Work Text:
Her laugh is red.
It’s sultry and it’s genuine and she clocks him in a place it hurts to go to only four refills in, tongue between teeth and a pointing finger.
He stops tipping over what he’s pouring, blinks. “What?”
“Come on Elliot, you need me to hold your hand while I spell it out for you too?”
He sets down his half-filled glass atop his knee, laughs tiredly.
“There’s someone,” she says, and she isn’t accusing - it’s light and loose and familiar.
He clings onto it, onto her, for that reason - familiarity. A life across a sea, a partnership almost as unwavering but never quite as synchronous. A life he’d never wholly gotten to say goodbye to.
“You show up in New York to tell me you started readin’ minds too or somethin’?”
He takes a swig of his drink and she throws back the rest of the liquor at the bottom of her own glass, sets her palm firm on his thigh.
There’s no buzz underneath it because it’s not even close to the hand he craves the touch from. Hands he’d last felt looped around his body in the heat of the summer, the heat of the fury. The only set of hands in the city he’ll let steady him, stand in his way.
He takes another sip, shakes away the feeling as quickly as it came.
“Just say it,” she pushes.
He’s too far-gone to pull. “Y’know what, fine. You wanna turn this into an interrogation —”
She laughs again, this time louder and crimson-stained and bleeding with certainty.
“Just doing what I do best, my friend.”
“There’s a reason I could uh, could never go back,” he admits, smacking his lips together like the sound is meant to be a period at the end of the confession.
“Mmm-hmm,” she hums.
“There’s someone, uh — A woman here in New York. A woman I can’t leave. The woman I’m in love with.”
The words float from the top of his lungs with ease, like an exhale he’s been holding in for half of his life.
“Ah.”
“What?”
“No no, it’s — it’s good, Elliot. All good things. To be in love. To have something to hold onto, a reason to stay.”
He blinks. Holds onto the image of his reason behind closed, hazy eyes - it’s beautiful and it’s brown-eyed and it’s bold, and through space and time and a decade and an ocean, it’s still the same woman he sees every damn time.
“It’s why you can’t be with me tonight,” she continues, “in that way.”
He fixes his gaze on the couch - the way the first thing he’d done after opening the door was drape a throw blanket across it, steal a pillow from the bedroom. A wordless boundary existed before he himself could figure out why he’d needed one.
He scrubs at his jaw with the heel of his hand, nods stalled and slow. “I guess —” he breathes out, “I guess it is.”
-
A monster and a cup of ground coffee and his mother and the rest of everyone else in his every day orbit have all clocked his feelings long before last night.
The woman I’m in love with, he starts to remember how he’d said it with his whole chest - the words never once fraying at their edges, solid and sturdy under the weight of the phrase.
This time they’re his and his alone to hold with glory.
As his cheek brushes her shoulder and his hands let go of her backside, he says goodbye to an old friend. To a place and a time and a past life and loose ends. A red string looped from him to a person who knows once she snips it loose it’ll set him free.
“Whoever it is you’re in love with…” She stops in her tracks, sincerity enveloping the words, “She’s a lucky woman.”
-
Her laugh is maroon.
It’s an octave deeper than he remembers it being and the blood rushes into his cheeks at the sound. It’s a rarity anything he says makes her smile this time around, but she is - smiling with her head tipped back, tears at the rims of her eyes she swears are happy ones.
She uses the pads of her thumbs to swipe them away, says she’s sorry.
“For…?”
“Keeping my distance,” she tells him.
Her eyes are still wet. The space between their bodies is still a burning ache he can feel in his bones, but he isn’t scared to close in on it anymore.
He reaches his hand into the doorway until his fingers can cup her cheek. He presses the tips of them into her warm, tear-stained skin and holds them there.
“You don’t have to say sorry for that, Olivia.”
Underneath his palm he feels her release a shaky breath, the sound of a cry tangled into it.
“Look at me.” He doesn’t move his hand. “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”
“Okay,” he thinks she says.
“That’s what being in love with you is, for me,” he drawls, hand swooping to the nape of her neck now.
She says his name. It’s not pleading, not desperate or fractured or heavy. It’s just his name - both delicate and firm enough like she’s just saying it because she can, because there are parts of her that have held onto this with the ferocity he has, too.
He has to make sure. “That okay with you?”
Her head falls into the dip of his shoulder at the sound of his question. Against him he feels her eyes shut. The ghost of a nod, small but just steady enough that he knows it’s a yes.
Later on when they’re on the couch he tells her again. Her feet are in his lap and they’re laughing - something about an impromptu wedding; something about love and healing and everything still feeling like it’s gone to shit all at the same time; something about losing her very best detective.
Twice, she’s sure to say, and he doesn’t miss the point.
He envelopes his hand around the bottom of her calf, gives it a squeeze.
“Hey, if they take the OC down like I told ya, I’ll reapply. Come and annoy you at the 1-6 every day until we die.”
Marooned and belly-deep, she laughs. It’s his favorite fucking sound in the world. “Shut up.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know, and that scares me.”
“Does this?” He motions in front of him. Her legs are still stretched out, the heel of her foot pressed into the middle of his Henley. There’s a quiet comfort that drowns out the unfamiliar here.
This burning desire has existed half of their lives.
She waits a second before she says, “No. No. Of course not.”
“I’m not here because I think things should be perfect right away between us,” he promises.
“I know. Because they’re not.”
“Right. You won’t even hire me.”
The corners of her lips curl. “You’re a little reckless, Stabler.”
He stretches his arm forward, laces his fingers through hers. In the silence he lifts her hand up between his lips, smooches her skin.
“Only sometimes.”