Title: Sunrise (1/1)
Author: SomewhereApart
Fandom: CSI: Miami
Characters: Eric/Calleigh
Rating: PG
Summary: Calleigh reflects on what she loves most about being with Eric.
A/N: What can I say? I was off all of this week, and had way too much time to write fluffy little ficlets.
If anyone asked Calleigh what she loved best about being with Eric, she wouldn’t have to reach to find the answer. There was nothing, absolutely nothing - not long, trembling nights of pleasure, not playful evenings experimenting in the kitchen, not Sunday afternoons curled on the sofa watching old movie after old movie - that compared to the way she woke every morning.
She always woke exactly one minute before the insistent chirp of the alarm, always woke curled around her pillow, and for a brief moment she always felt a deep, painful loneliness. Too accustomed to sleeping alone, she forgot he was there. And then the alarm blared, and she reached a clumsy hand to slap it into silence for another ten minutes, and every morning, without fail, the warmth of his hand found her hip, slid over it as he rolled lazily to spoon behind her. He nuzzled into her hair and sighed, his fingers always finding their way to a patch of warm, bare skin and stroking back and forth just so.
They lay there, together, silent as the dawn outside the window, his warm breath teasing against her neck. Half the time, his fingers stilled as he succumbed to sleep again, but she always stayed awake, her gaze on the clock, watching the minutes tick down until they had to get up and start the day, leaving behind the quiet bed they shared.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that compared to the first ten minutes of the day, when they were together, and in love, and everything was perfect, and still, and settled. One day he broke the silence, pressing a kiss into her hair and rumbling in that sexy, sleep-roughened voice she so loved a proposal that was completely unexpected, and yet not surprising in the least. “Marry me.”
Calleigh didn’t hesitate, not even for a moment, before she weaved their fingers and murmured a quiet, “Okay.”
He just chuckled against her, held her more tightly and fell silent again, and Calleigh knew exactly why she’d said yes: she couldn’t imagine a future without him wrapped around her for the first ten minutes of every day. Now, she would never have to.