Title: Words Unspoken
Author: WhatBecomesOfYou
Pairing: Calleigh/Eric
Fandom: CSI: Miami
Theme#13—Excessive Chain
Disclaimer: I do not own CSI: Miami or any of the characters from it. I'm just borrowing them and will return them intact to their rightful owners when I'm done, promise.
Note: One of my goals for this summer is to finish this set of prompts off. This is an outtake from a longer fic of mine (that will probably be posted later this summer or early in the fall) where it didn't end up fitting in.

"Do you trust me?" He leaned in closer. His face was all she could see; his words were all she could hear. Even now. Even after all this time, Eric—and everything about him—still utterly captivated her.

She nodded blindly. There were few things in her world that she considered unquestionable. One of them was the utter trust she held for Eric. Some of it was professional, to be sure; without trust in her co-workers, she'd likely be dead multiple times over by now. But her and Eric had been playing with blurring the line between professional and personal for a long while now. "Yes," she said in a hoarse whisper. "Of course I trust you." For such a simple statement of fact, she had given it a stark solemnity when she said it out loud.

"With everything?" He laid her hand in his own, and with the pad of his thumb, he gently kneaded her palm. And in that moment, his subtext became context.

She took their joined hands and slowly, but deliberately, guided them to rest over her chest. "Everything," she echoed.

"You—" he started to say, before he snapped back to attention. "Calleigh." Her name on his lips was the last thing she heard before he closed the fraction of the gap between them. The first kiss was at the corner of her lips, almost as an unspoken question, a silent "may I?"

Unspoken questions received unspoken answers.

She shifted her angle nearly imperceptibly, and, at the same time, drew her arm around his neck, pulling him that much closer to her; their hands were still clutched tightly against her chest. That was the extent of the distance between them, but it still felt like a blockade of some sort separating them from each other—too much distance. Opening her lips against his, she smiled as she returned the kiss and uttered a few silent declarations of her own.

Like this, they exchanged unspoken words back and forth, until they broke apart and rested their foreheads against each other, smiling into each other's eyes. "So."

"So," she echoed. To vocalize what had just happened would be to put words to the most complex aspects of their lives together. "I—" She knew rationally that they still had to talk everything through with each other, and figure out where they stood in relation to their past and the present and what had just happened—the kissing, after all, definitely complicated things. But a sincere part of her only wanted to keep being suspended in the silence of the moment.

"You don't have to say anything," he whispered, holding her close to him. "Anything at all."

And she knew that he was right.