Unfinished Business
Title: Unfinished Business
Pairing/Characters: Elle & Reid, past Elle/Reid
Rating: PG13
Words: ~2700
Summary: Four years after Elle leaves the BAU, she runs into Reid & takes stock of what's changed -- and what hasn't.
Warnings: Just some language & innuendo. Excessive diner use? Whatever.
Notes: You should probably read The Cure first (it's 200-ish words), or parts of this won't make sense. It's also helpful to have read The Unnavigable Sea, as it's the same 'verse, but not 100% necessary.
Elle watches him for a long time from the doorway.
She leans against the glass and tells the tired-looking woman at the counter that she's waiting for a friend, artfully ignoring the at 2am? and arched eyebrow. He's alone, like she knew he would be. He's ordered a coffee -- she would have known what was in it without having seen -- and some toast, but he isn't eating the toast, just picking at it with the blunt blade of the butter knife. His hair is short still, but different; she can tell it's been recently cut. No glasses. He's in a booth with his back to her, so she can't see his pants, but he's got on a heavy sweater despite the summer night outside. His posture is relaxed -- relaxed for Reid, anyway -- in a way that tells her something else that she already knows: late nights all alone at 24-hour diners are routine for him.
It's been years since she's been in the same room with him, and there is something inherently comforting in the fact that so little about him has changed, at least outwardly. It's peculiar to her, somehow, that he can't feel her; that he doesn't know her eyes are all over him. Even with the gun she knows he has tucked under his sweater, he is excruciatingly vulnerable like this. Elle would never take a seat facing away from the door, especially not if she was alone.
But then, that's why she came, isn't it? Because he would. And does -- still does -- even after all this time in the BAU.
It's only after she has made it halfway to his table that she realizes why. Reid is facing the back door, and in it is a reflection of the front. His eyes have been on both entrances the entire time, and he has been aware of her since she walked in. Elle stops dead in her tracks, and Reid reaches his right hand up in a small wave of acknowledgement when she does. She steels herself, shaken by her own mistake, and slides into the booth across from him.
"Elle!" he says, feigning surprise, his mouth revealing his slightly bewildered amusement.
She smiles wryly back. "In the flesh. Fancy meeting you here. Come here often?"
The line goes right over his head. "No, it's my first time, actually."
"That's what they all say." She quirks a brow at him, but he misses that one, too.
"Who says?"
"Nevermind."
A shadow falls across the table, and Elle looks up in time to see the waitress set a cup of coffee down in front of her, along with a small glass of milk in place of the usual creamer. "Whole," she says, and asks if they need anything else before she walks away.
Reid smiles around his sip, and Elle tilts her head, then shakes it, as she pours the milk into her coffee. "You're unbelievable."
"I asked her to bring it over when you finally decided to sit down," he explains, handing her a packet of sugar. "I didn't want it to get cold."
Elle opens the sugar with her teeth and tips it in. "Thanks. How long would you have let me stand there like an idiot?"
"How long were you going to pretend you didn't know we were here?" he counters.
Elle sighs heavily. "I'm not pretending anything. I don't have anything to do with the case. There's no reason for me to get involved." She pauses for a beat at Reid's skeptical expression, then tells him, "The lead is a friend of mine. I gave her JJ's information and suggested she get in touch. As far as I'm concerned, three dead kids is always a BAU case. I thought you guys could help."
"I think we can," Reid says, drawing his knife through his buttered toast. "But that still doesn't explain what you're doing here."
"If you don't know that I was looking for you, sweetheart, then I don't know why they're keeping you around." Elle stirs her coffee with a fingertip and surveys him from across the table, watching him wet his lips, suddenly betraying his own nerves. She smiles to herself at the idea that she can still make him sweat a little.
"I figured as much," he answers after a moment. "You found me."
"Wasn't hard, even for a rusty profiler like me. You know, anyone who wanted to stalk you would have it made, Reid. You're a creature of habit." Half of her mouth quirks up into a grin. "You still don't sleep, huh?"
"It's worse now, actually," he answers. His tone is carefully conversational, but Elle can tell from the way his eyes move that if she peeled back the words, she'd find a whole nest of something nasty. The realization twists her guts around. She knows the feeling. Reid senses a shift in her and immediately reacts. "You know, more than 70 million Americans suffer from some sort of sleep disorder," he says. "Of those 70 million, 60% have a chronic disorder. One in three..."
"Reid," she says, interrupting his auto-pilot. "Of those 70 million, I'm only here to talk about one."
"Which?" he asks, pulling his hands into fists then stretching them back out.
Elle smiles slowly and takes another sip of her coffee. "Funny, Doctor. I guess I'm here to talk about two of them."
He looks at her for a moment, and she can practically see him fighting with himself, trying to swallow the words. His mouth opens and closes twice before they finally spill out, fast and jumbled together but still audible. "I dream about you."
Elle's breath stops for a split second, but she manages to keep herself steady. She doesn't speak, just holds his eyes with her own and waits.
"I dream about you," he says again. "A lot. All the time. You're always just where I can't see you, though; just outside my peripheral vision. You're just... just a shadow. But I know it's you. And I turn to... to say something, or... I don't know, do something, and you're gone. And then I wake up."
"What are you trying to say to me?" she asks quietly. "In your dream, I mean."
"I... I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't even know why I told you that." Both of his hands are wrapped around his coffee mug, and he won't meet her eye anymore. He suddenly looks as though he regrets asking her to sit, regrets opening his mouth, regrets this whole thing, and it makes Elle's stomach churn.
Regret. She is seized by the desperate need to save him from it, and her hands reach across the table and close around his before she can stop them. "Don't," she says. "Don't. Stop. It's all right."
Reid raises his eyes slowly and lets them melt into hers. She feels, for a moment, like she might fall right in and drown. He looks deep and old, barely recognizable as the kid she seduced in a moment of inebriated honesty nearly four years ago. She suddenly can't fathom how she could have thought he hadn't changed. Of course he has. The job he's been doing practically since puberty is the same job that made her a completely different person after little more than a year.
"Reid..." she starts, but he blinks at her with those earnest eyes and she loses her train of thought entirely. All she can muster is, "God. You're not a baby anymore."
He smiles at her, a little sad and a little fond, and says, "Nope. I'm all grown up now, Elle."
"That's a goddamn shame," she says, bringing her mug to her lips for a heavy swallow. She sets it back down with a thick clink. "I knew I should have taken you with me."
They both laugh at that, a low, dry sound. Reid's tone is indecipherable when he answers. "You know I wouldn't have gone."
"No. You wouldn't have." She pauses briefly and watches the table. They are both drumming their fingers, his against the side of his mug, hers against her napkin. They're just half a beat off of one another, his thumb coming down a millisecond after hers. Following her lead. Unconscious mirroring. Elle's lips twitch, and then she raises her gaze and confesses. "I dream about you, too."
All of the drumming comes to a halt.
"What do you dream?" he asks, subdued, like he knows he's treading dangerous ground, or hallowed, or both. Elle wonders what happens in his nightmares that he isn't telling her.
The truth is that she dreams about him almost as frequently as she has nightmares about him. In some of the nightmares, she shoots him instead of William Lee. Sometimes, they make love - desperate and frantic, or lazy and sweet - and she wakes up with a corpse where his warm body should be. There are ones in which she is running from something so hard and fast that she feels like her heart might explode, running towards the sound of his voice, and he's screaming, and she's screaming, and then she wakes up sweaty and wet and terrified. She doesn't tell him about those.
"Good things," she says softly. This is true. The dreams are always good. She wakes up with gentle heat in her belly and a smile that she herself cannot always decode on her face. "Your shoulders, oddly enough," she adds, and then laughs.
"My... you... dream about my... shoulders?" He looks truly befuddled, his eyebrows drawn together and his lips parted.
"Mmmhmm. I've seen them. Or have you forgotten?"
Reid sucks in his lower lip and shifts in his seat. "Oh, no. I... my recall of that is pretty close to perfect."
Elle smiles. "I thought maybe you'd repressed that one."
She arches an eyebrow, and he ducks his gaze again, muttering, "No. Of course not." Neither of them speaks for a minute or so, both taking refuge in their coffee, and then Reid breaks the silence. "Why did you look for me?"
Sighing, Elle reaches for the straw wrapper from Reid's water and starts to roll it between her fingers. "Because I think about you a lot, and I wanted to see how you were. Because what happened at the BAU is part of what feels like a whole other lifetime, except for you. You're clear as day, Dr. Reid." She smiles. "I loved you best."
"Then why... why did you write to Hotch and not to me?" The words look like they take him by surprise, and he bites his lip a second too late to hold them back.
Elle has been expecting them, and she has her answer ready. "Because you carry more guilt than a good Catholic schoolboy, and Hotch is good with absolution. He loves you best, too, you know. I think he'd forgive just about anything from you."
Reid's eyes go wide, something flaring up behind them. "Did you tell him?"
"Of course not," Elle scoffs. "Do you really think I'd have to?"
Reid steeples his fingers and shakes his head in response. "No. You know what I told him?"
"What?"
"Well, not told him, precisely... more like told his door." He clears his throat, and Elle smirks. "I told his office door that I wasn't sorry."
"And what did the door think of that?"
Reid's face opens up into a sheepish smile. "I'm not entirely sure. It just sort of glared at me."
"I think it was jealous that you get all the hot babes." The laugh she's holding back twists her mouth up until she finally lets it go, bubbling over them both like a fountain.
Reid surveys her for a moment, trying to take the high road, but he finally gives in, his hand over his mouth and color rising in his cheeks. But even his laugh, Elle notes, is a little heavy, a little weathered. She reaches across the table and lets her fingertips brush his arm. She can barely find it through the thick material of his sweater, but she pushes down until he feels her. "Hey," she says. "I'm sorry I didn't write. I just kept thinking it would make things worse for you. I didn't want to give you some bullshit to play over and over in your head and dissect and make yourself crazy with. I didn't want you to remember words that would never be right, anyway. I thought it might be better if you could just forget the whole thing."
"It doesn't really work like that, Elle. And even if it did..." He stops and shrugs, taking a sip of his coffee. "Past tense," he finally says, in the middle of some other conversation she hasn't kept up with.
"I hate when you do that," she murmurs, rolling her eyes. "What?"
"You used the past tense. You loved me best."
"It was four years ago, Reid," she says, drawing her knees up onto her seat, making herself small. "I'm not even sure I know you anymore."
"You knew to sic Hotch on me then. You knew where to find me tonight."
"True." That's all that she can bring herself to say. She'd like to believe that it's just that easy, but she knows it's not. And so does he.
Reid watches her, waiting for a moment, but then, mercifully, jumps back in time again. "Hotch kept the sand you sent him, you know. It's in his desk."
"Did he?" Elle nods. "Good. I have something for you, too." She reaches into her pocket and fingers the slip of paper she's hiding there, debating with herself whether what she's about to do is a good idea. She comes to the conclusion that it probably isn't, but that presenting Reid with something questionable - a shot of vodka, for example, or her tits - has become something of a tradition, and why stop now? She rubs the sticky note between her fingers for a second, then pulls it out, lint stuck to the back. Sliding it across the table, she licks her suddenly-dry lips and reaches for his water. "Here."
Reid glances down and furrows his brow, then looks suddenly away from her, almost embarrassed. "What's this?"
Elle smiles around the straw and almost laughs aloud, sliding it out of her mouth as languorously as she can and noting to herself with some relief that some things never change. "My address."
The creases in his brow grow deeper. "This is a domestic violence shelter." He pauses for a moment, meeting her eye again when there is nothing remotely phallic between her lips, and then says, "I've been studying the area. Elle, you're not..."
"Of course you have," she says dryly. "And no, I'm not. You might recall what happened to the last guy who threatened me? I work there, honey. Security. I have an apartment in the back."
"Security?" Reid raises his eyebrows and lets out a long breath.
Elle nods. "I know, right? Most of these places can barely afford a bulb for the porch light. It's one of the best on the west coast. Plus, I work for less than I'm worth, and only part-time." She winks. "Hence the apartment. Anyway. When you come by, call me first, and I'll come down to meet you. Strange men make people there nervous." She digs into her other pocket and pulls out some cash, sliding it into the center of the table. "On me," she says. "I'm going to go not sleep somewhere else for awhile. It was good to see you. I mean that. I've missed you."
He doesn't say anything to stop her from leaving, and he doesn't question her use of when, either. He just nods at her, then stares at the yellow Post-It in front of him until she bends in to kiss his cheek goodbye. They lock eyes for a second, and Elle sees the whole world spinning behind his. "You, too," he says softly.
Elle glances back over her shoulder as she heads for the door and grins widely when he holds one hand up, the scrap of yellow between his fingers, then twirls it suddenly, making it disappear into thin air. She blows another kiss at the glass back door and pops a mint into her mouth as she leaves, pondering all of her unfinished business.
Pairing/Characters: Elle & Reid, past Elle/Reid
Rating: PG13
Words: ~2700
Summary: Four years after Elle leaves the BAU, she runs into Reid & takes stock of what's changed -- and what hasn't.
Warnings: Just some language & innuendo. Excessive diner use? Whatever.
Notes: You should probably read The Cure first (it's 200-ish words), or parts of this won't make sense. It's also helpful to have read The Unnavigable Sea, as it's the same 'verse, but not 100% necessary.
Elle watches him for a long time from the doorway.
She leans against the glass and tells the tired-looking woman at the counter that she's waiting for a friend, artfully ignoring the at 2am? and arched eyebrow. He's alone, like she knew he would be. He's ordered a coffee -- she would have known what was in it without having seen -- and some toast, but he isn't eating the toast, just picking at it with the blunt blade of the butter knife. His hair is short still, but different; she can tell it's been recently cut. No glasses. He's in a booth with his back to her, so she can't see his pants, but he's got on a heavy sweater despite the summer night outside. His posture is relaxed -- relaxed for Reid, anyway -- in a way that tells her something else that she already knows: late nights all alone at 24-hour diners are routine for him.
It's been years since she's been in the same room with him, and there is something inherently comforting in the fact that so little about him has changed, at least outwardly. It's peculiar to her, somehow, that he can't feel her; that he doesn't know her eyes are all over him. Even with the gun she knows he has tucked under his sweater, he is excruciatingly vulnerable like this. Elle would never take a seat facing away from the door, especially not if she was alone.
But then, that's why she came, isn't it? Because he would. And does -- still does -- even after all this time in the BAU.
It's only after she has made it halfway to his table that she realizes why. Reid is facing the back door, and in it is a reflection of the front. His eyes have been on both entrances the entire time, and he has been aware of her since she walked in. Elle stops dead in her tracks, and Reid reaches his right hand up in a small wave of acknowledgement when she does. She steels herself, shaken by her own mistake, and slides into the booth across from him.
"Elle!" he says, feigning surprise, his mouth revealing his slightly bewildered amusement.
She smiles wryly back. "In the flesh. Fancy meeting you here. Come here often?"
The line goes right over his head. "No, it's my first time, actually."
"That's what they all say." She quirks a brow at him, but he misses that one, too.
"Who says?"
"Nevermind."
A shadow falls across the table, and Elle looks up in time to see the waitress set a cup of coffee down in front of her, along with a small glass of milk in place of the usual creamer. "Whole," she says, and asks if they need anything else before she walks away.
Reid smiles around his sip, and Elle tilts her head, then shakes it, as she pours the milk into her coffee. "You're unbelievable."
"I asked her to bring it over when you finally decided to sit down," he explains, handing her a packet of sugar. "I didn't want it to get cold."
Elle opens the sugar with her teeth and tips it in. "Thanks. How long would you have let me stand there like an idiot?"
"How long were you going to pretend you didn't know we were here?" he counters.
Elle sighs heavily. "I'm not pretending anything. I don't have anything to do with the case. There's no reason for me to get involved." She pauses for a beat at Reid's skeptical expression, then tells him, "The lead is a friend of mine. I gave her JJ's information and suggested she get in touch. As far as I'm concerned, three dead kids is always a BAU case. I thought you guys could help."
"I think we can," Reid says, drawing his knife through his buttered toast. "But that still doesn't explain what you're doing here."
"If you don't know that I was looking for you, sweetheart, then I don't know why they're keeping you around." Elle stirs her coffee with a fingertip and surveys him from across the table, watching him wet his lips, suddenly betraying his own nerves. She smiles to herself at the idea that she can still make him sweat a little.
"I figured as much," he answers after a moment. "You found me."
"Wasn't hard, even for a rusty profiler like me. You know, anyone who wanted to stalk you would have it made, Reid. You're a creature of habit." Half of her mouth quirks up into a grin. "You still don't sleep, huh?"
"It's worse now, actually," he answers. His tone is carefully conversational, but Elle can tell from the way his eyes move that if she peeled back the words, she'd find a whole nest of something nasty. The realization twists her guts around. She knows the feeling. Reid senses a shift in her and immediately reacts. "You know, more than 70 million Americans suffer from some sort of sleep disorder," he says. "Of those 70 million, 60% have a chronic disorder. One in three..."
"Reid," she says, interrupting his auto-pilot. "Of those 70 million, I'm only here to talk about one."
"Which?" he asks, pulling his hands into fists then stretching them back out.
Elle smiles slowly and takes another sip of her coffee. "Funny, Doctor. I guess I'm here to talk about two of them."
He looks at her for a moment, and she can practically see him fighting with himself, trying to swallow the words. His mouth opens and closes twice before they finally spill out, fast and jumbled together but still audible. "I dream about you."
Elle's breath stops for a split second, but she manages to keep herself steady. She doesn't speak, just holds his eyes with her own and waits.
"I dream about you," he says again. "A lot. All the time. You're always just where I can't see you, though; just outside my peripheral vision. You're just... just a shadow. But I know it's you. And I turn to... to say something, or... I don't know, do something, and you're gone. And then I wake up."
"What are you trying to say to me?" she asks quietly. "In your dream, I mean."
"I... I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't even know why I told you that." Both of his hands are wrapped around his coffee mug, and he won't meet her eye anymore. He suddenly looks as though he regrets asking her to sit, regrets opening his mouth, regrets this whole thing, and it makes Elle's stomach churn.
Regret. She is seized by the desperate need to save him from it, and her hands reach across the table and close around his before she can stop them. "Don't," she says. "Don't. Stop. It's all right."
Reid raises his eyes slowly and lets them melt into hers. She feels, for a moment, like she might fall right in and drown. He looks deep and old, barely recognizable as the kid she seduced in a moment of inebriated honesty nearly four years ago. She suddenly can't fathom how she could have thought he hadn't changed. Of course he has. The job he's been doing practically since puberty is the same job that made her a completely different person after little more than a year.
"Reid..." she starts, but he blinks at her with those earnest eyes and she loses her train of thought entirely. All she can muster is, "God. You're not a baby anymore."
He smiles at her, a little sad and a little fond, and says, "Nope. I'm all grown up now, Elle."
"That's a goddamn shame," she says, bringing her mug to her lips for a heavy swallow. She sets it back down with a thick clink. "I knew I should have taken you with me."
They both laugh at that, a low, dry sound. Reid's tone is indecipherable when he answers. "You know I wouldn't have gone."
"No. You wouldn't have." She pauses briefly and watches the table. They are both drumming their fingers, his against the side of his mug, hers against her napkin. They're just half a beat off of one another, his thumb coming down a millisecond after hers. Following her lead. Unconscious mirroring. Elle's lips twitch, and then she raises her gaze and confesses. "I dream about you, too."
All of the drumming comes to a halt.
"What do you dream?" he asks, subdued, like he knows he's treading dangerous ground, or hallowed, or both. Elle wonders what happens in his nightmares that he isn't telling her.
The truth is that she dreams about him almost as frequently as she has nightmares about him. In some of the nightmares, she shoots him instead of William Lee. Sometimes, they make love - desperate and frantic, or lazy and sweet - and she wakes up with a corpse where his warm body should be. There are ones in which she is running from something so hard and fast that she feels like her heart might explode, running towards the sound of his voice, and he's screaming, and she's screaming, and then she wakes up sweaty and wet and terrified. She doesn't tell him about those.
"Good things," she says softly. This is true. The dreams are always good. She wakes up with gentle heat in her belly and a smile that she herself cannot always decode on her face. "Your shoulders, oddly enough," she adds, and then laughs.
"My... you... dream about my... shoulders?" He looks truly befuddled, his eyebrows drawn together and his lips parted.
"Mmmhmm. I've seen them. Or have you forgotten?"
Reid sucks in his lower lip and shifts in his seat. "Oh, no. I... my recall of that is pretty close to perfect."
Elle smiles. "I thought maybe you'd repressed that one."
She arches an eyebrow, and he ducks his gaze again, muttering, "No. Of course not." Neither of them speaks for a minute or so, both taking refuge in their coffee, and then Reid breaks the silence. "Why did you look for me?"
Sighing, Elle reaches for the straw wrapper from Reid's water and starts to roll it between her fingers. "Because I think about you a lot, and I wanted to see how you were. Because what happened at the BAU is part of what feels like a whole other lifetime, except for you. You're clear as day, Dr. Reid." She smiles. "I loved you best."
"Then why... why did you write to Hotch and not to me?" The words look like they take him by surprise, and he bites his lip a second too late to hold them back.
Elle has been expecting them, and she has her answer ready. "Because you carry more guilt than a good Catholic schoolboy, and Hotch is good with absolution. He loves you best, too, you know. I think he'd forgive just about anything from you."
Reid's eyes go wide, something flaring up behind them. "Did you tell him?"
"Of course not," Elle scoffs. "Do you really think I'd have to?"
Reid steeples his fingers and shakes his head in response. "No. You know what I told him?"
"What?"
"Well, not told him, precisely... more like told his door." He clears his throat, and Elle smirks. "I told his office door that I wasn't sorry."
"And what did the door think of that?"
Reid's face opens up into a sheepish smile. "I'm not entirely sure. It just sort of glared at me."
"I think it was jealous that you get all the hot babes." The laugh she's holding back twists her mouth up until she finally lets it go, bubbling over them both like a fountain.
Reid surveys her for a moment, trying to take the high road, but he finally gives in, his hand over his mouth and color rising in his cheeks. But even his laugh, Elle notes, is a little heavy, a little weathered. She reaches across the table and lets her fingertips brush his arm. She can barely find it through the thick material of his sweater, but she pushes down until he feels her. "Hey," she says. "I'm sorry I didn't write. I just kept thinking it would make things worse for you. I didn't want to give you some bullshit to play over and over in your head and dissect and make yourself crazy with. I didn't want you to remember words that would never be right, anyway. I thought it might be better if you could just forget the whole thing."
"It doesn't really work like that, Elle. And even if it did..." He stops and shrugs, taking a sip of his coffee. "Past tense," he finally says, in the middle of some other conversation she hasn't kept up with.
"I hate when you do that," she murmurs, rolling her eyes. "What?"
"You used the past tense. You loved me best."
"It was four years ago, Reid," she says, drawing her knees up onto her seat, making herself small. "I'm not even sure I know you anymore."
"You knew to sic Hotch on me then. You knew where to find me tonight."
"True." That's all that she can bring herself to say. She'd like to believe that it's just that easy, but she knows it's not. And so does he.
Reid watches her, waiting for a moment, but then, mercifully, jumps back in time again. "Hotch kept the sand you sent him, you know. It's in his desk."
"Did he?" Elle nods. "Good. I have something for you, too." She reaches into her pocket and fingers the slip of paper she's hiding there, debating with herself whether what she's about to do is a good idea. She comes to the conclusion that it probably isn't, but that presenting Reid with something questionable - a shot of vodka, for example, or her tits - has become something of a tradition, and why stop now? She rubs the sticky note between her fingers for a second, then pulls it out, lint stuck to the back. Sliding it across the table, she licks her suddenly-dry lips and reaches for his water. "Here."
Reid glances down and furrows his brow, then looks suddenly away from her, almost embarrassed. "What's this?"
Elle smiles around the straw and almost laughs aloud, sliding it out of her mouth as languorously as she can and noting to herself with some relief that some things never change. "My address."
The creases in his brow grow deeper. "This is a domestic violence shelter." He pauses for a moment, meeting her eye again when there is nothing remotely phallic between her lips, and then says, "I've been studying the area. Elle, you're not..."
"Of course you have," she says dryly. "And no, I'm not. You might recall what happened to the last guy who threatened me? I work there, honey. Security. I have an apartment in the back."
"Security?" Reid raises his eyebrows and lets out a long breath.
Elle nods. "I know, right? Most of these places can barely afford a bulb for the porch light. It's one of the best on the west coast. Plus, I work for less than I'm worth, and only part-time." She winks. "Hence the apartment. Anyway. When you come by, call me first, and I'll come down to meet you. Strange men make people there nervous." She digs into her other pocket and pulls out some cash, sliding it into the center of the table. "On me," she says. "I'm going to go not sleep somewhere else for awhile. It was good to see you. I mean that. I've missed you."
He doesn't say anything to stop her from leaving, and he doesn't question her use of when, either. He just nods at her, then stares at the yellow Post-It in front of him until she bends in to kiss his cheek goodbye. They lock eyes for a second, and Elle sees the whole world spinning behind his. "You, too," he says softly.
Elle glances back over her shoulder as she heads for the door and grins widely when he holds one hand up, the scrap of yellow between his fingers, then twirls it suddenly, making it disappear into thin air. She blows another kiss at the glass back door and pops a mint into her mouth as she leaves, pondering all of her unfinished business.