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El came down at seven fifteen looking like a million bucks in a blue and gold dress with her hair up in a complicated twist thing. Peter was ninety percent sure the dress was new, but there was that lingering ten percent uncertainty, so he stuck with a safely neutral, "you look great."
"Thank you." She was wearing the necklace he'd gotten her for their fifth wedding anniversary; the single sapphire was a tease, nestled in her cleavage like that. It still made Peter want to bury his face there, too. El leaned over the arm of the couch to kiss him. "Lipstick," she said, tapping his cheek with one finger.
"I know," Peter said, and kissed her, a soft, dry brush. She smelled as good as she looked.
The cab honked outside, and El's phone beeped with the alert text message. She lingered close though, one hand on his shoulder for balance. "Check in," she said. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," Peter said. "I've got a whole stack of cold cases. You?"
A smile bloomed like she couldn't hold it down anymore. "I'm really excited," she said, in the tones of a confession. "I was afraid you'd come upstairs while I was getting ready and catch me dancing."
Her frothy overspill of happiness was contagious. "I love you," he said. "Have fun, okay?"
"I'm all over it," El said, smirking. "Love you." She bounced up, twirled once to make her skirt flare and her shoes sparkle, and then ran to catch the cab.
Peter did stick to case files for a while. Two were so cold they were practically arctic, so he spent most of his time blowing dust off a private collection icon theft from December '05. There was a whole rigmarole with a contested will and a dodgey alarm system and a yappy poodle that Neal was going to eat up with a freaking spoon come Monday.
Peter got up a little after eight and defrosted a pan of El's lasagna. Satchmo hovered, nosing hopefully. Peter popped open a beer and leaned against the counter, watching through the oven door as the cheese slowly began to bubble.
Reservations at eight, so they'd be getting their appetizers right about now. They'd have their drinks already. Shmancy martinis, maybe. Or, no, wine. They'd get a whole bottle, something at least a decade old, aged in oak, that sort of thing. Or would it be champagne?
He ate in front of the TV, flipping between the news and hockey, both bloody. He made it all the way to nine o'clock before he reached for El's laptop and logged in remotely to pull up Neal's tracking data. Neal's location maps had made him nauseous with dread on more than one occasion. And then sometimes he'd been smug, sometimes he'd been ashamed, sometimes he'd been obscurely angry to see the Justice Department seal at the top of the webpage, as if the United States government were intruding on something that was just his. And Neal's.
Tonight it was purely satisfying. I know where you've been. I know where you are.
Neal was safely at home when Peter had checked last night. He'd gone out briefly at eleven fifteen. It was a familiar route, clearly on foot, and Peter didn't have to do any Google Map squinting to figure out it was an ice cream run. That old-fashioned parlor he liked so much with the checkered tile and the fountain drinks, and then a stop at the corner drugstore on the way back. He'd stayed put for the rest of the night until his morning commute. He was at Federal Plaza until 11, when they'd battled the early lunch traffic to get to the riverfront to question witnesses. Then lunch on the go. The tracking data didn't reveal the fifteen minute squabble over sandwiches versus sushi, which Neal had won by suborning both of Peter's new probies to his side. Then back to the office for the afternoon. And -- ah-ha -- he'd thought Neal was just a tiny bit windblown when he came in for the four thirty debriefing. He'd ducked out for a fast six-block sprint to a vaguely familiar address. Oh, right, that tiny hole-in-the-wall place where he got his imported origami paper, even though you could get kits off Amazon at a third the price, because he really was that much of a snob. It'd been a while. In Neal's endless font of esoteric passions, origami came and went unpredictably. Peter caught himself smiling, remembering the last time it had come around, when he'd ended up with the entire population of Noah's Ark on his desk.
Neal had been with him for the rest of the workday, and then gone straight home to June's. No more surprises. He'd had forty-five minutes to get ready, and he'd left for Galerie de l'Escroc with time to spare.
He was still there, naturally. A five-star place like that, with an endless wine list and a secluded corner table: Peter was giving it three hours, minimum.
He left the laptop open, eyes flicking between the game and the map. It refreshed every ninety seconds, but as predicted, Neal wasn't moving.
It would be over in six days. The tracker would come off for the last time, Neal would be free, and Peter wouldn't be able to watch him like this anymore.
Unless he traced the GPS in Neal's phone. Slip the request into a stack of others, a tiny misappropriation of Bureau assets, no one would ever know. He could do that, yeah.
This was what going crazy was like, catching yourself thinking . . . things. It'd all been so clear, once upon a time. Tracking a felon on an anklet was in the impersonally righteous reach of the law's long arm; tracking a free citizen was stalking. Except it had never been impersonal with Neal.
Not like losing his mind over Neal was new, anyway. Neal's brand of devil-may-care madness was catching, and the more time Peter spent with him, the worse it got. First it was the desire to lean in, unbutton Neal's collar, run his nose down Neal's neck and just breathe him in. Inappropriate. Transgressive. And then, too explicit for denial, he'd wanted to stroke down Neal's strong back, fit his hands to Neal's ass in black wool trousers, and squeeze. So many other things after that, a data dump straight from Peter's subconscious. He wanted to handcuff Neal, frisk him, strip search him, bite him, learn every alias, secure a confession for every crime. Not for the Bureau, just for himself.
But all the twisted stuff wasn't even the scariest part. Wanting to sleep next to him, getting sweaty-palmed and tongue-tied with the urge to – to fucking romance him, being ready to move heaven and earth to make sure he was happy . . . it was one thing to find out you were a little bit fucked up, down in the lizard brain. Who wasn't? But the other stuff, the tenderness Neal could wring from him with just a look. That was terrifying.
Peter turned the TV off, overpoweringly restless. He left the laptop running on the coffee table while he went upstairs to change. Satchmo followed him, then went thundering back down to wait by the door as soon as he saw Peter's running shoes.
It was a good night for it, cool for this early in the fall. The sky glowed, reflecting the New York dazzle even over their quiet little pocket of suburbia. Peter ran, Satchmo ranging ahead at the end of his leash. Three blocks east, past the pizza place that had given El food poisoning. Past the corner grocery with the fabulous bagels. Past the wine shop where Neal always stopped and called El on his way over for dinner to talk about complementary flavor palettes or whatever.
The point was to lose track of time, to get to the end of the night without thinking about it too much. It'd worked the first two times he'd been alone, watching Neal's tracker and waiting for El to come home. It wasn't working now, though, because the third time just might be the charm.
Stop it. Peter thought about his feet on the pavement, and Satchmo's paws, and the traffic light ahead. He didn't realize it was actually working until he passed their second option Chinese place with the inferior dumplings. He was halfway to Flatbush. He turned around, calves burning.
If he were wearing Neal's anklet, and the center point was his house, he'd be out-of-bounds right now. Two miles. A ridiculously generous margin in New York's dense honeycomb. Still, any leash would be claustrophobic, particularly to a globe-trotter like Neal.
He could still run, take his freedom and vanish with it. He wouldn't be skipping out on the anklet and ruining his chances of ever living freely in the United States again. But he'd be skipping out on them, and yeah, that would be personal.
Neal said he was sticking around. It wasn't a lie Peter was afraid of, not this time. Neal had always downplayed the anklet, like he downplayed prison. Temporary roadblocks, inconvenient but endurable, any flare of impatience or frustration quickly damped down. And he flat out didn't understand why Peter had put the brakes on things with the two of them until it was over.
"Seriously?" he'd said, kicking out his leg to display the tracker. "You, of all people, are spooked by this old thing?"
"I have a lot of power over you," Peter had said, folding his arms.
Neal twinkled up at him through his lashes. "Don't I know it."
"Stop that," Peter had snapped automatically, then groaned. "Look, just – just wait, okay? This is important to me. Three months, that's all I'm asking."
Neal had flicked a look over to Elizabeth, watching silently from the dining room table. "You don't have power over me," he'd said to her.
"Not even a little bit?" El had asked, really not helping.
"Well," Neal had said, giving her a dose of the eyes. "Maybe a little."
"Oh my God, could you at least agree to my terms before you start negotiating exceptions to them?" Peter had demanded, outraged.
"Have you ever been anyone's exception before?" Neal asked Elizabeth, doing about seven layers of innuendo with one arched eyebrow.
"Hey hey," Peter had said. "Can we focus? We can talk about – about possible exceptions later. Are you on board with me here?"
Neal had smiled, gesturing with two open hands. "Hey, yeah, if that's what you want," he'd said. "Fine. I'll pass your test, no problem. You'll see."
Which was crap. A million doors were about to open to Neal; his old life, or just travel for its own sake, or – who knew – school, or hell, maybe some shiny new life painting original nudes somewhere nobody knew his name and his history. Only one of those doors would lead him home to them. Peter wasn't worried about a lie; Peter was worried about second thoughts.
It was quarter to eleven by the time he got home. Satchmo sprawled out on the kitchen tile, panting. Peter leaned over the back of the couch and swiped his thumb over the trackpad to clear the screensaver. Still at the restaurant. Yeah, he knew his guy.
He took a slow shower, changed into sweats, caught a few sound bites of the eleven o'clock news. And when he checked again at eleven ten, Neal was at home.
Peter ran the sequence back. He'd left the restaurant at ten fifty one, on foot like he'd arrived. It was just a third of a mile, and Neal covered it at a slow amble, no deviations.
Peter caught the second half of The Daily Show, but couldn't name the guest thirty seconds after it was over. Eleven thirty, no change. Peter turned the TV off and paced. Eleven fifty. Midnight. Neal hadn't moved. And if Elizabeth had gotten a cab from the restaurant, she'd have been home forty five minutes ago.
Peter leaned on the back of the couch, head down, riding out an adrenaline rush. He glanced up at the laptop screen, and only looking at Neal's little blinking dot made his breath come faster. Just, okay, think of it like pre-takedown surveillance: the problem wasn't being ready for the burst of action at the end, the problem was not going nuts through all the waiting. So just settle down.
He went up to bed, because unless work got in the way, he usually did before one o'clock on Fridays. He brought the laptop with him and set it up on his nightstand. The glow of the screen was the only light once he closed the curtains and turned off the lamp. Peter lay on his side, watching the map not change. Eventually the screensaver flicked on, one of those hypnotic tropical fish ones, and he dozed.
El's footsteps on the stairs woke him. He was sitting up, the lamp on, by the time she came around the corner. The details struck his groggy brain: she was carrying a bouquet of origami flowers. Her eye makeup was faintly smudged and her lipstick was gone entirely. Her dress was a little crumpled, like it'd spent some time abandoned on someone's bedroom floor.
"Hi," she said, stopping at the foot of the bed.
Peter swallowed hard. "Your – you had your hair up earlier," he said.
El touched her hair, loose and shining over her shoulders. "Neal brushed it out for me," she said, looking him in the eye.
Peter tipped his head back, breathing out. "Ha," he said. "There's this photograph he loves. A St. Polier, black-and-white, a woman with her hair coming down." Neal had stared at it for twenty minutes straight, enchanted, saying a few disjointed things about the creation of visual intimacy and the quality of light necessary to bring out texture in brunette hair.
El took a few steps up the bed and sat on its edge. The flowers rustled faintly. Roses, he could see now, in impossible colors, gray and blue and gold.
"Aren't they amazing?" El ran a fingertip along the rim of one, delicately touching its intricate creases. Peter wanted to see Neal make one appear from a flat piece of paper. "He brought me four at the restaurant," El said. "Then he made the rest while I was napping." They looked at each other over the bouquet, letting that sink in. "Okay," El said. "Three 'feeling words,' you've got fifteen seconds, go."
"Worried," Peter said quickly. Then more carefully, "Jealous. Turned on."
Tension settled in her face, down her shoulders. "Jealous?"
"In a good way," Peter said. "I didn't know there was a good way, did you?"
"Yes," El said. "I figured that one out a few years ago, actually."
Peter nodded. No guilt, that was rule number three. And it really was a good way. "Your turn," he said. "Three 'feeling words'." El didn't generally need that old game to come up with hers, but fair was fair.
"Tired," she said. Peter leaned to his right to look – it was after three thirty. "Giddy. Satisfied."
It had to be the power of suggestion, but Peter would have sworn he could catch a whiff of Neal's cologne coming off her. Peter cleared his throat. "You, uh, you could have stayed the night. That would have been okay."
She laid the roses on the nightstand and bent to unbuckle her shoes. "He was kind of keyed up," she said to the floor. "He didn't sleep at all. I think he wanted some space."
Peter assimilated this detail, staring at the pretty curve of her back. She sat up, shoes dangling, hair in her face. Someone should take a picture of her like that. Someone like Neal, who could catch the wonder of a beautiful thing and put it on paper.
"I kept wishing you were there to tell me when he was lying," she said.
Peter pushed off his elbow and sat up all the way. "You think he was lying to you?"
She shook her hair back, the lamplight full on her face. "No. Well, not much. It's just at dinner, and last week at the theater, and two weeks ago at the gallery opening. I'd ask him a question, and he'd hesitate. And I just assumed he was lying, until I realized that he had to stop and think about it because he wasn't."
Peter laughed ruefully. "Yeah. He's the only person I've ever met who has a tell for the truth."
"That's our man," El said. They looked at each other, mutually startled. El breathed in and reached out her hand; Peter grabbed it and held tight. "Peter," she said. "Peter, I'm falling really hard, here."
"Yeah." Peter had never said it himself, but hearing her do it felt like he had, like letting a secret out.
"We're going to make this work," she said. "I really think we can."
"I really hope we can," Peter said.
"Hey." She let go of his hand and poked him in the chest. "We make a good team, you and me. Six more days. You just keep on being the stick, and I'll be the carrot."
"There are so many things wrong with that," Peter said, though he couldn't articulate any right off the top of his head.
"Sure thing, sheriff." She stood, taking her earrings out. "Oh, damn, my necklace."
She always left her jewelry wherever she dropped it at the end of the day. Peter could picture the necklace in a shining coil on Neal's nightstand.
"I'll get it from him on Monday," he said, hoarse.
"Thanks, honey." She unzipped her dress, standing in profile to him. It whispered down her body. She was wearing a peach-colored bra with little flowers on it. This time Peter was absolutely certain it was new. She wasn't wearing any underwear.
Elizabeth looked over at him, smiling crookedly. "They're in my purse," she said.
"El," he said, tormented.
She laughed, flung off her bra in two quick motions, and bounced onto the bed. Peter rolled her over him and off onto her back, struggling to get his legs free of the covers. "El," he said breathlessly. "Can I? You're not too tired? It's not . . . weird?"
"Yes," she said, pushing up on her hands for a kiss. "Come on, you look like you're going to have a stroke."
He kissed her, stretched her out on her back, ran his hands all over her. Looking for evidence. Her nipples were a little swollen, like someone had been playing with them. And there was a faint shadow on the inside curve of her left breast that might just be the trace of a mouth. Neal Caffrey never had liked to leave much evidence.
Peter kissed her stomach, scraping his stubbly cheek against the soft skin below her belly button. She got self-conscious about the trail of hair there and shaved it sometimes, like today. He ran his nose down the crease of her thigh. She smelled good, already wet. And it had been a long time, but yes, that was definitely a trace of latex, too. Peter groaned. He wanted to rub his face into her, he wanted her to wrap her legs around his shoulders and hold him in close while he put his tongue where Neal's fingers and maybe Neal's tongue and definitely Neal's cock had been.
But El was pulling him up by the shoulders, digging her nails in so he knew she really meant it. "No you don't," she said, narrow-eyed. "We're going to be here all night if you start in with that, too."
". . . Oh," Peter said, gulping. El loved foreplay and a slow build, and it was no surprise to learn Neal did, too. They must have taken lots of time with each other, driven themselves completely insane.
They rearranged their tangled legs, and she lifted her hips into his first thrust. He had to pull himself up hard after a minute, because she might be talking a good game, but she was clearly tired. And Neal had done a number on her.
Peter slowed down, rolling his hips the way she liked. She was saying "ah, ah, ah," quietly, her head tipped back. And from that angle he could see another mark, a bit darker than the first, right over the pulse point on her neck. He buried his face there, wrapped his arms around her, gave her too much of his weight as their hips rolled together. She clutched him to her, hands strong on his back. They breathed for a long time, fucking slowly, until Peter came to the end of his restraint.
"Love you," he said into her neck. "So much." He moved harder into her, sucking at the skin under his mouth.
She rubbed her cheek against the side of his head, then turned to speak into his ear. "I held him down," she said. "By his wrists, on his back. He really liked that."
Peter's eyes rolled back in his head. El's hands, Neal's wrists, Neal's bare ankle, paper roses, six more days. He came so hard, he rattled the headboard against the wall.
He pulled out as soon as he could think, rolled to the side and slid his fingers down. El arched into his hand. "Yes," she said, and "right there," like he didn't know. It wasn't long before she shivered through a quiet orgasm.
Peter rested his open palm on her stomach. She slung a leg across him, her eyes closed.
The flowers were directly in Peter's line of sight, bundled sideways on the laptop keyboard. Peter stared at them. Hmm.
"He told you to say that," he said, looking hard at the side of El's face. "The thing, you know. About holding him down."
She stretched and yawned. "Yep," she said, unapologetic. "Oh, and I put on some of his cologne."
"I am so screwed," Peter said.
"Not yet," El said complacently. "Just wait six days."