Chapter Text
It’s cold in the room, the kind of air-conditioned chill that inspires a deep sleep under weighted covers, the kind of chill that welcomes the heat of another body, the refreshing slide of a leg or an arm against cool sheets.
It’s dark in here too, the only light coming from a sliver of afternoon sun that filters in through a crack in the blackout curtains.
She’s been awake awhile, he can tell that by the way she is breathing, erratic and uneven, her body shifting against her covers in the other bed to the right of him. He slept for a few hours - not enough - but enough that he can think clearly again. He’d finally tugged his shirt off but left his jeans on, something that usually drives him crazy, but he hadn’t wanted to raise her anxiety even more by fully stripping down in the room with her.
“You would have been married by now.”
Jesus. Olivia isn’t crying anymore, but her voice is soft and hoarse, almost a monotone.
“Olivia, drink some water,” he says sleepily, still sprawled out on his stomach, facing the window. “You’re losing your voice, although if you’re gonna keep saying shit like that, it might not be such a bad thing if you go mute for a while.” His water bottle is depleted, and he knows her well enough to know she hasn’t opened hers yet. He’s spent almost half his life trying to get her to stay hydrated, to drink anything besides tea or coffee. Sure enough, he hears her roll over and crack the bottle open to take a few sips.
She hates water, says it’s uninteresting and she especially hates it when it’s room temperature, and he can almost hear her inner monologue cursing both him and the bland liquid out.
Despite a hellish day, he could almost laugh.
She is stubborn and bossy and ferocious, a badass Captain in the NYPD, but with him she’s also still that girl who walked into the 1-6 twenty-five years ago. She’ll concede on some things, look for guidance, relent every now and then when she needs a little taking care of.
He aches for Olivia right now. His fists open and close, longing to touch her. She’s his, and he can never say that out loud, but every fiber of his being says that all of this destruction today is worth it. It’s time to start living his - their - truth.
“What did you mean?” Hydrated for the moment, her voice is a slight bit stronger, but not by much. She’s asking him questions though. She’s laying here, she hasn’t run, and even though he’s got a lot of devastating things to answer for outside of this hotel room, he feels a rush of calm wash over him. It’s time, he thinks, it’s time to talk to her. It’s time she listens.
“About what?” he answers, keeping his tone even and deliberately casual.
“You said…” Olivia stops, and he can hear rustling on her side of the room, even as he keeps his eyes on the shadows of the window frame. “That you ran because…”
Of course, Olivia would start with the hardest questions. “Because I was married.”
“Yeah.” She tosses again, shifting her pillows, shoving the covers down, patting them as if she can’t get comfortable.
Elliot cracks his neck and turns over, facing the ceiling, letting the weight of the coming conversation settle over him. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get through this, or how she will, but he might have been going table to table right now, greeting family and friends, suffocating under the echo of vows said to the wrong person, and instead he’s in a hotel, far away from the mess of a disastrous life trajectory on his patio. Instead, he’s in the cool darkness, and Olivia is a few feet away, and that must mean he’s doing something right, finally.
Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t too late.
“Come here,” he says.
She stills, all of her restless tossing halted. He thinks he can hear the beat of her heart, loud and pounding in her chest. Or maybe that’s his own pulse, raging because he just keeps pushing, one step in front of another, and so far she’s been keeping up.
“Olivia - “
“Elliot, it’s your wedding day, I can’t climb into-“
“Stop saying that, alright? I’m not getting married, and I’m not trying to sleep with you right now. But if we’re finally going to talk about this, I want you next to me.” Christ, she’s going to be the death of him.
There is no movement on her side of the room. She’s laying perfectly still now, fidgeting set aside.
“Olivia, now.”
He hopes she doesn’t see him grin at the ceiling when she dramatically sighs. He hears the covers being thrown back - also dramatically - and she takes another sip of her water, stalling. Then she’s grumbling under her breath, something about pain in the ass but she’s at the edge of his bed anyway.
“Scoot over,” she grouses. “This bed is too small for both of us.”
He doesn’t know why her abject, pouting misery is making his chest clear, making him feel hopeful, but she’s bickering, and he could listen to her bitch and complain all day long if she just stays. “Told you we should have got the king.”
She flings back his covers now, and he almost protests, but she’s determined to make him as uncomfortable as possible. “I am not checking into a one bed hotel room with you on your wedd-“
“Olivia.” The woman is impossible as hell. “Say it again, and I will fucking make a move on you, just to prove a point that it is no such day. No wedding, no wedding day. Understand?”
He slides to his left and she crawls into the bed, careful not to touch him. She pulls the covers back over herself, deliberately patting them down between their bodies so there is no touching. He wants to laugh, holy shit he wants to laugh, but she’s still fragile and he’s still facing a load of repercussions outside of this room for all of his stupid decisions, so he merely smiles to himself.
“Would you like to put some pillows between us, too?” he teases gently.
She’s dramatic about her breathing, too. “If there was more room on this bed, I would. You could at least put your shirt on.”
He chuckles, and it probably makes her even more irritable. He loves this side of her. Loves that she only gives her rare hissy fits and mock indignation and petulance to him. She’s so contained and rational out in the world, the responsibility of a city and thousands of victims on her shoulders, and he thinks she is both beautiful and ridiculous when she lets go like this.
Olivia pats down the sheets again, as if making a line between their nearly fully clothed bodies on the queen-sized bed.
“I’m not going to take your virginity, can you relax?” He’s lying on his back, and she is doing the same, both of them facing the ceiling.
“I hate you,” she mutters, smacking his arm.
He can’t help it, because by God they need a break, and he fucking loves her. He’s got her here, fifteen floors above the city, in the dark, and it’s been so many damned years of dreaming of just being next to her in a bed like this. He wants more, hell his body is thrumming with need and he’s going to have to get that under control, but for right now, he’s going to shut out everything outside of this room.
Elliot rolls over on his side, facing her, somewhat just to annoy her, and she’s predictably more rigid than ever as he gets close enough to let his breath hit her cheek. “I mean, you might be a virgin again. It’s been awhile, right? You haven’t been dating, so -“ He’s not going to tell her that he would have killed anyone she went out with. He’s watching her, and she’s immobile, and he can feel her irritation rising, and he wants it, wants the playful between them back. Wants to get a rise out of her without fearing the result.
“I’d rather be a virgin than a man whore,” she says to the ceiling. “Did you sleep with every date, or was there some method to your rampant promiscuity?”
Elliot uses one of his fingers to trace the edge of Olivia’s cheek, to push back a strand of her hair. She’s teasing, he knows she doesn’t believe he had ever done that, and he’s grateful for the banter. He doesn’t know how he could go from bleeding out this morning to feeling this free, this light, this protective and sure of everything ahead in just a few hours, but he won’t let her run, he knows that.
If she pushes back, he will push back harder.
“There won’t be anyone after you. Ever.” It comes out low, from his gut, and he hadn’t meant to make it so serious so fast, but the truth is out there now, and she should know what his intentions are.
Because he’s watching her, he can see the way Olivia arches against the impact of his words, can see the instant way her expression contorts into pain, can see the glassiness that forms in her eyes, even as she steadfastly refuses to look at him. “How can you say that? You left me,” she finally whispers.
“Yeah,” he admits. Shit. It’s going to hurt now. The reprieve is over, and he’s back on guard, he’s got to be careful with how he gives her the rest of his truth. “I did.” There’s no hiding it, no forgiving it, no cushioning it. He just has to own it, lay his faults at her feet and pray she will take mercy on him.
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Why?”
He can’t do this with her belligerently determined not to look at him. She might tell him to go to hell, but he lays his left arm heavily over her stomach, above the covers, and tucks her into him a little bit. She doesn’t roll over, doesn’t turn her head, but she allows the contact. “When Jenna started firing - “ God, he hasn’t talked about this in so long, and he is the one with the raspy voice now. “I still had my head together. She killed two people, and I had it together. And then she swung that gun in your direction.”
Olivia’s now wide-open eyes fill and spill, but she’s silent, stiff, relentless in her focus on the white paint above them.
He can’t stop, not even if she is rejecting what he is telling her.
“Choosing you over Ryan was one thing, but after that day with Jenna, I had proof I was no good in the field. Not to you, not to anyone if we were partners. I’d have chosen you over anyone.” His throat might feel rough, his words might be said quietly, but they are coming, a solemn story, a truth, and she’s deserved this for far too long.
Her breaths are hollow and deep, even in the faint light he can see the outline of a drop of moisture on her cheek, falling into her hairline. Her hands are protectively folded on her stomach, and he lets his fingers graze her arm. She shivers and allows it, and emboldened, he lets his whole hand rest on her wrist.
“IAB told me - “
“It was a good shoot -“ Olivia starts, a half-cry, half-protest. “Like we always said, you don’t get to pick the vic. We didn’t set that in motion, Elliot, we didn’t -“
“Liv,” he interrupts. “Let me finish.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath, one only, and then settles again, almost as if defeated.
“IAB said I could have my badge back. But I couldn’t be your partner.”
That makes Olivia’s head turn and her eyes widen. “What?”
“Not in so many words. But the truth was, I was never gonna get past First Grade. They told me that. That was my peak. And you? You? They had high hopes for you, an expectation it could be your unit one day, and…it is. But if we’d stayed partners? We were both going to be blackballed.”
That finally spurs her to fully turn. With a rustle of the sheets, Olivia rolls over, and her palm comes to soothingly rest on his cheeks. Her thumb brushes his skin, and she looks like she’s about to cry. “I wouldn’t have cared. I should have had that choice, El.”
He shakes his head, and in the shadows, her eyes are almost black. Wet and black, a looking glass, a haunt and a prayer trapped in them. “I knew you’d sacrifice your career, give up what you could be for this city. It was time, I needed a break from the job.”
“From me.”
Elliot feels that soft plaintive accusation, the small whine of it, it cuts into his skin, in a place he will hold the memory of that fragile sound forever. “No,” he shakes his head. “You were never the job. Jesus, how could you ever think that? Those first few weeks home, I didn’t even think about the job, didn’t mourn the loss of it. I mourned you. I realized it had never been the job that I was hanging onto all those years. It wasn’t a need for the job, it was a need for you. And then the loss of you in my every waking minute, giving up the partnership and my days with you - that somehow got fucked up and twisted in my head. And the nightmares started.”
She’s quiet now, her forehead creased, her lips are parted as she listens, enraptured by a version of their history that she hadn’t known.
“I woke up, night after night, yelling for you. Jenna got you, every time. And every time you…slipped through my fingers.” Even now the memories of those nightmares have the power to make his heart race, make his skin pulse.
“You should have called me, Elliot.” Olivia drifts closer to him, maybe instinctively, and he manages to curve his arm over her waist. “If you needed a break, or needed to be done, I could have still been in your life, and you in mine. I needed - “
“No. I was…given a choice.” The words are heavy, full of hard, brutal implication, and there’s only so much he can lay bare. Only so much he can say. Olivia will know what he means, without him laying blame for something so long ago on someone who can’t defend herself, who shouldn’t have to defend clinging to a marriage. “Your name, coming from me like that at night?” His throat catches, this is confession and penance and absolution all at once. “She said when I was on the job, she had to accept my need for you. But without the job…if we weren’t partners…She…we either left town as a family, or she was leaving with Eli.”
Olivia’s body hunches over then, and it brings her head closer to his bare chest. She lets out a small sound, one of protest, of agony. Of understanding, and he doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserve for her to understand or have compassion. He’d been the weak one, and he’d forced them both to pay an impossible price.
“You said if you heard my voice -“ She’s barely speaking now, her words pushing air against his throat.
“I wouldn’t have been able to leave. I’d have left them. I’d have let her go, let them go, and that’s my kid, and what kind of man chooses his own happiness over his child?”
Olivia is the one who makes the move. She pushes into him, her hands flattening on his chest, her face fully burrowing into his neck. Olivia isn’t leaving him, she’s clutching him, touching him, and she’s silent and here and for the first time, he lets it all out of him. The guilt, the pain, the what-ifs. He’s never really done anything he truly wanted, not until today, not until he walked away from a marriage that he didn’t want.
It’s the truth of his then, and the truth of him now. He wants Olivia more than anything. He wants her without guilt or agony, without restrictions. He just wants, and just the possibility of her could keep him breathing until his time runs out.
“If it was just my marriage or you? I woulda let her go. She wanted to go down south, live near her sister if she left me. But he was my kid, Olivia. And now? I sometimes,” God, she doesn’t need to hear all of this, but it won’t stop spilling out of him, it’s a mudslide, no a flash flood, dark water racing down a mountainside and consuming everything in its path. “I get mad at her sometimes, and how fucked is that? I get mad because if she’d just stayed in New York but let me go, if I had let her go, then maybe, maybe today she’d-“
He must sound bad, because Olivia curves her hand around his neck, presses her whole body against his, without hesitation. She isn’t comforting him; her intention is to stop him. Her legs almost tangle in his, and she’s the one holding him now, her skin burning against his. “No. No what if’s. Because if you open them up for you, you open them for me, and I can’t - I can’t -“
“I left New York because I was stuck. Even if by some miracle you would have - had me, I didn’t have a choice.”
He can see the pieces clicking together for her. He can feel her head putting the facts in a row. Kathy’s dying questions of them. You really didn’t talk for ten years? Olivia’s always honest answers. I didn’t even know he was back on the job. The reassurances his wife had needed, even as she had been slipping away. That’s what Elliot told me, I didn’t believe him. The fabricated letter, anything for him to fulfill his marital duty, to just repent.
The million ways that Kathy had needed some closure to the incomparable, impenetrable emotional affair he’d been having for years.
“I left because I was married, Olivia. And you wanted me to do that today? Cause I can’t live like that, not ever again.”
“Why did you ask her then?” It’s a muted ask, one laden with guilt where there shouldn’t be.
He’d been the asshole; he’d have done anything to keep Olivia from being skittish around him.
Anything.
“Because every time there was any silence between us, you suddenly looked scared of me. Like I was going to put pressure on you to give me something you didn’t want to give. And when you said I should do it, when you said it would help you…if you wouldn’t be afraid of being near me, I’d have done whatever it took.”
In his arms, Olivia is silent. Her chest heaves with every deep, shuddering breath. He can almost hear the panic in her pulse, and he knows she’s trying to calm herself down, but it kills him that anything about him causes this reaction in her.
Elliot rubs his hand down her back, pressing into her spine. He does it again, starting with her hair, down between her shoulders, to the small of her back, and then back up again. Olivia’s rapid breathing eases, and he waits until she’s calm again before he asks. “Why do I scare you so much?”
She pulls back then, and even in the shadows he can see the apologies warring with vulnerability in her eyes. “I keep thinking you’re gonna leave.”
“Jesus, whether you wanna be with me or not, I’m not ever leaving your side again.”
“If you…” Olivia is hesitant again, averting her gaze as her voice trails off.
He won’t let anything remain unfinished between them. “If I what?”
She still can’t look at him. “Had me. If you and I-“
“If we’d been together back then? I’d have never left. And no matter what you choose now, I’m not leaving.” Something isn’t sitting right. There is something else she is holding back. He’s getting the sense that she believes he’ll stay, but there is more to her fear. “You gotta be honest with me, Liv. What are you so afraid of?”
“I just-“
He can feel the tension that slips into her shoulders. She will not finish a sentence. Olivia is bracing herself, and that makes him lower his voice. “You just what?” Elliot has his hand on the back of her head now, his chin resting in her hair.
“I don’t know how.”
Oh hell, she’s trembling now, exhaustion and revelation draining everything in her. Her delicate, brave admission guts him, because that hadn’t occurred to him. She’s been alone, no matter who she’d been with in the years he’d been gone, she’s still alone, and she’s spent her life without someone there to hold her.
She’s held everything together in her own hands, she isn’t going to know how to take his.
He closes his eyes, inhales the perfect scent of her, pulls her in tighter.
He doesn’t need to say anything, because now the dam within her has burst. “If I disappoint you, or Noah? I only know how to be alone. I didn’t even go after Noah when he was a baby, did you know that? I didn’t try to get him, but they gave him to me, just asked me, because I would have never asked. Not after I’d been told no years before that. I’d decided that I wasn’t meant for-“
Olivia stops talking again, her shoulders are shuddering and she’s crying softly once more. The pain of years has fallen out of her today, and he uses his body to shelter her as she expels the fear. She’s got to know he’s here, around her, with her, he’s here for her.
“You’re meant for everything,” he says with conviction into the top of her head. “You’re meant to have everything.”
Tucked safely in his arms, she shakes her head. “What if I don’t know how?”
“You gotta trust yourself, Liv. You built yourself a family – your son, your squad. You’re taking care of everyone, you hold together this whole damned city sometimes. You can build anything you want. You got this.” Elliot says, tilting her face up to his so she has to look at him. Olivia is beautiful both in the light and in the shadows, a perfect ocean of illumination and darkness within her. “We got this. We can’t live without anymore.”
She doesn’t blink. “Don’t run if I get it wrong,” Olivia whispers.
He gives her a smile, and he can breathe again, maybe for the first time in twenty years. “Only towards you, I promise. No matter what happens, I’ll run towards you.”
In the worst of moments, as her partner all those years ago, he’d always run towards her. Now, in the best of moments, as her everything else, he will never leave her side.
“Partners?” he asks, his pinky finger looping with hers as a sort of solemn promise between them.
Her finger instinctively loops back around his. It hooks around his, linked. Locked. Connected. Miraculously, Olivia believes him. “Partners,” she whispers.
Her eyes close, and with her faith and hope sated, she expels a breath and settles wholly into him.
+++
Her hand is frozen on the doorknob, and Olivia takes one last deep breath before she has to turn it, opening herself back up to him.
She’s standing in the beautiful bathroom of their hotel room - their hotel room - and she’s been in here for an hour, door locked, while she showered, used every lotion and bit of the toiletries she’d thrown in her duffel for his wedding this morning.
His wedding.
The actual mind-boggling reality of what she’d almost pushed him into, what he’d been willing to do - the hurt they had both caused a woman who didn’t deserve it - it had come for her in the shower a little while ago. Olivia had hunched over and cried, out of guilt, out of shock, out of relief and out of fear.
Fear, because she doesn’t want to run from Elliot anymore, but the truth of what that means still petrifies her.
She knows what openly loving him will mean.
She knows it will be so complete, so secure, so all-encompassing - that she will first have to go through the pain, the phantom and residual aching of truly living alone for her entire life seen through the lens of now being loved. It will be a reflection on her life she will have to process, to accept, to finally let her guard down and grieve for what she had missed, wanted, craved. The lonely side of her, she’s going to have to have a reckoning with that part of her life, she’s going to have to tell that part of herself it’s okay now, it’s over, he’s here.
He is hers, and it’s okay to trust him.
She’d used one of her delicate gold chain necklaces, looped in through the tiny hole on his brass-colored key. She’s wearing it now - it falls against her skin - to show him that she’s trying, to let him know how deeply important it is to her that he’s here, and open, and willing.
She is, too.
Olivia knows she won’t be able to live without him from here on out, and she will be vulnerable to absolute destruction if the unthinkable happens and she has to go back to being alone for some reason.
How one man could mean this much to her, she has no idea, but Elliot is woven into her, body and soul, and he is stitched into the very tapestry of her life. Something from beyond the world she understands had made him for her, and she for him.
Elliot is waiting on the other side of the door.
She’d slept in his arms for a few hours again after they had talked, his big, half-bare, carved body spooned around her, his heavy arm anchoring her body against his. He’d been aroused, she’d been on fire for him, but neither of them will let anything happen tonight. Not tonight, not in the face of what they had cost someone else today. They hadn’t talked about it, but it’s unspoken, an agreement innate and understood.
God, she’d slept in Elliot’s arms, his skin touching hers, all that muscle and brawn and brute strength encircling her.
Olivia had woken, having turned in his grasp, face pressed against his neck, half sprawled on his chest, and his hand in her hair. He’d groaned with pleasure, and her sleepy eyes had been heavy.
She’d been so content.
It was a rest like she’d never known before, a few hours within the cocoon of him that sated her body of sleep more than a thousand nights alone could have.
And now, Elliot is waiting.
He’d ordered them some room service, and she had blow dried her hair, put some mascara and lip gloss on, and even though she’d had to wear the same dress she’s been wearing all day, she feels like she’d just dressed for a date.
Of course, she’s still in bare feet, her pink polish the only thing decorating her toes tonight.
She stares at her feet, and she smiles, almost laughs, when she thinks about how she’d been tangled in the length of her dress in that bed, he’d been wearing his jeans, and yet her bare feet had found his bare feet, and there their skin had made contact, rubbing, nudging, intimate and innocent all at once.
Seasoned law enforcement officers playing footsies, Jesus Christ.
“Olivia,” he calls out. “Either you’re coming out or I’m coming in.”
“It’s locked,” she retorts. “I’ll take my time.”
His laugh is low, smug and satisfied. Bastard. Of course, he would congratulate himself on his ability to take down a door with a one half-assed kick even at his age. She almost moans when the rush of awareness hits her again. That absurd body of his, it’s gonna be hers one day soon. Her heart begins to race, and she can’t do it, can’t think about him touching her like that right now.
“What did you order me?” Olivia says, feigning disinterest, when in fact she’s almost unable to breathe from anticipation of opening the door again.
“You think I don’t know what your order would be from any damned menu in this city? Get your ass out here.”
Olivia catches her reflection in the mirror. She’s bright, she thinks. Her eyes are swollen, but either the lighting is good in here or she’s lit up a little bit. He would have chosen me, she thinks, if he could have. Elliot didn’t leave because of her. He left for his son, and that makes him wholly the man she loves. He wasn’t leaving the job - she wasn’t the job to him - he had been chasing a life with his child, for his child.
She would have done the same, and she believes all of his reasons.
A deep bruise over a decade long pain is finally healing, it will heal, she will heal.
Their lives have been hard, impossible, tragic sometimes. But she feels magic, too. She feels it when she’s with him, when she’s with her son. When their families are laughing, when she thinks about a life stretching out ahead of her still, with him.
Her eyes are bigger at the moment, wide open, ready to see what is still to come.
Olivia opens the door, and steps out into the room, towards him.
Towards hope and healing, towards Elliot, and the everything after of him.
+++
Dusk had come, and it is now in its waning moments.
The sun had risen this morning, orange and yellow streaks that had illuminated his patio as he had sat there holding a whiskey, feeling like everything he’d ever wanted had been falling through his fingers. Olivia had walked in on him this morning, and the sun had found her, a mirage that would disappear if he tried to touch her.
He’s turned off most of the lights in the room now, save one lamp, opened the drapes of the hotel room, set the room service rolling table up near the windows, requested an extra chair, put his damned shirt on again. And as Olivia walks out of the bathroom at this very moment, the colors of the sun find her again.
Only this time they are deep hues of red, burnt orange, sultry yellows. Not a burn or a glare, a warmth. She’s bathed in the sun’s quiet setting, toes peeking out from beneath the length of her dress, hair straight and shiny, even longer from the way she had dried it.
She stops, six feet from him, smoothing her hands down her thighs as if nervous. “Hi,” Olivia says softly.
Lord help him, he loves her.
He notices the key now. It’s dangling from her neck, delicate and perfect and signifying everything. It is open doors, open eyes, open days that remain ahead. It is his life, open to her. It is her, open to trying. It is everything they have always locked away, finally being set free.
It is the unlocking of them, and she’s wearing it as if it is a trophy they have spent their lives earning.
Olivia catches him eyeing it, and she touches it, a small breath of pleasure escaping her.
“You’re the love of my goddamned life.” He shouldn’t have just growled it like that, so possessively, there should have been some preamble, he should have warned her, but he’s told her before. Maybe she hadn’t believed him then, but it was big in his chest both then and now, the words suffocating him until they spilled out.
He will be faster to the door if she wants to leave. He’ll beg her at the door to stay.
Only she does something unexpected. Beautiful and soft, gentle and delicate, with the slightest of sounds, Olivia blushes and then she laughs. She laughs like a woman should be made to laugh, peacefully, as if it’s her own moment, her own joy, a private release of disbelief and…hope.
If hope had a sound, her laugh would be it.
Olivia’s cascade of hair shifts, falls and tumbles over her shoulder. The sunset lands on her cheeks, the city coming to life beneath its evening lights behind him. She is dark eyes and glossy lips, she is all the years of his beating heart.
She is his fighter, his protector, and he is hers.
“There isn’t much room in here,” he manages to say. He manages to stand still too, despite the crushing urge to reach for her. “But I told you this morning that there was only…”
He can’t even speak, he wants it so much.
Olivia just blinks at him. She is still and waiting, locked on him, listening. Not leaving, not running, not shutting down. “One woman you wanted to dance with,” she whispers almost reverently, finishing his sentence.
That breathy laugh again. Olivia ducks her head, shakes it a little. “You know I have to go home tonight. I was supposed to pick up Noah at eleven and - “ She’s keeping them both from temptation, from breaking a commitment to who they want to be today, out of deference to the pain that has also been caused by their reprieve.
Elliot takes his phone out of his back pocket. A few clicks and he’s got a song on. He’d heard it once on the radio, he’d saved it. Listened to it too many times alone, thinking about her. Music low, guitar strumming, he tosses the phone on the bed.
“We’ve got a few hours,” he says.
It is Olivia who closes the distance then, it is she who chooses what she wants. His whole life walks towards him, and he thinks that saying he’d heard all those years overseas, it’s wrong. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Like hell, the world he wants, it was built in one arc of the sun across the sky today. He’d gone from the end of him to the start of him, in one sunrise to sunset.
Olivia fits into him, their bare feet touching again. Her mouth finds his neck, her eyes close against his skin. Elliot’s hand slips around her waist, pulls her in so that her curves are flush against him. Her arms encircle his neck, and she sighs into him.
The music is slow, they are slower, a sway, a rocking, a soothing.
“Hours?” she says languidly. “I need -“
“Years,” he finishes, finding her hair with one of his hands. He will never get tired of touching it, touching her, and he can’t even think about that right now or he will never be able to drive her home later. “Jesus, I wanna kiss you.” He’s not expecting her to say yes, but she should know that it’s consuming his every thought.
“Our first kiss can’t be tonight,” Olivia smiles against his cheek, one hand cupping the back of his head.
She’s liking that he’s tortured, and he supposes that he deserves it. He can sense she’s enjoying that she’s in control, that she can probably hear his jaw grinding to keep from sliding his hands over her ass and pulling her even closer. “It wouldn’t be our first,” he counters, as casually as he can muster. “You kissed me last night.”
That draws her head back, eyes narrowing as she scowls at him. “I didn’t kiss you first,”
Elliot shrugs. “Your mouth touched mine. Pretty sure that’s a kiss.”
Fuck. He’s screwed up, he knows it the second he sees her every indignant thought flash through her challenging eyes. Olivia finally lets her eyelashes lower, deliberately, and he’s done for, he’s fucking fucked, because she tilts her mouth to the side, emitting a small anticipatory moan.
Her mouth hovers almost against his. He wants to believe, he wants to think he doesn’t know her, he wants to fantasize that it’s actually about to happen, even as her every tiny breath caresses his lips.
Millimeters from his mouth, she stops. Shit.
He closes his eyes, he can’t help it. He wishes, he wants, he waits. Seconds pass, and if he just shifted forward-
“When I kiss you, Stabler,” Olivia murmurs when barely a piece of paper could fit between their mouths, “you’ll know it.”
She’s lightning fast, out of his arms then, before he can even open his eyes. When he does, she is already opening both of the covers on their food, deciding which one she wants. “You did good,” Olivia congratulates him on his dinner choices without looking up, as if he hadn’t almost been kissing her a second ago. “I want your fries, though.”
“What if I want my fries?” he argues, teasing, already moving to pull her chair out for her.
She frowns, reaching for one of his fries and eating it, gloating about it, flaunting it, as she stares at him. “You left me for a decade, remember?” Olivia shrugs as she sits down and fans out her cloth napkin on her lap. “I get what I want for the next decade. Fair is fair. I want your ketchup, too.”
And just like that, he knows they will be okay. Whatever she understands about why he had made the brutal choices he had, she’s alright. She will be alright; she’s using it to get her way in the most mundane and harmless ways and that tells him they are going to come through.
He sits across from her; the sun has fully set now.
Night rises behind him, the city a backdrop to the miracles happening in this room. It’s the sound of her eating, the hum of approval when she likes something, the way they’ve eaten together hundreds of times, and yet this is brand new. It’s the way he catches her eyes, the way she catches his. It’s the glimmer in her, it’s her restless, playful feet, pushing at his under the table. It’s the conspiratorial light in her eyes, it’s the song, the rise of it, the rise of them, the sheer promise that permeates every moment with her.
When the silence has stretched, comfortable and easy, when they are almost done with their food, when she’s reached for what she wants on his plate a few times, when she’s given him her leftovers and she’s on her second glass of wine, that’s when she grins, fully grins, and leans over the table.
“I’ll tell you I love you too, soon,” Olivia shrugs, eyes dancing with mischief. “When the time is right.”
He laughs then. Elliot fully laughs. Because of course this is how she would tell him; this is how she would first say it. “You’re a pain in the ass,” he offers, leaning back in his chair to watch her.
So this is what it’s like to watch someone come alive, he thinks. He imagines he’d see the same in himself if he looked in the mirror.
Olivia is opening his dessert first now, trying to decide if she wants it, and he feels the day settle around him. His daughters had texted him to tell him the house was clean again, the rentals had been picked up, the coast was clear. After they pick up Noah and he drops them both home later, he will go sleep in his own bed. He’ll sleep soundly, he will sleep free of every expectation, every confinement, every single thing he’s ever denied himself now behind him.
He will marry Olivia one day, he’s sure of it.
It won’t be a backyard wedding. He wants this woman across from him to have it all, he wants it all. He wants everyone to be there, wants the world to damned well know that Olivia and he, they are the story to end all stories, they are the match made, they are everything, and they will have everything, and he will give her everything.
He wants a room full of peonies, one day. He wants her cascading towards him, one day. He wants Olivia to laugh all the time, one day.
She’s smiling right now, and that’s a start.
It’s a start, he promises her silently, to their happily ever after.