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Sonny is finishing up dessert, doling out ice cream to the plates that begged for it, still dirtied from his escapade with the flour, when the knock arrives. Olivia answers it with a familiar greeting, but it’s Noah who is the first to be surprised at the sudden presence at the door.
“Uncle Rafa! You came!”
He doesn’t look up. Sonny dusts his hands off on the apron and grabs the glass of white wine he had refilled. He might need a few more if he can beat Amanda from cutting him off early. She already had to throw Billie at him to get him to come and eat Christmas dinner with them. He shouldn’t give her any more grief.
Both Noah and Jessie, the latter who surprisingly recognizes the other man, are at the door and hollering with exuberant spirits. Fin says something that garners a laugh familiar enough to rattle his bones and strike his gut. Olivia makes an introduction of Kat, their latest member—she’s bright, quick on her feet, passionate. She has a lot to look forward to as far as a successful career goes.
Sonny hasn’t made his way over. He focuses on Billie, stuck in her high chair and wanting to get out with soft cries. Sonny grabs her so Amanda can give her own greeting and jostles her a bit to keep her entertained. Or perhaps to keep him occupied. He hasn’t quite decided what the difference between the feelings are.
“Who dah?” Billie asks him, eyes flitting over her sister and mother a few feet away.
“That’s an old friend,” he says. He holds out a finger so she can grab it and keep it close to her chest as if to ground her in some sort of familiarity. “He used to work with us.”
“I take offense to being called ‘old,’ even if it provides an accurate description.”
Sonny knows before he even looks at him that he’s still in love with Rafael Barba. From the second he walked away from them, from the moment Olivia told them that he was moving on from New York County, he knew he would never lose that feeling inside of him. It would die down enough for him to see other people—or at least try to—and it did for a while. But Sonny had a sneaking suspicion that all it would take was hearing that voice, or being in the same room, or seeing him, to reignite what had been lost.
Sonny looks up at Rafael and is thankful he keeps his breathing steady because it definitely feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He looks older but not tired, not like he did when he worked in the DA’s office; there’s a soft dusting of gray on the sides of his head, the ultimate swirl of salt and pepper. His beard is dark but trimmed, clearly well-maintained if the shape and length is anything to go by. His eyes are still intensely green: bright sparks of hazel, flickering in the rings of decorative lights around them, rejuvenated with the earthy tone of jade Sonny used to get lost in. And of course, he’s dressed impeccably: a dark green sweater that fits nicely around his middle, reminiscent of evergreen forests, over a peach dress shirt that peeks above his collar, folded crisp and clean.
It’s nowhere near the suits and bright splashes of color dancing off his neck and breast pocket. But it touches the things of Rafael that Sonny used to adore. The things he still adores, he reminds himself. All he’s been able to think about as an ADA is how proud Rafael could be. Sonny has no doubt he would be standing here, but it wouldn’t have been so soon if it wasn’t for Rafael Barba.
It takes Sonny a few seconds to realize Rafael is staring at him with just as much intensity. At least he catches what he’s saying as it leaves his mouth. “Well, being an ADA really cleaned you up, huh?” Rafael asks with a smirk.
Sonny laughs without thinking and looks at Billie, who’s gazing at Rafael like she’s sizing him up. “What, I never looked good before?”
Something in Rafael’s eyes gleams—from attraction, or surprise, or both, he can’t tell. He knows it’s something positive if the rising corner of his mouth is anything to go by. “I know it wasn’t my standard of looking ‘good.’”
“Can’t argue with that.” He smiles, and it feels blinding. For as long as they’ve lost touch, for as long as it’s been since they talked, he still feels strongly for Rafael. If he closes his eyes, he can feel each moment that brought them a bit too close, each sharing of words that had a few too many hidden meanings, each breath that only enhanced the slim space between them. He didn’t realize how much he missed that feeling until its source was staring in front of him.
Amanda lifts Billie into her arms; without her, Sonny feels bare and exposed. He has no idea how to greet him. He suddenly feels underdressed and dirtied, and he fumbles with the knot at the back of his apron. Rafael chuckles quietly at the motion, eyeing him up and down with an approving glance, and Olivia escorts him to the kitchen. Amanda and Fin don’t even have to say anything for him to recognize the teasing glint in their eyes; he scowls in response, eyes narrowing in a warning for them to not pull anything.
They finally get the chance to sit down for dessert. Kat talks with Rafael, asking questions about different cases and answering his own inquiries. Rafael sits up and preens a bit when her eyes shine with interest, but it’s not the same. Sonny can see how wounded it looks, how weak it is from what he’s used to. Rafael was like a peacock trying to impress a mate, all bright colors and cocky struts. But his edges are a bit worn now; they’re still active but with a wistful fondness attached to them. Perhaps the DA’s office had more of an effect on him than just killing a child.
Sonny focuses on the kids for the time being, helping Amanda stop Jessie from stealing Billie’s food. From beside him, Noah tells Fin about a kid at school who tried to lick a telephone pole at recess because he saw it in a movie. Liv watches Rafael, and it fills Sonny’s heart to see the old friends interact. Her hand keeps on stretching out toward him in a silent invitation, and he takes her fingers with such a grasp, it’s a surprise she doesn’t flinch. She had to watch him physically walk away; everyone else in the squad had to hear about it.
Fin and Amanda help clean up their plates of dessert while Sonny tricks the kids into watching a movie. He notes Rafael’s eyes following him as Olivia and Kat talk beside him. Sonny makes sure all three kids are within eyesight until Amanda relieves him with a pat on the shoulder. He recognizes the look in her eyes immediately; he expects a dozen or two text messages about how wild this is and how good this must be for him.
“Anyone need anything while I’m up?” He asks. “I’m gonna grab some air for a bit.” There’s a small balcony at the end of the hallway by the elevators. He doesn’t plan to be out for long, but any more time in this room and he might start to doubt it’s even real.
“Feeling claustrophobic, Counselor?” Fin teases with a smirk.
Sonny scoffs and shrugs his coat on, and is surprised to see Rafael stand. “I’ll join you. I need a bit of air myself.”
“Please, Rafael,” he starts, but the slight falter at the use of his name makes his heart leap in his throat. Sonny has to clear it before he can speak without cracking his voice. “I’m not going out for long.”
Rafael shrugs. “Who says I don’t need the same thing?” By the time he walks over to the front door to stand beside him, Sonny is already reaching for his coat—he doesn’t need to check that the camel coat is his. No one else would even try to wear it. When he looks up at him, his eyes are glistening again with that familiar spark. Sonny feels like a junior detective again who just wants to impress his fellow detectives and avoid landing at another precinct. If no one in any of the five boroughs had wanted him, he didn’t know what he would have done. Even if it still feels like that today.
Sonny loves being an ADA. There’s something to be said about prosecuting the case as opposed to putting it together in the first place. The best thing he can describe it to is cooking: he has everything he needs to make a dish, and all he needs is the time and energy and effort to put it together. As a detective, he had to write the recipes, even when there was nothing to write with or nothing to write about.
He just wishes his former detectives could understand that. They come to him with the recipes, demanding a finished product before he even has a chance to hold it in his hands, and when he doesn’t deliver, they scold him. It hurts his head to remember how happy everyone had been on his last day and compare it to Olivia’s requests or Amanda’s irritation. At least Kat knows him as an ADA—she can’t criticize him for doing his job and not her own.
Sonny walks in step with Rafael to the balcony. There’s a bit of snow in the air around them, a pleasant topping over the city for the two weeks before Christmas. Sonny looks up at the sky and can’t help but smile. New York City always looked beautiful with snowflakes drifting slowly down.
“You’re going gray.”
Sonny lets out a laugh at Rafael’s comment, what feels like the first one between them since he left two years ago. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.” He finally looks over at Rafael, and his heart jams itself against his ribcage. The way the flakes of white fall onto his hair, the glint of street lights in his eyes and the red across his cheeks—Sonny itches to reach out to it. Instead, he smiles impishly and tilts his head. “I didn’t notice it.”
“Well, that white in your hair isn’t from the snow.”
“So now it’s white? Make up your mind, Counselor.”
Rafael smirks, the corners twerking up a bit before his expression settles back to neutral. “I should be calling you that. It’s your title.”
Sonny gives a half-hearted shrug and stuffs his hands into his pockets. He knows he’s fidgeting but he feels anxious standing here and avoiding the only thing he should want to talk about with Rafael. “Yeah. But I had a good teacher who helped me get here.”
He scoffs; it’s the first sound he’s made that actually resembles what he used to associate with Rafael. “Well, don’t give him all the credit. I hear he has a big ego. Plus,” he looks up at the building across from them, gazes down at the streets below with a silent bustle to them, “I know he wasn’t exactly working with nothing. He had a great mind as his apprentice.”
Sonny swallows roughly and tries to laugh off the flush of red adorning his cheeks. “C’mon, you can’t be serious about that.”
“Still so hard on yourself.” Rafael shakes his head. A few snowflakes whistle past him and melt instantly on his head. If Sonny didn’t know any better, he would say the shorter man is trying to avoid him. “You really haven’t changed, have you?”
“I’d like to think I have.” He remembers what Rafael had said earlier, about looking better as an ADA. “But that would mean you were bluffing when you said my style got better as an ADA.”
Rafael raises a questioning brow but smiles and laughs when he realizes what he’s saying. “Perhaps I was. Can you blame me? My old shadow is doing what he loves.”
“He is.” Sonny smiles—he can’t help it. Rafael looks too damn content, too damn good, not to. Especially when he says something that he could only dream his fellow former detectives would understand. “Actually,” he bows his head, his blush coming back full force, “leading up to my interview, I practiced your summations in the mirror.”
He catches Rafael looking away just as fast, but his voice carries in the wind that glides by. “Oh. I…I’m flattered.” Sonny peeks up to see Rafael turn and lean against the balcony railing. The white in his hair, the baby slices of permanent snowfall that compliment the darker strands so nicely, are signs of his stress. He looks beautiful, framed by streetlights below, glimmering from the flurries, cold and warm all at once. Sonny almost punched himself to prove that he’s real.
Rafael opens his mouth, to add something or to continue with the conversation, but he falls flat and hangs his head instead. Sonny steps forward so he can lean against the railing, elbows resting on top. “I know I was meant to be an ADA,” Sonny says. He keeps his gaze forward but he can see Rafael look over at him in his peripheral vision. “As much as I loved being a cop, I feel like I can do more to help people. I don’t just wish them well and go to the next case. I get to see them through until the end. But I don’t think it would have been so soon if it weren’t for you.”
“I think you’re, what’s the word, hyping me up a little too much,” Rafael scoffs.
“Am I?” Sonny finally turns to look at him, and he sees so much hurt in Rafael’s eyes. It can’t come from what he’s said; it’s something deeply rooted in two years of avoiding people that got so close to him, they singed their hands when he broke off. “If you got in that courtroom today, you’d be just as brilliant as you were. You could wipe the floor with me.”
Rafael’s smile is sad, barely reaching his eyes like the ones before. “I wouldn’t. Not because I can’t do it, but because my time as the ADA is over. There’s someone better than me in that role.” His gaze drops to Sonny’s coat, and he dusts off a few drops of snow, as if they weren’t already melting into him. But his hand leaves a hot trail over him, and Sonny has to squeeze his hands into his palm to stop himself from reacting. “There’s someone greater taking the lead. I can only hope it doesn’t spit him out as roughly as it did to me.”
Sonny steps closer again. Rafael leans a bit to the left to help seal the gap between them. This man is a dream. Not in the sense that he can’t be here, but at the words he spills like liquid gold and spins like wool to a loom. He may think that he, the Harvard graduate with twenty plus years of experience, is bested by the Staten Island version of hot potato. But Sonny can’t use words like that; he hasn’t mastered them yet, and even if he did, it would pale in comparison. Rafael has always been a wordsmith. And the emotion in his statements is just as strong as his summations.
Rafael turns to rest his elbows on the railing with him. The motion leaves no space between them, barely a breath, and Sonny can feel the heat arching off his side. He always imagined Rafael as a naturally warm person, never bothered by the cold, always flaring like a furnace. He never truly got to find out if it was accurate. Sonny bumps their arms together lightly, barely a stretch for either of them.
“You know,” Rafael whispers, “I always hoped something would happen between us.”
Sonny swallows. A coil of heat trails up his spine in preparation for this conversation. He never thought he would be able to have it with him. “So did I,” he says, equally quiet. “Why didn’t you go forward with it?”
“I was worried it would affect your standing if you ever decided to put your law degree to the test. The thought of people judging you for sleeping with an ADA to get to your job and it was too much for me to face, fantasy or not. Not to mention,” a bitter smile appears on his face briefly before vanishing, “I didn’t want to poison our working relationship with something as trivial as unrequited attraction.” Rafael’s eyes meet his in a searing battle of appreciation and anxiety. He always kept his expression neutral, but his eyes never could learn how. Those pair of jade eyes always wanted to express the feelings clutching his heart. “What about you?”
Sonny wrings his hands and straightens up, fingers clutching the railing for stability. “I just didn’t think you liked me like that.”
Rafael snorts, ugly and curt. “God. That’s it?”
“What do you mean ‘that’s it’?” Sonny looks at him, absolutely beaming with amusement, and wants to kiss it right off. “I knew you liked me. I didn’t think it was like that.”
“And what,” Rafael is definitely closer now, their chests nearly touching from the shift, “exactly would ‘that’ be?”
Sonny raises a hand to caress his face—tip his chin up, hold his cheek, admire his eyes—but stops just short of doing it. Rafael does it for him, his fingers locked around his wrist as he pulls his palm up to his cheek. Sonny’s heart stutters at the motion and he chokes on the words that leap from his chest; “It’d be how much I like your face. The way you keep a straight face but say everything you’re feeling with your eyes. Or how I could walk into a room and find you because you stick out but you’re the only one I wanna look at anyway.”
Rafael shuts his eyes and hums when Sonny presses their foreheads together. So close. “What else?”
“No.” Rafael opens his eyes just to pout, and Sonny chuckles. Definitely worth it, if he gets to see that look. “Not until you share something.”
“Where do you want me to start?” Rafael is a breath away. Sonny can feel the tickle of his quiet laugh on his lips. His free hand gravitates to Rafael’s side to cement both of them in place If either of them moved any closer, they’d be kissing. “The fact that you have more white in your hair than me and it looks better than your hair without the grays? Or,” Rafael wraps his hands around the flaps of his jacket and pulls him in, the only thing stopping them from kissing being his talking, “that I couldn’t stop staring at your eyes if I wanted to?”
Sonny doesn’t know who initiates the kiss. He doesn’t want to. Having Rafael’s lips on his, tasting him on his tongue and reveling in how warm he is, makes him forget all those details. Where they are, who they are, is irrelevant. Rafael wants to kiss him until he’s breathless and panting, and Sonny has no plans of stopping him. Not when he wants to do the same thing.
He barely feels the cold of the winter night. Rafael warms him up too much to be able to feel it.