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Technically, she wasn’t supposed to be exercising yet.
If Sonny found out that Amanda was using her day off to go for a run along the West Side Highway, he would go ballistic. Then again, despite his strict adherence to all of her post-surgery instructions, Amanda didn’t exactly hear him protesting when they had sex two days before she was technically allowed to (which she had smugly pointed out after the fact). There had to be some flexibility (pun intended), she had reasoned, doe-eyed and breathless as their naked bodies lay intertwined for the first time in what felt like forever. She was well-aware - painfully aware - that she was supposed to reintroduce physically taxing things gradually, but Amanda had always been an all-or-nothing type of person.
She had been back to work for several weeks and feeling better in all of the ways that mattered, so that day she had made the executive decision to do whatever the hell she wanted. And what she wanted to do was get back to running. She was in therapy, but getting outside and hitting the pavement was really where her mind felt free. Amanda had been a track star as a teenager, a real athlete, and she still craved that high as an adult. It was never the acknowledgement from peers or coaches that she was after, it was the test of her own endurance she got a thrill from and the peace she found in the concentration required to push past discomfort.
Her right knee liked to remind her that she wasn’t in high school anymore. After four and a half miles, Amanda collapsed onto the nearest free surface: the edge of a bench. She stretched out her aching knee, letting the heel of her sneaker dig into the grass as the muscles and tendons of her hamstring and quadricep twitched beneath the black fabric of her leggings. In a way she was grateful for the pain in her leg because it meant that the wound in her abdomen wasn’t screaming for attention. It was also distracting her from the intense burning in her lungs and at her sternum, which alerted her to the fact that she had lost fitness from weeks of barely being able to move. Focusing on her knee, which had been betraying her for years now, made Amanda less angry.
She scraped her fingers through the tendrils of hair that had escaped her messy ponytail, pushing them back against her scalp while she tried to steady her breathing. She looked out at people running along the waterfront and for a moment it was hard to hear anything else other than the sound of her own heartbeat. Her eyes flickered to her left and immediately widened when she realized that she wasn’t alone on the bench: a young woman was sitting beside her. Her head was downcast and she appeared tearful as she fiddled with her phone in her lap. She was beautiful, Amanda thought, with striking features and long braids, wearing a camel-colored sweater dress that she would like to have for herself. If she hadn’t looked so downtrodden, Amanda would have asked her where she had bought it.
“Hey, uh, are you okay?” Amanda asked her tentatively.
“Huh?” She quickly wiped her tears away with her knuckles and shook her head. She didn’t look over at Amanda. “Oh, yes, I’m fine.”
“Y’sure?” Amanda’s badge was in the pocket of her jacket; she never left home without it. Soon, it would no longer be a part of her, but now, she was keenly aware of it as she studied this woman’s gloomy features.
“Yes,” she answered quickly. Then, after a beat of silence, she added flatly, “I just got dumped.”
“Oh.” That was not a case for SVU – and likely none of Amanda’s damn business. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright.” The woman fiddled with her phone in her lap and sighed. “It’s always the same thing,” she went on irritably, the sadness leaving her face, replaced by the sharpness of anger. “It always falls apart over the same thing…”
Okay, I’ll bite. “What do you mean?”
“I just, I don’t believe in marriage,” she explained. “I think it’s archaic.”
Amanda’s eyes darted down to her hand – her engagement ring glinted in the afternoon sunlight. “Oh?”
“My last serious relationship – before this one – I was with this wonderful guy,” the woman went on, appearing wistful as she gazed out toward the water in front of them. “He was caring, compassionate, so intelligent. In the beginning I thought maybe he was ‘the one.’”
“But he wanted to get married?” Amanda guessed.
The woman’s face hardened again. “I’m not going to be possessed by anybody. I’m my own person and I always will be.”
Amanda kept her features neutral even though she felt the intensity of this woman’s response in her own gut. “I’m, uh, not an expert here,” she began cautiously, “but is it possible to look at it a little differently? See it as more of a partnership, instead of one person taking ownership of another?"
She narrowed her eyes on Amanda. “That’s spoken like somebody who isn’t considering the deep patriarchal roots of the institution,” she said sharply, but a second later she seemed to deflate. “And it sounds exactly like something he’d say.”
Amanda leaned back against the hard panels of the bench and let her eyes drift up toward the bright blue sky as she thought. “I never used to think much of marriage either, really,” she admitted to the total stranger. “For a different reason.”
“And did some prince charming change your mind?” she sneered.
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from saying something snarky in return. Sitting up straight again, she met the woman's eyes. She looked like she was made of stone; the brief flash of vulnerability had disappeared. Amanda wondered if that was how she used to look - how she still looked, sometimes. “I’m not easily charmed. I changed my own mind.”
“I’m not changing my mind about this,” she insisted, shaking her head emphatically. “He was never changing his, either. I guess in a way I really admired that about him, even if I’ll never subscribe to the belief myself. Dominick was very Catholic, from a big Staten Island family, three sisters, and he always dreamed about having the ‘white picket fence.’”
The breath caught in Amanda’s chest. Her eyes took in her new acquaintance’s face, desperately searching for an ounce of familiarity, but she couldn’t identify a single detail. The man she was describing sounded eerily like her Dominick. If so, a mental puzzle piece slotted into place: was this Nicole? At first, all Amanda had ever known about Nicole had been in regards to her sister’s SVU case. Later, Sonny had offered up details about her in the interest of being honest (because, God, he was always so damn honest), and she had laughed their stark differences off. Now, sitting right next to her, she was The Nicole that was supposed to accompany Sonny to Fin and Phoebe’s almost-wedding.The Nicole whose staunch views created a space for Amanda to finally muster up the courage to kiss Sonny herself - and ultimately change the trajectory of their relationship forever.
Amanda began to inch away from Nicole on the bench. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
Nicole shook her head again. “I didn’t. It’s Nicole.”
“Nicole,” she repeated slowly. Her eyes narrowed on Nicole’s profile and she felt a hot prickle of jealousy. There was a question on the tip of her tongue - a juvenile, petty question that came from a place of immaturity and insecurity. She didn’t want to ask it, she didn’t want to be that girl, but… “You and this guy… you guys still talk?”
“Dominick and I?” Nicole looked over at Amanda, confused. “No, never. It ended awhile ago.” She heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Plus, he used to be NYPD, and I swear he had a thing for his old partner.”
X
“You never brought her around.”
When Amanda and Sonny were sprawled across their bed much later that night, unwinding from their separate days, she revealed to Sonny she had bumped into Nicole.
“It was kinda hard,” Sonny answered her.
He was pink-faced and damp-haired from his shower, all of his limbs long and loose atop the comforter. He had played basketball with a bunch of guys from the DA’s office after work, but still managed to make it through the door in time to assemble a dinner that didn’t come from a box or the back of the freezer. Prior to his arrival, Amanda had picked Jesse and Billie up from school – something that only happened occasionally, given her schedule – and eventually they had all eaten together like the kind of family unit Nicole found horrifically oppressive.
“What d’you mean?” Flat on her back on the mattress, she gingerly stretched her legs out in front of her, careful to disguise her wince at the twinge in her knee and the tug in her abdomen.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sonny glaring at her. “You really shouldn’t have gone on a run, Amanda.”
Her lower lip puffed out in a pout. “How’d you know?”
He sat up and dangled his phone in front of her face, showcasing the ‘fitness’ widget where her name shone brightly at the top of the list. “You logged it on your Apple Watch, genius. We share activity, remember?”
“Damn,” she muttered. Six months ago, she definitely would have been sharp enough to remember that pesky detail. She was so distracted lately, between her injury, pulling herself together enough to return to work, and figuring out how she was going to transition out of SVU. She waved her hand at him dismissively. “Answer my other question.”
Sonny adjusted a couple of pillows behind his back against the headboard and lazily slumped into them. He thumbed through his phone for a moment, then put it aside on the nightstand and focused his gaze back on Amanda. He arched an eyebrow. “How could I bring her around – or do anything – when I was always with you?”
“Oh.” It was the only thing she could say, because she knew he was right. His tone was matter-of-fact - light, even - not bitter or accusatory. They had spent eight years working together, but she had asked a lot of him outside of that, too. An anxious kind of guilt began to creep into Amanda’s chest. “Is that, should I, I mean is it my-“
“Is it because of you that I missed my shot at bein' with Nicole?” Sonny supplied. He appeared contemplative, then shrugged. “Nah. It was a piece of why we didn’t work, I guess.”
This was morphing into a more serious conversation than Amanda originally anticipated. She thought maybe she could tease him about Nicole a bit, then put on the Mets game, followed by an episode or two of Love Is Blind until they fell asleep. Instead, she was feeling more and more nervous as they spoke about a woman who may have had different views than Amanda, but was otherwise beautiful and intelligent and successful and–
“I wanna say I was all-in with her, but I wasn’t,” Sonny went on. He shifted onto his side so their bodies were parallel, his head resting in his hand. “I couldn’t be when I’d always loved you.”
In an instant, his words made Amanda feel like she had just gone careening off the edge of a rollercoaster’s highest peak. The information wasn’t new, but she still felt overwhelmed by it. Her hands flew up to her face, palms covering her eyes like a little kid who didn’t want to see the scary part of a movie, and she could feel the warmth radiating off of her cheeks. In some aspects, it was still terrifying to be loved the way Sonny loved her, but she would gladly walk through that fear if it meant she got to live each one of her days with him. “Oh, jeez, Carisi…” A hidden smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. I swear he had a thing for his old partner…
She felt him squeeze her hip. “The marriage hang-up was a sticking point, yeah,” he admitted sheepishly.
Her grin evaporated. A realization came over Amanda all at once, like a tidal wave. She struggled to sit up, ignoring the ache in her stomach and the burning in her legs. She looked at Sonny, her brow knitted together with worry of her own making. “What if she hadn’t felt that way? What if she wanted the same things you did?” Amanda didn’t let him answer before her next thought came tumbling out of her, voice barely a whisper as she told him, “I would have waited too long. I would have had to let you go.”
Sonny’s eyes met hers as a shadow crossed his face. Then he sat up, too, and he carefully maneuvered her legs so they were draped over his lap. He set a hand on her knee, the one that hurt, and the warmth of his big palm felt good against the battered tendons and joints. “Yeah, you would’ve.” He gave her a wan smile as he reminded her, “I had to let you go a couple times, though.”
Nodding solemnly, she leaned her body into the sturdiness of his, her head resting against his shoulder. “I’m here now,” she said meekly, covering his hand with her own.
Sonny extended his free arm to pull her in closer. “You know what my mother says?”
“Huh?” Amanda murmured into the damp fabric of his t-shirt.
She felt his lips at the crown of her head and heard the smile in his voice as he told her, “’what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.’”