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She watches him move around her kitchen, so easy, so effortlessly, like no time has passed at all. It may as well be her old apartment - the one he was so familiar with, the one haunted with memories of him long after he left before she finally moved out. Memories of orange juice and him trying to make her tea she has long since pushed away, rushing to the forefront of her mind now.
Which means that you drove all the way uptown from the Queensboro Bridge, dropped off the car, picked up the Sedan, turned around all the way back downtown to get here. That’s a lot of neighborhood my friend.
Stop acting like a cop.
~
Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll figure it out. You rest. You got anyone taking care of you?
No, I’m fine.
Yeah, sure you are. You’re burning up.
101. Down from 102 last night. I’m on the mend.
I’m going to make you some tea.
“What are you looking for?” she asks, trying to shake off their past once she realizes he’s aimlessly rummaging through her cabinets.
“Sugar?” he asks, holding up an empty container.
“It’s here,” she says, moving to help him search. “I have some here somewhere.”
He catches her off guard just as she pulls open a cabinet door. “Why didn’t you call me?”
She freezes, her hand wrapped around something she knows is definitely not the sugar. Oh, they’re doing this? This is a conversation he actually wants to have?
What about your kids? What about me?
She answers him without looking at him, her gaze focused on her kitchen cabinets as she moves to the other side of them. “Because I knew you would try to protect me.”
Blink your lights when you get inside.
“And there’s something wrong with that?”
Look, we both chose each other over the job. I’ll never let that happen again. Otherwise, we can’t be partners.
“I care for you,” he adds when she doesn’t immediately respond.
Oh they are really doing this. She’s just supposed to be looking for sugar for him. Not getting assaulted by memories of conversations past while he tries once again to tell her he has these giant feelings. Ones she completely understands but…now?
Nope, nope, nope maybe if she ignores him this conversation will just go away. Just move on to another cabinet. Where is the damn sugar, anyway?
“Liv, look at me.”
She can’t. She can’t. If she looks at him she will break. She can’t.
Oh fuck the sugar’s in this one, now what? Her hand curls around it. She can’t stall any longer or that soft ‘Liv’ will turn into a slightly more forceful ‘Olivia.’ And somehow she’s ended up back at that stage in their lives where she really hates it when he doesn’t just call her Liv.
“Here it is,” she says, pulling it down and turning to find him alarmingly close to her. When did he move over here?
She makes the mistake of making eye contact with him. She can’t do this. It’s too much. It’s too -
“Liv.”
She could collapse against him right here and now. Throw her arms around his neck and pull him in tight. Let her lips finally meet his after all of these years of wondering.
“Elliot.”
She has to use his full name to keep her voice from cracking around the single syllable of ‘El.’
“Elliot, I want to.” His forehead is pressed against her temple. If she could just turn her face. Her entire body is screaming at her to do it. 12 years . No, not just 12 years. Twice that. 24 years . She’s wanted this. For him to hold her, kiss her, touch her. She feels like she’s breathing in his air as their noses brush together. Oh god, it’s too much, she can’t, she can’t, she can’t. “I want to, but I can’t.”
Oh, she actually said that out loud that time, didn’t she? Knocked the air right out of her own lungs. Shit, shit, shit.
“Why not?” he asks, pulling back.
Of course, he knows. He knows she’s also had these feelings .
You’re the longest relationship I’ve ever had with a man. Who else would put up with me?
So why is she turning him down, now? Kathy has been dead for three years. Noah is asleep. What the fuck is wrong with her?
But she knows that too. It’s the fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing him again after she’s had all of him .
“Because,” she whispers, pressing her forehead against his again. “What if it doesn’t work out?”
“What if it does?”
“Elliot.”
She’s itching to touch him, to just wrap herself around him and never let go.
“No, Liv, I need you to talk to me. What are you afraid of?”
If she opens her eyes to look at him, they’ll be wet with tears. She knows it. She was not ready for this. Not tonight. Not after the week she’s had.
“Olivia.”
“I’m not ready,” she says, quietly, backing away from him, finding some breathing room that isn’t also his. “I’m not ready.”
“You think we’re going to fuck this up that badly?”
She shakes her head. “I think that people always leave.”
The expression on his face shifts. “And by people you mean me.”
She shakes her head again. “No. Not just you. Everyone. Cabot. Novak. You. And then Munch and Cragen retired. My new partner who came in after you left. Barba became a defense attorney, Carisi became a prosecutor. Ed died. Simon died. Rollins just quit. Duarte just died mere hours ago. Hell, even Noah has these new family members he’s all excited about.” She draws in a shaky breath. If she wasn’t crying before, she sure as hell is now. “Every time I get close to someone, they leave. If I keep you at arm’s distance this time, I -”
He does not follow her cue to keep her at arms distance and immediately pulls her back up against him. She should fight him on it, but she doesn’t want to. Fear be damned, she’s so tired of fighting. She lets her head fall into the crook of his neck, her arms wrapping around his shoulders.
“I fucked up,” he says into her hair. “And I’ve done it over and over again and I’m sorry. But I meant what I said to you that night in the hospital. Seeing you, hearing your voice, I would have stayed.”
“So then why didn’t you?” she asks, her head still turned away from him, even with her body pressing closer against his.
“I was trying to save my marriage.”
She pulls back to look at him then. “By moving to Italy? Without telling me? Quitting your job without even telling me? And don’t even come for me about my stint in Computer Crimes or when I went undercover as Persephone. This was not that. You knew how much I depended on you and you left me with nothing anyway. I respected your marriage, Elliot. I never purposely put myself in the way. If you needed to move to another continent to stop thinking about me -”
“That is not at all what happened.”
“Well then?”
“You know IAB has had a vendetta against me for years.”
“Tucker?” she smirks. “I think he was just jealous.”
“Of what?”
“Nothing,” she shakes her head. “He made you move to Italy?”
He sighs. “They didn’t want to admit that Jenna was a clean shooting.”
“But she had just shot Sister Peg and -”
“Liv, I - she was just a kid. And I - I didn’t want to do the job anymore. Special Victims. Hadn’t wanted to for a while at that point. How you and Fin are still there after all of this time…Saints, the both of you.”
“Elliot -”
“The only thing that was keeping me at SVU was you. I stayed because you needed me to stay. If I had come to you with this, you would have given me one look, that same one you’re giving me right now, and I would have stayed. But I was holding you back. You took your Sergeant’s exam what, a year or two after I left? Now you’re Captain. There’s no way in hell you’d want to be my boss. Italy was its own thing. After the IAB investigation ended, I needed somewhere to go. I still wanted to work. Italy was presented to me as an opportunity and I took it. And it did save my marriage. Kath and I were closer during those years than we’d been in a long time. But you’ve got to understand that I never stopped thinking about you. I need you to understand that yes, I miss Kathy, but at the same time I’m ready to see what this thing is we’ve been tip-toeing around for all of these years. I want to know you again. All of you.”
“You should have told me,” she says quietly.
“I couldn’t.”
She scoffs at that, stepping backwards out of his embrace. “You let nine years go by without a single word. You couldn’t have called once? Sent me an e-mail or a letter that wasn’t ghost-written by your wife? Do you know how many nights I spent wondering what I did wrong? You don’t just disappear on someone you care about like that. So, forgive me, but I seem to have developed trust issues. Which, to be fair, I was already terrible at in the first place.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. You’re right.”
“I know I am.”
“How do I make it up to you? What can I do to earn your trust back?”
“Get the last 12 years of my life back.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but then closes it, thinking. He tries again. “Is that my only option? Because I could watch a bunch of romantic comedies for inspiration and see if I could figure out a way to recreate the last 12 years in some cheesy montage but…do you think Rollins would help me?”
Oh, this man, she swears.
She sighs. “Like I said, I want to, but I’m not ready.”
“And I heard you. But this whole not telling each other when we get jumped by a gang thing we’ve got going on right now? That’s not working toward anything. We have agreed here tonight that we want this. Each other. Romantically. Then we have to start talking to each other again. Like we used to.”
She huffs, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m not going to show up on your doorstep at 3AM and leave my kid alone.”
“Ha. You’re funny.”
She lets herself smirk at him before continuing to bring her gaze quite literally anywhere else. She can still feel his arms around her. Wants them to be there again. But she’s afraid she’s set her boundary and now she has to stay in it.
“So what do you want to talk about?” she asks. “Work? Our kids? That sludge Munch tried to pass off as coffee in the breakroom?”
“I stand by my opinion that it was not actually coffee. And that was before I became an Italian coffee snob.”
“Please, and you used to give me crap for drinking tea.”
“There was a flower in your cup, who does that?”
“It was the tea bag! How bad is your night vision? I really shouldn’t have been letting you drive.”
“I’m an excellent driver.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“I am!”
“I’ll call Bell right now and ask her opinion. I’ll do it. She’ll tell me.”
“There is no reason to get her involved in this.”
“You know what she's going to say, don’t you? She’s going to side with me. Do you ever let her drive?”
“She drives all the time.”
“With you in the car?”
“Weren’t we talking about Munch’s coffee? How’d we end up picking on my driving skills?”
“You wanted us to talk like we used to,” she shrugs. “We had a strong banter volley back in the day.”
He grins, stepping back toward her, reaching out to place his hands on her shoulders. “Liv.”
She meets his gaze for a split second and then drops it. “I can’t start with the hard stuff, the heavy stuff. If you want to do this, you have to let me go at my own pace, and find our rhythm again. You missed…a lot. And I just can’t dive in head first. Or heart first, I suppose. Give me my friend back to start. My partner.”
I’m Detective Benson and this is my partner Detective Stabler.
“You sure you want that guy back? He had a bit of an anger problem.”
“Oh, did that magically get cured in Europe? I can confirm with Bell-”
“I forgot how much of a smartass you are.”
She smirks at him. “No, you didn’t.”
He skims his fingertips down her arms, reaching for her hands and twining them together with his own. “I’ve missed you, Benson.”
“God, when was the last time you called me that?”
He hums. “Five seconds ago?”
“Now who’s the smartass?”
“Just playing along into our ‘like we used to’ theme here, so sue me.”
She shakes her head, squeezing his hands before releasing them from hers. “Did you want something with this sugar now that I found it?”
“I don’t even remember what I was making.”
“You’re still thinking about kissing me, aren’t you?”
“A little bit yeah,” he laughs, rubbing at the back of his head. “But I’ll wait. The ball is in your court, Liv. Whenever you’re ready. I’ll be here, continuing to judge your tea drinking.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re lucky they didn’t send you to London.”
He grins. “Wanna grab lunch tomorrow? If you’re not swamped.”
“For you? I suppose I could pencil you in.”
“Good. We’ll see if I can still remember your Chinese food order.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
“Yeah? What’s the winner get?”
She grins, reaching back for the sugar to put it away. “I’ll figure it out after I win.”