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Peter padded barefoot into their bathroom in nothing but faded Quantico sweatpants and a smile for El who was standing at the sink in an old t-shirt, hair damp from her shower.
“Hey, hon.”
Navigating the narrow space with practiced ease, he reached past her and grabbed his toothbrush, pausing for a quick kiss to her freshly-scrubbed cheek. El hummed absently in acknowledgement but didn’t move, distracted.
Peter watched her as he squeezed toothpaste onto his toothbrush. Her attention was on something in her hands, something small and plastic he couldn’t quite identify in their reflection.
“You okay?” he tried, when she still didn’t look up.
She finally did, smiling sadly at him, cheeks dimpling for a too-brief second. “I’m fine. It’s just. I was looking under the sink for that extra bottle of moisturizer I thought I bought a few weeks ago, and I found this.”
She held up the thing in her hand and Peter’s breath hitched. El’s birth control wheel, all its little plastic pockets empty. They’d been empty for a while.
“I ran out five years ago this month,” she observed, trying for off-handed and landing far afield.
They’d never talked about it. Not after having failed to conceive the first few years of their marriage and convincing themselves they should focus on their careers for a while anyway, relegating the small ache of disappointment to a far corner of their minds. They hadn’t talked about it either the few times El had skipped taking her pill a week or two, uneventfully. Then she’d ran out of refills on her prescription and hadn’t gone back to see her doctor and neither she nor Peter had said anything when nothing happened, still, again. To this day. Sometimes self-preservation made you convince yourself you didn’t care, rather than letting you mourn something you thought for sure you’d get to have.
Peter set his toothbrush down and slipped both arms around her waist tightly, tucking his chin over her shoulder. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
He watched her look at the pill pack in her hands for a long quiet moment then shake her head, eyes wet.
He kissed her cheek again and held her wordlessly, just a little longer.