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He tosses the driver the only twenty in his wallet as a tip — suddenly you become a lawyer in sex crimes and have one day a month, maybe two to make it to the ATM — and then closes the car door behind them.
She smooths her hands down herself and her body shakes. She apologizes lowly, says only because she's cold, not nervous.
"I mean, you've followed me home how many times?" she teases, letting herself bask in the moment before they step through the door — before they're not just Carisi and Rollins anymore, but CarisiandRollins.
"This time's different," he counters, and she takes a few steps forward toward him, gliding her hand up his chest as she subtly nods in agreement. The only light on her street, the glare from the headlights of their ride home, is gone, and he says, "C'mon, let's go upstairs, get you outta those shoes."
"How'd you know they were buggin' me?" she asks, retreating her hand off of him and into her bag, searching for the set of keys she swore she threw in there before she left.
"'Cause I know you," he starts, "which is why I brought mine."
She sighs in relief — and bliss, a little bit of bliss — when he holds the spare key she'd given him, what, four years ago that night he watched Jesse for her while she had a GA meeting?, up into view, his tongue between his teeth.
She angles her body so that she's leaned into his side, her body a cocktail of tiredness from the long work week, delight from a night out watching her two close friends not get married — and still offer everyone loads of free alcohol, regardless — and this sense of all of the finally's in the world, at the speech he'd recited and the way she could suddenly say nothing but his name and the taste of his lips on hers for the first time.
"Dominick," she says, her voice low, "the girls are probably still up."
"Yeah, it's nothin' I haven't done before," he reminds her, her head suddenly flooding with images of him tucking both of her baby girls into bed — a kiss on the forehead, a 'We'll make time for a story next time, I promise' on days the D.A.'s office had been his unwelcome first priority and his second had been to stop by and see his Goddaughters.
"D-Do you have to go back?" she asks, knowing he'd been knee-deep in this case all week, the bags underneath his elated eyes still apparent in spite of the contentment of how the night had gone.
"I texted Hadid before, she said I'm off the hook — for now," he explains, easily finding Amanda's hand in his as they walk to her door.
Behind it, they hear a little voice — probably her five-year-old who'd never been good at falling asleep without her Momma. Another voice, Sienna's, says something like, 'No bedtime stories, though — it's late'.
With their hands still entwined, his thumb idly grazing the back of her hand, he pushes the door open with his shoulder and raises a brow at Jesse's jubilant greeting.
"Uncle Sonny?!"
He laughs breathily, letting go of Amanda's hand only to envelope her little, five-year-old counterpart into his arms, leveling himself to her to say hello.
He boops Jesse on the nose, asks, "What're you still doin' up, huh?"
"Waitin' for Momma," Jesse replies, her head darting up and off of her Uncle Sonny's shoulder only to stare at Amanda, who's behind the both of them laughing. "Did you take Momma to the wedding?" she queries after a beat, looking from Amanda to Sonny then back to Amanda and then back to Sonny, the unintentional coordination of their almost-wedding attire tricking Amanda's five-year-old into thinking that meant they'd been each other's dates.
Amanda finds his gaze and opens her mouth to say something, but rapidly settles for, "It's gettin' real late, baby. Want Uncle Sonny to tuck you in?" instead — holding off on the explanation of how Momma kissed Uncle Sonny after his speech about partners made her cry at a not-wedding.
So he scoops Jesse in his arms, the clock reading 11:04, way past the set bedtime Amanda'd implemented over the last year.
Amanda follows the both of them into Jesse's room, watching from the doorway, enamored by the easy way he tucks her into the purple comforter, smooches her on the forehead, says something like, "Pancakes in the mornin' if you go ta' bed now".
Billie coos from her crib and Sonny doesn't leave the room without kissing the top of her head, too, repeating the sentiment about tomorrow's breakfast to Amanda's two-year-old.
Amanda's leaned up against the frame of the door, commenting on how much her girls miss him when he's not here.
"You look tired," she adds, setting one of her palms flat on his right cheek. "You don't have to — to do the whole 'pancakes' thing."
"Yeah, but I wanna," he counters, sliding both of his hands around her waist, whatever else he means to say getting cut off by a yawn.
"Carisi."
"Y'know, you sayin' my name like that makes me wanna do the opposite of goin' ta' bed."
━━━━━━━━━
They sit quietly at her kitchen table, Amanda heating up tea in a mug for herself and asking him, in between microwave beeps, if he's sure he doesn't just want to go crash in her bed; that she'll meet him in there once she winds down.
"Can't do that," he argues from his spot in one of her dining chairs, his arms folded on the tabletop. "You comfy in that dress?"
"Wearin' no bra helped," she says with a smirk, and in spite of his exhaustion, he raises his brows suggestively and jokingly at her. "You're exhausted."
"It's our first night like — like this," he stutters, and behind her wordless laugh that says, 'Like what?' is a grin that tells him it may be the first, but hardly the last. "I just don't wanna miss anything."
"Me... drinking tea, taking off my dress, and begging you to let me sleep in your hoodie?"
”Wait, is that why I can’t find the old Fordham one anywhere?”
She shrugs a shoulder. “You left it here on New Year’s.”
His tired eyes follow her as she scoots out of her seat to grab her tea before the microwave can go off and startle the girls awake.
"You had a long day," she adds, setting her mug down onto the table delicately, blowing into it to cool it off as if that ever works.
He tilts his head, bites the inside of his cheek. ”And you didn’t?”
”Not as long as you — I mean, I wasn’t up all night last night writing a speech,” she reminds him, not sans a wink.
There’s a smirk on his face when he asks, “You really thought it was that good, huh?”
”I — You’re really good at saying all of the things I can’t,” she admits. “Not that easily, anyway.”
”If I minded that about you, d’you think I’d be sittin’ here watching you drink tea at eleven o’clock at night?”
She lifts the mug — that’s hardly cooled down, but she’s fatigued from today’s events, too — up to her lips and takes a swift sip. “I guess not,” she says with a smile behind the rim.
”I meant every word,” he adds after a few seconds of comfortable silence, and Amanda leans forward in her chair, one hand underneath her chin to steady herself. She blinks as she watches him talk — slowly, in comparison to his usual hasty way of conversation.
“Rollins, she — she wanted nothin’ I wanted, and she told me she’d catch me at the next wedding I minister as if that’s just somethin’ I do for fun on Friday’s, and — I’m not just here ‘cause it didn’t work with her.”
Amanda withdraws her hand from herself and places it onto his, says, “I didn’t think that was the case.”
”I want — I thought I’d be married, have — have kids by now, and — I’m not tryin’ ta’ unload anything onto you, I just —”
She knows he feels like he needs to explain himself, even if the Nicole thing is so far off the table it’s underneath her old apartment floorboard.
She looks around at the apartment wordlessly, his dress shoes sat on his unofficial spot on her shoe rack by the front door and Frannie Mae using his suit jacket that’s draped on the arm of the couch as her pillow. Gesturing to him, she says, “Y-You do — you have us, you know.”
He leans as forward as he can in Amanda’s kitchen chair, just far enough so he can crane his neck down to kiss her without cracking it. She chuckles as their lips press together, promises of whatever’s to come when he goes in for a second, and then a third.
”Can you please let me get you to bed now?” she interrupts after the fourth, sliding her mug out of the way to cup both sides of his cheeks.
━━━━━━━━━
The usual blurred lines of ‘What are we?’ vanished the moment he reciprocated her kiss on that rooftop — and then some — so sliding off her dress as he watches from up against her headboard feels perfectly fine.
She catches him staring and says, “Yeah, I know, I’m cold” in reference to her chest and the absence of a bra that just didn’t work with this dress.
His eyes are shutting now — heavy from the longest week, from an all-nighter for a speech he only got to read a quarter of to her, from all of the anticipation of the work that’d be waiting in a fat, Manila-colored pile on his desk come Monday morning.
He sleepily tosses her his Fordham hoodie from his lap and misses, laughing as it lands on the floor nowhere near her.
She slides it over her head with a laugh and then joins him on the bed, looping one of her arms through his. “Hey.”
”Hi, Rollins,” he greets hoarsely, and she’s about two minutes away from losing him to the most blissful sleep either of them’ll have for the first time in a long one.
It’s not how she’d imagined the night ending, but her girls are asleep in the next room and she — for once, and for real — wants to do things right with Dominick Carisi.
”I’m sorry I’m lousy company,” he apologizes, his head sinking into one of her pillows.
“You’re not, though,” she promises, adding a smooch to the end of that promise, just below his cheekbone. “It feels good, havin’ you here like this.”
”You act like I’ve never slept here before,” he says with a spent laugh.
”The couch doesn’t count,” she argues. “Carisi?”
His eyes are closed, now. “Hmm.”
”Never mind,” she insists, dropping the thought and in lieu of it, taking a hand up and weaving her fingers through his hair — now coming undone from the gel.
She wonders about the softness of this moment; thinks about the last time she’d touched someone like this and can’t even remember a scenario like it that didn’t lead to meaningless sex, to making sure she didn’t wake up next to them in any domestic way, shape, or form the next morning.
”Say it,” he pleas, his eyes still squeezed shut as he sinks further into the pillow behind him.
”I’ve been waitin’ a long time to do that.”
He cocks an eye open, not bothering to lift his head up. “What, mess up my hair?” he jokes, even though he knows entirely that she’s referring to the leap she took when she kissed him back on that rooftop.
”What d’you need it done for — you got a hot date or somethin’?”
He reaches one of his hands out from underneath the blanket to poke her in the arm and says, “Just you.”
She leans down to kiss him one more time before he crashes on her, thinking about goodnight kisses and how she’s never really had a consistent bout of them before. Something in her abdomen flutters when she thinks about him, in her bed, and how many more they’ll share. For the first time in a long time, she’s not terrified of waking up next to somebody.
”’S nice,” he mumbles into the kiss, and she smiles against his lips. “We’ll do that again tomorrow, right?”
She sets her hand on his chest, still hovering over him in his Fordham hoodie that’s three times too big on her, says, “You wake me up with pancakes and we can do whatever you want, Dominick.”