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“You know there’s a storm coming, right?” Gillian scolded from the back porch, the warmth of wood and home overflowing from the open door behind her and pooling on the ground just out of Cal’s reach.
Always just out of his reach.
“S’clear as a daydream from where I’m sitting,” he contradicted, as ever, from his little patch of the darkened back yard.
“That’s why they call it the ‘calm before the storm’,” she explained sardonically, teacher-like with her impish smile and familiar little indicator, her pointed finger moving along the air like it was landing on each part of the sentence as she said it.
Cal smiled, her levity gently charming away the day’s weariness as he stopped fighting her far sooner than he would have a year or more before. Perhaps that was the effect that had compelled him to invite her over more often for dinner, the reason he had grown so comfortable with her forming ranks with Emily and teasing him across his own dining-room table.
“Besides,” she had drifted down the wooden stairs and was suddenly standing over him, pretty in the crimson cashmere that had been a glorious contrast from the day’s shades of brown, “you’re not technically sitting anywhere.”
He grinned up at her, his hands clasped over his stomach and his back complaining more than he would ever admit as he lay, stretched out on the cool ground.
“View’s infinitely better from down here, love,” he played, the slight double entendre barely even recognisable in its lack of intent. Cal wasn’t sure when they had settled so neatly into the intimacy of a flirtation that needed no emphasis. Her blush was interior now, sub-dermal as she simply looked at him.
“I brought you another blanket,” she flirted right back.
He shifted to make a space beside him on the one that he had haphazardly laid out himself, a picnic rug with a history he would not talk about tonight. “C’mere,” he waved her into the space he had made.
“Are you kidding?” she seemed genuinely outraged, “This is a brand new Marant.”
“And this is an old jumper Em picked out when I wasn’t looking,” he gestured at it with a snobbish pantomime of the pride he noted in her tone.
Her face flickered, her smile tilting gently up on endeared chagrin.
He waited.
She rolled her eyes with a huff of air, sitting down beside him and perching herself neatly between him and the edge of the rug so that the dampness of grass didn’t lay claim to her jeans.
Cal shook his head just the tiniest bit.
“Foster,” he charged.
He could hear her take her little breath in, praying for patience as she shifted again, risking her fall knit and lying down beside him so they were shoulder to shoulder beneath the October sky, her hair spreading out beside her and gently tickling at his neck. She smelled like wildflowers, though the scent of her perfume had settled into the softness of her skin, reminiscent rather than bright - as though she always rose and retired to the smell of honeysuckle and geraniums.
She sighed, giving in to the glorious ache of her muscles relaxing after a long day.
“See?” he gestured up, and the night sky opened before her as it had done on another occasion, when she’d drunk his scotch and finally demanded his acknowledgement, “If you squint hard enough, you can almost make sense of what Dr Feldstein was sayin’.”
Gillian chuckled, recapturing the memory from their latest case, an elderly astronomy professor passionately explaining the sky through a withering voice that no longer shared his obvious enthusiasm. The lecture hall had been filled with glassy young faces, and she’d been unable to make out any clear words let alone a clear read. His accusations against the Dean, then, had been hard to verify. Cal, of course, had found a way around such inconveniences. Needless to say, the Dean had been fired, and Dr Feldstein freed up to further confuse students at the observatory.
“Is that what brought you out here?” she reflected beyond his joke, as was her wont.
“Well,” he kept the mirth in his voice, “figured if I couldn’t learn anythin’ at a university, I still had the school of life to fall back on.”
What had been a chuckle became a snort of derision in earnest. “Wow,” she winced. He could hear the second ‘w’, as his intended effect carried off.
He grinned.
She still clutched the second blanket to her middle, a pun about security touching neatly to his tongue as she all but eyed the threat to her sartorial integrity for the evening. He watched her as she watched the stars shimmering brightly in the piercing cool, the gusty breeze the only sign of dangers to come. Finally, she began to let go, sighing through her nose, her body sinking further and the touch of her shoulder growing surer against his.
It was not his nearness she was afraid of, then.
He turned his eyes back to the sky, the deep quiet of the calm seeping into him - into them, here, together. It ached a little, if he was honest. After everything that had happened when she’d lost Claire - the blood on her hands, the hollow look of shock on her face - something of his had stepped itself over her cautious line without permission and, try as he might, he could not pull it back over to his side.
Emily had seen it, had felt prompted to ask a question she had only suspected in his direction with querying looks and thoughtful glances.
As Gillian lay beside him now, he still had no answer for his daughter or himself. He wanted her near, and the surest way to keep her that way was to tread so lightly about her that she did not notice, to hold his breath lest he disturb her, and she turn her insightful gaze on the longing in his every sinew.
“I can hear you thinking from here,” she teased, her smile slipping languidly over her features.
A beat.
“Well, the joke’s on you, then,” he rebutted seamlessly, “I haven’t done any real thinking since about 1975.“
Another warm chuckle, “No arguments here.” It was heaven to see her at ease again. At least in one way.
“Though that’s the pot calling the kettle out on its stress pattern, that is,” he continued, “’cause if you clutch that blanket any tighter, I’m pretty certain it’ll disappear.” He could feel her defence, the unwillingness to admit that he was right, and it drove him to act at once, a hand snapping out like lightening and snatching her guard from her, “See?”
“He-ey!” she yelped, though he was pleased to see it was all delight, even as she turned over and snatched after the soft wool.
He caught her wrist, laughing too, “It’s grass, Foster, it’s not going to kill you. Or your cashmere.”
“It’s freezing,” she justified her need for the object, narrowing her eyes and trying to return to her former position with an air of nonchalance, to prove just how much she did not care about grass. He did not let go of her wrist, however, refusing to let her retreat from the space where she was warm beside him.
If it was so cold, what better place to be?
Her glance at the hindrance was a myriad of things, each of them delightful as they flittered across her face. Surprise. Intrigue. Pleasure, before she could hide it this close to him. She met his gaze with that familiar challenge, the charge of testing boundaries between them coming up against him.
Guilty, your Honour.
Finally, she gave a resigned sigh, dramatised for effect as she settled against him, placing her head on his shoulder and leaving her wrist in his hand, her own fingers opening tentatively across his torso. As though it were not enough, he reached across himself and hooked his other fingers around the back of her knee, pulling her flush up against him, smug as he pleased as he settled and held her there. A breath escaped beside an indulgent laugh as she considered - for the millionth time in their acquaintance - if he’d ever developed passed fifteen.
“Bully,” she prodded as she looked back up at the stars, more than content. More than safe with him.
He smiled, following her gaze upward as he simply savoured the closeness he had never quite found with anyone else - no matter how near he had drawn to any number of them. He wasn’t even sure he’d found it with Zoe, either, their dynamic full of so much combat, so much heated resistance, so much push and pull. Here, with Gillian, there was a softness that he’d been too reckless with in his wife, a cushioned safety that he had driven away from his marriage with aggression and doubt.
Not that he hadn’t done the same to the woman in his arms. Hers was a resilience he would perhaps never understand.
“Where’s Em?” he found himself asking, as though it was time and some fatherly alarm had gone off in his head.
“She fell asleep on the sofa,” Gillian answered, her own yawn appearing in sympathy, “apparently Watson and Skinner aren’t as riveting when you’re seventeen.”
“There’s a shocker,” he replied, “though I’m not sure age has anything to do with it, love.”
She swatted his chest with alarming sharpness.
“Oi!” he recoiled, upsetting her hold for a moment to defend himself.
“Considering the heavy influence both must have had on your own science, Dr Lightman,” she schooled, “I wouldn’t be so cavalier in doling out your opinions.”
He was laughing again.
“Yeah, but I worked with all the interesting bits and left out the boring bollocks you shrinks are so fond of rabbiting on endlessly about…” he huffed as he received an elbow to the ribs, entirely unsure how she had managed it.
“You didn’t seem to mind it in Chapter Four of your book, or when you put a price tag on it and sold it to DoD for an exorbitant sum,” she fired back, pressing herself up on one arm to look down on him and shuffle the conversation into the kind of rapid-fire exchange that frequently got them into trouble.
His amusement was bright, “That’s business, darlin’, not pleasure.”
“Oh, I see,” laughter in her tone, “those keep turning up as very convenient labels.”
“You have no idea,” he smirked.
“After everything you’ve pulled, I actually think I have a better idea than most,” she returned with her usual impenetrable logic.
“You think you’ve had a good view, do you?”
“Front row seats, as a matter of fact; though, sometimes it feels like I’m right up on stage.”
“In your dreams.”
“Abso-bloody-lutely,” she said it off the cuff of her enthusiasm for the tease, echoing a phrase she’d heard from him and playing the banter as she could find it. As she grinned down at him, though, she realised her misstep, the fact that something had changed, something she had not counted on. Cal’s eyes bore that languid but fixated seriousness, despite the smile that lingered unconvincingly.
And it happened.
Just as he’d feared, she noticed.
Business and pleasure. He could see her hold her breath, recalculate.
Gillian froze as care careened into her, and all pretence of play slipped from her features. It was a plain reaction, not hidden from him despite its importance. Her breath drew shallow. “Cal?” she tried.
Damn it. Damn it all. Damn every line, damn every hiccup.
He reached up and brushed her hair behind her ear. “Gill,” he said simply, without the question in her voice, without the lack of surety - this was statement for him, admission.
Of course she heard it.
After everything, she’d expected friction when they found this place. She’d anticipated Cal fighting her with everything, or her own terrible caution throwing up as many walls as she could muster - because the fact was, this was capable of unpicking both of them. And so it was strange that she felt no fear, no alarm, no staggering need to distance him from her - it was strange that they seemed to fall so naturally into it.
Perhaps it was finally time.
He leaned up on one elbow to kiss her, gently turning the brush to her hair into a touch to her face so quietly encouraging, her thoughts seemed to abandon her. He was gentle, undemanding, and she acquiesced like the calm about them had settled into both of them completely, and shut off the torrent of difficulties that had warred between them of late. Her soft hum of resolution was as involuntary as her sinking into the kiss, simply answering what the night sky seemed to suggest.
He had expected need - not hers, never hers - but his, years as it had been of prodding and shifting and dodging and weaving into and away from her. He had expected the heady devouring of the taste of her, a frantic rush to know every part of what they had been missing. Instead, his kisses seemed lost, wandering and curious, earnest but patient - which was a bloody wonder, really.
He felt her laugh bubble up before he heard it, the vibration of it touching his fingers, lingering on her throat.
“Okay,” she smiled, her nose still pressed to his, “for a front-row-seater, I guess I should have seen that one coming?”
His fingers slipped over her shoulder, down her side and to her hip, his smile was still serious, “Darlin’, I don’t think anyone saw that one coming.” He meant the calm, the ease with which it had happened. Whatever their obvious chemistry, what they were was not anticipated to be quiet, uncomplicated.
Her lungs took in the brush of his breath, feeding on the air of the moment catching between them. She felt the crush of emotion on her chest. "This isn't what you brought me out here for, then?" she challenged, reading his features as much as her nearness would allow.
He shook his head, true as it had ever been, "Nah, love... I came for the sky."
And he'd found it, hidden just at the corner of her mouth.
~*~*~