Work Text:
Summer hits New York City like a curse.
The air is thick and muggy the minute they step outside; Olivia shrugs out of her blazer immediately, her whole face wrinkled in displeasure, smooth tanned arms on display as she stands by the passenger’s side and waits for Elliot to fumble to with the key.
“Christ,” Elliot mutters to himself when he slides into his seat, the inside of the car so hot he can barely breathe. Olivia’s got her window rolled down as soon as he gets the key in the ignition, practically, her other hand reaching up to hold her hair up from the back of her neck.
“I swear it gets worse every year,” she mutters.
Elliot’s shirt is clinging to the small of his back, damp with sweat. He grunts his agreement as he eases the car out of park.
They’re answering a call from a couple of uniforms — some girl’s body dumped behind a church, a bad sign from the start — and Elliot really isn’t looking forward to whatever they’re gonna find, his mood already sour from the heat. The kids were snapping at each other over breakfast this morning, sweaty and irritable, and when he showed up at the station Olivia wasn’t faring much better, sniping at Munch about — Elliot doesn’t even know what. Something about Munch’s handwriting, but he didn’t wanna ask. Olivia was scowling about it the whole way to the car.
Could be worse, though. At least he’s not partnered with Munch, Elliot reasons with himself, grimacing as he waits for an opening in the left lane. Olivia’s way better at remembering to reapply deodorant, for one thing, when it starts getting hot like this. She smells better just in general, and as an added bonus she’s never once brought up an opinion on the JFK assassination. She’s good people.
She’s a good partner.
*
“Witness discovered the body in the dumpster this morning,” one of the uniforms informs them on their arrival. Poor bastard’s pink-cheeked and miserable-looking, his whole face damp with sweat. “Jane Doe, probably underage. We didn’t make sure or anything, but it’s looking like sexual assault.”
Olivia’s got a hand under her nose before they’re even close enough to know what they’re looking at, wincing; a dead body’s a dead body, but at least in the winter they freeze before they start to smell.
“Jesus,” she mutters. She shrugged her blazer back on before they got to the scene and judging by the look on her face, she regrets it. Elliot wonders if she’s gonna hurl. She hasn’t yet, but it happens to everyone at least once.
It was a kid, Elliot’s first time, chopped up and left on the side of the road like garbage, and he remembers it clear as anything: staggering off until he was far enough not to disturb the crime scene before he lost his lunch. Hands braced on his knees, staring down at the pavement, trying to hold back the next wave. When he made it back his partner at the time handed him a breath mint, silent, and never said anything about it either way.
It was summer then, too.
Elliot comes up next to Olivia, wincing when he gets a good look at the body. This part never gets any easier. The girl’s face is round with youth, sweet-looking — or at least she was, probably, when her cheeks still had any life in them. She’s got no visible wounds from the waist up, head and face unmarred, pristine except the blood on her skirt — and even that’s been pulled back down to cover her properly, a useless attempt to preserve her nonexistent modesty, as though the blood seeping through it doesn’t ruin the tableau.
“Not a stranger,” Olivia mutters, gesturing towards the careful way she’s been arranged.
“Good call,” Elliot nods. Olivia’s eyes flick to his, a little wary, but he keeps his face blank and the moment passes, the wrinkle between her brows smoothing out. She was prickly about compliments, at first, like she was worried he was just being patronizing, but lately she’s been easing up. “Boyfriend, you think? Older guy?”
“Could be,” Olivia says, not sounding committed to either idea. Elliot isn’t really either, this early. They don’t even know the girl’s name yet. “Could be a family member.”
Family member is the most likely, but Elliot doesn’t want to say that out loud. Feels like a curse. He settles for a curt nod, mouth twisting into a grimace. Olivia sees it but doesn’t call him on it, a dark look in her own eyes.
“Let’s let the M.E. take a look,” Elliot says, breaking the moment, and Olivia nods and steps back. “Go from there.”
*
“I’ll know more after I’ve actually examined her,” the medical examiner — Shelley, on loan from Brooklyn for a few weeks, Olivia had told him last week — warns, obviously unimpressed with the way Elliot’s already crowding her for details.
“Preliminary impressions, then,” Elliot pushes, unswayed by her reticence. It’s what’s gotten him here, that pushiness; Kathy’s always sighing that he never knows when to let up.
Next to him Olivia’s silent. Her eyes flick between the two of them, watching, waiting to step in if necessary, but she lets him take the lead for now.
“Rape’s not out of the question, but I’m pretty sure we’re looking at a botched home abortion,” Shelley says frankly. Elliot blinks, taking that in; next to him, Olivia looks just as shocked.
“You think that’s the cause of death?” Olivia cuts in, curiosity getting the best of her.
“No other marks on her, so yeah. Looks like she bled out from the injury,” Shelley confirms, and Olivia’s standing close enough that Elliot can hear her throat stick when she swallows.
“Is it possible it was self-inflicted?”
Elliot freezes; that wasn’t what he would have expected. He glances over at her again, trying to get a sense of where she’s at, but Olivia’s face is blank as she asks, nothing to give her away.
Shelley frowns, thinking it over, then shrugs.
“I’d say it’s possible, but not likely,” she says slowly. “The angle, the amount of force … I don’t know.”
It makes Elliot wince, picturing it, but Olivia doesn’t seem phased.
“Maybe some kind of … I don’t know, psychotic episode?” she presses, insistent, and Shelley shrugs again.
“Possible,” she agrees, sounding just as skeptical as she did the first time. “When the tox screen comes back we’ll be able to tell if she was drugged first, that’ll give us a better idea.”
Olivia catches her bottom lip between her teeth, thinking.
“Thanks,” she says, after a moment, offering Shelley a friendly, if distant, smile.
“Anytime,” Shelley says. “Now get outta here and let me work.”
*
“You really think she did it to herself?” he asks later, in the car, heading back to check for witnesses at the scene. No one’s been reported missing who matches her description, so it’s door to door until they get something better to work with.
“Maybe,” Olivia says. It’s a half-hearted response, and her eyes are focused out the window.
She’s holding something back.
“Liv,” Elliot presses. Look at me, he doesn’t say, so she doesn’t look. “What are you thinking?”
“Just — it makes sense, doesn’t it?” Olivia’s voice is strange, faraway. “She has that baby, she thinks about what happened to her every time she looks at it.”
It.
“We don’t even know if she was raped,” Elliot reminds her, because he doesn’t know where to start with the rest of it. How sure Olivia sounded when she said it, like she’s heard it before. Maybe she has, Elliot guesses, only she hasn’t been in the unit that long, all things considered. As far as he can remember, this is the first time it’s come up directly. They’ve been lucky: no pregnancies since she started, at least not until this one.
“That girl was what, fourteen? Fifteen?” Olivia’s voice is icy, insistent.
Elliot winces; it’s not really an argument he wants to see to its conclusion. He doesn’t actually even disagree with her — it’s possible she got knocked up by some pimply fourteen year old in her eighth-grade class, sure, but neither of them think that’s really what happened.
“If she wanted an abortion, she could have gone to a doctor,” he tries, but that’s weak, too, and he knows it.
“Fourteen,” Olivia repeats. “What would you do, if it was one of your daughters?”
“Don’t ask that,” Elliot snaps, on edge just thinking about it.
“You’d be mad, right? Furious.”
“What are you trying to say right now?” Elliot bites out, knowing she’s goading him and pissed that it’s working. “That I’d kill my own kid, if some jackass knocked her up?”
That he’d try to — but Elliot can’t even finish the thought, not in the context of his own girls. He swallows hard against it, disturbed.
“Of course not,” Olivia says immediately, and when he glances over at her she has the nerve to look shocked at the accusation.
“Then what?”
“I’m just saying you’d be furious, any dad would be furious. And if it were someone else, someone who couldn’t control himself, maybe — ”
Elliot doesn’t really like that implication much better — that he could do it, even if he wouldn’t. That the possibility is there.
That Olivia thinks the possibility is there.
“Nah,” he says, after a few moments, clearing his throat to keep his voice steady. “It doesn’t match up. What happened to her — that wasn’t someone losing control. No marks on her face, no bruises? No.”
Olivia pauses, considering.
“It could have been the mother,” she offers, and now her voice sounds different than it did before. Flatter.
When Elliot glances over at her she looks normal, her eyes on the road in front of her, but the way she doesn’t look over to meet his gaze is a sign in itself. Whatever she’s thinking about right now, she doesn’t want Elliot to see it.
“Could have been,” he agrees, wary. “We gotta find her first, though.”
“Search’ll turn her up,” Olivia says vaguely, eyes still on the road — and from the way she’s focused, you’d think she was the one driving the damn car.
Elliot snorts a vague agreement.
There’s silence for a few blocks, and then —
“Would you let her do it? If she were one of your girls?”
It takes Elliot a second to catch up with what she’s asking, and then he frowns when he gets it.
“I’m Catholic, Liv,” he reminds her, distracted by the glare of the sun as it cuts through the windshield. He flips down the visor but it does nothing; the sun’s hitting too low. “C’mon.”
“So? You can’t have your own opinion?”
That’s Liv, he thinks wryly. Always ready to call bullshit.
She isn’t wrong, is the thing; the truth is that if it was one of his daughters Elliot thinks he would look the other way, if it came down to that, let Kathy take her to the clinic and never say a word. Maybe even drive her himself, if it came to that. When Kathy got pregnant with Maureen they’d never even considered something like that, never even laid the option on the table, but that was different. He and Kathy were in love. Under the paralyzing fear there had been awe, that they had created life. Even if they didn’t know how to do it right, even if it scared them both shitless — they had wanted that baby. Their baby.
But if the situation were different, if the baby came from violence instead of love — yeah, Elliot would look the other way. And even more damning, he thinks maybe God should do the same thing. But it’s one thing to think something like that, and another thing entirely to say it out loud.
He sighs and looks over, ready to snap at her to mind her own business, only instead of staring at the road she’s staring at him, now, and the look on her face pulls him up short. It isn’t what he expected at all: not stubborn, not pissed, but hurt, almost. Searching. Like whatever he’s gonna say next really matters.
The problem is Elliot’s got no idea what it is she wants him to say. No idea what she’s searching for. He can read her real good, usually, but they’ve wandered out too far, somehow, past any of the usual sign posts, and it’s weird, feeling like this with Olivia. Elliot never would have expected it, when he first saw her — too young and too pretty, with a stubborn tilt to her chin that spelled trouble — but most of the time he gets her, he really does. From the first time he saw her jaw clench in anger, he’s felt like he knows her. Knows what she’s thinking, knows what she’s gonna say before she says it.
Most of the time.
“Not my job to have an opinion,” is what he settles on. It’s a cop-out and they both know it; Olivia breathes out a slow sigh, unimpressed, and turns to aim her gaze out the window. It’s the same move Maureen pulls when he picks her up too early from a friend’s house, and it pisses him off but it makes him wonder, too. Did Olivia try the same shit with her own dad, what — ten, fifteen years ago? Did she turn away when he disappointed her, sigh and look out the window like his very presence offended her?
He tries to picture it — Olivia in the front seat, complaining about missing the end of whatever asinine show she and her friends were watching, whining that everyone will be talking about it tomorrow without her and refusing to look her dad in the eye — but somehow it doesn’t quite fit. He can’t picture Olivia as a kid at all; the lines of her face are too harsh, the look in her eyes too dark. Like she’s always been as old as she is right now.
*
“You’d think these apartments all had professional sound-proofing, the way these people clam up,” Olivia mutters after the eighth — ninth? — door turns up nothing, one hand coming up to scrub at her forehead.
Elliot grunts his agreement, coming to stand next to her on the sidewalk. It’s getting dark for real now, a twilight grey he associates with the long summer evenings of his childhood. He can hear a group of kids playing up at the end of the street, oblivious to what’s happened; every time one of them shrieks he catches himself glancing up, checking that they’re all still fine. When he looks back at her Olivia’s got a pinched expression on her face that says she’s hungry and not gonna say anything about it; he lets out a sigh, casting his glance down the sidewalk.
“It’s not looking like a serial,” he says after a moment. “We can probably take a break for tonight, get something to eat. Start fresh tomorrow.”
Olivia’s face pinches even further like he’s offended her, obviously still pissed off from their earlier conversation in the car.
“Come on,” he says, quieter this time, cutting her off before she can say something that’ll sting. “Maybe Munch and Jeffries are having better luck, huh? Maybe they’ll have something for us.”
Olivia chews on that for a second, bottom lip caught between her teeth, before she gives in and nods. Elliot lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, relieved.
Back at the car he walks ahead to get the door for her, and Olivia rolls her eyes a little but she lets him do it, slides into the front seat without complaint. She rests her elbow on the ledge below the window, this time, her chin on her palm and her body turned towards his.
“Wanna pick something up?” he asks as he switches on the car lights, flicking his gaze up to check the rearview.
“It’s getting late,” Olivia tries, dodging the question. “Your kids are probably waiting up for you, I’ll just order in when I get home.”
“What, you mean you’re not gonna cook yourself a three-course meal?”
Olivia scoffs, but it’s good-natured, a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
“Sure thing,” she says, voice dry. “Let me just tie on my apron.”
Elliot laughs at the image, so incongruous he can barely picture it. He only ever sees Olivia when she’s all business, all solid colours, no-nonsense. He’s never even seen her in one of those plaid shirts Kathy’s always wearing over her jeans — too casual, Elliot guesses, for the image Olivia wants to project on the job.
“Chinese it is,” he says, still smiling, as he puts the car into drive.
*
He was right about Munch and Jeffries, it turns out; when they show up the next morning Jeffries has got a name from the local middle school.
Carolyn Jacobs, thirteen and eleven months. Just finished eighth grade, ready to start high school in the fall. No father in the picture, but the guidance counselor said her mom’s real overprotective, Jeffries relays, voice matter-of-fact but a look on her face like she already knows where this is going.
“Jesus,” Elliot mutters, setting his coffee mug down on the desk. Next to him Olivia has gone quiet and still, her whole body rigid with tension. Elliot cuts a glance over at her, but she’s not showing any of it on her face: it’s all in her crossed arms, the tense line of her shoulders. He wants to rest a hand there, dig his thumb into the hollow of her collarbone until her shoulders slump and her neck curves forward.
He swallows and doesn’t touch her, looks away instead.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Cragen cuts in, then, and four faces turn towards him in unison. He gestures towards Elliot and Olivia, then the door. “Go make a visit, see what she has to say.”
*
Carolyn Jacobs’ mother lets them into a cramped one-bedroom, and if the way she refuses to meet their eyes didn’t give her away, the fidgeting of her fingers would do the trick. Elliot hangs back while Olivia perches on the edge of a floral sofa, hovering just next to it in case she needs him. He takes in the apartment while Olivia speaks to the mother — Rachel Jacobs, she introduced herself as — and tries to stifle the useless anger, taking in the way Carolyn’s school portraits track her progress from a gap-toothed kindergartener to an awkward, almost-pretty middle school student.
“Did your daughter bring friends home? Maybe a boyfriend?”
The air in the room goes still, frozen, and Elliot jerks his gaze back to the couch. Olivia’s eyes are intent on Rachel Jacobs, and she’s still got a sympathetic expression on her face but he can see the tension in her shoulders, the way she’s bracing herself for when the question lands.
“Nothing like that,” Rachel Jacobs snaps. “She was a good girl, she wouldn’t — no. Nothing.”
“Are you sure?” Olivia probes. She leans forward as she says it, and her voice is soft and reassuring but it isn’t enough, because before Elliot can even register what’s happening Rachel Jacobs has reached forward and snatched Olivia’s arm.
Olivia does nothing at all; her eyes go wide with something Elliot can’t identify and her whole body goes rigid, her wrist held tightly in a white-knuckled grip. She looks like she’s barely breathing.
“Hey,” he barks, taking a step closer. “Hands to yourself, huh? Don’t touch her.”
For a tense few seconds he thinks he’s gonna have to interfere, going to have to reach in there and pry Rachel Jacobs’ hand off of her himself, but then Olivia comes back to herself, pulls her arm back with a jerk.
Fear, Elliot realizes, a sick feeling roiling in his gut. That’s what he’d seen on her face. Fear.
“Answer her question,” he snaps, and his voice has none of Olivia’s feigned sympathy. “Did you know Carolyn had a boyfriend?”
Rachel Jacobs’ face crumples in, then, both her hands coming up to cover her face. Olivia’s expression tightens and she looks away, meeting Elliot’s gaze for the barest of moments. He reaches out and squeezes her shoulder, once, a silent you’re fine. She doesn’t say anything, but he can read the thank you in her eyes just fine.
*
The mom gives it up easy after that, confesses it all in one long ramble, how she dosed her daughter with Nyquil and tried to dig the baby out herself, the details gruesome enough that even Elliot flinches, hands clenched into fists at his side. She lets Olivia cuff her and ease her into the back of the car, much more gently than Elliot would have done, and when they get back to the station Cragen’s waiting with a medical examiner’s report that backs up everything she said.
After that it’s all paperwork, a seemingly endless slog, mostly silent between them as they tie it up nice and neat for the DA’s office.
Elliot looks at the picture of Carolyn the school gave Jeffries, smile a little awkward but still sweet, hair pulled back in a frizzy blonde braid. She could be Maureen. Hell, she could be Kathleen. His thumb runs along the edge of the photo as he remembers his conversation with Olivia in the car. The angry clench of her jaw, her face turned away from his.
Carolyn Jacobs did have a middle school boyfriend, it turns out, the only balm from a case that’s stung all over. Most of them don’t, in cases like this. It’s someone older, someone crueler. Someone in their own home.
Elliot looks up from her photo, staring at the top of Olivia’s head as she leans over the report she’s filling out, handwriting a million times neater than his own. There’s an uneaten sandwich next to her and tension in her shoulders, exhaustion radiating off her even though it’s not even that late, and in that moment some stupid part of him decides that Olivia deserves his honesty. He finds himself opening his mouth before he can stop himself.
“If it was one of my girls, if someone did something to her and she didn’t want it,” Elliot starts, and Olivia’s head jerks up to look at him, waiting for him to continue. “I’d take her to the clinic. If she didn’t think — if she didn’t want the reminder.”
Olivia blinks at him, eyes wide with surprise, as Elliot’s words sink in. Her mouth drops open and then snaps shut again, her response deserting her completely.
She’s silent for so long that Elliot thinks maybe she isn’t going to say anything at all, that maybe he said all that for nothing. A dull flush starts to spread up the back of his neck, embarrassment setting in for no good reason. He shouldn’t have said anything, should have just kept his damn mouth —
“My mom used to say that to me.”
Her voice is so quiet. Hoarse, like it hurts her to get the words out.
“What?” Elliot’s voice drops right along with his stomach, quiet to match hers. He doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. He thinks, maybe, but — No. Surely not.
“That she didn’t want the reminder,” Olivia says, dull like a blunt knife. Her eyes are dark, huge with shadow, focused right on Elliot’s. She’s never been one to flinch. Not even now.
“Olivia — ” Elliot starts, at a loss. He can hear what she’s really saying, can read between the lines just fine. It makes sense, he guesses, although even the thought sickens him, stomach twisting as the truth of it settles in. “Liv — ”
She shakes her head before he can finish, dark hair swinging against her neck. This late her makeup is mostly melted off, whatever shit she wears on her eyes all smudged and messy underneath. It makes her look younger — a college girl home from a night out, maybe. Stumbling in on high heels, disheveled, laughing with her friends.
But Olivia’s not laughing, and she isn’t in college anymore, and Elliot doesn’t know what she does on her nights off. Doesn’t know that much about her at all, all things considered. He only ever sees her at work.
Elliot’s not spilling his life story to her every chance he gets, nothing like that, but he mentions Kathy a fair amount. Talks about his kids a lot. Olivia always seems interested — genuinely interested, questions and everything, not just faking it to get in good with her new partner — but she never reciprocates. Never volunteers anything personal unless asked, and even then it’s vague. He knows she went to her homecoming dance, from listening to her comfort a teenage victim a few weeks back. Knows where she went to college, from a date-rape case at Hudson that ended up going nowhere. Knows where she lives from driving her home a couple times, but he’s never seen inside her apartment.
Doesn’t know her parents’ names. Doesn’t know about any of her friends, doesn’t know if she’s got a boyfriend. Mostly, she’s still a whole lot of blank space.
A little less blank now, he guesses, stomach swimming with something sick and sour.
“They never caught him,” Olivia says, eyes dark and focused on his. “They didn’t, usually, back then.”
“Yeah,” Elliot agrees. It feels like they don’t catch the guys often enough now, or if they do they don’t get enough evidence to prosecute. It makes him sick, and it makes him angry, and looking at Olivia now he knows it makes her sick and angry too. Maybe that’s what makes them work so well together, he thinks. That anger. “So you don’t know — ?”
“No.” Olivia’s jaw is set as she stares him down, like she’s daring him to get this wrong. She’s brave as hell, he’s gotta give her that. “I don’t know anything about my father.” She pauses for a moment, eyes blinking closed and then open, mouth pulling tight at the corners. “Just what I see in the mirror, I guess,” she adds, then, quieter, and Elliot’s stomach twists into another knot.
She looks exhausted — sounds exhausted, too, like the weight of it has been pressing her down a long time. Which, Elliot guesses, it has. That weight has been pressing her down her whole life.
The only thing you see in the mirror is you, he wants to tell her, only he doesn’t quite know how to actually make himself say it, and it probably wouldn’t mean anything to her anyway. He understands, is the thing. He feels the ghost of his old man every day, practically, breathing down the back of his neck and telling him to do better.
Only it doesn’t feel quite right, knowing that Olivia gets the same feeling. Worse, even; Elliot’s dad was a real piece of work, but there were good moments, too. Few and far between, maybe, but Elliot still remembers his dad teaching him to throw a baseball. Remembers watching games on TV together, sometimes, on good nights. Olivia doesn’t have anything like that.
“That why you’re here?” he asks, and Olivia nods, expression solemn.
She reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear and he sees it, then, reaching out across the desk to grab her arm before he can stop himself.
“Shit, Liv,” he mutters, turning her wrist up to reveal angry, red scratches. “She really got you good.”
“Oh,” Olivia says, surprised, like she’s only just now noticed. “It’s nothing, it’s just — ”
“It’s not nothing,” Elliot says, cutting her off. “You gotta put cream or some shit on that, it’ll scar.”
Olivia’s trained her surprised look on him, now, mouth dropped open in a half-laugh.
“Elliot, it’s a scratch.”
Maybe Elliot’s reaction was a little strong, but it’s definitely more than a scratch — four red lines down the inside of her forearm, some of them already starting to scab over. Rachel Jacobs must have sunk her nails in deep.
Jeffries keeps first-aid shit in her desk, both because she’s usually the only one who really takes it seriously and because she’s the one going for the Tylenol most frequently, so Elliot digs it out and sets it on the edge of Olivia’s desk, reaches for her arm again once he’s got it open.
“What you said — what you just told me,” Elliot starts, fiddling with the top of an ancient tube of Polysporin. “I dunno if it’s worth much,” he rasps out, finally. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
It sounds stupid as soon as he’s said it, a useless sentiment against the horror of what she’s revealed to him. He takes in a breath to take it back, to apologize for crossing a line, but before he can get the words out her mouth quirks in the faintest of smiles.
“Thanks,” she says quietly, still holding her arm very still.
Weirdly enough, he thinks she might really mean it.
He smiles back, relieved to be understood. Nods toward her free hand and holds out the Polysporin until she gets it, holding up her pointer finger so he can squeeze some out and let her apply it herself.
He tears open the band-aid wrapper while she’s at it, getting it ready, and when she glances up to say she’s finished he doesn’t bother handing it to her, just leans forward to stick it on himself. It’s the jumbo-sized one, meant for kids’ scraped knees and thus left untouched at the back of the box until now, but still the scrapes stretch out further than the edge of the bandage. He arranges it so it’s at least covering up the scabs, chuckling at Olivia’s impatient, wrinkle-nosed expression.
“You’ll be pissed if it leaves a mark,” he chides her gently, crumpling the band-aid wrapper in his fist as he leans back. Olivia takes her wrist back slowly, a funny look settling on her face.
“Sorry I froze up back there,” she says after a moment, realizing that the way Elliot’s perched his ass against her desk means he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “It won’t happen again.”
Elliot frowns at the reminder, not just the fear on Olivia’s face but the implication of it, of a grown woman whose first instinct is still to flinch back from an angry mother.
“You’re fine,” he says, deliberately casual. “It was only a second.”
“A second can make a big difference, you know that,” Olivia argues.
“It can,” Elliot agrees, reluctantly. Rachel Jacobs was never a real threat, but others have been. But Olivia’s been fine every other time it’s gotten rough; a guy pulled a knife on her last month and she was cool as anything. This was different. Something personal. He thinks she’ll only get mad if he brings that up, though, so he keeps it to himself. “That’s what you got a partner for, though,” he says instead, nudging her knee with his own.
Olivia stares at him for another moment, searching, and then quick as anything her stormy expression breaks, clears like it was never there at all, and she’s smiling at him, easy as anything.
“Right,” she agrees, still smiling.
“C’mon,” Elliot says, giving her knee another nudge, letting it rest there before he pulls it back and straightens, standing up properly and offering her a hand. “I’ll drive you home.”
He keeps his hand at the small of her back as they walk out to the garage, and if Olivia minds she doesn’t say it.
“I meant what I said before,” he repeats in the car, idling in a rare free spot outside her building. “You’re my partner, alright? And I’m glad you’re here.”
Olivia pauses where she’d been ready to let herself out, face cast in shadow. He thinks maybe she’ll bristle at it, maybe try and laugh it off, but instead she just looks at him, eyes so dark they’re almost black.
“You’re a good partner,” she says, finally, mouth pulling into a tight little smile. He may not know everything about her, but he knows her well enough to know that look. Knows it means she’s getting emotional and trying to stave it off.
“And so are you,” he says, voice final. “Now go order yourself Chinese.”
“Chinese was last night,” Olivia reminds him, and now she’s laughing as she steps out onto the curb. “It’s pizza tonight.”
“Get outta here,” Elliot cracks, but he’s laughing a little too, as he waits for her to make it up to her place, to see her light click on.
Still smiling even as he drives off, headed towards home.