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Amanda is positive Sonny didn’t sign up for any of this.
She isn’t talking about the reason why both of them had overslept—in fact, she remembers just how much of a willing participant he was in that, with his roaming hands and blown pupils and persistent lips.
This is rushing around her tiny apartment, getting ready for work while trying not to step on stray Lego pieces or pointy Barbie feet, in between wrangling two kids under six and coaxing them to finish their breakfasts.
This also turns out to be Billie’s split-second decision to wear her bowl of cold cereal as a hat.
When Amanda whirls around to face him, she’s ready to tell him to go and have a good day, she’s got this—
Except he beats her to it, stealing her words right out of her mouth before adding, “Liv is going to kill you, you’ve already been late twice this week.”
“Carisi, you can’t—”
“I can,” he insists, pressing a kiss onto her lips and her keys into her hand, “and I will. What, you think I want to meet with Buchanan first thing? I can push our meeting back 30 minutes.”
She looks at Billie, who has soggy Cheerios tangled in her hair and plastered on her face, and then at Jesse, who seems dead set on wearing her entire outfit inside out today.
“Alright, an hour,” he concedes at her raised eyebrows. The corners of their eyes crinkle as they both try not to laugh.
She grabs her black blazer from the hallway closet and drapes it over her arm. “See you later, Dominick,” she says, and it’s a statement, not a question.
“See you,” he says, and it’s a promise.
* * *
Thanks to Carisi, she makes it to the precinct just in time, and she stays there until Fin hangs up his desk phone with a break in their case. “That was Mercy,” he says. “Our vic finally came to. Let’s go.”
She leaps up from her seat, grabs her blazer, and slips it on.
Two things happen almost simultaneously.
The first is her realization that this blazer is too big, and not in a stretched out, laundry mishap kind of way.
The second is Sonny coming through the door, the lines on his forehead more prominent than they’ve been since she’d kissed him two months ago. He isn’t wearing his suit jacket, which she chalks up to the summer heat, but he does have it in one hand, and—
It all clicks for her about half a second after it does for Fin. His eyes widen, and he slowly sinks onto the corner of his desk, staring back and forth between Amanda, jacket still hanging loosely on her petite frame, and Carisi, who can’t seem to look up from his shoes.
“Gotta say, didn’t think that was your style,” Fin finally says to her, and it’s clear he doesn’t mean the blazer.
Amanda feels warmth creep up her neck and into her cheeks, but it isn’t from the humiliation of being found out. Not for the first time, she thinks about all the moments he’s shown up for her—not just when the cases were hard, but even when she didn’t make it easy on him to stick around.
“Me either,” she says, slipping her hand into Carisi’s, “but turned out to be the perfect fit.”