Chapter Text
The dawn sunlight streams in through their wide bay windows, glancing off the cold ceramic tiles of the kitchen and straight into Nick’s eyes. He covers his face with a hand, rubbing it through his kinked hair, trying to unknot it as he shuffles around the kitchen in fuzzy orange house slippers a few sizes too small. He pours coffee (Juliette is a goddess), and ignores the looming knowledge that he’ll have to go to work today. On Friday he reports in towards mid-afternoon due to the normal uptick in criminal activity on weekend nights; half the time it’s a heart-pounding challenge, but the other half it’s him and Hank doing their best impression of being beat-cops again. Something tells him that tonight is going to be the latter.
Once the coffee is in him, he finally comes alive enough to hear a light clicking sound from the dining room. He shuffles in, not bothering to close his dressing gown.
“Mornin’,” he says gruffly.
“Morning,” replies Juliette, not looking up from her laptop. An empty mug sits next to her, the black ring of grinds at the bottom almost fully evaporated: she must have been up for a while. She has her glasses and her silky, purple gown on, her hair in a high ponytail, and no makeup whatsoever on her face. She obviously hasn’t started her day yet, though she’s already finished a cup of coffee and left it sitting for at least fifteen minutes. It’s unlike her.
Nick comes over with his steaming cup to kiss her forehead, which she offers up unthinkingly. He doesn’t miss her quick tab-switching, either, though she’s pretty deft since she spends more time online than he does. The tab she’s switched to is some site called Etsy.
Nick sets his cup down next to her arm, putting his coffee-warmed hand on her nape and rubbing with a thumb. “It’s okay, you can look at porn with me in the room.”
Juliette looks up at him and rolls her eyes, strangely not smiling at the joke. “I’m not looking at porn.”
Trying to coax a smile out of her, Nick quirks an eyebrow. “It’s alright, honey, I don’t judge. When you get to the the really hot stuff, just let me — ”
Pinching his stomach over her shoulder, Juliette scoffs and then gestures to her empty coffee. “Get me a refill and maybe I’ll share.”
“Alright.” Nicks grabs her cold cup and begins to walk away. “There better be eight tabs up when I get back.”
She makes a face at him, muttering something about “dating a detective.”
Nick sends her a self-satisfied smirk over his shoulder, then goes to do her bidding.
Back in the dining room with her coffee, Nick pulls up a chair over the carpet to sit right next to her, looping an arm around the back of her chair and running his hand through her ponytail with a sense of casual proprietary. “So?” he prods.
Unease flashes on her face before she turns to face him more fully. Nick’s brow furrows and a jolt of worry goes through him, but she’s already talking.
“There is a startling amount of variation among humanity,” she starts, her voice calmly certain. “It’s one of the things that some people point to when they want to attempt to prove human exceptionalism from animals: the sheer number of our heights and widths, skin colors, muscle masses, personalities.” Juliette sends Nick a meaningful look. “Or differences in organs and body features.”
“Uh.” Nicks wrinkles his nose a bit, obviously missing the meaning in Juliette’s meaningful look. “Okay?”
“There are the occasional outliers. The nine-foot tall man. The head as big as a grapefruit.” Juliette taps his nose. “The bulbous nose. But eventually the range of body types among humans does end.”
All this talk of ‘humanity’ starts to make sense to Nick, and a yawning hole opens in his stomach, alarm beginning to fill it even as Nick fills in the blanks for things she’s left unsaid.
Juliette stares at him, putting a hand over his. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice last night, Nick. I know you did.”
For the first time in a long time, Nick feels truly trapped by Juliette, unable to say anything without digging himself deeper into the hole he’s managed to get into with his secrets and lies. He opens his mouth, hoping something will come out. Nothing does.
“You saw and didn’t say anything. I waited all night for you to bring it up, and you didn’t. Which means you knew, or expected on some level, for him to be — different.”
Nick tries to think fast, of what he can say that will salvage this situation, make Juliette aware that he didn’t know and didn’t expect anything. But he hadn’t exactly been surprised, had he? Still wasn’t surprised at the fact that Monroe isn’t completely human down-there.
Juliette looks down, eyes sad, and begins to pull her hand off Nick’s. In desperation he flips his hand and grips hers, palm to palm, and tugs her back to face him. “Juliette,” he says, floundering. “I didn’t know.”
“But you weren’t surprised! You weren’t. I could tell.” Then she wrenches her hand from his, bringing it to her keyboard. “This is what I was looking at, since you wanted to know so badly.”
The next second knocks the breath from Nick as surely as a punch to the gut would, shocking and slightly painful.
“Like I said.” Juliette motions to the screen. “Humans might not have the range needed to explain what we saw last night. But that doesn’t mean such an animal doesn’t exist.”
Nick leans in towards the screen, for one moment forgetting Juliette’s hurt and anger at him in favor of the fascination pricking at his skin: this is something like what he’d seen on Monroe, that dark, almost-purple swelling at the base of his cock where it disappeared into his boxers. It’s followed a second later by awe at Juliette for somehow fitting this puzzle together when even Nick, who had more of the pieces, had been left slightly confused.
Her hand comes up and snicks the laptop closed. “So,” starts Juliette, voice quiet and thready, the complete opposite of her normal confidence; Nick immediately feels even more like shit. “You’ve been a little distant for a few months. I thought maybe it was your first shooting at work, the more violent crimes you’ve been dealing with lately. I tried to understand you staying out later with the guys and working through nights. I know you just want to help people. But this, Nick —” Juliette puts a self-conscious hand to her pony-tail, eyes fixed on the smooth grain of the dining table below. “Anything you want to tell me? Had you seen that — seen Monroe’s. Before?”
Nick’s mouth hangs open a little still, cold air entering and drying his tongue out. Had he seen Monroe naked before? Is that what she’s asking?
“Juliette,” Nick croaks, hand falling to her lap to squeeze hers. She doesn’t squeeze back. “That was the first time I’d ever seen Monroe like that. First time I’d done anything with him. I would never keep that from you.” Nick can hear the truth in his voice, and he hopes she will too.
Slowly she nods, her hair brushing her back with the movement. “But you would keep something from me. What are you not telling me? That thing that we saw... no human should have that. No human does have that.”
Nick takes a deep breath.
“And another thing,” interrupts Juliette, now on a roll, her brow furrowed and her eyes finally coming back to Nick’s. The lines on her face are starting to read anger and not sadness, which strangely relieves Nick. “That woman, when she was terrified of me. You said she ‘must have thought I was someone I wasn’t.’ What was that about? Why did you say that? And when that guy broke in. I thought it was random, or because you were a cop, but now that doesn’t seem right either. And — ”
“Woah, woah,” Nick tries to smile. “One thing at a time.” Quickly, he runs through a dozen different things that he can say. He has always known that if he wants to keep Juliette in the long-run he will have to tell her about himself, at least the basics. And he had planned to tell her, he really had; but the days have gone by so fast, the right time never arriving, leaving Nick unable to work out the best way to explain it all. Who could have guessed Monroe unbuckling his belt would provide the impetus for Nick having to bare his secrets, as well? Soon she’ll know everything: that he is a freak, that he is dangerous to be with, that he isn’t who she has thought he was for so long.
The clock on the wall chimes, and Juliette’s head snaps around to look at its face, though they both know what it will say.
“Crap, I’m going to be late for work,” she mutters, pushing back from the table and Nick to stand. “When will you be home tonight?”
Nick stares at her, his heart unsteady in his chest, beating so hard he thinks his whole body is throbbing. “I’ll be off by nine,” he says, then clears his throat. “And if the Captain tries to keep me, I’ll tell him to budge off, because my girlfriend might leave me if I’m not home to stop her.”
Shaking her head, Juliette puts a hand on Nick’s cheek. “Don’t be an idiot. No one is leaving anyone.” She then bows down to kiss his forehead, the same as he’d kissed hers. “But after tonight...No more secrets.”
“What if they’re not all mine to keep?”
“Well.” Juliette quirks an eyebrow up. “I highly doubt Monroe is going to be able to hide anything if he ever gets around to taking off his pants in front of both of us.”
The apprehension and distress that was building in Nick’s chest don’t pop, but it’s as if Juliette has opened a pinprick of a hole in them, letting some pressure off of Nick’s chest with the curve of her smile. Nick takes a steadying breath. They can handle this.
Burrowing his face in her stomach, he hugs her close. She smells so nice, citrus and fresh laundry, and he can’t help mumbling a grateful “love you.”
She runs her hands through his thick hair, humming down at him in agreement. “I love y -- “she stops, and fists her hands in his hair just enough to make her presence known. “Nick,” she says slowly, like she’s got a knife in her hand and isn’t sure whether to go after him or not. “Are those my slippers on your feet?”
Nick freezes, face mashed into her soft stomach, arms around her middle. He tries to pull his feet back from where they’re sprawled out so that he can hide the orange fuzzy slippers under the bulk of their bodies, but it’s too late. She’s caught him.
“I cannot believe that you’re wearing my slippers! I have been looking for those forever.” Juliette tugs his ear to peel him off of her stomach, then steps back once.
It’s her first mistake: Nick makes a break for it, jostling her out of the way to try to escape her wrath.
“They’re mine now,” he says in a parting jibe, crowing more than he really should over stealing house slippers that are two sizes too small for him.
“Nick!” she yells after him, starting to chase him around the house, her robe fluttering open. “I have to be at work soon!”
Laughing, Nick lets her tackle him to the couch, the wool blanket from yesterday under them, still smelling like musk and come. He bites at Juliette’s neck from below, letting his hands roam under her slip, from thigh to hip to stomach. Juliette grabs his wrists and wrenches them up, twinning her hands with his above his head and pinning him down.
“Juliette,” Nick says, for no other reason than the fact that he can. A little sleep crustie that she must have missed this morning sticks to the corner of her right eye, and Nick slips a hand out of her hold to cradle her face and wipe it gently away.
She smiles but her eyes stay guarded, and Nick resolves again to tell her the complete truth tonight.
~*~
“Oh, hell no,” says Wu when he sees Nick’s face at noon. “I am not walking beat with you tonight.”
“Don’t be like that,” replies Nick, putting his hands on his hips. “I look great.”
Wu gives him a visible once over, managing to make every second as disdainful as possible — one of his many gifts. “If by great you mean ‘like you’ve been run over by a semi-truck’, then yes, Nick, you look great.”
Dropping the routine and his hands, Nick goes to his desk and slips his coat onto his chair. He sighs. “That bad?”
“The bags under your eyes look like formerly undiscovered moon craters.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” Wu walks over and smacks a list of sundry overnight, petty crime onto Nick’s desk with totally undeserved sense of self-satisfaction. “So. Trouble with Julez?”
“God, why do you call her that?” Nick picks up the papers and starts leafing through them, sighing at the number of cars reported missing. He shrugs, fighting a smile. “We stayed up late.”
Wu winces in sympathy. “Ouch, late-night fights are always — ” he stops dead. “Oh, Burkhardt.” Nick feels his smile spreading, though he keeps pretending to read. “Burkhardt you almost had me. Well look at you. Good to know you both still have it. Love. Life. Joie de vivre.”
Nick pretends to pop his collar. “What can I say?”
“What can you say?” asks a deep voice from behind Nick. Nick startles and turns to see Captain Renard in his suit, jacket still buttoned. He must be on his way to morning court.
Wu nods over to Nick. “Burkhardt was just saying how much he misses duty at the car lot on Fridays, Captain.”
Renard lifts a single eyebrow. “You got it, Burkhardt. Hank can take beat with Wu today. Now get on it.”
As soon as Renard is out of the room, Nick rolls up the list of offenses from last night and smacks Wu in the chest with it. “I hate the lot and you know it.”
“Yeah.” Wu reaches out to grab the papers from Nick. “But now you’ll be home by eight.”
“Ass,” says Nick fondly.
“Hotter than yours.”
Nick can only nod to that. Even he has to occasionally acknowledge the truth.