Work Text:
Lucy chews on her pencil erasers when she’s thinking. It’s something Tim has always noticed, but today, he notices. He notices because he’s jealous of the damn eraser. He wishes his lip was between her teeth before she’d pull it into her mouth. He wishes her hands were in his hair instead of her own. She pushes a brown wave behind her ear before peering up at him and asking, “Is this good?”
He shakes his head to restore his focus. “What?”
She flips her notebook around to reveal her notes, which include their covers’ first real date, whose apartment they end up at more often, the day his cover got her likeness tattooed on his forearm- a full life laid out. Tim had never been so jealous of two nonexistent people loosely based on two real criminals.
“That’s good!” he finally replies. “Easy to remember.”
“Great!” She turns her focus back to her paper, pursing her lips as she continues to think.
He should be thinking too. Well, technically, he is thinking, but they’re very obviously not thinking about the same thing. How is she so unaffected? His brain’s pretty much frozen in the same place his body had been last night: outside her door, staring blankly ahead as the events of the past three minutes washed over him. God, three minutes. It only took that long for the most vital relationship in his life to be flipped completely on its head, because now, he has no idea how he’s supposed to continue being her colleague, her superior, her friend like he’s not burning with the desire to kiss her again, and again, and again, and never stop.
“So…” she starts, keeping her eyes on her notebook, and he’s once again trying his best to shift his brain back into work mode. “What are you doing tonight?”
That was not the question Tim was expecting, so he takes a moment before answering, “Dinner at home. With Ashley.”
Which was true. He’d called her that morning and told her to clear her schedule for the night and come over. He had a girlfriend, a pretty one, a fun one, and he’d do well to remember that before hitting the 24-hour mark of daydreaming about his subordinate.
But that didn’t make it any easier when her eyes shot up from her paper, a quick flash of something in them that Tim couldn’t quite read. “Oh,” she said, looking back down.
Why? he wanted to ask. Why do you care what I’m doing tonight? Do you care? Why am I hanging onto any indication that last night affected you like it’s a lifeline? Why am I still acting like I don’t know exactly why?
Before his brain could answer any of his rhetoricals, or probably ask more since he was still so damn confused, she spoke up. “I should probably see what Chris is doing tonight. Ask if he wants to come over.”
NO! “Yeah, you probably should.” ABSOLUTELY NOT! “Sounds fun.” SHIT!
“Mmhm.” Her voice is tight, and he once again finds himself just wanting to ask her why?
Eventually, Hajek makes contact, and the operation goes smoothly. It turned out, they didn’t need much of the work they had done, which Lucy had mentioned was a high probability, but it was shocking how much they didn’t need. They didn’t need their backstories, they didn’t need their key moments, and they definitely didn’t need the PDA training. As it turned out, drug traffickers are more interested in getting paid than watching two underlings make out.
It isn’t until later, when they’re in the nearby surveillance van, removing everything that makes them Dim and Juicy, that it hits him again. He’s got one hand roughly scrubbing at the stubborn tattoo on his neck, and Lucy’s got her hand wrapped halfway around his opposite forearm, running rubbing alcohol over the half-assed image of her likeness that they’d given Tim just in case he had to lift his sleeves for any reason. With every wipe, Tim can see “Juicy” fading from his arm, and it registers that their little charade of being a couple is really over now. He has no excuse to end up at her apartment, coming up with dirty first meetings and making out in the glow of a comical number of candles.
It’s over.
And Lucy’s still Lucy. Proud, confident, chipper as ever, just like she had been after her first UC job. And her second, and any other time she’d gone undercover, like this one was nothing different. She was exactly how she should be, and Tim was still checking his arm for faded marks of something that was supposed to look like her.
He’s at his dining table, still checking his arm when he hears the knock he had expected. He gets up and smooths his hands over the wrinkles in his dress shirt before crossing to the door. He opens it, and there stands Ashley. Pretty, fun (on occasion) Ashley. He’d told her to prepare for a night of romance, and she was certainly dressed for the occasion. She’d ditched her usual third-grade teacher chic for a navy blue knee-length dress with a low neckline. I can do this, Tim thought to himself. This night with his beautiful girlfriend was exactly what he needed to get his mind off of Lucy, her lips, that sliver of skin between her sweater and camisole strap, and whatever she’s going tonight-
ASHLEY!
Their meal goes by pleasantly enough. Ashey catches him up on her day, Tim catches her up on (strictly the patrol parts of) his, a few laughs and smiles are shared, and Tim is content. He’s satisfied. Which is fine.
Finally, they’re finished eating, and Ashley asks Tim to pour her a second glass of wine, which he takes as an indicator that she’s staying the night. And that’s good! Why would Tim invite his girlfriend over for a candlelit dinner and not want her to stay the night?
“So,” she starts, and he knows that voice. He feels the outside of her high heel graze the inside of his shin from across the table. “Now that you’ve filled me up with spaghetti and wine, what would you think about moving this to the bedroom?”
Tim releases a low hum as Ashley stalks her way over to him before settling in his lap. She studies his face for a moment before grasping his chin between her thumb and forefinger and bringing her lips to his. He shifts his hand from his lap to her hip, because he’s supposed to do that. He opens her lips with his own because that’s what the situation calls for. He kisses her again, and again, and again, mentally begging, pleading with her to feel like Lucy. To feel better than Lucy, to make him forget. To make him forget the feeling of Lucy’s soft fingers sliding from the short hairs on the back of his head down his neck, finally coming to rest on his cheek. To make him forget that flash of elation between kisses when he realized Lucy was not moving away.
And then he realizes he’s kissing another woman while mentally chanting Lucy’s name. He spent all day worried about how Lucy was affected by the kiss, and he realizes that in this moment, it doesn’t matter how she felt because he knows how he does. He’s in love with her. He knows now that he’s loved her for a while, but his last thread of denial was snapped last night with her kiss. He loved her then, he loves her now, and he will love her in the future.
Ashley deserves better than this. He is better than this. He breaks the kiss with a grunt, which she misinterprets as a signal to move her kisses down to his neck, and never in Tim’s life have neck kisses felt less sexy.
“This isn’t working,” he mutters, mostly to himself, but audible enough that she hears.
She sits upright, her eyes wide. “What?”
“This isn’t working,” he repeats.
“What’s not working?”
“This. Us.”
Her eyebrows furrow and she lets out a dry laugh. “You’re saying we need to break up?”
He doesn’t answer, just gives her a look, and by her reaction, he knows his look communicated what it needed to. She jumps off of his lap, her heels clicking as she moves backward toward her original spot at the table.
“So what, you brought me over and did all this so you could have one last night with me before kicking me to the curb or…?”
Tim shook his head, shocked that she’d even think that. “No, no, it’s not like that. I didn’t even know we had to break up until right now.”
“Is this about what we talked about the other night?”
“Weirdly, no. It’s not anything you did at all.”
“Oh, please, spare me the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ cliche.”
“It’s true, it has nothing-”
He cuts himself off. He’d had no plans to tell Ashley the real reason behind this, but as her eyes narrow and the sound of her breathing through her nose gets shakier, Tim knows he’s gone horribly off-script.
“To do with me,” she finishes. “Nothing to do with me. Is that what you were going to say? Meaning it’s something, or someone, completely unrelated to me breaking us up.”
He stands up to move toward her, the gentleman in him feeling like this long of a relationship should end better than this. “Ashley-”
Tim is cut off by something cold hitting his chest and he glances down to see a red stain sinking into the light blue of his dress shirt that Lucy had once said brought out his eyes. He hadn’t even seen Ashley pick up the wine glass.
“Screw you, Tim,” she seethes, grabbing her purse and stomping over to his front door. She opens it and turns back from the entrance. “If you’re going over to Lucy’s after this, make sure you tell her how you got wine on your shirt.”
With a slam, she’s gone, out of his life forever. He should feel sadder; she was his girlfriend for the better part of a year, and overall, she was decent. He wasn’t lonely, so being with her definitely beat being single. But now, Tim’s main woe is that Lucy is no longer the last person to kiss him, and he feels lonelier than ever.
He can’t even bother cleaning himself up, just carries the dirty plates and empty wine glasses to the sink. He lets Kojo into the backyard to do his business and figures he’ll let the dog frolic in the night air for a moment while he collects his thoughts on the couch.
His thoughts end up being mostly quite simple. A. He loves Lucy. B. The chances of her returning his feelings are slim. The last thought is the only complicated one. C. He has to tell her. He’d do himself a disservice by letting her update him on other guys knowing she wouldn’t know it hurt him, that it always had. He’d be doing her a disservice by continuing to act like he was any of her other guy friends, like Nolan or Thorsen. She trusted him to be honest with her, and hiding how badly he ached for her would go against that.
Psyching himself up to get off the couch is a struggle because he knows the next time he sits will be in his truck, gearing up to go back to her apartment, ready to lay it all on the table. If Chris was there, good. In the more-than-likely event Lucy chose him, he should appreciate the reminder to treat her right, that there were other men out there who would kill to be in his position.
He lets Kojo back into the house and grabs his keys off the counter in the middle of his speed walk to the entrance. He swings the door open and-
Freezes. Furrows his eyebrows as he takes in the brown eyes of the woman standing in front of him.
“Lucy?”
~30 minutes earlier~
Chris was a distraction. Lucy knew that going into whatever they had going on. If she ended up developing real feelings for him at some point, all the better, but for now, she just needed something to take her mind off of where it always tended to wander nowadays. And, boy, did she need a distraction right now.
He’s nothing if not prompt, so Lucy isn’t surprised when his knock comes right on time. She opens up for him and he raises a bag of takeout from her favorite sushi place above his head. “Hi!” he greets cheerily.
“Hey,” she replies with a smile.
He makes his way into her apartment, setting the sushi on her kitchen counter as he looks around. “No candles?”
“Hm?”
“You always have candles burning when we have dinner.”
Lucy gazes over the unlit candles in her living room and her chest feels tight for a moment. “Oh. Forgot, I guess. Long day.”
Chris smiles fondly. “You go ahead and get the sushi out on the table, I’ll bring some candles over to set a mood.”
Lucy brings the takeout boxes to the table before turning back to get plates. When she turns back, Chris has ditched his suit jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and unbuttoned a few top buttons on his shirt. As he clicks her lighter toward one of the candles, Lucy can’t help but think he looks like something straight out of a romance novel. Chris is funny and handsome, and he really likes her.
That thought propels her forward as she unceremoniously sets the two plates on the table and steps into his space, inches from him. She reaches over to wrap one hand around his wrist and uses the other to pluck the lighter from his hand. She drops it on the table and peers back up to meet his questioning eyes.
She answers by pushing up to her toes to kiss him. He makes a happy noise and immediately returns her kiss. She takes control, reaching up to lace her fingers behind his neck, holding him to her.
He breaks the kiss for a moment. “What about dinner?”
“We can do dinner after.”
He smiles and closes the gap between them again. His hands shift to her waist and she responds to the motion by pressing the front of her entire body into his.
This is good. Chris is a good kisser. He’s strong, he’s taken the time to learn what she likes, and he makes her feel good in the moment. And damn, does she need to feel good right now. Right now, because if she spends another moment not focused on herself or on Chris, her mind will wander again. Right back to the couch behind her, where she’d used her beer bottle and carefully chosen words to purposely render Tim slack-jawed with desire. It was always such a head rush when she could expose Tim’s lustful side; it made her feel powerful. Not as powerful as it felt to pull him in and do what she’d been aching to do for months: shut him up with a kiss. And the way he’d held her. Not forcefully like Chris was now, Tim was gentle, like he had no idea how to touch her, but had to somehow. And instead of being a distraction, kissing Chris had now become a reminder. A reminder that she could have good, not amazing. Not a powerful head rush that she could still feel the effects of long after he left her apartment. Because when Chris left her apartment, she wouldn’t spend another moment thinking about him until she saw him again. She never had. The moment Chris was out of sight, Tim crept back into her mind like he had for months. And now that kissing Tim wasn’t just a fantasy, now that she knew what she was missing, Chris just felt like the cheap knockoff of the real thing.
“Hey, where’d you go?” Chris asks with a light laugh, cupping her cheek to direct her face to his. The lightness in his eyes fades as he reads her expression. “Lucy?”
“I’m sorry,” she eeks out, wiggling out of his hold to step back from him.
“It’s fine, I was hungry anyway. Maybe we’ll pick back up after we eat someth-”
“No. Chris.”
He stops, shoving his hands in his pockets. “You’re not sorry about killing the mood, are you?”
She shakes her head, and he breathes out a sigh.
“Can I ask why?”
Because I’m in love with my sergeant? Because I knowingly entered this sham of a relationship with you knowing I was in love with my sergeant? Who I can’t have because he will never want me enough to jeopardize what we built together. He’ll always pick the safe options, and I’ll be stuck living for stolen moments with him for God knows how long.
Chris seems to have learned to read Lucy better than she’s given him credit for, and the look in his eyes makes her feel like the worst person in the world. “It will never be me, will it?”
She tries to speak, but nothing comes out.
“You’ll never want to meet my mom, you’ll never want to give this a real title, you’ll never want to keep me any closer than arm’s length. And it’s not because you’re just a casual relationship kind of girl- you want all the big stuff, just not with me. And you never will.”
Lucy steps further back from him as she begins to fidget with her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you said that.” He turns to gather his suit jacket from where he’d had it draped over her couch, then begins his exit. “I’ll see you at the station, Lucy.”
“I’ll pay you back for the sushi!”
Her only response is a gentle slamming of her door, and she hears his footsteps grow further.
Tim is with Ashley. He’s planning a romantic Hawaii vacation with her. Even if the proposal wasn’t real at that moment, he still sees a future with her. Lucy has no business grabbing her car keys while Ashley is more than likely probably still at Tim’s house enjoying a night of romance he’d had no problems planning the night after their kiss.
But she does anyway.
Lucy was standing at Tim’s door, her fist raised to knock, not able to bring herself to yet. It had been one thing to think about telling Tim the kiss meant something, everything, to her, but it was a different thing to actually shoot your shot at your superior who was already in a relationship. She was deciding whether or not to just leave without letting him see her before he made the decision for her.
Now they were just staring at each other, his keys in his hand, her fist still raised.
“Lucy?” he asks, and she’s reminded she can speak.
“Um….” Solid start. “Were you about to leave?”
His keys jingle as he shoves them in his pockets. “Uh, no,” he replies, opening the door further and standing out of her way. “Come in.”
She peeks past the entry and tentatively steps through. “Is Ashley…”
“Oh, she’s not here, um…”
He trails off and when she turns back, he’s gesturing to his shirt, which has a huge red stain on it. For the first time in hours, Lucy laughs, her hand slapping over her mouth to muffle it. “Did she throw wine on you?!”
“Sure did.”
She steps closer to survey the damage and frowns when she realizes the shirt is completely ruined. “That’s a shame, I liked that shirt. Brought out your eyes.”
He chuckles, and she cringes when she remembers she’s told him that before. “I’ll buy a new one.”
She’d stepped closer than she meant to, or maybe he’d stepped closer to her, but there’s now a dangerous lack of distance between them. They’ve been this close before, closer even, but given where they were 24 hours ago, being close to him now feels different. It feels like more.
She’s tempted to keep her eyes on his chest- act like she’s still examining the wine stain, but his gaze burns a hole into her head, so she has to look up.
“Why did you come here?” Tim asks softly.
Lucy wants to tell him she’s come here to tell him she loves him. To tell him she can’t go back to not kissing him now that she knows what it feels like. She wants to tell him to let Ashley go, and ditch the future he has planned with his girlfriend to make one with her.
But that requires a lot of thought, and his blue eyes are way too close to allow her to think.
“Tim?” she asks, her voice small.
He blinks and gives her a barely perceptible nod.
“Can you kiss me again?”
He doesn’t answer with words, but with action, looping his left arm around her waist and using his right hand to cup her cheek, bringing her up to him. His mouth smothers hers, and it takes everything in her not to squeal against his lips. He’d kissed her, no questions, no hesitation. As if he’d been waiting all day for her to ask.
The gentleness of his hand on her face is a stark contrast to the insistence of his kiss. She’s vaguely aware that one of her hands is grabbing the collar of his shirt while her other is resting on his jaw. Last night wasn’t a fluke. She hadn’t spent the day building the kiss up in her head to be more than it was; this was just how it was to kiss Tim Bradford. Their second kiss was sweet, and soft, and safe, and sexy, just like their first kiss. But this was more. Aside from being longer, this wasn’t a stolen moment subject to interruption. If this one got interrupted, she’d just kiss him again.
Finally, they broke, panting for air, their holds on each other staying firm.
“ That’s what that’s supposed to feel like,” Lucy states.
Tim smiles, resting his forehead against hers. “Agreed. We should have started doing that a long time ago.”
Lucy nods, her head leaving his to move towards his shoulder, her arms moving to wrap around his torso. She worries Tim might find it weird that she’d crave a hug after such an intense makeout, but his arm around her waist squeezes tighter as his other hand finds its way into her hair, cradling her head.
“This changes everything,” she whispers.
“Everything needed to change.”
“Can I stay the night?” Despite everything that had just happened, her voice still shakes as she gets the question out.
Tim chuckles, and the vibration against Lucy’s body sends a current through her. “How many nights can you stay? I’ll take all of them, please.”
He might regret saying that, because Lucy will happily take every night he has to offer.
She pulls her head back to gaze at the dopey smile on his lips, her heart swelling at the notion that she put it there.
She hopes he can see in her face that she loves him because she might not be ready to say it until tomorrow morning. His expression softens, and she’s pretty sure she can see that same message reflected back in his.
She should’ve known they’d be able to communicate this with just their eyes, as so many of their deepest connections had happened without words.
Of the many happy changes taking place, Lucy was grateful that could stay the same.