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There were times when Ed would look at her, and she’d think maybe. Maybe she could do this. Maybe she could love him. Maybe she could wake up next to him everyday and feel complete, without those aching chasms in her chest, the wounds that never healed themselves. The doubts always won out, in the end.
They won out the first time she’d slept with Ed, had a drink with him, flirted with him. More than anything Tucker could do, the thing that was making her blush, making her feel excited— It had nothing to do with him.
It was the thought of someone else, someone lost to her, who would’ve hated what he was seeing, that moved her into Tucker’s arms that first time. He would’ve seethed at the sight of her, with another man, yes, always with any other man, but with this specific man. This man he loathed.
She has no way of knowing if he would still react the same. She hasn’t seen him in half a decade. But the man she knew, the man she remembers, would hate this, and that’s what made Olivia love it. She wanted to make him burn, to make him hurt, and the idea of this particular betrayal, the idea of being happy with someone he hated, of letting his enemy into her life, into her bed, into her heart… That’s what made her want Ed Tucker. Not that he didn’t have his perfectly lovely qualities. It just wasn’t really about him.
There was a time when she thought Ed was going to ask her to marry him. Was pretty damn sure of it, actually, when she found a ring tucked in his luggage when they’d returned from Paris. The writing was on the wall in the relief that hit her, then, when she realized that he’d bought this ring, packed it for the trip, and ultimately decided not to ask her. For whatever reason. Maybe she should’ve been perturbed by his doubt, but she wasn’t. Not when she had so much doubt of her own. She tried to imagine it; a calm, sweet, domestic life with him. But she couldn’t.
Maybe Ed had tried to imagine it too; when he’d bought the ring, when he’d tucked it into a thick black sock in his suitcase. Maybe he’d hit the same brick wall she did, and it kept the ring safely inside the sock.
He’d thought maybe. He’d had doubts. The doubts had won.
It was relief.
Because what if Elliot came back? If Elliot came back to find her married to him, it’d make him sick. It would make her sick too, and not in the fun way that had made the beginning of her and Ed’s relationship so thrilling. No, she would never be able to find that easy happiness with him. With anyone. With anyone else.
Not that it had ever been easy with Elliot. The closest thing she’d had to that died on the floor of a bus terminal in 2006. There were moments of ease, after that, moments of happiness and lightness and humor, but they were punctuated and framed by so much more. Hurt and longing and the keen, unshakeable awareness of things unsaid.
But still. When she looked at Ed, it wasn’t the same raw emotion she’d once tried so hard to run from. It never would be. That black hole had opened with Gitano and closed with Jenna Fox and everything in it or close to it, before and after it, had been colored by its gravity. Ed himself had seen it, in all its danger and magnitude. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t calm, happy, peaceful love. But it was, she believed, in the deepest, truest parts of herself, love. Her love. Hers.
And ever since— ever since the revelation that she could feel that much, she couldn’t fathom binding herself to a life without it. Ed could ask her to marry him, and she could say yes, and she could leave that piece of her soul under lock and key forever, bury that version of her that was the most alive, and she’d suffocate under the weight of it.
She would always be waiting for Elliot. And if he never came, she’d still keep waiting.
She’s standing at the counter, packing away the leftover spaghetti into two tupperwares for tomorrow’s lunches when he says it.
“We never talk about him.”
She sighs, impulsively tugging down her sweater where she feels like it’s ridden up over her hip, even though it hasn’t.
“You already know what happened, Ed. You know more than I’m probably ever gonna tell anybody else.”
“I’m not talking about Lewis.”
“Then what—“ She starts to say, but she already knows, doesn’t she. There was only one him that Ed, that anyone, really, wasn’t bold enough to mention by name. She shakes her head, turns to face him. “Why?”
“You know why.”
“Uh, care to clue me in, then? Why do you want to stand here and talk about a retired cop you hated?”
She’s giving Ed her best unwavering stare and he’s giving it right back to her.
“Because you didn’t hate him. You still don’t, and you never will. Because I think there’s more to the story, parts I don’t know. Parts that matter to you.” She watches Ed pause, watches the muscle in his jaw twitch and settle. When he speaks again, his voice is softer, somehow; more delicate, like he knows he might set her off. “Because I’ve never believed that the two of you were only ever just partners.”
She smiles bitterly and ignores the tightness in her throat. “Never could prove that one, though, could you?”
She snaps a tupperware lid closed, more forcefully than necessary, hoping he’ll drop this line of questioning. He doesn’t.
“You said his name, Olivia.”
“Excuse me? When?” She could almost laugh. She never said his name. Not aloud, not ever.
“The second time we slept together, you said his name,” Ed says, and it’s like her heart stops in her chest, her mouth dropping open, her lungs burning in their sudden emptiness, her head dizzy with shock, but she can’t dwell on any of that right now, because he is still talking.
“You were drunk, we were both drunk, and you… You said his name, and I didn’t think anything of it, really, didn’t care enough to stop, it was only the second time, we— we weren’t anything, yet. And then we were something, and you… called me by my own name, and it was fine, and then…”
She braces her hands against the counter, wondering if she even wants him to continue, but knowing the uncertainty of it would haunt her more than the truth.
“Then what?”
“Then you started saying his name in your sleep.”
She closes her eyes in embarrassment, her head dropping with shame, but she is not shocked this time. That was believable, she thought. That made sense. The townhouse dreams she’d been having back when she’d first started letting Ed sleep over had warped in her mind, fused with the Lewis dreams, reanimated an old Sealview dream or two, and on the edges of all of them stood him, Elliot, out of reach but always fucking there. Then there was Gitano, and Valerie Sennett, and Jenna Fox and Sister Peg, and all the other cases that had marked her subconscious, and if she fought hard enough, all of it could melt away and she’d be sitting on a stoop with Elliot, tea warming her hands, the press of his thigh warming her legs. That was a memory she’d do anything to slip into, and never let herself in her waking hours. It made sense, she thought, that it would find her in her sleep. That she would run towards it, full speed, calling out to him.
She thinks about a prison infirmary in Oregon, about a redhead who’d poked fun at her unconscious mumbling. She’d called out to him then, in a time before being cuffed to a bed had given her any reason to, before it had meant something fearful and desperate. She wonders if Brian had been keeping secrets from her.
In any case, she’s not asleep now.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I just want you to talk to me, Olivia. Whatever went on between the two of you… You’re not over it. Maybe it would help, if you—“
“Okay, you’re not my therapist, so—“
“Really? You talk to your therapist about Stabler?” He asks incredulously, and the way she winces when Ed says his name is enough of an answer. He sighs, taking a few steps towards her, lowering his voice like there’s someone who would care to listen to the poorly buried dormant yearnings of a woman who knows better.
“I know it’s only one letter off, but I know who El is. He was the one you were thinkin’ about the first few times you were with me. And I know you were drunk, and I know it’s been years since you saw him, but I was the one who made you feel so good you couldn’t think straight. I was the one there after the trial, after the townhouse, after Dodds. I’m the one who’s here now. But he still has a part of you that I’m never gonna touch. A big part.”
The big part. The big, red, beating part.
“Ed…”
She wants to roll her eyes, to cry, to run away.
“It’s okay, Liv. It’s okay. I can live with it, I can. Because I love you, and I love you enough to know the things I can’t change. I can’t change the way that story goes, or the way you feel about him, and I don’t want to, because it’s part of you. I just want to make you feel safe. Cared for. I don’t want you to wake up one day and resent the fact that I’m not the man you call out for in your dreams.”
She’s quiet for a long time, and Ed surely notices the tears in her eyes, but he’s gracious enough to ignore them. Olivia inhales deeply through her nose, trying to think of something, anything to say. She knows what she wants to say, which is nothing at all. She’s kept everything with Elliot so close to the chest, these past several years, and she’s done it well. The destruction and the devastation and the steadily charged years before that, the all-consuming need they’d had to be close to each other, side-by-side, no matter the consequences, the things she was determined never to admit to herself and thus has not really even processed— all of that she’s kept guarded, kept hidden, entombed, because no one who wasn’t there could ever understand what she herself could never fully grasp. The depth of it all. The reach. Maybe Elliot had finally understood. Maybe it’s why he left the way he did.
She’d been so angry in her grief, the better part of that first year. Her life had gone from accepting Elliot’s influence, Elliot’s nearness, Elliot’s touch in every single part of itself to nothing but an automated voicemail and bitter, anxious dreams, and the realization that he was just gone. Cold turkey. The phantom limb pains made her pissy.
The new additions to the squad had helped the transition, because they did not know her, and it was easy to just let them think she was a bitch. Better not to let them get too close. Munch and Fin and Cragen were different, and Alex and Casey, too, people who saw her everyday and people who didn’t, because they’d known her before, and they’d watched her go from their warm, good-humored friend to a fucking terror to be around, and she feels bad about that now, but she didn’t then. She’d needed the anger. The anger had helped her avoid his memory and the memory of who she’d been beside him. They had helped her avoid it. Munch and Fin would shoot Nick and Amanda threatening looks if they so much as caught a whiff of curiosity about Olivia’s old partner; and then Lewis had taken her, and she was more pissed about that, more shaken by that, more focused on that than she was on the looming absence that had barely faded; and then Munch had left, and Cragen had left, too, and then the only person in the room who had born witness to the legendary Benson and Stabler was Fin, and he was smart enough never to press her. He knew she didn’t talk about Elliot. With anyone.
But that was Ed’s point.
This is the one solid, good relationship she’s had in a long time. He could give her things, he wants to offer himself to her, wants her to let him in. She figures the least she could do is try— try to communicate, try to meet him halfway, try to give him a piece of herself.
“You do make me feel safe,” she whispers, and means it. It’s not the locked, life-or-death safety she’d felt with Elliot, all those years. It’s not the unwavering security, the certainty. Certainty, that’s what she’d had with Elliot. Until she didn’t.
She feels uncertain now, but not unsafe. Ed is detested by many with a cold exterior, but he is warm here in her kitchen, warm when he sleeps beside her, warm when he looks at her with those blue eyes that she tries so hard not to compare to anyone else’s, because they are striking in their own right. And boring into her, at present.
His gaze is piercing, but it isn’t the one she could just fall into. It isn’t the one that picked her very soul up off the ground and pulled it in and understood, without so much as a word. Ed’s eyes aren’t the dangerous, burning ones she’d looked into across desks, across center consoles and takeout containers and hospital rooms, across a warehouse with guns drawn, the whole world blurred by their tears and the sound of the monster taunting them drowned out by the sheer gravitational pull of those eyes.
They are safe eyes, Ed’s. Olivia swallows and looks away.
“I do feel safe, with you,” she repeats, with less conviction this time. “I just don’t know if I can talk about him. With anyone. I’m not— I just can’t.”
Brian had asked her about Elliot, once. It hadn’t gone well. It hadn’t really been a conversation, but even so there had been shouting and slammed doors and after Brian had retreated to bed, there’d been silent, angry tears as Olivia stared at the living room ceiling for hours before she could finally fall asleep. It was their stupidest fight, because she hadn’t answered his question, in the end. Hadn’t given him anything, at least not what he was looking for, because Olivia had known that Brian would never understand the depth of the pit he was trying to walk into.
Ed does, though. He knows what answers might be hiding behind those doors, and he wants to open them anyway. He wouldn’t like it, but he could take it. In some way, he has already accepted it.
She thinks about them in tandem sometimes, Brian and Ed. The only two men she’s shared anything substantial with in the years since Elliot’s vanishing from her life. Where Brian had been much like an overgrown frat boy sometimes, all Miller Lite and Mets games and quick, athletic sex, Ed was something different. Ed wined and dined her, watched old movies with her, did his own fucking laundry. That Christmas in the Bahamas with Brian had been nice, but it was a tequila-filled haze, mostly. Tequila she’d paid for. Ed was different. Ed had held her hand in the Louvre, and Brian once refused to even go to the Whitney. There was a time and a place for Brian’s enthusiasm for sports betting, sure, but she’d never looked over at him watching a basketball game and felt something loosen in her chest, the way she had when Ed smiled in awe at the Notre Dame. Or smiled fondly at her son. Or smiled, incredibly pleased with himself, when he got an answer right on Jeopardy. He was a little older, a little wiser, and what she needed, in so many ways.
She compares the two of them almost compulsively, and she wonders about that, a lot, because it’s different from the way she compares them both to Elliot. Ed is the present, Brian is the past, and as much as it hurts her to remember, Elliot is the past, too. So why does it feel like he is so permanent? Ed is standing right there in front of her, asking her for more, and she can’t help but repeatedly lump him in with the ex-boyfriend she’d always known would never stick around. She’d lived with him. She’d loved him, in a pleasant, untethered sort of way. But she’d always known she wasn’t in love with him. She’d always known she never would be.
Brian had nearly shit his pants when Olivia’s period had been late, and that whole ordeal had been the writing on the wall for them, she knew; had known it even then. But Ed takes care of Noah, with grace and tenderness that reminds her of another lifetime. She watched Ed’s face a few months ago as he gave her son that elephant stuffed animal he loves so much and wondered if what he was feeling in that moment was anything like what she’d felt when Eli was born, when she’d cradled him close and vowed to love and protect him, because he was a piece of someone she loved.
Ed is the present. Ed loves her now. Ed is supposed to be potential and possibility. Ed is so different from Brian. So why does she feel like they are two of the same? Locked in some sort of limbo, the purgatory that is her life without Elliot.
She feels a surge of resentment and shame, then, because how had she let herself get to that point? That reliant and dependent on the presence of a man who could never, ever give her what she'd always pretended not to want from him. Why had one man been able to leave her so incomplete?
Ed had hated Elliot, that was true. But he hadn’t been so fond of her, back then, either, and sometimes current-Ed will say something or twist his mouth or shrug his shoulders in a certain way and something in her will shatter and bloom with warmth at the same time, because the similarities she can see there would undoubtedly make both of them clench their fists in rage.
It scares her, sometimes. It scares her because Ed is here, and Elliot is not, but from the very fucking beginning Elliot has been here, he has, because if it weren’t for the echoes of him in Ed’s smile, in the lines around his eyes, in his faith and his strength and his masculinity, if it weren’t for the fact that there was spite in her; a primal need to strike back into the gaping void Elliot had left of her by taking a man he hated to bed, she might never have done it. If it weren’t for the stubborn presence of Elliot in her mind, she would still think of Ed Tucker as a rat, as a royal pain in her ass, and with not an ounce of the softness she felt now. She would never have been to Paris, and she would know significantly less about what makes a good bourbon, and she might’ve died in that townhouse, but if she hadn’t, she’d still be here, in her kitchen, missing Elliot with no one to call her out on it.
And she’s not actually that surprised by Ed’s first revelation. Saying his name out loud was likely a first, brought on by the alcohol and the blurry flashes of the blue of his eyes and the memories of sitting at their desks and griping about this very man, this asshole, this fucking guy who’d had it out for them, they’d been sure of it. She’d never meant to say his name. She’d just been thinking of him. And that wasn’t a first.
She’d been doing that since David Haden. Since Kurt Moss. Since Brian Cassidy, in another century, and what had then been low-priority musings about what it might be like to go home with a different coworker, to break more than just professional rules.
All the ones she could have were haunted and tainted by the one she couldn’t, and that… She isn’t proud of that. She isn’t ready to face it. It isn’t fair.
“Olivia?”
“Don’t ask me about him. Please.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“Any of it. All of it.”
“You don’t blame me, do you?”
“What?”
“I took his badge, after that shooting—”
“That—”
“And instead of fighting for it back, he fell on his sword.”
A thought occurs to her, one that never dawned on her before this very moment. “Did you talk to him?”
Ed is silent.
She’s thought about what those days had looked like for Elliot, sure. She’s thought about that echoing void of silence in the wake of the squad room shootout, of Sister Peg’s blood drying on her hands, of how desperately she just wanted to talk to him, just wanted to see him, to find some comfort for them both, and how all she’d gotten was the impersonal rasp of his voicemail and an empty desk across from hers. She’s thought, long and hard, about what it must have been like for him— the blood of a child on his hands, a child who had desperately wanted justice, who had been failed by all the systems that were supposed to get it for her. She’d thought about what that must have done to him, sure. Another fatal shooting in his jacket, and it was a good shooting, on paper, but not to anyone with a conscience as loud or as wide as Elliot’s.
Another shot fired. Another life taken. Another mark in his ledger, only mere weeks removed from that kid’s bogus sexual assault complaint. It would have been a hell of a fight, to come back from all of that. Especially when he didn’t want to, when he didn’t believe he deserved to. That was why she just wanted to talk. She just wanted him to talk to her about it. She could have shouldered the burden with him, made it all a little less heavy, because she was his partner and she would have followed him into Hell itself, and had. Whatever low place he’d found himself in after that day, she’d surely gone lower. She had been dangling off a cliff, and he was the rope, the grappling hook, the safety net, and he had severed all of it without warning, without talking to her.
But maybe he’d talked to someone else.
“Ed. Did he talk to you before he put his papers in?” She repeats, angry now. She didn’t blame Ed, had not even associated him with the greatest loss of her life, oh, but she could. If he was about to give her a reason to, then she could. It would feel nice, probably, to blame someone other than Elliot and herself.
“Yes.”
For about the third time tonight, all the breath is stolen from her lungs. She takes a step back, a step away from him, running her index finger over her bottom lip, trying not to let it start quivering. Jesus, the last thing she needs to do right now is cry.
“What did he say?” She asks, hating how her voice wavers.
“I don’t know if—”
“Tell me what he fucking said to you.”
“He was tired, Liv. He was done. The job was killing him, taking everything he had. He didn’t have anything left for his family. And with a jacket like his… He thought the least he could give them was his pension. Didn’t wanna risk that getting taken away after all that time. All that sacrifice.”
That word, sacrifice, bounces around in her head like a ringing bell.
What about me?
She knew damn well about the sacrifices he’d made over the years, choosing where to spend his time and energy. Where to pour his love. The thing is, he’d done it for his kids. He’d done it to support them, to feed them, house them, send them to school, to help them pay for college, one day, and set themselves up for bigger things than he’d been able to aspire to. He’d protected other people’s kids instead of having dinner with his own; a few too many times, maybe, but someone had to do it, and he was damn good at it. They were damn good at it, together. And if he’d just talked to her about this, about leaving for the family, for the pension, for the chance at a fresh start, she would have understood. She was always good at sending him back to Kathy. At pulling him back, when she had to.
She’d rebuffed Kathy, that day in the park, when she’d confessed about her worries that he’d preferred spending time with her over his wife and kids. She thinks about divorce papers and you give him stability and that goddamned stoop again.
She’d followed Kathy around their house a few years after that, pleading with her to stop packing a bag to leave him. She’d done it so many times, in ways big and small, over and over, for what? To set herself up for this ultimate hurt? He couldn’t have left her for his family’s benefit if his family had already left him, but they hadn’t. She’d made sure of that. She didn’t let him send Kathleen to jail. She didn’t flinch when Dickie provoked her in his own hurting. She didn’t let anything happen to little baby Eli. She’d helped Maureen with birth control, but she doesn’t think Elliot ever knew about the sex talk his precious eldest daughter, his first baby, had initiated with her when she was sixteen.
She’d kept his family safe, and whole, and it had left her broken and alone.
“I… I just… Why didn’t he call me?”
The touch of Ed’s hand on her arm startles her, and she realizes she’d spoken out loud. Or, at least, she’d made some sort of whining, bargaining noise.
Ed’s voice is soft when he answers, softer than she’d been expecting, and she realizes it’s probably a response to her— the way her fingers are twitching anxiously, grievously, the way the lump in her throat is making it almost impossible to speak, the way she can’t quite meet his eyes. His voice is soft, comforting, but his words are anything but.
“His mind was made up, Olivia. You couldn’t have said anything to change it. He thought he was doing everyone a favor, and he might’ve been right. Certainly did me a favor. Maybe you, too.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Look at you. You’re a Lieutenant, you’re a mother… Hell, do you think you and I would be together if he was around?”
She wants to say she didn’t even want to be a Lieutenant. Didn’t want to be a Sergeant, even. She climbed the ranks because she had to, to keep SVU hers. Because Cragen was going, because the brass didn’t trust her without the extra armor of prestige, because clinging to power was the only way forward. She wants to say she misses Detective Benson, but she doesn’t, because she doesn’t know if it’s the shape of the badge or the rhythm of the footsteps beside her who made Detective Benson who she was; if she was happier before the politics and all the rest of it, if she’s ever been happy at all. Detective Benson had had less, but what she’d had was good. It wasn’t everything she’d ever dreamed of, but it was a good life. Is she better off? Is her life now better? On paper it looks like a yes, but she doesn’t feel that way. She doesn’t feel that way at all, except for when she looks at Noah.
She wants to say that Noah was hers, regardless of Elliot’s absence. She wants to believe that he would’ve supported her, because he’d said he would— because he’d always said she would be a great mother, had always known how much she wanted it. He was a little bit of an asshole about Calvin, sure, but in hindsight she could see clearly that he was only trying to protect her heart, keep her feet on the ground. Calvin was never going to be hers. Vivian’s family could give him a house, a yard, a history— more than she could offer, in truth.
That whole ordeal, Calvin, Elliot; it’s why she’d been so cautious with Noah, in spite of that instantaneous, possessive tug of joy she’d felt when she scooped him up out of that drawer. She waited. She watched. She didn’t get too attached, not even when the Judge finally sent him home with her. Those first days with Noah hadn’t felt real, but they had felt right. She wants to tell Ed that Elliot would’ve seen it, would’ve known Noah was her son, the same way she did.
She isn’t naive. She knows how all-consuming it had been, and she’d told Nick as much a little over a year ago. Told him how she’d grown as his partner, how she’d made a family with his support. But Elliot was her family too, once, wasn’t he?
She knew he was. One person could mean family, and it had for thirteen aching years, for her whole childhood before that, for a few briefly idealistic moments with Simon, and now she found herself, again, with a one-person family. Her little boy was her whole world, as Elliot had been before him, and those loves were as different as night and day, but they were the two most profound feelings she had ever, ever experienced. The kind of feelings that made her feel less like a human and more like a force of nature. Maybe it was the love she’d had for Elliot, the knowledge that she could belong somewhere, not with a mother, or a brother, with anyone related to her by blood, but someone the universe had placed in her path; maybe it was that revelation of how much of another person she could hold in her heart that made her open it to Noah. Elliot and Noah. Brian and Ed.
Do you think you and I would be together if he was around?
Her and Elliot didn’t leave room for anyone else, she’d told Nick, and she knows it to be true, still. He was everything to her. Her best friend, her home, her person, her partner. And now she was thinking about this, about family, and love, and what all that looked like for her. Her and Serena, her and Elliot, her and Noah. Serena had had a family before her, and Elliot had one separate from her, and one day, surely, Noah would grow up to build one of his own, but her? She’d only ever had one person at a time. One person to pour all of her love and her care into. All of her.
Did that leave any room for Ed at all?
And what the hell is she supposed to say now? Ed had asked her why she never talks about Elliot, and this, this right here, was why. One question and it was all unraveling, this fragile semblance of a life slipping through her fingers like sand.
He was my best friend. He was my home. He was my person. He was my partner.
Do you think you and I would be together if he was around?
She would’ve found Noah no matter what, but she wouldn’t be standing here with Ed.
She might’ve fucked him, once or twice, but it wouldn’t have gone further than that.
She wonders, not for the first time, if it was a mistake to have let it.
In the end, she answers his question with a question. An accusation. “Are you serious?”
It seems her stretches of silence have riled Ed, have stoked the flames of something mean in him. He was so sweet with her, with Noah, he was a good man, but she’d known his darkness first. For years, she had seen him as only vindictive, and cantankerous, and mean.
“Tell me— how often do you think about him? Every day? Once a week? Or just when you’re in bed with me?”
There he is, she thinks, there’s the Tucker I remember.
She thinks about the ring in the suitcase, and how grateful she is for the sock still concealing it.
“You know what? This conversation is over,” she says, turning all the way around and picking up the forgotten containers of spaghetti, moving past Ed to get to the fridge.
“I’m sorry. Liv, that was low. I—I’m sorry. I didn’t want this to be a fight.”
“Oh, are we fighting?”
Brian and Ed. Nick and Amanda. Munch and Fin. Serena. Elliot. Noah.
“Come on, don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Shut down. Shut me out. We gotta finish this conversation now, or we’re never gonna.”
“Then you just let me know how you want it to end, and we can skip right to it. How’s that?”
She closes the fridge, narrows her eyes at him. They’ve switched positions in the kitchen, and now he’s the one closer to the wall, she’s the one with the clear escape. Her voice is hard and unwavering, now.
“I don’t want it to end.”
“You just said—“
“I don’t want us to end, Liv. Not over this. Not now. We can finish this conversation, but we can’t just skip through it, I can’t just tell you what to say. I want you to be honest with me. I want the truth, not omissions, not evasiveness, and not fucking silence. I want to hear whatever it is you have to say.”
“Well, I don’t have anything to say.”
“What— do you think I’m gonna walk away if you tell me? Is that what’s going on here?”
No. Yes. Maybe. She wishes he would. She hopes to God he doesn’t.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
He looks at her in a way that clearly says bullshit, but he doesn’t press her. He might be giving up.
“I think you should go.”
“You want me to leave?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Really?”
She inhales, exhales. “No, not really.”
“Okay.”
He turns the kitchen light off, walks past her, and back towards her bedroom.
She wipes down the counter with a dry paper towel, just for something to do. Ed already wiped the crumbs from the garlic bread away an hour ago. She peeks in on Noah, sound asleep. It’s a cloudy night, there’s no moonlight streaming through the window. All she can hear is her own breathing and the soft ticking of her watch. She considers whether to proposition her boyfriend when she crawls into her own bed tonight, and doesn't come to a solid conclusion. She washes her hands before finally following him down the hall.
She wonders how many more times she’s going to follow him. She wonders how much longer she can keep waiting.