The Currency of Heroes (Law and Order: SVU) by surreallis, 2/5
Title: The Currency of Heroes - 2/5
Author: surreallis
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part One
Part Two
[]
They’re sitting point for Munch and Fin on the Friday night a few weeks after they truly close the child abduction case . It’s twilight, and they’re stuck in the car together, and she just knows he’s going to bring it up. She wonders if maybe she should head him off at the pass. Hey, you know, that thing last week where we had sex? It happens. We can just forget about it. Except, of course, she hasn’t forgotten about it, and neither has he, and her dreams have been particularly vivid lately. The memory of waking up in the middle of the night already mid-orgasm kind of blows across her mind and makes her face heat up.
“Are we going to talk about this?” he finally asks, when it’s fully dark and only the streetlights are giving meager illumination.
“Why should we?” she counters. “It happens, right?” She tries for nonchalance and keeps her gaze directed out the windshield.
He’s silent for a moment. “You can’t even look me in the eye, Olivia.”
She bites the inside of her lip and knows he doesn’t mean just tonight. He means the past week, and he’s been trying to make eye contact with her for a long time now. Except every time he does, she sees all of it in his eyes and it sends everything inside of her into a hopeless tangle, so she just looks away. It wasn’t even like they got drunk and fell into bed together one night. They fucked against the wall in the precinct’s garage during a huge fight. That was just… What was that?
She takes a breath, because as much as this whole thing might just scare her a bit, the thought of losing him scares her more. She looks at him.
His eyes are shadowed, but his jaw is loose. He’s not angry, but…
“I don’t regret it,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t ask if she does. “I mean, it could have happened in a more appropriate place, I know, but...” He trails away and holds her gaze. When she says nothing, he swallows and says, “It was going to fucking happen, Liv. It just was.”
And she sighs. Maybe that’s something they can agree on. She pauses, feeling the words stick in her throat. She’s dangerously close to admitting something, and she’s not even sure what. “I don’t want to lose this job, El. It’s everything to me.”
“You won’t lose this job. Hell, if it comes down to that, you tell them it was all me. Okay? It was all me.”
She rubs wearily at her forehead. That won’t work, and she suspects he knows that. She gives him a tired look but says nothing.
He looks at her a while, but when she won’t look back, he faces forward again, and he says, with a low, forced voice, “We’re not finished, Olivia.”
[]
They spend nearly all night on the stakeout, and then catch a few hours of sleep in the crib until they’re back at it by mid-morning on Saturday. Elliot has to cancel on his kids again and it puts him in a dangerous mood.
She tries to leave him alone and not aggravate him, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. She thinks they’ll both have to take some vacation time soon, so he can spend some time with his kids and she can sleep. The job is kicking their asses this year…
When he pulls up to her apartment, finally, in the late afternoon, she sits for a moment trying to figure out what to say to him.
“Can I come up?” he asks instead. His voice is a tired rasp.
“I, uh…” She hesitates, not sure where this is going. But she doesn’t really want to leave him, despite his sour mood, and she’s not sure she can take another week of trying to avoid eye contact. “Sure.”
He follows her up her stairs, and she unlocks the door, and he stands close behind her. She can hear him breathing and feel the heat of his body, and despite her weariness it starts a warmth in the pit of her stomach.
She opens the door and goes through, and he comes in behind her, and she can feel the tension coming off of him and she knows he isn’t up here to talk.
She walks away from him and hears the door click closed behind him, and then his hand is sliding down her arm and grabbing her wrist and she turns to face him. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her with hooded eyes and then pulls her closer, and then he leans down and kisses her, hard, mouth open and wet on hers. It isn’t all that unexpected, really, after everything that’s gone on between them, and her stomach flips slowly as his mouth moves on hers. She kisses him back.
His free hand slides down her other arm and closes around her wrist and then he’s bending both of her arms behind her back and pushing her back against the wall, and she isn’t afraid of him, but that little bit of aggression makes her feel eager. For him. For the fight. Sometimes they are so very alike.
He moves his mouth to her neck, drops her wrists long enough to slide his hands under her shirt, and his palms are electrical against her skin. Every soft, small hair on her skin stands up at the charge.
“El,” she says, and it comes out a little more breathless than she’d planned. She really isn’t sure if she’s protesting or encouraging him.
“We’re not finished,” he says, and the baritone of his voice sounds loud against her ear.
His fingers drag the strap of her camisole down, and then his mouth finds the skin underneath and sucks warmly at it. She feels his teeth, briefly, and then he’s leaning into her, laying his body right up against hers and grabbing her head, bringing her mouth to his again.
Really, all she can think about is how he felt inside of her in that fucking parking garage, and how much she wants to feel him again. That despite the lack of orgasm, it had been something devastating to her body. Maybe to her soul.
She breaks away from his kiss and grabs him by the arm, and he follows her silently into her bedroom.
He doesn’t give her a chance to breathe. He covers her mouth, and his hands lift at her shirt, tug at her pants, slide underneath the fabric to dig into her bare skin, and she can feel the hard energy coming off of him. He isn’t furious like before, but he’s just as focused. He strips her shirt off, and then his mouth is hot against her breast, first one than the other, and she can feel the force of his breath against her skin. His own shirt and tie disappear, and his shoulders are smooth and hard under her hands. He drops lower, to his knees, and then her pants are being dragged down, and she lifts her feet to let them go. His fingers curl into her thighs, and his mouth drops on the skin of her inner thigh, and she realizes as she falls down onto the bed behind her that she’s lost complete control of this situation. Her legs are still bent over the side of the bed, and he’s kneeling between them, and it’s startling when his mouth sucks at the crease between her thigh and her hip, and then his tongue suddenly finds her clit.
She jumps, against her will, and really all she wants is more, but he grabs her wrists again and slides them under her lower back, holding them there. It tilts her hips toward him and tightens the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and even in her back and stomach, and she can’t move as easily. It’s… shockingly arousing, and his tongue feels like heat and silk, and the pleasure rolls through her in waves, and she can’t even form words in her mind. She can only think about the feeling between her legs and the way he feel so hot and how much she wants to come already.
She arches a bit against him, and his hands tighten around her wrists, and it hurts a bit, her muscles stretching to their limit, and it feels good in that weird way between pain and pleasure and sex and control, and she curls one leg around his back and pushes him toward her with her heel, and his whole mouth comes in to suck at her clit, and she only has time to gasp before she’s pressing hard against his mouth and coming with an intensity that steals her breath and makes her dizzy with the heat.
It goes on.
Even after she starts breathing again.
And he finally stops when she sags beneath him.
Christ.
She doesn’t have the energy to do anything except lie there for a few minutes, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, and she feels his breath, hard and fast against her skin as he presses his forehead to her thigh and seems as helpless as she is.
“Well,” she finally says, as the silence stretches on and her senses come back. “Does your ego feel better now?”
She feels him shake his head. “Liv…” And he swears, softly. And she wonders a bit at how much they drive the emotions in each other. How anger and sadness and desperation and even happiness seem to get so tangled up between them and feel so damn heavy.
She disengages from him and slides up onto her bed, collapsing bonelessly. “Not that I’m not appreciative…”
He sighs, heavily, and she listens as he shucks his boots onto the floor and then stands, and in the muted light of her bedroom his chest is golden. “You started this,” he says. “Did you think I was just going to walk away, like Cassidy did? Fuck.”
She did start it, she realizes. She ran her hands over his body and erased that line between them, and she may as well have pulled a trigger too, because stopping this felt like she was trying to stop a bullet.
“It happens,” she says, quietly, throwing his own words back at him, and then adding her own. “You don’t mean it to.”
He climbs up on the bed in his jeans, shirtless and shoeless, and he straddles her hips. “And sometimes you do,” he says, reminding her of the rest of his speech. His expression is sullen.
She puts her fingers on the button of his jeans. “We can’t keep doing this,” she says.
He takes her wrists carefully and pulls her hands away from him. He leans forward, pressing her arms over her head, and stares down at her. “We need each other, Olivia,” he says softly. “This job is tearing us up. We need each other to survive.”
The intensity of his gaze, his words, makes her mouth run dry. How have they fallen so far? “We need to have sex for the good of the job?” She tries for sarcasm and isn’t sure she quite succeeds.
His jaw tightens and he stares at her for a long moment, before he swears. “Goddamn it. You can’t do this, Liv. You can’t touch me like you love me and fuck me like you hate me and then act as if it means nothing. You can’t do that.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s still holding her down, and she’s starting to feel a little spooked. “It doesn’t mean nothing, I just… It’s complicated, Elliot. We go through so much together.”
“That’s why we work together, Liv, in so many ways. Because this job is tough, and we go through it together.”
“That’s just it,” she finally whispers to him. “How much is just the job, and how much is real, El?”
“It’s all real,” he counters, and everything about his expression is hard and unforgiving. “Sometimes I wish this job wasn’t, but it is. You can’t wish it away, Olivia, this thing between us.”
She fidgets, restlessly, and his hands tighten around her wrists. “You’ve been holding me down a lot lately.” She tries to change the subject, feeling that weight between them crushing down.
“You keep running away from me.”
“Maybe you should just tie me up. Give your arms a rest.” She finds her sarcasm again.
He watches her for a moment, and then he releases her and his weight lifts as he leans over the side of the bed. She frowns, and then he settles back on top of her, his discarded tie in his hands. “Maybe I should,” he says.
She snorts. “Tie me up, baby. I guess this night isn’t done quite yet.” She tries for a teasing tone, pleased that she’s successfully diverting their talk away from emotions and back onto sex.
He smirks faintly. “Turnabout is fair play,” he says.
She presses her arms by her side, apart. “I didn’t actually tie you,” she protests.
He lays the tie across her breasts and then braces his hands on either side of her head, so he can stare down at her from barely a foot above. “You might as well have, and you know it.”
“You could have stopped me, Elliot, and you know that.”
He furrows his brow. “I didn’t want to stop you. I wanted you to touch me. Christ, Liv. Of course I did. What I didn’t want was for you to take stupid risks.”
She holds his gaze. “I didn’t think it was stupid,” she says.
His gaze trails over her face. “I trusted you when you asked. Now…” He sits back up again and picks up the tie. “Do you trust me?”
She feels a hollow drop in the pit of her stomach. Everything between them feels so urgent all the time. So powerful. It’s tiring and overwhelming and addictive. He is her partner though, and of course she trusts him. “I wouldn’t be partners with you if I didn’t.”
He smiles a little bit. “I know you trust me with a gun guarding your back. But do you trust me here?” He looks directly into her eyes.
She swallows, and hesitates. She is not afraid of him, or of sex, but there is something terrifying about how she feels around him. How much they share. How much she already needs him. “I…”
When she can’t say anything else, he exhales. “Okay,” he acquiesces. “I guess we’ll have to work on that.”
“I do trust you,” she finally manages.
“Show me,” he says, quietly, and he holds up the tie.
She hesitates again, but resisting him is sort of like resisting sleep, she realizes, after she’s been up for three days on a case. Everything else kind of disappears for a while, and all she can feel is that slow burn behind her eyes. Pretty soon nothing else matters and she wakes up and realizes she doesn’t even remember falling asleep.
She holds her wrists up, offering them to him, and his eyes seem to darken. He grows still and intense, and she holds his gaze, but just barely. He positions her hands, palms together, and then wraps the tie around her wrists, loosely, several times. Then he wraps each free end around the fabric between her wrists and ties it, so she’s effectively cuffed. He pushes her arms over her head and leans over her. She feels the headboard against her fingers, but it’s a solid block and provides no anchor for her bondage.
“Stay still,” he orders, quietly, pressing her hands down into the mattress over her head. She swallows and leaves her hands in position. He sits back up and looks down at her, and she feels curiously exposed. She’s never really been that troubled by her own nudity, but… It feels different when she’s restrained.
Elliot knows more about her than anybody else in her life now, and the way he looks at her has her shifting beneath him, uneasily. She’s dealt with enough cases in the S&M world to know that people get into bondage for different reasons, but those who enjoy being tied like it because it makes them feel safe. It makes them feel wanted. Loved. She feels some of that, although she can’t really tell if that’s just Elliot or if it really is the act of tying her. But mostly she feels out of her own control and a little uneasy, and she thinks that maybe this is not really her thing.
“It’s okay,” he says, trying to reassure her, and then he leans down to kiss her. His mouth is warm and wet and hard, and her breath quickens. She arches up against him a bit, and twists, pushing her hip between his legs. He exhales into her mouth. His hands slide up to grab her wrists, just beneath where they’re bound, and then he pushes down, pinning her. He sits up a bit and looks down at her, and he’s all furrowed brows and ruthless gaze and a breathless voice. “You want a new partner, Olivia?”
The repercussions of their moment in the garage are going to linger for a while.
“No,” she says, quietly. She strains against his weight a bit, but he keeps her locked down. “I was angry when I said that.”
He’s silent for a moment, and then, “Have you ever wanted to leave me?”
The way he phrases it… Have you ever wanted to leave me? Like they’re together. It sends a flash of panic, and of heat, through her blood. She hasn’t really, although she thinks she should have. His reputation as an impulsive cop, a dangerous partner, is well earned. He’s been through a lot of partners. And she’s seen why. But she’s never wanted to leave him. Somehow… they fit.
“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had,” she says. And then feels uncomfortable. Like she’s just revealed too much.
“For better or worse,” he reminds her, softly. His mouth brushes hers.
“You think we’re taking this marriage metaphor thing a little too seriously?” she asks, wryly.
He huffs out a quiet laugh against her lips, but he doesn’t reply. Instead he slides down a little bit and she feels his mouth close hotly around one nipple and he sucks at it, hard, and she inhales sharply and twists beneath him. “El… God.”
He opens his mouth with a hard exhale and then he’s licking over the nipple, then moving to the other. She arches her head back and shuts her eyes and every nerve ending in her body sings.
His fingers trace over her eyelids. She feels a ripple of excitement.
His touch is light, and it moves down to her mouth. He runs the tip of his middle finger over her lips. She looks up at him. He touches her cheek, his gaze following his fingers, and then his thumb settles on her lower lip, tracing slowly, and she opens her mouth slightly. He lets his thumb press in and brush over her teeth, against her tongue, and she closes her lips around it. His gaze shifts to her eyes and the muscles in his jaw flex. “Kathy hated my hands,” he says, his voice a low, forced rasp. “She thought they made me look violent and rough.”
She opens her mouth and he pulls his thumb back. She says, quietly, “I like your hands. Every shitty day of this job is marked on them.”
He stares at her for a long moment, and then his mouth is on hers, and those scarred hands of his are running down over her throat, onto her shoulders, over her breasts. He shifts up, until he’s on all fours above her, and traces her ribs and drags his knuckles over the soft skin at her waist. When he curls his fingers between her legs, she gasps, quietly. It hasn’t been that long since he’d had his mouth there, and she’s ready again. He slides two fingers into her and he moves them slowly, and it’s not even a thrust, it’s a caress. The heavy pleasure of sex settles between her legs, and she wonders what the hell was wrong with Kathy that she hated those hands. Jesus.
She just wants to touch him now, and she can’t keep still, and he half sits on her legs so she has to lie there and take it, and she feels like she might go crazy. She can’t open her legs to get more of his hand against her, and she can’t arch up as the heat swallows her. She closes her eyes, and with her sight gone and her hands bound she starts to see the reason that people like this. Her heart pounds with anticipation, and with her eyes closed she doesn’t know what he’s going to do, but she can think of nothing else. There’s nothing to focus on but what he’s doing to her.
“It was a bad case, Olivia,” he murmurs, leaning down over her to brush her mouth with his. And she knows he’s talking about the case that had them fucking in the parking garage. As if there was any other on their minds.
“Yes,” she agrees. She feels a little breathless.
“We have to cut ourselves some slack.” He slides his mouth under her chin and pushes up, forcing her head back as he sucks at the skin there.
She’s so focused on how good it feels that she can barely answer. “Yeah.”
He slowly eases his weight up and slides onto his knees between her legs, as if he was going to fuck her. The stiff fabric of his jeans scratches against her inner thighs, and then his fingers dip inside of her. He moves slowly. So fucking slowly that she almost can’t stand it. He braces himself on the bed with one hand and with the other he slides two fingers inside of her with such painstaking and minute movements that she finds herself breathing faster in anticipation. She still feels curiously exposed in a way she never has before, and she doesn’t care anymore.
“Easy,” he orders, and his voice is soothing. Low. Rough.
It creates sparks that fire along her spine and over her skin. She’s used to the control. She’s the one who takes control in sex, usually, and she’s not sure why. She thinks it probably has something to do with trust, and she’s never tried to fool herself into thinking she doesn’t have trust issues. But she trusts Elliot, and this… God. This.
When his fingers are buried to the hilt, he presses against her, harder, trying to get just that much deeper, and she exhales and starts to bring her arms down, forgetting that they’re bound.
"Fuck," she swears, breathlessly.
His breath heats up the skin of her cheek. "Trust me," he says, reminding her.
He moves then, easing his fingers in and out, and it’s still not so much a stroke as it is a caress, and he learned a few things with his mouth, because he knows just where to touch her with his thumb. His mouth sucks at her neck, moves lower to her breasts, and it’s almost too much. When she opens her eyes, he’s a hulking shadow over her, and if he were anyone else she’d find it disturbing. But he’s not, and all she can think is that this is Elliot. This is her partner doing these amazing things to her, and it’s so very cliché and so fucking predictable, and she just doesn’t care.
“We need each other, Liv,” he says in a low, breathless rasp against her breast, and he twists his fingers inside of her, and she gasps and flexes, and she thinks she’d agree to anything right now if he’d only push her over that slow-building ledge of heat that’s growing low and heavy between her legs.
She can’t say anything without moaning, so she just nods her head, weakly, and he catches her mouth with his, his tongue sliding deep, and it takes her breath away. His fingers start a rhythmic motion, and he brushes her clit again and again with his thumb, and she just… Goes right over.
She tightens, tightens, and then the climax hits her, and her own breathing sounds loud as she rides it out, the waves of pleasure stealing everything but her ability to feel. She can hear Elliot breathing in her ear, roughly, and his words as he swears, “Fuck, Liv. Fuck.”
And then she is too exhausted to do anything except go limp and catch her breath. His fingers slide out of her, and his weight lifts off her legs, and when she opens her eyes he’s sliding down beside her and dragging his fingers over his tongue, and his gaze catches hers and holds, and he uses that wolfish grin she’s come to know so well, and she thinks, Jesus, Elliot.
But it’s been a long day, and an even longer evening, and she feels in the back of her mind that she’s told him things tonight she’s never told anyone else. Things she’s said without speaking. Things he asked, and she surrendered. She feels wrung out, and she knows it can’t be even 7 o’clock yet, but she’s so drained that she feels like she’s in torpor. His fingers touch her wrists, and the tie loosens and then drops from her wrists, and she winces as she draws her arms back down. His palms cover her shoulders and knead a bit, and she exhales slowly. She thinks she really needs to return the favor and not fall asleep on him, but she jerks awake as he touches her, and it’s already too late.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, and his arm is warm around her.
Her muscles are weak, her endurance exhausted, and she closes her eyes.
“We can do this,” she hears him whisper, feels his breath against her temple, but she is too tired to keep her eyes open.
So she sleeps.
[]
She wakes a few hours later to Elliot’s mouth on her nape, his hands heavy in her hair, his legs tangling with hers.
Her body is slow to wake, but his tongue against her skin is already making her shiver, and he’s naked now, his cock hot and hard against the curve of her ass, and the hair below his navel rough against the small of her back. She turns, and before she can even settle, he’s pulling her against him, over him, as he shifts onto his back. She’s still feeling languid and drained from earlier, but it’s a good sort of pain, and she runs her hand between them, over him for the first time, and he’s so hard she almost gasps.
He’s wet at the tip already and he grits his teeth as she slides her hand around him. She remembers that while she’s come twice, he hasn’t at all, and she takes her hand away. He slides his between her legs, and when she finally slips down over him, she’s wet, and she has to bite her lip as he fills her. It sends a fleeting memory of the parking garage through her mind, but then his hands grab her hips and his strength is iron as he controls her movements.
“I can’t take much,” he murmurs, as she leans down over him and moves shallowly, her mouth just above his. She kisses him softly.
The one and only time they’d fucked before this was a storm of anger and lust and it had been so unexpected that she’d barely known how to process it all. But she feels it all this time. Each give of her muscles, each movement of his, each tiny millimeter he sinks in deeper. He’s thick enough to make it slightly uncomfortable at first, and that’s always been her weakness. She moves slowly and kisses him when he lifts his mouth toward hers, and he’s already breathing heavily, his fingers curling into her thighs almost painfully, so she slides one hand down between them to touch herself, and he swallows thickly, his eyes closed.
He comes first, trying to hold it back and not succeeding. He groans and almost lifts her into the air, and his hands hold her down on his hips, keeping him buried deep. She watches his face because he keeps his eyes closed, and his jaw flexes and then gets loose, and she comes after him, when he collapses back, panting, his erection just starting to wan. It’s still enough to get her off, and she digs her forehead against his shoulder as she shudders against him. His hands ease off her hips and slide warmly up her back, and he rubs his thumb soothingly against her nape as she breathes into his skin and slowly relaxes.
It’s a warm, languid moment and she can feel his affection for her, and for a moment she feels what it would be like, the two of them together. Really together. And she doesn’t want to move, she doesn’t even want to breathe…
“It isn’t just the job, Olivia,” he says, softly.
She thinks about this, but she doesn’t know how to reply. “The job doesn’t help,” she finally says.
“If I quit…” he starts.
And she turns on him. “Do you want to quit?”
He looks at her, surprised. “No…” he says, slowly. “I want to do this job with you.”
She sighs, but her cell phone chirps and she climbs off the bed, grimacing at the wetness between her legs. She doesn’t even glance at the display before answering and regrets it when Michael’s voice greets her.
“Oh,” she exclaims, somewhat taken aback. “Hi.” They’d finally met once, for coffee, but after canceling on him too many times, he’d backed off with his phone calls, and she hadn’t pursued him. This thing between Elliot and her…
Elliot glances at her curiously, and she slips into the bathroom to clean up and allow herself a little privacy, and she feels like an idiot talking to one man when she’s just had sex with another and is still in the process of wiping him off of her skin.
“Look,” Michael says. “We’ve been putting this off long enough. Let’s just meet next week for drinks, okay? We can talk then.”
She hedges, because this is not at all fair to him, and she really needs to figure out what’s going on between her and Elliot, but she’s been talking on the phone to him for almost two months, and she feels like a brush off isn’t what he deserves. “Okay,” she says. “You’re right.”
“Good,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “Looking forward to it.”
“Yeah,” she says, and she winces inwardly.
When she comes out, Elliot is sitting on the edge of her bed and he looks directly into her eyes. “Who was that?” he asks, and she can tell by the tightness of his jaw that he knows exactly who it was.
“Michael,” she says, because she’s never lied outright to Elliot before, and she’s not going to start now.
He stares at her as she sets the cell down. “You’re still dating him?”
She licks her lips nervously and turns to face him. “We haven’t really started dating… Yet.”
His face hardens.
“Well, it’s just been so… complicated lately,” she protests.
He glares now, and grabs a pillow off the bed, throwing it, hard, onto the floor. “Olivia,” he growls. “Christ!”
“Elliot,” she says. “I just… I don’t even know what this is between us. And Michael and I have only met once. I haven’t even had time to think about him, much less talk to him lately.”
“We’re sleeping together, Liv,” he says, and he’s irritated.
She hesitates then, because she just can’t untangle her thoughts. “Let’s just… Can we just not rush things here?”
He furrows his brows in anger. “You want to have sex without strings, is that it?”
He says it so condescendingly that she bristles. “What,” she demands. “You want to start dating now?”
He stares at her, and then he stands up and grabs his jeans. “Maybe I do,” he growls, and he puts his legs into the jeans and pulls them up, tucking himself inside and buttoning the fly.
“Elliot,” she says, placating. “I just… I’m not sure I can start something with you here and then walk out with you on the job and watch you face a bullet someday!”
“You’re already doing it,” he snaps.
“It’s not the same!” she protests.
“It’s not different either!” He glares at her. “I liked being married, Olivia. I liked having someone there.”
She feels a real fear then, that this has already gone way beyond her control. That they’re spiraling down, down. Down to the ground. “Can we just… slow down?”
He clenches his jaw and then he seems to get ahold of himself. He stops dressing and watches her and then he walks right up to her until he’s only inches away, looking down at her. “How do I make you feel, Liv?” It’s a breathless question, quiet, and he’s very, very serious.
Good, she thinks. Powerful. Worried. Terrified. She moves her mouth, but she can’t speak.
“How do you really feel about me?” he demands, and the look in his eyes freezes the breath in her lungs.
But she looks at him in the golden light of her bedroom lamp and she doesn’t know how to respond. He is different than anyone else in her job or her life, and she couldn’t let him go if she tried. But he has so much power over her. So much damn power… He doesn’t even realize. She can’t answer. She isn’t even sure of the answer. She isn’t sure what belongs to the job and what belongs to him. So she stays silent.
He breathes against her skin and then he leans slowly forward until his forehead touches hers. He shakes his head. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “Okay.”
“El,” she says, her voice almost a whisper.
He swallows. “I’ve had one-night stands before. I’m as capable as anyone of having strings-free sex, Olivia.” He hesitates and meets her gaze with hard eyes. “But not with you.”
And she has no idea what to say, but it doesn’t matter. Because by then he’s halfway across her living room floor. And moments later she hears her front door click shut behind him.
She listens to his footfalls as he goes down her stairs, and then her apartment is achingly silent.
[]
On Sunday, Cragen calls her early and tells her they caught a rape and she needs to go catch Elliot on his way out of church and get both their asses to the scene.
She glances at the clock and knows she has some time. Elliot keeps his phone turned off during church, and this is his weekend with the kids. Even if they hadn’t had that fight on Friday night, he’d have been an absent presence in her life this weekend. Cragen usually tries to keep them off call on Elliot’s weekends with the kids, but it just doesn’t work out very often.
She takes a cab to the precinct and picks up a squad, and then she drives out to Queens. She knows his church, and she double parks across the street until a space opens up in front, some football fan looking to get out early, right after communion.
There’s still melting on the streets, but it’s sunny and warmer than it has been in a while, and she stares at the stone church, so similar to every other church in New York. Stained glass, big wooden doors and cement steps, and if she’s silent she can hear the faint sound of singing. It mystifies her, the peace people find in churches.
She slips out of the car when the wooden doors open and people start walking out in their long coats and good clothes. She leans back against the car and watches and wonders how he’ll receive her.
They’ve had plenty of fights over the years, gotten so angry with one another that they didn’t speak for a day, but their job depends on their communication, so even when they’re mad they still talk. Even if it’s stilted and dismissive. And once the case gets hot or tiring or intense or even close to the end, they always fall back in as thick as thieves, as if nothing ever happened. And at the end of the day, one of them would glance over and say, “We good?” And the other would nod, and then they’d spend half the night talking over a beer, or calling on the phone, catching up on the 24 hours they’d missed with each other.
She sighs.
Through the doors, she sees Elliot’s oldest daughter, Maureen. She’s in her late teens and gaining that elegance that age finally brings to girls. Elliot comes through carrying his youngest daughter, his son beside him, and the fourth, Kathleen, following. He’s in a white shirt and black slacks, nothing he’s ever worn to work, and she gets that. That he wouldn’t want to wear fabric to church that had seen what he sees everyday.
He is smiling and mellow and snapping at the kids good-naturedly, and she thinks that he is a good man, despite his faults, and it sends a yearning through her chest and low in her belly that just feels painful. She can’t understand how she can want him so much and be so fucking terrified of actually being with him. If she loses him as a partner, she suspects she’ll never get over it, but if she’s sleeping with him, dating him, and she loses him? The thought creates a lump in her throat, as if she’s waiting for the gunshot, for the bullet to hit her instead.
He looks up as they start down the sidewalk, and he sees her. He smiles at first, his grin widening, and then he catches himself, remembers. She watches as his smile fades. But he doesn’t glare or look angry. He simply furrows his brow, questioningly, and she nods. Yes, they have a case. Sorry.
He walks the kids down the street to his car, and pops the trunk, grabbing a duffel bag out of it. She watches as he hands Elizabeth to Maureen along with his car keys, and hugs them all before jogging across the street toward her. Behind him, Kathleen waves at her, and she waves back. She meets them all at restaurants sometimes, with Elliot. Kathleen is fascinated by her, and the fact that she does the same job as her dad. It makes her feel good, to be honest, that someone looks up to her.
“Hey,” Elliot says as he walks up to her. It’s not warm enough to be without a coat, but he’s always run hot. “We catch one?”
“Yeah,” she says, studying him for signs of anger. “Sorry.”
He shrugs and holds her gaze for one beat too long. A reminder of Friday night. He looks away. “S’okay. Let’s go.”
He changes in the car, hitting his elbows on the dashboard as he tries to yank his good pants off and slide into jeans. She stays silent and tries to watch the traffic.
She wants to ask, “We good?” But no. No, they’re not good. Not yet. Maybe not ever now. Maybe they’ve fucked it up forever this time.
So she thinks, well, it was only a matter of time anyway. Nothing good ever lasts.
[]
The rape is a standard case. As standard as they get, and that always bugs her, that they can have a ‘standard’ rape case. But the victim is angry and the perpetrator is clear, and they pick him up within three hours of talking to the victim and send him on his way into the court system.
The paperwork is brief, and she glances up at Elliot from time to time as they work across from each other on Monday morning in the eerily empty squad room. He doesn’t react to her, but he doesn’t seem tense and angry either.
“I’m not mad at you,” he finally says, when she glances at him for the fifth time in silence. He looks at her, and she lifts her brows, and he corrects himself. “I mean, I am, sort of. But…” He pauses and swallows, and she sees then that maybe he’s more hurt than angry. “I can’t make you feel something you don’t.”
“It’s not that, El,” she says softly. Monday has been slow, but nearly all the detectives are out, and the clerks are at their desks and there’s no one within earshot. “I just…” And then she hesitates, because she doesn’t know how to tell him about her fear of losing of him, of losing the job, because they’re all she really has. It feels too… revealing, even with him. “Everything is telling me it’s a bad idea.”
He holds her gaze for a long moment, and in the early morning sun his eyes are a very light blue. “It might be,” he finally says quietly. “Or it might be the best thing we ever do.”
She keeps looking into his eyes, and her mouth runs dry, and she knows he is asking her to take a risk. To jump in with both feet, the way he always does, and she just wants to slow things down, make sure it’s right.
He doesn’t press though. He looks back down at his reports and asks, “You want some coffee? I’ll make a run.”
And she stares at him a beat longer, feeling the anxiety fade a bit. He seems so clear on his feelings, and hers are such a tangled mess.
“Okay,” she says.
He gives her a faint smile and stands, grabbing his coat, and she can’t help but feel like he’s trying to placate her and put her at ease again. She watches his back as he heads out of the room, his stride is so familiar to her that she can recognize it at a distance now.
[]
Part Three
Author: surreallis
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part One
Part Two
[]
They’re sitting point for Munch and Fin on the Friday night a few weeks after they truly close the child abduction case . It’s twilight, and they’re stuck in the car together, and she just knows he’s going to bring it up. She wonders if maybe she should head him off at the pass. Hey, you know, that thing last week where we had sex? It happens. We can just forget about it. Except, of course, she hasn’t forgotten about it, and neither has he, and her dreams have been particularly vivid lately. The memory of waking up in the middle of the night already mid-orgasm kind of blows across her mind and makes her face heat up.
“Are we going to talk about this?” he finally asks, when it’s fully dark and only the streetlights are giving meager illumination.
“Why should we?” she counters. “It happens, right?” She tries for nonchalance and keeps her gaze directed out the windshield.
He’s silent for a moment. “You can’t even look me in the eye, Olivia.”
She bites the inside of her lip and knows he doesn’t mean just tonight. He means the past week, and he’s been trying to make eye contact with her for a long time now. Except every time he does, she sees all of it in his eyes and it sends everything inside of her into a hopeless tangle, so she just looks away. It wasn’t even like they got drunk and fell into bed together one night. They fucked against the wall in the precinct’s garage during a huge fight. That was just… What was that?
She takes a breath, because as much as this whole thing might just scare her a bit, the thought of losing him scares her more. She looks at him.
His eyes are shadowed, but his jaw is loose. He’s not angry, but…
“I don’t regret it,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t ask if she does. “I mean, it could have happened in a more appropriate place, I know, but...” He trails away and holds her gaze. When she says nothing, he swallows and says, “It was going to fucking happen, Liv. It just was.”
And she sighs. Maybe that’s something they can agree on. She pauses, feeling the words stick in her throat. She’s dangerously close to admitting something, and she’s not even sure what. “I don’t want to lose this job, El. It’s everything to me.”
“You won’t lose this job. Hell, if it comes down to that, you tell them it was all me. Okay? It was all me.”
She rubs wearily at her forehead. That won’t work, and she suspects he knows that. She gives him a tired look but says nothing.
He looks at her a while, but when she won’t look back, he faces forward again, and he says, with a low, forced voice, “We’re not finished, Olivia.”
[]
They spend nearly all night on the stakeout, and then catch a few hours of sleep in the crib until they’re back at it by mid-morning on Saturday. Elliot has to cancel on his kids again and it puts him in a dangerous mood.
She tries to leave him alone and not aggravate him, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. She thinks they’ll both have to take some vacation time soon, so he can spend some time with his kids and she can sleep. The job is kicking their asses this year…
When he pulls up to her apartment, finally, in the late afternoon, she sits for a moment trying to figure out what to say to him.
“Can I come up?” he asks instead. His voice is a tired rasp.
“I, uh…” She hesitates, not sure where this is going. But she doesn’t really want to leave him, despite his sour mood, and she’s not sure she can take another week of trying to avoid eye contact. “Sure.”
He follows her up her stairs, and she unlocks the door, and he stands close behind her. She can hear him breathing and feel the heat of his body, and despite her weariness it starts a warmth in the pit of her stomach.
She opens the door and goes through, and he comes in behind her, and she can feel the tension coming off of him and she knows he isn’t up here to talk.
She walks away from him and hears the door click closed behind him, and then his hand is sliding down her arm and grabbing her wrist and she turns to face him. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her with hooded eyes and then pulls her closer, and then he leans down and kisses her, hard, mouth open and wet on hers. It isn’t all that unexpected, really, after everything that’s gone on between them, and her stomach flips slowly as his mouth moves on hers. She kisses him back.
His free hand slides down her other arm and closes around her wrist and then he’s bending both of her arms behind her back and pushing her back against the wall, and she isn’t afraid of him, but that little bit of aggression makes her feel eager. For him. For the fight. Sometimes they are so very alike.
He moves his mouth to her neck, drops her wrists long enough to slide his hands under her shirt, and his palms are electrical against her skin. Every soft, small hair on her skin stands up at the charge.
“El,” she says, and it comes out a little more breathless than she’d planned. She really isn’t sure if she’s protesting or encouraging him.
“We’re not finished,” he says, and the baritone of his voice sounds loud against her ear.
His fingers drag the strap of her camisole down, and then his mouth finds the skin underneath and sucks warmly at it. She feels his teeth, briefly, and then he’s leaning into her, laying his body right up against hers and grabbing her head, bringing her mouth to his again.
Really, all she can think about is how he felt inside of her in that fucking parking garage, and how much she wants to feel him again. That despite the lack of orgasm, it had been something devastating to her body. Maybe to her soul.
She breaks away from his kiss and grabs him by the arm, and he follows her silently into her bedroom.
He doesn’t give her a chance to breathe. He covers her mouth, and his hands lift at her shirt, tug at her pants, slide underneath the fabric to dig into her bare skin, and she can feel the hard energy coming off of him. He isn’t furious like before, but he’s just as focused. He strips her shirt off, and then his mouth is hot against her breast, first one than the other, and she can feel the force of his breath against her skin. His own shirt and tie disappear, and his shoulders are smooth and hard under her hands. He drops lower, to his knees, and then her pants are being dragged down, and she lifts her feet to let them go. His fingers curl into her thighs, and his mouth drops on the skin of her inner thigh, and she realizes as she falls down onto the bed behind her that she’s lost complete control of this situation. Her legs are still bent over the side of the bed, and he’s kneeling between them, and it’s startling when his mouth sucks at the crease between her thigh and her hip, and then his tongue suddenly finds her clit.
She jumps, against her will, and really all she wants is more, but he grabs her wrists again and slides them under her lower back, holding them there. It tilts her hips toward him and tightens the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and even in her back and stomach, and she can’t move as easily. It’s… shockingly arousing, and his tongue feels like heat and silk, and the pleasure rolls through her in waves, and she can’t even form words in her mind. She can only think about the feeling between her legs and the way he feel so hot and how much she wants to come already.
She arches a bit against him, and his hands tighten around her wrists, and it hurts a bit, her muscles stretching to their limit, and it feels good in that weird way between pain and pleasure and sex and control, and she curls one leg around his back and pushes him toward her with her heel, and his whole mouth comes in to suck at her clit, and she only has time to gasp before she’s pressing hard against his mouth and coming with an intensity that steals her breath and makes her dizzy with the heat.
It goes on.
Even after she starts breathing again.
And he finally stops when she sags beneath him.
Christ.
She doesn’t have the energy to do anything except lie there for a few minutes, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, and she feels his breath, hard and fast against her skin as he presses his forehead to her thigh and seems as helpless as she is.
“Well,” she finally says, as the silence stretches on and her senses come back. “Does your ego feel better now?”
She feels him shake his head. “Liv…” And he swears, softly. And she wonders a bit at how much they drive the emotions in each other. How anger and sadness and desperation and even happiness seem to get so tangled up between them and feel so damn heavy.
She disengages from him and slides up onto her bed, collapsing bonelessly. “Not that I’m not appreciative…”
He sighs, heavily, and she listens as he shucks his boots onto the floor and then stands, and in the muted light of her bedroom his chest is golden. “You started this,” he says. “Did you think I was just going to walk away, like Cassidy did? Fuck.”
She did start it, she realizes. She ran her hands over his body and erased that line between them, and she may as well have pulled a trigger too, because stopping this felt like she was trying to stop a bullet.
“It happens,” she says, quietly, throwing his own words back at him, and then adding her own. “You don’t mean it to.”
He climbs up on the bed in his jeans, shirtless and shoeless, and he straddles her hips. “And sometimes you do,” he says, reminding her of the rest of his speech. His expression is sullen.
She puts her fingers on the button of his jeans. “We can’t keep doing this,” she says.
He takes her wrists carefully and pulls her hands away from him. He leans forward, pressing her arms over her head, and stares down at her. “We need each other, Olivia,” he says softly. “This job is tearing us up. We need each other to survive.”
The intensity of his gaze, his words, makes her mouth run dry. How have they fallen so far? “We need to have sex for the good of the job?” She tries for sarcasm and isn’t sure she quite succeeds.
His jaw tightens and he stares at her for a long moment, before he swears. “Goddamn it. You can’t do this, Liv. You can’t touch me like you love me and fuck me like you hate me and then act as if it means nothing. You can’t do that.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s still holding her down, and she’s starting to feel a little spooked. “It doesn’t mean nothing, I just… It’s complicated, Elliot. We go through so much together.”
“That’s why we work together, Liv, in so many ways. Because this job is tough, and we go through it together.”
“That’s just it,” she finally whispers to him. “How much is just the job, and how much is real, El?”
“It’s all real,” he counters, and everything about his expression is hard and unforgiving. “Sometimes I wish this job wasn’t, but it is. You can’t wish it away, Olivia, this thing between us.”
She fidgets, restlessly, and his hands tighten around her wrists. “You’ve been holding me down a lot lately.” She tries to change the subject, feeling that weight between them crushing down.
“You keep running away from me.”
“Maybe you should just tie me up. Give your arms a rest.” She finds her sarcasm again.
He watches her for a moment, and then he releases her and his weight lifts as he leans over the side of the bed. She frowns, and then he settles back on top of her, his discarded tie in his hands. “Maybe I should,” he says.
She snorts. “Tie me up, baby. I guess this night isn’t done quite yet.” She tries for a teasing tone, pleased that she’s successfully diverting their talk away from emotions and back onto sex.
He smirks faintly. “Turnabout is fair play,” he says.
She presses her arms by her side, apart. “I didn’t actually tie you,” she protests.
He lays the tie across her breasts and then braces his hands on either side of her head, so he can stare down at her from barely a foot above. “You might as well have, and you know it.”
“You could have stopped me, Elliot, and you know that.”
He furrows his brow. “I didn’t want to stop you. I wanted you to touch me. Christ, Liv. Of course I did. What I didn’t want was for you to take stupid risks.”
She holds his gaze. “I didn’t think it was stupid,” she says.
His gaze trails over her face. “I trusted you when you asked. Now…” He sits back up again and picks up the tie. “Do you trust me?”
She feels a hollow drop in the pit of her stomach. Everything between them feels so urgent all the time. So powerful. It’s tiring and overwhelming and addictive. He is her partner though, and of course she trusts him. “I wouldn’t be partners with you if I didn’t.”
He smiles a little bit. “I know you trust me with a gun guarding your back. But do you trust me here?” He looks directly into her eyes.
She swallows, and hesitates. She is not afraid of him, or of sex, but there is something terrifying about how she feels around him. How much they share. How much she already needs him. “I…”
When she can’t say anything else, he exhales. “Okay,” he acquiesces. “I guess we’ll have to work on that.”
“I do trust you,” she finally manages.
“Show me,” he says, quietly, and he holds up the tie.
She hesitates again, but resisting him is sort of like resisting sleep, she realizes, after she’s been up for three days on a case. Everything else kind of disappears for a while, and all she can feel is that slow burn behind her eyes. Pretty soon nothing else matters and she wakes up and realizes she doesn’t even remember falling asleep.
She holds her wrists up, offering them to him, and his eyes seem to darken. He grows still and intense, and she holds his gaze, but just barely. He positions her hands, palms together, and then wraps the tie around her wrists, loosely, several times. Then he wraps each free end around the fabric between her wrists and ties it, so she’s effectively cuffed. He pushes her arms over her head and leans over her. She feels the headboard against her fingers, but it’s a solid block and provides no anchor for her bondage.
“Stay still,” he orders, quietly, pressing her hands down into the mattress over her head. She swallows and leaves her hands in position. He sits back up and looks down at her, and she feels curiously exposed. She’s never really been that troubled by her own nudity, but… It feels different when she’s restrained.
Elliot knows more about her than anybody else in her life now, and the way he looks at her has her shifting beneath him, uneasily. She’s dealt with enough cases in the S&M world to know that people get into bondage for different reasons, but those who enjoy being tied like it because it makes them feel safe. It makes them feel wanted. Loved. She feels some of that, although she can’t really tell if that’s just Elliot or if it really is the act of tying her. But mostly she feels out of her own control and a little uneasy, and she thinks that maybe this is not really her thing.
“It’s okay,” he says, trying to reassure her, and then he leans down to kiss her. His mouth is warm and wet and hard, and her breath quickens. She arches up against him a bit, and twists, pushing her hip between his legs. He exhales into her mouth. His hands slide up to grab her wrists, just beneath where they’re bound, and then he pushes down, pinning her. He sits up a bit and looks down at her, and he’s all furrowed brows and ruthless gaze and a breathless voice. “You want a new partner, Olivia?”
The repercussions of their moment in the garage are going to linger for a while.
“No,” she says, quietly. She strains against his weight a bit, but he keeps her locked down. “I was angry when I said that.”
He’s silent for a moment, and then, “Have you ever wanted to leave me?”
The way he phrases it… Have you ever wanted to leave me? Like they’re together. It sends a flash of panic, and of heat, through her blood. She hasn’t really, although she thinks she should have. His reputation as an impulsive cop, a dangerous partner, is well earned. He’s been through a lot of partners. And she’s seen why. But she’s never wanted to leave him. Somehow… they fit.
“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had,” she says. And then feels uncomfortable. Like she’s just revealed too much.
“For better or worse,” he reminds her, softly. His mouth brushes hers.
“You think we’re taking this marriage metaphor thing a little too seriously?” she asks, wryly.
He huffs out a quiet laugh against her lips, but he doesn’t reply. Instead he slides down a little bit and she feels his mouth close hotly around one nipple and he sucks at it, hard, and she inhales sharply and twists beneath him. “El… God.”
He opens his mouth with a hard exhale and then he’s licking over the nipple, then moving to the other. She arches her head back and shuts her eyes and every nerve ending in her body sings.
His fingers trace over her eyelids. She feels a ripple of excitement.
His touch is light, and it moves down to her mouth. He runs the tip of his middle finger over her lips. She looks up at him. He touches her cheek, his gaze following his fingers, and then his thumb settles on her lower lip, tracing slowly, and she opens her mouth slightly. He lets his thumb press in and brush over her teeth, against her tongue, and she closes her lips around it. His gaze shifts to her eyes and the muscles in his jaw flex. “Kathy hated my hands,” he says, his voice a low, forced rasp. “She thought they made me look violent and rough.”
She opens her mouth and he pulls his thumb back. She says, quietly, “I like your hands. Every shitty day of this job is marked on them.”
He stares at her for a long moment, and then his mouth is on hers, and those scarred hands of his are running down over her throat, onto her shoulders, over her breasts. He shifts up, until he’s on all fours above her, and traces her ribs and drags his knuckles over the soft skin at her waist. When he curls his fingers between her legs, she gasps, quietly. It hasn’t been that long since he’d had his mouth there, and she’s ready again. He slides two fingers into her and he moves them slowly, and it’s not even a thrust, it’s a caress. The heavy pleasure of sex settles between her legs, and she wonders what the hell was wrong with Kathy that she hated those hands. Jesus.
She just wants to touch him now, and she can’t keep still, and he half sits on her legs so she has to lie there and take it, and she feels like she might go crazy. She can’t open her legs to get more of his hand against her, and she can’t arch up as the heat swallows her. She closes her eyes, and with her sight gone and her hands bound she starts to see the reason that people like this. Her heart pounds with anticipation, and with her eyes closed she doesn’t know what he’s going to do, but she can think of nothing else. There’s nothing to focus on but what he’s doing to her.
“It was a bad case, Olivia,” he murmurs, leaning down over her to brush her mouth with his. And she knows he’s talking about the case that had them fucking in the parking garage. As if there was any other on their minds.
“Yes,” she agrees. She feels a little breathless.
“We have to cut ourselves some slack.” He slides his mouth under her chin and pushes up, forcing her head back as he sucks at the skin there.
She’s so focused on how good it feels that she can barely answer. “Yeah.”
He slowly eases his weight up and slides onto his knees between her legs, as if he was going to fuck her. The stiff fabric of his jeans scratches against her inner thighs, and then his fingers dip inside of her. He moves slowly. So fucking slowly that she almost can’t stand it. He braces himself on the bed with one hand and with the other he slides two fingers inside of her with such painstaking and minute movements that she finds herself breathing faster in anticipation. She still feels curiously exposed in a way she never has before, and she doesn’t care anymore.
“Easy,” he orders, and his voice is soothing. Low. Rough.
It creates sparks that fire along her spine and over her skin. She’s used to the control. She’s the one who takes control in sex, usually, and she’s not sure why. She thinks it probably has something to do with trust, and she’s never tried to fool herself into thinking she doesn’t have trust issues. But she trusts Elliot, and this… God. This.
When his fingers are buried to the hilt, he presses against her, harder, trying to get just that much deeper, and she exhales and starts to bring her arms down, forgetting that they’re bound.
"Fuck," she swears, breathlessly.
His breath heats up the skin of her cheek. "Trust me," he says, reminding her.
He moves then, easing his fingers in and out, and it’s still not so much a stroke as it is a caress, and he learned a few things with his mouth, because he knows just where to touch her with his thumb. His mouth sucks at her neck, moves lower to her breasts, and it’s almost too much. When she opens her eyes, he’s a hulking shadow over her, and if he were anyone else she’d find it disturbing. But he’s not, and all she can think is that this is Elliot. This is her partner doing these amazing things to her, and it’s so very cliché and so fucking predictable, and she just doesn’t care.
“We need each other, Liv,” he says in a low, breathless rasp against her breast, and he twists his fingers inside of her, and she gasps and flexes, and she thinks she’d agree to anything right now if he’d only push her over that slow-building ledge of heat that’s growing low and heavy between her legs.
She can’t say anything without moaning, so she just nods her head, weakly, and he catches her mouth with his, his tongue sliding deep, and it takes her breath away. His fingers start a rhythmic motion, and he brushes her clit again and again with his thumb, and she just… Goes right over.
She tightens, tightens, and then the climax hits her, and her own breathing sounds loud as she rides it out, the waves of pleasure stealing everything but her ability to feel. She can hear Elliot breathing in her ear, roughly, and his words as he swears, “Fuck, Liv. Fuck.”
And then she is too exhausted to do anything except go limp and catch her breath. His fingers slide out of her, and his weight lifts off her legs, and when she opens her eyes he’s sliding down beside her and dragging his fingers over his tongue, and his gaze catches hers and holds, and he uses that wolfish grin she’s come to know so well, and she thinks, Jesus, Elliot.
But it’s been a long day, and an even longer evening, and she feels in the back of her mind that she’s told him things tonight she’s never told anyone else. Things she’s said without speaking. Things he asked, and she surrendered. She feels wrung out, and she knows it can’t be even 7 o’clock yet, but she’s so drained that she feels like she’s in torpor. His fingers touch her wrists, and the tie loosens and then drops from her wrists, and she winces as she draws her arms back down. His palms cover her shoulders and knead a bit, and she exhales slowly. She thinks she really needs to return the favor and not fall asleep on him, but she jerks awake as he touches her, and it’s already too late.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, and his arm is warm around her.
Her muscles are weak, her endurance exhausted, and she closes her eyes.
“We can do this,” she hears him whisper, feels his breath against her temple, but she is too tired to keep her eyes open.
So she sleeps.
[]
She wakes a few hours later to Elliot’s mouth on her nape, his hands heavy in her hair, his legs tangling with hers.
Her body is slow to wake, but his tongue against her skin is already making her shiver, and he’s naked now, his cock hot and hard against the curve of her ass, and the hair below his navel rough against the small of her back. She turns, and before she can even settle, he’s pulling her against him, over him, as he shifts onto his back. She’s still feeling languid and drained from earlier, but it’s a good sort of pain, and she runs her hand between them, over him for the first time, and he’s so hard she almost gasps.
He’s wet at the tip already and he grits his teeth as she slides her hand around him. She remembers that while she’s come twice, he hasn’t at all, and she takes her hand away. He slides his between her legs, and when she finally slips down over him, she’s wet, and she has to bite her lip as he fills her. It sends a fleeting memory of the parking garage through her mind, but then his hands grab her hips and his strength is iron as he controls her movements.
“I can’t take much,” he murmurs, as she leans down over him and moves shallowly, her mouth just above his. She kisses him softly.
The one and only time they’d fucked before this was a storm of anger and lust and it had been so unexpected that she’d barely known how to process it all. But she feels it all this time. Each give of her muscles, each movement of his, each tiny millimeter he sinks in deeper. He’s thick enough to make it slightly uncomfortable at first, and that’s always been her weakness. She moves slowly and kisses him when he lifts his mouth toward hers, and he’s already breathing heavily, his fingers curling into her thighs almost painfully, so she slides one hand down between them to touch herself, and he swallows thickly, his eyes closed.
He comes first, trying to hold it back and not succeeding. He groans and almost lifts her into the air, and his hands hold her down on his hips, keeping him buried deep. She watches his face because he keeps his eyes closed, and his jaw flexes and then gets loose, and she comes after him, when he collapses back, panting, his erection just starting to wan. It’s still enough to get her off, and she digs her forehead against his shoulder as she shudders against him. His hands ease off her hips and slide warmly up her back, and he rubs his thumb soothingly against her nape as she breathes into his skin and slowly relaxes.
It’s a warm, languid moment and she can feel his affection for her, and for a moment she feels what it would be like, the two of them together. Really together. And she doesn’t want to move, she doesn’t even want to breathe…
“It isn’t just the job, Olivia,” he says, softly.
She thinks about this, but she doesn’t know how to reply. “The job doesn’t help,” she finally says.
“If I quit…” he starts.
And she turns on him. “Do you want to quit?”
He looks at her, surprised. “No…” he says, slowly. “I want to do this job with you.”
She sighs, but her cell phone chirps and she climbs off the bed, grimacing at the wetness between her legs. She doesn’t even glance at the display before answering and regrets it when Michael’s voice greets her.
“Oh,” she exclaims, somewhat taken aback. “Hi.” They’d finally met once, for coffee, but after canceling on him too many times, he’d backed off with his phone calls, and she hadn’t pursued him. This thing between Elliot and her…
Elliot glances at her curiously, and she slips into the bathroom to clean up and allow herself a little privacy, and she feels like an idiot talking to one man when she’s just had sex with another and is still in the process of wiping him off of her skin.
“Look,” Michael says. “We’ve been putting this off long enough. Let’s just meet next week for drinks, okay? We can talk then.”
She hedges, because this is not at all fair to him, and she really needs to figure out what’s going on between her and Elliot, but she’s been talking on the phone to him for almost two months, and she feels like a brush off isn’t what he deserves. “Okay,” she says. “You’re right.”
“Good,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “Looking forward to it.”
“Yeah,” she says, and she winces inwardly.
When she comes out, Elliot is sitting on the edge of her bed and he looks directly into her eyes. “Who was that?” he asks, and she can tell by the tightness of his jaw that he knows exactly who it was.
“Michael,” she says, because she’s never lied outright to Elliot before, and she’s not going to start now.
He stares at her as she sets the cell down. “You’re still dating him?”
She licks her lips nervously and turns to face him. “We haven’t really started dating… Yet.”
His face hardens.
“Well, it’s just been so… complicated lately,” she protests.
He glares now, and grabs a pillow off the bed, throwing it, hard, onto the floor. “Olivia,” he growls. “Christ!”
“Elliot,” she says. “I just… I don’t even know what this is between us. And Michael and I have only met once. I haven’t even had time to think about him, much less talk to him lately.”
“We’re sleeping together, Liv,” he says, and he’s irritated.
She hesitates then, because she just can’t untangle her thoughts. “Let’s just… Can we just not rush things here?”
He furrows his brows in anger. “You want to have sex without strings, is that it?”
He says it so condescendingly that she bristles. “What,” she demands. “You want to start dating now?”
He stares at her, and then he stands up and grabs his jeans. “Maybe I do,” he growls, and he puts his legs into the jeans and pulls them up, tucking himself inside and buttoning the fly.
“Elliot,” she says, placating. “I just… I’m not sure I can start something with you here and then walk out with you on the job and watch you face a bullet someday!”
“You’re already doing it,” he snaps.
“It’s not the same!” she protests.
“It’s not different either!” He glares at her. “I liked being married, Olivia. I liked having someone there.”
She feels a real fear then, that this has already gone way beyond her control. That they’re spiraling down, down. Down to the ground. “Can we just… slow down?”
He clenches his jaw and then he seems to get ahold of himself. He stops dressing and watches her and then he walks right up to her until he’s only inches away, looking down at her. “How do I make you feel, Liv?” It’s a breathless question, quiet, and he’s very, very serious.
Good, she thinks. Powerful. Worried. Terrified. She moves her mouth, but she can’t speak.
“How do you really feel about me?” he demands, and the look in his eyes freezes the breath in her lungs.
But she looks at him in the golden light of her bedroom lamp and she doesn’t know how to respond. He is different than anyone else in her job or her life, and she couldn’t let him go if she tried. But he has so much power over her. So much damn power… He doesn’t even realize. She can’t answer. She isn’t even sure of the answer. She isn’t sure what belongs to the job and what belongs to him. So she stays silent.
He breathes against her skin and then he leans slowly forward until his forehead touches hers. He shakes his head. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “Okay.”
“El,” she says, her voice almost a whisper.
He swallows. “I’ve had one-night stands before. I’m as capable as anyone of having strings-free sex, Olivia.” He hesitates and meets her gaze with hard eyes. “But not with you.”
And she has no idea what to say, but it doesn’t matter. Because by then he’s halfway across her living room floor. And moments later she hears her front door click shut behind him.
She listens to his footfalls as he goes down her stairs, and then her apartment is achingly silent.
[]
On Sunday, Cragen calls her early and tells her they caught a rape and she needs to go catch Elliot on his way out of church and get both their asses to the scene.
She glances at the clock and knows she has some time. Elliot keeps his phone turned off during church, and this is his weekend with the kids. Even if they hadn’t had that fight on Friday night, he’d have been an absent presence in her life this weekend. Cragen usually tries to keep them off call on Elliot’s weekends with the kids, but it just doesn’t work out very often.
She takes a cab to the precinct and picks up a squad, and then she drives out to Queens. She knows his church, and she double parks across the street until a space opens up in front, some football fan looking to get out early, right after communion.
There’s still melting on the streets, but it’s sunny and warmer than it has been in a while, and she stares at the stone church, so similar to every other church in New York. Stained glass, big wooden doors and cement steps, and if she’s silent she can hear the faint sound of singing. It mystifies her, the peace people find in churches.
She slips out of the car when the wooden doors open and people start walking out in their long coats and good clothes. She leans back against the car and watches and wonders how he’ll receive her.
They’ve had plenty of fights over the years, gotten so angry with one another that they didn’t speak for a day, but their job depends on their communication, so even when they’re mad they still talk. Even if it’s stilted and dismissive. And once the case gets hot or tiring or intense or even close to the end, they always fall back in as thick as thieves, as if nothing ever happened. And at the end of the day, one of them would glance over and say, “We good?” And the other would nod, and then they’d spend half the night talking over a beer, or calling on the phone, catching up on the 24 hours they’d missed with each other.
She sighs.
Through the doors, she sees Elliot’s oldest daughter, Maureen. She’s in her late teens and gaining that elegance that age finally brings to girls. Elliot comes through carrying his youngest daughter, his son beside him, and the fourth, Kathleen, following. He’s in a white shirt and black slacks, nothing he’s ever worn to work, and she gets that. That he wouldn’t want to wear fabric to church that had seen what he sees everyday.
He is smiling and mellow and snapping at the kids good-naturedly, and she thinks that he is a good man, despite his faults, and it sends a yearning through her chest and low in her belly that just feels painful. She can’t understand how she can want him so much and be so fucking terrified of actually being with him. If she loses him as a partner, she suspects she’ll never get over it, but if she’s sleeping with him, dating him, and she loses him? The thought creates a lump in her throat, as if she’s waiting for the gunshot, for the bullet to hit her instead.
He looks up as they start down the sidewalk, and he sees her. He smiles at first, his grin widening, and then he catches himself, remembers. She watches as his smile fades. But he doesn’t glare or look angry. He simply furrows his brow, questioningly, and she nods. Yes, they have a case. Sorry.
He walks the kids down the street to his car, and pops the trunk, grabbing a duffel bag out of it. She watches as he hands Elizabeth to Maureen along with his car keys, and hugs them all before jogging across the street toward her. Behind him, Kathleen waves at her, and she waves back. She meets them all at restaurants sometimes, with Elliot. Kathleen is fascinated by her, and the fact that she does the same job as her dad. It makes her feel good, to be honest, that someone looks up to her.
“Hey,” Elliot says as he walks up to her. It’s not warm enough to be without a coat, but he’s always run hot. “We catch one?”
“Yeah,” she says, studying him for signs of anger. “Sorry.”
He shrugs and holds her gaze for one beat too long. A reminder of Friday night. He looks away. “S’okay. Let’s go.”
He changes in the car, hitting his elbows on the dashboard as he tries to yank his good pants off and slide into jeans. She stays silent and tries to watch the traffic.
She wants to ask, “We good?” But no. No, they’re not good. Not yet. Maybe not ever now. Maybe they’ve fucked it up forever this time.
So she thinks, well, it was only a matter of time anyway. Nothing good ever lasts.
[]
The rape is a standard case. As standard as they get, and that always bugs her, that they can have a ‘standard’ rape case. But the victim is angry and the perpetrator is clear, and they pick him up within three hours of talking to the victim and send him on his way into the court system.
The paperwork is brief, and she glances up at Elliot from time to time as they work across from each other on Monday morning in the eerily empty squad room. He doesn’t react to her, but he doesn’t seem tense and angry either.
“I’m not mad at you,” he finally says, when she glances at him for the fifth time in silence. He looks at her, and she lifts her brows, and he corrects himself. “I mean, I am, sort of. But…” He pauses and swallows, and she sees then that maybe he’s more hurt than angry. “I can’t make you feel something you don’t.”
“It’s not that, El,” she says softly. Monday has been slow, but nearly all the detectives are out, and the clerks are at their desks and there’s no one within earshot. “I just…” And then she hesitates, because she doesn’t know how to tell him about her fear of losing of him, of losing the job, because they’re all she really has. It feels too… revealing, even with him. “Everything is telling me it’s a bad idea.”
He holds her gaze for a long moment, and in the early morning sun his eyes are a very light blue. “It might be,” he finally says quietly. “Or it might be the best thing we ever do.”
She keeps looking into his eyes, and her mouth runs dry, and she knows he is asking her to take a risk. To jump in with both feet, the way he always does, and she just wants to slow things down, make sure it’s right.
He doesn’t press though. He looks back down at his reports and asks, “You want some coffee? I’ll make a run.”
And she stares at him a beat longer, feeling the anxiety fade a bit. He seems so clear on his feelings, and hers are such a tangled mess.
“Okay,” she says.
He gives her a faint smile and stands, grabbing his coat, and she can’t help but feel like he’s trying to placate her and put her at ease again. She watches his back as he heads out of the room, his stride is so familiar to her that she can recognize it at a distance now.
[]
Part Three