Hi everyone! This is my first fanfiction EVER! Have you ever been sitting in bed thinking of ideas and just never doing anything with them? Well, this time I actually wrote them down. Hope you enjoy!
Eli woke slowly to the morning light filtering through the blinds. He looked over at the clock and saw that it was almost 9 am. It was Saturday, their day to sleep in. He turned over rubbing his eyes when his sight landed on her. Clare. His wife.
His eyes traveled down the planes of her face, from those gorgeous eyes he loved that are now closed in rest, to her soft pink lips that he knew better than his own. She looked so peaceful right now, her chest slowly rising and falling in her slumber. Good. She deserved it.
The new way of doing things with basically everybody working from home in no way lightened the workload of the two writers. He had been trying to crank out more pages of the screenplay for his upcoming short film (he would worry about when and where it would be able to be shot later), and she had been writing article after article each week for her column in the magazine she worked for as she always had before the pandemic and things were normal.
She was glad to finish her work early last evening and they had spent the night cuddled up watching a movie and eventually passing out from their exhaustion. Even with normal life interrupted she still worked so hard.
He loved that about her. Well, he kinda just loved everything about her. They were almost complete opposites, really, but they managed to get along so well. They were really different, and there were a lot of things they didn't agree on, but they somehow had a lot of things in common, too, one being their shared passion: writing.
He loved reading her writing. He loved being the one that could read it. He couldn't count how many times he had wanted to share a piece of his work with her, but couldn't when they were broken up all those years ago. Reading each other's writing, peering into each other's thoughts had been something that they loved doing throughout their friendship, and later on during their relationship. Simply having her read his piece about the stupid Grundy awards for the school paper his senior year had been an electrifying glimpse into their close past after being without each other for what felt like so long.
If his seventeen year-old self could see him now, waking up next to Clare every morning, his ring on her finger, he wouldn't believe it. It would have been too good to be true. It's definitely not something he takes for granted. After those crazy high school years of being hormonal, unstable teenagers- him especially -and going through things that normal high school couples never had to endure, they managed to find their way back to each other and stay that way.
He revels in the domesticity they had in their life since they moved in together in New York. The dinners together, late-night and early morning talks, waiting up for one another to get home from work. Leaving each other notes around the apartment, falling asleep in each other's arms.
Sometimes he wants to thank that god she believes in, it's just so incredible.
After drudging through years of a chaotic and gloomy adolescence, after losing Julia, he really thought that he would never be happy again. Accepted it even. Then Clare Edwards barrelled her way into his life with the force of a train moving hundreds of miles per hour. Looking back, he felt so foolish for ever trying to keep her out. When he looked into her eyes for the first time after gracelessly running over her glasses, he should have known he was done for.
He certainly did not expect to meet his soulmate at sixteen.
Now, nearly ten years later she still manages to stop him in his tracks and make his heart skip a beat. He loved it. He loved her. To have Clare, the one person who knew him inside and out, who has seen him at his darkest and ugliest and still believes in him and can laugh and cry and talk and simply just be with him. He loved just as much to do the same for her. To be the one to make her smile after a long day, to be her shoulder to cry on, the person she tells all her good news to first, or to see her in her unguarded state of rest, like right now.
She stirred a bit in her sleep. He pushed an auburn curl out of her face and tucked it behind her ear and gave her a quick peck on the forehead. Maybe he'll get up and make them something to eat soon. It feels like a breakfast in bed kind of day.
He loves that they have decades more worth of this time together in the future. Their future.