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11. "I know baby" while you are cumming with Caleb.
🔞MDNI🔞
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The silence was the worst part.
Thirty two days of it. It was not like the comfortable quiet of your apartment on a Sunday morning, it was something heavier, pressing down on your chest until every breath felt like work. You'd developed routines around it without meaning to. Checking your phone at the same times every day. Sitting on the edge of your bed in the dark, watching the notification light on your watch for something that never came. Eating when you remembered to. Sleeping when you couldn't stay awake anymore.
The Fleet had given you nothing.
You weren't official family. That was the problem, the one that the Farspace Fleet kept running into every time you called. Childhood bonds didn't have paperwork. Shared trauma didn't have a form number. The promise made in the darkness of his room more than a year ago didn't hold any legal weight, and so every time you called you got the same automated voice, the same words in the same order.
The expedition into the deepspace flux zone is ongoing. All communications are classified under Level 4 security protocols.
You'd stopped counting how many times you'd heard it.
A week ago rumors started moving through the hunter channels, spreading fast and going quiet the moment an official walked into a room. A collapse inside the tunnel. A squadron cut off from the extraction point. You'd cornered a senior officer at the Association headquarters and watched her look at everything in the room except your face while she told you to prepare for the worst. As if that was a sentence you were supposed to absorb and go home.
They were writing him off. Filling in forms. Moving toward the moment where they'd call it officially and send you a letter with his name at the top and a condolences paragraph at the bottom, and the universe would have taken him from you a second time. The first time had been the explosion. You'd been clueless then, and the grief had carved something out of you that had never fully grown back. Thirty two days of silence and you could feel those same edges again, the same hollow shape of a loss you didn't know how to survive this time.
You'd spent the last two days crying under your duvet without a reason to come out.
2:14 AM. The front door clicked.
You sat up so fast the blood rushed out of your head. Sat completely still in the dark, heart hammering, telling yourself it was nothing— probably a neighbor's door, your own exhausted mind making up sounds it wanted to hear. You'd been doing that. Hearing things. Seeing his face in the corner of your eye on the street and turning to find a stranger.
Heavy footsteps in the hallway. A duffel bag dropped onto the hardwood floor. The weight of it, the carelessness of someone too exhausted to set something down gently, sent something electric straight up your spine.
You got out of bed. Your legs weren't entirely reliable. You caught the door frame, steadied yourself, crossed the hallway on autopilot with your heart somewhere in your throat.
The bathroom light was on. Through the glass the steam was already building, the shower ran hard and hot, and you could smell it from the doorway—your shampoo.
You pushed the door open.
The steam rolled out around you, warm and thick, and through the clear panel of the shower glass—
Caleb.
He didn't know you were there yet.
He was standing under the water with his forehead pressed against the tile, shoulders rising and falling. The water was too hot—you could tell because the steam was already thick enough to blur the far wall—but he wasn't adjusting it. Just standing in it. Letting it hit the back of his neck and run down the lines of his shoulders to carry whatever he'd brought back with him down the drain.
His skin was pale, the kind of pale that came from a month without real sunlight, and every muscle in his back was wound so tight it looked painful.
He looked like he had fought his way to a door and wasn't entirely sure yet that he'd made it through.
His head turned.
His eyes found yours through the condensation and steam, bloodshot from lack of sleep and completely awake in an instant, and the look on his face when he saw you standing there—the unguarded relief of it—hit you somewhere behind your ribs and stayed there.
He reached back to shut the water off then stepped out without reaching for a towel, water running off his shoulders and chest, steam rising off his skin. He looked different. Harder at the edges. Several days of dark stubble caught the harsh bathroom light and he looked nothing like the man who'd kissed you goodbye a month ago, or he looked exactly like that man, just with everything worn closer to the surface, less of it contained.
Neither of you spoke. You weren't sure you could. The reality of him standing in front of you—breathing, dripping water onto the floor—was still making its way through days of silence and the grief of someone who had already lost him once and had spent the last forty eight hours preparing to do it again.
"Caleb." It came out barely a sound.
He crossed the bathroom floor in three steps, water trailing behind him, and his hand wrapped around your wrist. His grip was warm, real and it made your eyes sting immediately. He didn't say anything. He just held you for a moment, his thumb pressed against your pulse point, and let you feel that he was there.
He kept hold of your wrist the whole way. Down the hall, through the door of your room, until your shoulders found a wall and he stopped in front of you. The sight of him, still yours, broke something open in your chest that you'd been holding very carefully shut.
"Caleb,—the fleet, they—I thought you were—"
"I'm right here." His voice came out rough, scraped down to something raw and unrecognizable, nothing of his usual warmth in it yet. "Forget what they said. I'm right here. I'm safe."
He placed his palms against the wall on either side of your head, steadying the space around you like he always had. The heat coming off his skin was startling against the cool air of the bedroom. You looked up at him, at the dark sharp lines of his jaw and the thick stubble that made him look exhausted and more real than anything you'd let yourself imagine in the last four weeks.
"Look at you," he said quietly, eyes moving over your face, your shaking hands, "Why are you trembling. It's okay." His voice dropped further. "I've got you."
"I thought you were dead." The first sob broke through before you could stop it "They wouldn't tell me anything, Caleb. They told me to prepare for the worst, I didn't know what that—fuck, I did know what it meant and I couldn't—"
"I know." He pulled you away from the wall and buried his face in the curve of your neck, you felt the rough drag of his stubble against your skin and gasped. He breathed you in slowly, deeply, his whole chest expanding against yours. "I know what they're like." His arms tightened around you. "But I promised you. I have always promised you. I fought my way out of that tunnel because leaving you again was not an option."
His hands moved down and without any warning he hooked his hands under your thighs and lifted you clean off the floor.
You wrapped your legs around his waist on instinct, hands flying to his shoulders. Your shorts rode up with the movement, bare thighs pressing against the heat of his hips.
"Baby—"
His mouth came down on yours.
It wasn't desperate in the way you'd expected. It was slower than that, deeper, a kiss that had too much behind it to rush. A month of darkness, cold and whatever he'd fought through to get back to you, all of it pressing into the way his lips moved against yours, his tongue parting your mouth in a heavy stroke that made your fingers curl into his damp hair and pull.
He shifted your weight, pressing your spine gently but firmly into the wall, and you felt the full length of his cock against you through the thin fabric of your shorts—already hard, already searching for the closeness you both needed, his hips moving in a slow rhythm that mirrored exactly what his mouth was doing.
He broke the kiss just far enough to look at you again.
"I'm here," he said, his words almost too quiet to hear. "Right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I need—" Your voice broke, tears were streaming down your face. "Please. I need to feel you. I need to know you're actually—"
The sound that came out of him was pained. He lowered you until your feet touched the floor, keeping one arm tight around your waist, and his free hand went to your waistband, careful, guiding your shorts and underwear down together until they pooled at your ankles and you stepped out of them.
He straightened back up and you looked at each other in the quiet of the room. He was watching your face with an expression that made your throat close up again. The marks of the last month were all over him, the exhaustion, the weight loss, the hollowness around his eyes, and he was still the most beautiful man you'd ever seen.
He reached for the hem of your shirt and pulled it over your head, tossing it behind him without looking. Then he was back against you, chest to chest, and the heat of his body in front of you and the cool hard wall behind you made your breath leave you all at once.
His jaw dragged down your throat. The stubble was rough and you felt every millimeter of it, that scraping friction kept pulling you back into your body every time emotion threatened to pull you out of it. He was doing it on purpose. Making sure you felt him. "Right here," he said softly against your skin. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. I'm yours."
There was nothing left to say that your body wasn't already saying for you.
He hooked one of your legs over his hip, his forearm sliding under your thigh to hold you there. His free hand moved between you, guiding himself to your entrance, and he paused—just for a breath, tip pressed against your heat—eyes on your face, waiting.
"Please. Now. Ca—"
He pressed forward and you buried your face in his neck.
The sob that came out of you surprised both of you. He felt it move through you and pulled you closer, both arms wrapping around you, his hands spread wide across your back.
"I've got you," he whispered, lips against your temple. "I've got you. I'm here."
He pulled back slowly. Almost all the way. Let you feel the drag of it, the absence, and then drove back in deeper.
"Caleb—" he swallowed the sound of his name with a sound of his own, low in his chest, his forehead dropping to yours.
He began to move and there was nothing fast about it. Just you and him.
The heat built fast anyway. Your nails found his back, his shoulders, whatever you could reach, and he let you—didn't flinch, didn't shift away, just kept moving in a steady rhythm while the wet sounds of it and both of your breathing filled up the room. Your tears were still falling and you stopped trying to do anything about them, just let them come while your mouth left marks on his body.
His shoulder pulled away from your mouth.
"Look at me." Came his voice, strained, like it cost him something to speak. "Let me see you."
You lifted your head. Your vision was a bit blurry, everything fractured through tears, but you could see him clearly enough, jaw clenched, neck tight, the muscles in his face working against something he was holding back.
"You don't have to be scared anymore," he rasped, hips driving forward again, finding a shorter faster rhythm that dragged against every nerve ending you had. "I'm right here, baby. I'm staying right here."
"I was so scared—" The words broke apart before you got through them, your body clenching around him in tight pulses. "Caleb, I thought—I kept calling and they wouldn't—and then she said to prepare and I didn't—"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry you had to sit with that."
"Don't apologize—"
"Look at me," he said again, softer this time. "Stay with me."
He grabbed your other leg, hoisting you higher until you were fully suspended—nothing under you but him, every thrust finding someplace deeper, enough to make your whole body seize up and your head fall back against the wall.
"Oh—Caleb—I'm going to—I—"
"I've got you." He brought his face to your cheek, lips moving against the wet, salty skin there, breathing you in. "I've got you. Let go."
The past month collapsed into a single point in your chest and then detonated. Not just pleasure—though that rolled through you in long shaking waves—but everything under it. Every night staring at his empty side of the bed. Every time a voice said please await official updates. The two days under your duvet where you'd let yourself start to grieve him. All of it coming up at once, unstoppable, your whole body shaking with it while he held you against the wall and didn't let you fall.
"I love you," you sobbed into his neck, the words coming out in pieces. "I love you—I love you—"
"I know." His voice cracked on the second word. He was close. His lips pressed to your temple, your jaw, your wet cheek "I know, baby. I love you. I love you. I'm home."
He buried himself as deep as he could go, shaking, your name in his mouth like a prayer he'd been repeating for a month to keep himself moving forward.
He carried you to the bed eventually. Lay down with you still tangled against his chest, one hand moving slow up and down your back, the other tucked under his head.
"They really told you to prepare?"
"Three days ago."
He was quiet for a moment. His hand stilled on your back.
"They wouldn't tell me anything because I'm not—I'm not on any form. There's no box I fit in. I'm not—" You stopped. Felt your throat tighten again and breathed through it. "There's no paperwork that says I'm yours. So as far as they were concerned I was nobody and they owed me nothing."
Caleb didn't say anything. His chest rose and fell steadily.
"I need that to change"
"Okay," he said.
"I mean it, Caleb." You pushed yourself up onto your elbow and looked at him, his eyes were already on you. "I need it to actually change. Not someday. Not when things settle down or when the fleet rotation is easier or when we find a better time. I need—" your voice came out fierce and a little unsteady and you let it be both. "I need to be your wife. Legally. On every form and every document and every emergency contact line they have. I need there to be paperwork that says you're mine so that the next time someone tries to lock me out of a room where decisions are being made about your life, I can put it on their desk and they cannot say no to me."
He was very still.
"I'm not asking you to do something romantic," you said. "I'm not—this isn't about a ceremony or a dress or any of that, though I want all of that too, I do. I'm asking you because I spent a month being nobody to the people who had information about whether you were alive. I'm asking because I sat in this apartment with no legal right to know anything and I cannot do that again. I will not do that again."
Caleb looked at you for a long moment then he reached up and put his hand against the side of your face, his thumb brushing your cheekbone.
"I've wanted to ask you, I kept waiting for the right moment."
"This is the right moment."
"You're proposing to me at four in the morning."
"I am."
The corner of his mouth pulled up. The first real version of his smile you'd seen since he walked through the door, the one that reached all the way up, the one that was so him it made your chest ache.
He pulled you back down against him, arms wrapping around you, lips pressing to the top of your head and staying there. "First thing tomorrow we go to the registration office. We fill out every form they have. We put your name on everything."
You pressed your face into his chest and closed your eyes, this time it wasn't to wait for a notification that never came.
It was just to sleep.
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