"Sonny? I'm home."
When silence was the only answer Rafael got, he couldn't help but chuckle, reaching up to loosen the buttery yellow tie around his neck as he made his way through the hallway and into their bedroom.
His progress came up short, however, at the sight of his Sonny, spread out and naked and lean in their bed, a copy of Rafael's volume on foreign law propped on his chest.
"Aw, you're still reading that? How adorable."
Sonny looked up at that, blue eyes narrowed and pointedly avoiding the way Rafael's own gaze was traveling down the length of him, from chiseled jaw to muscled calves.
"You're a real asshole sometimes, you know that?" His boyfriend demanded, nose going back to in between well-worn pages as Rafael smirked in anything but apology.
"Kewpie doll. What the fuck does that even mean, Rafael?"
Parting the halves of his starched button-up, Rafael chuckled, throwing the shirt in their laundry basket along with his tie for the dry-cleaning run they'd make tomorrow before coffee and work.
Looking at Sonny once more, those gorgeous eyes resolutely averted, he took two steps towards the bed, answering once he'd gotten to the edge, "It's an older expression, meaning to give oneself a consolation prize."
The corners of his lips quirked upwards as Sonny turned his eyes on him only to glare.
"Oh, so it's an old man thing? Good to know."
Sonny had managed to get even wittier since they'd gotten together, and Rafael could only blame that fact for the way that he climbed on top of Sonny then, delighting in the way he gasped and squirmed as Rafael's mouth found the pulse point throbbing in his neck.
"I'm still mad at you," Sonny protested weakly, thin fingers flying to Rafael's hair and tangling, pressing his mouth closer to the warm skin below his jaw as Rafael sucked and bit.
Not that Rafael needed the incentive to further his ministrations.
A pouting Sonny was both adorable and sexy in equal measures, and it turned Rafael on in a way he'd yet to understand; he'd always went with the odd ways in which Sonny ruined him though, and their current state was no exception as he mouthed up to below his boyfriend's pale earlobe.
"You're lucky I get off on being verbally abused," the man below him sighed, and Rafael nosed along his jaw, his dimpled chin, until he'd come face-to-face with Sonny.
"You know I'm proud of you, though, right?" He whispered. He brought his hand from where he'd been thumbing the dip in Sonny's thin waist and stroked gentle fingers through wheat-colored hair, gone soft with the evening's late hour.
He relished the way Sonny leaned into his palm, the way he went soft and pliant at affectionate touches, affectionate words.
Above all else, it was the reason why Sonny Carisi held his whole heart.
"I was just messing with you today in Liv's office," Rafael continued, still quiet, the closeness of Sonny giving up the fight and finally touching him, squeezing his bicep all he knew. "Mostly because I wanted to at least attempt to throw Liv off of our scent, but also because I'm a dick who can't pass up the opportunity to see his boyfriend pout."
Sonny rolled his eyes, but grinned all the same, a light and happy thing that always left Rafael feeling as though the sun needn't come up when he had this man burning so brightly in his arms.
He wanted to kiss Sonny, kiss him silly, kiss him until he'd forgotten his own name, until the breaths they were each taking in had no clear point of existence.
But before that, he needed to extend that smile's lifespan just a little bit longer.
"I meant what I said, though. About being proud of you. I haven't been home a lot this week, but I noticed the books on your nightstand. All on foreign law, on the US's legal relations with other countries. And all I could think about, every time I saw those books sitting there, was how proud I am of you for always wanting to better yourself."
Wide-eyed and breathless Sonny was almost better than a smiling one.
Almost.
"How can you do that?" Sonny demanded as he smacked Rafael lightly in the ribs, against the vibrations of laughter that were making their way through his chest. "How can you piss me off so much, like literally make me actually consider withholding sex from you for a week, and then come home and say those sorts of things and make me feel so in love?"
Chuckling, Rafael leaned forward to rub their noses together, Sonny sighing underneath him at the movement.
"It's a talent, I suppose," he murmured, and if Sonny's eyes and rose-tinged grin were anything to go by, he agreed.
Rafael fit their mouths together before that look could be chased away.