In a manner that is supposedly unconscious, she tips her head the opposite direction of his, leans like a perfect fit to his gawkiness. It is an unspoken and gutsy (for her and her cautious nature) invitation for him to fit his mouth to hers and find whatever completion she can possibly offer him. It's an anniversary of movements, one she makes over and over again, one that marks the finer moments of their tenured friendship. He knows that. He knows it's a movement that she's made before and will continue to make because she's been making it since days (maybe months, more likely years) before her divorce. It's a movement she makes more often when they're alone than in the company of their colleagues. It's a definitive shift that started right round when he started quite obviously pretending not to notice Alec's lies – despite the fact that she knew (that he knew), he knew (that she knew), Alec subconsciously knew (that everyone knew), and bloody hell – even Torres knew it right off.
It's sure as hell not unconscious though, much as Foster'd like him to think it is and much as both of them would like to pretend she doesn't mean to make herself quite so very available to him. Much as he'd like to pretend she doesn't realize that she's offering him every little thing he wants but doesn't dare reach for yet. She intentionally makes that movement along with the splayed shift of her hips (which are a couple of symmetrical curves he's mentally mapped more than once in a hundred Blue Moons).
She angles toward him, opening the front of her body and baring her throat with that proud high jaw and her head tips to make a puzzle piece that he's sure, damn positive, he could fit into... if ever he could shave off some rougher edges, maybe shear off the damaged and worn in bits of himself. He knows when her thumb rubs the jutting of her pelvic bone and her slender fingers spread down the stretch of her thigh that he cannot mash what he is up against her clean (immaculate, isn't she?) edges yet.
Wouldn't fit right now, would he?
It'd be the two pieces that you force together because they're just near close enough and you're losin' your patience but... picture'd be off, yeah?
Can't puzzle land and sky together unless you've found the horizon, the median line.
"Sounds like you already have."
He blinks roughly, shakes off the realization that someone is answering what he'd half thought was only rattling through his head. "What now?"
Right, in a bar. Having a drink, same old bar. Same bartender.
That annoying(ly cute) one with the big wide eyes and the near Natural ability to tell him that he's in love with his best friend. Right, like that isn't an obvious one, tell us another, Natural. Psssh. Most good bartenders learned to read people right quick - had to, force of habit, self service, business savvy. This girl'd learned people. Maybe it was work, maybe it was home, maybe it was just time and exposure to base human nature.
"You said you can't fit the sky and land pieces together," the familiar face leans closer and the girl that owns it shrugs at him bemusedly, "not unless you find the horizon. From the way you talk about her... sounds like you already have."
The bartender looks at him with that 'duh, Dad' look that Emily gapes at him sometimes and he instantly stops thinking of her as all that pretty after all. Though, she is– but in a simple and round faced way, not the way some women try to force a face of pretty over their own insecurities. Sad and lonely looking, though. Something echoes off her that says she internalizes every little bit of life. Got interested brown eyes and a lilt to her words that sounds more southern than their current location.
She is verging near a Natural though, this one.
Got a potential that interests him... and a stubborn quality that ups the ante of the game.
Cal studies her over the bar, the way she's crossing her arms in front of her breasts to block a view down the buttoned shirt but still leaning toward him, openly giving him her attention, her opinion. She finds him safe (especially when he spends his time talking about Foster) and therefore uses him as a distraction, as a deterrent to the other men in the bar. They won't harass her half as much if she's leaned into a conversation with a man who looks less like a doctor and more like an inked-sleeves-rolled-up and smug smiling son of a bitch. They've had this conversation before, nothin' new. He likes this bar because of this bartender in particular and he likes this bartender because she likes to play this game with him but more out of interest and an oddly endearing affection than flirtation.
And he slicks his tongue on his lips as he shakes another back and forth of his head in argument, hand lifting between them as he lounges farther away from her. "What's that mean? Way I talk about her?"
"Same way you always talk about her," she laughs her way off the bar, pressing away as she straightens her shoulders back and waves her fingers up behind her shoulder. "Need me to call her?"
Cal sighs, littering a glance across the empty glasses she's pushed aside rather than cleaning up so that she can less than subtly remind him exactly how much he's had and that, yeah, it's too much for driving home now. "Had a bit much, have I?"
"You're way over your limit, Doctor Lightman."
Kudos to her for having that name on the tip of her tongue, ready to wield it should she find necessary cause. She's cautious and nervy, prepared.
"Well, been a hell of a day." He launches himself up onto the edge of the bar, wedging onto crossed arms as he watches her head toward the phone that's hooked on the wall and the little book she keeps protectively jammed between the register and the framing of the mirror. "Got 'er number back there? Really?"
She's in the process of rolling her eyes at him as she reaches for the book and cuts him back a wry look at once. Brow arch. Pursed lips. His feigned surprise doesn't trip her an inch – good girl. "She left her card last time. You know that."
He... didn't actually. Not consciously. He hadn't known it in the way she implies.
"Naw, just a cab, love."
"She won't be mad, ya know?" Two things, at the least: she's honest and she's right. That doesn't make the suggestion feel any better to his tightened chest, though. "She isn't. When she comes."
"Cab's fine," he tells her as he avoids the way she looks at him as though he's a bloody coward. Which, sure, yeah, in this particular case maybe he is. However, it's none much of her business, now is it? "Wouldn't fit yet, ya know?"
"You should just let me call her."
"Oi." He leans himself swaying back into the bar, a finger lifted in her direction as he tries not to laugh at her sturdy and surprisingly resilient return stare. "No match-makin'. Just cuz I tell you what comes in and outta my head sometimes doesn't mean - "
"That she's your horizon line?"
That she is. Doesn't make a damn bit of difference at the moment, though.
Not when the only person in the world he can't seem to share that tidbit of information with is the woman in question – and he's semi soused.
"Right. Yes." His hands lift and aim into his chest as he steps back far enough from the bar to wave over his barely straight standing position. "But I'm still in the Northern Hemisphere now, aren't I?"
The bartender cocks him a look that's more teenage girlish rebellion and snark than truth, but it smacks about the same when she opens her mouth in rebuttal, "Doubt she'd mind you taking a trip farther south."
Now that's a pretty picture to paint in his head (damn her). Awfully pretty.
Like he hasn't taken that mental vacation often enough, traveling down the entire luxurious length of that woman in his head.
"You really just say that? That's cheeky." Cal lifts an accusing finger in her direction and circles it around a bit as they share a mirrored smirk. "Little mouth, aren't ya?"
"It's true." She smiles victory into the slow dip and rise of his eyelashes as he accepts the accusation and doesn't deny its veracity. "Buy you another if you let me call her."
He merely shakes his head against the tempting offer, a momentarily flash of better judgment overcoming the want of drink and something finer to, uh, dine on. "What I tell ya? Huh? Cab."
"Equator's awfully warm this time of year, Doctor Lightman," she teases at him and he knows that she saw his own mental argument and that alone sobers him a little – the idea that he so easily let a not-even-Natural read something like that off him. "Ya know, the median line? Mid level between the two Tropics?"
"How much do you make here, huh? Minimum wage and crap tips?" he deflects as he leans into the back of the nearest bar stool, wedging his chin down onto crossed arms as he folds forward.
Cheeky, as he's now mentally dubbed her, bends forward into his leaning and her hair makes a delightful forward shift that reminds him instantly of someone else. "I don't want your job offer, remember?"
"Right. Turn me down every time." Cal shrugs his shoulders looser as he downs his face, rubbing his chin into the muscle of his forearm. "Can't really pay ya anyhow. Foster'd kill me for bringin' in another mouth to feed. I mean, m'not Fagin, am I?"
She's heading for the phone, sarcasm slicking her tone, "Pro bono work, huh? That's icing on the cake, isn't it?"
"She loves cake," he lifts his head dazedly into the response, fingers waving around on their own. "Oddly enthralled with sugars, that one."
"Hey, Doctor Foster."
That ungrateful little pisser. That sneaky, sweet-faced, too smart for her own goddamned good, wicked little woman had gone and ratted him out anyhow - and he isn't at the giddily fun drunk stage anymore. It's not funny, despite the fact her face is laughing across the bar in response to his mortified silence. It's a fuckin' tragedy waiting to happen if you ask him for the truth of it - because he's not gonna be able to help himself from himself at this part of the game.
"What'd I tell you?" Cal points the question angrily in her direction before even answering it himself, shaking his head. "Told you a cab."
The beautiful tragedy itself is actually the learned trace of her fingers from the middle of his back and down the exaggerated curve of his slumping, the way the tickling softness of the touch has his body ramming straight on the stool as she curves into the side of him and utterly wrecks what's left of his senses.
Why's she smell more like, well, her, than usual?
Why's she gotta smell so bloody warm and heady and wholesome at once?
"Thank you," Gillian offers gently over the bar, her palm marking flat on his lower back as she pushes him straighter into a grown-up's posture rather than the drunken slouch. "He owe anything? Tab?"
The twenty-something gives her a shrug as she starts to clear a plethora of glasses from off his right side, "Nope, he's settled."
He snorts derision between the two of them, letting his head loll onto his palm and his elbow near dent into wood with swaying weight, "Cheeky here owes me another for bein' sneaky and callin' in the cavalry."
She has a way of innocently ignoring his bitterness with an equal proportion of sweetness.
(Which is just one of the reasons that he tries not to touch her with it too overly often.)
Probably the various sugars she downs, despite his teasing, actually...
Her lashes look forgivingly soft as she blinks a bemused smile over the drunken sight of him. "Hi."
"Told her not to call you." Cal intentionally shifts sidelong in the stool seat as he slides a considerable cash tip onto the bar, leans up rather than away and catches the way her jaw circles before she downs it so that she can watch his eyes. "Cab woulda done."
"Fancy meeting you here too," she agrees as her hand scrubs warmth against his back and then leaves him, not far as she reaches for the way he's slacked his jacket along the chair's back.
He lets her make the movement away from his intrusion on her space, watches her go as she steps back and lifts the fabric up from behind him. She's got a jacket that costs probably 'bout as much as his car cinched over what looks like and sweater and jeans and of course she's wearing those heels that make her just taller than him. Sure and of course she'd show up with superior vertical leverage when he's already skunked.
The hair along her neck is damply spiraling on the sides of her throat and he blinks his lids lower, realizing he's staring at it as he steps from the stool and not much caring. Foster doesn't play fair sometimes (which, actually, he especially likes) – doesn't give him more than in inch of rope for hanging. And most especially when he's obviously interrupted at-home-down-time. Double, maybe triple, especially when he's interrupted a bath.
One that has her damp and smelling like minerals and ozone and heat and fucking sweet comfort.
He blatantly lets himself survey the entire length of her as he swings himself backwards toward the door, trying to press the smile down between his lips as she follows slowly, patiently, in that perfectly unflappable Gillian way. "Hey, Foster?"
She looks more amused than he expects she should, her arms wrapped against herself as she slowly places one precise and heeled step in front of the other, "Hmmm?"
"What's the average temperature on the equator?" Can't help his hand waving between the way she's got her arms tucked under her breasts and her hips are slowly swaying him to death as he back pedals for the door. "Western hemisphere."
"I'm sure I don't know," Gill murmurs, tucking his coat tighter clutched into her ribs as the rest of the fabric falls loose over her arms.
"C'mon, Gill." Cal steps forward instead of back on an unchecked gamble, leaning into the supposedly relaxed gait she's got and forcing her to stop abruptly into his chest. "What is it?"
Right, she never gives him an inch - unless she's feeling playful, happy, amused. She's been a bit short on playful lately... It's there, though. Something's got her humor tweaked and she's loosely relaxed enough to let him taunt her into a game or five. Cheeky Girl was right, though – she never did seem all that angry about having to grab him up. She never complained about being his speed-dial, never did tell him to call someone else his back-up plan.
"What are we really discussing right now?" her voice is a murmuring warmth as she cocks her head in that damn infuriating way, watching how his glance is purposefully dallying down the front of her. Play-time it is, all right. Because she smiles wryly as she realizes she's not getting an answer to her question. "Daily mean is around eighty."
"Quite warm then, yeah?" He lifts his jaw into hers and waits for her to draw back but, Round One to Gillian, she stays blocked up still.
"Cal?" If she could hear her own whisper the way he hears it then she'd have a field day sorting through the intonations, the subtle hushing, something more intimate than they're usually allowed (than she usually allows herself). "What?"
"Just checking."
Can't save himself from backing down.
It's become habit now, really...
So maybe she wins the second round too (and he lets her do it), because he leans his steps away from her and shoves the weight of his body into the door, swinging it open for her despite the watching of the rest of the patrons. His hand aims her through it as he shrugs off his retreat and nods her out onto the sidewalk. Cal follows after her, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he notes how she tightens his coat into her stomach. She's shielding her bare hands against the chill as she takes a lean to the right and smiles back at him. The hesitation of her steps lasts only long enough for him to let up an unrealized laugh, the door shushing shut behind him as he leans along her side and follows the turning way she heads for her car down the block.
"This girl doesn't want to work for you." She's shaking her head in perturbation but it's tempered, more weary humor than actual frustration. "Why can't you leave her alone?"
"Cuz she makes ya jealous."
"No, she doesn't," Gill casts over him as she keeps her steps agile and quick, her eyes brightening a private humor in his direction.
"No," he admits in a surprised breath, huffing out as he wedges his elbow up into her side and matches their steps, pantomiming the steady grace of her movements, "she doesn't. Why is that?"
"Because you think she has natural potential. You wouldn't so much as leer at her."
Got a point, really. And that point is that she can sure as hell tell exactly when he's hooking in a woman and play sniping with an observant bartender is far from it. Makes him stop still on the sidewalk and refuse the next few steps, watching her hips and on up her spine as she realizes that he's no longer in step beside him, her body turning half back.
He can see her car and he can see some sort of end coming for this dual mischief and he realizes that the entire point of going to the bar may have been just to find her curling his coat into her body and staring at him as the temperature drops around them and her eyes just get lighter and lighter and lighter from blue toward clear.
"I was right with Torres." He shrugs his shoulders up as his head involuntarily swings back and forth in a sad defensiveness, a slight ache vibrating up behind his eyes as he realizes he's starting to sober a little more and earlier than he'd like. "Why can't you be on my side in this?"
"I am on your side," Gill breathes out tiredly as she leans away from him farther, carefully stepping onto the street and toward the driver's side. "So get in the car before you land yourself a restraining order."
"Takin' me home?" he asks with a leering tease, dropping a glance down her before grinning his way back up to her laughing eyes. "Em's at her mum's. I could pub crawl if I wanted."
"Do you want to?"
If the options are stumbling his way from one pub to another or sparring a little longer with her...
Well... hell. "No."
Gill shakes him a beleaguered smile as she steps into leaning along the side of the car. "Cal... get in the car."
"Shotgun." He juts up his jaw at her, trying not to swallow at her blink of confusion.
"You're the only - "
"Spare bedroom." One of his hands lifts to waggle between them, head lifting higher at her, "I call shotgun."
The smile she shoots over the car is genuine – at least, bleedin' Christ, he hopes it is. Because it makes her look glorious and damn radiant in otherwise sallow street lighting. "On my spare room?"
His hands open with wide questioning as he watches her over the roof, voice spitting accusatory regardless of whether or not he wants it to – got a mind of its own, sometimes. "Got someone else in there?"
Her head tips on him again, eyes narrowing dangerously as she tugs at her own door handle. "Cal, get in the car."
"Shoes." She murmurs it just loud enough to hear but he toes at one roughly, legs scrabbling as he shucks them off the end of her spare bed like he's just been patiently awaiting the reprimand. The thunking follows shortly after and he slacks his back entirely into the mattress, head tilted inches from the pillows. One of his hands lifts against his face, wiping slowly down tired features.
"Why wouldn't someone barely makin' enough to keep clothes on her back want to work at a company so prestigious it's got my name on it, huh?"
Gillian purposefully keeps her face clean of reactions, ignoring his smug tone even as she knows that somehow, in his head, the commentary is made of some sort of self deprecation. Her fingers nudge into his shoulder, the other hand lowering a mug of coffee in his direction as she draws a knee up and sits along the edge of the mattress. Her eyes follow the slow way he takes the mug even as he shoulders closer to her nearness and lets his head rest onto the folded up leg. He doesn't drink it – not that she actually expects him to take a swallow. Making it was an effort in futility, sure, but she feels better having provided it. Even if he is just balancing the mug into the center of his chest as he rubs the back of his skull against the flex of her knee.
She shrugs and tugs a pillow lower, offering it under him and watching as he lifts his head up just enough to sniff at the steaming drink but grunt dismissal at her attempt to caretake. "Maybe she's happy where she is, Cal."
"Wrong." His head drops back against her leg nearly violently and she realizes that it's sheer frustration in his voice, confusion and annoyance.
"Lacking in confidence?"
His shoulders make a nudging against her as he considers the suggestion, his body relaxing again now that she's taking part in the conversation and offering suggestions. "Possibly."
He can't piece it together, this particular mystery of a girl, and it's absolutely driving him maddened. It's a puzzle he doesn't have all the pieces for and while he's sort of adorable in how physically he shows his ire, it's got his eyes swirled dark. She realizes it's something for him to fixate on, more likely. An aside that he can pick and piece at when his brain needs to be distracted and his head needs a focal point for its aggression (one that isn't his daughter or her or their employees).
"Maybe she just doesn't like you," Gillian offers mildly, letting a tease into her tone as she finally just takes the mug from his hands and sips at it herself.
"Also wrong." He follows her movement with an accusatory wave of his fingers. "Uses me as a protective foil with other men in the bar. Like an alpha."
"Like a father?"
He hisses a feigned pain in her direction, wincing onto a half smile as his eyes dip thinner. "Guilty."
Gill sets the coffee aside after another swallow, realizing how dusty the bedside table is as she lets her spine go loose into the headboard, lets him watch the movement without comment. "Maybe she just doesn't find what we do all that interesting."
"Incorrect again. She plays the game. She's interested." Cal turns his cheek into her leg so that he can still trap her with a glance should he feel the need to see her reaction play out. It's a habit she's not sure he realizes – that he can't keep from studying her face. She trends toward blaming it on his job and not at all the fact that maybe he just enjoys looking at her.
Her smile rises on its own and regardless of his watching, she can't stop it from evolving, widening and warming over him. "And you like it when people play with you."
"Doesn't everyone?" The jeering is lusty and intentionally pointed and she just rolls her eyes because that's the next step in this game – the one they play that nobody else gets to take part in.
"What was all that nonsense about the equator?" She pries at him, tucking the fabric of his shirt into her fingers and pulling because she knows that he's mapping the proximity and duration of her touches, that he's made a study of her for too long not to notice.
"Dunno how we got there from the horizon line." He's doing his best to ignore the touch, though. He's doing his best to just stay still against how lightly she strafes her fingers from the fabric. "Two different things but she connects them in her mind, makes them one geographical position. Why is that?"
"You still drunk?"
"Lil' bit," Cal grins it up at her sharply but blinks as she starts to shift from him, his head bearing down with pressure to still her. "Where you goin'?"
"Nowhere." She leans back into his questioning, letting her fingertips press his shoulder and still there in an unspoken agreement to stay.
"Told her you're the sky." It's whispered into the open space of an unused bedroom like it's nothing for him to say such things, it's known and accepted and perfect in this place.
"Why?" Gillian asks as her fingers stroke his shoulder.
"Well, it'd be silly to make myself the sky." He's shrugging that same deprecation, lolling his head against her leg as he feigns a tone of humor that doesn't well entirely down his throat. "I'm the grounded one here, aren't I?"
"You're the drunk one, actually."
He frowns away her teasing, continuing an explanation she didn't necessarily ask for but he obviously needs to phrase in the quietness of her extra bedroom. "But, see, you take two pieces of a puzzle, a landscape, say. One's sky and one's not, right?"
She lets her smile widen into the hushed and patterned falling of his voice, the way the explanation is sleepy but cautious at once. "Okay."
His head shifts farther toward her fingers and she meets the movement with a sure touch, catching along his ear and tracing around it while he leans into the fullness of her hand.
"You could maybe wedge 'em together, make 'em fit." And he keeps his eyes closed as he lays his cheek against the flat of her palm, his stubble gritting but warm. "But the picture would be wrong. It'd be off."
This softness in him only comes intermittently, usually (suprisingly) exactly when she needs it.
He's better at reading her than he thinks he is – because she's pretty sure she does need it this time.
For all his talk about her being his blind spot, his unreadable and untouchable... he pegs her more often than even he realizes.
"Unless they meet on the horizon line." Gillian offers gently over the way he's managed to curl his head tighter into her, lets her thumb rub under his ear. "Once you have the horizon, the picture is easy."
"Knew I liked that brain of yours," he mumbles into her touch. "S'very sexy brain."
A throaty sound of agreement comes off her throat, "I know."
"But see, I referenced it as the median." There's still a lucid annoyance at the girl's flat out denial breaking through his buzz, rising past his sleepiness as he sighs. "Which, in turn, had her brain connecting it to the equator. She's linear. Calculating. Precise."
Something tugs at her, tweaks her attention as she pulls his head back up so that he's leaned back against her thigh and she can rasp her knuckles down his cheek. "You asked me for the average temperature at the equator."
"In this hemisphere."
She studies the tenseness in his face, can still hear an echoing of how tentative his voice has become in the last few minutes. "You wanted to know how warm a reception you'd get if you - "
"Eighty degrees is - "
"Especially warm, Cal," her voice is much quieter than she means it to be but in all actuality... it doesn't matter when it's with him. He slowly takes her tones into him when they're this soft, swallows them without reaction or accusation or judgment.
It's not her voice that has the both of them shocked still – it's her fingertips brushing his parted lips.
She paints her touch to the corner of his mouth and then along his cheek and his body sharpens on a sudden jolt as he blinks at her.
"I know." His eyes wince thinner as his tongue ghosts against his lips and then he's blinking with a shade of concern. "Had a bit to drink, Gill."
She can only manage to nod at first, letting her glance follow her fingers as she traces an uneven pattern along the stubble on his jaw. "I know."
"Didn't mean for her to call you."
A full body wince, barely emitted and nearly contained, has her fingers curling into a closed palm beside his temple, "I see."
"Glad she did, though." He amends quickly, lifting up a smile from the way he's still ridiculously cuddled into her leg and reveling in their closeness. "Cheeky shit."
Modest surprise touches heat over her face and she ignores the urge to hide it. Not like he doesn't see every inch of it written all over her anyhow, even if he is still buzzed by the looks of his eyes. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," he waffles the response back quickly, reaching up for the knotted tie that's comfortably low along her waist, letting the backs of his knuckles brush the softly battered fabric. "These are very fancy pants for just lounging in. With a very fancy fastening system."
The patented Lightman Deflection – it always has a sort of unfettered whimsy to it.
Well, that or malice.
She neglects telling him that they were Alec's as she smiles at his tone - but that they're so damn worn in comfortable that she and her especially good divorce lawyer would have Shock and Awe fire-bombed all over her ex-husband had he tried to make them one of the assets he retained post marriage.
His fingers are focused and tugging on the knotted and ratted ties with all the lacking grace of an autistic five-year-old. "Cal."
"Sorry you had to come."
He isn't, actually, all that sorry about it. Were he really sorry that she was the phone call someone made to take care of him then there'd be more sadness or regret in his voice than there is. As it is, his voice is just made up of an intimate softness, one that implies he realizes it's late and she'd been relaxed and, yeah, he was the reason she'd had to put down her book, crawl out of the tub, and drive out to fumble his drunk ass into a car. The rest of his tone is a barely hidden pride and a sway of affection. The combination of the two making her sigh into the remembrance that, in broader terms, Cal Lightman was a smug son of a bitch who took repeated advantage of the fact that she would do anything he actually physically needed in order to make sure he safely put his head to rest at night.
If he was sorry for anything, it was the fact that he couldn't help himself, couldn't stop needing her to be that phone call over and over again.
And, to be fair, she's not really all that sorry for reprising the role...
"I always do," she murmurs as she stops the fidgeting of his fingers, laying them flat underneath her own and pressed against her leg. "Don't I?"
He refuses to look at her but his head makes a marginal thrust against her, weighing the words that just barely make it past his usual posturing and Must-Not-Love-Gill-Out-Loud filter (which, ironically, seems to be the only filter he has). "Point of the apology, in'it?"
"My choice, though," Gill sighs off slowly, letting the words near his head as she wipes off his knuckles and revels in the way his body relaxes into her acceptance of a near decade's shared guilt. "Isn't it?"
"Still my rock, darling?" Now, that's shame in his voice, apologetic sorrow as he looks up at her like a legitimately contrite gentlemen, utterly distant from his usual demeanor. "Still my Gill-braltar?"
She can't help from laughing and finds his smile is nearly as sharp as the snort she lets off as she shoves lightly at the side of his head. "That's it. No more horrible puns before daylight."
"You thought it was funny." He's rubbing the back of his head deeper and harder into her leg but his eyes shut as he sways a little back and forth. "Fess up."
"I was placating you," she tells him softly, watching his face relax as his entire body weighs heavier into the bed. "Go to sleep."
She can tell he's been in her office before she even sees the mess he's left strewn along the top of her desk and it's not because of any particularly reason or subconscious cue or anything else of the sort. It's because he's standing at the door of his inner office, head ducked and hands stuffed strangely in his pockets, as though he absolutely needs to control them still. Because he's waiting for her to see whatever it is he's done and he can't help but look like an ashamed child and a smugly proud reprobate at once. Which, really, isn't all that odd a combination when it comes to Lightman.
Gill keeps her eyes on him as she uses one hand to shove open her office door, a mug of coffee lifted high with the other as a half smile twitches at his lips. "What did you do?"
"May've been a bit bored." Cal's shoulders sway him farther back against the door frame, his head finally lifting back and against it as his hands stuff deeper into his pockets.
"Needed some educational entertainment."
The fact he's keeping himself still is so suddenly strange to her, somewhat worrisome.
He's controlling his body as he waits, clamping himself still until she's seen whatever it is he so obviously wants her to see.
"So you mess around in my office?"
Deftly he gives her a look of confused innocence and were she anyone else it may have actually seemed genuine. "Crossin' a line, am I?"
She ignores the rest of the act as well as the digging implication he's made, turning her weight into the door so that she can swing it open and disregard him all together. Ignoring Cal's antics is generally the only way she can actually get any work done, though even she'll admit she can't help playing into them sometimes. Because they're... fun. He's fun. He's brightly adorable at times and she can't keep herself from falling into the (un)intentional trap of his silliness. Not that just silliness explains why he's managed to dump what looks like an entire puzzle across the top of her desk and left the pieces scattered from keyboard to picture frames to the chair and onto the floor. And, good God, did he have to get them everywhere? The image of him laughing maniacally as he tossed them around her office like a cartoon villain flashes through her as she stares over the mess.
"Cal." It whines out of her a little as her shoulders drop.
He is such a child sometimes. Such an unapologetic little shit.
"Well, at least look before y'skin me." Maybe not completely unrepentant, because he seems near shy and tentative, his voice lowering into that dusted range of curious but cautious honesty as he flits a glance past her and through the glass of her office windows. "Y've cleaned up bigger messes, love."
The slow slagging way he presses away from the frame of the door keeps her eyes on him. His hands stay still stuffed in his pockets and his shoulders lowering leads her to watch his back as he uses the heel of his shoe to kick his own door closed. It's the reality of living a life that involves Cal Lightman, she muses – having the answer ahead without understanding its implication nor having heard the question.
Gill rolls her glance away from his now closed door and presses the weight of her body into her own, sipping at nearly forgotten coffee as she steps up along the front of her desk. A puzzle piece gets nicked under the edge of one shoe but she can't really care much about it as she unintentionally smiles, licking the coffee from her lips as she stares down on the center of the desk.
He's made an immaculate image in the middle of his own mess. Two puzzle pieces in the center of her desk, space circled around them before the rest of their brothers and sisters go scattering every which way and outward.
Sky and water, met in the middle, the two pieces perfectly fit together on the horizon line and staring happily at her.
Insufferably perfect (vehemently romantic) and inevitably impossible man.
But, regardless, he always has been exceptionally good at both messes and puzzles.
And, really, she's always inexplicably loved that about him.