(no subject)
Title: Port
Pairing: A/O
Spoilers: Season 10
Synopsis: Over a postprandial drink, Alex confesses her feelings for Olivia - unfortunately, Olivia is not in the room at the time.
Disclaimers: The “Law & Order: SVU” characters are not mine, but I am using them for entertainment and not for profit.
Notes: This is way too long to be a drink, and yet it is. I have been trying to shorten it for three weeks now, but each correction and re-write seems to make it longer, so I thought I'd better post it before it turns into a novel! It has not been beta read and multiple corrections tend to leave behind stray words and other glaring errors, so apologies in advance.
Cross-posted to A/O Lovers and my journal.
“Alex, will you at least consider telling me what’s wrong? You’ve hardly touched your dinner.”
“Sorry, Jeremy. I should have told you that I wouldn’t be good company tonight.”
“Actually, you did tell me, but I’m your most stubborn cousin and I’ve missed you, so I twisted your arm and made you let me in anyway.”
“Well, you came bearing home-cooked food and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast…” Alex smiled.
“In my opinion, you still haven’t,” Jeremy replied, looking pointedly at her plate. “But at least you had something and from the tone of your voice on the phone, I knew that you’d probably spend the night with legal briefs and Mahler if I didn’t feed you. It’s not as if you allow anyone else behind those emotional walls of yours.”
Alex looked pained. “I intended to order Chinese, if you must know,” she protested.
He waved dismissively. “C'mon Alex, talk to me. You’ve been through a lot in the last year: the end of your insane engagement, stepping out of the shadows at the DA’s office…”
“Seeing Olivia again.”
“Ah, the delectable detective. Was the reception particularly chilly?”
“No. At the time she looked shocked and… hurt. Elliot filled in some inadequate excuse for my absence and we went to work. After that there was no chance for a private conversation. Until today.”
“How bad was it?”
Alex pushed her chair back from the table abruptly. “Would you like some Port? I have a bottle I bought for no apparent reason, since I never socialize.”
“Or talk to anyone who isn’t a relative, a cop or a lawyer, which is a waste, because you are gorgeous and smart and usually funny - when you’re not brooding over sexy detectives.” He picked up their plates and went into the kitchen as Alex surveyed the wine cabinet.
“She is, isn’t she?” Alex sighed and collapsed into a dining chair and setting the bottle of Port down with a thump. “It’s just so inappropriate.”
“What is?” Her cousin asked, walking back into the room with two glasses. “The sexiness of the detective? Your behavior since you came back from the dead? The relationship you had with Detective Benson before you left?”
“We never had a relationship, per se.”
He snatched the bottle from her and expertly opened it. “Not going to be distracted... So what exactly is inappropriate? The detective’s impressive rack, her wonderful ass, the swagger that makes her hips sway like something out of…”
“Jeremy you’re gay!”
“Yeah, so are you. The difference is, I’m out.” He waved his hand in an exaggerated effeminate gesture. “Just because I don’t want to do whatever things you want to do to her,” he shuddered delicately, “doesn’t mean I don’t notice the woman’s physical attributes.”
“I really didn’t have a ‘relationship’ with Olivia before I was shot.”
“But you slept with her.”
They were both seated again when she answered. “It happened… it had started to happen quite often. It was never planned and more often than not it happened after a bad case or a fight at work.” She gulped her drink, but didn’t seem to notice. “I’m usually meticulous about those things. Safe sex or a recent medical history.”
“In writing?” Jeremy had been teasing, but at his cousin’s faint blush he guffawed with laughter. “So, you broke the rules with her before you went away.”
“Every last one of them,” Alex admitted, holding out her glass for a refill. After Jeremy had complied, she sighed and said, “It started after a bad case. I needed human contact and so did she. She was driving me home, we got out of the car and hugged… and it was as though somebody lit a fuse.” She closed her eyes and Jeremy saw her flush deepen.
“Hot, unsafe sex, huh?”
“I didn’t want any barriers between us,” Alex remembered, speaking softly. “It’s not just the way she looks… feels.” Tastes. “It’s the way she is, Jer.” She didn’t seem to notice the abbreviated form of his name that she hadn’t used since their teens. “She’s so impassioned when it comes to protecting the victims - so strong and confident. But she let me see the other side of her - her vulnerabilities, the person she is underneath.”
“You were in love with her,” Jeremy concluded. He tried and failed to hide his surprise. He had grown accustomed to his cousin’s habit of separating sex from any emotion which might prove messy or detrimental to her career.
Alex drained her glass. “I wish I could lie well enough to use the past tense.”
“You ignored that and got engaged to a man when you got back?”
“I also ignored it and got involved with a man and two women while I was in the program. What’s your point?”
“All at the same time?”
“Very funny!”
“And let me guess, safe sex with all of the above.”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Robert was outraged and sarcastically asked me if I would compromise on the matter after we were married, at least for long enough to for him to make me pregnant.” This time she was the one who affected a shudder.
“I’m guessing you don’t want children.”
“Not his children, no.”
Jeremy said nothing and let the statement hang between them until Alex broke the silence by holding up her glass. “I think I’ll have another.”
“What happened today, Alex?”
“We had to visit a witness in Inwood. It was the first time we’d been alone for an extended period since I went back to SVU and only because Elliot has the flu and it was a low-risk visit to a six year-old.” She sipped her drink. “Being in the car with her was… difficult. She still uses the same shampoo. We didn’t talk much, but she was tense… I could hear it in her voice. And I was trying not to look down her shirt… or remember what her voice could sound like when…”
She put down her glass, as though feeling, or fearing, the effect of the alcohol on an almost-empty stomach in making her too candid, even with the person closest to her. “Then it turned out that the little boy’s parents were lesbians. They had a beautiful apartment and it was clear that they were in love.”
She picked up her glass again, seemingly out of a desire to do something with her hands. “The first thing they did was assume we were a couple and express surprise that we worked together. It was awkward because the usual response, ‘You’re mistaken, we’re just professional colleagues’, was so clearly a lie that they winked before apologizing, assuming our affair was a secret... an assumption that was helped along by the awareness between us.”
She closed her eyes. “The last few times I’d seen her, she’d been wearing the strangest clothes, but today she was back to snug black trousers, a white top that hugged her breasts and dipped slightly too low in the front and a brown leather jacket.”
“Alex, you’re drooling just talking about it.” He was grinning, but Alex was too caught up in the memory to chastise him.
“By the end of the interview, all I could think about was what it used to be like to smell the leather while we kissed and I could feel her hands all over me.” What it was like to push those pants down her long legs and know that I was the one who could make her look like that, sound like that… She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Shit!”
She sounded as though she was on the verge of tears and Jeremy walked around the table and gently took her hands. “Memories can screw with your head, can’t they?” Alex wouldn’t allow herself to meet his sympathetic gaze, so he asked gently, “What happened then, Alex?”
“Gillian, the little boy’s mother, she saw us out. Olivia told her we’d do everything we could to protect her son if he needed to testify. Not because the defendant was a real threat, but because the process could be frightening for children.” She swallowed. “Then Gillian turned to me and said, ‘You should have kids with this one, she’ll make a great mom. And they’ll be gorgeous, too. Too bad you two can’t have them genetically. They’d be amazing.’”
“I guess it’s awkward to tell a mother that you don’t understand the attraction of kids.”
“If I’d managed to say that.” She closed her eyes. “I think I managed to say something and we walked back to the car. I was still in a daze when Olivia said my name. I looked at her and she looked… haunted.” She swallowed and opened her eyes, but she wasn't really seeing Jeremy any more. “I apologized to her; said I was sorry if she was uncomfortable.” Alex got quiet as the conversation came back into her head.
“Uncomfortable? Do you remember what it was like between us, Alex?”
“You know I do.”
“That was so far outside my comfort zone that nothing that woman could say could make me feel ‘uncomfortable’ in comparison. And yet you managed to come back to New York and live your life as though it never happened!”
“I tried to… and you can be angry at me for that if you want, but I heard about Kurt Moss and I know you moved on while I was engaged.”
“Kurt? He was just another damn distraction from this… thing between us! I could have sex with him because there was no link in my mind or my body between doing that and making love with you. So having some random lesbian tell me that you and I would have good-looking kids is not even slightly disconcerting to me. It’s just an odds-on fact. What I want to know is why it made you look like fucking Casper?
“Because we never had the chance to think about things like that! To have dreams like that - about what we had and where it could go - before Velez made sure it went nowhere. Then when I got out I went to see you and you were with Casey Novak - at least, she was leaving your building at 7 am. I couldn’t face hearing you say that you were in love with someone else… knowing that you’d moved on, so I took it as read and tried to do the same.”
“Casey was, is, my friend! She got my drunk ass home after we hung out and stayed to make sure I didn’t choke on my own vomit. It happened maybe three times. But maybe that gave you the excuse you needed. Left you free to fake your perfect heterosexual life!”
“I can’t deny faking it, Olivia, but I swear to you that it wasn’t my first choice - you were. I won’t tell you I was a saint while I was in the program and I didn’t expect you to be. But New York for me was full of memories of you… of us.”
“Do you know that from the time I was nineteen, you are the only person I’ve had unprotected sex with? It got so I could tell the brand of dental dam by the fucking taste. Kurt thought it was a quirk of my job that I didn’t want…”
“I know… I know because it’s that way for me, too. Liv, don't turn away from me. You were the first person for me - ever. But when we made love I wanted to taste you... feel you against me and inside me - skin on skin.”
“Maybe you didn't, but I had dreams like that, Alex... Dreams of what it might be like to live with you. I guess I just didn’t have the self-discipline to keep them at bay like you did.”
“Was it self-discipline or stupidity? I knew how I felt, Olivia. It wasn’t just the way we made love, it was everything. I thought about you constantly, but I couldn’t cope with what that meant for the plans I had for my career and for my life. Yes, I was that shallow. But the last night we were together though, the night before the bomb, I knew I was wasting my time. I made up my mind that when it was over, when we’d gotten justice for Lidia Sandoval, the first person I’d tell was my mother... After that, I had no idea. I felt the need to keep some distance from you until I had it all sorted out in my head... I didn’t know it would be my last chance.”
“Oh god, Alex, don’t cry…”
“This entire mess is my fault. So if it upsets me to see two lesbians making a life together, if it tears at my insides when someone reminds me of the life I might have had if I’d shown even an ounce of courage…”
“She kissed me. I think she did it because she wanted to shut me up and because the moment had become so emotionally…extreme…”
“So you made out on the street in Inwood, outside a witness’s home?”
“We kissed.” When he continued to stare at her. “A lot.”
“And then she just drove you back to the office?”
“We went to her apartment.”
“And had unsafe sex.” Alex’s expression was all the confirmation he needed. “You’re not looking happy. Does that mean it wasn’t as good as you remembered?”
“That’s hardly the point! I’m back exactly where I was five years ago, except I have no idea whether Olivia still wants this to become a real relationship, or whether it’s too late for anything except… sex. She could have changed in the time I’ve been away - I know I have. She said I didn't allow myself to dream about a life with her and she was right. But that has changed.” She raised tear-drenched blue eyes to meet Jeremy's. “I wake up in the morning thinking, dreaming about waking up with her and I fall asleep with a similar thought.”
“I take it you no longer want to be governor of New York?” he asked, dryly.
“I want a job I enjoy that contributes something positive to society. I want Olivia; I want a relationship with her - maybe a home some day. She told me once that she wanted kids and when I saw that little boy today it occurred to me that if I had come straight back to her after Witsec, by now there might have been a toddler running around who looks like Olivia.”
“Maybe you're growing a biological clock - you are forty, you know.”
She ignored the dig. “What am I going to do, Jeremy?”
“What did she say when you told her how you felt?”
“Told her…?”
Jeremy groaned. “You’re certifiable, do you know that?” He led her back to the table and sat her down. “Alex, you have got to try talking to someone other than me. My suggestion would be that you start with your detective.”
When Alex just looked helpless, he sighed. “I’m going to get out of here, because Steve is at home alone on a Friday night and, quite frankly, I think I’ve been enabling your antisocial behavior. So when I leave, you call Detective Benson and invite her over, am I clear? No work, no Mahler and definitely no more Port unless she’s drinking it with you.”
Alex sighed. “I suppose you’re right but…”
“No buts.”
Alex stood reluctantly. “Give Steve a hug for me. He’s my favorite cousin-in-law.” She smiled sadly. “Thanks, Jer.”
“My pleasure.”
She walked him to the front door, they hugged good-bye and as she was about to close the door behind him, he said, “Oh and Alex…” When Alex looked inquiringly at him, he asked, “Was it as good as you remembered?”
“I’m about to put my pride and my self-respect on the line and call the woman,” she replied wryly. “What do you think?”