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Cullen lives in lists and orders, he lives in inventories and inspections, he doesn’t realize he’s cataloging the curve of her neck and the small dimple in her left cheek when he’s doing the routine weapon checks. He had been a decent student once, he swears, his favourite teacher always told him he had a good memory.
He looks at her, and looks at the amount of things he’d never been able to notice. Some days he plays a game and tries to count the freckles on her face, later, he realizes they’re also on her arms and legs and places he’d only ever see in his dreams.
He doesn’t realize that maybe, she’s been looking at him too.
-
“We don’t have to be anything,” she tells him, holding his hand gently as if he were mean’t to break. “If you’re not- I mean if you’re not comfortable.”
His wounds have healed, he doesn’t pick at the scabs like he used to and time has been kind to him unlike the way poultices have drained down his throat and engulfed his lungs. But he stares at her and maybe- he can try. Maybe he can try to take the next step, so he does.
“I want you,” he says and he kisses her then, hand against her ruddy cold cheeks and the other tangled into her blonde hair. “All of you.”
-
It never starts off the way that she believes it will, they are slow and cautious. But they settle in a small habit, and even that in itself is more than enough.
Cullen is reserved, she realizes that there will always be parts of him that he guards.
(a soldier, even without the uniform and the sword, she thinks)
There are days when the universe seems to rotate backwards for Cullen, when he scowls and barks at everyone more than usual, when his stubble appears more dirty; unkempt than before, and when he purposely skips out on their meetings with hurried excuses.
There are boundaries she doesn’t dare cross, even through it all, he is at the utmost discreet about his problems.
He is in the training yard when she arrives, his old Templar initiate shirt and sweats are soaked and his hair a wet curly mess across his scalp. Their gazes catch each other, yet they don't speak for awhile- the silence filled with the loud smacks of his wooden sword against the dummy. When his arms are tired enough and the rain doesn't seem to let up, she speaks then.
"You're going to catch a cold like that."
Cullen looks at her then, a long second before he replies, "then let me."
His stare burns with a sore fire that’s fighting to stay alive, so she beckons him to come to her and in his weakness he does. When she wraps her arms around him, his body is so cold. If he clutches her too tightly, she does not say a single word.
It’s a long moment before he says anything, a soft choke: “How long have you known?”
She strokes his backside in a slow fashion. There’s a sense of trepidation in his hands as he bunches up the material of her shirt in his clutch.
“How much does it matter?”
“It doesn’t,” he breathes. She moves him so that their foreheads are touching, looks at his eyes one at a time.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t. It isn’t that simple,” she replies. “Listen to me.”
Her hands cradle his cheeks, thumb drawing over his jaw. “Don’t apologize.”
Over his lips. “Don’t explain.”
Over the veins on his neck. “You’re trying, I know.”
When her lips ease over his, there’s a breath of relief as the warmth of it all spills into him. When they pull apart he buries himself in her neck.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. “I have never thought of you less, because of it.”
-
Cullen is a quiet lover, he’s the quietest lover she’s ever had. It’s not so much as he doesn’t have emotion, but the fact that the words get caught in his throat and he can only stare at her in reverence and hope that she knows the jumble of words that he wishes he could say.
(she does, she does know, it’s in the way his earthy brown eyes glisten and stare at her with such intensity and love that she knows-)
Some days it’s hard, he wakes up thrashing from a nightmare and can’t believe she’s real. Some days she has to remind him where he is, what time it is, what her name is- she’s not a healer, maker, she’s never excelled at spirit healing back in the circle. She tries her best, though, and later when he’s back to his senses he apologizes like it’s the only word he knows.
“It’s okay,” she tells him like a mantra she has rehearsed.
But also some days it’s good, some days they can sit and read, with his arms wrapped around her and his head burrowed in her neck placing sweet kisses along her collar. When Cullen speaks his mind as if he’s a horse racer going at 160 miles per hour, he speaks about his family, parents, his friends, and talks about his scars, his plans for the future. And Evelyn is only content to sit and watch him ramble with his animated face- and when he realizes he’s been going on for too long his features always soften then.
“Have I mentioned, lately, how much I love you?” He tells her.
“Yes,” she says. “But I would like to hear it again.”
He barrages her with playful kisses, his rough stubble scratching enough to redden her face. He tells her he loves her, just as all the moments he does before and it still feels like the first time he said it.
They have bad moments and good moments, Evelyn doesn’t mind to stick around for both.