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“He’s out like a light,” she tells Elliot softly, closing Noah’s bedroom door as gently as she can, her son safe and warm and snoring within. It’s an almost odd feeling, having him home after over two weeks without him; her brain had started to accept the cold empty feeling of her apartment without him in it.
Now though, now she has mess. Pencils and paints and drawings scattered on her dining table and across the counter where she’s managed to gouge herself a small space just large enough to deposit her phone and laptop, mess from the dinner she’d come home to find Elliot cooking, Noah playing sous chef. It was all so… domestic, and she’d felt her worn out self starting to recharge by proximity alone.
Her home feels vibrant, again, with her son and her… whatever Elliot is to her these days occupying it alongside her. She’s barely spoken to him for months, yet when she’d called him earlier, asked him to make the four hour round trip he hadn’t hesitated, not even for a second.
She hopes he wasn’t in the middle of something important at work; she has the feeling that he dropped everything to grab Noah for her, and she hopes he at least asked Ayanna for the time off.
“He’s had a hard week,” Elliot replies, pulling her from her reverie as he digs around in her cupboards, two mugs on her island waiting for him to make the coffee he’d promised.
“Yeah,” she nods tiredly, sitting down at the counter, watching him.
“So did you,” he comments with a pointed glance, still digging around. He looks both comfortable and out of place at the same time in her kitchen; relaxed with his shirt sleeves rolled up like he’s been coming here regularly. To look at him, you’d never know that it’s the first time he’s been here since she moved into this apartment fifteen months ago, after he’d inadvertently proven that the security at her old place was decidedly not up to scratch (what kind of security lets a clearly drugged, dishevelled man into the elevator anyway?).
The only tell is that he hasn’t got a clue where she keeps anything.
“Thank you Elliot,” she tells him. “Thank you for picking him up.”
“You’re family.” His tone is nonchalant, but the words, the words send a spark of heat through her heart, the warmth spreading through her entire body.
All I’ve ever wanted was a family, she thinks.
He’s still digging around in her cupboards, seems to have lost something, and she frowns. “What are you looking for?” She asks.
He shakes her empty sugar jar. It looks a lot smaller in his hand than it ever does in hers, and she swallows. “Sugar?” He says.
Tearing her eyes from his hand, his large hand, she gets up, glad of the momentary distraction. “It’s here,” she says, rounding the counter. “I have some here somewhere.”
She knows exactly where it is; the farthest cabinet from where she’d been sitting, but she needs a minute to calm herself down, force her brain to stop looking at him all big and muscular and here and Olivia for the love of God stop it focus on the sugar dammit pretend you’re looking for the sugar so she starts with the nearest one instead, feigns needing to look for it.
“Why didn’t you call me?” His voice, soft and gentle, tinged with hurt but more curiosity than anything else, sounds from behind her and she winces, pausing only briefly before resuming her fake sugar hunt.
“Because I knew you would try to protect me.” The admission comes out of her mouth before her brain catches up, and she silently berates herself. Stupid, she thinks. Don’t tell him that.
The truth is, ever since facing down her would-be killers, all she’s wanted was for him to do just that; charge in like the bull she knows he can be, tear everyone involved to shreds and just look after her.
But those ten years without him had hardened her; she’d picked herself up after Lewis, and this… this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that. So she hadn’t called him. She’s slightly surprised that he hadn’t heard, given the NYPD’s penchant for gossip, but Fin had quietly whispered that OCCB had been working some big cases, and even Ayanna hadn’t known until, she presumes, Elliot had told her earlier, if the Sergeant’s text message was anything to go by.
“And there’s something wrong with that?” Now he sounds hurt, and she grimaces, holds her nerve and doesn’t turn, moving along to the next cabinet, opening the door and poking around inside, wordlessly.
“I care for you,” he says next, and she almost crumbles. Swallowing thickly, she moves to the last cabinet, the one the sugar is actually in, and she’s running out of time, running out of excuses and fuck, she’s going to have to turn and face him and-
“Liv, look at me.”
Here goes… she turns, sugar in hand only to find him closer, a lot closer than she’d expected. “Here it is,” she says, holding it out like a shield, before dropping it onto the countertop.
He’s so close… his lips are right-
She’s leaning in before really thinking about it, her lips moving towards his as he dips his own head to catch her eye, saying her name twice and all of a sudden it’s awkward as their foreheads bump together. Fuck. She sighs, her temple tracing a path down the side of his face to his cheek as she comes to her senses. “Elliot…” She breathes. “Elliot… I want to… but I can’t.”
It’s not that she doesn’t trust him; she does, with her life, with her son. But with her heart? The thing inside her chest that has been broken so many times, once by Elliot himself… she fears if he broke it again she might not be able to put it back together this time, and as she shifts her stance, their lips coming perilously close to brushing, part of her thinks why not just take the damn chance?
“Why not?” He asks, hurt in his eyes.
Because I’m terrified, she thinks, shaking her head, pulling back, breathing out heavily. “Because,” she inhales. “What if it doesn’t work out?” She says on the exhale, peering up at him through her lashes God he’s so tall…
He squints, like the thought had never occurred to him. “And what if things work out?”
Yeah, she thinks as she leans in. What if they do… “Elliot,” their foreheads touch again all too briefly. “I’m not ready for this.” Their cheeks brush as she pulls away, her hand falling away from his shoulder and when did I put that there? She wonders. “I’m not ready for this.” There are so many things you don’t know, she thinks sadly as she steps back, once, twice, three times before her back hits the counter, her shoulder finding the fridge. “I’m not ready for this.”
“Liv…”
He doesn’t step towards her, and she’s grateful for the distance he’s keeping, the space he’s respecting as she wraps her arms around herself. “You know… Duarte was…” Killed. Slaughtered. Butchered… no word seems to fully encompass what happened to her fellow Captain, and she sees Elliot’s tiny wince; he’d clearly heard about that at least.
She lets out a dry chuckle. “A half hour before,” she confides. “We were in a bar, and he was trying to get me to bring him back here.” She shakes her head. “I just keep thinking… if I had…” If I’d taken him to bed, fucked him like he wanted… “Maybe he’d still be alive.” Maybe we’d have gotten wind of the hit before they got the chance to take him out, maybe we could’ve saved him.
Elliot’s facial journey is something else, and despite everything she finds herself trying not to smirk. “Did you uh,” he chokes out. “Did you want to?”
She admires his restraint; the jealousy - even of a dead man, Jesus Elliot - there in his eyes but not in his voice. “Well he’s dead, so clearly not,” she deadpans.
Bites her lip as the sorrow hits hard. “You know… he had a lot of faults El.” Keeping that rape tree to himself the biggest one, she thinks. “A lot of them. But he didn’t deserve that.”
“No-one does.”
She sniffs, nodding in agreement. “And I just keep thinking… two weeks ago that was almost me, and I… I…” The air in the room is too thick, suddenly, and she grasps at her face, covering her eyes with her hands as the tears spill over, the grief for the man she’d formed an, albeit begrudging, friendship with hitting hard.
Her fridge is a lot of things, solid and strong but it’s also slippery, and she feels herself start to slide down in the direction of the floor.
She doesn’t hit it.
Solid muscle wraps around her instead; Elliot’s arms catching her before she can wind up in a heap on her kitchen floor, tugging her up, against him as she starts to sob openly, grabbing at him blindly, her arms winding around his neck as he hauls her bodily to her feet, holding her tight, rubbing her back as she cries.
This is what I needed, she thinks as he holds on, her face tucked into his neck, her tears soaking into the soft fabric of his button-down. This right here.
I’ve always been so afraid, she thinks as he shushes her, swaying gently with her in his arms right there, in the middle of her kitchen. Afraid that the fantasy I’ve had in my head for… a couple of decades, won’t match up to the reality but… what if it does? What if it’s… better?
Maybe I should just… take the leap and find out.