Fic - Hard Habit to Break (Rizzoli & Isles)
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Hard Habit to Break
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The sound of running water cut off abruptly. Jane Rizzoli slowly counted to thirty before walking over to her guest room and tapping on the door.
“Maura?”
The door opened a crack and Maura peeked through, tendrils of steam curling around her face. A surge of heated air made sweat bead on Jane’s forehead; she knew that Maura had blasted herself with as hot a shower as she had been able to bear. Jane’s skin was still tingling from doing exactly the same in her own bathroom.
“Brought you these.” She held up an armful of clothing. “I looked for silk, but all I found was cotton.”
Maura smiled, taking the pajamas. “Cotton is fine. Uh, do you have…” Her voice trailed off when Jane held up a first aid kit. “Oh.”
“Same happened to mine.” Jane gestured vaguely toward her neck, which now sported a pink-tinged dressing. “Guess the water opened it up. You need a hand?”
Maura was already retreating. “No, just give me a few minutes.” The door closed behind her with a soft click.
Jane wandered through into her living room. As she crossed to her sofa, the draft lifted a balloon into the air. She paused to watch it bounce off an upturned glass and then pop as it hit the tines of a discarded fork. The deflated rubber draped itself over a half-eaten slice of cake. Jane slumped onto her sofa and wondered why the fuck that half-assed piece of symbolism made her feel so damn sad.
It was past 2 a.m., and they were supposed to be cleaning up. Friends, family, and colleagues had drifted away, excuses about crack-of-dawn shifts, pets to feed, and case reports to write up having been on their lips almost as soon as Jane arrived. Perhaps they had caught the look in her eyes as her smile wavered for a second, or noted the tremor in Maura’s hand as her knuckles whitened around the can of beer that she wasn’t really drinking. Appreciative of her mother’s considerable efforts, Jane had thanked the guests for coming, and for their gifts and their support, but she hadn’t tried to stop them leaving early. Only Maura had stayed behind, ostensibly to help with the cleaning.
Jane pushed herself off the sofa, found a bottle of cold beer in the fridge, and poured Maura a large glass of wine. Jo-Friday snuffled around on the tiles, her face full of cake crumbs. Jane patted her fondly and then left her to get on with it. At least that way something would be tidied up.
“Hey.”
With her feet bare, Maura’s approach had been almost soundless, and Jane suspected she had only spoken to avoid being met by the business end of a kitchen knife.
“Hey yourself.” Jane made no comment about the neat strip of gauze on Maura’s throat, but just handed Maura the wineglass and gestured toward the sofa. “Did you want cake? According to the bottle, that’s a dessert wine, so I think it needs cake with it.”
This time Maura’s smile was slightly less strained, and she gave a slight nod. “I will if you will.”
“Lady strikes a hard bargain.” Jane cut two generous slices, washed two forks, and then, with her beer balanced precariously beneath her chin, went to sit beside Maura on the sofa.
“Cheers.” She clinked her bottle against Maura’s glass and drank deeply.
“Happy birthday,” Maura said, but the words seemed to choke her.
For a few minutes, they sipped their drinks and took careful bites of cake. Maura was the first to set hers aside. Jane continued to push her mangled slice around with her fork for a while before giving up and sacrificing it to Jo-Friday. Outside in the street, a car alarm blared, two sharp pips from a key fob silencing it as suddenly as it had started. Jane pulled her knees up beneath her chin and wrapped her arms around them. The apartment was warm but she felt chilled to the bone. When Maura tucked a blanket around her, she shut her eyes miserably. It felt too much like old times and she missed that closeness so acutely that the ache was physically painful.
“Are you mad at me?” she whispered, once she was sure that she could speak without screaming.
Maura’s response came instantly. “No.”
“I killed Hoyt.”
“I know that.”
“No,” Jane shook her head and turned to face Maura. “No, I don’t think you do. Not really. That son of a bitch was down, Maura. And I could’ve kept him down easily.” She swallowed hard, feeling sick, but the words kept coming in a rush. It could have been a confession, had she felt the slightest shred of remorse. “He hurt you and I just lost it. I wasn’t really thinking, not consciously, but I knew that some part of the cancer was a lie. He was too strong to be that close to death. He hurt you and he saw what that did to me. I’d given everything away and I realized then that he’d try again. In whatever time he had left, he’d try again.” She used her shirtsleeve to swipe tears from her cheeks. “I couldn’t let him, Maura. I just couldn’t.” She huddled into the blanket, her shoulders heaving with the sobs she was struggling to suppress.
Maura reached out a tentative hand and wrapped her fingers around Jane’s. It was enough to make Jane stop clutching at the blanket and grip Maura’s hand instead.
“I should’ve fought him,” Maura said in a voice so brittle it was barely recognizable. “I should’ve done something, but I could see him with the blade at your throat and I was so scared I just froze. I autopsied Hoyt’s victims, Jane. He could have made that cut in a heartbeat.” All the color had drained from her face and she was shaking her head convulsively. “It was almost a relief when he came toward me instead. I couldn’t bear the thought of watching you die again.”
As Jane stared unblinking at her, Maura’s composure deserted her and her face crumpled. She hid her head in her hands, curled in on herself, and keened like a wounded animal. The sound was so terrible it made Jane’s skin crawl and she wondered exactly how long this breakdown had been threatening.
“Jesus Christ.” She didn’t know what to do for the best. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
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In the end, Jane wrapped Maura in the blanket, made tea, and fetched a box of tissues. She sat back down and waited silently until Maura managed a weak smile and used one of the tissues to dab at her face.
“Want to talk about it?” Jane asked tentatively.
“I don’t think so.”
“Got plenty of tissues now.”
Maura acknowledged that by taking another and blowing her nose, but she still didn’t speak. Drawing in a deep breath, Jane decided to push her a little.
“You know, this is only the third time you’ve been here since I got back to work.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Maura’s tone implied otherwise, but she didn’t seem willing to elaborate.
Jane took a gulp of tea, scalding her throat. She swallowed it down, wishing she’d made coffee instead, wishing she could just say the right words that would make everything between them go back to normal.
“I miss you, Maura.”
There was no reply. Jane’s hand shook as she set the mug down. Tea splashed over the rim and burned the backs of her fingers, but she barely felt the pain. Something had gone so wrong between them, but without Maura’s help there was no way they could fix it.
“Okay, so we should probably get to bed,” Jane said lightly. She tried to smile, tried to make as if it wasn’t a big deal, but her smile felt more like a grimace, and her limbs were leaden when she moved.
“You were losing so much blood, Jane, and I couldn’t stop it.”
Her pulse pounding in her chest, Jane turned her head sharply toward Maura. Maura didn’t look away, and the horror Jane saw in her eyes made her recoil even before she heard Maura’s next words.
“I watched you bleeding out onto the sidewalk and I didn’t think it was possible that you would live. But you did.” She touched a hand to Jane’s cheek, just the faintest hint of pressure against the skin. “You came back, but I couldn’t,” she said with simple sadness. “I wouldn’t have been able to survive that again.”
For Jane, it was the mental equivalent of a light bulb switching on, and she understood at once what Maura had done: the different men, the mood swings, the frantic drive to redecorate - to alter and reclaim the spaces where they had always spent time together. Everything that had driven a wedge between them since the day Jane had shot herself clicked neatly into place, and she didn’t, couldn’t blame Maura for wanting to protect herself. Their ordeal with Hoyt that afternoon had given Jane an object lesson in what it meant to love someone so absolutely.
Jane realized with a jolt that Maura was watching her, and something in her expression must have given away her sudden comprehension because Maura nodded in confirmation.
“I think it was probably a post-traumatic breakdown.” Maura hesitated as if working it out for herself; a doctor adjusting her diagnosis slightly for the sake of accuracy. “Or at the very least a break from reality. I felt like I was watching myself but not connecting. I would say things and do things, and objectively wonder why even as I did them.”
Jane winced and gave a short nod. “And mainly I was just being a bitch.”
This brought the briefest hint of a smile to Maura’s lips. “You might have been slightly brusque on occasion. Not that it was entirely unwarranted. I could see that I was driving you crazy, but it was easier for me to talk in facts and figures than it was just to talk. But then…” Her voice trailed away and her smile turned wistful.
“But then, what?” Jane prompted carefully.
“But then, the last few weeks it all started to feel so right again.”
“I know,” Jane murmured. She had noticed the change herself. It had made her happier than she had been in months. Without thinking, she reached up and tucked a strand of damp hair away from Maura’s face. Her fingers lingered close to Maura’s jaw line. “I guess this explains why you invited half my family to live with you,” she said mildly.
Maura conceded the point without any attempt at subterfuge, her eyes closing beneath Jane’s touch. “Every time you came to my house, someone was with me. It felt safer somehow.”
“You don’t feel safe with me?”
“No, not like this. This doesn’t feel safe at all.”
“You scared?” Jane ran her thumb across Maura’s bottom lip.
Tears shone in Maura’s eyes when she opened them. “Terrified,” she whispered. With both hands she drew Jane closer to her, and then cupped Jane’s face and kissed her fiercely.
Too stunned to do anything at first, Jane felt herself gradually begin to yield to the pressure of Maura’s lips. She smiled at the touch of Maura’s tongue against hers, tasted vanilla frosting and sweet wine, and heard herself moan low in her throat.
“I missed you too,” Maura said when they finally broke apart. She smiled shyly. “And I’ve wanted to do that for the longest time.”
“Oh God.” Jane was still struggling to catch her breath. Every nerve-ending in her body seemed to be firing simultaneously and completely fucking up her equilibrium.
She swayed back toward Maura and was met halfway by another kiss that threatened to undo her completely. Maura took Jane’s hand and guided it to the buttons on the front of her pajama top. She held it there until she seemed sure that Jane had gotten the message, and then sighed contentedly as Jane began to open the buttons one by one.
Somewhat hazily, Jane wondered whether Maura would think her a tease for being so slow. In fact, her dexterity had deserted her entirely, leaving her fingers clumsy and practically useless. Useless, that is, until Maura touched her tongue to the side of Jane’s throat and Jane decided that taking her time might just pay dividends after all.
As she slid her hand inside Maura’s shirt, she heard Maura murmur indecipherable sounds of encouragement. The material fell open and Jane bit down on her lip as her fingertips grazed the small burn that Hoyt had left on Maura’s clavicle.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.” Maura shivered as Jane kissed the raw skin. “Not really. Not now. Oh…” Jane played her lips across Maura’s breast. “That really doesn’t hurt,” Maura said, thumping her head back against the sofa’s cushions.
Jane grinned, moving her hand lower and hearing Maura’s breathing catch hard and then hold. “Breathe, Maura,” she said, as she slipped her fingers easily into wet heat and Maura arched up against her. “Don’t forget to breathe.”
“I won’t.” As if making up for lost time, Maura was now hyperventilating.
Jane kissed her gently. “Don’t you be fainting on me, Doctor.” She dragged her fingers upward and Maura whimpered in agreement, her breathing still harsh but slower now and more controlled.
Mesmerized, Jane saw a flush of color spread slowly across Maura’s bare chest and watched the way her lips parted as she breathed or responded to a particular caress. Her hair and skin were damp with sweat, her lips full and swollen, and she was the most beautiful Jane had ever seen her. Tears prickled in Jane’s eyes, blurring her vision. She blinked them away quickly.
“Are you still scared?” she whispered plaintively.
Maura’s lips touched hers. “I love you,” she said. “I think that’s always going to scare me.”
Jane stopped everything to stare at her as the words hit home hard. “You love me?”
“Yes,” Maura said urgently.
Belatedly recognizing the cause of Maura’s impatience, Jane grinned and arched an eyebrow. “Even when I do this?” She twisted her fingers.
“Especially when you do that,” Maura gasped. Her hands reached for Jane, pulling her closer. “I love you,” she said again, emotion making her breath hitch on the words. “Please don’t stop…”
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End
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Tiny bit of gratuitous pimpage for anyone who might be interested in reading some original f/f fiction by me… My first novel, Snowbound, is being published by Bold Strokes Books on December 12th and is available for pre-order at their website or over on amazon. There’s an lj/author’s blog here: http://carihunter.livejournal.com/ and a bio and early teaser over at my author’s page on the BSB site.