radio and sang along. (And that last part was mostly to bug Scott, but by the time they pull up in front of their childhood home the two are dueting together to {I’ve Had} The Time of my Life, so basically, things are totally normal.)
Scott pushes through the door first, without knocking, and before they make it to the living room all three kids are barrelling at them, yelling over one another about a video game and a baseball tournament and what kind of fireworks their dad bought to shoot off on the Fourth. Chris gives the obligatory hugs and high fives and follows the kids into the family room and as soon as he can see other adults, he starts scanning the room. Carly appears right in front of him and opens her arms, so he bends to hug her, and when he does she presses her cheek to his and says quietly, “She’s in the kitchen. It was sweet of her to want to come over so that you would come here first, but she’s been a mess for the last 30 minutes. I think she’s hiding.”
Chris furrows his brow and pulls back to look down at his big sister. “Is she okay?”
“Oh yeah.” Carly nods, smiling. “She’s a good mess, an excited mess. An eight-year-old-on-Christmas-morning mess. I think she’s just embarrassed about how giddy she is.”
Chris knows that feeling. Hell, he had that feeling as the plane was touching down and taxiing toward the gate. Then he read her text. And yeah, he’s still wicked excited to see her, and hold her, and kiss her, but the idea that he’d be doing it with an audience had dampened his excitement somewhat. It’s coming back though, along with the hope that he’ll be able to talk her into getting out of here, like, soon.
He makes his way around the room quickly, hugging his mom and little sister and clapping his brother-in-law and Shanna’s boyfriend (his future brother-in-law, if he had to bet on it) on their backs, then makes a beeline for the kitchen. She’s standing just in front of the sink, sipping from a glass of water while she stares out the window in front of her. He slips in as quietly as he can and is shocked (maybe a little disappointed) when she doesn’t even flinch when he wraps his arms around her waist from behind and drops his chin to her shoulder. Then he sees her reflection in the glass, and her soft smile and sparkling eyes tell him she’d been watching him the same way.
“Hey you,” she says softly, reaching to set the glass in the sink, and god he’s missed that voice, close and quiet and real.
“Hey,” he answers before turning his face down to bury it in her neck, pressing kisses to her warm skin and inhaling her scent. He feels her sigh and her hand comes up to curl around the back of his head. It’s only for a second, though, because then both of her hands fly to his wrists and she’s pulling, looking down at his arms as she tugs them away from her body. “What are you doing?”
“I wanna see,” she tells him, holding his arms straight out in front of them both and turning them palms up. It takes him a second, but it eventually clicks for him.
“Sweetheart,” he kisses the side of her head, “that was six weeks ago. I’m all healed up, not even so much as a trace of a bruise left.”
“I want to see for myself.”
He laughs softly into her hair. “You have seen, plenty of times.” Then, his voice lower as he speaks right into her ear, he says, “In fact, I’m pretty sure you had a very clear shot of my right forearm the other night.”
The innuendo goes right over her head, or maybe she just chooses to ignore it. Either way, she says again, “I want to see myself. In person.” And he’s not going to tease her anymore, because that was her small voice, her anxiety voice, her I’m scared but I don’t want you to know it because I’m afraid you’ll think I’m being silly voice. He fucking hates that voice.
“Alright sweetheart,” he says, resting his cheek softly on the top of her head as he stretches his arms long, tightening his hands into fists and baring the now-unmarked skin of the insides of his forearms. “Look as much as you want.”
Her fingertips ghost over the skin, from his wrists to the crooks of his elbows and back. When she seems to finally be satisfied with what she sees, she turns and pushes onto her toes to wrap her arms around his neck. “I missed you,” she breathes, the words muffled by his shoulder.
Chris wraps his arms tight around her, curling his long fingers around her ribs on opposite sides and holding her body as close to his as he can manage. “I missed you too,” he promises, and if that’s not the understatement of the year, he doesn’t know what is.
“And I didn’t like that,” she continues, as if he hadn’t said anything. “The bruises looked bad in the pictures, like you’d been in a car accident or something.”
“I was fine, sweet girl. Occupational hazard, that’s all.”
“Well, I still don’t like it.” Her hands tighten around his tshirt, pulling at the shoulders until the sleeves ride up and dig into his armpits. “Promise me you’ll be more careful.”
“Sweetheart -”
“Promise. Please.” And there’s that voice again.
“I promise. It’s not a guarantee that accidents won’t happen, but I do promise that I will be as careful as I can.”
There have been a few moments like this since he headed out to work on The Gray Man, moments when the reality of his career and what it will sometimes mean for them really seems to hit her. And overall, she’s been a fucking champ about it. Never once has she tried to make him feel bad about how long he was gone, or them not spending his birthday together, or even the handful of times that he had to miss their scheduled video and phone dates because things came up on set. But sometimes he can just tell that certain things hit her harder than she wants them to, whether it’s loneliness or not getting to share experiences with him (including trips to their wedding venue, which had hit him pretty hard, too, though he was glad to know she at least had his sisters, on one trip, and her kids, on another), or, yes, accidents and injuries when she’s too far away to see him in-person and really believe that he’s okay and feel like she’s helping him somehow. And when that happens, he does everything he possibly can to reassure her and comfort her without actually being dishonest about the fact that this is his job, and one that he loves. When he’d first sent her the pictures of the bruises, after a long, long day of filming in L.A. and before he posted them to Instagram, he could tell that she didn’t love it. She was just too quiet, her voice too even and her words too measured. But aside from an almost whispered I’m sorry you got hurt, she hadn’t really said anything about it. He should have known it would come back in one form or another. Still, if this is it, if this is the kind of ‘blowback,’ he’s going to get for the rest of his life - her being concerned about him and needing a little extra TLC once they’re together again - he’s more than okay with that.
He’s more than okay with it, but that doesn’t mean he wants to dwell on it. In fact, as ‘frustrating’ as his previous train of thought and state of mind had been, he’d much rather get back to that and see what they can do about moving this reunion some place more private. So while she still clings to him, her breath hot on the side of his neck, he slides his hands down to the softer spots on her sides, right above her hips, and squeezes lightly, just enough to make her jump. “But hey, since I’m here now, and totally fine and in one piece, can I get my welcome home kiss?”
She nods as she pulls back and one of her hands slides up onto the back of his head, her thumb rubbing over the shorter than usual hair. He’s still holding her so close that when she pushes up to meet him in the middle, the front of her body rubs along his, and any ‘calming’ effect that their last conversation may have had is undone in a second. He ducks his head and meets her with his lips already parted, and when her tongue immediately teases at the top one for a second before sliding over his, he moans into her mouth. Yeah, the last few months with nothing but his own company and her image on a screen came nowhere close to this. They kiss until he’s backed her up to the counter, her back arched over it as he leans farther and farther into the kiss, and he can tell that her hand wants to sink into his hair and tug, and that she’s a little frustrated that there’s not enough of it there. For their part, his own hands have slid down until he has a firm grip on her ass, lifting her up until her toes just barely touch the floor and holding her so close that he’s not sure even air can pass between them.
Dragging his teeth lightly over her bottom lip, he pulls back just enough to break the kiss but keeps his forehead pressed to hers. He’s breathing heavily as he straightens enough to let her stand up fully, and he can feel her chest rising and falling heavily against his own. “Fuck, ” he mutters on an exhale, then smirks at the furrow in her brow when she drags her hand over the back of his head then to his jaw, covered in sandpaper-like stubble. “It’ll grow back,” he promises, then pulls back farther when she nods her reluctant agreement, kissing her forehead softly as he goes.
A second later, once they’ve both come back to themselves a little and he’s moved his hands back into safer territory on her back, her own resting on his biceps, he nods once and says, “Alright. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What?”
“Sweetheart, I know you came here so that I wouldn’t have to decide who to see first and I could see you and my family all at the same time. And that was so, so thoughtful and just one of the million reasons I love you so much. But,” he leans in until he’s sort of towering over her and can bend to speak just above her left ear and goes on much more quietly (quite possibly in that voice Scott mentioned earlier), “if we’re not out of here within the next three minutes, I’m going to fuck you over my sister’s kitchen counter.”
He hears her gasp and when he pulls back to look at her, her jaw has dropped and her eyes are wide. “Too much?” he asks with a sheepish squint.
It takes her a second, but she schools her features, then she actually drags her teeth over her bottom lip (and she knows that drives him fucking crazy, because that’s one of the things she does right before - well, when she’s feeling really good), and she looks up at him and says, “That depends.”
“On?”
“If we are out of here in the next three minutes, does that mean you’re going to fuck me over our kitchen counter?”
His hands tighten into fists, taking the flowy material of her shirt with them. (He has no control over it, really, it just happens.) “Oh sweetheart. Wherever you’ll let me.”
And she might actually kill him one day, just cause him to spontaneously combust out of a buildup of arousal and desire and need you right fucking now, because she actually shrugs at that and says, “We can start there.”
Chris closes his eyes and forces a long slow breath through his nose, but he can’t seem to help the literal growl that tacks itself onto the end of the exhale. “Yeah,” he manages, his eyes still closed, “we gotta go. Now.” She giggles, and if he wasn’t already completely out of his mind for her, that would do him in.
It’s not easy, but he makes himself let go of her and he takes a step back, digging into his left hip pocket as he goes. He pulls out his keys and dangles them in front of her by the keyring. “Give these to Scott,” he tells her when she tilts her head a little to one side and draws her eyebrows down and together. “Tell him he’s staying here tonight and to bring my car home in the morning.”
“Okay?”
“Baby,” he watches her pupils dilate at the drop in his voice, and Good, he thinks, at least we’re in the same boat here, “I haven’t touched you or tasted you in months. I think it’s best if it’s just the two of us in the house, at least for tonight.” She doesn’t say anything, just nods, as she reaches for the keys, and if his eyes fall to her chest, watching it rise and fall slowly, well, sue him. (He’s told her before that her boobs look really fucking good in this top, and he doesn’t believe for a second that it’s a coincidence that she’s wearing it now.) He presses the keys into her palm and tells her, “Okay, you go and start saying your goodbyes and I’ll be right behind you. I, uh, I need a minute.”
She nods at that and reaches up with her free hand, flattening it gently on his cheek and lifting up onto her toes to press her lips to his other cheek. “Take your time,” she says, and it sounds sweet and innocent, but when he looks at her as she starts to move toward the door, she winks.
He honestly has no idea what this gorgeous, smart, funny, kind woman is doing with his goofy ass, or why she puts up with all his shenanigans and his shitty work hours (or days, or months), but she does. And in just a few months he gets to call her his wife, and in case he needed a reminder of why that’s the best fucking thing to happen to his life ever (he didn’t), this time working on The Gray Man has provided that. He’s not going to stop working any time soon - and he knows she’d never ask him to - but he definitely has a better reason than ever to look forward to coming home at the end of every job.
“Hey babe?” he calls when she’s almost at the doorway that leads to the dining room and he’s managed to adjust his pants so that they’re a little more comfortable (he’s still not fit for polite company, though - that’s going to take another minute or so). She stops and turns, looking at him half over her shoulder, and he says sincerely, “I love you, and I missed you.” Because he’s pretty sure she knows better, but he can’t let her leave the room if there’s even the slightest possibility that she thinks he missed anything, even the sex, more than just being with her.
She gives him that sweet, soft little smile that always comes out whenever she thinks he’s said or done something particularly sweet, or romantic, then she nods a little, her eyelids fluttering closed. “I know. I love you too.”
He watches her go, his heart and mind settled at the knowledge that she’s not going far, and that he’s not going anywhere, not without her, not for a good long while.