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She’s pretty careful about touching him. He’s not the kind to touch casually, and he doesn’t seem to be particularly receptive to casual touches, either. He’s always so deliberate with it. Conscious. Respectful.
Sometimes, though, she forgets. Because her default is to touch. And when she’s really happy, or excited, or scared she reaches. She thinks he knows that. Thinks maybe he allows it more, because he knows her, knows she needs it.
It’s why, she thinks, he’s allowing her hands on his shoulder, fingers light against his skin and skirting the edges of the bandages. It’ll take weeks for him to heal properly. The bullet plowed right into his scapula.
It’s been strange, not riding next to him. She misses seeing him for twelve straight hours, it’s been one of the harder parts of moving up. She’s glad for her opportunities, but she misses him. In more ways than one. She’d taken a terrific professional opportunity at a time when she wasn’t quite emotionally ready for it, because she thought — after the axis-tilting kiss, after the undercover operation, after they’d both ended their relationships — that they were headed towards something else, something more.
But then they just... hadn’t. They saw each other socially, with their group of friends, or sometimes just the two of them, but it always stopped just a hair short of being a date. They hadn't kissed again. And they certainly hadn’t gotten more used to touching.
Still, he sits patiently, breathing through the pain, while her fingers skim his heated skin and worry the edges of the bandages and gauze pads taped to him. She wants to press their bodies close together, not necessarily hug him, though she wants that too. She wants to feel all the warmth of him seeping into her. And she can’t imagine, right now, why she’s not allowed to do that. She wants him. All of him.
The doctor comes in to explain the surgery he’s about to have. She wants to stay, she wants to hear all about what's going to happen, about how he’ll need to heal, about the expected outcomes. That it’s not her place gives her a stabbing pain in the general region of her heart. The fierceness with which she wants to stay right by his side must show on her face because Tim’s paying a lot more attention to her than he should be, with his surgeon standing right in front of him. And when she swallows heavily, steeling herself to back away, he tangles his fingers with hers, up by his shoulder, in clear view of the doctor standing there.
The validation courses through her, hot and thick.
He rests their clasped hands on his thigh, the coarse material of his uniform pants feeling rough against her emotional, sensitive skin. “Listen close, Chen,” he says lowly, “I might pass out while she talks, and you’ll be the only thing between me and losing my arm to bad post-op care.”
She hates the wet sound she makes when she tries to laugh. She’s barely not crying, and she can only hide the thickness in her throat when she’s clenching her jaw.
The surgery itself is supposed to take only ninety minutes. Two thirds of the way through the wait, Angela appears with fancy smoothies from the place in the lobby and a mom-bag filled with snacks. Lucy can’t eat, but the cool fruit and yogurt is simple enough to manage, even with her nervy stomach. They make small talk about Jack, about Wesley’s new role at the ADA’s office, and about if Lucy likes working with the Juvenile Division (she does).
“I really thought we’d have our acts together by now,” Lucy says when the conversation lulls for a couple of minutes.
Angela scoffs. “I think you two just like the torture.”
“I don’t. I’m...”
“Madly, deeply, insanely in love with him?”
Lucy blinks hard. “Something like that.”
“Yeah well, he’s crazy about you, too.”
“Maybe we’re both just crazy.”
“I think you’re both scared,” Angela says in a way that makes Lucy look at her. She’s not teasing, or poking, she’s being authentic. Serious.
Lucy looks down at her smoothie and jabs at a half a mangled strawberry with her straw. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe I’m just afraid of what happens when it ends.”
“What if this is the real deal, Lucy? You ever think about that?”
“All the time.”
Then the surgeon comes out and tells her he came through the surgery just fine, is expected to make a full recovery, and she can see him when he wakes up from the anesthesia in a couple of hours. Angela hugs her and goes home to her family. Lucy leaves to take care of Kojo and pack Tim an overnight bag.
She spends almost an hour in the backyard with the dog. It’s a nice yard. Comfortable but well-maintained. There’s a grill, and a chiminea, and some very comfortable lawn furniture. There’s a hammock on a metal frame, that she really likes. The fabric is an unbelievably soft canvas with tropical colored stripes, and she finds herself in it most of the times she’s in his back yard. Today she skips the hammock and throws a dirty rubber ball until Kojo gives up and wanders off to lie down and pant in the shade.
When the timer on her watch goes off she knows she’s got enough time to get back to the hospital to sit vigil during the window of time during which Tim should wake up. As she throws a few items into a bag for Tim, she wonders if it's sweet or pathetic that she’s willing to sit there and stare at him sleeping off the vestiges of the anesthesia. She wonders what he’ll think about her doing that. Personally, she found great comfort in opening her eyes and seeing him. But that had been before things got complicated.
He sleeps on and off, mostly on, until well past visiting hours, but she’s still sitting there in the uncomfortable recliner, watching HGTV when he finally wakes up for what seems like it will be more than five minutes. He’s thirsty, not at all hungry, and really really wants to brush his teeth. With permission from the nurse, he’s allowed to get up if supervised. Lucy stands in the doorway of the tiny bathroom, hawkeyed, while he brushes his teeth. He closes the door, forcing her to step back, with a roll of his eyes when he has to pee. “You’re hovering,” he says through the closed door. She hears the stream of urine hitting the toilet water. It should feel like too much.
Despite his churlishness — which she’s attributing mostly to pain — she thinks she saw something good in his eyes when he realized she was there. Waiting.
The toilet flushes and he opens the door, letting her watch him wash his hands, then his face, and his wince when he bends over too far for his still partly anesthesia-muffled brain and tries to catch himself with his bad arm. He’s bandaged and slung such that he can’t do any damage, and she’s right there so she threads an arm around him, to help keep him from tilting too far. He leans back into her only enough so that she feels it. The image in the mirror gives nothing away. “I’ve earned a little hovering, don’t you think?”
“You saying I’m a bad patient?”
She chooses not to answer. “I brought you some clothes. You want to change out of the gown?”
He exhales and emphatic, “Yes.”
He does okay getting the underwear on, but the sweatpants prove to be too much material for a guy who can’t bend over well, even sitting on the edge of the bed. She crouches down to help him and has to tug the pants out of his hands to get him to allow her to help. “Usually, women try to take my clothes off,” he grouses, his tone reaching for biting but falling just short.
“Usually, women don’t have to keep you from falling over in the bathroom.” She feeds his feet through the legs of the pants and works them up just past his knees until his can finish it himself. “I’d hope.” She wouldn’t know, and if she’s a little salty about that, well, he deserves to hear it.
Pants properly in place, he discards the gown. He can’t wear the shirt she brought, but he doesn’t appear to be too bothered by it, collapsing back into the hospital bed, grey sweatpants and partially-obscured-by-bandages tanned chest standing out against the bright white sheets.
“Did you feed Kojo?” he asks her, head lolled towards her on the pillow, television remote clutched in his hand. He’s holding down the button and scrolling through channels he’s not even looking at.
“Of course,” she says, offended he’d think for one minute that she hadn’t. “Will you pick a channel, already?” The blips of sound from some of the channels is annoying; grating. Her nerves are already raw. She hasn’t fully recovered from hearing the call for assistance over the radio, coming from the new P2 who was his current aide. “I threw the ball until he wouldn’t even bring it back to me.”
He stops flipping through the channels on a channel showing an old episode of NYPD Blue. The suspect on the screen fires at Jimmy Smits. “Pick something else, please.”
Without looking, he presses the channel button one time. A lifeguard in a high-cut red swimsuit runs across the truncated 4:3 screen. She wants to tell him to change it again, but she doesn’t. He’s not watching it anyway, he’s watching her.
She pulls her feet up into the seat with her, resting her chin on her knees. She watches Yasmine Bleeth perform weak chest compressions on Hulk Hogan. “This is the most ridiculous show."
“You come here to watch crappy TV and be pissed at me?”
“The crappy TV is just a bonus.”
“So pissed at me really was the plan?”
She tips her head to look at him, the denim of her jeans is rough against the skin of her cheek. “You got shot. What did you expect?”
“Sympathy?”
“It wasn’t even a through and through.”
He laughs, one short burst of humor, but it makes his eyes sparkle, and the laugh lines appear around his eyes and mouth. He’s so goddamn handsome, even trussed up and post-surgical. His voice goes a little soft. “If my injuries are so unimpressive, what are you doing here?’
She blows out a breath through pursed lips and shakes out her hair. She scoots to the edge of the chair and leans forward, enough to make strong eye contact. “You scared the shit out of me today.” She doesn’t even realize she’s reached for him until his hand connects with hers. He threads their fingers together. He’s warm. She traces the pad of her middle finger over the blunt edges of his nails and then squeezes his hand with hers. “That was the first time I’ve heard a call over the radio about you being hurt.”
“Not a terrific feeling, is it?”
Bile rises up in her throat. She swallows. “No. It’s not.”
“I’m okay,” he says in a way that doesn’t feel patronizing. She knows he’ knows she’s knows he’s okay. It’s not patent reassurance. It’s something else. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but it feels older, like the things that made her think they were headed for something serious.
She looks at their hands twined together. She likes the way his skin feels, likes the warmth of him, the solidity. She wants to climb into the hospital bed with him, curl up against him, feel him breathe. She lets go of his hand, has to shake him off, just a little. She only looks at his face for a single heartbeat and can see the confusion plain in his ridiculously blue eyes.
“I can’t… I can’t do this like this, Tim. Not anymore.”
She sees him make the decision not to play dumb. He clenches his jaw against whatever time-buying retort comes naturally to him.
“We were supposed to try, you know? I took this job, left you in someone else’s hands, because we were supposed to try.” She stands up because she feels energy bubbling up inside her and she can’t yell at him, even though she feels kind of like she wants to. “All the hikes and the nights at the sports bar and both of us babysitting for Angela and Wesley…”
“Lucy, I—”
“I’m not done.” His mouth snaps closed. “You know that night we went to that dumb interpretive art thing Bailey invited us to? It was a date, Tim. Or it should have been. Bailey and Nolan, Angela and Wes, and you and me. I wore matching underwear. Got a little tipsy on fancy champagne. You didn’t even try to kiss me.
“And now you’re here. You were shot. And you know who they called?”
He makes strong eye contact. “You.”
“That’s right! They called me. And you know what I thought when I saw you sitting there on that gurney, covered in blood and bandages and pissed as hell that they made you ride in an ambulance?”
She blinks away a flood of tears, wipes away one that coalesces to roll down her cheek.
“I thought, why did he want them to call me?”
He makes a pained noise and swings his legs around so he can sit on the edge of the bed and face her. His head is still a little fuzzy though, she can tell because he doesn’t move very fast, and he sways a little once he’s upright. “Don’t say that… please don’t say that.” He takes a deep breath. “If something bad happens to me, Lucy, you’re the one I want to know. You’re the one I trust to make the hard decisions. And you’re the one I want to see first.”
He reaches for her with his free, non-dominant hand. He snags one of her beltloops and pulls her a couple of small steps closer. “I’m sorry I didn’t make the move when you wanted me too, and I’m not proud of it but damnit, Lucy. What if we don’t actually work?”
She nods, because she gets it. She’s had this same argument with herself a dozen times. He’s too important to her to lose him because she’s too young or too flighty or too much. All the chemistry in the world doesn’t change the fact that they’re very different people. And just because they’ve learned to adapt to one another doesn’t mean it’s all going to work out.
Then again, it’s been a long time now, and this is probably the worst miscommunication they’ve ever had. That’s got to be a good sign. Maybe Angela was right.
“Okay,” she says, slowly. “But, what if this is the real deal, Tim? Do you ever think about that?”
He tugs her one step closer, until she has to lean back a little to keep him in focus. “All the time.”
She looks down at him, his eyes are on her mouth. “This isn’t how I wanted our first kiss to go.”
“Our first kiss was in your living room,” he reminds her.
“Well,” she says, leaning in, “okay then.” She does kiss him, but it’s soft, the angle strange and the tilt of his body wrong because he’s injured and sitting on the edge of a hospital bed. But it doesn’t lessen the impact of the relief when she presses her lips against his, or the way the feel of his mouth on hers lights her body up from the deepest parts inside her. His arm wraps around her holding her tightly to the space in the vee of his legs.
He breaks the kiss and then presses his forehead against her sternum. She can feel the warmth of his deep breaths dampening the cotton of her shirt and the way his hand is kneading at her hip. She wraps her arms around him and holds him to her. How is this more than the kiss? But it is. She feels it, that thing she wanted back when she’d first seen him sitting in the emergency room.
Two sharp knocks at the door break the little bubble they’re surrounded in, and the night nurse comes in to check his wound and change his bandages. Lucy steps back and the nurse gives her directions to a little open-late coffee kiosk in the lobby.
Tim stops her before she leaves. “You can go home, Lucy. Or spend the night with Kojo.”
“Kojo’s fine,” she says. “And I’m not. I’ll take my chances with the kiosk coffee. Can I bring you anything?”
“You know what I like,” he says, wincing as the nurse releases the Velcro holding the sling in place.
“Girlfriend?” Lucy hears the nurse ask as she leaves the room.
Tim’s voice is low but lighter than she’s used to hearing. “Not yet.”
She can feel herself blush as she pushes the down button for the elevator.