Work Text:
He gives her a key to his place the second time she sleeps over.
“Oh,” Olivia says—looking down at it for a moment, the weight of it like a moon rock in her palm. “Okay. Um. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to take it,” he tells her, looking faintly amused. He’s shirtless in a pair of soft blue sweatpants, the trail of hair beneath his navel going gray. “I just thought…you know.”
“No, of course.” She has no idea what he thought, actually. The loft is in Long Island City; she’s got exactly no reason ever to pop on over here when he isn’t home to let her in. What’s she going to do, sit on the couch and watch his ESPN package? Start a load of laundry?
“It’s a gesture, Liv,” he says, still with that half-smile on his face like possibly he thinks he’s explaining to her how adult relationships work. “That’s all.”
“I know what it is.” Amanda has a key to her apartment. Martha has one now, too. Olivia had a key to Elliot’s for the months he was separated, presumably in case he locked himself out or shattered all the bones in his hand punching an inanimate object and needed a ride to the hospital. He had a key to hers all thirteen years.
She tucks the thing into her work bag next to her travel mug and some case notes on a double murder Fin is working with Velasco. “You do realize I’ve had keys to other men’s apartments before,” she can’t resist saying. “Lived with them, even. I’m familiar with the process.”
Elliot blinks. “I know,” he says, though she can tell by the way his expression flickers that he hadn’t pictured it until right this second, either on purpose or because in his mind she simply ceased to exist once he put in his papers, powered down like a piece of office equipment awaiting his return. “Of course I know.”
“Okay,” she says. “Well.”
Elliot nods slowly, backing her up against his fridge. “F’you don’t want it,” he murmurs, bracing his hands against the stainless steel on either side of her shoulders, bending his elbows and leaning so the hard bulk of his chest presses against hers, “I’ll take it back.”
Olivia rolls her eyes even as she pushes her hips at him, liking the way he’s crowding her. “I never said–” she starts, but he kisses her before she can get the words out, his mouth warm and knowing and keen. Olivia hums. So far the sex is just as good as she always suspected it would be–better, even, not that she’s ever going to say that to his face. It’s the rest of it she can’t settle into, like a dress she kept in the closet for years and years only to finally pull it out for a special occasion and discover it didn’t quite fit.
“I gotta go,” she says now, shoving him gently off her, ghosting her nails across his rib cage. The skin of his stomach is burning hot against her palms. “I’m supposed to pick Noah up in half an hour.”
Elliot growls his quiet frustration, but he backs up right away. “Okay,” he agrees, watching as she slips her coat on, kissing her again beside the door. “I’ll see you?”
He’s asking something else, but Olivia pretends she doesn’t know that. “You’ll see me,” she promises, and lets herself out.
*
She tries to save her nights and weekends for Noah, so Elliot brings lunch to her office sometimes, or coffee if she’s too busy to take a real break. It’s nice, him cross-legged on her sofa, both of them working. It feels like the old days, and also nothing like the old days at all.
They’re just finishing up when Muncy and Velasco come in to brief her on a cold case that’s bubbling up again, a potential suspect working as a conductor on the Harlem Line of the Metro North. “Sorry,” Muncy says, canny gaze darting to Elliot and back again like she senses there’s something to know here. “I didn’t realize you were…”
“You’re fine,” Olivia says airily, introducing him as her old partner, waving at Muncy and Velasco to go ahead. She’s half-expecting Elliot to jump in with ideas or suggestions but instead he just sits there quietly, listening while she talks them through next steps and a plan of action, and when her office empties out again she realizes he’s staring.
“What?” she asks, touching her face instinctively. “Tell me I didn’t just do that entire meeting with something in my teeth.”
“No,” he says, going back to his sandwich, “nothing.” Then, a moment later: “You’re…” He shakes his head. “You’re a very impressive person, that’s all.”
Olivia snorts, picking the last couple of walnuts out of the salad. He got her the same thing she used to order back in 2010. “Thank you.”
“I mean it.” He’s still gazing at her, steady, and the expression on his face is so sincere, so open, that she almost needs to get up and walk out of the room. “What you did here. The way they look at you. It’s something, Liv. It’s rare.”
Olivia remembers how it felt to walk with him down Eighth Avenue in high summer. She remembers how it felt to walk down the street alone after he left. “Okay,” she says, snapping the lid shut on the plastic clamshell and tossing it into the garbage. “Well. Out of my office, detective. I’ve gotta get back to work.”
*
She tells him to come over after bedtime on Thursday, but then there’s drama in Noah’s friends group at school that requires a detailed unpacking which means Elliot winds up sitting in his car on the street around the corner for the better part of an hour, waiting for her to text him the all clear. “Sorry,” she says, when she finally buzzes him into the apartment.
“It’s okay,” he says. He’s letting her get away with things, which is frankly the least he can do, but his patience has never been infinite. She’s bad in romantic relationships, sure, but she’s usually better than this. “He good?”
“He’s fine.” Elliot’s asked more than once if he can spend some time with Noah, if the three of them can go to lunch, but the thought of it makes her feel like she’s been gored so she keeps making up excuses for why it’s not a good idea yet. “Come inside.”
She leads him down the quiet hallway to her bedroom, peels off his jacket and his henley and his boots. It’s strange, how after all those years of scrupulously not touching this feels like the easiest part of whatever it is they’re doing: her fist wrapped tight around the length of him, his mouth on the underside of her breast. Her body knows how to be with his body. She thinks it sort of always did.
“We should go somewhere,” he says later, thumb tracing the soft curve of her hipbone. He always touches her a lot, after they’re done. “Like, for a weekend.”
Olivia props herself up on one elbow, suspicious. “Like where?”
“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging into her pillows. “The Catskills or something. Wherever normal people go.”
Olivia laughs, she can’t help it. “You want to go to the Catskills?”
”Fuck you,” he says, but there’s no heat behind it. The expression on his face is the one she has come to recognize as the one he gets when he thinks she’s giving him a hard time on purpose. “Yes. I want to go to the fucking Catskills.”
So. They go to the fucking Catskills. Amanda takes Noah for the weekend and Elliot picks her up in his car and they eat grass-fed burgers at the bar in a renovated motor lodge outside Phoenicia, drink wine by a firepit in the dark. There’s another couple sitting across from them, maybe twenty years younger, and Olivia wonders what she and Elliot look like to them: somebody’s empty-nester parents, probably, the kids off at Fairfield or Binghamton. She feels an insane but nearly unbearable urge to tell them the truth.
Back in the hotel room he drapes her sideways on the bed and slings her leg up over his shoulder, keeps her on the edge for as long as she can stand. “I love you,” he mutters into her thigh, so quiet it’s possible she mishears him. “Holy shit, Olivia, I love you so fucking much.”
The stars are incredible up here, a million more than you ever see in the city. She tries to take a picture for Noah on her phone, but when she scrolls back through her camera roll in the car on the way home the following morning, it all just looks like a smudge.
*
They get back from vacation, and she doesn’t call him for five days.
She’s busy, that’s all. She’s a captain in the New York Police Department. Her kid is nine years old. She doesn’t mean anything by it, though if she’s being honest with herself she doesn’t not mean anything by it, either, and she guesses she shouldn’t be surprised when she gets back from dropping Noah at a buddy’s on Friday evening and finds Elliot standing on the street outside her building, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat.
“Oh, good,” he says by way of greeting, pushing himself off the wall. “You’re still alive.”
Olivia rolls her eyes. “Elliot–”
“I gotta say, Liv, it’s a lot lonelier than I thought it would be,” he announces, loud enough for the entire West Side to get an earful. “Being with you.”
Jesus Christ, the balls on this person. The absolute fucking nerve. “Well,” she manages finally, “I’m sorry to hear that. Why don’t you find someone to write me a weird, passive-aggressive note about it for you, and then maybe in another year or so we can—“
He huffs out a breath, like he’s the one who’s disgusted. “Okay,” he says, holding his hands up. “You know what–”
“I’m not doing this on the street, Elliot.” Olivia brushes past him and wrenches the front door open before the doorman can get to it, jerking her head toward the lobby. “Are you coming up or not?”
*
“Did I do something wrong?” he asks, before she’s even dropped her keys into the bowl on the table. Both of them seethed in silence all the way upstairs. “Am I handling this wrong?”
“Handling what?” she asks blandly, though of course she knows all that’s going to do is piss him off. She shrugs out of her blazer and tosses it onto the couch before heading for the kitchen, pulling a bottle of wine from the fridge. “We literally just started seeing each other.”
He doesn’t slam his fist against her wall, but it’s a near thing. “Goddamnit, Liv, stop treating me like I’m any other fucking guy!” Angry, yes, but mostly wounded, the flinch just visible around his eyes. “I’m not some schmuck you met at the gym you can keep at arm’s length because you’re worried you might get hurt.”
Very carefully, Olivia sets the wine back on the shelf. “Because I’m worried I might get hurt?” Oh, she is breathless. She thinks it’s possible she’s never hated him more. “First of all: fuck you, Elliot. Second of all—“ She breaks off.
“What?” he asks, eyes narrowing as they square off across the kitchen. “What?”
Well. I used to pretend you were dead because that ached less and turns out I am still so incandescently angry with you I cannot fucking see straight and it’s actually mostly luck that I’m still alive at all, is what, but she doesn’t want to say any of those things, she cannot say any of those things, so instead she crosses the room and grabs his jacket and crashes her mouth up at his hard enough to split his bottom lip open, shoving him back toward the bedroom and reaching for his belt buckle as she goes.
Right away, Elliot goes still as winter. “Easy,” he says softly. “Hang on a sec.”
Olivia ignores him, yanking at his zipper. When she kisses him again she tastes blood. She slips her hand into his pants, palms his cock roughly through his boxers; Elliot groans once, then shakes his head. “Liv,” he says, grabbing her wrists. “Liv, come on, no.”
Olivia startles. “Sorry,” she says–stepping way back, holding her hands up. All at once she feels her chin wobble. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”
Elliot shakes his head and zips his pants up, adjusting himself as he goes. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she says, still holding her palms out. “That was–” She closes her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” He smiles and laces their fingers together. “I probably could have defended myself, if it came to that.”
Olivia pulls away. “I don’t want you to have to defend yourself from me,” she says, sitting down on the couch and scrubbing her hands over her face. “That’s miserable. I don’t want us to have to defend ourselves from each other.”
“We don’t,” he says immediately. “You don’t.”
“Of course I do!” she explodes. “Jesus Christ, Elliot, sometimes it’s like you honestly have no idea what it was like–what it did–when you left, and I can’t even talk to you about it in any detail because the truth makes me sound like Miss fucking Havisham.”
Elliot looks at her blankly. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Oh my god. Oh my god.” She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She has no idea how to explain this to him. In some enormously fucked-up way it was almost easier to talk to him about Lewis, to throw the file on his desk and let him see it for himself: the ballistics report and the rape kit, statements from the officers on the scene. Full-color photos of the damage. A final tallying of the cost.
She stares at a fixed point on the carpet instead of looking at him. “There was a case,” she tries, “a few years after you left. An IAB thing, partners out of the 12th. And the woman–” she breaks off again.
“What?” he prods, and his voice is so quiet. “Tell me.”
Olivia shakes her head. How pathetic that officer was when the facts were laid out on the table, how deeply embarrassing. How heartbreakingly sad. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t do that,” he counters immediately. “Of course it matters. You say I don’t know what it was like for you, but I’m standing here with my hat in my fuckin’ hand and I am asking you to tell me–”
“You didn’t even come back because you wanted to, Elliot!” Olivia paces across the living room like an animal, wishing she could crawl right out of her skin. “Are we just never going to acknowledge that part? You could have lived the rest of your life in Rome or Geneva or any other fucking place that wasn’t here with me, and maybe you would have had some regrets or maybe you wouldn’t have, I don’t know, but either way it would have been fine for y–”
He’s shaking his head before she’s halfway finished. “That’s not true,” he says, voice hoarse and breaking. “You can’t look at me, and know everything we both know, and honestly say you think that’s true.”
“I gotta tell you, Elliot.” Olivia purses her lips, tips her head to the side. “Feels true.”
Elliot blows a loud breath out through his nose. “What do you want to hear, Liv?” he asks, prowling across the carpet; he is holding onto his temper with two shaking hands. “That I thought everything in your life would be better if I wasn’t in it? That I put the entire Atlantic Ocean between us and it didn’t do jack? That I used to lie in bed at night and imagine you so fucking hard I was sure you could feel it?”
Olivia crosses her arms at the window, bites her tongue hard enough to taste salt. “Well,” she says flatly, “I couldn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Excuse me?” Olivia’s eyes widen.
Elliot shrugs. “I don’t believe you,” he repeats with a truly belligerent confidence, but then his whole expression just sort of falls. “You are a fucking cathedral to me, Liv. You’ve gotta know that. You stun me. I’ve been ruined for you since I was thirty years old.”
Olivia swallows, swiping at her cheekbone. She is so tired of crying about this. “Elliot–”
“I can’t change how we got here,” he continues, “but we got here. I’ve loved you–very imperfectly–for almost twenty-five years, and I’ll love you like you deserve for the rest of my life if you let me. But for fuck’s sake, Liv.” He drops his shoulders. “You have to let me.”
Olivia considers that for a moment, turning it over like a piece of evidence in both hands. He’s right, of course. He’s come as far as he can on his own: over the ocean and west through the city, into her apartment and her bedroom and her body, and all the while she’s had her gun aimed neatly at the back of his head. If this is ever going to work, she has to drop her weapon. If it’s ever going to work, she needs to come out with her hands held high. Of course Olivia knows that; she’s known it since the night of the car bomb. It remains so extravagantly unfair. “I don’t know if I can.”
Elliot nods and closes his eyes for a moment, his eyelashes making shadows on his cheekbones in the half-light. “Okay,” he whispers. The acceptance on his face is almost religious; it reminds her, suddenly, of that day in the warehouse with Gitano back before everything happened. A surrender, maybe. A letting go. “It’s okay. I understand.”
Neither one of them says anything for a moment. There isn’t really anything to say. He reaches for her, though, and she lets him, coming to rest flush against his body; he holds her there for a minute by the windows, takes her weight. His mouth starts at her temple, then drifts down her jaw until it finally gets to the very edge of her bottom lip, just pressing. “This all right?” he murmurs, and Olivia turns her head to kiss him for real.
It goes on like that for a long time, tongue and teeth and memory: his knuckles drifting up and down her backbone, her fingertips at the nape of his neck. “We don’t have to,” she murmurs, even as they’re already fitting themselves together. Elliot pulls his sweater over his head.
They don’t talk when it’s over, the city getting dark outside the bedroom window. Finally Olivia gets out of bed.
“Where are you going?” he asks, as she fastens her bra and slips back into her work pants. “Liv.”
“I just need a minute,” Olivia says, scooping her hair back. ”Wait here, okay?”
“Look, we just–” He sounds desperate now, none of the stoic composure from earlier. All at once he looks ready to fight. “Liv.”
He stands up but she reaches out to stop him, flattening her palm against his heart. “Do you trust me?” she asks, and Elliot doesn’t hesitate before he nods and immediately sits down again, the mattress dipping under his weight. Olivia watches him there for a moment: the scars on his solid body, the lines on his weathered face. She loves him, obviously. She’s always loved him, there is nothing he could ever do to make her not love him, and that is her burden to bear.
“Okay,” she says, as calmly as she can manage, then puts her coat back on and leaves.
*
It’s nearly spring now but still cold in the evenings, the wind off the Hudson so brackish and sharp her eyes water. Olivia breathes in. She heads south on Amsterdam past her nail salon and the breakfast place she takes Noah every Saturday morning, the bank that used to be a bodega that used to be a bar. She’s lived in this neighborhood a long time, the memories all layered on top of one another. The past and the present existing both at once.
There’s a hardware store a couple of blocks down the avenue, KEYS COPIED HERE in neon in the window. Olivia pulls the door open, goes inside.