Archive of Our Own

January 2023

She lets him hold her.

That’s how this whole thing begins.

The storm of ferocity he’d trekked through the door of her apartment with settles once they lay down on her couch. 

Well, she lays down. Her feet curl into the crooks of her knees and the pain medicine is kicking in. It starts to work so well that she can even blink lazily, softer than she’s been able to in days. She almost forgets there’s a bruise that’s taken up semi-permanent residence underneath her left eye and she almost forgets why he’s here; his hand curled around her ankle as he shifts her leg an inch to make room for himself at the end of the sofa.

He sits up, back straight against the cushion. He says her name - low and hoarse.

When she responds to him with nothing but a hum - because she can’t, because the exhaustion knocks over her body like a wave coming to shore; gentle and steady, and then all in one vicious swoop - he lifts her socked feet into his lap, circles his thumb at the bottom of her calf.

The slow motions he makes say to sleep, that they have time, that whatever they need to be said can be said later. Tomorrow. The day after that.

Some time after she drifts, her ringing phone wakes her up.

She swallows, reaches a tired hand out for the phone Elliot is holding.

“I — I didn’t wanna —”

It’s still buzzing. The sound is louder and louder the more she peels her eyes open. 

She forces herself up. Her mouth is dry and her lips are chapped and the space on her cheek where the bruise rests is starting to ache again. 

She snatches her phone from him, presses it up against her ear. “Fin,” she greets. “Hey, no, you don’t — you don’t have to do that, please.”

He’s asking to stop by her apartment. He and Phoebe have a tray of something she made an extra serving of for dinner; enough left over so that Olivia won’t have to cook for herself tonight, maybe tomorrow.

She pulls her feet out of Elliot’s lap, sits up straighter. She attempts to rub the exhaustion from her eyes until she remembers the left side is off-limits, until it’s too late and she’s wincing under the rough way the pads of her fingers feel atop the bruise.

She feels his hand graze up to grab onto her thigh at the same time the pain envelopes her in its wrath, and she can’t do both things at once: Talk on the phone like normal, and breathe under the burning circumstances - Elliot’s fingertips pressing into her skin, a touch so foreign and familiar all at once.

It’s overwhelming as all hell, to say the least.

“Why not?” Fin asks. “C’mon, we’re close enough to your place, we don’t mind.”

Elliot’s hand stops before he can reach her hip. He leaves it there.

“Because,” she begins, squeezing her eyes shut, “I’m going back to sleep.”

Fin laughs on the other end of the phone like he knows she’s full of shit. Why, he hasn’t clocked nor will he put in the effort in an attempt to, but he still says, “You good over there, Benson?”

She holds a warm palm against her throat, gulps. “Yeah. Fine.”

Fin hangs up - but not without telling her that if she needs anything, she knows where to find him.

“Yeah, on your couch playing video games, annoying Phoebe,” she says, and she feels Elliot shift - laughing - as the side of his body brushes against her calves. “Bye, Fin. And  — thank you.”

He waits barely two seconds to say, “What’s with that, y’don’t want him knowing I’m here?”

She raises a brow, laughs sharply. “You mean, I don’t want him knowing that you stomped in here like you were about to burn down a fucking building? No, I’d rather not get into detail about that with Fin today, thank you.”

He sucks in a breath and stills.

“And he might’ve had some questions if he walked in on you with your hand there,” she adds, and on cue, he pulls his fingers off of her body.

“Yeah. Uh, sorry.”

“How uh, how long was I asleep?”

“Three Friends episodes,” he says, holding up three fingers in her peripheral. 

She groans, pinches two fingers gently at the bridge of her nose. She’s fucking spent, and achy, but she knows they can’t leave it all unsaid - not after today.

“Ugh. Not long enough.”

“Liv…”

“He shouldn’t have called you,” she says at the sound of him saying her name.

“Who, Fin?” He squints, and she nods in confirmation. “Ah, actually, you’ve got Amanda Rollins to thank for this one. Blame her for my presence.”

“Amanda.” He nods slowly. “She — She’s the one who — For what?”

“Clearly ‘cause she’s the only other person on earth who knows how fucking stubborn you are.”

“I’m fi—”

“You’re not fine, Olivia.”

“Why, because Amanda told you I wasn’t?”

“No. Because there’s a hit out on you. Because your son was sent upstate indefinitely.”

She presses her lips together furiously, shakes her head. “It’s not indefinitely, it’s —”

“Liv, you’re looking at me dead in the face with a black eye telling me you’re fine but you’re not convincing, not this time.”

“Yeah, you already told me all that when you busted in here.”

He holds his pointer finger up, says, “Okay, well, you let me in, for starters —”

“Would you rather we argued by the elevators instead? Or how about the lobby, give everyone out there a little show?”

“We weren’t arguing…”

“Elliot.” She hates how rigid his name sounds when she says it now; like it’s the end of an exhale she’s been waiting years and years to breathe out, but the anticipation is gone and it isn’t relieving anymore. It’s sad, heavy, fractured. “I don’t need you.”

He laces his fingers together and sets his hands in his lap. “Yeah. You made that very clear, Liv.”

He’s still sitting. Her temples are throbbing, and if she doesn’t lay back down where she’d fallen asleep, she might puke all over her own sofa. 

“Here, lemme —” He notices her lean back and stands up with haste, brushes the throw blanket over parts of her that are now uncovered after she’d answered the phone call. “You okay?”

She shakes her head as much as she can muster. She barely manages to lift her cheek off of the arm of the couch. “The — Opiates. They make me nauseous, which is why I hate ‘em.”

“I know. I know.”

“Can you stay, just — just to make sure —”

The sorries she means to say are stuck in her throat. Her mouth is so beyond dry and all she wants to do is sleep, but if he leaves she won’t and it’s a lie if she convinces herself - even in this hazy state - otherwise.

Without a second thought, a blink, he says, “‘Course.”

Some time when the last dose of meds she’d taken wears off, she finds herself tiptoeing off of the couch and into her own bedroom. Her neck is aching - the last thing she needs, on top of a swollen black-and-blue eye, two fractured ribs and a sprained wrist is a neck she can’t turn for two weeks - and she needs to swap what she’s using for a better pillow.

On instinct she brings her hand over to flick the light switch on until she can’t; until she notices that underneath her comforter rests a Stabler-sized lump, sprawled out on the left side of her bed like somehow he knows she only sleeps on the right. 

At the movement of her body throughout her own bedroom - because her steps aren’t the least bit graceful, fluid - he shifts. Wakes up in a militant sort of manner, like he’s been put on this goddamn earth to guard her movements.

Her breath hitches, and he squints at her in the darkness.

“You — You good?”

She laughs. Everything that happened in the doorway before doesn’t matter, suddenly, and she laughs at the sight of him curled up in her bed - just above the sheets, because sleeping underneath them is a boundary they both know he won’t break through. He’s still in jeans and ankle socks and a goddamn button-down, and it’s half-sleep; the shitty kind of rest they’d taken in the cribs way back in the day, where part of them always had to be on high alert no matter how tired or overworked their bodies were.

The memory of it is so distant, and also five feet in front of her.

“Me? You’re sleeping in jeans, Elliot.”

“It was either these or squeeze into your son’s joggers, you pick.”

“You’re not getting that ass in a kids’ size twelve.”

“Exactly.” He sits up, lifts the comforter with him. “What’s up, couldn’t sleep?”

She takes a step closer, until she’s able to plop down at the end of the bed.

“My neck hurts.”

“Not the —” He swirls a finger in the air, laughs lowly, “Not the eye or the ribs or the —”

“Shut up. No. My neck.”

“Oh, well.” He wiggles out from underneath the covers, the denim sticking to the staticky sheets. “Here, I’ll take the couch.”

“Elliot.”

“What, Liv?”

“We both know you don’t want to take the couch.”

He scrubs the heel of his palm across his jaw. 

“Obviously,” he manages.

So he doesn’t take the couch.

So she climbs in beside him - wincing underneath the weight of all that’s been left behind on her body, but it’s still better than the goddamn couch and he’s there. He’s there, like a pillar, and she lets him be.

So he holds her, with caution and with delicacy and also with a little bit of possession in the way his arm is gently but fiercely draped across her middle - careful around her bruises and her fractures, but intentionally sturdy enough so she knows what this is, why he’s here, why he’ll stay.

*

They make it to the morning and she hasn’t kicked him out yet.

Not for holding her in their sleep; not for the egg sandwiches and orange juices he runs to the deli down the block and back to get, a domestic-enough display of breakfast-for-two splayed across the kitchen island all before she’s even out of the shower; not for setting the pad of his thumb on her cheek after breakfast and holding it there, over the bruise.

She sighs underneath his touch, though. “What?”

“This uh, this makes me lose my shit.”

“I know.” She blinks, and he pulls his thumb away from her purpling skin. “And so do my neighbors.”

“C’mon, I wasn’t that loud. You’re louder.”

“You think I’m loud?”

“In a good way, but yeah, y’can be.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Jesus. Are you — What does that even mean?”

She leans into him slightly, just enough to where her lips ghost the crook of his ear and he can smell her soap. Her wet hair brushes against the sleeve of his Henley and he freezes when she says, “I think you know.” 

*

He picks up on the third ring.

“El,” she breathes out.

“I knew you shouldn’t’a let me go to work.”

“No, I’m fine, I just —” She sets her palm into the marble of her bathroom vanity. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday and she’s studying the lines in her face, squinting at the ones blooming into an ugly shade of yellow. “Before, when I —”

“It’s fine, Liv.”

“Right, no, it — it is, or it could be, because when we were laying there this morning I thought about it, but then I remembered I have a black eye and bruised ribs and one working hand.”

“So…”

“So there’s no way in hell you’re fucking me while I look like this.”

The gulp he takes echoes through the other end of the phone call. 

“I — I didn’t even know that was on the table.”

When she says his name next it’s breathless - less seriousness in the syllables than she’s said it in almost two years.

“Liv,” he begins, “I didn’t —”

And because she needs to have the last word - because she hasn’t ever really had the last word when it comes to them - she says,

“Well. Now you do.”

*

On the night of her birthday, she somehow lets him rope her into checking into a hotel room with him.

The weeks leading up to February 7th have been so suffocatingly busy, they’ve seen each other just once. 

But now they’re here. He’s shuffling through the door of a suite with two duffel bags, one slung over each shoulder, and a woman he’s fallen asleep next to once.

A woman he’s spent half their lives loving. 

He watches her gaze flit to the center of the room - a single bed, two terry cloth bath robes hung on hooks by the closet, a bottle of champagne and two upside-down flues and a gold-and-white Happy Birthday card beside it.

The unease clouds the familiar, and they both dance around it. That part isn’t foreign to them.

She tells him she’s going to take a bath. There are still parts of her that are bruised, broken, vicious reminders of what happened to her last month, and the last place her body needs to be is hunched over in a firm four-star hotel bed while they wordlessly scan the room service menu - something to fill the silence.

He clears his throat and sits at the end of the bed, grabs the remote and turns on the tv.

He waits until he can’t. Until it’s been ten minutes and the faucet shuts off. Until he peeks his head through the slit in the door - the door she’d left open.

“Hey, you mind company?”

The water is up to her collarbone. She tilts her head back, hair plopped in a knot atop her head. It rests against the white shower tile, and she shuts her eyes, shakes her head slightly.

She’s an age she won’t even say aloud today, but none of that matters to him. Everything about her is still so beautiful - overwhelmingly so. Through thick eyelashes she looks up at him, smiles at the corners of her mouth in a soft way, like everything about them never crumbled.

“Not at all.”

“‘S why you left the door open.”

“Hm.” She presses her lips together. “Almost like you’re a detective or something.”

He starts to undress. First comes his shirt. Then he loops his belt out from his jeans and he slides the denim down his legs. He keeps a little bit of himself still-covered - enough of him so she’ll know he’s capable of sitting in a bathtub without assuming he’s just here to fuck her, even if the need is burning.

He steps inside, one foot after the other. The water rises and flattens out, and he can hear the hitch in her breath when he joins her.

“Hey.”

He folds his body as comfortably into this fucking bathtub as he can, his knees pressing into the bare skin on her thighs as he does.

She laughs. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he repeats. “You’re — so beautiful.”

Her cheeks flush crimson, and she bows her head at the compliment. 

“So…” His palm hovers at the surface of the water until he slides it up her arm. “Not the worst birthday ever, right?”

She pulls her knees to her chest and the water ripples. She tucks her chin in between and smiles. “I’ve had a few shitty birthdays while you were gone so, no, not the worst.”

“Olivia look —”

“I know.”

He presses the tips of his fingers into her skin and tries to tug her close - as close as to him as she can go in this hotel bathtub.

“I don’t know where to start with you,” he confesses after a few quiet seconds.

“Well, a hotel room on my birthday was pretty bold.”

He widens his eyes, chuckles. “You didn’t have to say yes.”

“I’m trying to stop listening to the part of me that would’ve said ‘no’.”

“Yeah?”

She nods wordlessly against her own knee.

“Yeah.”

“I’m uh, I’m sorry,” he mutters, his thumb drawing circles on her elbow.

She squints, and then her gaze falls to his hand, still on her skin. “For…?”

“Pushing you.”

“You didn’t.”

He pinches two fingers together. “I think I did. A little bit.”

He threads a few fingers through her hair, his palm rested at her nape.

“I’m trying to forgive you,” she admits at his touch. 

He knows. It’s in everything they do - the weight of what his leaving has done to her.

“I’m trying,” she says again, “but it’s hard not to be mad at you, not to think about the fact that you came back here married —”

He breathes so staggardly he can see the rise and fall of it by the way the bath water moves. 

“— but I know you love me, ‘cause you’re sitting in this goddamn tub —”

He raises his brows, slides both hands down to the middle of her back.

“In my underwear.”

“In your underwear.”

“I do,” he begins, “love you.”

“I’m trying to learn how to let you.”

“Get dressed,” he says after another quiet minute, just the two of them squished together in this marbled hotel bath tub. The water is stilled, cold, and no part of his aging body is going to let him fuck her in here - even if he’s dying to. “Or don’t, wait — just — stay there.”

He uses both hands to lay his palms flat on the tile, tugging himself up until he’s standing.

“So I get to ring in my birthday naked and alone and cold in this tub and you…”

He stretches one arm to grab a towel off of the rack, wrapping it around his torso. “Will be right back, I’ll give you the signal, here, where — where’d you put your clothes?”

She gestures to the satin pajamas thrown haphazardly onto the toilet. It’s very Olivia of her, that they aren’t folded into a neat square, stacked atop each other. 

He exits the bathroom, makes a call, and reenters an agonizing twelve minutes later - because he’d made sure to tell them to take less than fifteen with it all if possible.

He taps his knuckles on the door like he hadn’t just sat in a bathtub with her, and she’s wrapped in nothing but a towel, hovered over where her clothes are.

“Take this too,” he says, tossing her his gray zip-up. “‘S cold.”

“Cold in our hotel room with heat…?”

He shakes his head. “Nah. Outside.”

“No.” She sucks on the inside of her cheek, shakes her head with fervence. “No Elliot. I’m not going outside. No way in hell.”

“C’mon, I just mean the balcony Liv. That’s all.”

“The balcony,” she repeats, her glare icy as she lets the towel fall onto the bathroom floor, stepping one foot at a time into her pajama bottoms.

He observes, “So you’re a sleep set kinda woman now, huh?”

She laughs as she covers her right side with the pants, both hands flat against her bare breasts. “Shut up.”

“Listen, you earned it. What are those, Alexander McQueen pants?”

“Elliot, shut up.”

“Don’t forget that,” he reminds her, pointing at his hoodie she’d slung over the towel rack. “It’s —”

She grits her teeth, “Cold on the fucking balcony El, I know.”

Her hair is damp at the ends from where loose strands had fallen out of her clip, and she lets him take the lead. He slides open the doors and outside a single cupcake - chocolate is all they’d had, and he hopes with time she hasn’t become too boujee about her desserts - is right where he’d left it on a white plate, a single candle wedged into the center. The lighter he’d asked the staff to bring is there too, and he looks behind him at Olivia to make sure she hasn’t changed too much - that she still finds gestures like this ridiculous.

Her lips are pressed together in a tight line, but she’s trying not to laugh. 

Good. She still finds gestures like this ridiculous.

“You gotta blow out a candle.”

“That’s…” She shudders at the temperature, mostly. Tugs up the zipper on his hoodie with two fingers.

He moves out of the way to let her pass, resting his backside against the arm of the single chair out here. 

“Stupid, I know,” he finishes, igniting a flame anyway. “But still.”

And she does. She leans over him and closes her eyes and blows out the candle. She won’t budge, won’t tell him whether or not she made a wish and most definitely won’t tell him what realm the wish would fall in if she did.

But this is enough for him.

In the cold February air they sit in silence, splitting a cupcake down the middle. She plants half of her ass down on one of his knees and falls into him, just a little bit. 

She scrunches her nose as she licks frosting off of the side, says, “Not bad for a hotel cupcake, Stabler.”

“No?”

“No, I mean, it’s no stale vending machine crackers —” She folds the cupcake wrapper in fourths between her fingers, explains, “Fin’s gift to me last year.”

He scrunches his nose. “‘Course not.”

“But it’s good.”

She takes another bite, and he watches her. She sinks further into his lap, the back of her still-damp hair splayed across his chest, right where the button of his Henley isn’t closed.

And then she swallows, brushes the chocolate crumbs off of her palms.

“There is so much going against this.”

He runs a hand across her shoulder, asks, “Like what?”

“Like: my son.”

“You’ve never dated anyone Noah met before?”

“This isn’t dating.”

“C’mon, I got you a suite with a jacuzzi tub and a cupcake,” he teases. “I think it’s dating, a little.”

“Our friendship,” she presses on. “We lose our friendship. You take me back in there and realize you hate kissing me. Then what?”

“Olivia, I can promise you, all I’ve thought about for twenty-four years is kissing —”

She snaps her head around so she’s facing him, setting her pointer finger over the center of his lips.

“I’m bad, like — I make you cringe.”

“You could never make me cringe.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’re the most beautiful person in the world to me. I know that.”

“Okay. Fine. I snore in my sleep. Loud.”

“So do I.”

“Great.”

“Okay, so we — we get earplugs. We wear earplugs ‘til the day we die.”

She widens her eyes, says, “‘Til we die? That’s…very committal of you.”

“What do you want me to say Liv? You want me to fuck you once in a hotel room on your birthday and ghost you after that?”

She drops her gaze, and then her finger, from where it’d been hovering at his jaw.

“Olivia.” His hand cups her face in one fell swoop. Her skin is clammy, even on a thirty-degree February night. “I shouldn’t care what your wish was but I dunno, I kind of do.”

“It was for Alexander McQueen to make sleepwear. My wish.”

He narrows his eyes at her and tugs her closer, one arm pulling her into him by the hip.

“He gets used to me, slowly. Noah. I don’t push, but I get a chance, at least.”

She speaks softly into him, her cheek rested against his. “I told you, he gets attached.”

“Let him. Olivia, let him. He can.”

“Attatched attached. Like, he’ll be asking me why he can’t call you ‘Dad’ in a week and I just —”

“We,” he corrects, “talk to him about it then, together.”

“My work schedule is terrible, Elliot. Terrible. You’d see me like, two nights a week.”

“Better than none,” he decides, pressing his lips lazily into the crook of her neck.

“And yours, it’s — it’s not like it isn’t just as hectic,” she presses on, her jaw tense underneath the touch of his mouth.

“Why are you pushing me away?”

“If you have to ask me that —”

“I know. I know why, I just — I’m here ‘cause I want things to be different.” He looks out into the distance, at how small and insignificant he feels in the heart of the city, surrounded by lights and buzzing streets and buildings so much taller than the balcony they’re sitting out on. In the grand scheme of things, they’re both so small - yet this partnership is the road map of it all. “Don’t you?”

*

She rings in fifty-five with a little bit of heartburn - thanks, hotel cupcake and champagne; not the best combination past ten o’clock for someone who’d forgotten to take the last three, four days worth of her vitamins. She rings in fifty-five with another body beside her in a bed that is neither of their own, a calloused palm splayed across the bare skin of her belly like if he breaks the contact it’ll all go away. She rings in fifty-five knowing that there’d been an Olivia before tonight, and an Olivia after - and in the dark, with Elliot breathing steadily beside her - she needs to get okay with that.

They didn’t fuck. At least, he doesn’t let her call it that entirely.

He’d said it was more than that. He’d started by kissing her with a delicate sort-of hunger, across her collarbone and tongue-swirling around her nipples and down into the crook of her warm thighs, taking his time but devouring it all too. 

When he’d brought his mouth back up to meet hers, she’d lifted her thumb to part his lips fully, latching her own on just as hungrily.

He laughed into a kiss, said, “And you thought I’d hate that?”

She sighed into his open mouth, said, “Well, not anymore.”

With her hair sprawled onto the white of the hotel bed comforter, she’d sunken into it - the comfort of the moment, the heat of it all.

He’d slipped inside of her easier than she’d expected him to - like bodies could suddenly be made for one another, and his was made for her.

It’d been one of the stupider thoughts she’s had, so she slipped it into the back of her mind and reveled in the Finally of it all - of Elliot fucking — “Making love,” he’d reminded her later on, four fingers in her hair and his lips pressed into the soft of her stomach as he grumbled the words — her like he’d been waiting a goddamn lifetime to.

Half a lifetime, she can hear him say with smugness, certainty.

And now they’re here, in the after, two slowed-down heartbeats and a boundary that’s been begging to be broken since before they could ever call it a boundary aloud.

She rolls onto her side and Elliot’s arm follows, limp and loose and undoubtedly numb.

“Mmm.” He peeks one eye open, like he’s checking she hasn’t run out on him in the middle of the night. “Hey.”

He holds onto her with such tenacity and protection; the same kind of ferocity in which she’d never been taught to give to anyone else, like life had been saving it for him all along.

She both loathes and loves that fact.

“Hi,” she whispers. The room is dark sans for the peek in the balcony curtain they’d purposely left a bit open. 

His fingers trace abstract lines across her skin. 

“You okay?”

“I — I think so.”

“I’m not on one knee asking you to marry me.”

“Well, at least there’s that,” she breathes out.

“But out of all the birthdays…”

“It wasn’t the worst,” she teases, sighing against him.

*

He meets her son - officially - on the first weekend of March.

A snowstorm blankets the city in its cold wrath - heavy and stubborn and long-falling on the Saturday Olivia brings Noah by the apartment for lunch.

He’s at the kitchen table contentedly eating lasagna - Bernie’s recipe, Elliot’s execution - and a side salad which was Olivia’s contribution, something she’d said she couldn’t mess-up.

“My mom said you’re a grandpa,” he says, cutting through the sound of forks scraping at cheese on glass dishes, through gulps of lemon water, through gusts of snowy winds enveloping Long Island City.

“I —” Elliot laughs, even though Olivia’s gaze is sharp and fixed on her son. “I know. Your mom’s got a nine year old and I’m a grandpa.”

He feels Olivia’s fingers curl around his elbow.

“Well when you put it that way…” she says.

“I guess the shaved head isn’t doin’ me any favors,” he says.

“You had hair,” Noah mumbles through a forkful of pasta, “a long time ago.”

“Stop talking with your mouth full, Noah.”

“Sorry, mom. But you did. He did.”

“Y’know what, I did.”

“In the pictures, I mean. Mom keeps —”

Elliot narrows his eyes, swivels in his seat so half of his body is pointed toward Olivia’s. “Mom keeps ‘em where?”

“By her bed. But you’re not old in it.”

“Noah!”

“‘S okay, no, he’s —” Elliot sets down his fork, runs his finger over the rim of his glass. “I kept a lot of pictures from those days too.”

“How long were you and my mom partners?”

He treads delicately, not knowing where the stories of the days they’d spent together start and end, in Olivia’s retelling. In front of him is an innocent, curious, nine-year-old boy enamored by the magic of his mom in a lifetime he wasn’t ever a part of, unlike his kids who’d not only been there through the days of Benson and Stabler, but considered Olivia somewhat of a third parent throughout the entirety of their youth - and then some.

Elliot Stabler, to Noah, is a two-decades old picture in a frame on a dresser. Nothing more.

“I told you baby, twelve years,” Olivia interjects. She’s twirling her fork between her fingers and her lasagna is barely touched, and that’s because he knows she’s sitting here with knots in her stomach and her heart in her throat, watching the two halves of her heart connect.

“But then you left,” Noah points out. “Before mom met me.”

“A little — A little before that,” Elliot chokes out, “yeah.”

“For work?”

“Okay, Detective,” Olivia interrupts, enveloping a hand atop his at the center of the table. “I think that’s enough of the interrogation, eat your lasagna.”

But Elliot, who owes her boy - and Olivia herself - an answer, even in the shortest of forms, says, “The job here just got a little uh, a little too hard for me. Your mom is way better at it than I ever was.”

Noah shrugs in acceptance, another bite of lasagna between his lips. “Oh. Yeah, my mom’s the best at her job. Is that why she’s Captain and you’re not? ”

“Absolutely, kid.”

*

She knew this would happen.

The snow would pile up - over a foot, now - and Elliot would insist. His loft is empty, Eli’s room still has a bed, and he’s not letting her drive back to the city with her son in falling snow; not when the forecast says it isn’t stopping until three, four in the morning.

“I wanna stay,” Noah assures her, slipping into a t-shirt - one that had belonged to Eli a few years back - and sweatpants that are two sizes too big. Olivia crouches down and rolls the band for him once, twice, and then stands back up. “Please.”

“We are baby, we are. But listen to me.”

Elliot’s in the bathroom. She knows that much from the sound of running water, the buzz of an electric toothbrush. It’s just she and her boy in a house that’d never been home but feels enough like it that she can’t fight Elliot with reasons they can’t stay.

“Elliot is a friend doing us a favor, okay?”

“Mom.”

“And there are so many things that when — when you’re old enough, I’ll tell you,” she begins.

“Because Elliot is your…” Noah stops to look around where he’s standing - up and down the hallway until he realizes Elliot is still in the bathroom, still brushing his teeth. “Boyfriend.”

“No, he’s not my boyfriend.”

“But he wants to be.”

“Noah.”

“Mom! I know what true love looks like. I’ve seen Frozen.”

“Yeah, I don’t think Elliot is exactly a Hans, baby.”

She laughs, pats him on the behind and tells him it’s time for bed, that she’ll leave the door to Eli’s room open - only a little bit.

When she reemerges into the living area, she remembers the two whiskey glasses Elliot had set on the counter for after. She stands on socked toes and grabs the bottle from where he’d told her it’d been, starts to pour them both a glass.

“Tryn’a get me drunk, Benson?”

“If my son weren’t asleep down the hall, maybe.”

“He’s a good kid, Liv. Great kid actually. Looks just like you.”

She shakes her head around a sip, says, “You know he isn’t mine, El.”

“He is where it counts.”

“Of course.”

“You’re a good mom. The best.”

“Yeah well, a few months ago, before — before Christmas,” she starts, “he met his half-brother, on this, this ancestry app.”

He rounds the counter, curls his hand around the drink she’d poured him.

“Yeah?”

“He would’ve told you otherwise about me uh, being the best mom.”

“Why’s that?”

“It was the worst week of my life,” she says, her voice cracking at its edges. “All of a sudden he had this whole family, like a mom and a dad and a brother who loved him and each other. I wasn’t good enough for him anymore.”

“Whatever happened, he didn’t mean that. Y’know how many times the kids told Kathy and I they hated us?”

“Well, I know your kids and I’m willing to guess: way too many times.”

He laughs, swishes the drink in his mouth. “Exactly.”

“Sometimes I hate myself because I can’t give him any of that.”

“Liv…”

She bows her head, takes a longer swig of whiskey.

“‘The only real family I have’, that’s — that’s what he said.”

“Damn. I’m sorry baby.”

She brushes off the pet name; how comfortable it sounds coming from between his lips. How uncomfortable she wants to be rendered by it - but she won’t, can’t.

“This is…” She looks around his home, his loft. It’s vacant but love still lives here. Picture frames with photos of the kids decorate every end-table. Bernie’s hand-knit pot holders hang above the stove. Eli’s soccer trophies and medals have their own shelf in the living room. “A family. Noah is dying to be a part of a family, and if —”

He shushes her. Steals the glass from her hands and sets it atop the counter beside his own. He takes her hand in his and presses them up against his own chest, then her knuckles against his lips. “I know what you’re gonna say.”

“That if this doesn’t work…” she begins.

“Yeah but Liv, what about this isn’t working?”

“I don’t — I don’t know.”

“‘Cause it’s working for me. Jesus. I’ve never wanted anything to work so badly before.”

Her eyes fall to the floor in guilt, fear.

“But if you really don’t think it can, I’m not —” He shakes his head, keeping her hands firm in his own. “Then I can’t force you to stay.”

She takes a shaky exhale, looks back up at their married hands,

“I love you.”

She doesn’t know how deep in her gut it’d been resting, but it’d been there since the night at the hotel, and then before that. So many nights and days and all-nighters in a crappy sedan with a cracked radio and nothing but burnt coffee in their bellies and the quiet company of each other filling the silence, before that.

His face drops - relief resting in the lines of his tight-lipped smile.

“But I don’t have a right to be mad that you left.”

“Who told you that?”

“Me.”

“Yeah? ‘Cause Olivia, I was uh, I was so in love with you I didn’t see another way.”

“Elliot, don’t.”

“I knew when I shot Jenna Fox that I’d choose you, every damn time. And I couldn’t — I couldn’t do my job that way anymore.”

“So you just…stopped,” she says.

“So I just stopped. And I’m sorry. I’ll hate myself forever for doing that, for — for running scared, but you had every right to be pissed. Still do.”

She knits her brows together, says, “Oh, I was more than pissed.”

He smooches the back of her hand once more. “I know.”

In the dim light of his kitchen, he lets go. He grabs both whiskey glasses and presses his elbows into the counter, watching her slowly sip the liquor down. This is always when they were at their best - in the quiet, talking with their eyes and their hands and the space that always felt better shared.

She feels the warmth of him in her orbit when he sets down his empty glass, grabbing her own between his fingers and placing it down quietly - Noah is down the hall, fast asleep - beside his.

He laces a hand around her bicep and twists her in her place until she can face him. He thumbs the tail of her sweater until both of his hands can rest flat over her belly, trailing them up her body slowly.

He speaks against her chest - against her rapid heartbeat. A crescendo in the quiet.

“I love you too. Obviously.”

*

“Were you gonna tell me you got asked out or just hope I heard about it from Fin?”

“Good morning to you too, Elliot.”

He drops a piping hot coffee atop her desk, careful to set it away from the pile of paperwork she’s got her nose in.

He softens when she looks up, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, a hand tucked underneath her chin.

“Hi. Hey. I’m — Look, can we just talk?”

She gestures in front of him, her palm facing flatly upward. “Floor’s yours. Close my door.”

He taps the edge of her office door with his shoulder until it shuts, and if anyone out there is shooting them a look of nosy suspicion, he doesn’t give a fuck right now.

“It’s just fucking aggravating, that — that no one knows about us, I guess.”

“Can you just sit and stop like, bouncing around all angrily?”

It’s only then he catches the fact that his fingers are curled into fists, half-moon shapes from his nails making angry marks into the skin of his palm. He sits down across from her.

“Elliot, what —” She takes a breath, two fingers pressed into either sides of her temples. “Do you want me to walk around with a Post-It note on my forehead, I’m getting fucked by Elliot Stabler on the regular, so don’t ask me out?”

“I mean, I don’t hate that.”

“Of course you don’t, you possessive fuck,” she says, but she’s smiling around the words. 

“Duarte can piss off.”

“And who’s to say he didn’t?”

“Tutuola.”

“Fin’s just riling you up because he knows how you get. Case in point.”

“So what’d you tell Duarte?”

“What any taken woman would — that I’m seeing someone.”

“Someone.”

“Elliot.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

“That — I dunno. Liv, it doesn’t have to be some secret.”

“It isn’t. The kids know. Fin and Phoebe. Amanda and Carisi and your sergeant and, and your mom. It’s — It’s not.”

“I want…” Jesus, this is ridiculous but the desire is there and it’s burning and it hasn’t gone away. The more time he spends in her bed and in the hushed quiet of her apartment after work and weekends with her son and lazy nights inside of her, the more it never can. “What if you marry me? Then what?”

She taps the edge of the styrofoam cup and chuckles. “Please, I haven’t even had a sip of this yet. Don’t do that to me.”

“You wouldn’t want to be my wife?”

“What — What we have is fine.”

He gulps. “Just fine.”

“El…” She strips the lid off of the coffee cup, leans down to blow it cool. “I think what we have is enough.”

“You don’t think you’d be a good wife.”

“I…” Her jaw drops, and she uses the heel of one hand to brush across her chin. “I’ve never been one before so, no, I don’t think I’d be a good one.”

Before he can counter with something he knows she doesn’t feel like hearing, there’s a knock - all knuckles, abrasive and interruptive - at her door.

“Sorry, Capt,” a scratchy, feminine voice speaks, and Elliot looks down at the toes of the sneakers that slide across the floor and come to an abrupt stop when the detective sees she has company.

“Muncy, it’s fine, come in. This is — Detective Stabler, my partner.”

“Ah yeah, your old partner,” Muncy recalls, squinting her eyes at them both.

“Well yes, but also my partner. He uh, he came over here to bring me this,” she says, lifting the coffee cup into view, “and argue with me about why I’d be a good wife. How’s your Tuesday going?”

*

She asks him to meet her in the park. Them, really - because it’s a Saturday afternoon in late May and days off are rarely days spent without her boy.

He knows that. He loves that about her, he says. He joins them with no qualms; asks what she needs or what he should bring and she just texts back, Yourself.

Noah is at the food cart getting sodas and hot dogs when he finds their picnic blanket - sprawled across the lawn in a spot where she could watch Noah bike up and down the trail well-enough without losing sight of him.

They haven’t spent any time together since Tuesday - that Tuesday in her office.

He ducks down and kisses the top of her hair in lieu of a spoken hello, sliding across the creased blanket until he can plant his ass down into the middle of it.

“I shouldn’t have gotten so pissed about Duarte askin’ you out,” he starts. “I mean, the guy’s what, five-foot-two? You’d never.”

She leans the right side of her body lazily into his. “Shut up, Elliot.”

“Am I wrong?”

“He’s pretty short, so…”

“I don’t need —” He shakes his head, starts again. In the distance, Noah is holding three hot dogs and three sodas close to his body, tucking them into his elbows so he won’t drop them all. At the sight of him, he stops.

“You can say it,” she pushes.

“If you don’t wanna get married, I won’t — I won’t bring it up again.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Noah’s steps are short and slow and careful, like if he moves too swiftly he’ll drop all of their lunch.

“Should I go help him out?”

“It’s okay, he likes doing things like that.”

“Fighting for his life in Central Park?”

She nudges him in the stomach with her elbow. “Elliot, shut up.”

Noah’s eyes widen when he gets back to the blanket and takes notice of their company.

He drops the food onto the surface, hands Olivia all three sodas. “Elliot!”

From the corner of her eye, she watches Elliot bump his fist into Noah’s.

“Hey, buddy. Been a minute.”

“Yeah! Mom, Mom?”

“What is it, baby?”

“I wanna ride my bike again, can I?”

She stops unwrapping the edges of the foil over the hot dog she’d been opening for him, says,

“Fifteen more minutes, and then you need to eat.”

“He’s cute,” Elliot says, “with the — with the little helmet.”

“He was too cool to wear one until like, ten minutes ago, and then I told him you were coming.”

She leans back onto her elbows, feels Elliot’s hand brush against the small of her back.

“I love you,” she breathes out. “And I love how much you love me, how — I mean, I’ve dated a handful of men and none of them have ever showed up with coffee begging me to marry them so some guy I don’t even think about can fuck off, but…”

“I’ve loved you for so long.”

The confession comes with an exhale of relief, and she gets it.

“But I get it, if uh, if you’re happy like this.”

“I am,” she says, and she is, really. There’s a swift sort of contentment that’s cascaded into every corner of her life, and they aren’t perfect but they never would’ve been, never were supposed to be. “But I can compromise.”

She watches him raise a brow. “Yeah?”

“Ten guests, tops. And I keep my last name. And we can do rings, but they’re simple because I’m a fifty-five year old NYPD Captain, not a Real Housewife.”

He blinks slowly. “Are you serious?”

She continues, “And you can’t ask me to marry you in public, in front of anyone. I’m serious, if you — Okay, like, if you got down on one knee in the middle of this park I’d block your number and pull a you, move to Europe for a decade.”

“Not funny.”

“That’s how serious I am.”

“Can I at least tell the girls?” He means Mo, Katie, Lizzie. She squints her eyes at him and shrugs a shoulder. “Come on, y’know they’d be excited to help.”

“Help host a garden party with no more than ten of us, fine.”

“My family alone is bigger than ten people, Olivia.”

She sighs, “Fifteen.”

“Twenty, and an old friend marries us.”

“I’m not getting married by Judge Donnelly.”

“How’d you — I didn’t even say who it was.”

“Because I know you,” she says.

“Okay, then you know I wanna write our own vows,” he challenges.

“The internet has plenty — pick decent ones, print ‘em out, and use ‘em.”

He smacks his lips together. “You’re serious.”

“So serious.”

“Olivia.”

Before she can say anything else, the thud of Noah’s bike falling into the spot on the grass nearest to their blanket jolts them away from their conversation.

“Done already?”

He nods, sitting on his knees and reaching for the hot dog - still wrapped in its foil, still warm.

“Elliot?”

“Yeah, bud.”

He chews, swallows a bite down.

“Are you still dating my mom?”

“Noah, don’t —”

“Yeah Noah. I think I’m still in your mom’s good graces. For now.”

Around another bite, he drops his jaw.

“Chew with your mouth closed, Noah,” Olivia warns, reaching a hand out to squeeze her fingers into the top of his thigh.

“Sorry. Why ‘for now’? Is it ‘cause you told her she snores?”

Elliot can barely mask his laughter. “Yeah, something like that.”

*

One night they’re in his bedroom and he pretends to do it - just to gauge how she’d handle it if he did.

She’s at the foot of the bed slathering moisturizer across her legs, and he gets down on one knee, right there on the ground.

It takes her a minute to notice - to stop rubbing her lotion in circles long enough to duck her head down, widen her eyes.

“El, get up.”

“No. I have to ask you something first.”

“Jesus.” Her breath is shaky and hesitant and he reminds himself it’s because this isn’t something she’s ever needed and not because she doesn’t love him. “Not like this, either.”

He stands up then - too fast, and his goddamn knee taunts him for it. It cracks and he leans over, lips pressed against her forehead. He tastes a blend of serums on his mouth, and he licks his lips.

“Then like what, baby? How the fuck am I supposed to do it? You’ll cut my balls off if I propose in public, now I’m not allowed to do it in our bedroom…”

“You’ll figure it out,” she smirks surely, lacing both of her arms around his torso. “Now never do that again.”

*

It’s no secret she doesn’t like big gestures.

Everything about her life has been small, sacred, hers. She’s celebrated lots of things in silence, in small circles. She’s even been blessed with the only kid in New York who’s content with a four-friend birthday outing and a day at the aquarium instead of a full-blown party, somehow.

On Father’s Day, it’s her idea to have brunch in the garden for Elliot, and his daughters are more than happy to help set up the surprise.

Elliot is picking up Eli from the airport. His flight gets in right before nine-thirty, and it’s entirely coincidental, that all of his kids plus her own will be together like this on Father’s Day.

Olivia gets back with a dozen bagels and half of the house is still asleep - Noah in their bed, Dickie in Eli’s old room. Kathleen and Lizzie are in the kitchen washing dishes, cutting the stems off of florals, hanging fingerprint paintings Maureen’s boys made in school on the fridge.

“Liv, Dad is not gonna see this coming,” Lizzie says as she’s scrubbing a serving tray clean.

Kathleen agrees, and then she asks Olivia to join her out in the garden so she can tell her whether or not the layout of the table makes sense.

“Liz,” Kathleen adds, “if Noah wakes up tell him Liv’s outside, okay?”

Lizzie nods, hums as the sink water runs.

“I wanted to talk to you, alone,” Kathleen says once they’re outside.

The garden is filled with the sounds of an early June morning - the chirping of bugs and birds and the sound of neighboring lawn mowers sliding across grass. It’s so distant from the sounds of the city, but she could get used to it.

Kathleen sets a stack of plates next to the empty pitchers Olivia displays at the center of the table, says, “We feel so lucky to have you in our lives, after — after all this time.”

Olivia nods slowly. “Oh, honey, that’s not —”

“And of course, we — we miss Mom. But Liv, you and my dad, it’s just —” She watches Kathleen - a girl she’d known through years and years, the same blue eyes she remembers belonging to a bold eight-year-old on her first year in the force. They’re steady and soft and valiant and her dad’s.

“You don’t have to say anything, sweetheart,” Olivia promises, tucking one hand into the crook of Kathleen’s shoulder.

But Kathleen shakes her head in stubborn disagreement, and everyone says she’s the spitting image of her mother, but all Olivia sees is Elliot right now.

“I feel like I do. I don’t — I don’t want to involve myself in something I’m not a part of, but Olivia, if you don’t want to marry dad because you’re afraid of how it would hurt us, I just…” She stops to take a breath, folds her hands at her center, “It wouldn’t. You’ve been a part of this family for so long, and it would just be making it official.”

*

She says he owes the kids a thank you for all of this - not her.

But he thinks she’s full of shit, and he tells her so later on - once the bagels are all eaten, once everyone’s had enough of Maureen’s mimosas that the garden is buzzing, once Eli and Noah ditch the festivities to walk the few blocks to the skate park.

She’s pressed up against the counter, scraping the scraps of everyone’s eggs into the trash bin, one-by-one-by-one.

He holds her wrist as it’s still in motion and she drops the fork she’s holding onto an uncleared plate, rested atop the counter.

“What is it?” She’s smirking at him - three mimosas deep herself.

“I love you.”

“Enough to help me clean up?”

“Sure, gimme,” he says, reaching a wiggling hand out for the plates.

“I’m kidding. What is it though?”

“You said this was Katie’s idea.”

“Uh huh,” she hums. “That’s because it was.”

“Liv.”

“What, El?”

“You.” He sets a kiss atop her Cupid’s bow, holds his mouth there for a second. “Your idea.”

“Katie’s. I told you.”

“Liv.”

“Fine, but the kids helped so much it may as well have been theirs, too.”

He tugs her forward until their centers meet. It’s a warm June afternoon and the air conditioning hasn’t kicked on yet, but he still holds her close, against his sweat-rimmed t-shirt and all.

He moves stray strands of her hair away from her cheek and he rubs his thumb there - right in the spot where a ghost of a bruise that’d changed the course of their fate had once rested, faded into her flesh again after months of waiting.

“You didn’t even blink when Noah asked to go to the skate park with Eli,” he points out.

She hums against him. “He’s family. I trust him.”

“Ah, see.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just making my point.”

“Your point…?”

“That all of this is easier than you thought it’d be, ‘s all.”

*

Nothing is easy in the middle of July.

He’s pissed. In a dizzying sort of fury, he approaches the scene - uninvited, unannounced. His hands are fists at his side and his forehead is sweat-beaded and she can see the rise and fall of his chest so blatantly, from the way he’d ran up to the dunes to find her.

“You drove all the way out to Gilgo Beach to cause a scene, Stabler?”

Fin holds him back with spread-out arms and a smug look that says Fuck off without actually uttering the words.

Olivia doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t. She leans into Fin and squeezes his shoulder, and he backs off, surrenders. He walks away with Muncy and Velasco and defeat is painted in the way their heads hang low and their arms swing tiredly at their sides.

Everyone is covered in agony, and two girls are dead - dead and buried somewhere on this beach, because they didn’t get to them in time.

Elliot swoops around to the passenger side and waits for her to climb in. She feels bad for not wiping the wet sand off of her boots out on solid ground, and now she’s tracked it all inside, right onto the floor mats of his truck.

He looks over and down at the way she’s staring at the mess she’s trailed in with her and breaks the silence with a small, “Don’t worry about the floor, Liv.”

She presses her face against the glass and catches her breath. Twenty minutes ago, she and her detectives had looked death in the eye, begging for their lives at the barrel of a gun held by a monster.

He’d turned it on himself after, and she’s still trying to blink Muncy’s piercing reaction out of her head.

“Jet heard about it. Told me.”

She doesn’t pick her head up from off the glass. Every blink feels so weighted.

“You don’t have enough detectives to send out there so you gotta what, let ‘em follow your lead?”

She breathes out a sharp breath, and in her lungs it feels like there lives a lethal combination of sand and sweat and sobs when she exhales.

He sets a hand on her thigh then, and she wants to shake it off of her, wiggle out from underneath his touch. But two innocent girls just died. She doesn’t have it in her to move.

“There are so many risks.”

“Right, and Organized Crime is just what, you and Bell playing fucking Uno in her office?”

“Don’t start.”

“It’s my job, Elliot. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

He moves his hand further down her leg, cupping her knee. He coasts down the mostly-vacant Ocean Parkway, storm-ridden and somber.

“I want you to admit it’s dangerous.”

“Never said it wasn’t.”

“If something happpens to you —”

“You already know it has.” They don’t speak his name, because they don’t give him that power over them; they never will again. But she sees the guilt settle in his gut anyway, and she knows he closes his eyes and has to live with the nightmare of not being there. “Elliot, I’m fine.”

His voice is lower, more cautiously delicate now, “Guess I just had to see for myself.”

“So you drove all the way out to Long Island to.”

“When you put it that way…”

She lets out a breath so heavy it fogs the glass she’s leaned up against.

“I’m gonna spend the rest of my life protecting you,” he says once they’ve been driving in silence for awhile, once the rain starts to steady and still into a trickle rather than a storm.

“What do you mean?”

“Part of the vows I would’ve written —”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re still caught up on that?”

“Twenty-four years,” he says. “I’ve got twenty-four years worth of things to say to you, and you’re making me rely on an internet stranger instead.”

“Consider it your punishment for showing up and babysitting me at a job.”

“‘M not.” He pulls his hand off of her leg and slings both arms over the wheel. The rain picks up again, and she feels her eyes close - the heaviness of today welding them shut. “I’m sorry.”

She rubs her lips together and reaches her left hand out, finds his and brings it to the center console, her fingers lacing through his.

“Don’t,” she says. “Because I’m — I’m glad you’re here, that — that you’re taking me home.”

*

In August, Olivia cries on the other end of the phone and the sound of it - tears not caused by him, by the agony of the job, by McGrath breathing down her back with some dumb demand - shatters him more than he’d imagined it could.

Throughout the years and years of knowing her, he’d been accustomed to every one of her reactions - including her cries. He’d memorized every one, knew where to place them and what the catalyst of each one had been.

This one is new to him: the guilty mom cry.

“It’s just — It’s his first solo, and of course, of course two of my detectives are away and we’re slammed,” she says through a sharp breath, stress hugging the syllables of every word, “and I can’t — He’s gonna be heartbroken, El.”

“Okay, okay baby, wait —” He kicks his feet up onto his desk, presses the phone closer to his ear, “When is this thing?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Okay, two o’clock, hold — Yo, Bell!”

“No, I’ll only get drinks with you tonight if Benson comes along, I like her better than you,” she teases as she passes by his desk, chops at his ankles with both of her hands as a wordless signal for him to get his feet the fuck down. “What is it?”

“Tomorrow, two o’clock. I have my kid’s uh, my kid’s dance recital thing. Good to cover?”

She curls her bottom lip forward, shrugs. “Sure, go ahead.”

“Alright,” he speaks back into the phone, “tell me where to show up.”

Through a sniffle, Olivia laughs. “You’re serious.”

“You heard that whole thing?”

“That Bell likes me better than you?”

“Well that too, but no, no, tell — tell Noah I’ll be there. Or I can call him, text him, whatever.”

So he texts Noah, who sends him back ten emojis and a picture of the ticket - the ticket he’ll need to present at the door of the auditorium.

Well, it’s outside, at a park, but there’s still a stage and snacks and you can bring a video camera, so that Mom can still see my dances, he explains over dinner that night, beaming with excitement.

“How’s a phone I kind of know how to use?” Elliot asks, and Eli snides from the other side of the table.

“That works!”

*

The migration of their things happens in early September.

For the sake of them and her boy and some peace, they both know it’s best if she and Noah move into the loft in Long Island City. There’s a terrace flooded with greenery a few months out of the year; the bustling sounds of the city don’t always reach out this way; the space is open and airy and there’s more room for family dinners and all of their things and he promises, he’ll let her have more of the closet.

It’s swift and seamless and she wants to find something to nitpick about but she can’t, not when Elliot’s home feels like hers the second she hangs three blazers up on velvet hangers in a closet he’d left more than enough room for her in.

Not when he stocks the fridge with everything she and Noah eat without ever having to ask; not when he turns Eli’s old room into one her ten-year-old is excited to sleep in; not when her days start and end with his body pressed up against hers in their bed, in their shower, in the kitchen when it’s late and neither of them can sleep.

One night when Noah’s been asleep for a few hours and work was slow enough that she’d gotten off in time to tuck her boy into bed and reheat last night’s leftovers, Elliot walks through the door just before midnight.

She’s dozing off, or she’s already half-asleep. She blinks and remnants of her mascara scatter in black dots across the underneaths of her eyes. She swipes the back of her hand over where it’d fallen and knows she just made it worse.

Elliot, from the doorway, with his keys still in his hand, laughs exasperatedly.

She doesn’t budge from the sofa. “What?”

He walks over to her slowly, toeing off his shoes and holding them between his fingers.

“I know, I’ve never looked better,” she exclaims, hoisting her arms tiredly above her head. She’s still in today’s blazer.

“Actually, you’re right,” he says. He licks the pad of his thumb and swipes it right over her face, catching the mascara onto it.

“Gross.”

“We’ve done worse.”

“Shut up.”

“Olivia, marry me.”

She’s too tired to sit upright, and when she blinks it feels so heavy. But she blinks anyway, and she slides a hand up her arm and catches his gaze in the soft light of their living room.

“What?”

“Marry me. I want — I want you to be my wife Liv, more than — more than anything.”

“Wait. Now?”

He shakes his head, a hand shoved into the pocket of his jeans. “No, not — not right now, baby.”

She furrows her brows. “Then when?”

“End of the year, how about. No frills, like you said.”

“And you’re serious.”

He nods sternly. “As serious as my handwritten vows.”

“Elliot.”

“I’ll let you plan it.”

She pouts. “Why? You know I’m not the planner here.”

“Okay, good. Was just waiting for you to admit that. I’ll plan it, with — with the girls’ help. Noah too, if he wants.”

“God. I mean, he’s gonna want, obviously.”

She laughs and thinks about her sleeping son in his bedroom down the hall; how all he’d wanted last Christmas was a sibling to call his own - and now he’d gotten five more and a father figure who shows up to his dance recitals and cuts the crust off all of his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and loves him like one of his own without Noah ever having to ask for it.

“Good.” 

*

He feels her start to pull away from it.

It’s the beginning of October and Kathleen - bless his daughter and the care she envelopes everyone she loves in - brings over a bag full of bridal magazines to the loft, says they’re for Olivia.

“I don’t think Olivia’s interested in lookin’ through those, baby,” Elliot says from his place at the kitchen island.

Noah, who’s spooning cereal into his mouth, sets his spoon down to say, “I’ll look at them, Katie!”

“Knock yourself out, kiddo,” Kathleen says with a laugh, setting the stack of magazines down in front of Olivia’s kid, who starts thumbing through the pages manically.

She presses into the countertop, stealing a forkful of Elliot’s waffle.

“What do you mean, she isn’t interested?”

“Ah, she just —” He fumbles, does his best to teeter around the words he’s trying to say because her ten-year-old is right here, and he’s always handled conversations around Noah with careful delicacy.

“Hates weddings!” Noah says, tearing his gaze away from the magazine.

Kathleen widens her eyes and shakes her head incredously. “But she’s…marrying you.”

“She is,” Elliot says surely, folding his hands atop the counter, “but y’know, she just, she isn’t into the planning, all of that.”

“Oh. I — Dad.”

“What, sweetheart.”

“Nothing, I just — Remember when I called off my engagement?”

“Well, he wasn’t right for you. And you were smart enough to know that.”

“Yeah, but what —” Kathleen stops herself in the same moment Elliot nods, a hand hovering above Noah’s head. “No, you’re right, maybe she just…hates planning, but I just hope —”

“Katie.” Elliot grabs his daughter’s frantic-moving hands in his and stills them, pulling them toward his chest. “If she didn’t want it we wouldn’t be going through with it, okay?”

*

His mouth trails kisses along her clit, two fingers inside of her as she comes undone. When he slides them out, he presses his lips against the slopes of her thighs for a few more lingering seconds, catching his breath.

His head is at her center, and her hands are pressed into his shoulders.

When they’re together like this, it’s a burning reminder of why there’s always been this gravitational pull between them both; why in every parallel universe it’s she and him; why she’s convinced bodies are made for one another and so are souls.

“Liv…”

“What?”

“You’re pulling away.”

“That was me pulling away? I’d hate to see me at my best, then. You better start taking supplements, Stabler.”

She’s laughing around the words, and he is not.

She feels him nod tensely, his chin moving up and down against her belly.

“How?”

“I don’t — D’you still want to get married?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Why aren’t you just answering that you do?”

She shoots up now, a fiery fury swooping over her body at the accusation.

“I’m here, aren’t I? I — I moved my life into here to be with you. My son’s life! My son’s entire world changed, and I was okay with that because you —” She loses her breath at the top of her throat, shakes her head. “I don’t know why you’re pushing this so hard.”

“Because I was…not a good husband.”

“So you…want a do-over or something?”

“Olivia.”

“I don’t get it, El.”

“Forget it,” he says, swatting a hand in the air in frustration.

She grabs onto that hand. Tugs it toward her until he shifts forward.

“Tell me,” she urges.

“There was uh, always this part of me that held onto you. Even when I shouldn’t have. Had no business thinkin’ about it, but I did. I did.”

She nods slowly, softly. She stays firm in her place on the bed - naked with only the edge of a throw blanket draped over her lap. She wants him to know she isn’t running, that he can tell her every thought coursing through his mind - even the fucked-up ones.

“In every universe, you’re my wife.”

“El, don’t — You don’t know that.”

“Yeah I do.”

*

He watches the kid admire himself in the reflection, his tiny hand tugging at the collar of his dress shirt.

“Ever worn a suit before?”

Noah shakes his head, smoothing his hands over the lapels. “Not one like this.”

“Looks good on you. Real good. Here, lemme — let’s take a picture, for Mom.”

“She can see my suit before the wedding?”

“Yeah, I think it’s just me who can’t see her dress,” Elliot mumbles, lifting his phone out from the pocket of his jeans. “Somethin’ like that.”

Noah smiles for the picture Elliot takes - beaming in his suit, a smaller version of the same one Eli will be wearing. He tucks his phone back into his pocket, calls for the saleswoman.

“That one?” He asks again, just to make sure.

“That one,” Noah confirms, slipping back into the dressing room.

Afterward they head to the diner, just the two of them, like Elliot had promised. They sit in a booth in the back-right corner, scan the menu for a minute before deciding you can never go wrong with a diner cheeseburger.

“El?”

Elliot stops squeezing the lemon into his water, tilts his head. “What’s up?”

“When you went to Italy, was it — was it ‘cause of my mom?”

“Like, her fault?”

“Yeah.”

“No. No. Uh, Noah, look, everything — everything that happened was my doing,” he starts to explain. The kid is about to be his step-son, and he’s older now, inquisitive. His questions are only going to get more curious as the years go on, and Elliot doesn’t want to do what his mom did when he was Noah’s age; shush him by telling him that magic masks the world, that real emotions and real hurt is just an excuse for the actions people take when they don’t know what they’re seeking.

“Oh.” Noah slurps through a sip of water, chews on his cheek. “You didn’t want to be her partner anymore?”

“I —” Jesus. Where the hell the waiter had trekked off to, he’s got no idea, but he’s desperately begging for him to come back around to take their orders. “I wanted to be her partner more than anything in the world, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But I uh, I outgrew the job, I did,” he continues. “And your mom, without me there, she — Look at everything she’s done, y’know.”

“Like how she’s Captain,” Noah says, certainty coloring the words.

“Right.”

“El?”

“I’m happy you came back though,” he exclaims simply. “Now you get to marry her.”

He puffs out his cheeks. “Yeah. No kidding. Thank God, huh.” 

*

“You are way too good with my grandkids,” he comments, beat from trekking ten blocks with the boys and Noah tonight.

She waves a hand at him dismissively, sinks into the pillows behind her.

“I’m serious. So what’re you thinking, you wanna be called ‘Grandma’ or…?”

“God, no. Makes me sound ancient.”

He chuckles, presses a quick kiss to her lips. “They call me Grandpa, Liv.”

“Well, you’re older than I am,” she prods, poking him in the chest.

“I feel thirty, with you.”

She tugs at the base of her ponytail, tightens it.

“That’s not what your bad knee said during sex last night,” she smirks.

He groans, “Don’t remind me.”

*

Eli comes home a weekend before he’s supposed to come home for Thanksgiving break.

It’s Olivia who picks him up from the overcrowded Delta terminal at JFK. It’s Olivia who moves Noah into their bed - just for the night, just so his son can have his old space to himself for a day without a ten-year-old occupying half of it.

It’s Olivia who holds his boy in loving arms on the couch as he speaks through breathless sobs. Her hand weaves through the back of his hair and she tells him to try and breathe, says something like, “We’re not mad.”

Elliot hovers in the doorway, careful to curl his fingers around his key ring so they don’t clank together and make a sound. 

“Eli, no one is mad at you,” he hears her coax. Delicacy is threaded through her voice. Her hands slide down to the small of his back. “No one is mad, okay?”

“Does Dad know?”

“No, but he — Honey, you’re not a failure for needing a break, okay?”

“I feel like one,” his son confesses.

“You’re human. Humans need breaks.”

His son’s voice is hoarse and throaty and guilt-ridden. Elliot is cautiously firm in his spot, a palm flat on the wall.

“So what, I just — I move back in here? Go what, go to community college like all of the other people who couldn’t live on their own?”

“Well your dad would never throw you out on the street, sweetheart.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’d kick his ass, for starters,” she says, and then he watches her pull her hands away from him, only to set them back onto his tear-streaked cheeks. “Eli, why don’t you go to bed? We’ll — We’ll talk to your dad in the morning about everything, okay? It’s late.”

Eli, who’d swam in the grief of losing his mom for the better part of two years, accepts. He nods in Olivia’s hold and accepts the woman in front of him in a way Elliot could never surely say he ever would’ve. 

“Liv,” he says her name with sincerity, “thank you — for everything.”

She pulls back, kisses the center of his forehead. Lets it linger there.

Elliot waits until the sound of his old bedroom door shutting echoes throughout the loft to walk all of the way into the room.

Olivia sinks into the back of the couch, closes her eyes.

“Liv…”

“I know. You heard.”

“Yeah well…”

“He confided in me in the car, on — on the way back.” She’s whispering, threading her fingers together. She lifts her neck up, only halfway. “He hates being away from the city, from his siblings.”

He clears his throat, standing solidly at the center of the room. “Okay. Okay. So, that’s — that’s fine.”

“That’s what I said.”

“We have an extra bedroom, for Noah.”

“We do, but I’m not worried about Noah.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Our bed.”

“Ah.”

“Your spot.”

He laughs. “Of course.”

She holds both of her arms out silently.

“Me?”

“No, the other bald cop standing in our living room.”

He takes his time sitting down, one hand pressed against the dip in her collarbone.

“Thank you,” he begins, “for being so…y’know. With Eli.”

“Soft?”

“Soft, yeah,” he laughs.

“He’s scared of disappointing you.”

He promises, “He couldn’t.”

“So maybe…” She drums the tips of her fingers across his lap, ducking forward to rest her lips on the side of his jaw, “Maybe you wake up tomorrow and you tell him that.”

He nods sturdily, finding her moving fingers and lacing them between his own. “But you’ll be there.”

“I always am, right?”

*

Noah moves into Bernie’s old room without a fuss.

Her boy, Olivia thinks, is just thrilled to have the option; to live in a house with a soon-to-be step-brother he gets to argue over the single shower with; to be a part of a family that manages to eat dinner all together at a table two, three nights a week.

On a night in December a week before Christmas, he knocks at their half-ajar bedroom door right at the center - lightly enough that it might’ve not even awoken them if they hadn’t been barely asleep, still buzzing from the busyness of today.

“Mom?” He tiptoes in, hugging one of Bernie’s old knitted throws close to his middle.

She whispers even if Elliot just closed his eyes less than two minutes ago. She feels him shift against her. “Yeah, baby.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Is it the room?” Elliot asks, jolting out of sleep and peeling the comforter off of himself.

Noah shrugs. “Don’t think so. I like the room.”

“Remember,” Elliot says, pointing a finger at him, “Ayanna came over and saged the place clean.”

“And that helped,” Noah promises, dropping the throw at the edge of the bed by their feet.

Olivia watches her son wordlessly climb in beside Elliot and over his center until he’s wedged in between the both of them. Elliot squeezes his arm, says, “Comfy?”

Noah nods, closing his eyes and letting himself fall into Olivia’s side.

“Good.”

“I’m excited, mom.”

“For…?”

“For the wedding,” he mumbles sleepily, his cheek buried in her arm.

They’re about two weeks out now. She has a simple cream-colored dress in a black garment bag that’s been hiding-out at Kathleen’s because she doesn’t trust him not to unzip it and take a peek. Noah and Eli picked out matching suits, and it’s all her son has talked about - his suit, the wedding, how he’s kinda too old to be a ring bearer but he’ll do it anyway.

At the mention of the wedding, Elliot’s lips curl at the corners like they always do anytime someone reminds him Olivia will be his wife on December 31st.

The part of her that has never been someone’s wife is terrified of it.

The part of her that knows marriage will be a whole lot of this drapes her arm across Noah’s torso, her fingers landing right at Elliot’s side.

She falls asleep to the feeling of both of them underneath her touch; something she could spend the rest of her days doing.

*

She lets him write his own vows.

That’s how this whole thing begins.

She doesn’t take his last name, because this name has been hers for fifty-five years, and she doesn’t need a hyphenated name to complicate her signature, to be threaded to the man she’s saying I Do to, she explains.

The ferocity of nerves that brush across her start to settle. He cups a hand over her cheek - delicately enough so he can’t swipe off the makeup one of the girls helped her with.

“Hi,” he says lowly, his thumb stroking her hairline.

“Hey,” she manages.

“I know that — I know we weren’t gonna do the thing where I write my own vows,” he says, “but you know…”

Laughter echoes through the garden, but she’s looking only at him, her gaze sharp and settled and steady.

“I know,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Me too.”

So he says everything he needs to. Most of it. Tucked into the sleeve of his wallet back in the house is the rest - for later, another time, when dozens of eyes aren’t on he and his bride.

He dips her and plants a kiss onto her lips before he’s supposed to, and Noah and Eli pop the confetti poppers she let them buy and bring to the ceremony. Untraditional, sure, but this union is about more than the both of them and they’d be blind to ignore that fact.

Later on, when the terrace is buzzing and the guests - minus the boys - are buzzed on Bernie’s cocktails, he finds Olivia in the kitchen, palms pressed into the countertop. She’s taking a breath away from it all. It’s almost midnight, and she’ll have to go back outside for the countdown, for the toast he knows the kids have planned.

He curls a hand around her wrist, careful not to brush the sleeve of his jacket up against the cake atop the counter. 

“Good baby?”

She nods, smiles up at him through thick, mascara-coated lashes. Her cheeks are brushed with a thin layer of blush. She’s stunning in every color, and he doesn’t give a shit that she isn’t in traditional white. He runs a palm flat over her middle, over the satin of her cream dress.

“Good,” she promises.

She presses the print of her pointer finger into the side of the cake, lifts it out.

“What’re you doi—”

She holds it against the center of his parted lips, and he wraps his mouth around her finger and sucks off the icing.

“Mm. Yeah. Seven outta ten.”

She laughs, head back. “Seven?!”

“I compromised on the cake.”

“God forbid, Stabler.”

“God forbid you, Stabler,” he mocks.

“Mmm, fine, you can say it just once.”

He cocks a brow, sets his lips at the pulse point on her neck. “Later.”

“Saving it?”

He shrugs, says, “I waited this long, right?”

Against his body, his wife laughs - rounded and full of radiance; a laugh he’s been waiting his whole life for.

“Right.”