Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

14. It will be worth it anyway

It was just dawn when Johnny left Yael's bed. He made it with the meticulous care he had learned in his years as a recruit, made himself a coffee and got into the shower.

As the hot water washed away the vaguely floral scent of the sheets from his body, he instinctively smiled at the inordinate amount of hair products he had to wade through to find a shampoo.

An almost impossible task without the girl's instructions.

He could have gone back to the base that night, get a better night's sleep in a bed that didn't hold the same memories, that didn't seem so empty without that small, warm shape under the covers.

Instead, the choice had been so obvious for him that it made his stomach clench.

Everything had happened so quickly and so naturally between them lately that it made his head spin. The doctor had given him the keys to the apartment just a few weeks earlier.

"For your convenience." She had told him and Soap had accepted without hesitation, but in his stomach he had felt something very similar to the air vacuum he felt when skydiving twenty thousand feet from a cargo plane.

Then there was always that little detail that had only surfaced on his lips the night before.

He took a raspy breath that fogged up the bathroom mirror, the deep growl of an animal, and shook his head as if to ward off a disturbing thought. He was sure that if he had had time to write it all down in his notebook, the whole thing would have seemed much clearer to him.

He started the engine of the 4Runner in the pink light that barely diffused from the gray blanket of clouds and left Manchester at breakneck speed, praying to find the MacTavishes still asleep.

The shutters of the farmhouse were still closed when Johnny's car slowly drove down the gravel driveway to the back shed. With a caught breath, he entered the lacquered door with the same meticulous care as when he was still a boy.

The light footsteps and slow movements of those morning returns after a night out in the city. The boards of the old wooden floor creaked barely under his boots and he almost let out a curse.

"Welcome home, love." Muriel's thin, warm voice through the half-open kitchen door stopped him in his tracks. A low, spontaneous laugh rose in his chest as he reached his mother sitting at the large walnut table.

He placed a fleeting kiss on her short, carefully curled hair and his big fingers squeezed her thin shoulder under her dressing gown.

Muriel let him rummage through the cupboards of the distinctly British-style kitchen in search of coffee, in silence.

"I ken ye want tae ask me, Mam." Johnny sighed without looking at her, he could feel those blue eyes drilling into the back of his neck in a way so familiar it took his breath away.

"What's her name?" she asked him after a while, in a tone of shrill nonchalance that was uncharacteristic of her.

"Yael." the sergeant chuckled as he finally turned on the coffee maker and, for a moment, felt so vulnerable that his hands almost reached for the combat vest on his chest in an attempt to cling to it.

"What a beautiful name."

"Aye."

With a certain discomfort, Soap found that his heart was beating only slightly faster in the soft hum of the coffee maker. He perched himself on the kitchen counter in an attempt to camouflage his embarrassment, but his mother's blue eyes fixed on his with a sweetness that was crumbling him.

"Is she on yer team?" Muriel pressed on, her usual measured and nonchalant tone.

"Naw. She's a surgeon." John croaked back, he would have given anything to have something to manipulate to break the tension. A knife would have been fine.