A/N: A very small snippet from the last episode. Just something that came into my head as I was watching it!
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"Just keep smiling, just keep smiling"
She let go of Cal and watched as he moved towards Torres, moving into her outstretched arms.
"You look nice…ish", he said jokingly as he moved back from the embrace.
She waited expectantly, almost shamefully, hoping that he would pay her the same attention. She knew she didn't need his approval, his compliments, his…acceptance. But there was something about the way her stomach jumped to her throat when he commented on her younger colleague's appearance that made her realise that she may not have needed his compliments but she certainly wanted them.
She had been terrified these last couple of days and she almost laughed at the absurdity of her internal complaint at his lack of attention. It should have been enough that he had come back alive and relatively unscathed from what could have been a disastrous backwards step to the man that she had first met; a man who was mentally scarred with guilt by the decisions that he had made, that even now she wasn't entirely aware of.
Yet, there was a part of her that knew that her need for his admiring attention was more to do with her fear at his absence than it did for her own sense of vanity. She had received plenty of compliments from her partner, her friend, in the years that she had known him and she knew that more was said by what he hadn't put into words over the years. She knew that her issue then was that she needed to know that this was her Cal, that he hadn't been changed by the past couple of days, by his interaction with the one man that could have made him doubt himself.
She realised that she had been standing in a world of her own, ignoring those around her, forgetting that this was meant to be a party. She raised her head, straightened her back and found herself looking directly into his eyes.
"You alright, love?" he said, his head cocked to the side, his shoulders slightly slumped so as to reach the level of her eyes.
"Yeah, I'm okay. Sorry, just thinking about a couple of things" she said, attempting a smile which she knew, without needing a mirror, hadn't reached her eyes.
"S'alright. As long as you weren't trying to come up with some excuse for not getting me a present!" she could hear the humour in his tone of voice, see the smile on his face but the concern in his eyes made her realise that he hadn't been fooled by her avoidance.
"I wouldn't be concerned about that" she replied, not giving anything else away.
"Okay" his simple reply almost shocked her, his incessant need for the truth often meant that he questioned beyond the point of comfort; tonight, she was glad he had accepted her reluctance to answer.
The silence stretched between them, almost reaching the uncomfortable stage and she realised that her eyes, once again, had travelled to rest somewhere on the floor.
It was then that his hand reached towards her face, cupping her cheek...feeling almost like the invisible part of her anatomy that had never been complete. And she looked up, finding the depth of his gaze to be more than unnerving, almost too eager for the truth.
"You alright love?" he repeated the question.
"No. But you're back so that's all that really matters" she was reluctant to give more, to open herself further in that moment than she was willing.
And it was then that she realised that the compliment that she had heard him lay on Torres had been insignificant, merely a token of sentiment that would only warm the coolest of temperaments. It was this that she had really wanted, the pure intimacy of his eyes searching hers, searching for the truth that he had only just come to realise was infinitely harder to find than when he had first met her; when she was naive to his abilities, almost too open to him.
And even though she had learned to hide the deepest recesses of her feelings, she found the way he yearned to learn her truth to be slightly unnerving, more than exhilarating.
And she loved his eagerness because it was the one time that his openness to searching her left him open and vulnerable to her scrutiny. It was the one time that she saw the shadow of desire that she had often thought she had imagined but now knew to be candid.
It was the one time that she wished the necessity to surround themselves with people was redundant.
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